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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Martin Eden, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Martin Eden
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: September, 1997 [eBook #1056]
+[Most recently updated: April 20, 2021]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: David Price
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTIN EDEN ***
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Martin Eden
+
+by Jack London
+
+
+Contents
+
+ CHAPTER I. 
+ CHAPTER II. 
+ CHAPTER III. 
+ CHAPTER IV. 
+ CHAPTER V. 
+ CHAPTER VI. 
+ CHAPTER VII. 
+ CHAPTER VIII. 
+ CHAPTER IX. 
+ CHAPTER X. 
+ CHAPTER XI. 
+ CHAPTER XII. 
+ CHAPTER XIII. 
+ CHAPTER XIV. 
+ CHAPTER XV. 
+ CHAPTER XVI. 
+ CHAPTER XVII. 
+ CHAPTER XVIII. 
+ CHAPTER XIX. 
+ CHAPTER XX. 
+ CHAPTER XXI. 
+ CHAPTER XXII. 
+ CHAPTER XXIII. 
+ CHAPTER XXIV. 
+ CHAPTER XXV. 
+ CHAPTER XXVI. 
+ CHAPTER XXVII. 
+ CHAPTER XXVIII. 
+ CHAPTER XXIX. 
+ CHAPTER XXX. 
+ CHAPTER XXXI. 
+ CHAPTER XXXII. 
+ CHAPTER XXXIII. 
+ CHAPTER XXXIV. 
+ CHAPTER XXXV. 
+ CHAPTER XXXVI. 
+ CHAPTER XXXVII. 
+ CHAPTER XXXVIII. 
+ CHAPTER XXXIX. 
+ CHAPTER XL. 
+ CHAPTER XLI. 
+ CHAPTER XLII. 
+ CHAPTER XLIII. 
+ CHAPTER XLIV. 
+ CHAPTER XLV. 
+ CHAPTER XLVI. 
+
+
+“Let me live out my years in heat of blood!
+    Let me lie drunken with the dreamer’s wine!
+Let me not see this soul-house built of mud
+    Go toppling to the dust a vacant shrine!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a
+young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap. He wore rough clothes that
+smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious
+hall in which he found himself. He did not know what to do with his
+cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it
+from him. The act was done quietly and naturally, and the awkward young
+fellow appreciated it. “He understands,” was his thought. “He’ll see me
+through all right.”
+
+He walked at the other’s heels with a swing to his shoulders, and his
+legs spread unwittingly, as if the level floors were tilting up and
+sinking down to the heave and lunge of the sea. The wide rooms seemed
+too narrow for his rolling gait, and to himself he was in terror lest
+his broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or sweep the
+bric-a-brac from the low mantel. He recoiled from side to side between
+the various objects and multiplied the hazards that in reality lodged
+only in his mind. Between a grand piano and a centre-table piled high
+with books was space for a half a dozen to walk abreast, yet he essayed
+it with trepidation. His heavy arms hung loosely at his sides. He did
+not know what to do with those arms and hands, and when, to his excited
+vision, one arm seemed liable to brush against the books on the table,
+he lurched away like a frightened horse, barely missing the piano
+stool. He watched the easy walk of the other in front of him, and for
+the first time realized that his walk was different from that of other
+men. He experienced a momentary pang of shame that he should walk so
+uncouthly. The sweat burst through the skin of his forehead in tiny
+beads, and he paused and mopped his bronzed face with his handkerchief.
+
+“Hold on, Arthur, my boy,” he said, attempting to mask his anxiety with
+facetious utterance. “This is too much all at once for yours truly.
+Give me a chance to get my nerve. You know I didn’t want to come, an’ I
+guess your fam’ly ain’t hankerin’ to see me neither.”
+
+“That’s all right,” was the reassuring answer. “You mustn’t be
+frightened at us. We’re just homely people—Hello, there’s a letter for
+me.”
+
+He stepped back to the table, tore open the envelope, and began to
+read, giving the stranger an opportunity to recover himself. And the
+stranger understood and appreciated. His was the gift of sympathy,
+understanding; and beneath his alarmed exterior that sympathetic
+process went on. He mopped his forehead dry and glanced about him with
+a controlled face, though in the eyes there was an expression such as
+wild animals betray when they fear the trap. He was surrounded by the
+unknown, apprehensive of what might happen, ignorant of what he should
+do, aware that he walked and bore himself awkwardly, fearful that every
+attribute and power of him was similarly afflicted. He was keenly
+sensitive, hopelessly self-conscious, and the amused glance that the
+other stole privily at him over the top of the letter burned into him
+like a dagger-thrust. He saw the glance, but he gave no sign, for among
+the things he had learned was discipline. Also, that dagger-thrust went
+to his pride. He cursed himself for having come, and at the same time
+resolved that, happen what would, having come, he would carry it
+through. The lines of his face hardened, and into his eyes came a
+fighting light. He looked about more unconcernedly, sharply observant,
+every detail of the pretty interior registering itself on his brain.
+His eyes were wide apart; nothing in their field of vision escaped; and
+as they drank in the beauty before them the fighting light died out and
+a warm glow took its place. He was responsive to beauty, and here was
+cause to respond.
+
+An oil painting caught and held him. A heavy surf thundered and burst
+over an outjutting rock; lowering storm-clouds covered the sky; and,
+outside the line of surf, a pilot-schooner, close-hauled, heeled over
+till every detail of her deck was visible, was surging along against a
+stormy sunset sky. There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly. He
+forgot his awkward walk and came closer to the painting, very close.
+The beauty faded out of the canvas. His face expressed his
+bepuzzlement. He stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then
+stepped away. Immediately all the beauty flashed back into the canvas.
+“A trick picture,” was his thought, as he dismissed it, though in the
+midst of the multitudinous impressions he was receiving he found time
+to feel a prod of indignation that so much beauty should be sacrificed
+to make a trick. He did not know painting. He had been brought up on
+chromos and lithographs that were always definite and sharp, near or
+far. He had seen oil paintings, it was true, in the show windows of
+shops, but the glass of the windows had prevented his eager eyes from
+approaching too near.
+
+He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and saw the books on
+the table. Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as
+promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight
+of food. An impulsive stride, with one lurch to right and left of the
+shoulders, brought him to the table, where he began affectionately
+handling the books. He glanced at the titles and the authors’ names,
+read fragments of text, caressing the volumes with his eyes and hands,
+and, once, recognized a book he had read. For the rest, they were
+strange books and strange authors. He chanced upon a volume of
+Swinburne and began reading steadily, forgetful of where he was, his
+face glowing. Twice he closed the book on his forefinger to look at the
+name of the author. Swinburne! he would remember that name. That fellow
+had eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flashing light. But who
+was Swinburne? Was he dead a hundred years or so, like most of the
+poets? Or was he alive still, and writing? He turned to the title-page
+. . . yes, he had written other books; well, he would go to the free
+library the first thing in the morning and try to get hold of some of
+Swinburne’s stuff. He went back to the text and lost himself. He did
+not notice that a young woman had entered the room. The first he knew
+was when he heard Arthur’s voice saying:-
+
+“Ruth, this is Mr. Eden.”
+
+The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he turned he was
+thrilling to the first new impression, which was not of the girl, but
+of her brother’s words. Under that muscled body of his he was a mass of
+quivering sensibilities. At the slightest impact of the outside world
+upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt
+and played like lambent flame. He was extraordinarily receptive and
+responsive, while his imagination, pitched high, was ever at work
+establishing relations of likeness and difference. “Mr. Eden,” was what
+he had thrilled to—he who had been called “Eden,” or “Martin Eden,” or
+just “Martin,” all his life. And “_Mister_!” It was certainly going
+some, was his internal comment. His mind seemed to turn, on the
+instant, into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his
+consciousness endless pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and
+forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals
+and slum streets, wherein the thread of association was the fashion in
+which he had been addressed in those various situations.
+
+And then he turned and saw the girl. The phantasmagoria of his brain
+vanished at sight of her. She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide,
+spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair. He did not know how
+she was dressed, except that the dress was as wonderful as she. He
+likened her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem. No, she was a
+spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such sublimated beauty was not of the
+earth. Or perhaps the books were right, and there were many such as she
+in the upper walks of life. She might well be sung by that chap,
+Swinburne. Perhaps he had had somebody like her in mind when he painted
+that girl, Iseult, in the book there on the table. All this plethora of
+sight, and feeling, and thought occurred on the instant. There was no
+pause of the realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand coming out to
+his, and she looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands,
+frankly, like a man. The women he had known did not shake hands that
+way. For that matter, most of them did not shake hands at all. A flood
+of associations, visions of various ways he had made the acquaintance
+of women, rushed into his mind and threatened to swamp it. But he shook
+them aside and looked at her. Never had he seen such a woman. The women
+he had known! Immediately, beside her, on either hand, ranged the women
+he had known. For an eternal second he stood in the midst of a portrait
+gallery, wherein she occupied the central place, while about her were
+limned many women, all to be weighed and measured by a fleeting glance,
+herself the unit of weight and measure. He saw the weak and sickly
+faces of the girls of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous
+girls from the south of Market. There were women of the cattle camps,
+and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. These, in turn, were
+crowded out by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden
+clogs; by Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with degeneracy; by
+full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and brown-skinned.
+All these were blotted out by a grotesque and terrible nightmare
+brood—frowsy, shuffling creatures from the pavements of Whitechapel,
+gin-bloated hags of the stews, and all the vast hell’s following of
+harpies, vile-mouthed and filthy, that under the guise of monstrous
+female form prey upon sailors, the scrapings of the ports, the scum and
+slime of the human pit.
+
+“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Eden?” the girl was saying. “I have been
+looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us. It was brave
+of you—”
+
+He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at
+all, what he had done, and that any fellow would have done it. She
+noticed that the hand he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in the
+process of healing, and a glance at the other loose-hanging hand showed
+it to be in the same condition. Also, with quick, critical eye, she
+noted a scar on his cheek, another that peeped out from under the hair
+of the forehead, and a third that ran down and disappeared under the
+starched collar. She repressed a smile at sight of the red line that
+marked the chafe of the collar against the bronzed neck. He was
+evidently unused to stiff collars. Likewise her feminine eye took in
+the clothes he wore, the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of
+the coat across the shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the
+sleeves that advertised bulging biceps muscles.
+
+While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at all,
+he was obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair. He found time
+to admire the ease with which she sat down, then lurched toward a chair
+facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the awkward figure he was
+cutting. This was a new experience for him. All his life, up to then,
+he had been unaware of being either graceful or awkward. Such thoughts
+of self had never entered his mind. He sat down gingerly on the edge of
+the chair, greatly worried by his hands. They were in the way wherever
+he put them. Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his
+exit with longing eyes. He felt lost, alone there in the room with that
+pale spirit of a woman. There was no bar-keeper upon whom to call for
+drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a can of beer and by
+means of that social fluid start the amenities of friendship flowing.
+
+“You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden,” the girl was saying.
+“How did it happen? I am sure it must have been some adventure.”
+
+“A Mexican with a knife, miss,” he answered, moistening his parched
+lips and clearing his throat. “It was just a fight. After I got the
+knife away, he tried to bite off my nose.”
+
+Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision of that hot,
+starry night at Salina Cruz, the white strip of beach, the lights of
+the sugar steamers in the harbor, the voices of the drunken sailors in
+the distance, the jostling stevedores, the flaming passion in the
+Mexican’s face, the glint of the beast-eyes in the starlight, the sting
+of the steel in his neck, and the rush of blood, the crowd and the
+cries, the two bodies, his and the Mexican’s, locked together, rolling
+over and over and tearing up the sand, and from away off somewhere the
+mellow tinkling of a guitar. Such was the picture, and he thrilled to
+the memory of it, wondering if the man could paint it who had painted
+the pilot-schooner on the wall. The white beach, the stars, and the
+lights of the sugar steamers would look great, he thought, and midway
+on the sand the dark group of figures that surrounded the fighters. The
+knife occupied a place in the picture, he decided, and would show well,
+with a sort of gleam, in the light of the stars. But of all this no
+hint had crept into his speech. “He tried to bite off my nose,” he
+concluded.
+
+“Oh,” the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed the shock in
+her sensitive face.
+
+He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment shone faintly on
+his sunburned cheeks, though to him it burned as hotly as when his
+cheeks had been exposed to the open furnace-door in the fire-room. Such
+sordid things as stabbing affrays were evidently not fit subjects for
+conversation with a lady. People in the books, in her walk of life, did
+not talk about such things—perhaps they did not know about them,
+either.
+
+There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get
+started. Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek. Even
+as she asked, he realized that she was making an effort to talk his
+talk, and he resolved to get away from it and talk hers.
+
+“It was just an accident,” he said, putting his hand to his cheek. “One
+night, in a calm, with a heavy sea running, the main-boom-lift carried
+away, an’ next the tackle. The lift was wire, an’ it was threshin’
+around like a snake. The whole watch was tryin’ to grab it, an’ I
+rushed in an’ got swatted.”
+
+“Oh,” she said, this time with an accent of comprehension, though
+secretly his speech had been so much Greek to her and she was wondering
+what a _lift_ was and what _swatted_ meant.
+
+“This man Swineburne,” he began, attempting to put his plan into
+execution and pronouncing the _i_ long.
+
+“Who?”
+
+“Swineburne,” he repeated, with the same mispronunciation. “The poet.”
+
+“Swinburne,” she corrected.
+
+“Yes, that’s the chap,” he stammered, his cheeks hot again. “How long
+since he died?”
+
+“Why, I haven’t heard that he was dead.” She looked at him curiously.
+“Where did you make his acquaintance?”
+
+“I never clapped eyes on him,” was the reply. “But I read some of his
+poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come in. How
+do you like his poetry?”
+
+And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject he
+had suggested. He felt better, and settled back slightly from the edge
+of the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands, as if it
+might get away from him and buck him to the floor. He had succeeded in
+making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he strove to follow
+her, marvelling at all the knowledge that was stowed away in that
+pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale beauty of her face.
+Follow her he did, though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly
+from her lips and by critical phrases and thought-processes that were
+foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set
+it tingling. Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was
+beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He
+forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something
+to live for, to win to, to fight for—ay, and die for. The books were
+true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them. She lent
+wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread
+themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love
+and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s sake—for a pale woman, a
+flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a
+fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of
+literature and art. He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of
+the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that was essentially
+masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes. But she, who knew
+little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his
+burning eyes. She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it
+embarrassed her. She stumbled and halted in her utterance. The thread
+of argument slipped from her. He frightened her, and at the same time
+it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her
+of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her instincts
+rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to hurdle caste
+and place and gain to this traveller from another world, to this
+uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused
+by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was
+soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her
+cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to
+learn the paradox of woman.
+
+“As I was saying—what was I saying?” She broke off abruptly and laughed
+merrily at her predicament.
+
+“You was saying that this man Swinburne failed bein’ a great poet
+because—an’ that was as far as you got, miss,” he prompted, while to
+himself he seemed suddenly hungry, and delicious little thrills crawled
+up and down his spine at the sound of her laughter. Like silver, he
+thought to himself, like tinkling silver bells; and on the instant, and
+for an instant, he was transported to a far land, where under pink
+cherry blossoms, he smoked a cigarette and listened to the bells of the
+peaked pagoda calling straw-sandalled devotees to worship.
+
+“Yes, thank you,” she said. “Swinburne fails, when all is said, because
+he is, well, indelicate. There are many of his poems that should never
+be read. Every line of the really great poets is filled with beautiful
+truth, and calls to all that is high and noble in the human. Not a line
+of the great poets can be spared without impoverishing the world by
+that much.”
+
+“I thought it was great,” he said hesitatingly, “the little I read. I
+had no idea he was such a—a scoundrel. I guess that crops out in his
+other books.”
+
+“There are many lines that could be spared from the book you were
+reading,” she said, her voice primly firm and dogmatic.
+
+“I must ’a’ missed ’em,” he announced. “What I read was the real goods.
+It was all lighted up an’ shining, an’ it shun right into me an’
+lighted me up inside, like the sun or a searchlight. That’s the way it
+landed on me, but I guess I ain’t up much on poetry, miss.”
+
+He broke off lamely. He was confused, painfully conscious of his
+inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he
+had read, but his speech was inadequate. He could not express what he
+felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship,
+on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. Well,
+he decided, it was up to him to get acquainted in this new world. He
+had never seen anything that he couldn’t get the hang of when he wanted
+to and it was about time for him to want to learn to talk the things
+that were inside of him so that she could understand. _She_ was bulking
+large on his horizon.
+
+“Now Longfellow—” she was saying.
+
+“Yes, I’ve read ’m,” he broke in impulsively, spurred on to exhibit and
+make the most of his little store of book knowledge, desirous of
+showing her that he was not wholly a stupid clod. “‘The Psalm of Life,’
+‘Excelsior,’ an’ . . . I guess that’s all.”
+
+She nodded her head and smiled, and he felt, somehow, that her smile
+was tolerant, pitifully tolerant. He was a fool to attempt to make a
+pretence that way. That Longfellow chap most likely had written
+countless books of poetry.
+
+“Excuse me, miss, for buttin’ in that way. I guess the real facts is
+that I don’t know nothin’ much about such things. It ain’t in my class.
+But I’m goin’ to make it in my class.”
+
+It sounded like a threat. His voice was determined, his eyes were
+flashing, the lines of his face had grown harsh. And to her it seemed
+that the angle of his jaw had changed; its pitch had become
+unpleasantly aggressive. At the same time a wave of intense virility
+seemed to surge out from him and impinge upon her.
+
+“I think you could make it in—in your class,” she finished with a
+laugh. “You are very strong.”
+
+Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, heavy corded, almost
+bull-like, bronzed by the sun, spilling over with rugged health and
+strength. And though he sat there, blushing and humble, again she felt
+drawn to him. She was surprised by a wanton thought that rushed into
+her mind. It seemed to her that if she could lay her two hands upon
+that neck that all its strength and vigor would flow out to her. She
+was shocked by this thought. It seemed to reveal to her an undreamed
+depravity in her nature. Besides, strength to her was a gross and
+brutish thing. Her ideal of masculine beauty had always been slender
+gracefulness. Yet the thought still persisted. It bewildered her that
+she should desire to place her hands on that sunburned neck. In truth,
+she was far from robust, and the need of her body and mind was for
+strength. But she did not know it. She knew only that no man had ever
+affected her before as this one had, who shocked her from moment to
+moment with his awful grammar.
+
+“Yes, I ain’t no invalid,” he said. “When it comes down to hard-pan, I
+can digest scrap-iron. But just now I’ve got dyspepsia. Most of what
+you was sayin’ I can’t digest. Never trained that way, you see. I like
+books and poetry, and what time I’ve had I’ve read ’em, but I’ve never
+thought about ’em the way you have. That’s why I can’t talk about ’em.
+I’m like a navigator adrift on a strange sea without chart or compass.
+Now I want to get my bearin’s. Mebbe you can put me right. How did you
+learn all this you’ve ben talkin’?”
+
+“By going to school, I fancy, and by studying,” she answered.
+
+“I went to school when I was a kid,” he began to object.
+
+“Yes; but I mean high school, and lectures, and the university.”
+
+“You’ve gone to the university?” he demanded in frank amazement. He
+felt that she had become remoter from him by at least a million miles.
+
+“I’m going there now. I’m taking special courses in English.”
+
+He did not know what “English” meant, but he made a mental note of that
+item of ignorance and passed on.
+
+“How long would I have to study before I could go to the university?”
+he asked.
+
+She beamed encouragement upon his desire for knowledge, and said: “That
+depends upon how much studying you have already done. You have never
+attended high school? Of course not. But did you finish grammar
+school?”
+
+“I had two years to run, when I left,” he answered. “But I was always
+honorably promoted at school.”
+
+The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he had gripped the
+arms of the chair so savagely that every finger-end was stinging. At
+the same moment he became aware that a woman was entering the room. He
+saw the girl leave her chair and trip swiftly across the floor to the
+newcomer. They kissed each other, and, with arms around each other’s
+waists, they advanced toward him. That must be her mother, he thought.
+She was a tall, blond woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful. Her
+gown was what he might expect in such a house. His eyes delighted in
+the graceful lines of it. She and her dress together reminded him of
+women on the stage. Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and
+gowns entering the London theatres while he stood and watched and the
+policemen shoved him back into the drizzle beyond the awning. Next his
+mind leaped to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too, from the
+sidewalk, he had seen grand ladies. Then the city and the harbor of
+Yokohama, in a thousand pictures, began flashing before his eyes. But
+he swiftly dismissed the kaleidoscope of memory, oppressed by the
+urgent need of the present. He knew that he must stand up to be
+introduced, and he struggled painfully to his feet, where he stood with
+trousers bagging at the knees, his arms loose-hanging and ludicrous,
+his face set hard for the impending ordeal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.
+Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times
+seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and was seated alongside
+of Her. The array of knives and forks frightened him. They bristled
+with unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their
+dazzle became a background across which moved a succession of
+forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates sat eating salt beef with
+sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins
+by means of battered iron spoons. The stench of bad beef was in his
+nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers
+and groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He
+watched them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he
+would be careful here. He would make no noise. He would keep his mind
+upon it all the time.
+
+He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur’s
+brother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his
+heart warmed toward them. How they loved each other, the members of
+this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of her mother, of
+the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them walking toward him with
+arms entwined. Not in his world were such displays of affection between
+parents and children made. It was a revelation of the heights of
+existence that were attained in the world above. It was the finest
+thing yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that world. He was
+moved deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting with
+sympathetic tenderness. He had starved for love all his life. His
+nature craved love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had
+gone without, and hardened himself in the process. He had not known
+that he needed love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in
+operation, and thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and
+splendid.
+
+He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough
+getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman.
+Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would have been too much
+for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never worked so
+hard in his life. The severest toil was child’s play compared with
+this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on his forehead, and his shirt
+was wet with sweat from the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed
+things at once. He had to eat as he had never eaten before, to handle
+strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and learn how to
+accomplish each new thing, to receive the flood of impressions that was
+pouring in upon him and being mentally annotated and classified; to be
+conscious of a yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a
+dull, aching restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the
+walk in life whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again
+straying off in speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her.
+Also, when his secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to
+any one else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in
+any particular occasion, that person’s features were seized upon by his
+mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine what
+they were—all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to hear what was
+said to him and what was said back and forth, and to answer, when it
+was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required
+a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion, there was the
+servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his
+shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums
+demanding instantaneous solution. He was oppressed throughout the meal
+by the thought of finger-bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of
+times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like.
+He had heard of such things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the
+next few minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings
+who used them—ay, and he would use them himself. And most important of
+all, far down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was the
+problem of how he should comport himself toward these persons. What
+should his attitude be? He wrestled continually and anxiously with the
+problem. There were cowardly suggestions that he should make believe,
+assume a part; and there were still more cowardly suggestions that
+warned him he would fail in such course, that his nature was not fitted
+to live up to it, and that he would make a fool of himself.
+
+It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide upon
+his attitude, that he was very quiet. He did not know that his
+quietness was giving the lie to Arthur’s words of the day before, when
+that brother of hers had announced that he was going to bring a wild
+man home to dinner and for them not to be alarmed, because they would
+find him an interesting wild man. Martin Eden could not have found it
+in him, just then, to believe that her brother could be guilty of such
+treachery—especially when he had been the means of getting this
+particular brother out of an unpleasant row. So he sat at table,
+perturbed by his own unfitness and at the same time charmed by all that
+went on about him. For the first time he realized that eating was
+something more than a utilitarian function. He was unaware of what he
+ate. It was merely food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this
+table where eating was an aesthetic function. It was an intellectual
+function, too. His mind was stirred. He heard words spoken that were
+meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only in books and
+that no man or woman he had known was of large enough mental caliber to
+pronounce. When he heard such words dropping carelessly from the lips
+of the members of this marvellous family, her family, he thrilled with
+delight. The romance, and beauty, and high vigor of the books were
+coming true. He was in that rare and blissful state wherein a man sees
+his dreams stalk out from the crannies of fantasy and become fact.
+
+Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept himself in
+the background, listening, observing, and pleasuring, replying in
+reticent monosyllables, saying, “Yes, miss,” and “No, miss,” to her,
+and “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” to her mother. He curbed the
+impulse, arising out of his sea-training, to say “Yes, sir,” and “No,
+sir,” to her brothers. He felt that it would be inappropriate and a
+confession of inferiority on his part—which would never do if he was to
+win to her. Also, it was a dictate of his pride. “By God!” he cried to
+himself, once; “I’m just as good as them, and if they do know lots that
+I don’t, I could learn ’m a few myself, all the same!” And the next
+moment, when she or her mother addressed him as “Mr. Eden,” his
+aggressive pride was forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with
+delight. He was a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to
+shoulder, at dinner, with people he had read about in books. He was in
+the books himself, adventuring through the printed pages of bound
+volumes.
+
+But while he belied Arthur’s description, and appeared a gentle lamb
+rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course of
+action. He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle would
+never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature. He talked only
+when he had to, and then his speech was like his walk to the table,
+filled with jerks and halts as he groped in his polyglot vocabulary for
+words, debating over words he knew were fit but which he feared he
+could not pronounce, rejecting other words he knew would not be
+understood or would be raw and harsh. But all the time he was oppressed
+by the consciousness that this carefulness of diction was making a
+booby of him, preventing him from expressing what he had in him. Also,
+his love of freedom chafed against the restriction in much the same way
+his neck chafed against the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he
+was confident that he could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful
+of thought and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and
+urgent. He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that
+struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then he
+forgot himself and where he was, and the old words—the tools of speech
+he knew—slipped out.
+
+Once, he declined something from the servant who interrupted and
+pestered at his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically, “Pow!”
+
+On the instant those at the table were keyed up and expectant, the
+servant was smugly pleased, and he was wallowing in mortification. But
+he recovered himself quickly.
+
+“It’s the Kanaka for ‘finish,’” he explained, “and it just come out
+naturally. It’s spelt p-a-u.”
+
+He caught her curious and speculative eyes fixed on his hands, and,
+being in explanatory mood, he said:-
+
+“I just come down the Coast on one of the Pacific mail steamers. She
+was behind time, an’ around the Puget Sound ports we worked like
+niggers, storing cargo—mixed freight, if you know what that means.
+That’s how the skin got knocked off.”
+
+“Oh, it wasn’t that,” she hastened to explain, in turn. “Your hands
+seemed too small for your body.”
+
+His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of another of his
+deficiencies.
+
+“Yes,” he said depreciatingly. “They ain’t big enough to stand the
+strain. I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders. They are too
+strong, an’ when I smash a man on the jaw the hands get smashed, too.”
+
+He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled with disgust at
+himself. He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked about
+things that were not nice.
+
+“It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did—and you a
+stranger,” she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though not of
+the reason for it.
+
+He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warm
+surge of gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-worded
+tongue.
+
+“It wasn’t nothin’ at all,” he said. “Any guy ’ud do it for another.
+That bunch of hoodlums was lookin’ for trouble, an’ Arthur wasn’t
+botherin’ ’em none. They butted in on ’m, an’ then I butted in on them
+an’ poked a few. That’s where some of the skin off my hands went, along
+with some of the teeth of the gang. I wouldn’t ’a’ missed it for
+anything. When I seen—”
+
+He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own depravity
+and utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did. And while
+Arthur took up the tale, for the twentieth time, of his adventure with
+the drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how Martin Eden had
+rushed in and rescued him, that individual, with frowning brows,
+meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, and wrestled more
+determinedly with the problem of how he should conduct himself toward
+these people. He certainly had not succeeded so far. He wasn’t of their
+tribe, and he couldn’t talk their lingo, was the way he put it to
+himself. He couldn’t fake being their kind. The masquerade would fail,
+and besides, masquerade was foreign to his nature. There was no room in
+him for sham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He
+couldn’t talk their talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that
+he was resolved. But in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be his
+own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible to them and
+so as not to shock them too much. And furthermore, he wouldn’t claim,
+not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar with anything that was
+unfamiliar. In pursuance of this decision, when the two brothers,
+talking university shop, had used “trig” several times, Martin Eden
+demanded:-
+
+“What is _trig_?”
+
+“Trignometry,” Norman said; “a higher form of math.”
+
+“And what is math?” was the next question, which, somehow, brought the
+laugh on Norman.
+
+“Mathematics, arithmetic,” was the answer.
+
+Martin Eden nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the apparently
+illimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw took on tangibility. His
+abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete form. In
+the alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematics and the whole
+field of knowledge which they betokened were transmuted into so much
+landscape. The vistas he saw were vistas of green foliage and forest
+glades, all softly luminous or shot through with flashing lights. In
+the distance, detail was veiled and blurred by a purple haze, but
+behind this purple haze, he knew, was the glamour of the unknown, the
+lure of romance. It was like wine to him. Here was adventure, something
+to do with head and hand, a world to conquer—and straightway from the
+back of his consciousness rushed the thought, _conquering, to win to
+her, that lily-pale spirit sitting beside him_.
+
+The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur, who,
+all evening, had been trying to draw his wild man out. Martin Eden
+remembered his decision. For the first time he became himself,
+consciously and deliberately at first, but soon lost in the joy of
+creating in making life as he knew it appear before his listeners’
+eyes. He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling schooner
+_Halcyon_ when she was captured by a revenue cutter. He saw with wide
+eyes, and he could tell what he saw. He brought the pulsing sea before
+them, and the men and the ships upon the sea. He communicated his power
+of vision, till they saw with his eyes what he had seen. He selected
+from the vast mass of detail with an artist’s touch, drawing pictures
+of life that glowed and burned with light and color, injecting movement
+so that his listeners surged along with him on the flood of rough
+eloquence, enthusiasm, and power. At times he shocked them with the
+vividness of the narrative and his terms of speech, but beauty always
+followed fast upon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved by
+humor, by interpretations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors’
+minds.
+
+And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes. His
+fire warmed her. She wondered if she had been cold all her days. She
+wanted to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was like a volcano
+spouting forth strength, robustness, and health. She felt that she must
+lean toward him, and resisted by an effort. Then, too, there was the
+counter impulse to shrink away from him. She was repelled by those
+lacerated hands, grimed by toil so that the very dirt of life was
+ingrained in the flesh itself, by that red chafe of the collar and
+those bulging muscles. His roughness frightened her; each roughness of
+speech was an insult to her ear, each rough phase of his life an insult
+to her soul. And ever and again would come the draw of him, till she
+thought he must be evil to have such power over her. All that was most
+firmly established in her mind was rocking. His romance and adventure
+were battering at the conventions. Before his facile perils and ready
+laugh, life was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint,
+but a toy, to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be
+lived and pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside. “Therefore,
+play!” was the cry that rang through her. “Lean toward him, if so you
+will, and place your two hands upon his neck!” She wanted to cry out at
+the recklessness of the thought, and in vain she appraised her own
+cleanness and culture and balanced all that she was against what he was
+not. She glanced about her and saw the others gazing at him with rapt
+attention; and she would have despaired had not she seen horror in her
+mother’s eyes—fascinated horror, it was true, but none the less horror.
+This man from outer darkness was evil. Her mother saw it, and her
+mother was right. She would trust her mother’s judgment in this as she
+had always trusted it in all things. The fire of him was no longer
+warm, and the fear of him was no longer poignant.
+
+Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, aggressively, with
+the vague intent of emphasizing the impassableness of the gulf that
+separated them. Her music was a club that she swung brutally upon his
+head; and though it stunned him and crushed him down, it incited him.
+He gazed upon her in awe. In his mind, as in her own, the gulf widened;
+but faster than it widened, towered his ambition to win across it. But
+he was too complicated a plexus of sensibilities to sit staring at a
+gulf a whole evening, especially when there was music. He was
+remarkably susceptible to music. It was like strong drink, firing him
+to audacities of feeling,—a drug that laid hold of his imagination and
+went cloud-soaring through the sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded
+his mind with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He
+did not understand the music she played. It was different from the
+dance-hall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard. But he
+had caught hints of such music from the books, and he accepted her
+playing largely on faith, patiently waiting, at first, for the lilting
+measures of pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because those
+measures were not long continued. Just as he caught the swing of them
+and started, his imagination attuned in flight, always they vanished
+away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was meaningless to him, and
+that dropped his imagination, an inert weight, back to earth.
+
+Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all
+this. He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the
+message that her hands pronounced upon the keys. Then he dismissed the
+thought as unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself more freely to
+the music. The old delightful condition began to be induced. His feet
+were no longer clay, and his flesh became spirit; before his eyes and
+behind his eyes shone a great glory; and then the scene before him
+vanished and he was away, rocking over the world that was to him a very
+dear world. The known and the unknown were commingled in the
+dream-pageant that thronged his vision. He entered strange ports of
+sun-washed lands, and trod market-places among barbaric peoples that no
+man had ever seen. The scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils
+as he had known it on warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up
+against the southeast trades through long tropic days, sinking
+palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea behind and lifting
+palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. Swift as thought
+the pictures came and went. One instant he was astride a broncho and
+flying through the fairy-colored Painted Desert country; the next
+instant he was gazing down through shimmering heat into the whited
+sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing ocean where
+great ice islands towered and glistened in the sun. He lay on a coral
+beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the mellow-sounding surf. The
+hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue fires, in the light of which
+danced the _hula_ dancers to the barbaric love-calls of the singers,
+who chanted to tinkling _ukuleles_ and rumbling tom-toms. It was a
+sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano crater was
+silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon,
+and the Southern Cross burned low in the sky.
+
+He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his
+consciousness was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind that
+poured against those strings and set them vibrating with memories and
+dreams. He did not merely feel. Sensation invested itself in form and
+color and radiance, and what his imagination dared, it objectified in
+some sublimated and magic way. Past, present, and future mingled; and
+he went on oscillating across the broad, warm world, through high
+adventure and noble deeds to Her—ay, and with her, winning her, his arm
+about her, and carrying her on in flight through the empery of his
+mind.
+
+And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all this
+in his face. It was a transfigured face, with great shining eyes that
+gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leap and pulse of
+life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit. She was startled. The
+raw, stumbling lout was gone. The ill-fitting clothes, battered hands,
+and sunburned face remained; but these seemed the prison-bars through
+which she saw a great soul looking forth, inarticulate and dumb because
+of those feeble lips that would not give it speech. Only for a flashing
+moment did she see this, then she saw the lout returned, and she
+laughed at the whim of her fancy. But the impression of that fleeting
+glimpse lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling
+retreat and go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another of
+Browning—she was studying Browning in one of her English courses. He
+seemed such a boy, as he stood blushing and stammering his thanks, that
+a wave of pity, maternal in its prompting, welled up in her. She did
+not remember the lout, nor the imprisoned soul, nor the man who had
+stared at her in all masculineness and delighted and frightened her.
+She saw before her only a boy, who was shaking her hand with a hand so
+calloused that it felt like a nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and
+who was saying jerkily:-
+
+“The greatest time of my life. You see, I ain’t used to things. . . ”
+He looked about him helplessly. “To people and houses like this. It’s
+all new to me, and I like it.”
+
+“I hope you’ll call again,” she said, as he was saying good night to
+her brothers.
+
+He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and was
+gone.
+
+“Well, what do you think of him?” Arthur demanded.
+
+“He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone,” she answered. “How old is
+he?”
+
+“Twenty—almost twenty-one. I asked him this afternoon. I didn’t think
+he was that young.”
+
+And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she kissed
+her brothers goodnight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
+pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
+tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He drew
+the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long
+and lingering exhalation. “By God!” he said aloud, in a voice of awe
+and wonder. “By God!” he repeated. And yet again he murmured, “By God!”
+Then his hand went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and
+stuffed into his pocket. A cold drizzle was falling, but he bared his
+head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging along in splendid
+unconcern. He was only dimly aware that it was raining. He was in an
+ecstasy, dreaming dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past.
+
+He had met the woman at last—the woman that he had thought little
+about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had
+expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next to
+her at table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into her eyes
+and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit;—but no more beautiful than
+the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh that gave it
+expression and form. He did not think of her flesh as flesh,—which was
+new to him; for of the women he had known that was the only way he
+thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He did not conceive of her
+body as a body, subject to the ills and frailties of bodies. Her body
+was more than the garb of her spirit. It was an emanation of her
+spirit, a pure and gracious crystallization of her divine essence. This
+feeling of the divine startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to
+sober thought. No word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever
+reached him before. He had never believed in the divine. He had always
+been irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their
+immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had contended; it
+was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But what he had seen in
+her eyes was soul—immortal soul that could never die. No man he had
+known, nor any woman, had given him the message of immortality. But she
+had. She had whispered it to him the first moment she looked at him.
+Her face shimmered before his eyes as he walked along,—pale and
+serious, sweet and sensitive, smiling with pity and tenderness as only
+a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never dreamed purity could be.
+Her purity smote him like a blow. It startled him. He had known good
+and bad; but purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered
+his mind. And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of
+goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal life.
+
+And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was not
+fit to carry water for her—he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a
+fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and
+talk with her that night. It was accidental. There was no merit in it.
+He did not deserve such fortune. His mood was essentially religious. He
+was humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement and abasement. In
+such frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form. He was convicted
+of sin. But as the meek and lowly at the penitent form catch splendid
+glimpses of their future lordly existence, so did he catch similar
+glimpses of the state he would gain to by possessing her. But this
+possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from
+possession as he had known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw
+himself climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her,
+pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her. It was a
+soul-possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free
+comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought. He
+did not think it. For that matter, he did not think at all. Sensation
+usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with emotions he had
+never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility where feeling
+itself was exalted and spiritualized and carried beyond the summits of
+life.
+
+He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud: “By
+God! By God!”
+
+A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted his
+sailor roll.
+
+“Where did you get it?” the policeman demanded.
+
+Martin Eden came back to earth. His was a fluid organism, swiftly
+adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and
+crannies. With the policeman’s hail he was immediately his ordinary
+self, grasping the situation clearly.
+
+“It’s a beaut, ain’t it?” he laughed back. “I didn’t know I was talkin’
+out loud.”
+
+“You’ll be singing next,” was the policeman’s diagnosis.
+
+“No, I won’t. Gimme a match an’ I’ll catch the next car home.”
+
+He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on. “Now wouldn’t
+that rattle you?” he ejaculated under his breath. “That copper thought
+I was drunk.” He smiled to himself and meditated. “I guess I was,” he
+added; “but I didn’t think a woman’s face’d do it.”
+
+He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley. It was
+crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and ever and
+again barking out college yells. He studied them curiously. They were
+university boys. They went to the same university that she did, were in
+her class socially, could know her, could see her every day if they
+wanted to. He wondered that they did not want to, that they had been
+out having a good time instead of being with her that evening, talking
+with her, sitting around her in a worshipful and adoring circle. His
+thoughts wandered on. He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a
+loose-lipped mouth. That fellow was vicious, he decided. On shipboard
+he would be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a better
+man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed to draw him
+nearer to Her. He began comparing himself with the students. He grew
+conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident that
+he was physically their master. But their heads were filled with
+knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk,—the thought depressed
+him. But what was a brain for? he demanded passionately. What they had
+done, he could do. They had been studying about life from the books
+while he had been busy living life. His brain was just as full of
+knowledge as theirs, though it was a different kind of knowledge. How
+many of them could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout?
+His life spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and
+daring, hardship and toil. He remembered his failures and scrapes in
+the process of learning. He was that much to the good, anyway. Later on
+they would have to begin living life and going through the mill as he
+had gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he could be
+learning the other side of life from the books.
+
+As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated
+Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story
+building along the front of which ran the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAM’S
+CASH STORE. Martin Eden got off at this corner. He stared up for a
+moment at the sign. It carried a message to him beyond its mere
+wording. A personality of smallness and egotism and petty
+underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters themselves. Bernard
+Higginbotham had married his sister, and he knew him well. He let
+himself in with a latch-key and climbed the stairs to the second floor.
+Here lived his brother-in-law. The grocery was below. There was a smell
+of stale vegetables in the air. As he groped his way across the hall he
+stumbled over a toy-cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and
+nieces, and brought up against a door with a resounding bang. “The
+pincher,” was his thought; “too miserly to burn two cents’ worth of gas
+and save his boarders’ necks.”
+
+He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his
+sister and Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his
+trousers, while his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his feet
+dangling in dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the second
+chair. He glanced across the top of the paper he was reading, showing a
+pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes. Martin Eden never looked
+at him without experiencing a sense of repulsion. What his sister had
+seen in the man was beyond him. The other affected him as so much
+vermin, and always aroused in him an impulse to crush him under his
+foot. “Some day I’ll beat the face off of him,” was the way he often
+consoled himself for enduring the man’s existence. The eyes,
+weasel-like and cruel, were looking at him complainingly.
+
+“Well,” Martin demanded. “Out with it.”
+
+“I had that door painted only last week,” Mr. Higginbotham half whined,
+half bullied; “and you know what union wages are. You should be more
+careful.”
+
+Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of
+it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the
+wall. It surprised him. He had always liked it, but it seemed that now
+he was seeing it for the first time. It was cheap, that was what it
+was, like everything else in this house. His mind went back to the
+house he had just left, and he saw, first, the paintings, and next,
+Her, looking at him with melting sweetness as she shook his hand at
+leaving. He forgot where he was and Bernard Higginbotham’s existence,
+till that gentleman demanded:-
+
+“Seen a ghost?”
+
+Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent,
+cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same
+eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below—subservient
+eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.
+
+“Yes,” Martin answered. “I seen a ghost. Good night. Good night,
+Gertrude.”
+
+He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the
+slatternly carpet.
+
+“Don’t bang the door,” Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.
+
+He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and closed
+the door softly behind him.
+
+Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.
+
+“He’s ben drinkin’,” he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper. “I told you he
+would.”
+
+She nodded her head resignedly.
+
+“His eyes was pretty shiny,” she confessed; “and he didn’t have no
+collar, though he went away with one. But mebbe he didn’t have more’n a
+couple of glasses.”
+
+“He couldn’t stand up straight,” asserted her husband. “I watched him.
+He couldn’t walk across the floor without stumblin’. You heard ’m
+yourself almost fall down in the hall.”
+
+“I think it was over Alice’s cart,” she said. “He couldn’t see it in
+the dark.”
+
+Mr. Higginbotham’s voice and wrath began to rise. All day he effaced
+himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the
+privilege of being himself.
+
+“I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk.”
+
+His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation
+of each word like the die of a machine. His wife sighed and remained
+silent. She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and
+always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and her husband.
+
+“He’s got it in him, I tell you, from his father,” Mr. Higginbotham
+went on accusingly. “An’ he’ll croak in the gutter the same way. You
+know that.”
+
+She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were agreed that Martin
+had come home drunk. They did not have it in their souls to know
+beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and that
+glowing face betokened youth’s first vision of love.
+
+“Settin’ a fine example to the children,” Mr. Higginbotham snorted,
+suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and which
+he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him more. “If
+he does it again, he’s got to get out. Understand! I won’t put up with
+his shinanigan—debotchin’ innocent children with his boozing.” Mr.
+Higginbotham liked the word, which was a new one in his vocabulary,
+recently gleaned from a newspaper column. “That’s what it is,
+debotchin’—there ain’t no other name for it.”
+
+Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on. Mr.
+Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.
+
+“Has he paid last week’s board?” he shot across the top of the
+newspaper.
+
+She nodded, then added, “He still has some money.”
+
+“When is he goin’ to sea again?”
+
+“When his pay-day’s spent, I guess,” she answered. “He was over to San
+Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But he’s got money, yet, an’
+he’s particular about the kind of ship he signs for.”
+
+“It’s not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs,” Mr. Higginbotham
+snorted. “Particular! Him!”
+
+“He said something about a schooner that’s gettin’ ready to go off to
+some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he’d sail on
+her if his money held out.”
+
+“If he only wanted to steady down, I’d give him a job drivin’ the
+wagon,” her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his
+voice. “Tom’s quit.”
+
+His wife looked alarm and interrogation.
+
+“Quit to-night. Is goin’ to work for Carruthers. They paid ’m more’n I
+could afford.”
+
+“I told you you’d lose ’m,” she cried out. “He was worth more’n you was
+giving him.”
+
+“Now look here, old woman,” Higginbotham bullied, “for the thousandth
+time I’ve told you to keep your nose out of the business. I won’t tell
+you again.”
+
+“I don’t care,” she sniffled. “Tom was a good boy.” Her husband glared
+at her. This was unqualified defiance.
+
+“If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the wagon,”
+he snorted.
+
+“He pays his board, just the same,” was the retort. “An’ he’s my
+brother, an’ so long as he don’t owe you money you’ve got no right to
+be jumping on him all the time. I’ve got some feelings, if I have been
+married to you for seven years.”
+
+“Did you tell ’m you’d charge him for gas if he goes on readin’ in
+bed?” he demanded.
+
+Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded away, her spirit
+wilting down into her tired flesh. Her husband was triumphant. He had
+her. His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in the
+sniffles she emitted. He extracted great happiness from squelching her,
+and she squelched easily these days, though it had been different in
+the first years of their married life, before the brood of children and
+his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.
+
+“Well, you tell ’m to-morrow, that’s all,” he said. “An’ I just want to
+tell you, before I forget it, that you’d better send for Marian
+to-morrow to take care of the children. With Tom quit, I’ll have to be
+out on the wagon, an’ you can make up your mind to it to be down below
+waitin’ on the counter.”
+
+“But to-morrow’s wash day,” she objected weakly.
+
+“Get up early, then, an’ do it first. I won’t start out till ten
+o’clock.”
+
+He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his
+brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and entered
+his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-stand, and one
+chair. Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a servant when his wife
+could do the work. Besides, the servant’s room enabled them to take in
+two boarders instead of one. Martin placed the Swinburne and Browning
+on the chair, took off his coat, and sat down on the bed. A screeching
+of asthmatic springs greeted the weight of his body, but he did not
+notice them. He started to take off his shoes, but fell to staring at
+the white plaster wall opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty
+brown where rain had leaked through the roof. On this befouled
+background visions began to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and
+stared long, till his lips began to move and he murmured, “Ruth.”
+
+“Ruth.” He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful. It
+delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition of it.
+“Ruth.” It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with. Each time he
+murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing the foul wall
+with a golden radiance. This radiance did not stop at the wall. It
+extended on into infinity, and through its golden depths his soul went
+questing after hers. The best that was in him was out in splendid
+flood. The very thought of her ennobled and purified him, made him
+better, and made him want to be better. This was new to him. He had
+never known women who had made him better. They had always had the
+counter effect of making him beastly. He did not know that many of them
+had done their best, bad as it was. Never having been conscious of
+himself, he did not know that he had that in his being that drew love
+from women and which had been the cause of their reaching out for his
+youth. Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about
+them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had
+been better because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he
+lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always reached
+out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was not just to them, nor
+to himself. But he, who for the first time was becoming conscious of
+himself, was in no condition to judge, and he burned with shame as he
+stared at the vision of his infamy.
+
+He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-glass
+over the wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked again, long
+and carefully. It was the first time he had ever really seen himself.
+His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that moment they had been
+filled with the ever changing panorama of the world, at which he had
+been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at himself. He saw the head and face
+of a young fellow of twenty, but, being unused to such appraisement, he
+did not know how to value it. Above a square-domed forehead he saw a
+mop of brown hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that
+were a delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and
+fingers tingle to pass caresses through it. But he passed it by as
+without merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the
+high, square forehead,—striving to penetrate it and learn the quality
+of its content. What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his
+insistent interrogation. What was it capable of? How far would it take
+him? Would it take him to her?
+
+He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were often
+quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs of the
+sun-washed deep. He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to her. He
+tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed
+in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself inside other men’s
+minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life he knew. He did not
+know her way of life. She was wonder and mystery, and how could he
+guess one thought of hers? Well, they were honest eyes, he concluded,
+and in them was neither smallness nor meanness. The brown sunburn of
+his face surprised him. He had not dreamed he was so black. He rolled
+up his shirt-sleeve and compared the white underside of the arm with
+his face. Yes, he was a white man, after all. But the arms were
+sunburned, too. He twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his
+other hand, and gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun.
+It was very white. He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the
+thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor did
+he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women who
+could boast fairer or smoother skins than he—fairer than where he had
+escaped the ravages of the sun.
+
+His might have been a cherub’s mouth, had not the full, sensuous lips a
+trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth. At times, so
+tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic.
+They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover. They could taste the
+sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the sweetness aside
+and command life. The chin and jaw, strong and just hinting of square
+aggressiveness, helped the lips to command life. Strength balanced
+sensuousness and had upon it a tonic effect, compelling him to love
+beauty that was healthy and making him vibrate to sensations that were
+wholesome. And between the lips were teeth that had never known nor
+needed the dentist’s care. They were white and strong and regular, he
+decided, as he looked at them. But as he looked, he began to be
+troubled. Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and
+vaguely remembered, was the impression that there were people who
+washed their teeth every day. They were the people from up above—people
+in her class. She must wash her teeth every day, too. What would she
+think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all the days
+of his life? He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form the habit. He
+would begin at once, to-morrow. It was not by mere achievement that he
+could hope to win to her. He must make a personal reform in all things,
+even to tooth-washing and neck-gear, though a starched collar affected
+him as a renunciation of freedom.
+
+He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over the calloused
+palm and gazing at the dirt that was ingrained in the flesh itself and
+which no brush could scrub away. How different was her palm! He
+thrilled deliciously at the remembrance. Like a rose-petal, he thought;
+cool and soft as a snowflake. He had never thought that a mere woman’s
+hand could be so sweetly soft. He caught himself imagining the wonder
+of a caress from such a hand, and flushed guiltily. It was too gross a
+thought for her. In ways it seemed to impugn her high spirituality. She
+was a pale, slender spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but
+nevertheless the softness of her palm persisted in his thoughts. He was
+used to the harsh callousness of factory girls and working women. Well
+he knew why their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was
+soft because she had never used it to work with. The gulf yawned
+between her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not have
+to work for a living. He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who
+did not labor. It towered before him on the wall, a figure in brass,
+arrogant and powerful. He had worked himself; his first memories seemed
+connected with work, and all his family had worked. There was Gertrude.
+When her hands were not hard from the endless housework, they were
+swollen and red like boiled beef, what of the washing. And there was
+his sister Marian. She had worked in the cannery the preceding summer,
+and her slim, pretty hands were all scarred with the tomato-knives.
+Besides, the tips of two of her fingers had been left in the cutting
+machine at the paper-box factory the preceding winter. He remembered
+the hard palms of his mother as she lay in her coffin. And his father
+had worked to the last fading gasp; the horned growth on his hands must
+have been half an inch thick when he died. But Her hands were soft, and
+her mother’s hands, and her brothers’. This last came to him as a
+surprise; it was tremendously indicative of the highness of their
+caste, of the enormous distance that stretched between her and him.
+
+He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off his
+shoes. He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman’s face and by
+a woman’s soft, white hands. And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on
+the foul plaster-wall appeared a vision. He stood in front of a gloomy
+tenement house. It was night-time, in the East End of London, and
+before him stood Margey, a little factory girl of fifteen. He had seen
+her home after the bean-feast. She lived in that gloomy tenement, a
+place not fit for swine. His hand was going out to hers as he said good
+night. She had put her lips up to be kissed, but he wasn’t going to
+kiss her. Somehow he was afraid of her. And then her hand closed on his
+and pressed feverishly. He felt her callouses grind and grate on his,
+and a great wave of pity welled over him. He saw her yearning, hungry
+eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed from childhood
+into a frightened and ferocious maturity; then he put his arms about
+her in large tolerance and stooped and kissed her on the lips. Her glad
+little cry rang in his ears, and he felt her clinging to him like a
+cat. Poor little starveling! He continued to stare at the vision of
+what had happened in the long ago. His flesh was crawling as it had
+crawled that night when she clung to him, and his heart was warm with
+pity. It was a gray scene, greasy gray, and the rain drizzled greasily
+on the pavement stones. And then a radiant glory shone on the wall, and
+up through the other vision, displacing it, glimmered Her pale face
+under its crown of golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a star.
+
+He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed them.
+Just the same, she told me to call again, he thought. He took another
+look at himself in the glass, and said aloud, with great solemnity:-
+
+“Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the free library an’
+read up on etiquette. Understand!”
+
+He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under his body.
+
+“But you’ve got to quit cussin’, Martin, old boy; you’ve got to quit
+cussin’,” he said aloud.
+
+Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and
+audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+He awoke next morning from rosy scenes of dream to a steamy atmosphere
+that smelled of soapsuds and dirty clothes, and that was vibrant with
+the jar and jangle of tormented life. As he came out of his room he
+heard the slosh of water, a sharp exclamation, and a resounding smack
+as his sister visited her irritation upon one of her numerous progeny.
+The squall of the child went through him like a knife. He was aware
+that the whole thing, the very air he breathed, was repulsive and mean.
+How different, he thought, from the atmosphere of beauty and repose of
+the house wherein Ruth dwelt. There it was all spiritual. Here it was
+all material, and meanly material.
+
+“Come here, Alfred,” he called to the crying child, at the same time
+thrusting his hand into his trousers pocket, where he carried his money
+loose in the same large way that he lived life in general. He put a
+quarter in the youngster’s hand and held him in his arms a moment,
+soothing his sobs. “Now run along and get some candy, and don’t forget
+to give some to your brothers and sisters. Be sure and get the kind
+that lasts longest.”
+
+His sister lifted a flushed face from the wash-tub and looked at him.
+
+“A nickel’d ha’ ben enough,” she said. “It’s just like you, no idea of
+the value of money. The child’ll eat himself sick.”
+
+“That’s all right, sis,” he answered jovially. “My money’ll take care
+of itself. If you weren’t so busy, I’d kiss you good morning.”
+
+He wanted to be affectionate to this sister, who was good, and who, in
+her way, he knew, loved him. But, somehow, she grew less herself as the
+years went by, and more and more baffling. It was the hard work, the
+many children, and the nagging of her husband, he decided, that had
+changed her. It came to him, in a flash of fancy, that her nature
+seemed taking on the attributes of stale vegetables, smelly soapsuds,
+and of the greasy dimes, nickels, and quarters she took in over the
+counter of the store.
+
+“Go along an’ get your breakfast,” she said roughly, though secretly
+pleased. Of all her wandering brood of brothers he had always been her
+favorite. “I declare I _will_ kiss you,” she said, with a sudden stir
+at her heart.
+
+With thumb and forefinger she swept the dripping suds first from one
+arm and then from the other. He put his arms round her massive waist
+and kissed her wet steamy lips. The tears welled into her eyes—not so
+much from strength of feeling as from the weakness of chronic overwork.
+She shoved him away from her, but not before he caught a glimpse of her
+moist eyes.
+
+“You’ll find breakfast in the oven,” she said hurriedly. “Jim ought to
+be up now. I had to get up early for the washing. Now get along with
+you and get out of the house early. It won’t be nice to-day, what of
+Tom quittin’ an’ nobody but Bernard to drive the wagon.”
+
+Martin went into the kitchen with a sinking heart, the image of her red
+face and slatternly form eating its way like acid into his brain. She
+might love him if she only had some time, he concluded. But she was
+worked to death. Bernard Higginbotham was a brute to work her so hard.
+But he could not help but feel, on the other hand, that there had not
+been anything beautiful in that kiss. It was true, it was an unusual
+kiss. For years she had kissed him only when he returned from voyages
+or departed on voyages. But this kiss had tasted of soapsuds, and the
+lips, he had noticed, were flabby. There had been no quick, vigorous
+lip-pressure such as should accompany any kiss. Hers was the kiss of a
+tired woman who had been tired so long that she had forgotten how to
+kiss. He remembered her as a girl, before her marriage, when she would
+dance with the best, all night, after a hard day’s work at the laundry,
+and think nothing of leaving the dance to go to another day’s hard
+work. And then he thought of Ruth and the cool sweetness that must
+reside in her lips as it resided in all about her. Her kiss would be
+like her hand-shake or the way she looked at one, firm and frank. In
+imagination he dared to think of her lips on his, and so vividly did he
+imagine that he went dizzy at the thought and seemed to rift through
+clouds of rose-petals, filling his brain with their perfume.
+
+In the kitchen he found Jim, the other boarder, eating mush very
+languidly, with a sick, far-away look in his eyes. Jim was a plumber’s
+apprentice whose weak chin and hedonistic temperament, coupled with a
+certain nervous stupidity, promised to take him nowhere in the race for
+bread and butter.
+
+“Why don’t you eat?” he demanded, as Martin dipped dolefully into the
+cold, half-cooked oatmeal mush. “Was you drunk again last night?”
+
+Martin shook his head. He was oppressed by the utter squalidness of it
+all. Ruth Morse seemed farther removed than ever.
+
+“I was,” Jim went on with a boastful, nervous giggle. “I was loaded
+right to the neck. Oh, she was a daisy. Billy brought me home.”
+
+Martin nodded that he heard,—it was a habit of nature with him to pay
+heed to whoever talked to him,—and poured a cup of lukewarm coffee.
+
+“Goin’ to the Lotus Club dance to-night?” Jim demanded. “They’re goin’
+to have beer, an’ if that Temescal bunch comes, there’ll be a
+rough-house. I don’t care, though. I’m takin’ my lady friend just the
+same. Cripes, but I’ve got a taste in my mouth!”
+
+He made a wry face and attempted to wash the taste away with coffee.
+
+“D’ye know Julia?”
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+“She’s my lady friend,” Jim explained, “and she’s a peach. I’d
+introduce you to her, only you’d win her. I don’t see what the girls
+see in you, honest I don’t; but the way you win them away from the
+fellers is sickenin’.”
+
+“I never got any away from you,” Martin answered uninterestedly. The
+breakfast had to be got through somehow.
+
+“Yes, you did, too,” the other asserted warmly. “There was Maggie.”
+
+“Never had anything to do with her. Never danced with her except that
+one night.”
+
+“Yes, an’ that’s just what did it,” Jim cried out. “You just danced
+with her an’ looked at her, an’ it was all off. Of course you didn’t
+mean nothin’ by it, but it settled me for keeps. Wouldn’t look at me
+again. Always askin’ about you. She’d have made fast dates enough with
+you if you’d wanted to.”
+
+“But I didn’t want to.”
+
+“Wasn’t necessary. I was left at the pole.” Jim looked at him
+admiringly. “How d’ye do it, anyway, Mart?”
+
+“By not carin’ about ’em,” was the answer.
+
+“You mean makin’ b’lieve you don’t care about them?” Jim queried
+eagerly.
+
+Martin considered for a moment, then answered, “Perhaps that will do,
+but with me I guess it’s different. I never have cared—much. If you can
+put it on, it’s all right, most likely.”
+
+“You should ’a’ ben up at Riley’s barn last night,” Jim announced
+inconsequently. “A lot of the fellers put on the gloves. There was a
+peach from West Oakland. They called ’m ‘The Rat.’ Slick as silk. No
+one could touch ’m. We was all wishin’ you was there. Where was you
+anyway?”
+
+“Down in Oakland,” Martin replied.
+
+“To the show?”
+
+Martin shoved his plate away and got up.
+
+“Comin’ to the dance to-night?” the other called after him.
+
+“No, I think not,” he answered.
+
+He went downstairs and out into the street, breathing great breaths of
+air. He had been suffocating in that atmosphere, while the apprentice’s
+chatter had driven him frantic. There had been times when it was all he
+could do to refrain from reaching over and mopping Jim’s face in the
+mush-plate. The more he had chattered, the more remote had Ruth seemed
+to him. How could he, herding with such cattle, ever become worthy of
+her? He was appalled at the problem confronting him, weighted down by
+the incubus of his working-class station. Everything reached out to
+hold him down—his sister, his sister’s house and family, Jim the
+apprentice, everybody he knew, every tie of life. Existence did not
+taste good in his mouth. Up to then he had accepted existence, as he
+had lived it with all about him, as a good thing. He had never
+questioned it, except when he read books; but then, they were only
+books, fairy stories of a fairer and impossible world. But now he had
+seen that world, possible and real, with a flower of a woman called
+Ruth in the midmost centre of it; and thenceforth he must know bitter
+tastes, and longings sharp as pain, and hopelessness that tantalized
+because it fed on hope.
+
+He had debated between the Berkeley Free Library and the Oakland Free
+Library, and decided upon the latter because Ruth lived in Oakland. Who
+could tell?—a library was a most likely place for her, and he might see
+her there. He did not know the way of libraries, and he wandered
+through endless rows of fiction, till the delicate-featured
+French-looking girl who seemed in charge, told him that the reference
+department was upstairs. He did not know enough to ask the man at the
+desk, and began his adventures in the philosophy alcove. He had heard
+of book philosophy, but had not imagined there had been so much written
+about it. The high, bulging shelves of heavy tomes humbled him and at
+the same time stimulated him. Here was work for the vigor of his brain.
+He found books on trigonometry in the mathematics section, and ran the
+pages, and stared at the meaningless formulas and figures. He could
+read English, but he saw there an alien speech. Norman and Arthur knew
+that speech. He had heard them talking it. And they were her brothers.
+He left the alcove in despair. From every side the books seemed to
+press upon him and crush him.
+
+He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge bulked so big. He
+was frightened. How could his brain ever master it all? Later, he
+remembered that there were other men, many men, who had mastered it;
+and he breathed a great oath, passionately, under his breath, swearing
+that his brain could do what theirs had done.
+
+And so he wandered on, alternating between depression and elation as he
+stared at the shelves packed with wisdom. In one miscellaneous section
+he came upon a “Norrie’s Epitome.” He turned the pages reverently. In a
+way, it spoke a kindred speech. Both he and it were of the sea. Then he
+found a “Bowditch” and books by Lecky and Marshall. There it was; he
+would teach himself navigation. He would quit drinking, work up, and
+become a captain. Ruth seemed very near to him in that moment. As a
+captain, he could marry her (if she would have him). And if she
+wouldn’t, well—he would live a good life among men, because of Her, and
+he would quit drinking anyway. Then he remembered the underwriters and
+the owners, the two masters a captain must serve, either of which could
+and would break him and whose interests were diametrically opposed. He
+cast his eyes about the room and closed the lids down on a vision of
+ten thousand books. No; no more of the sea for him. There was power in
+all that wealth of books, and if he would do great things, he must do
+them on the land. Besides, captains were not allowed to take their
+wives to sea with them.
+
+Noon came, and afternoon. He forgot to eat, and sought on for the books
+on etiquette; for, in addition to career, his mind was vexed by a
+simple and very concrete problem: _When you meet a young lady and she
+asks you to call, how soon can you call_? was the way he worded it to
+himself. But when he found the right shelf, he sought vainly for the
+answer. He was appalled at the vast edifice of etiquette, and lost
+himself in the mazes of visiting-card conduct between persons in polite
+society. He abandoned his search. He had not found what he wanted,
+though he had found that it would take all of a man’s time to be
+polite, and that he would have to live a preliminary life in which to
+learn how to be polite.
+
+“Did you find what you wanted?” the man at the desk asked him as he was
+leaving.
+
+“Yes, sir,” he answered. “You have a fine library here.”
+
+The man nodded. “We should be glad to see you here often. Are you a
+sailor?”
+
+“Yes, sir,” he answered. “And I’ll come again.”
+
+Now, how did he know that? he asked himself as he went down the stairs.
+
+And for the first block along the street he walked very stiff and
+straight and awkwardly, until he forgot himself in his thoughts,
+whereupon his rolling gait gracefully returned to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin Eden.
+He was famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands had gripped
+his life with a giant’s grasp. He could not steel himself to call upon
+her. He was afraid that he might call too soon, and so be guilty of an
+awful breach of that awful thing called etiquette. He spent long hours
+in the Oakland and Berkeley libraries, and made out application blanks
+for membership for himself, his sisters Gertrude and Marian, and Jim,
+the latter’s consent being obtained at the expense of several glasses
+of beer. With four cards permitting him to draw books, he burned the
+gas late in the servant’s room, and was charged fifty cents a week for
+it by Mr. Higginbotham.
+
+The many books he read but served to whet his unrest. Every page of
+every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed
+upon what he read, and increased. Also, he did not know where to begin,
+and continually suffered from lack of preparation. The commonest
+references, that he could see plainly every reader was expected to
+know, he did not know. And the same was true of the poetry he read
+which maddened him with delight. He read more of Swinburne than was
+contained in the volume Ruth had lent him; and “Dolores” he understood
+thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not understand it, he concluded. How
+could she, living the refined life she did? Then he chanced upon
+Kipling’s poems, and was swept away by the lilt and swing and glamour
+with which familiar things had been invested. He was amazed at the
+man’s sympathy with life and at his incisive psychology. _Psychology_
+was a new word in Martin’s vocabulary. He had bought a dictionary,
+which deed had decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day
+on which he must sail in search of more. Also, it incensed Mr.
+Higginbotham, who would have preferred the money taking the form of
+board.
+
+He dared not go near Ruth’s neighborhood in the daytime, but night
+found him lurking like a thief around the Morse home, stealing glimpses
+at the windows and loving the very walls that sheltered her. Several
+times he barely escaped being caught by her brothers, and once he
+trailed Mr. Morse down town and studied his face in the lighted
+streets, longing all the while for some quick danger of death to
+threaten so that he might spring in and save her father. On another
+night, his vigil was rewarded by a glimpse of Ruth through a
+second-story window. He saw only her head and shoulders, and her arms
+raised as she fixed her hair before a mirror. It was only for a moment,
+but it was a long moment to him, during which his blood turned to wine
+and sang through his veins. Then she pulled down the shade. But it was
+her room—he had learned that; and thereafter he strayed there often,
+hiding under a dark tree on the opposite side of the street and smoking
+countless cigarettes. One afternoon he saw her mother coming out of a
+bank, and received another proof of the enormous distance that
+separated Ruth from him. She was of the class that dealt with banks. He
+had never been inside a bank in his life, and he had an idea that such
+institutions were frequented only by the very rich and the very
+powerful.
+
+In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution. Her cleanness and
+purity had reacted upon him, and he felt in his being a crying need to
+be clean. He must be that if he were ever to be worthy of breathing the
+same air with her. He washed his teeth, and scrubbed his hands with a
+kitchen scrub-brush till he saw a nail-brush in a drug-store window and
+divined its use. While purchasing it, the clerk glanced at his nails,
+suggested a nail-file, and so he became possessed of an additional
+toilet-tool. He ran across a book in the library on the care of the
+body, and promptly developed a penchant for a cold-water bath every
+morning, much to the amazement of Jim, and to the bewilderment of Mr.
+Higginbotham, who was not in sympathy with such high-fangled notions
+and who seriously debated whether or not he should charge Martin extra
+for the water. Another stride was in the direction of creased trousers.
+Now that Martin was aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the
+difference between the baggy knees of the trousers worn by the working
+class and the straight line from knee to foot of those worn by the men
+above the working class. Also, he learned the reason why, and invaded
+his sister’s kitchen in search of irons and ironing-board. He had
+misadventures at first, hopelessly burning one pair and buying another,
+which expenditure again brought nearer the day on which he must put to
+sea.
+
+But the reform went deeper than mere outward appearance. He still
+smoked, but he drank no more. Up to that time, drinking had seemed to
+him the proper thing for men to do, and he had prided himself on his
+strong head which enabled him to drink most men under the table.
+Whenever he encountered a chance shipmate, and there were many in San
+Francisco, he treated them and was treated in turn, as of old, but he
+ordered for himself root beer or ginger ale and good-naturedly endured
+their chaffing. And as they waxed maudlin he studied them, watching the
+beast rise and master them and thanking God that he was no longer as
+they. They had their limitations to forget, and when they were drunk,
+their dim, stupid spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his
+heaven of intoxicated desire. With Martin the need for strong drink had
+vanished. He was drunken in new and more profound ways—with Ruth, who
+had fired him with love and with a glimpse of higher and eternal life;
+with books, that had set a myriad maggots of desire gnawing in his
+brain; and with the sense of personal cleanliness he was achieving,
+that gave him even more superb health than what he had enjoyed and that
+made his whole body sing with physical well-being.
+
+One night he went to the theatre, on the blind chance that he might see
+her there, and from the second balcony he did see her. He saw her come
+down the aisle, with Arthur and a strange young man with a football mop
+of hair and eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him to instant
+apprehension and jealousy. He saw her take her seat in the orchestra
+circle, and little else than her did he see that night—a pair of
+slender white shoulders and a mass of pale gold hair, dim with
+distance. But there were others who saw, and now and again, glancing at
+those about him, he noted two young girls who looked back from the row
+in front, a dozen seats along, and who smiled at him with bold eyes. He
+had always been easy-going. It was not in his nature to give rebuff. In
+the old days he would have smiled back, and gone further and encouraged
+smiling. But now it was different. He did smile back, then looked away,
+and looked no more deliberately. But several times, forgetting the
+existence of the two girls, his eyes caught their smiles. He could not
+re-thumb himself in a day, nor could he violate the intrinsic
+kindliness of his nature; so, at such moments, he smiled at the girls
+in warm human friendliness. It was nothing new to him. He knew they
+were reaching out their woman’s hands to him. But it was different now.
+Far down there in the orchestra circle was the one woman in all the
+world, so different, so terrifically different, from these two girls of
+his class, that he could feel for them only pity and sorrow. He had it
+in his heart to wish that they could possess, in some small measure,
+her goodness and glory. And not for the world could he hurt them
+because of their outreaching. He was not flattered by it; he even felt
+a slight shame at his lowliness that permitted it. He knew, did he
+belong in Ruth’s class, that there would be no overtures from these
+girls; and with each glance of theirs he felt the fingers of his own
+class clutching at him to hold him down.
+
+He left his seat before the curtain went down on the last act, intent
+on seeing Her as she passed out. There were always numbers of men who
+stood on the sidewalk outside, and he could pull his cap down over his
+eyes and screen himself behind some one’s shoulder so that she should
+not see him. He emerged from the theatre with the first of the crowd;
+but scarcely had he taken his position on the edge of the sidewalk when
+the two girls appeared. They were looking for him, he knew; and for the
+moment he could have cursed that in him which drew women. Their casual
+edging across the sidewalk to the curb, as they drew near, apprised him
+of discovery. They slowed down, and were in the thick of the crowd as
+they came up with him. One of them brushed against him and apparently
+for the first time noticed him. She was a slender, dark girl, with
+black, defiant eyes. But they smiled at him, and he smiled back.
+
+“Hello,” he said.
+
+It was automatic; he had said it so often before under similar
+circumstances of first meetings. Besides, he could do no less. There
+was that large tolerance and sympathy in his nature that would permit
+him to do no less. The black-eyed girl smiled gratification and
+greeting, and showed signs of stopping, while her companion, arm linked
+in arm, giggled and likewise showed signs of halting. He thought
+quickly. It would never do for Her to come out and see him talking
+there with them. Quite naturally, as a matter of course, he swung in
+along-side the dark-eyed one and walked with her. There was no
+awkwardness on his part, no numb tongue. He was at home here, and he
+held his own royally in the badinage, bristling with slang and
+sharpness, that was always the preliminary to getting acquainted in
+these swift-moving affairs. At the corner where the main stream of
+people flowed onward, he started to edge out into the cross street. But
+the girl with the black eyes caught his arm, following him and dragging
+her companion after her, as she cried:
+
+“Hold on, Bill! What’s yer rush? You’re not goin’ to shake us so sudden
+as all that?”
+
+He halted with a laugh, and turned, facing them. Across their shoulders
+he could see the moving throng passing under the street lamps. Where he
+stood it was not so light, and, unseen, he would be able to see Her as
+she passed by. She would certainly pass by, for that way led home.
+
+“What’s her name?” he asked of the giggling girl, nodding at the
+dark-eyed one.
+
+“You ask her,” was the convulsed response.
+
+“Well, what is it?” he demanded, turning squarely on the girl in
+question.
+
+“You ain’t told me yours, yet,” she retorted.
+
+“You never asked it,” he smiled. “Besides, you guessed the first
+rattle. It’s Bill, all right, all right.”
+
+“Aw, go ’long with you.” She looked him in the eyes, her own sharply
+passionate and inviting. “What is it, honest?”
+
+Again she looked. All the centuries of woman since sex began were
+eloquent in her eyes. And he measured her in a careless way, and knew,
+bold now, that she would begin to retreat, coyly and delicately, as he
+pursued, ever ready to reverse the game should he turn fainthearted.
+And, too, he was human, and could feel the draw of her, while his ego
+could not but appreciate the flattery of her kindness. Oh, he knew it
+all, and knew them well, from A to Z. Good, as goodness might be
+measured in their particular class, hard-working for meagre wages and
+scorning the sale of self for easier ways, nervously desirous for some
+small pinch of happiness in the desert of existence, and facing a
+future that was a gamble between the ugliness of unending toil and the
+black pit of more terrible wretchedness, the way whereto being briefer
+though better paid.
+
+“Bill,” he answered, nodding his head. “Sure, Pete, Bill an’ no other.”
+
+“No joshin’?” she queried.
+
+“It ain’t Bill at all,” the other broke in.
+
+“How do you know?” he demanded. “You never laid eyes on me before.”
+
+“No need to, to know you’re lyin’,” was the retort.
+
+“Straight, Bill, what is it?” the first girl asked.
+
+“Bill’ll do,” he confessed.
+
+She reached out to his arm and shook him playfully. “I knew you was
+lyin’, but you look good to me just the same.”
+
+He captured the hand that invited, and felt on the palm familiar
+markings and distortions.
+
+“When’d you chuck the cannery?” he asked.
+
+“How’d yeh know?” and, “My, ain’t cheh a mind-reader!” the girls
+chorussed.
+
+And while he exchanged the stupidities of stupid minds with them,
+before his inner sight towered the book-shelves of the library, filled
+with the wisdom of the ages. He smiled bitterly at the incongruity of
+it, and was assailed by doubts. But between inner vision and outward
+pleasantry he found time to watch the theatre crowd streaming by. And
+then he saw Her, under the lights, between her brother and the strange
+young man with glasses, and his heart seemed to stand still. He had
+waited long for this moment. He had time to note the light, fluffy
+something that hid her queenly head, the tasteful lines of her wrapped
+figure, the gracefulness of her carriage and of the hand that caught up
+her skirts; and then she was gone and he was left staring at the two
+girls of the cannery, at their tawdry attempts at prettiness of dress,
+their tragic efforts to be clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap
+ribbons, and the cheap rings on the fingers. He felt a tug at his arm,
+and heard a voice saying:-
+
+“Wake up, Bill! What’s the matter with you?”
+
+“What was you sayin’?” he asked.
+
+“Oh, nothin’,” the dark girl answered, with a toss of her head. “I was
+only remarkin’—”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Well, I was whisperin’ it’d be a good idea if you could dig up a
+gentleman friend—for her” (indicating her companion), “and then, we
+could go off an’ have ice-cream soda somewhere, or coffee, or
+anything.”
+
+He was afflicted by a sudden spiritual nausea. The transition from Ruth
+to this had been too abrupt. Ranged side by side with the bold, defiant
+eyes of the girl before him, he saw Ruth’s clear, luminous eyes, like a
+saint’s, gazing at him out of unplumbed depths of purity. And, somehow,
+he felt within him a stir of power. He was better than this. Life meant
+more to him than it meant to these two girls whose thoughts did not go
+beyond ice-cream and a gentleman friend. He remembered that he had led
+always a secret life in his thoughts. These thoughts he had tried to
+share, but never had he found a woman capable of understanding—nor a
+man. He had tried, at times, but had only puzzled his listeners. And as
+his thoughts had been beyond them, so, he argued now, he must be beyond
+them. He felt power move in him, and clenched his fists. If life meant
+more to him, then it was for him to demand more from life, but he could
+not demand it from such companionship as this. Those bold black eyes
+had nothing to offer. He knew the thoughts behind them—of ice-cream and
+of something else. But those saint’s eyes alongside—they offered all he
+knew and more than he could guess. They offered books and painting,
+beauty and repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence.
+Behind those black eyes he knew every thought process. It was like
+clockwork. He could watch every wheel go around. Their bid was low
+pleasure, narrow as the grave, that palled, and the grave was at the
+end of it. But the bid of the saint’s eyes was mystery, and wonder
+unthinkable, and eternal life. He had caught glimpses of the soul in
+them, and glimpses of his own soul, too.
+
+“There’s only one thing wrong with the programme,” he said aloud. “I’ve
+got a date already.”
+
+The girl’s eyes blazed her disappointment.
+
+“To sit up with a sick friend, I suppose?” she sneered.
+
+“No, a real, honest date with—” he faltered, “with a girl.”
+
+“You’re not stringin’ me?” she asked earnestly.
+
+He looked her in the eyes and answered: “It’s straight, all right. But
+why can’t we meet some other time? You ain’t told me your name yet. An’
+where d’ye live?”
+
+“Lizzie,” she replied, softening toward him, her hand pressing his arm,
+while her body leaned against his. “Lizzie Connolly. And I live at
+Fifth an’ Market.”
+
+He talked on a few minutes before saying good night. He did not go home
+immediately; and under the tree where he kept his vigils he looked up
+at a window and murmured: “That date was with you, Ruth. I kept it for
+you.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met Ruth
+Morse, and still he dared not call. Time and again he nerved himself up
+to call, but under the doubts that assailed him his determination died
+away. He did not know the proper time to call, nor was there any one to
+tell him, and he was afraid of committing himself to an irretrievable
+blunder. Having shaken himself free from his old companions and old
+ways of life, and having no new companions, nothing remained for him
+but to read, and the long hours he devoted to it would have ruined a
+dozen pairs of ordinary eyes. But his eyes were strong, and they were
+backed by a body superbly strong. Furthermore, his mind was fallow. It
+had lain fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the
+books was concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing. It had never been
+jaded by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with
+sharp teeth that would not let go.
+
+It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived centuries,
+so far behind were the old life and outlook. But he was baffled by lack
+of preparation. He attempted to read books that required years of
+preliminary specialization. One day he would read a book of antiquated
+philosophy, and the next day one that was ultra-modern, so that his
+head would be whirling with the conflict and contradiction of ideas. It
+was the same with the economists. On the one shelf at the library he
+found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse
+formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were
+obsolete. He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to know. He had become
+interested, in a day, in economics, industry, and politics. Passing
+through the City Hall Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the
+centre of which were half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised
+voices, earnestly carrying on a discussion. He joined the listeners,
+and heard a new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the
+people. One was a tramp, another was a labor agitator, a third was a
+law-school student, and the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen.
+For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single tax,
+and learned that there were warring social philosophies. He heard
+hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging to fields
+of thought that his meagre reading had never touched upon. Because of
+this he could not follow the arguments closely, and he could only guess
+at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then
+there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union
+baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the
+strange philosophy that _what is is right_, and another old man who
+discoursed interminably about the cosmos and the father-atom and the
+mother-atom.
+
+Martin Eden’s head was in a state of addlement when he went away after
+several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the definitions
+of a dozen unusual words. And when he left the library, he carried
+under his arm four volumes: Madam Blavatsky’s “Secret Doctrine,”
+“Progress and Poverty,” “The Quintessence of Socialism,” and “Warfare
+of Religion and Science.” Unfortunately, he began on the “Secret
+Doctrine.” Every line bristled with many-syllabled words he did not
+understand. He sat up in bed, and the dictionary was in front of him
+more often than the book. He looked up so many new words that when they
+recurred, he had forgotten their meaning and had to look them up again.
+He devised the plan of writing the definitions in a note-book, and
+filled page after page with them. And still he could not understand. He
+read until three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but
+not one essential thought in the text had he grasped. He looked up, and
+it seemed that the room was lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship
+upon the sea. Then he hurled the “Secret Doctrine” and many curses
+across the room, turned off the gas, and composed himself to sleep. Nor
+did he have much better luck with the other three books. It was not
+that his brain was weak or incapable; it could think these thoughts
+were it not for lack of training in thinking and lack of the
+thought-tools with which to think. He guessed this, and for a while
+entertained the idea of reading nothing but the dictionary until he had
+mastered every word in it.
+
+Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, finding his
+greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more understandable. He
+loved beauty, and there he found beauty. Poetry, like music, stirred
+him profoundly, and, though he did not know it, he was preparing his
+mind for the heavier work that was to come. The pages of his mind were
+blank, and, without effort, much he read and liked, stanza by stanza,
+was impressed upon those pages, so that he was soon able to extract
+great joy from chanting aloud or under his breath the music and the
+beauty of the printed words he had read. Then he stumbled upon Gayley’s
+“Classic Myths” and Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable,” side by side on a
+library shelf. It was illumination, a great light in the darkness of
+his ignorance, and he read poetry more avidly than ever.
+
+The man at the desk in the library had seen Martin there so often that
+he had become quite cordial, always greeting him with a smile and a nod
+when he entered. It was because of this that Martin did a daring thing.
+Drawing out some books at the desk, and while the man was stamping the
+cards, Martin blurted out:-
+
+“Say, there’s something I’d like to ask you.”
+
+The man smiled and paid attention.
+
+“When you meet a young lady an’ she asks you to call, how soon can you
+call?”
+
+Martin felt his shirt press and cling to his shoulders, what of the
+sweat of the effort.
+
+“Why I’d say any time,” the man answered.
+
+“Yes, but this is different,” Martin objected. “She—I—well, you see,
+it’s this way: maybe she won’t be there. She goes to the university.”
+
+“Then call again.”
+
+“What I said ain’t what I meant,” Martin confessed falteringly, while
+he made up his mind to throw himself wholly upon the other’s mercy.
+“I’m just a rough sort of a fellow, an’ I ain’t never seen anything of
+society. This girl is all that I ain’t, an’ I ain’t anything that she
+is. You don’t think I’m playin’ the fool, do you?” he demanded
+abruptly.
+
+“No, no; not at all, I assure you,” the other protested. “Your request
+is not exactly in the scope of the reference department, but I shall be
+only too pleased to assist you.”
+
+Martin looked at him admiringly.
+
+“If I could tear it off that way, I’d be all right,” he said.
+
+“I beg pardon?”
+
+“I mean if I could talk easy that way, an’ polite, an’ all the rest.”
+
+“Oh,” said the other, with comprehension.
+
+“What is the best time to call? The afternoon?—not too close to
+meal-time? Or the evening? Or Sunday?”
+
+“I’ll tell you,” the librarian said with a brightening face. “You call
+her up on the telephone and find out.”
+
+“I’ll do it,” he said, picking up his books and starting away.
+
+He turned back and asked:-
+
+“When you’re speakin’ to a young lady—say, for instance, Miss Lizzie
+Smith—do you say ‘Miss Lizzie’? or ‘Miss Smith’?”
+
+“Say ‘Miss Smith,’” the librarian stated authoritatively. “Say ‘Miss
+Smith’ always—until you come to know her better.”
+
+So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.
+
+“Come down any time; I’ll be at home all afternoon,” was Ruth’s reply
+over the telephone to his stammered request as to when he could return
+the borrowed books.
+
+She met him at the door herself, and her woman’s eyes took in
+immediately the creased trousers and the certain slight but indefinable
+change in him for the better. Also, she was struck by his face. It was
+almost violent, this health of his, and it seemed to rush out of him
+and at her in waves of force. She felt the urge again of the desire to
+lean toward him for warmth, and marvelled again at the effect his
+presence produced upon her. And he, in turn, knew again the swimming
+sensation of bliss when he felt the contact of her hand in greeting.
+The difference between them lay in that she was cool and self-possessed
+while his face flushed to the roots of the hair. He stumbled with his
+old awkwardness after her, and his shoulders swung and lurched
+perilously.
+
+Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on
+easily—more easily by far than he had expected. She made it easy for
+him; and the gracious spirit with which she did it made him love her
+more madly than ever. They talked first of the borrowed books, of the
+Swinburne he was devoted to, and of the Browning he did not understand;
+and she led the conversation on from subject to subject, while she
+pondered the problem of how she could be of help to him. She had
+thought of this often since their first meeting. She wanted to help
+him. He made a call upon her pity and tenderness that no one had ever
+made before, and the pity was not so much derogatory of him as maternal
+in her. Her pity could not be of the common sort, when the man who drew
+it was so much man as to shock her with maidenly fears and set her mind
+and pulse thrilling with strange thoughts and feelings. The old
+fascination of his neck was there, and there was sweetness in the
+thought of laying her hands upon it. It seemed still a wanton impulse,
+but she had grown more used to it. She did not dream that in such guise
+new-born love would epitomize itself. Nor did she dream that the
+feeling he excited in her was love. She thought she was merely
+interested in him as an unusual type possessing various potential
+excellencies, and she even felt philanthropic about it.
+
+She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different. He
+knew that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never before
+desired anything in his life. He had loved poetry for beauty’s sake;
+but since he met her the gates to the vast field of love-poetry had
+been opened wide. She had given him understanding even more than
+Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week before he would not
+have favored with a second thought—“God’s own mad lover dying on a
+kiss”; but now it was ever insistent in his mind. He marvelled at the
+wonder of it and the truth; and as he gazed upon her he knew that he
+could die gladly upon a kiss. He felt himself God’s own mad lover, and
+no accolade of knighthood could have given him greater pride. And at
+last he knew the meaning of life and why he had been born.
+
+As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring. He reviewed
+all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at the door,
+and longed for it again. His gaze wandered often toward her lips, and
+he yearned for them hungrily. But there was nothing gross or earthly
+about this yearning. It gave him exquisite delight to watch every
+movement and play of those lips as they enunciated the words she spoke;
+yet they were not ordinary lips such as all men and women had. Their
+substance was not mere human clay. They were lips of pure spirit, and
+his desire for them seemed absolutely different from the desire that
+had led him to other women’s lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his own
+physical lips upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful
+fervor with which one would kiss the robe of God. He was not conscious
+of this transvaluation of values that had taken place in him, and was
+unaware that the light that shone in his eyes when he looked at her was
+quite the same light that shines in all men’s eyes when the desire of
+love is upon them. He did not dream how ardent and masculine his gaze
+was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting the alchemy of her
+spirit. Her penetrative virginity exalted and disguised his own
+emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool chastity, and he would
+have been startled to learn that there was that shining out of his
+eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through her and kindled a kindred
+warmth. She was subtly perturbed by it, and more than once, though she
+knew not why, it disrupted her train of thought with its delicious
+intrusion and compelled her to grope for the remainder of ideas partly
+uttered. Speech was always easy with her, and these interruptions would
+have puzzled her had she not decided that it was because he was a
+remarkable type. She was very sensitive to impressions, and it was not
+strange, after all, that this aura of a traveller from another world
+should so affect her.
+
+The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help him,
+and she turned the conversation in that direction; but it was Martin
+who came to the point first.
+
+“I wonder if I can get some advice from you,” he began, and received an
+acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound. “You remember
+the other time I was here I said I couldn’t talk about books an’ things
+because I didn’t know how? Well, I’ve ben doin’ a lot of thinkin’ ever
+since. I’ve ben to the library a whole lot, but most of the books I’ve
+tackled have ben over my head. Mebbe I’d better begin at the beginnin’.
+I ain’t never had no advantages. I’ve worked pretty hard ever since I
+was a kid, an’ since I’ve ben to the library, lookin’ with new eyes at
+books—an’ lookin’ at new books, too—I’ve just about concluded that I
+ain’t ben reading the right kind. You know the books you find in
+cattle-camps an’ fo’c’s’ls ain’t the same you’ve got in this house, for
+instance. Well, that’s the sort of readin’ matter I’ve ben accustomed
+to. And yet—an’ I ain’t just makin’ a brag of it—I’ve ben different
+from the people I’ve herded with. Not that I’m any better than the
+sailors an’ cow-punchers I travelled with,—I was cow-punchin’ for a
+short time, you know,—but I always liked books, read everything I could
+lay hands on, an’—well, I guess I think differently from most of ’em.
+
+“Now, to come to what I’m drivin’ at. I was never inside a house like
+this. When I come a week ago, an’ saw all this, an’ you, an’ your
+mother, an’ brothers, an’ everything—well, I liked it. I’d heard about
+such things an’ read about such things in some of the books, an’ when I
+looked around at your house, why, the books come true. But the thing
+I’m after is I liked it. I wanted it. I want it now. I want to breathe
+air like you get in this house—air that is filled with books, and
+pictures, and beautiful things, where people talk in low voices an’ are
+clean, an’ their thoughts are clean. The air I always breathed was
+mixed up with grub an’ house-rent an’ scrappin’ an booze an’ that’s all
+they talked about, too. Why, when you was crossin’ the room to kiss
+your mother, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen.
+I’ve seen a whole lot of life, an’ somehow I’ve seen a whole lot more
+of it than most of them that was with me. I like to see, an’ I want to
+see more, an’ I want to see it different.
+
+“But I ain’t got to the point yet. Here it is. I want to make my way to
+the kind of life you have in this house. There’s more in life than
+booze, an’ hard work, an’ knockin’ about. Now, how am I goin’ to get
+it? Where do I take hold an’ begin? I’m willin’ to work my passage, you
+know, an’ I can make most men sick when it comes to hard work. Once I
+get started, I’ll work night an’ day. Mebbe you think it’s funny, me
+askin’ you about all this. I know you’re the last person in the world I
+ought to ask, but I don’t know anybody else I could ask—unless it’s
+Arthur. Mebbe I ought to ask him. If I was—”
+
+His voice died away. His firmly planned intention had come to a halt on
+the verge of the horrible probability that he should have asked Arthur
+and that he had made a fool of himself. Ruth did not speak immediately.
+She was too absorbed in striving to reconcile the stumbling, uncouth
+speech and its simplicity of thought with what she saw in his face. She
+had never looked in eyes that expressed greater power. Here was a man
+who could do anything, was the message she read there, and it accorded
+ill with the weakness of his spoken thought. And for that matter so
+complex and quick was her own mind that she did not have a just
+appreciation of simplicity. And yet she had caught an impression of
+power in the very groping of this mind. It had seemed to her like a
+giant writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down. Her face
+was all sympathy when she did speak.
+
+“What you need, you realize yourself, and it is education. You should
+go back and finish grammar school, and then go through to high school
+and university.”
+
+“But that takes money,” he interrupted.
+
+“Oh!” she cried. “I had not thought of that. But then you have
+relatives, somebody who could assist you?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“My father and mother are dead. I’ve two sisters, one married, an’ the
+other’ll get married soon, I suppose. Then I’ve a string of
+brothers,—I’m the youngest,—but they never helped nobody. They’ve just
+knocked around over the world, lookin’ out for number one. The oldest
+died in India. Two are in South Africa now, an’ another’s on a whaling
+voyage, an’ one’s travellin’ with a circus—he does trapeze work. An’ I
+guess I’m just like them. I’ve taken care of myself since I was
+eleven—that’s when my mother died. I’ve got to study by myself, I
+guess, an’ what I want to know is where to begin.”
+
+“I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar. Your
+grammar is—” She had intended saying “awful,” but she amended it to “is
+not particularly good.”
+
+He flushed and sweated.
+
+“I know I must talk a lot of slang an’ words you don’t understand. But
+then they’re the only words I know—how to speak. I’ve got other words
+in my mind, picked ’em up from books, but I can’t pronounce ’em, so I
+don’t use ’em.”
+
+“It isn’t what you say, so much as how you say it. You don’t mind my
+being frank, do you? I don’t want to hurt you.”
+
+“No, no,” he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness.
+“Fire away. I’ve got to know, an’ I’d sooner know from you than anybody
+else.”
+
+“Well, then, you say, ‘You was’; it should be, ‘You were.’ You say ‘I
+seen’ for ‘I saw.’ You use the double negative—”
+
+“What’s the double negative?” he demanded; then added humbly, “You see,
+I don’t even understand your explanations.”
+
+“I’m afraid I didn’t explain that,” she smiled. “A double negative
+is—let me see—well, you say, ‘never helped nobody.’ ‘Never’ is a
+negative. ‘Nobody’ is another negative. It is a rule that two negatives
+make a positive. ‘Never helped nobody’ means that, not helping nobody,
+they must have helped somebody.”
+
+“That’s pretty clear,” he said. “I never thought of it before. But it
+don’t mean they _must_ have helped somebody, does it? Seems to me that
+‘never helped nobody’ just naturally fails to say whether or not they
+helped somebody. I never thought of it before, and I’ll never say it
+again.”
+
+She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his
+mind. As soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but
+corrected her error.
+
+“You’ll find it all in the grammar,” she went on. “There’s something
+else I noticed in your speech. You say ‘don’t’ when you shouldn’t.
+‘Don’t’ is a contraction and stands for two words. Do you know them?”
+
+He thought a moment, then answered, “‘Do not.’”
+
+She nodded her head, and said, “And you use ‘don’t’ when you mean ‘does
+not.’”
+
+He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.
+
+“Give me an illustration,” he asked.
+
+“Well—” She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she thought,
+while he looked on and decided that her expression was most adorable.
+“‘It don’t do to be hasty.’ Change ‘don’t’ to ‘do not,’ and it reads,
+‘It do not do to be hasty,’ which is perfectly absurd.”
+
+He turned it over in his mind and considered.
+
+“Doesn’t it jar on your ear?” she suggested.
+
+“Can’t say that it does,” he replied judicially.
+
+“Why didn’t you say, ‘Can’t say that it do’?” she queried.
+
+“That sounds wrong,” he said slowly. “As for the other I can’t make up
+my mind. I guess my ear ain’t had the trainin’ yours has.”
+
+“There is no such word as ‘ain’t,’” she said, prettily emphatic.
+
+Martin flushed again.
+
+“And you say ‘ben’ for ‘been,’” she continued; “‘come’ for ‘came’; and
+the way you chop your endings is something dreadful.”
+
+“How do you mean?” He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get down
+on his knees before so marvellous a mind. “How do I chop?”
+
+“You don’t complete the endings. ‘A-n-d’ spells ‘and.’ You pronounce it
+‘an’.’ ‘I-n-g’ spells ‘ing.’ Sometimes you pronounce it ‘ing’ and
+sometimes you leave off the ‘g.’ And then you slur by dropping initial
+letters and diphthongs. ‘T-h-e-m’ spells ‘them.’ You pronounce it—oh,
+well, it is not necessary to go over all of them. What you need is the
+grammar. I’ll get one and show you how to begin.”
+
+As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had read in
+the etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as to whether
+he was doing the right thing, and fearing that she might take it as a
+sign that he was about to go.
+
+“By the way, Mr. Eden,” she called back, as she was leaving the room.
+“What is _booze_? You used it several times, you know.”
+
+“Oh, booze,” he laughed. “It’s slang. It means whiskey an’
+beer—anything that will make you drunk.”
+
+“And another thing,” she laughed back. “Don’t use ‘you’ when you are
+impersonal. ‘You’ is very personal, and your use of it just now was not
+precisely what you meant.”
+
+“I don’t just see that.”
+
+“Why, you said just now, to me, ‘whiskey and beer—anything that will
+make you drunk’—make me drunk, don’t you see?”
+
+“Well, it would, wouldn’t it?”
+
+“Yes, of course,” she smiled. “But it would be nicer not to bring me
+into it. Substitute ‘one’ for ‘you’ and see how much better it sounds.”
+
+When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair near his—he
+wondered if he should have helped her with the chair—and sat down
+beside him. She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads were
+inclined toward each other. He could hardly follow her outlining of the
+work he must do, so amazed was he by her delightful propinquity. But
+when she began to lay down the importance of conjugation, he forgot all
+about her. He had never heard of conjugation, and was fascinated by the
+glimpse he was catching into the tie-ribs of language. He leaned closer
+to the page, and her hair touched his cheek. He had fainted but once in
+his life, and he thought he was going to faint again. He could scarcely
+breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his throat and
+suffocating him. Never had she seemed so accessible as now. For the
+moment the great gulf that separated them was bridged. But there was no
+diminution in the loftiness of his feeling for her. She had not
+descended to him. It was he who had been caught up into the clouds and
+carried to her. His reverence for her, in that moment, was of the same
+order as religious awe and fervor. It seemed to him that he had
+intruded upon the holy of holies, and slowly and carefully he moved his
+head aside from the contact which thrilled him like an electric shock
+and of which she had not been aware.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar,
+reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the books that
+caught his fancy. Of his own class he saw nothing. The girls of the
+Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried Jim with
+questions, and some of the fellows who put on the glove at Riley’s were
+glad that Martin came no more. He made another discovery of
+treasure-trove in the library. As the grammar had shown him the
+tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the tie-ribs of poetry,
+and he began to learn metre and construction and form, beneath the
+beauty he loved finding the why and wherefore of that beauty. Another
+modern book he found treated poetry as a representative art, treated it
+exhaustively, with copious illustrations from the best in literature.
+Never had he read fiction with so keen zest as he studied these books.
+And his fresh mind, untaxed for twenty years and impelled by maturity
+of desire, gripped hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the
+student mind.
+
+When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he had
+known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and
+harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with this
+new world and expanded. His mind made for unity, and he was surprised
+when at first he began to see points of contact between the two worlds.
+And he was ennobled, as well, by the loftiness of thought and beauty he
+found in the books. This led him to believe more firmly than ever that
+up above him, in society like Ruth and her family, all men and women
+thought these thoughts and lived them. Down below where he lived was
+the ignoble, and he wanted to purge himself of the ignoble that had
+soiled all his days, and to rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt
+the upper classes. All his childhood and youth had been troubled by a
+vague unrest; he had never known what he wanted, but he had wanted
+something that he had hunted vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his
+unrest had become sharp and painful, and he knew at last, clearly and
+definitely, that it was beauty, and intellect, and love that he must
+have.
+
+During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each
+time was an added inspiration. She helped him with his English,
+corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But their
+intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study. He had seen too
+much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be wholly content with
+fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis; and there were times when
+their conversation turned on other themes—the last poetry he had read,
+the latest poet she had studied. And when she read aloud to him her
+favorite passages, he ascended to the topmost heaven of delight. Never,
+in all the women he had heard speak, had he heard a voice like hers.
+The least sound of it was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and
+throbbed with every word she uttered. It was the quality of it, the
+repose, and the musical modulation—the soft, rich, indefinable product
+of culture and a gentle soul. As he listened to her, there rang in the
+ears of his memory the harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and,
+in lesser degrees of harshness, the strident voices of working women
+and of the girls of his own class. Then the chemistry of vision would
+begin to work, and they would troop in review across his mind, each, by
+contrast, multiplying Ruth’s glories. Then, too, his bliss was
+heightened by the knowledge that her mind was comprehending what she
+read and was quivering with appreciation of the beauty of the written
+thought. She read to him much from “The Princess,” and often he saw her
+eyes swimming with tears, so finely was her aesthetic nature strung. At
+such moments her own emotions elevated him till he was as a god, and,
+as he gazed at her and listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life
+and reading its deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the
+heights of exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided that this was
+love and that love was the greatest thing in the world. And in review
+would pass along the corridors of memory all previous thrills and
+burnings he had known,—the drunkenness of wine, the caresses of women,
+the rough play and give and take of physical contests,—and they seemed
+trivial and mean compared with this sublime ardor he now enjoyed.
+
+The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never had any experiences
+of the heart. Her only experiences in such matters were of the books,
+where the facts of ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy
+realm of unreality; and she little knew that this rough sailor was
+creeping into her heart and storing there pent forces that would some
+day burst forth and surge through her in waves of fire. She did not
+know the actual fire of love. Her knowledge of love was purely
+theoretical, and she conceived of it as lambent flame, gentle as the
+fall of dew or the ripple of quiet water, and cool as the velvet-dark
+of summer nights. Her idea of love was more that of placid affection,
+serving the loved one softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and
+dim-lighted, of ethereal calm. She did not dream of the volcanic
+convulsions of love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched
+ashes. She knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the
+world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion. The conjugal
+affection of her father and mother constituted her ideal of
+love-affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging, without
+shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence with a
+loved one.
+
+So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange
+individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the effects
+he produced upon her. It was only natural. In similar ways she had
+experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild animals in the
+menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or shuddered at the
+bright-ribbed lightning. There was something cosmic in such things, and
+there was something cosmic in him. He came to her breathing of large
+airs and great spaces. The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in
+his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life. He
+was marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and
+rougher deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon. He was
+untamed, wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact
+that he came so mildly to her hand. Likewise she was stirred by the
+common impulse to tame the wild thing. It was an unconscious impulse,
+and farthest from her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay
+of him into a likeness of her father’s image, which image she believed
+to be the finest in the world. Nor was there any way, out of her
+inexperience, for her to know that the cosmic feel she caught of him
+was that most cosmic of things, love, which with equal power drew men
+and women together across the world, compelled stags to kill each other
+in the rutting season, and drove even the elements irresistibly to
+unite.
+
+His swift development was a source of surprise and interest. She
+detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by day,
+like flowers in congenial soil. She read Browning aloud to him, and was
+often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave to mooted
+passages. It was beyond her to realize that, out of his experience of
+men and women and life, his interpretations were far more frequently
+correct than hers. His conceptions seemed naive to her, though she was
+often fired by his daring flights of comprehension, whose orbit-path
+was so wide among the stars that she could not follow and could only
+sit and thrill to the impact of unguessed power. Then she played to
+him—no longer at him—and probed him with music that sank to depths
+beyond her plumb-line. His nature opened to music as a flower to the
+sun, and the transition was quick from his working-class rag-time and
+jingles to her classical display pieces that she knew nearly by heart.
+Yet he betrayed a democratic fondness for Wagner, and the “Tannhäuser”
+overture, when she had given him the clew to it, claimed him as nothing
+else she played. In an immediate way it personified his life. All his
+past was the _Venusburg_ motif, while her he identified somehow with
+the _Pilgrim’s Chorus_ motif; and from the exalted state this elevated
+him to, he swept onward and upward into that vast shadow-realm of
+spirit-groping, where good and evil war eternally.
+
+Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind temporary doubts as to
+the correctness of her own definitions and conceptions of music. But
+her singing he did not question. It was too wholly her, and he sat
+always amazed at the divine melody of her pure soprano voice. And he
+could not help but contrast it with the weak pipings and shrill
+quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and untrained, and with the
+raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the women of the seaport
+towns. She enjoyed singing and playing to him. In truth, it was the
+first time she had ever had a human soul to play with, and the plastic
+clay of him was a delight to mould; for she thought she was moulding
+it, and her intentions were good. Besides, it was pleasant to be with
+him. He did not repel her. That first repulsion had been really a fear
+of her undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep. Though she
+did not know it, she had a feeling in him of proprietary right. Also,
+he had a tonic effect upon her. She was studying hard at the
+university, and it seemed to strengthen her to emerge from the dusty
+books and have the fresh sea-breeze of his personality blow upon her.
+Strength! Strength was what she needed, and he gave it to her in
+generous measure. To come into the same room with him, or to meet him
+at the door, was to take heart of life. And when he had gone, she would
+return to her books with a keener zest and fresh store of energy.
+
+She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was an
+awkward thing to play with souls. As her interest in Martin increased,
+the remodelling of his life became a passion with her.
+
+“There is Mr. Butler,” she said one afternoon, when grammar and
+arithmetic and poetry had been put aside.
+
+“He had comparatively no advantages at first. His father had been a
+bank cashier, but he lingered for years, dying of consumption in
+Arizona, so that when he was dead, Mr. Butler, Charles Butler he was
+called, found himself alone in the world. His father had come from
+Australia, you know, and so he had no relatives in California. He went
+to work in a printing-office,—I have heard him tell of it many
+times,—and he got three dollars a week, at first. His income to-day is
+at least thirty thousand a year. How did he do it? He was honest, and
+faithful, and industrious, and economical. He denied himself the
+enjoyments that most boys indulge in. He made it a point to save so
+much every week, no matter what he had to do without in order to save
+it. Of course, he was soon earning more than three dollars a week, and
+as his wages increased he saved more and more.
+
+“He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to night school. He had
+his eyes fixed always on the future. Later on he went to night high
+school. When he was only seventeen, he was earning excellent wages at
+setting type, but he was ambitious. He wanted a career, not a
+livelihood, and he was content to make immediate sacrifices for his
+ultimate gain. He decided upon the law, and he entered father’s office
+as an office boy—think of that!—and got only four dollars a week. But
+he had learned how to be economical, and out of that four dollars he
+went on saving money.”
+
+She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it. His
+face was lighted up with interest in the youthful struggles of Mr.
+Butler; but there was a frown upon his face as well.
+
+“I’d say they was pretty hard lines for a young fellow,” he remarked.
+“Four dollars a week! How could he live on it? You can bet he didn’t
+have any frills. Why, I pay five dollars a week for board now, an’
+there’s nothin’ excitin’ about it, you can lay to that. He must have
+lived like a dog. The food he ate—”
+
+“He cooked for himself,” she interrupted, “on a little kerosene stove.”
+
+“The food he ate must have been worse than what a sailor gets on the
+worst-feedin’ deep-water ships, than which there ain’t much that can be
+possibly worse.”
+
+“But think of him now!” she cried enthusiastically. “Think of what his
+income affords him. His early denials are paid for a thousand-fold.”
+
+Martin looked at her sharply.
+
+“There’s one thing I’ll bet you,” he said, “and it is that Mr. Butler
+is nothin’ gay-hearted now in his fat days. He fed himself like that
+for years an’ years, on a boy’s stomach, an’ I bet his stomach’s none
+too good now for it.”
+
+Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.
+
+“I’ll bet he’s got dyspepsia right now!” Martin challenged.
+
+“Yes, he has,” she confessed; “but—”
+
+“An’ I bet,” Martin dashed on, “that he’s solemn an’ serious as an old
+owl, an’ doesn’t care a rap for a good time, for all his thirty
+thousand a year. An’ I’ll bet he’s not particularly joyful at seein’
+others have a good time. Ain’t I right?”
+
+She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:-
+
+“But he is not that type of man. By nature he is sober and serious. He
+always was that.”
+
+“You can bet he was,” Martin proclaimed. “Three dollars a week, an’
+four dollars a week, an’ a young boy cookin’ for himself on an
+oil-burner an’ layin’ up money, workin’ all day an’ studyin’ all night,
+just workin’ an’ never playin’, never havin’ a good time, an’ never
+learnin’ how to have a good time—of course his thirty thousand came
+along too late.”
+
+His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner sight all the
+thousands of details of the boy’s existence and of his narrow spiritual
+development into a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year man. With the
+swiftness and wide-reaching of multitudinous thought Charles Butler’s
+whole life was telescoped upon his vision.
+
+“Do you know,” he added, “I feel sorry for Mr. Butler. He was too young
+to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of thirty
+thousand a year that’s clean wasted upon him. Why, thirty thousand,
+lump sum, wouldn’t buy for him right now what ten cents he was layin’
+up would have bought him, when he was a kid, in the way of candy an’
+peanuts or a seat in nigger heaven.”
+
+It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth. Not
+only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but she
+always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or modify
+her own convictions. Had she been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she
+might have been changed by them; but she was twenty-four, conservative
+by nature and upbringing, and already crystallized into the cranny of
+life where she had been born and formed. It was true, his bizarre
+judgments troubled her in the moments they were uttered, but she
+ascribed them to his novelty of type and strangeness of living, and
+they were soon forgotten. Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them,
+the strength of their utterance, and the flashing of eyes and
+earnestness of face that accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew
+her toward him. She would never have guessed that this man who had come
+from beyond her horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her
+horizon with wider and deeper concepts. Her own limits were the limits
+of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in
+others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that
+where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed
+of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was
+identified with hers.
+
+“But I have not finished my story,” she said. “He worked, so father
+says, as no other office boy he ever had. Mr. Butler was always eager
+to work. He never was late, and he was usually at the office a few
+minutes before his regular time. And yet he saved his time. Every spare
+moment was devoted to study. He studied book-keeping and type-writing,
+and he paid for lessons in shorthand by dictating at night to a court
+reporter who needed practice. He quickly became a clerk, and he made
+himself invaluable. Father appreciated him and saw that he was bound to
+rise. It was on father’s suggestion that he went to law college. He
+became a lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took
+him in as junior partner. He is a great man. He refused the United
+States Senate several times, and father says he could become a justice
+of the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants to. Such a
+life is an inspiration to all of us. It shows us that a man with will
+may rise superior to his environment.”
+
+“He is a great man,” Martin said sincerely.
+
+But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred
+upon his sense of beauty and life. He could not find an adequate motive
+in Mr. Butler’s life of pinching and privation. Had he done it for love
+of a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would have understood.
+God’s own mad lover should do anything for the kiss, but not for thirty
+thousand dollars a year. He was dissatisfied with Mr. Butler’s career.
+There was something paltry about it, after all. Thirty thousand a year
+was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed
+such princely income of all its value.
+
+Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made it
+clear that more remodelling was necessary. Hers was that common
+insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color,
+creed, and politics are best and right and that other human creatures
+scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they. It was
+the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew thank God he was
+not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary god-substituting to
+the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire to shape this man from
+other crannies of life into the likeness of the men who lived in her
+particular cranny of life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a lover’s
+desire. His store of money exhausted, he had shipped before the mast on
+the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon Islands, after eight
+months of failure to find treasure, had witnessed the breaking up of
+the expedition. The men had been paid off in Australia, and Martin had
+immediately shipped on a deep-water vessel for San Francisco. Not alone
+had those eight months earned him enough money to stay on land for many
+weeks, but they had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and
+reading.
+
+His was the student’s mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
+indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth. The grammar he had
+taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded brain had
+mastered it. He noticed the bad grammar used by his shipmates, and made
+a point of mentally correcting and reconstructing their crudities of
+speech. To his great joy he discovered that his ear was becoming
+sensitive and that he was developing grammatical nerves. A double
+negative jarred him like a discord, and often, from lack of practice,
+it was from his own lips that the jar came. His tongue refused to learn
+new tricks in a day.
+
+After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the
+dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary. He found
+that this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he steadily went
+over and over his lengthening list of pronunciations and definitions,
+while he invariably memorized himself to sleep. “Never did anything,”
+“if I were,” and “those things,” were phrases, with many variations,
+that he repeated under his breath in order to accustom his tongue to
+the language spoken by Ruth. “And” and “ing,” with the “d” and “g”
+pronounced emphatically, he went over thousands of times; and to his
+surprise he noticed that he was beginning to speak cleaner and more
+correct English than the officers themselves and the
+gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who had financed the expedition.
+
+The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into
+possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and Martin
+had washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted access to
+the precious volumes. For a time, so steeped was he in the plays and in
+the many favorite passages that impressed themselves almost without
+effort on his brain, that all the world seemed to shape itself into
+forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy and his very thoughts were in
+blank verse. It trained his ear and gave him a fine appreciation for
+noble English; withal it introduced into his mind much that was archaic
+and obsolete.
+
+The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he had
+learned of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned much of
+himself. Along with his humbleness because he knew so little, there
+arose a conviction of power. He felt a sharp gradation between himself
+and his shipmates, and was wise enough to realize that the difference
+lay in potentiality rather than achievement. What he could do,—they
+could do; but within him he felt a confused ferment working that told
+him there was more in him than he had done. He was tortured by the
+exquisite beauty of the world, and wished that Ruth were there to share
+it with him. He decided that he would describe to her many of the bits
+of South Sea beauty. The creative spirit in him flamed up at the
+thought and urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience
+than Ruth. And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea. He
+would write. He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw,
+one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through which
+it felt. He would write—everything—poetry and prose, fiction and
+description, and plays like Shakespeare. There was career and the way
+to win to Ruth. The men of literature were the world’s giants, and he
+conceived them to be far finer than the Mr. Butlers who earned thirty
+thousand a year and could be Supreme Court justices if they wanted to.
+
+Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to
+San Francisco was like a dream. He was drunken with unguessed power and
+felt that he could do anything. In the midst of the great and lonely
+sea he gained perspective. Clearly, and for the first time, he saw Ruth
+and her world. It was all visualized in his mind as a concrete thing
+which he could take up in his two hands and turn around and about and
+examine. There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he
+saw it as a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to
+master it. To write! The thought was fire in him. He would begin as
+soon as he got back. The first thing he would do would be to describe
+the voyage of the treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San
+Francisco newspaper. He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she
+would be surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print. While he
+wrote, he could go on studying. There were twenty-four hours in each
+day. He was invincible. He knew how to work, and the citadels would go
+down before him. He would not have to go to sea again—as a sailor; and
+for the instant he caught a vision of a steam yacht. There were other
+writers who possessed steam yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, it
+would be slow succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content
+to earn enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying.
+And then, after some time,—a very indeterminate time,—when he had
+learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and his
+name would be on all men’s lips. But greater than that, infinitely
+greater and greatest of all, he would have proved himself worthy of
+Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for Ruth that his splendid
+dream arose. He was not a fame-monger, but merely one of God’s mad
+lovers.
+
+Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up his
+old room at Bernard Higginbotham’s and set to work. He did not even let
+Ruth know he was back. He would go and see her when he finished the
+article on the treasure-hunters. It was not so difficult to abstain
+from seeing her, because of the violent heat of creative fever that
+burned in him. Besides, the very article he was writing would bring her
+nearer to him. He did not know how long an article he should write, but
+he counted the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement
+of the _San Francisco Examiner_, and guided himself by that. Three
+days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it
+carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a
+rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as
+paragraphs and quotation marks. He had never thought of such things
+before; and he promptly set to work writing the article over, referring
+continually to the pages of the rhetoric and learning more in a day
+about composition than the average schoolboy in a year. When he had
+copied the article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he read in
+a newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered the iron law
+that manuscripts should never be rolled and that they should be written
+on one side of the paper. He had violated the law on both counts. Also,
+he learned from the item that first-class papers paid a minimum of ten
+dollars a column. So, while he copied the manuscript a third time, he
+consoled himself by multiplying ten columns by ten dollars. The product
+was always the same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was
+better than seafaring. If it hadn’t been for his blunders, he would
+have finished the article in three days. One hundred dollars in three
+days! It would have taken him three months and longer on the sea to
+earn a similar amount. A man was a fool to go to sea when he could
+write, he concluded, though the money in itself meant nothing to him.
+Its value was in the liberty it would get him, the presentable garments
+it would buy him, all of which would bring him nearer, swiftly nearer,
+to the slender, pale girl who had turned his life back upon itself and
+given him inspiration.
+
+He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to the
+editor of the _San Francisco Examiner_. He had an idea that anything
+accepted by a paper was published immediately, and as he had sent the
+manuscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on the following
+Sunday. He conceived that it would be fine to let that event apprise
+Ruth of his return. Then, Sunday afternoon, he would call and see her.
+In the meantime he was occupied by another idea, which he prided
+himself upon as being a particularly sane, careful, and modest idea. He
+would write an adventure story for boys and sell it to _The Youth’s
+Companion_. He went to the free reading-room and looked through the
+files of _The Youth’s Companion_. Serial stories, he found, were
+usually published in that weekly in five instalments of about three
+thousand words each. He discovered several serials that ran to seven
+instalments, and decided to write one of that length.
+
+He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once—a voyage that was
+to have been for three years and which had terminated in shipwreck at
+the end of six months. While his imagination was fanciful, even
+fantastic at times, he had a basic love of reality that compelled him
+to write about the things he knew. He knew whaling, and out of the real
+materials of his knowledge he proceeded to manufacture the fictitious
+adventures of the two boys he intended to use as joint heroes. It was
+easy work, he decided on Saturday evening. He had completed on that day
+the first instalment of three thousand words—much to the amusement of
+Jim, and to the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who sneered
+throughout meal-time at the “litery” person they had discovered in the
+family.
+
+Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in-law’s surprise on
+Sunday morning when he opened his _Examiner_ and saw the article on the
+treasure-hunters. Early that morning he was out himself to the front
+door, nervously racing through the many-sheeted newspaper. He went
+through it a second time, very carefully, then folded it up and left it
+where he had found it. He was glad he had not told any one about his
+article. On second thought he concluded that he had been wrong about
+the speed with which things found their way into newspaper columns.
+Besides, there had not been any news value in his article, and most
+likely the editor would write to him about it first.
+
+After breakfast he went on with his serial. The words flowed from his
+pen, though he broke off from the writing frequently to look up
+definitions in the dictionary or to refer to the rhetoric. He often
+read or re-read a chapter at a time, during such pauses; and he
+consoled himself that while he was not writing the great things he felt
+to be in him, he was learning composition, at any rate, and training
+himself to shape up and express his thoughts. He toiled on till dark,
+when he went out to the reading-room and explored magazines and
+weeklies until the place closed at ten o’clock. This was his programme
+for a week. Each day he did three thousand words, and each evening he
+puzzled his way through the magazines, taking note of the stories,
+articles, and poems that editors saw fit to publish. One thing was
+certain: What these multitudinous writers did he could do, and only
+give him time and he would do what they could not do. He was cheered to
+read in _Book News_, in a paragraph on the payment of magazine writers,
+not that Rudyard Kipling received a dollar per word, but that the
+minimum rate paid by first-class magazines was two cents a word. _The
+Youth’s Companion_ was certainly first class, and at that rate the
+three thousand words he had written that day would bring him sixty
+dollars—two months’ wages on the sea!
+
+On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words long.
+At two cents a word, he calculated, that would bring him four hundred
+and twenty dollars. Not a bad week’s work. It was more money than he
+had ever possessed at one time. He did not know how he could spend it
+all. He had tapped a gold mine. Where this came from he could always
+get more. He planned to buy some more clothes, to subscribe to many
+magazines, and to buy dozens of reference books that at present he was
+compelled to go to the library to consult. And still there was a large
+portion of the four hundred and twenty dollars unspent. This worried
+him until the thought came to him of hiring a servant for Gertrude and
+of buying a bicycle for Marian.
+
+He mailed the bulky manuscript to _The Youth’s Companion_, and on
+Saturday afternoon, after having planned an article on pearl-diving, he
+went to see Ruth. He had telephoned, and she went herself to greet him
+at the door. The old familiar blaze of health rushed out from him and
+struck her like a blow. It seemed to enter into her body and course
+through her veins in a liquid glow, and to set her quivering with its
+imparted strength. He flushed warmly as he took her hand and looked
+into her blue eyes, but the fresh bronze of eight months of sun hid the
+flush, though it did not protect the neck from the gnawing chafe of the
+stiff collar. She noted the red line of it with amusement which quickly
+vanished as she glanced at his clothes. They really fitted him,—it was
+his first made-to-order suit,—and he seemed slimmer and better
+modelled. In addition, his cloth cap had been replaced by a soft hat,
+which she commanded him to put on and then complimented him on his
+appearance. She did not remember when she had felt so happy. This
+change in him was her handiwork, and she was proud of it and fired with
+ambition further to help him.
+
+But the most radical change of all, and the one that pleased her most,
+was the change in his speech. Not only did he speak more correctly, but
+he spoke more easily, and there were many new words in his vocabulary.
+When he grew excited or enthusiastic, however, he dropped back into the
+old slurring and the dropping of final consonants. Also, there was an
+awkward hesitancy, at times, as he essayed the new words he had
+learned. On the other hand, along with his ease of expression, he
+displayed a lightness and facetiousness of thought that delighted her.
+It was his old spirit of humor and badinage that had made him a
+favorite in his own class, but which he had hitherto been unable to use
+in her presence through lack of words and training. He was just
+beginning to orientate himself and to feel that he was not wholly an
+intruder. But he was very tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set
+the pace of sprightliness and fancy, keeping up with her but never
+daring to go beyond her.
+
+He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan to write for a
+livelihood and of going on with his studies. But he was disappointed at
+her lack of approval. She did not think much of his plan.
+
+“You see,” she said frankly, “writing must be a trade, like anything
+else. Not that I know anything about it, of course. I only bring common
+judgment to bear. You couldn’t hope to be a blacksmith without spending
+three years at learning the trade—or is it five years! Now writers are
+so much better paid than blacksmiths that there must be ever so many
+more men who would like to write, who—try to write.”
+
+“But then, may not I be peculiarly constituted to write?” he queried,
+secretly exulting at the language he had used, his swift imagination
+throwing the whole scene and atmosphere upon a vast screen along with a
+thousand other scenes from his life—scenes that were rough and raw,
+gross and bestial.
+
+The whole composite vision was achieved with the speed of light,
+producing no pause in the conversation, nor interrupting his calm train
+of thought. On the screen of his imagination he saw himself and this
+sweet and beautiful girl, facing each other and conversing in good
+English, in a room of books and paintings and tone and culture, and all
+illuminated by a bright light of steadfast brilliance; while ranged
+about and fading away to the remote edges of the screen were
+antithetical scenes, each scene a picture, and he the onlooker, free to
+look at will upon what he wished. He saw these other scenes through
+drifting vapors and swirls of sullen fog dissolving before shafts of
+red and garish light. He saw cowboys at the bar, drinking fierce
+whiskey, the air filled with obscenity and ribald language, and he saw
+himself with them drinking and cursing with the wildest, or sitting at
+table with them, under smoking kerosene lamps, while the chips clicked
+and clattered and the cards were dealt around. He saw himself, stripped
+to the waist, with naked fists, fighting his great fight with Liverpool
+Red in the forecastle of the _Susquehanna_; and he saw the bloody deck
+of the _John Rogers_, that gray morning of attempted mutiny, the mate
+kicking in death-throes on the main-hatch, the revolver in the old
+man’s hand spitting fire and smoke, the men with passion-wrenched
+faces, of brutes screaming vile blasphemies and falling about him—and
+then he returned to the central scene, calm and clean in the steadfast
+light, where Ruth sat and talked with him amid books and paintings; and
+he saw the grand piano upon which she would later play to him; and he
+heard the echoes of his own selected and correct words, “But then, may
+I not be peculiarly constituted to write?”
+
+“But no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for
+blacksmithing,” she was laughing, “I never heard of one becoming a
+blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship.”
+
+“What would you advise?” he asked. “And don’t forget that I feel in me
+this capacity to write—I can’t explain it; I just know that it is in
+me.”
+
+“You must get a thorough education,” was the answer, “whether or not
+you ultimately become a writer. This education is indispensable for
+whatever career you select, and it must not be slipshod or sketchy. You
+should go to high school.”
+
+“Yes—” he began; but she interrupted with an afterthought:-
+
+“Of course, you could go on with your writing, too.”
+
+“I would have to,” he said grimly.
+
+“Why?” She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did not quite like
+the persistence with which he clung to his notion.
+
+“Because, without writing there wouldn’t be any high school. I must
+live and buy books and clothes, you know.”
+
+“I’d forgotten that,” she laughed. “Why weren’t you born with an
+income?”
+
+“I’d rather have good health and imagination,” he answered. “I can make
+good on the income, but the other things have to be made good for—” He
+almost said “you,” then amended his sentence to, “have to be made good
+for one.”
+
+“Don’t say ‘make good,’” she cried, sweetly petulant. “It’s slang, and
+it’s horrid.”
+
+He flushed, and stammered, “That’s right, and I only wish you’d correct
+me every time.”
+
+“I—I’d like to,” she said haltingly. “You have so much in you that is
+good that I want to see you perfect.”
+
+He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of being
+moulded by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the image of her
+ideal of man. And when she pointed out the opportuneness of the time,
+that the entrance examinations to high school began on the following
+Monday, he promptly volunteered that he would take them.
+
+Then she played and sang to him, while he gazed with hungry yearning at
+her, drinking in her loveliness and marvelling that there should not be
+a hundred suitors listening there and longing for her as he listened
+and longed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+He stopped to dinner that evening, and, much to Ruth’s satisfaction,
+made a favorable impression on her father. They talked about the sea as
+a career, a subject which Martin had at his finger-ends, and Mr. Morse
+remarked afterward that he seemed a very clear-headed young man. In his
+avoidance of slang and his search after right words, Martin was
+compelled to talk slowly, which enabled him to find the best thoughts
+that were in him. He was more at ease than that first night at dinner,
+nearly a year before, and his shyness and modesty even commended him to
+Mrs. Morse, who was pleased at his manifest improvement.
+
+“He is the first man that ever drew passing notice from Ruth,” she told
+her husband. “She has been so singularly backward where men are
+concerned that I have been worried greatly.”
+
+Mr. Morse looked at his wife curiously.
+
+“You mean to use this young sailor to wake her up?” he questioned.
+
+“I mean that she is not to die an old maid if I can help it,” was the
+answer. “If this young Eden can arouse her interest in mankind in
+general, it will be a good thing.”
+
+“A very good thing,” he commented. “But suppose,—and we must suppose,
+sometimes, my dear,—suppose he arouses her interest too particularly in
+him?”
+
+“Impossible,” Mrs. Morse laughed. “She is three years older than he,
+and, besides, it is impossible. Nothing will ever come of it. Trust
+that to me.”
+
+And so Martin’s rôle was arranged for him, while he, led on by Arthur
+and Norman, was meditating an extravagance. They were going out for a
+ride into the hills Sunday morning on their wheels, which did not
+interest Martin until he learned that Ruth, too, rode a wheel and was
+going along. He did not ride, nor own a wheel, but if Ruth rode, it was
+up to him to begin, was his decision; and when he said good night, he
+stopped in at a cyclery on his way home and spent forty dollars for a
+wheel. It was more than a month’s hard-earned wages, and it reduced his
+stock of money amazingly; but when he added the hundred dollars he was
+to receive from the _Examiner_ to the four hundred and twenty dollars
+that was the least _The Youth’s Companion_ could pay him, he felt that
+he had reduced the perplexity the unwonted amount of money had caused
+him. Nor did he mind, in the course of learning to ride the wheel home,
+the fact that he ruined his suit of clothes. He caught the tailor by
+telephone that night from Mr. Higginbotham’s store and ordered another
+suit. Then he carried the wheel up the narrow stairway that clung like
+a fire-escape to the rear wall of the building, and when he had moved
+his bed out from the wall, found there was just space enough in the
+small room for himself and the wheel.
+
+Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school
+examination, but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he spent
+the day in the white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and romance
+that burned in him. The fact that the _Examiner_ of that morning had
+failed to publish his treasure-hunting article did not dash his
+spirits. He was at too great a height for that, and having been deaf to
+a twice-repeated summons, he went without the heavy Sunday dinner with
+which Mr. Higginbotham invariably graced his table. To Mr. Higginbotham
+such a dinner was advertisement of his worldly achievement and
+prosperity, and he honored it by delivering platitudinous sermonettes
+upon American institutions and the opportunity said institutions gave
+to any hard-working man to rise—the rise, in his case, which he pointed
+out unfailingly, being from a grocer’s clerk to the ownership of
+Higginbotham’s Cash Store.
+
+Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished “Pearl-diving” on
+Monday morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high school.
+And when, days later, he applied for the results of his examinations,
+he learned that he had failed in everything save grammar.
+
+“Your grammar is excellent,” Professor Hilton informed him, staring at
+him through heavy spectacles; “but you know nothing, positively
+nothing, in the other branches, and your United States history is
+abominable—there is no other word for it, abominable. I should advise
+you—”
+
+Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and
+unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes. He was professor of physics
+in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre salary, and a
+select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.
+
+“Yes, sir,” Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at the
+desk in the library was in Professor Hilton’s place just then.
+
+“And I should advise you to go back to the grammar school for at least
+two years. Good day.”
+
+Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though he was surprised
+at Ruth’s shocked expression when he told her Professor Hilton’s
+advice. Her disappointment was so evident that he was sorry he had
+failed, but chiefly so for her sake.
+
+“You see I was right,” she said. “You know far more than any of the
+students entering high school, and yet you can’t pass the examinations.
+It is because what education you have is fragmentary, sketchy. You need
+the discipline of study, such as only skilled teachers can give you.
+You must be thoroughly grounded. Professor Hilton is right, and if I
+were you, I’d go to night school. A year and a half of it might enable
+you to catch up that additional six months. Besides, that would leave
+you your days in which to write, or, if you could not make your living
+by your pen, you would have your days in which to work in some
+position.”
+
+But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school, when
+am I going to see you?—was Martin’s first thought, though he refrained
+from uttering it. Instead, he said:-
+
+“It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school. But I wouldn’t
+mind that if I thought it would pay. But I don’t think it will pay. I
+can do the work quicker than they can teach me. It would be a loss of
+time—” he thought of her and his desire to have her—“and I can’t afford
+the time. I haven’t the time to spare, in fact.”
+
+“There is so much that is necessary.” She looked at him gently, and he
+was a brute to oppose her. “Physics and chemistry—you can’t do them
+without laboratory study; and you’ll find algebra and geometry almost
+hopeless without instruction. You need the skilled teachers, the
+specialists in the art of imparting knowledge.”
+
+He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least vainglorious
+way in which to express himself.
+
+“Please don’t think I’m bragging,” he began. “I don’t intend it that
+way at all. But I have a feeling that I am what I may call a natural
+student. I can study by myself. I take to it kindly, like a duck to
+water. You see yourself what I did with grammar. And I’ve learned much
+of other things—you would never dream how much. And I’m only getting
+started. Wait till I get—” He hesitated and assured himself of the
+pronunciation before he said “momentum. I’m getting my first real feel
+of things now. I’m beginning to size up the situation—”
+
+“Please don’t say ‘size up,’” she interrupted.
+
+“To get a line on things,” he hastily amended.
+
+“That doesn’t mean anything in correct English,” she objected.
+
+He floundered for a fresh start.
+
+“What I’m driving at is that I’m beginning to get the lay of the land.”
+
+Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.
+
+“Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room. Whenever I go into the
+library, I am impressed that way. The part played by teachers is to
+teach the student the contents of the chart-room in a systematic way.
+The teachers are guides to the chart-room, that’s all. It’s not
+something that they have in their own heads. They don’t make it up,
+don’t create it. It’s all in the chart-room and they know their way
+about in it, and it’s their business to show the place to strangers who
+might else get lost. Now I don’t get lost easily. I have the bump of
+location. I usually know where I’m at—What’s wrong now?”
+
+“Don’t say ‘where I’m at.’”
+
+“That’s right,” he said gratefully, “where I am. But where am I at—I
+mean, where am I? Oh, yes, in the chart-room. Well, some people—”
+
+“Persons,” she corrected.
+
+“Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get along
+without them. I’ve spent a lot of time in the chart-room now, and I’m
+on the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to,
+what coasts I want to explore. And from the way I line it up, I’ll
+explore a whole lot more quickly by myself. The speed of a fleet, you
+know, is the speed of the slowest ship, and the speed of the teachers
+is affected the same way. They can’t go any faster than the ruck of
+their scholars, and I can set a faster pace for myself than they set
+for a whole schoolroom.”
+
+“‘He travels the fastest who travels alone,’” she quoted at him.
+
+But I’d travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to
+blurt out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit
+spaces and starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm
+around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same
+instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If he
+could so frame words that she could see what he then saw! And he felt
+the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint
+these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah,
+that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very thing
+that the great writers and master-poets did. That was why they were
+giants. They knew how to express what they thought, and felt, and saw.
+Dogs asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to
+tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered
+what it was. And that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun. He saw
+noble and beautiful visions, but he could only whine and bark at Ruth.
+But he would cease sleeping in the sun. He would stand up, with open
+eyes, and he would struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes
+unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her his visioned
+wealth. Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of making
+words obedient servitors, and of making combinations of words mean more
+than the sum of their separate meanings. He was stirred profoundly by
+the passing glimpse at the secret, and he was again caught up in the
+vision of sunlit spaces and starry voids—until it came to him that it
+was very quiet, and he saw Ruth regarding him with an amused expression
+and a smile in her eyes.
+
+“I have had a great visioning,” he said, and at the sound of his words
+in his own ears his heart gave a leap. Where had those words come from?
+They had adequately expressed the pause his vision had put in the
+conversation. It was a miracle. Never had he so loftily framed a lofty
+thought. But never had he attempted to frame lofty thoughts in words.
+That was it. That explained it. He had never tried. But Swinburne had,
+and Tennyson, and Kipling, and all the other poets. His mind flashed on
+to his “Pearl-diving.” He had never dared the big things, the spirit of
+the beauty that was a fire in him. That article would be a different
+thing when he was done with it. He was appalled by the vastness of the
+beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind flashed and
+dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not chant that beauty in
+noble verse as the great poets did. And there was all the mysterious
+delight and spiritual wonder of his love for Ruth. Why could he not
+chant that, too, as the poets did? They had sung of love. So would he.
+By God!—
+
+And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing. Carried
+away, he had breathed it aloud. The blood surged into his face, wave
+upon wave, mastering the bronze of it till the blush of shame flaunted
+itself from collar-rim to the roots of his hair.
+
+“I—I—beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I was thinking.”
+
+“It sounded as if you were praying,” she said bravely, but she felt
+herself inside to be withering and shrinking. It was the first time she
+had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she was shocked,
+not merely as a matter of principle and training, but shocked in spirit
+by this rough blast of life in the garden of her sheltered maidenhood.
+
+But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.
+Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything. He had not had
+a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and succeeding,
+too. It never entered her head that there could be any other reason for
+her being kindly disposed toward him. She was tenderly disposed toward
+him, but she did not know it. She had no way of knowing it. The placid
+poise of twenty-four years without a single love affair did not fit her
+with a keen perception of her own feelings, and she who had never
+warmed to actual love was unaware that she was warming now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been
+finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by his
+attempts to write poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth,
+but they were never completed. Not in a day could he learn to chant in
+noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure were serious enough in
+themselves, but there was, over and beyond them, an intangible and
+evasive something that he caught in all great poetry, but which he
+could not catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit of
+poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture. It
+seemed a glow to him, a warm and trailing vapor, ever beyond his
+reaching, though sometimes he was rewarded by catching at shreds of it
+and weaving them into phrases that echoed in his brain with haunting
+notes or drifted across his vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty.
+It was baffling. He ached with desire to express and could but gibber
+prosaically as everybody gibbered. He read his fragments aloud. The
+metre marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and
+equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he felt
+within were lacking. He could not understand, and time and again, in
+despair, defeated and depressed, he returned to his article. Prose was
+certainly an easier medium.
+
+Following the “Pearl-diving,” he wrote an article on the sea as a
+career, another on turtle-catching, and a third on the northeast
+trades. Then he tried, as an experiment, a short story, and before he
+broke his stride he had finished six short stories and despatched them
+to various magazines. He wrote prolifically, intensely, from morning
+till night, and late at night, except when he broke off to go to the
+reading-room, draw books from the library, or to call on Ruth. He was
+profoundly happy. Life was pitched high. He was in a fever that never
+broke. The joy of creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was
+his. All the life about him—the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds,
+the slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr.
+Higginbotham—was a dream. The real world was in his mind, and the
+stories he wrote were so many pieces of reality out of his mind.
+
+The days were too short. There was so much he wanted to study. He cut
+his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along upon it.
+He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back to five. He
+could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon any one of his
+pursuits. It was with regret that he ceased from writing to study, that
+he ceased from study to go to the library, that he tore himself away
+from that chart-room of knowledge or from the magazines in the
+reading-room that were filled with the secrets of writers who succeeded
+in selling their wares. It was like severing heart strings, when he was
+with Ruth, to stand up and go; and he scorched through the dark streets
+so as to get home to his books at the least possible expense of time.
+And hardest of all was it to shut up the algebra or physics, put
+note-book and pencil aside, and close his tired eyes in sleep. He hated
+the thought of ceasing to live, even for so short a time, and his sole
+consolation was that the alarm clock was set five hours ahead. He would
+lose only five hours anyway, and then the jangling bell would jerk him
+out of unconsciousness and he would have before him another glorious
+day of nineteen hours.
+
+In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was ebbing low, and
+there was no money coming in. A month after he had mailed it, the
+adventure serial for boys was returned to him by _The Youth’s
+Companion_. The rejection slip was so tactfully worded that he felt
+kindly toward the editor. But he did not feel so kindly toward the
+editor of the _San Francisco Examiner_. After waiting two whole weeks,
+Martin had written to him. A week later he wrote again. At the end of
+the month, he went over to San Francisco and personally called upon the
+editor. But he did not meet that exalted personage, thanks to a
+Cerberus of an office boy, of tender years and red hair, who guarded
+the portals. At the end of the fifth week the manuscript came back to
+him, by mail, without comment. There was no rejection slip, no
+explanation, nothing. In the same way his other articles were tied up
+with the other leading San Francisco papers. When he recovered them, he
+sent them to the magazines in the East, from which they were returned
+more promptly, accompanied always by the printed rejection slips.
+
+The short stories were returned in similar fashion. He read them over
+and over, and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out the cause
+of their rejection, until, one day, he read in a newspaper that
+manuscripts should always be typewritten. That explained it. Of course
+editors were so busy that they could not afford the time and strain of
+reading handwriting. Martin rented a typewriter and spent a day
+mastering the machine. Each day he typed what he composed, and he typed
+his earlier manuscripts as fast as they were returned him. He was
+surprised when the typed ones began to come back. His jaw seemed to
+become squarer, his chin more aggressive, and he bundled the
+manuscripts off to new editors.
+
+The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own work.
+He tried it out on Gertrude. He read his stories aloud to her. Her eyes
+glistened, and she looked at him proudly as she said:-
+
+“Ain’t it grand, you writin’ those sort of things.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” he demanded impatiently. “But the story—how did you like
+it?”
+
+“Just grand,” was the reply. “Just grand, an’ thrilling, too. I was all
+worked up.”
+
+He could see that her mind was not clear. The perplexity was strong in
+her good-natured face. So he waited.
+
+“But, say, Mart,” after a long pause, “how did it end? Did that young
+man who spoke so highfalutin’ get her?”
+
+And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made
+artistically obvious, she would say:-
+
+“That’s what I wanted to know. Why didn’t you write that way in the
+story?”
+
+One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories,
+namely, that she liked happy endings.
+
+“That story was perfectly grand,” she announced, straightening up from
+the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her forehead
+with a red, steamy hand; “but it makes me sad. I want to cry. There is
+too many sad things in the world anyway. It makes me happy to think
+about happy things. Now if he’d married her, and—You don’t mind, Mart?”
+she queried apprehensively. “I just happen to feel that way, because
+I’m tired, I guess. But the story was grand just the same, perfectly
+grand. Where are you goin’ to sell it?”
+
+“That’s a horse of another color,” he laughed.
+
+“But if you _did_ sell it, what do you think you’d get for it?”
+
+“Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the way prices go.”
+
+“My! I do hope you’ll sell it!”
+
+“Easy money, eh?” Then he added proudly: “I wrote it in two days.
+That’s fifty dollars a day.”
+
+He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare. He would wait
+till some were published, he decided, then she would understand what he
+had been working for. In the meantime he toiled on. Never had the
+spirit of adventure lured him more strongly than on this amazing
+exploration of the realm of mind. He bought the text-books on physics
+and chemistry, and, along with his algebra, worked out problems and
+demonstrations. He took the laboratory proofs on faith, and his intense
+power of vision enabled him to see the reactions of chemicals more
+understandingly than the average student saw them in the laboratory.
+Martin wandered on through the heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he
+was getting to the nature of things. He had accepted the world as the
+world, but now he was comprehending the organization of it, the play
+and interplay of force and matter. Spontaneous explanations of old
+matters were continually arising in his mind. Levers and purchases
+fascinated him, and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks
+and tackles at sea. The theory of navigation, which enabled the ships
+to travel unerringly their courses over the pathless ocean, was made
+clear to him. The mysteries of storm, and rain, and tide were revealed,
+and the reason for the existence of trade-winds made him wonder whether
+he had written his article on the northeast trade too soon. At any rate
+he knew he could write it better now. One afternoon he went out with
+Arthur to the University of California, and, with bated breath and a
+feeling of religious awe, went through the laboratories, saw
+demonstrations, and listened to a physics professor lecturing to his
+classes.
+
+But he did not neglect his writing. A stream of short stories flowed
+from his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of verse—the
+kind he saw printed in the magazines—though he lost his head and wasted
+two weeks on a tragedy in blank verse, the swift rejection of which, by
+half a dozen magazines, dumfounded him. Then he discovered Henley and
+wrote a series of sea-poems on the model of “Hospital Sketches.” They
+were simple poems, of light and color, and romance and adventure. “Sea
+Lyrics,” he called them, and he judged them to be the best work he had
+yet done. There were thirty, and he completed them in a month, doing
+one a day after having done his regular day’s work on fiction, which
+day’s work was the equivalent to a week’s work of the average
+successful writer. The toil meant nothing to him. It was not toil. He
+was finding speech, and all the beauty and wonder that had been pent
+for years behind his inarticulate lips was now pouring forth in a wild
+and virile flood.
+
+He showed the “Sea Lyrics” to no one, not even to the editors. He had
+become distrustful of editors. But it was not distrust that prevented
+him from submitting the “Lyrics.” They were so beautiful to him that he
+was impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some glorious, far-off
+time when he would dare to read to her what he had written. Against
+that time he kept them with him, reading them aloud, going over them
+until he knew them by heart.
+
+He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his sleep,
+his subjective mind rioting through his five hours of surcease and
+combining the thoughts and events of the day into grotesque and
+impossible marvels. In reality, he never rested, and a weaker body or a
+less firmly poised brain would have been prostrated in a general
+break-down. His late afternoon calls on Ruth were rarer now, for June
+was approaching, when she would take her degree and finish with the
+university. Bachelor of Arts!—when he thought of her degree, it seemed
+she fled beyond him faster than he could pursue.
+
+One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually
+stayed for dinner and for music afterward. Those were his red-letter
+days. The atmosphere of the house, in such contrast with that in which
+he lived, and the mere nearness to her, sent him forth each time with a
+firmer grip on his resolve to climb the heights. In spite of the beauty
+in him, and the aching desire to create, it was for her that he
+struggled. He was a lover first and always. All other things he
+subordinated to love.
+
+Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his
+love-adventure. The world itself was not so amazing because of the
+atoms and molecules that composed it according to the propulsions of
+irresistible force; what made it amazing was the fact that Ruth lived
+in it. She was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or dreamed, or
+guessed.
+
+But he was oppressed always by her remoteness. She was so far from him,
+and he did not know how to approach her. He had been a success with
+girls and women in his own class; but he had never loved any of them,
+while he did love her, and besides, she was not merely of another
+class. His very love elevated her above all classes. She was a being
+apart, so far apart that he did not know how to draw near to her as a
+lover should draw near. It was true, as he acquired knowledge and
+language, that he was drawing nearer, talking her speech, discovering
+ideas and delights in common; but this did not satisfy his lover’s
+yearning. His lover’s imagination had made her holy, too holy, too
+spiritualized, to have any kinship with him in the flesh. It was his
+own love that thrust her from him and made her seem impossible for him.
+Love itself denied him the one thing that it desired.
+
+And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was bridged
+for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it was ever
+narrower. They had been eating cherries—great, luscious, black cherries
+with a juice of the color of dark wine. And later, as she read aloud to
+him from “The Princess,” he chanced to notice the stain of the cherries
+on her lips. For the moment her divinity was shattered. She was clay,
+after all, mere clay, subject to the common law of clay as his clay was
+subject, or anybody’s clay. Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries
+dyed them as cherries dyed his. And if so with her lips, then was it so
+with all of her. She was woman, all woman, just like any woman. It came
+upon him abruptly. It was a revelation that stunned him. It was as if
+he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen worshipped purity
+polluted.
+
+Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began pounding
+and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who was not a
+spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a cherry could
+stain. He trembled at the audacity of his thought; but all his soul was
+singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean, assured him he was right.
+Something of this change in him must have reached her, for she paused
+from her reading, looked up at him, and smiled. His eyes dropped from
+her blue eyes to her lips, and the sight of the stain maddened him. His
+arms all but flashed out to her and around her, in the way of his old
+careless life. She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will
+fought to hold him back.
+
+“You were not following a word,” she pouted.
+
+Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he looked
+into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of what he
+felt, he became abashed. He had indeed in thought dared too far. Of all
+the women he had known there was no woman who would not have
+guessed—save her. And she had not guessed. There was the difference.
+She was different. He was appalled by his own grossness, awed by her
+clear innocence, and he gazed again at her across the gulf. The bridge
+had broken down.
+
+But still the incident had brought him nearer. The memory of it
+persisted, and in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt upon
+it eagerly. The gulf was never again so wide. He had accomplished a
+distance vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts, or a dozen
+bachelorships. She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of
+purity; but cherries stained her lips. She was subject to the laws of
+the universe just as inexorably as he was. She had to eat to live, and
+when she got her feet wet, she caught cold. But that was not the point.
+If she could feel hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, then could she
+feel love—and love for a man. Well, he was a man. And why could he not
+be the man? “It’s up to me to make good,” he would murmur fervently. “I
+will be _the_ man. I will make myself _the_ man. I will make good.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry the
+beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain,
+Martin was called to the telephone.
+
+“It’s a lady’s voice, a fine lady’s,” Mr. Higginbotham, who had called
+him, jeered.
+
+Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a wave
+of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth’s voice. In his battle with
+the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the sound of her
+voice his love for her smote him like a sudden blow. And such a
+voice!—delicate and sweet, like a strain of music heard far off and
+faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect tone, crystal-pure.
+No mere woman had a voice like that. There was something celestial
+about it, and it came from other worlds. He could scarcely hear what it
+said, so ravished was he, though he controlled his face, for he knew
+that Mr. Higginbotham’s ferret eyes were fixed upon him.
+
+It was not much that Ruth wanted to say—merely that Norman had been
+going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a headache,
+and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and that if he
+had no other engagement, would he be good enough to take her?
+
+Would he! He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice. It was
+amazing. He had always seen her in her own house. And he had never
+dared to ask her to go anywhere with him. Quite irrelevantly, still at
+the telephone and talking with her, he felt an overpowering desire to
+die for her, and visions of heroic sacrifice shaped and dissolved in
+his whirling brain. He loved her so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.
+In that moment of mad happiness that she should go out with him, go to
+a lecture with him—with him, Martin Eden—she soared so far above him
+that there seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her. It was
+the only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty
+emotion he felt for her. It was the sublime abnegation of true love
+that comes to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone,
+in a whirlwind of fire and glory; and to die for her, he felt, was to
+have lived and loved well. And he was only twenty-one, and he had never
+been in love before.
+
+His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from the
+organ which had stirred him. His eyes were shining like an angel’s, and
+his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and
+holy.
+
+“Makin’ dates outside, eh?” his brother-in-law sneered. “You know what
+that means. You’ll be in the police court yet.”
+
+But Martin could not come down from the height. Not even the bestiality
+of the allusion could bring him back to earth. Anger and hurt were
+beneath him. He had seen a great vision and was as a god, and he could
+feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot of a man. He did not
+look at him, and though his eyes passed over him, he did not see him;
+and as in a dream he passed out of the room to dress. It was not until
+he had reached his own room and was tying his necktie that he became
+aware of a sound that lingered unpleasantly in his ears. On
+investigating this sound he identified it as the final snort of Bernard
+Higginbotham, which somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.
+
+As Ruth’s front door closed behind them and he came down the steps with
+her, he found himself greatly perturbed. It was not unalloyed bliss,
+taking her to the lecture. He did not know what he ought to do. He had
+seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that the women took
+the men’s arms. But then, again, he had seen them when they didn’t; and
+he wondered if it was only in the evening that arms were taken, or only
+between husbands and wives and relatives.
+
+Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie. Minnie had
+always been a stickler. She had called him down the second time she
+walked out with him, because he had gone along on the inside, and she
+had laid the law down to him that a gentleman always walked on the
+outside—when he was with a lady. And Minnie had made a practice of
+kicking his heels, whenever they crossed from one side of the street to
+the other, to remind him to get over on the outside. He wondered where
+she had got that item of etiquette, and whether it had filtered down
+from above and was all right.
+
+It wouldn’t do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had
+reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind Ruth and took up his station
+on the outside. Then the other problem presented itself. Should he
+offer her his arm? He had never offered anybody his arm in his life.
+The girls he had known never took the fellows’ arms. For the first
+several times they walked freely, side by side, and after that it was
+arms around the waists, and heads against the fellows’ shoulders where
+the streets were unlighted. But this was different. She wasn’t that
+kind of a girl. He must do something.
+
+He crooked the arm next to her—crooked it very slightly and with secret
+tentativeness, not invitingly, but just casually, as though he was
+accustomed to walk that way. And then the wonderful thing happened. He
+felt her hand upon his arm. Delicious thrills ran through him at the
+contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed that he had left the
+solid earth and was flying with her through the air. But he was soon
+back again, perturbed by a new complication. They were crossing the
+street. This would put him on the inside. He should be on the outside.
+Should he therefore drop her arm and change over? And if he did so,
+would he have to repeat the manoeuvre the next time? And the next?
+There was something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about
+and play the fool. Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and
+when he found himself on the inside, he talked quickly and earnestly,
+making a show of being carried away by what he was saying, so that, in
+case he was wrong in not changing sides, his enthusiasm would seem the
+cause for his carelessness.
+
+As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem. In
+the blaze of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her giggly
+friend. Only for an instant he hesitated, then his hand went up and his
+hat came off. He could not be disloyal to his kind, and it was to more
+than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was lifted. She nodded and looked at
+him boldly, not with soft and gentle eyes like Ruth’s, but with eyes
+that were handsome and hard, and that swept on past him to Ruth and
+itemized her face and dress and station. And he was aware that Ruth
+looked, too, with quick eyes that were timid and mild as a dove’s, but
+which saw, in a look that was a flutter on and past, the working-class
+girl in her cheap finery and under the strange hat that all
+working-class girls were wearing just then.
+
+“What a pretty girl!” Ruth said a moment later.
+
+Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-
+
+“I don’t know. I guess it’s all a matter of personal taste, but she
+doesn’t strike me as being particularly pretty.”
+
+“Why, there isn’t one woman in ten thousand with features as regular as
+hers. They are splendid. Her face is as clear-cut as a cameo. And her
+eyes are beautiful.”
+
+“Do you think so?” Martin queried absently, for to him there was only
+one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her hand upon
+his arm.
+
+“Do I think so? If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr. Eden,
+and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be fairly
+dazzled by her, and so would all men.”
+
+“She would have to be taught how to speak,” he commented, “or else most
+of the men wouldn’t understand her. I’m sure you couldn’t understand a
+quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally.”
+
+“Nonsense! You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your point.”
+
+“You forget how I talked when you first met me. I have learned a new
+language since then. Before that time I talked as that girl talks. Now
+I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to
+explain that you do not know that other girl’s language. And do you
+know why she carries herself the way she does? I think about such
+things now, though I never used to think about them, and I am beginning
+to understand—much.”
+
+“But why does she?”
+
+“She has worked long hours for years at machines. When one’s body is
+young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like putty
+according to the nature of the work. I can tell at a glance the trades
+of many workingmen I meet on the street. Look at me. Why am I rolling
+all about the shop? Because of the years I put in on the sea. If I’d
+put in the same years cow-punching, with my body young and pliable, I
+wouldn’t be rolling now, but I’d be bow-legged. And so with that girl.
+You noticed that her eyes were what I might call hard. She has never
+been sheltered. She has had to take care of herself, and a young girl
+can’t take care of herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like—like
+yours, for example.”
+
+“I think you are right,” Ruth said in a low voice. “And it is too bad.
+She is such a pretty girl.”
+
+He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity. And then he
+remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his fortune
+that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm to a lecture.
+
+Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass,
+that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and
+curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong
+by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of
+toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong
+with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and
+stenches. There are the stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are
+rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the
+books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful
+paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your
+own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
+Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles
+beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what are you?
+damn you! And are you going to make good?
+
+He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge of
+the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes. Then he got out note-book
+and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations, while the hours
+slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of dawn flooded against
+his window.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers that
+held forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was
+responsible for the great discovery. Once or twice in the month, while
+riding through the park on his way to the library, Martin dismounted
+from his wheel and listened to the arguments, and each time he tore
+himself away reluctantly. The tone of discussion was much lower than at
+Mr. Morse’s table. The men were not grave and dignified. They lost
+their tempers easily and called one another names, while oaths and
+obscene allusions were frequent on their lips. Once or twice he had
+seen them come to blows. And yet, he knew not why, there seemed
+something vital about the stuff of these men’s thoughts. Their
+logomachy was far more stimulating to his intellect than the reserved
+and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse. These men, who slaughtered English,
+gesticulated like lunatics, and fought one another’s ideas with
+primitive anger, seemed somehow to be more alive than Mr. Morse and his
+crony, Mr. Butler.
+
+Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park, but
+one afternoon a disciple of Spencer’s appeared, a seedy tramp with a
+dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the absence of a
+shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and
+the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully
+held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, “There is no god
+but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet.” Martin was
+puzzled as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the
+library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and
+because of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned “First
+Principles,” Martin drew out that volume.
+
+So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried Spencer, and
+choosing the “Principles of Psychology” to begin with, he had failed as
+abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There had been no
+understanding the book, and he had returned it unread. But this night,
+after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a sonnet, he got into bed
+and opened “First Principles.” Morning found him still reading. It was
+impossible for him to sleep. Nor did he write that day. He lay on the
+bed till his body grew tired, when he tried the hard floor, reading on
+his back, the book held in the air above him, or changing from side to
+side. He slept that night, and did his writing next morning, and then
+the book tempted him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to
+everything and oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth
+gave to him. His first consciousness of the immediate world about him
+was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know
+if he thought they were running a restaurant.
+
+Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. He wanted to
+know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the
+world. But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had known,
+and that he never could have known had he continued his sailing and
+wandering forever. He had merely skimmed over the surface of things,
+observing detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making
+superficial little generalizations—and all and everything quite
+unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance. The
+mechanism of the flight of birds he had watched and reasoned about with
+understanding; but it had never entered his head to try to explain the
+process whereby birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been
+developed. He had never dreamed there was such a process. That birds
+should have come to be, was unguessed. They always had been. They just
+happened.
+
+And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything. His ignorant
+and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless. The medieval
+metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served
+the sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers. In
+similar manner his attempt to study evolution had been confined to a
+hopelessly technical volume by Romanes. He had understood nothing, and
+the only idea he had gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust
+theory, of a lot of little men possessed of huge and unintelligible
+vocabularies. And now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but
+an accepted process of development; that scientists no longer disagreed
+about it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.
+
+And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him,
+reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and
+presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization
+that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors make and put into
+glass bottles. There was no caprice, no chance. All was law. It was in
+obedience to law that the bird flew, and it was in obedience to the
+same law that fermenting slime had writhed and squirmed and put out
+legs and wings and become a bird.
+
+Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and
+here he was at a higher pitch than ever. All the hidden things were
+laying their secrets bare. He was drunken with comprehension. At night,
+asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in the
+day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon
+the world he had just discovered. At table he failed to hear the
+conversation about petty and ignoble things, his eager mind seeking out
+and following cause and effect in everything before him. In the meat on
+the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its energy back through
+all its transformations to its source a hundred million miles away, or
+traced its energy ahead to the moving muscles in his arms that enabled
+him to cut the meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles
+to move to cut the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun
+shining in his brain. He was entranced by illumination, and did not
+hear the “Bughouse,” whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his
+sister’s face, nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham’s
+finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in his
+brother-in-law’s head.
+
+What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the correlation
+of knowledge—of all knowledge. He had been curious to know things, and
+whatever he acquired he had filed away in separate memory compartments
+in his brain. Thus, on the subject of sailing he had an immense store.
+On the subject of woman he had a fairly large store. But these two
+subjects had been unrelated. Between the two memory compartments there
+had been no connection. That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should
+be any connection whatever between a woman with hysterics and a
+schooner carrying a weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have
+struck him as ridiculous and impossible. But Herbert Spencer had shown
+him not only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for
+there to be no connection. All things were related to all other things
+from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the myriads of
+atoms in the grain of sand under one’s foot. This new concept was a
+perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually
+in tracing the relationship between all things under the sun and on the
+other side of the sun. He drew up lists of the most incongruous things
+and was unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them
+all—kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes,
+rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions,
+illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and
+tobacco. Thus, he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it,
+or wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a
+terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal,
+but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there was to
+know. And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the
+universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it all.
+
+“You fool!” he cried at his image in the looking-glass. “You wanted to
+write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write
+about. What did you have in you?—some childish notions, a few
+half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass
+of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as
+big as your love and as futile as your ignorance. And you wanted to
+write! Why, you’re just on the edge of beginning to get something in
+you to write about. You wanted to create beauty, but how could you when
+you knew nothing about the nature of beauty? You wanted to write about
+life when you knew nothing of the essential characteristics of life.
+You wanted to write about the world and the scheme of existence when
+the world was a Chinese puzzle to you and all that you could have
+written would have been about what you did not know of the scheme of
+existence. But cheer up, Martin, my boy. You’ll write yet. You know a
+little, a very little, and you’re on the right road now to know more.
+Some day, if you’re lucky, you may come pretty close to knowing all
+that may be known. Then you will write.”
+
+He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his joy
+and wonder in it. But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic over it.
+She tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it from her own
+studies. It did not stir her deeply, as it did him, and he would have
+been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it was not new and fresh
+to her as it was to him. Arthur and Norman, he found, believed in
+evolution and had read Spencer, though it did not seem to have made any
+vital impression upon them, while the young fellow with the glasses and
+the mop of hair, Will Olney, sneered disagreeably at Spencer and
+repeated the epigram, “There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert
+Spencer is his prophet.”
+
+But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that
+Olney was not in love with Ruth. Later, he was dumfounded to learn from
+various little happenings not only that Olney did not care for Ruth,
+but that he had a positive dislike for her. Martin could not understand
+this. It was a bit of phenomena that he could not correlate with all
+the rest of the phenomena in the universe. But nevertheless he felt
+sorry for the young fellow because of the great lack in his nature that
+prevented him from a proper appreciation of Ruth’s fineness and beauty.
+They rode out into the hills several Sundays on their wheels, and
+Martin had ample opportunity to observe the armed truce that existed
+between Ruth and Olney. The latter chummed with Norman, throwing Arthur
+and Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.
+
+Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was with
+Ruth, and great, also, because they were putting him more on a par with
+the young men of her class. In spite of their long years of disciplined
+education, he was finding himself their intellectual equal, and the
+hours spent with them in conversation was so much practice for him in
+the use of the grammar he had studied so hard. He had abandoned the
+etiquette books, falling back upon observation to show him the right
+things to do. Except when carried away by his enthusiasm, he was always
+on guard, keenly watchful of their actions and learning their little
+courtesies and refinements of conduct.
+
+The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a source
+of surprise to Martin. “Herbert Spencer,” said the man at the desk in
+the library, “oh, yes, a great mind.” But the man did not seem to know
+anything of the content of that great mind. One evening, at dinner,
+when Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the conversation upon Spencer.
+Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned the English philosopher’s agnosticism, but
+confessed that he had not read “First Principles”; while Mr. Butler
+stated that he had no patience with Spencer, had never read a line of
+him, and had managed to get along quite well without him. Doubts arose
+in Martin’s mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would
+have accepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up. As it
+was, he found Spencer’s explanation of things convincing; and, as he
+phrased it to himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent to a
+navigator throwing the compass and chronometer overboard. So Martin
+went on into a thorough study of evolution, mastering more and more the
+subject himself, and being convinced by the corroborative testimony of
+a thousand independent writers. The more he studied, the more vistas he
+caught of fields of knowledge yet unexplored, and the regret that days
+were only twenty-four hours long became a chronic complaint with him.
+
+One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up algebra
+and geometry. Trigonometry he had not even attempted. Then he cut
+chemistry from his study-list, retaining only physics.
+
+“I am not a specialist,” he said, in defence, to Ruth. “Nor am I going
+to try to be a specialist. There are too many special fields for any
+one man, in a whole lifetime, to master a tithe of them. I must pursue
+general knowledge. When I need the work of specialists, I shall refer
+to their books.”
+
+“But that is not like having the knowledge yourself,” she protested.
+
+“But it is unnecessary to have it. We profit from the work of the
+specialists. That’s what they are for. When I came in, I noticed the
+chimney-sweeps at work. They’re specialists, and when they get done,
+you will enjoy clean chimneys without knowing anything about the
+construction of chimneys.”
+
+“That’s far-fetched, I am afraid.”
+
+She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in her gaze and
+manner. But he was convinced of the rightness of his position.
+
+“All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in the world, in
+fact, rely on the specialists. Herbert Spencer did that. He generalized
+upon the findings of thousands of investigators. He would have had to
+live a thousand lives in order to do it all himself. And so with
+Darwin. He took advantage of all that had been learned by the florists
+and cattle-breeders.”
+
+“You’re right, Martin,” Olney said. “You know what you’re after, and
+Ruth doesn’t. She doesn’t know what she is after for herself even.”
+
+“—Oh, yes,” Olney rushed on, heading off her objection, “I know you
+call it general culture. But it doesn’t matter what you study if you
+want general culture. You can study French, or you can study German, or
+cut them both out and study Esperanto, you’ll get the culture tone just
+the same. You can study Greek or Latin, too, for the same purpose,
+though it will never be any use to you. It will be culture, though.
+Why, Ruth studied Saxon, became clever in it,—that was two years
+ago,—and all that she remembers of it now is ‘Whan that sweet Aprile
+with his schowers soote’—isn’t that the way it goes?”
+
+“But it’s given you the culture tone just the same,” he laughed, again
+heading her off. “I know. We were in the same classes.”
+
+“But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to something,”
+Ruth cried out. Her eyes were flashing, and in her cheeks were two
+spots of color. “Culture is the end in itself.”
+
+“But that is not what Martin wants.”
+
+“How do you know?”
+
+“What do you want, Martin?” Olney demanded, turning squarely upon him.
+
+Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.
+
+“Yes, what do you want?” Ruth asked. “That will settle it.”
+
+“Yes, of course, I want culture,” Martin faltered. “I love beauty, and
+culture will give me a finer and keener appreciation of beauty.”
+
+She nodded her head and looked triumph.
+
+“Rot, and you know it,” was Olney’s comment. “Martin’s after career,
+not culture. It just happens that culture, in his case, is incidental
+to career. If he wanted to be a chemist, culture would be unnecessary.
+Martin wants to write, but he’s afraid to say so because it will put
+you in the wrong.”
+
+“And why does Martin want to write?” he went on. “Because he isn’t
+rolling in wealth. Why do you fill your head with Saxon and general
+culture? Because you don’t have to make your way in the world. Your
+father sees to that. He buys your clothes for you, and all the rest.
+What rotten good is our education, yours and mine and Arthur’s and
+Norman’s? We’re soaked in general culture, and if our daddies went
+broke to-day, we’d be falling down to-morrow on teachers’ examinations.
+The best job you could get, Ruth, would be a country school or music
+teacher in a girls’ boarding-school.”
+
+“And pray what would you do?” she asked.
+
+“Not a blessed thing. I could earn a dollar and a half a day, common
+labor, and I might get in as instructor in Hanley’s cramming joint—I
+say might, mind you, and I might be chucked out at the end of the week
+for sheer inability.”
+
+Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced that
+Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he accorded
+Ruth. A new conception of love formed in his mind as he listened.
+Reason had nothing to do with love. It mattered not whether the woman
+he loved reasoned correctly or incorrectly. Love was above reason. If
+it just happened that she did not fully appreciate his necessity for a
+career, that did not make her a bit less lovable. She was all lovable,
+and what she thought had nothing to do with her lovableness.
+
+“What’s that?” he replied to a question from Olney that broke in upon
+his train of thought.
+
+“I was saying that I hoped you wouldn’t be fool enough to tackle
+Latin.”
+
+“But Latin is more than culture,” Ruth broke in. “It is equipment.”
+
+“Well, are you going to tackle it?” Olney persisted.
+
+Martin was sore beset. He could see that Ruth was hanging eagerly upon
+his answer.
+
+“I am afraid I won’t have time,” he said finally. “I’d like to, but I
+won’t have time.”
+
+“You see, Martin’s not seeking culture,” Olney exulted. “He’s trying to
+get somewhere, to do something.”
+
+“Oh, but it’s mental training. It’s mind discipline. It’s what makes
+disciplined minds.” Ruth looked expectantly at Martin, as if waiting
+for him to change his judgment. “You know, the foot-ball players have
+to train before the big game. And that is what Latin does for the
+thinker. It trains.”
+
+“Rot and bosh! That’s what they told us when we were kids. But there is
+one thing they didn’t tell us then. They let us find it out for
+ourselves afterwards.” Olney paused for effect, then added, “And what
+they didn’t tell us was that every gentleman should have studied Latin,
+but that no gentleman should know Latin.”
+
+“Now that’s unfair,” Ruth cried. “I knew you were turning the
+conversation just in order to get off something.”
+
+“It’s clever all right,” was the retort, “but it’s fair, too. The only
+men who know their Latin are the apothecaries, the lawyers, and the
+Latin professors. And if Martin wants to be one of them, I miss my
+guess. But what’s all that got to do with Herbert Spencer anyway?
+Martin’s just discovered Spencer, and he’s wild over him. Why? Because
+Spencer is taking him somewhere. Spencer couldn’t take me anywhere, nor
+you. We haven’t got anywhere to go. You’ll get married some day, and
+I’ll have nothing to do but keep track of the lawyers and business
+agents who will take care of the money my father’s going to leave me.”
+
+Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting
+shot.
+
+“You leave Martin alone, Ruth. He knows what’s best for himself. Look
+at what he’s done already. He makes me sick sometimes, sick and ashamed
+of myself. He knows more now about the world, and life, and man’s
+place, and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or I, or you, too, for
+that matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and French, and Saxon, and
+culture.”
+
+“But Ruth is my teacher,” Martin answered chivalrously. “She is
+responsible for what little I have learned.”
+
+“Rats!” Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious. “I
+suppose you’ll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her
+recommendation—only you didn’t. And she doesn’t know anything more
+about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon’s mines. What’s
+that jawbreaker definition about something or other, of Spencer’s, that
+you sprang on us the other day—that indefinite, incoherent homogeneity
+thing? Spring it on her, and see if she understands a word of it. That
+isn’t culture, you see. Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, Martin,
+I won’t have any respect for you.”
+
+And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been aware
+of an irk in it as well. It was about studies and lessons, dealing with
+the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted
+with the big things that were stirring in him—with the grip upon life
+that was even then crooking his fingers like eagle’s talons, with the
+cosmic thrills that made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness
+of mastery of it all. He likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the
+shores of a strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and
+stammering and vainly trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of
+his brethren in the new land. And so with him. He was alive, painfully
+alive, to the great universal things, and yet he was compelled to
+potter and grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he
+should study Latin.
+
+“What in hell has Latin to do with it?” he demanded before his mirror
+that night. “I wish dead people would stay dead. Why should I and the
+beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is alive and everlasting.
+Languages come and go. They are the dust of the dead.”
+
+And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very well,
+and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar fashion
+when he was with Ruth. He was only a schoolboy, with a schoolboy’s
+tongue, when he was in her presence.
+
+“Give me time,” he said aloud. “Only give me time.”
+
+Time! Time! Time! was his unending plaint.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and his love for
+Ruth, that he finally decided not to take up Latin. His money meant
+time. There was so much that was more important than Latin, so many
+studies that clamored with imperious voices. And he must write. He must
+earn money. He had had no acceptances. Twoscore of manuscripts were
+travelling the endless round of the magazines. How did the others do
+it? He spent long hours in the free reading-room, going over what
+others had written, studying their work eagerly and critically,
+comparing it with his own, and wondering, wondering, about the secret
+trick they had discovered which enabled them to sell their work.
+
+He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead. No
+light, no life, no color, was shot through it. There was no breath of
+life in it, and yet it sold, at two cents a word, twenty dollars a
+thousand—the newspaper clipping had said so. He was puzzled by
+countless short stories, written lightly and cleverly he confessed, but
+without vitality or reality. Life was so strange and wonderful, filled
+with an immensity of problems, of dreams, and of heroic toils, and yet
+these stories dealt only with the commonplaces of life. He felt the
+stress and strain of life, its fevers and sweats and wild
+insurgences—surely this was the stuff to write about! He wanted to
+glorify the leaders of forlorn hopes, the mad lovers, the giants that
+fought under stress and strain, amid terror and tragedy, making life
+crackle with the strength of their endeavor. And yet the magazine short
+stories seemed intent on glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sordid
+dollar-chasers, and the commonplace little love affairs of commonplace
+little men and women. Was it because the editors of the magazines were
+commonplace? he demanded. Or were they afraid of life, these writers
+and editors and readers?
+
+But his chief trouble was that he did not know any editors or writers.
+And not merely did he not know any writers, but he did not know anybody
+who had ever attempted to write. There was nobody to tell him, to hint
+to him, to give him the least word of advice. He began to doubt that
+editors were real men. They seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it
+was, a machine. He poured his soul into stories, articles, and poems,
+and intrusted them to the machine. He folded them just so, put the
+proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the manuscript,
+sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into the
+mail-box. It travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse
+of time the postman returned him the manuscript in another long
+envelope, on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed.
+There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning
+arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to
+another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein
+one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had
+delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It
+depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got
+chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought
+checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only
+the latter slot.
+
+It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible machinelikeness
+of the process. These slips were printed in stereotyped forms and he
+had received hundreds of them—as many as a dozen or more on each of his
+earlier manuscripts. If he had received one line, one personal line,
+along with one rejection of all his rejections, he would have been
+cheered. But not one editor had given that proof of existence. And he
+could conclude only that there were no warm human men at the other end,
+only mere cogs, well oiled and running beautifully in the machine.
+
+He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and he would have
+been content to continue feeding the machine for years; but he was
+bleeding to death, and not years but weeks would determine the fight.
+Each week his board bill brought him nearer destruction, while the
+postage on forty manuscripts bled him almost as severely. He no longer
+bought books, and he economized in petty ways and sought to delay the
+inevitable end; though he did not know how to economize, and brought
+the end nearer by a week when he gave his sister Marian five dollars
+for a dress.
+
+He struggled in the dark, without advice, without encouragement, and in
+the teeth of discouragement. Even Gertrude was beginning to look
+askance. At first she had tolerated with sisterly fondness what she
+conceived to be his foolishness; but now, out of sisterly solicitude,
+she grew anxious. To her it seemed that his foolishness was becoming a
+madness. Martin knew this and suffered more keenly from it than from
+the open and nagging contempt of Bernard Higginbotham. Martin had faith
+in himself, but he was alone in this faith. Not even Ruth had faith.
+She had wanted him to devote himself to study, and, though she had not
+openly disapproved of his writing, she had never approved.
+
+He had never offered to show her his work. A fastidious delicacy had
+prevented him. Besides, she had been studying heavily at the
+university, and he felt averse to robbing her of her time. But when she
+had taken her degree, she asked him herself to let her see something of
+what he had been doing. Martin was elated and diffident. Here was a
+judge. She was a bachelor of arts. She had studied literature under
+skilled instructors. Perhaps the editors were capable judges, too. But
+she would be different from them. She would not hand him a stereotyped
+rejection slip, nor would she inform him that lack of preference for
+his work did not necessarily imply lack of merit in his work. She would
+talk, a warm human being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important
+of all, she would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden. In his work
+she would discern what his heart and soul were like, and she would come
+to understand something, a little something, of the stuff of his dreams
+and the strength of his power.
+
+Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of his short
+stories, hesitated a moment, then added his “Sea Lyrics.” They mounted
+their wheels on a late June afternoon and rode for the hills. It was
+the second time he had been out with her alone, and as they rode along
+through the balmy warmth, just chilled by she sea-breeze to refreshing
+coolness, he was profoundly impressed by the fact that it was a very
+beautiful and well-ordered world and that it was good to be alive and
+to love. They left their wheels by the roadside and climbed to the
+brown top of an open knoll where the sunburnt grass breathed a harvest
+breath of dry sweetness and content.
+
+“Its work is done,” Martin said, as they seated themselves, she upon
+his coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth. He sniffed the
+sweetness of the tawny grass, which entered his brain and set his
+thoughts whirling on from the particular to the universal. “It has
+achieved its reason for existence,” he went on, patting the dry grass
+affectionately. “It quickened with ambition under the dreary downpour
+of last winter, fought the violent early spring, flowered, and lured
+the insects and the bees, scattered its seeds, squared itself with its
+duty and the world, and—”
+
+“Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical eyes?”
+she interrupted.
+
+“Because I’ve been studying evolution, I guess. It’s only recently that
+I got my eyesight, if the truth were told.”
+
+“But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical,
+that you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub the
+down off their beautiful wings.”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before. I
+just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was
+just beautiful without rhyme or reason. I did not know anything about
+beauty. But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know. This
+grass is more beautiful to me now that I know why it is grass, and all
+the hidden chemistry of sun and rain and earth that makes it become
+grass. Why, there is romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and
+adventure, too. The very thought of it stirs me. When I think of the
+play of force and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel
+as if I could write an epic on the grass.
+
+“How well you talk,” she said absently, and he noted that she was
+looking at him in a searching way.
+
+He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood
+flushing red on his neck and brow.
+
+“I hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered. “There seems to be so
+much in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can’t find ways to
+say what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world,
+all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was
+clamoring for me to be the spokesman. I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I
+feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child.
+It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech,
+written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens,
+transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a
+lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in
+through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and
+fancies. It is a breath of the universe I have breathed. I know song
+and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see
+visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass,
+and I would like to tell them to you, to the world. But how can I? My
+tongue is tied. I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe
+to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass. But I have not
+succeeded. I have no more than hinted in awkward speech. My words seem
+gibberish to me. And yet I am stifled with desire to tell. Oh!—” he
+threw up his hands with a despairing gesture—“it is impossible! It is
+not understandable! It is incommunicable!”
+
+“But you do talk well,” she insisted. “Just think how you have improved
+in the short time I have known you. Mr. Butler is a noted public
+speaker. He is always asked by the State Committee to go out on stump
+during campaign. Yet you talked just as well as he the other night at
+dinner. Only he was more controlled. You get too excited; but you will
+get over that with practice. Why, you would make a good public speaker.
+You can go far—if you want to. You are masterly. You can lead men, I am
+sure, and there is no reason why you should not succeed at anything you
+set your hand to, just as you have succeeded with grammar. You would
+make a good lawyer. You should shine in politics. There is nothing to
+prevent you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made. And
+minus the dyspepsia,” she added with a smile.
+
+They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always to
+the need of thorough grounding in education and to the advantages of
+Latin as part of the foundation for any career. She drew her ideal of
+the successful man, and it was largely in her father’s image, with a
+few unmistakable lines and touches of color from the image of Mr.
+Butler. He listened eagerly, with receptive ears, lying on his back and
+looking up and joying in each movement of her lips as she talked. But
+his brain was not receptive. There was nothing alluring in the pictures
+she drew, and he was aware of a dull pain of disappointment and of a
+sharper ache of love for her. In all she said there was no mention of
+his writing, and the manuscripts he had brought to read lay neglected
+on the ground.
+
+At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height above
+the horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them up.
+
+“I had forgotten,” she said quickly. “And I am so anxious to hear.”
+
+He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his
+very best. He called it “The Wine of Life,” and the wine of it, that
+had stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his brain now as
+he read it. There was a certain magic in the original conception, and
+he had adorned it with more magic of phrase and touch. All the old fire
+and passion with which he had written it were reborn in him, and he was
+swayed and swept away so that he was blind and deaf to the faults of
+it. But it was not so with Ruth. Her trained ear detected the
+weaknesses and exaggerations, the overemphasis of the tyro, and she was
+instantly aware each time the sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered. She
+scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous,
+at which moments she was disagreeably impressed with its
+amateurishness. That was her final judgment on the story as a
+whole—amateurish, though she did not tell him so. Instead, when he had
+done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the
+story.
+
+But he was disappointed. Her criticism was just. He acknowledged that,
+but he had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with her for the
+purpose of schoolroom correction. The details did not matter. They
+could take care of themselves. He could mend them, he could learn to
+mend them. Out of life he had captured something big and attempted to
+imprison it in the story. It was the big thing out of life he had read
+to her, not sentence-structure and semicolons. He wanted her to feel
+with him this big thing that was his, that he had seen with his own
+eyes, grappled with his own brain, and placed there on the page with
+his own hands in printed words. Well, he had failed, was his secret
+decision. Perhaps the editors were right. He had felt the big thing,
+but he had failed to transmute it. He concealed his disappointment, and
+joined so easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize
+that deep down in him was running a strong undercurrent of
+disagreement.
+
+“This next thing I’ve called ‘The Pot’,” he said, unfolding the
+manuscript. “It has been refused by four or five magazines now, but
+still I think it is good. In fact, I don’t know what to think of it,
+except that I’ve caught something there. Maybe it won’t affect you as
+it does me. It’s a short thing—only two thousand words.”
+
+“How dreadful!” she cried, when he had finished. “It is horrible,
+unutterably horrible!”
+
+He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched
+hands, with secret satisfaction. He had succeeded. He had communicated
+the stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain. It had struck
+home. No matter whether she liked it or not, it had gripped her and
+mastered her, made her sit there and listen and forget details.
+
+“It is life,” he said, “and life is not always beautiful. And yet,
+perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful there.
+It seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because it is
+there—”
+
+“But why couldn’t the poor woman—” she broke in disconnectedly. Then
+she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out: “Oh! It is
+degrading! It is not nice! It is nasty!”
+
+For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. _Nasty_! He
+had never dreamed it. He had not meant it. The whole sketch stood
+before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he
+sought vainly for nastiness. Then his heart began to beat again. He was
+not guilty.
+
+“Why didn’t you select a nice subject?” she was saying. “We know there
+are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason—”
+
+She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following her. He
+was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal face, so
+innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity seemed always to
+enter into him, driving out of him all dross and bathing him in some
+ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft and velvety as starshine.
+_We know there are nasty things in the world_! He cuddled to him the
+notion of her knowing, and chuckled over it as a love joke. The next
+moment, in a flashing vision of multitudinous detail, he sighted the
+whole sea of life’s nastiness that he had known and voyaged over and
+through, and he forgave her for not understanding the story. It was
+through no fault of hers that she could not understand. He thanked God
+that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew
+life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of
+the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on
+it to the world. Saints in heaven—how could they be anything but fair
+and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime—ah, that was the
+everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral
+grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first
+glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of
+weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness,
+arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment—
+
+He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.
+
+“The tone of it all is low. And there is so much that is high. Take ‘In
+Memoriam.’”
+
+He was impelled to suggest “Locksley Hall,” and would have done so, had
+not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her, the
+female of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment, creeping and
+crawling up the vast ladder of life for a thousand thousand centuries,
+had emerged on the topmost rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and
+fair, and divine, and with power to make him know love, and to aspire
+toward purity, and to desire to taste divinity—him, Martin Eden, who,
+too, had come up in some amazing fashion from out of the ruck and the
+mire and the countless mistakes and abortions of unending creation.
+There was the romance, and the wonder, and the glory. There was the
+stuff to write, if he could only find speech. Saints in heaven!—They
+were only saints and could not help themselves. But he was a man.
+
+“You have strength,” he could hear her saying, “but it is untutored
+strength.”
+
+“Like a bull in a china shop,” he suggested, and won a smile.
+
+“And you must develop discrimination. You must consult taste, and
+fineness, and tone.”
+
+“I dare too much,” he muttered.
+
+She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another story.
+
+“I don’t know what you’ll make of this,” he said apologetically. “It’s
+a funny thing. I’m afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but my
+intentions were good. Don’t bother about the little features of it.
+Just see if you catch the feel of the big thing in it. It is big, and
+it is true, though the chance is large that I have failed to make it
+intelligible.”
+
+He read, and as he read he watched her. At last he had reached her, he
+thought. She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon him,
+scarcely breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought, by the
+witchery of the thing he had created. He had entitled the story
+“Adventure,” and it was the apotheosis of adventure—not of the
+adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage
+taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and
+whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and
+nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death at
+the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous delirium
+of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging insects leading
+up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to royal culminations
+and lordly achievements.
+
+It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story, and
+it was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and listened. Her
+eyes were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and before he finished it
+seemed to him that she was almost panting. Truly, she was warmed; but
+she was warmed, not by the story, but by him. She did not think much of
+the story; it was Martin’s intensity of power, the old excess of
+strength that seemed to pour from his body and on and over her. The
+paradox of it was that it was the story itself that was freighted with
+his power, that was the channel, for the time being, through which his
+strength poured out to her. She was aware only of the strength, and not
+of the medium, and when she seemed most carried away by what he had
+written, in reality she had been carried away by something quite
+foreign to it—by a thought, terrible and perilous, that had formed
+itself unsummoned in her brain. She had caught herself wondering what
+marriage was like, and the becoming conscious of the waywardness and
+ardor of the thought had terrified her. It was unmaidenly. It was not
+like her. She had never been tormented by womanhood, and she had lived
+in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy, dense even to the full
+significance of that delicate master’s delicate allusions to the
+grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens and knights. She
+had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering imperatively at
+all her doors. Mentally she was in a panic to shoot the bolts and drop
+the bars into place, while wanton instincts urged her to throw wide her
+portals and bid the deliciously strange visitor to enter in.
+
+Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict. He had no doubt of
+what it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:
+
+“It is beautiful.”
+
+“It is beautiful,” she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.
+
+Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere
+beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty
+its handmaiden. He sprawled silently on the ground, watching the grisly
+form of a great doubt rising before him. He had failed. He was
+inarticulate. He had seen one of the greatest things in the world, and
+he had not expressed it.
+
+“What did you think of the—” He hesitated, abashed at his first attempt
+to use a strange word. “Of the _motif_?” he asked.
+
+“It was confused,” she answered. “That is my only criticism in the
+large way. I followed the story, but there seemed so much else. It is
+too wordy. You clog the action by introducing so much extraneous
+material.”
+
+“That was the major _motif_,” he hurriedly explained, “the big
+underrunning _motif_, the cosmic and universal thing. I tried to make
+it keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial after
+all. I was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly. I did not
+succeed in suggesting what I was driving at. But I’ll learn in time.”
+
+She did not follow him. She was a bachelor of arts, but he had gone
+beyond her limitations. This she did not comprehend, attributing her
+incomprehension to his incoherence.
+
+“You were too voluble,” she said. “But it was beautiful, in places.”
+
+He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he
+would read her the “Sea Lyrics.” He lay in dull despair, while she
+watched him searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and wayward
+thoughts of marriage.
+
+“You want to be famous?” she asked abruptly.
+
+“Yes, a little bit,” he confessed. “That is part of the adventure. It
+is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that counts.
+And after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means to something
+else. I want to be famous very much, for that matter, and for that
+reason.”
+
+“For your sake,” he wanted to add, and might have added had she proved
+enthusiastic over what he had read to her.
+
+But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that
+would at least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was
+which he had hinted at. There was no career for him in literature. Of
+that she was convinced. He had proved it to-day, with his amateurish
+and sophomoric productions. He could talk well, but he was incapable of
+expressing himself in a literary way. She compared Tennyson, and
+Browning, and her favorite prose masters with him, and to his hopeless
+discredit. Yet she did not tell him her whole mind. Her strange
+interest in him led her to temporize. His desire to write was, after
+all, a little weakness which he would grow out of in time. Then he
+would devote himself to the more serious affairs of life. And he would
+succeed, too. She knew that. He was so strong that he could not fail—if
+only he would drop writing.
+
+“I wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden,” she said.
+
+He flushed with pleasure. She was interested, that much was sure. And
+at least she had not given him a rejection slip. She had called certain
+portions of his work beautiful, and that was the first encouragement he
+had ever received from any one.
+
+“I will,” he said passionately. “And I promise you, Miss Morse, that I
+will make good. I have come far, I know that; and I have far to go, and
+I will cover it if I have to do it on my hands and knees.” He held up a
+bunch of manuscript. “Here are the ‘Sea Lyrics.’ When you get home,
+I’ll turn them over to you to read at your leisure. And you must be
+sure to tell me just what you think of them. What I need, you know,
+above all things, is criticism. And do, please, be frank with me.”
+
+“I will be perfectly frank,” she promised, with an uneasy conviction
+that she had not been frank with him and with a doubt if she could be
+quite frank with him the next time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+“The first battle, fought and finished,” Martin said to the
+looking-glass ten days later. “But there will be a second battle, and a
+third battle, and battles to the end of time, unless—”
+
+He had not finished the sentence, but looked about the mean little room
+and let his eyes dwell sadly upon a heap of returned manuscripts, still
+in their long envelopes, which lay in a corner on the floor. He had no
+stamps with which to continue them on their travels, and for a week
+they had been piling up. More of them would come in on the morrow, and
+on the next day, and the next, till they were all in. And he would be
+unable to start them out again. He was a month’s rent behind on the
+typewriter, which he could not pay, having barely enough for the week’s
+board which was due and for the employment office fees.
+
+He sat down and regarded the table thoughtfully. There were ink stains
+upon it, and he suddenly discovered that he was fond of it.
+
+“Dear old table,” he said, “I’ve spent some happy hours with you, and
+you’ve been a pretty good friend when all is said and done. You never
+turned me down, never passed me out a reward-of-unmerit rejection slip,
+never complained about working overtime.”
+
+He dropped his arms upon the table and buried his face in them. His
+throat was aching, and he wanted to cry. It reminded him of his first
+fight, when he was six years old, when he punched away with the tears
+running down his cheeks while the other boy, two years his elder, had
+beaten and pounded him into exhaustion. He saw the ring of boys,
+howling like barbarians as he went down at last, writhing in the throes
+of nausea, the blood streaming from his nose and the tears from his
+bruised eyes.
+
+“Poor little shaver,” he murmured. “And you’re just as badly licked
+now. You’re beaten to a pulp. You’re down and out.”
+
+But the vision of that first fight still lingered under his eyelids,
+and as he watched he saw it dissolve and reshape into the series of
+fights which had followed. Six months later Cheese-Face (that was the
+boy) had whipped him again. But he had blacked Cheese-Face’s eye that
+time. That was going some. He saw them all, fight after fight, himself
+always whipped and Cheese-Face exulting over him. But he had never run
+away. He felt strengthened by the memory of that. He had always stayed
+and taken his medicine. Cheese-Face had been a little fiend at
+fighting, and had never once shown mercy to him. But he had stayed! He
+had stayed with it!
+
+Next, he saw a narrow alley, between ramshackle frame buildings. The
+end of the alley was blocked by a one-story brick building, out of
+which issued the rhythmic thunder of the presses, running off the first
+edition of the _Enquirer_. He was eleven, and Cheese-Face was thirteen,
+and they both carried the _Enquirer_. That was why they were there,
+waiting for their papers. And, of course, Cheese-Face had picked on him
+again, and there was another fight that was indeterminate, because at
+quarter to four the door of the press-room was thrown open and the gang
+of boys crowded in to fold their papers.
+
+“I’ll lick you to-morrow,” he heard Cheese-Face promise; and he heard
+his own voice, piping and trembling with unshed tears, agreeing to be
+there on the morrow.
+
+And he had come there the next day, hurrying from school to be there
+first, and beating Cheese-Face by two minutes. The other boys said he
+was all right, and gave him advice, pointing out his faults as a
+scrapper and promising him victory if he carried out their
+instructions. The same boys gave Cheese-Face advice, too. How they had
+enjoyed the fight! He paused in his recollections long enough to envy
+them the spectacle he and Cheese-Face had put up. Then the fight was
+on, and it went on, without rounds, for thirty minutes, until the
+press-room door was opened.
+
+He watched the youthful apparition of himself, day after day, hurrying
+from school to the _Enquirer_ alley. He could not walk very fast. He
+was stiff and lame from the incessant fighting. His forearms were black
+and blue from wrist to elbow, what of the countless blows he had warded
+off, and here and there the tortured flesh was beginning to fester. His
+head and arms and shoulders ached, the small of his back ached,—he
+ached all over, and his brain was heavy and dazed. He did not play at
+school. Nor did he study. Even to sit still all day at his desk, as he
+did, was a torment. It seemed centuries since he had begun the round of
+daily fights, and time stretched away into a nightmare and infinite
+future of daily fights. Why couldn’t Cheese-Face be licked? he often
+thought; that would put him, Martin, out of his misery. It never
+entered his head to cease fighting, to allow Cheese-Face to whip him.
+
+And so he dragged himself to the _Enquirer_ alley, sick in body and
+soul, but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal enemy,
+Cheese-Face, who was just as sick as he, and just a bit willing to quit
+if it were not for the gang of newsboys that looked on and made pride
+painful and necessary. One afternoon, after twenty minutes of desperate
+efforts to annihilate each other according to set rules that did not
+permit kicking, striking below the belt, nor hitting when one was down,
+Cheese-Face, panting for breath and reeling, offered to call it quits.
+And Martin, head on arms, thrilled at the picture he caught of himself,
+at that moment in the afternoon of long ago, when he reeled and panted
+and choked with the blood that ran into his mouth and down his throat
+from his cut lips; when he tottered toward Cheese-Face, spitting out a
+mouthful of blood so that he could speak, crying out that he would
+never quit, though Cheese-Face could give in if he wanted to. And
+Cheese-Face did not give in, and the fight went on.
+
+The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed the afternoon
+fight. When he put up his arms, each day, to begin, they pained
+exquisitely, and the first few blows, struck and received, racked his
+soul; after that things grew numb, and he fought on blindly, seeing as
+in a dream, dancing and wavering, the large features and burning,
+animal-like eyes of Cheese-Face. He concentrated upon that face; all
+else about him was a whirling void. There was nothing else in the world
+but that face, and he would never know rest, blessed rest, until he had
+beaten that face into a pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until the
+bleeding knuckles that somehow belonged to that face had beaten him
+into a pulp. And then, one way or the other, he would have rest. But to
+quit,—for him, Martin, to quit,—that was impossible!
+
+Came the day when he dragged himself into the _Enquirer_ alley, and
+there was no Cheese-Face. Nor did Cheese-Face come. The boys
+congratulated him, and told him that he had licked Cheese-Face. But
+Martin was not satisfied. He had not licked Cheese-Face, nor had
+Cheese-Face licked him. The problem had not been solved. It was not
+until afterward that they learned that Cheese-Face’s father had died
+suddenly that very day.
+
+Martin skipped on through the years to the night in the nigger heaven
+at the Auditorium. He was seventeen and just back from sea. A row
+started. Somebody was bullying somebody, and Martin interfered, to be
+confronted by Cheese-Face’s blazing eyes.
+
+“I’ll fix you after de show,” his ancient enemy hissed.
+
+Martin nodded. The nigger-heaven bouncer was making his way toward the
+disturbance.
+
+“I’ll meet you outside, after the last act,” Martin whispered, the
+while his face showed undivided interest in the buck-and-wing dancing
+on the stage.
+
+The bouncer glared and went away.
+
+“Got a gang?” he asked Cheese-Face, at the end of the act.
+
+“Sure.”
+
+“Then I got to get one,” Martin announced.
+
+Between the acts he mustered his following—three fellows he knew from
+the nail works, a railroad fireman, and half a dozen of the Boo Gang,
+along with as many more from the dread Eighteen-and-Market Gang.
+
+When the theatre let out, the two gangs strung along inconspicuously on
+opposite sides of the street. When they came to a quiet corner, they
+united and held a council of war.
+
+“Eighth Street Bridge is the place,” said a red-headed fellow belonging
+to Cheese-Face’s Gang. “You kin fight in the middle, under the electric
+light, an’ whichever way the bulls come in we kin sneak the other way.”
+
+“That’s agreeable to me,” Martin said, after consulting with the
+leaders of his own gang.
+
+The Eighth Street Bridge, crossing an arm of San Antonio Estuary, was
+the length of three city blocks. In the middle of the bridge, and at
+each end, were electric lights. No policeman could pass those
+end-lights unseen. It was the safe place for the battle that revived
+itself under Martin’s eyelids. He saw the two gangs, aggressive and
+sullen, rigidly keeping apart from each other and backing their
+respective champions; and he saw himself and Cheese-Face stripping. A
+short distance away lookouts were set, their task being to watch the
+lighted ends of the bridge. A member of the Boo Gang held Martin’s
+coat, and shirt, and cap, ready to race with them into safety in case
+the police interfered. Martin watched himself go into the centre,
+facing Cheese-Face, and he heard himself say, as he held up his hand
+warningly:-
+
+“They ain’t no hand-shakin’ in this. Understand? They ain’t nothin’ but
+scrap. No throwin’ up the sponge. This is a grudge-fight an’ it’s to a
+finish. Understand? Somebody’s goin’ to get licked.”
+
+Cheese-Face wanted to demur,—Martin could see that,—but Cheese-Face’s
+old perilous pride was touched before the two gangs.
+
+“Aw, come on,” he replied. “Wot’s the good of chewin’ de rag about it?
+I’m wit’ cheh to de finish.”
+
+Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of
+youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to
+destroy. All the painful, thousand years’ gains of man in his upward
+climb through creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a
+milestone on the path of the great human adventure. Martin and
+Cheese-Face were two savages, of the stone age, of the squatting place
+and the tree refuge. They sank lower and lower into the muddy abyss,
+back into the dregs of the raw beginnings of life, striving blindly and
+chemically, as atoms strive, as the star-dust of the heavens strives,
+colliding, recoiling, and colliding again and eternally again.
+
+“God! We are animals! Brute-beasts!” Martin muttered aloud, as he
+watched the progress of the fight. It was to him, with his splendid
+power of vision, like gazing into a kinetoscope. He was both onlooker
+and participant. His long months of culture and refinement shuddered at
+the sight; then the present was blotted out of his consciousness and
+the ghosts of the past possessed him, and he was Martin Eden, just
+returned from sea and fighting Cheese-Face on the Eighth Street Bridge.
+He suffered and toiled and sweated and bled, and exulted when his naked
+knuckles smashed home.
+
+They were twin whirlwinds of hatred, revolving about each other
+monstrously. The time passed, and the two hostile gangs became very
+quiet. They had never witnessed such intensity of ferocity, and they
+were awed by it. The two fighters were greater brutes than they. The
+first splendid velvet edge of youth and condition wore off, and they
+fought more cautiously and deliberately. There had been no advantage
+gained either way. “It’s anybody’s fight,” Martin heard some one
+saying. Then he followed up a feint, right and left, was fiercely
+countered, and felt his cheek laid open to the bone. No bare knuckle
+had done that. He heard mutters of amazement at the ghastly damage
+wrought, and was drenched with his own blood. But he gave no sign. He
+became immensely wary, for he was wise with knowledge of the low
+cunning and foul vileness of his kind. He watched and waited, until he
+feigned a wild rush, which he stopped midway, for he had seen the glint
+of metal.
+
+“Hold up yer hand!” he screamed. “Them’s brass knuckles, an’ you hit me
+with ’em!”
+
+Both gangs surged forward, growling and snarling. In a second there
+would be a free-for-all fight, and he would be robbed of his vengeance.
+He was beside himself.
+
+“You guys keep out!” he screamed hoarsely. “Understand? Say, d’ye
+understand?”
+
+They shrank away from him. They were brutes, but he was the arch-brute,
+a thing of terror that towered over them and dominated them.
+
+“This is my scrap, an’ they ain’t goin’ to be no buttin’ in. Gimme them
+knuckles.”
+
+Cheese-Face, sobered and a bit frightened, surrendered the foul weapon.
+
+“You passed ’em to him, you red-head sneakin’ in behind the push
+there,” Martin went on, as he tossed the knuckles into the water. “I
+seen you, an’ I was wonderin’ what you was up to. If you try anything
+like that again, I’ll beat cheh to death. Understand?”
+
+They fought on, through exhaustion and beyond, to exhaustion
+immeasurable and inconceivable, until the crowd of brutes, its
+blood-lust sated, terrified by what it saw, begged them impartially to
+cease. And Cheese-Face, ready to drop and die, or to stay on his legs
+and die, a grisly monster out of whose features all likeness to
+Cheese-Face had been beaten, wavered and hesitated; but Martin sprang
+in and smashed him again and again.
+
+Next, after a seeming century or so, with Cheese-Face weakening fast,
+in a mix-up of blows there was a loud snap, and Martin’s right arm
+dropped to his side. It was a broken bone. Everybody heard it and knew;
+and Cheese-Face knew, rushing like a tiger in the other’s extremity and
+raining blow on blow. Martin’s gang surged forward to interfere. Dazed
+by the rapid succession of blows, Martin warned them back with vile and
+earnest curses sobbed out and groaned in ultimate desolation and
+despair.
+
+He punched on, with his left hand only, and as he punched, doggedly,
+only half-conscious, as from a remote distance he heard murmurs of fear
+in the gangs, and one who said with shaking voice: “This ain’t a scrap,
+fellows. It’s murder, an’ we ought to stop it.”
+
+But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on wearily and
+endlessly with his one arm, battering away at a bloody something before
+him that was not a face but a horror, an oscillating, hideous,
+gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his wavering vision and
+would not go away. And he punched on and on, slower and slower, as the
+last shreds of vitality oozed from him, through centuries and aeons and
+enormous lapses of time, until, in a dim way, he became aware that the
+nameless thing was sinking, slowly sinking down to the rough
+board-planking of the bridge. And the next moment he was standing over
+it, staggering and swaying on shaky legs, clutching at the air for
+support, and saying in a voice he did not recognize:-
+
+“D’ye want any more? Say, d’ye want any more?”
+
+He was still saying it, over and over,—demanding, entreating,
+threatening, to know if it wanted any more,—when he felt the fellows of
+his gang laying hands on him, patting him on the back and trying to put
+his coat on him. And then came a sudden rush of blackness and oblivion.
+
+The tin alarm-clock on the table ticked on, but Martin Eden, his face
+buried on his arms, did not hear it. He heard nothing. He did not
+think. So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he
+fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the
+blackness and the blankness endured. Then, like one from the dead, he
+sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat pouring down his face, shouting:-
+
+“I licked you, Cheese-Face! It took me eleven years, but I licked you!”
+
+His knees were trembling under him, he felt faint, and he staggered
+back to the bed, sinking down and sitting on the edge of it. He was
+still in the clutch of the past. He looked about the room, perplexed,
+alarmed, wondering where he was, until he caught sight of the pile of
+manuscripts in the corner. Then the wheels of memory slipped ahead
+through four years of time, and he was aware of the present, of the
+books he had opened and the universe he had won from their pages, of
+his dreams and ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith of a girl,
+sensitive and sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she
+witness but one moment of what he had just lived through—one moment of
+all the muck of life through which he had waded.
+
+He arose to his feet and confronted himself in the looking-glass.
+
+“And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden,” he said solemnly. “And
+you cleanse your eyes in a great brightness, and thrust your shoulders
+among the stars, doing what all life has done, letting the ‘ape and
+tiger die’ and wresting highest heritage from all powers that be.”
+
+He looked more closely at himself and laughed.
+
+“A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?” he queried. “Well, never mind.
+You licked Cheese-Face, and you’ll lick the editors if it takes twice
+eleven years to do it in. You can’t stop here. You’ve got to go on.
+It’s to a finish, you know.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+The alarm-clock went off, jerking Martin out of sleep with a suddenness
+that would have given headache to one with less splendid constitution.
+Though he slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a cat, and he awoke
+eagerly, glad that the five hours of unconsciousness were gone. He
+hated the oblivion of sleep. There was too much to do, too much of life
+to live. He grudged every moment of life sleep robbed him of, and
+before the clock had ceased its clattering he was head and ears in the
+washbasin and thrilling to the cold bite of the water.
+
+But he did not follow his regular programme. There was no unfinished
+story waiting his hand, no new story demanding articulation. He had
+studied late, and it was nearly time for breakfast. He tried to read a
+chapter in Fiske, but his brain was restless and he closed the book.
+To-day witnessed the beginning of the new battle, wherein for some time
+there would be no writing. He was aware of a sadness akin to that with
+which one leaves home and family. He looked at the manuscripts in the
+corner. That was it. He was going away from them, his pitiful,
+dishonored children that were welcome nowhere. He went over and began
+to rummage among them, reading snatches here and there, his favorite
+portions. “The Pot” he honored with reading aloud, as he did
+“Adventure.” “Joy,” his latest-born, completed the day before and
+tossed into the corner for lack of stamps, won his keenest approbation.
+
+“I can’t understand,” he murmured. “Or maybe it’s the editors who can’t
+understand. There’s nothing wrong with that. They publish worse every
+month. Everything they publish is worse—nearly everything, anyway.”
+
+After breakfast he put the type-writer in its case and carried it down
+into Oakland.
+
+“I owe a month on it,” he told the clerk in the store. “But you tell
+the manager I’m going to work and that I’ll be in in a month or so and
+straighten up.”
+
+He crossed on the ferry to San Francisco and made his way to an
+employment office. “Any kind of work, no trade,” he told the agent; and
+was interrupted by a new-comer, dressed rather foppishly, as some
+workingmen dress who have instincts for finer things. The agent shook
+his head despondently.
+
+“Nothin’ doin’ eh?” said the other. “Well, I got to get somebody
+to-day.”
+
+He turned and stared at Martin, and Martin, staring back, noted the
+puffed and discolored face, handsome and weak, and knew that he had
+been making a night of it.
+
+“Lookin’ for a job?” the other queried. “What can you do?”
+
+“Hard labor, sailorizing, run a type-writer, no shorthand, can sit on a
+horse, willing to do anything and tackle anything,” was the answer.
+
+The other nodded.
+
+“Sounds good to me. My name’s Dawson, Joe Dawson, an’ I’m tryin’ to
+scare up a laundryman.”
+
+“Too much for me.” Martin caught an amusing glimpse of himself ironing
+fluffy white things that women wear. But he had taken a liking to the
+other, and he added: “I might do the plain washing. I learned that much
+at sea.” Joe Dawson thought visibly for a moment.
+
+“Look here, let’s get together an’ frame it up. Willin’ to listen?”
+
+Martin nodded.
+
+“This is a small laundry, up country, belongs to Shelly Hot
+Springs,—hotel, you know. Two men do the work, boss and assistant. I’m
+the boss. You don’t work for me, but you work under me. Think you’d be
+willin’ to learn?”
+
+Martin paused to think. The prospect was alluring. A few months of it,
+and he would have time to himself for study. He could work hard and
+study hard.
+
+“Good grub an’ a room to yourself,” Joe said.
+
+That settled it. A room to himself where he could burn the midnight oil
+unmolested.
+
+“But work like hell,” the other added.
+
+Martin caressed his swelling shoulder-muscles significantly. “That came
+from hard work.”
+
+“Then let’s get to it.” Joe held his hand to his head for a moment.
+“Gee, but it’s a stem-winder. Can hardly see. I went down the line last
+night—everything—everything. Here’s the frame-up. The wages for two is
+a hundred and board. I’ve ben drawin’ down sixty, the second man forty.
+But he knew the biz. You’re green. If I break you in, I’ll be doing
+plenty of your work at first. Suppose you begin at thirty, an’ work up
+to the forty. I’ll play fair. Just as soon as you can do your share you
+get the forty.”
+
+“I’ll go you,” Martin announced, stretching out his hand, which the
+other shook. “Any advance?—for rail-road ticket and extras?”
+
+“I blew it in,” was Joe’s sad answer, with another reach at his aching
+head. “All I got is a return ticket.”
+
+“And I’m broke—when I pay my board.”
+
+“Jump it,” Joe advised.
+
+“Can’t. Owe it to my sister.”
+
+Joe whistled a long, perplexed whistle, and racked his brains to little
+purpose.
+
+“I’ve got the price of the drinks,” he said desperately. “Come on, an’
+mebbe we’ll cook up something.”
+
+Martin declined.
+
+“Water-wagon?”
+
+This time Martin nodded, and Joe lamented, “Wish I was.”
+
+“But I somehow just can’t,” he said in extenuation. “After I’ve ben
+workin’ like hell all week I just got to booze up. If I didn’t, I’d cut
+my throat or burn up the premises. But I’m glad you’re on the wagon.
+Stay with it.”
+
+Martin knew of the enormous gulf between him and this man—the gulf the
+books had made; but he found no difficulty in crossing back over that
+gulf. He had lived all his life in the working-class world, and the
+_camaraderie_ of labor was second nature with him. He solved the
+difficulty of transportation that was too much for the other’s aching
+head. He would send his trunk up to Shelly Hot Springs on Joe’s ticket.
+As for himself, there was his wheel. It was seventy miles, and he could
+ride it on Sunday and be ready for work Monday morning. In the meantime
+he would go home and pack up. There was no one to say good-by to. Ruth
+and her whole family were spending the long summer in the Sierras, at
+Lake Tahoe.
+
+He arrived at Shelly Hot Springs, tired and dusty, on Sunday night. Joe
+greeted him exuberantly. With a wet towel bound about his aching brow,
+he had been at work all day.
+
+“Part of last week’s washin’ mounted up, me bein’ away to get you,” he
+explained. “Your box arrived all right. It’s in your room. But it’s a
+hell of a thing to call a trunk. An’ what’s in it? Gold bricks?”
+
+Joe sat on the bed while Martin unpacked. The box was a packing-case
+for breakfast food, and Mr. Higginbotham had charged him half a dollar
+for it. Two rope handles, nailed on by Martin, had technically
+transformed it into a trunk eligible for the baggage-car. Joe watched,
+with bulging eyes, a few shirts and several changes of underclothes
+come out of the box, followed by books, and more books.
+
+“Books clean to the bottom?” he asked.
+
+Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books on a kitchen table which
+served in the room in place of a wash-stand.
+
+“Gee!” Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the deduction to arise
+in his brain. At last it came.
+
+“Say, you don’t care for the girls—much?” he queried.
+
+“No,” was the answer. “I used to chase a lot before I tackled the
+books. But since then there’s no time.”
+
+“And there won’t be any time here. All you can do is work an’ sleep.”
+
+Martin thought of his five hours’ sleep a night, and smiled. The room
+was situated over the laundry and was in the same building with the
+engine that pumped water, made electricity, and ran the laundry
+machinery. The engineer, who occupied the adjoining room, dropped in to
+meet the new hand and helped Martin rig up an electric bulb, on an
+extension wire, so that it travelled along a stretched cord from over
+the table to the bed.
+
+The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was routed out for a
+quarter-to-seven breakfast. There happened to be a bath-tub for the
+servants in the laundry building, and he electrified Joe by taking a
+cold bath.
+
+“Gee, but you’re a hummer!” Joe announced, as they sat down to
+breakfast in a corner of the hotel kitchen.
+
+With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the assistant gardener,
+and two or three men from the stable. They ate hurriedly and gloomily,
+with but little conversation, and as Martin ate and listened he
+realized how far he had travelled from their status. Their small mental
+caliber was depressing to him, and he was anxious to get away from
+them. So he bolted his breakfast, a sickly, sloppy affair, as rapidly
+as they, and heaved a sigh of relief when he passed out through the
+kitchen door.
+
+It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, wherein the most
+modern machinery did everything that was possible for machinery to do.
+Martin, after a few instructions, sorted the great heaps of soiled
+clothes, while Joe started the masher and made up fresh supplies of
+soft-soap, compounded of biting chemicals that compelled him to swathe
+his mouth and nostrils and eyes in bath-towels till he resembled a
+mummy. Finished the sorting, Martin lent a hand in wringing the
+clothes. This was done by dumping them into a spinning receptacle that
+went at a rate of a few thousand revolutions a minute, tearing the
+water from the clothes by centrifugal force. Then Martin began to
+alternate between the dryer and the wringer, between times “shaking
+out” socks and stockings. By the afternoon, one feeding and one
+stacking up, they were running socks and stockings through the mangle
+while the irons were heating. Then it was hot irons and underclothes
+till six o’clock, at which time Joe shook his head dubiously.
+
+“Way behind,” he said. “Got to work after supper.” And after supper
+they worked until ten o’clock, under the blazing electric lights, until
+the last piece of under-clothing was ironed and folded away in the
+distributing room. It was a hot California night, and though the
+windows were thrown wide, the room, with its red-hot ironing-stove, was
+a furnace. Martin and Joe, down to undershirts, bare armed, sweated and
+panted for air.
+
+“Like trimming cargo in the tropics,” Martin said, when they went
+upstairs.
+
+“You’ll do,” Joe answered. “You take hold like a good fellow. If you
+keep up the pace, you’ll be on thirty dollars only one month. The
+second month you’ll be gettin’ your forty. But don’t tell me you never
+ironed before. I know better.”
+
+“Never ironed a rag in my life, honestly, until to-day,” Martin
+protested.
+
+He was surprised at his weariness when he got into his room, forgetful
+of the fact that he had been on his feet and working without let up for
+fourteen hours. He set the alarm clock at six, and measured back five
+hours to one o’clock. He could read until then. Slipping off his shoes,
+to ease his swollen feet, he sat down at the table with his books. He
+opened Fiske, where he had left off to read. But he found trouble and
+began to read it through a second time. Then he awoke, in pain from his
+stiffened muscles and chilled by the mountain wind that had begun to
+blow in through the window. He looked at the clock. It marked two. He
+had been asleep four hours. He pulled off his clothes and crawled into
+bed, where he was asleep the moment after his head touched the pillow.
+
+Tuesday was a day of similar unremitting toil. The speed with which Joe
+worked won Martin’s admiration. Joe was a dozen of demons for work. He
+was keyed up to concert pitch, and there was never a moment in the long
+day when he was not fighting for moments. He concentrated himself upon
+his work and upon how to save time, pointing out to Martin where he did
+in five motions what could be done in three, or in three motions what
+could be done in two. “Elimination of waste motion,” Martin phrased it
+as he watched and patterned after. He was a good workman himself, quick
+and deft, and it had always been a point of pride with him that no man
+should do any of his work for him or outwork him. As a result, he
+concentrated with a similar singleness of purpose, greedily snapping up
+the hints and suggestions thrown out by his working mate. He “rubbed
+out” collars and cuffs, rubbing the starch out from between the double
+thicknesses of linen so that there would be no blisters when it came to
+the ironing, and doing it at a pace that elicited Joe’s praise.
+
+There was never an interval when something was not at hand to be done.
+Joe waited for nothing, waited on nothing, and went on the jump from
+task to task. They starched two hundred white shirts, with a single
+gathering movement seizing a shirt so that the wristbands, neckband,
+yoke, and bosom protruded beyond the circling right hand. At the same
+moment the left hand held up the body of the shirt so that it would not
+enter the starch, and at the same moment the right hand dipped into the
+starch—starch so hot that, in order to wring it out, their hands had to
+thrust, and thrust continually, into a bucket of cold water. And that
+night they worked till half-past ten, dipping “fancy starch”—all the
+frilled and airy, delicate wear of ladies.
+
+“Me for the tropics and no clothes,” Martin laughed.
+
+“And me out of a job,” Joe answered seriously. “I don’t know nothin’
+but laundrying.”
+
+“And you know it well.”
+
+“I ought to. Began in the Contra Costa in Oakland when I was eleven,
+shakin’ out for the mangle. That was eighteen years ago, an’ I’ve never
+done a tap of anything else. But this job is the fiercest I ever had.
+Ought to be one more man on it at least. We work to-morrow night.
+Always run the mangle Wednesday nights—collars an’ cuffs.”
+
+Martin set his alarm, drew up to the table, and opened Fiske. He did
+not finish the first paragraph. The lines blurred and ran together and
+his head nodded. He walked up and down, batting his head savagely with
+his fists, but he could not conquer the numbness of sleep. He propped
+the book before him, and propped his eyelids with his fingers, and fell
+asleep with his eyes wide open. Then he surrendered, and, scarcely
+conscious of what he did, got off his clothes and into bed. He slept
+seven hours of heavy, animal-like sleep, and awoke by the alarm,
+feeling that he had not had enough.
+
+“Doin’ much readin’?” Joe asked.
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+“Never mind. We got to run the mangle to-night, but Thursday we’ll
+knock off at six. That’ll give you a chance.”
+
+Martin washed woollens that day, by hand, in a large barrel, with
+strong soft-soap, by means of a hub from a wagon wheel, mounted on a
+plunger-pole that was attached to a spring-pole overhead.
+
+“My invention,” Joe said proudly. “Beats a washboard an’ your knuckles,
+and, besides, it saves at least fifteen minutes in the week, an’
+fifteen minutes ain’t to be sneezed at in this shebang.”
+
+Running the collars and cuffs through the mangle was also Joe’s idea.
+That night, while they toiled on under the electric lights, he
+explained it.
+
+“Something no laundry ever does, except this one. An’ I got to do it if
+I’m goin’ to get done Saturday afternoon at three o’clock. But I know
+how, an’ that’s the difference. Got to have right heat, right pressure,
+and run ’em through three times. Look at that!” He held a cuff aloft.
+“Couldn’t do it better by hand or on a tiler.”
+
+Thursday, Joe was in a rage. A bundle of extra “fancy starch” had come
+in.
+
+“I’m goin’ to quit,” he announced. “I won’t stand for it. I’m goin’ to
+quit it cold. What’s the good of me workin’ like a slave all week,
+a-savin’ minutes, an’ them a-comin’ an’ ringin’ in fancy-starch extras
+on me? This is a free country, an’ I’m to tell that fat Dutchman what I
+think of him. An’ I won’t tell ’m in French. Plain United States is
+good enough for me. Him a-ringin’ in fancy starch extras!”
+
+“We got to work to-night,” he said the next moment, reversing his
+judgment and surrendering to fate.
+
+And Martin did no reading that night. He had seen no daily paper all
+week, and, strangely to him, felt no desire to see one. He was not
+interested in the news. He was too tired and jaded to be interested in
+anything, though he planned to leave Saturday afternoon, if they
+finished at three, and ride on his wheel to Oakland. It was seventy
+miles, and the same distance back on Sunday afternoon would leave him
+anything but rested for the second week’s work. It would have been
+easier to go on the train, but the round trip was two dollars and a
+half, and he was intent on saving money.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+Martin learned to do many things. In the course of the first week, in
+one afternoon, he and Joe accounted for the two hundred white shirts.
+Joe ran the tiler, a machine wherein a hot iron was hooked on a steel
+string which furnished the pressure. By this means he ironed the yoke,
+wristbands, and neckband, setting the latter at right angles to the
+shirt, and put the glossy finish on the bosom. As fast as he finished
+them, he flung the shirts on a rack between him and Martin, who caught
+them up and “backed” them. This task consisted of ironing all the
+unstarched portions of the shirts.
+
+It was exhausting work, carried on, hour after hour, at top speed. Out
+on the broad verandas of the hotel, men and women, in cool white,
+sipped iced drinks and kept their circulation down. But in the laundry
+the air was sizzling. The huge stove roared red hot and white hot,
+while the irons, moving over the damp cloth, sent up clouds of steam.
+The heat of these irons was different from that used by housewives. An
+iron that stood the ordinary test of a wet finger was too cold for Joe
+and Martin, and such test was useless. They went wholly by holding the
+irons close to their cheeks, gauging the heat by some secret mental
+process that Martin admired but could not understand. When the fresh
+irons proved too hot, they hooked them on iron rods and dipped them
+into cold water. This again required a precise and subtle judgment. A
+fraction of a second too long in the water and the fine and silken edge
+of the proper heat was lost, and Martin found time to marvel at the
+accuracy he developed—an automatic accuracy, founded upon criteria that
+were machine-like and unerring.
+
+But there was little time in which to marvel. All Martin’s
+consciousness was concentrated in the work. Ceaselessly active, head
+and hand, an intelligent machine, all that constituted him a man was
+devoted to furnishing that intelligence. There was no room in his brain
+for the universe and its mighty problems. All the broad and spacious
+corridors of his mind were closed and hermetically sealed. The echoing
+chamber of his soul was a narrow room, a conning tower, whence were
+directed his arm and shoulder muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the
+swift-moving iron along its steaming path in broad, sweeping strokes,
+just so many strokes and no more, just so far with each stroke and not
+a fraction of an inch farther, rushing along interminable sleeves,
+sides, backs, and tails, and tossing the finished shirts, without
+rumpling, upon the receiving frame. And even as his hurrying soul
+tossed, it was reaching for another shirt. This went on, hour after
+hour, while outside all the world swooned under the overhead California
+sun. But there was no swooning in that superheated room. The cool
+guests on the verandas needed clean linen.
+
+The sweat poured from Martin. He drank enormous quantities of water,
+but so great was the heat of the day and of his exertions, that the
+water sluiced through the interstices of his flesh and out at all his
+pores. Always, at sea, except at rare intervals, the work he performed
+had given him ample opportunity to commune with himself. The master of
+the ship had been lord of Martin’s time; but here the manager of the
+hotel was lord of Martin’s thoughts as well. He had no thoughts save
+for the nerve-racking, body-destroying toil. Outside of that it was
+impossible to think. He did not know that he loved Ruth. She did not
+even exist, for his driven soul had no time to remember her. It was
+only when he crawled to bed at night, or to breakfast in the morning,
+that she asserted herself to him in fleeting memories.
+
+“This is hell, ain’t it?” Joe remarked once.
+
+Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation. The statement had been
+obvious and unnecessary. They did not talk while they worked.
+Conversation threw them out of their stride, as it did this time,
+compelling Martin to miss a stroke of his iron and to make two extra
+motions before he caught his stride again.
+
+On Friday morning the washer ran. Twice a week they had to put through
+hotel linen,—the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table-cloths, and
+napkins. This finished, they buckled down to “fancy starch.” It was
+slow work, fastidious and delicate, and Martin did not learn it so
+readily. Besides, he could not take chances. Mistakes were disastrous.
+
+“See that,” Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could
+have crumpled from view in one hand. “Scorch that an’ it’s twenty
+dollars out of your wages.”
+
+So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his muscular tension,
+though nervous tension rose higher than ever, and he listened
+sympathetically to the other’s blasphemies as he toiled and suffered
+over the beautiful things that women wear when they do not have to do
+their own laundrying. “Fancy starch” was Martin’s nightmare, and it was
+Joe’s, too. It was “fancy starch” that robbed them of their hard-won
+minutes. They toiled at it all day. At seven in the evening they broke
+off to run the hotel linen through the mangle. At ten o’clock, while
+the hotel guests slept, the two laundrymen sweated on at “fancy starch”
+till midnight, till one, till two. At half-past two they knocked off.
+
+Saturday morning it was “fancy starch,” and odds and ends, and at three
+in the afternoon the week’s work was done.
+
+“You ain’t a-goin’ to ride them seventy miles into Oakland on top of
+this?” Joe demanded, as they sat on the stairs and took a triumphant
+smoke.
+
+“Got to,” was the answer.
+
+“What are you goin’ for?—a girl?”
+
+“No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket. I want to renew
+some books at the library.”
+
+“Why don’t you send ’em down an’ up by express? That’ll cost only a
+quarter each way.”
+
+Martin considered it.
+
+“An’ take a rest to-morrow,” the other urged. “You need it. I know I
+do. I’m plumb tuckered out.”
+
+He looked it. Indomitable, never resting, fighting for seconds and
+minutes all week, circumventing delays and crushing down obstacles, a
+fount of resistless energy, a high-driven human motor, a demon for
+work, now that he had accomplished the week’s task he was in a state of
+collapse. He was worn and haggard, and his handsome face drooped in
+lean exhaustion. He pulled his cigarette spiritlessly, and his voice
+was peculiarly dead and monotonous. All the snap and fire had gone out
+of him. His triumph seemed a sorry one.
+
+“An’ next week we got to do it all over again,” he said sadly. “An’
+what’s the good of it all, hey? Sometimes I wish I was a hobo. They
+don’t work, an’ they get their livin’. Gee! I wish I had a glass of
+beer; but I can’t get up the gumption to go down to the village an’ get
+it. You’ll stay over, an’ send your books down by express, or else
+you’re a damn fool.”
+
+“But what can I do here all day Sunday?” Martin asked.
+
+“Rest. You don’t know how tired you are. Why, I’m that tired Sunday I
+can’t even read the papers. I was sick once—typhoid. In the hospital
+two months an’ a half. Didn’t do a tap of work all that time. It was
+beautiful.”
+
+“It was beautiful,” he repeated dreamily, a minute later.
+
+Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head laundryman had
+disappeared. Most likely he had gone for a glass of beer Martin
+decided, but the half-mile walk down to the village to find out seemed
+a long journey to him. He lay on his bed with his shoes off, trying to
+make up his mind. He did not reach out for a book. He was too tired to
+feel sleepy, and he lay, scarcely thinking, in a semi-stupor of
+weariness, until it was time for supper. Joe did not appear for that
+function, and when Martin heard the gardener remark that most likely he
+was ripping the slats off the bar, Martin understood. He went to bed
+immediately afterward, and in the morning decided that he was greatly
+rested. Joe being still absent, Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay
+down in a shady nook under the trees. The morning passed, he knew not
+how. He did not sleep, nobody disturbed him, and he did not finish the
+paper. He came back to it in the afternoon, after dinner, and fell
+asleep over it.
+
+So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard at work, sorting
+clothes, while Joe, a towel bound tightly around his head, with groans
+and blasphemies, was running the washer and mixing soft-soap.
+
+“I simply can’t help it,” he explained. “I got to drink when Saturday
+night comes around.”
+
+Another week passed, a great battle that continued under the electric
+lights each night and that culminated on Saturday afternoon at three
+o’clock, when Joe tasted his moment of wilted triumph and then drifted
+down to the village to forget. Martin’s Sunday was the same as before.
+He slept in the shade of the trees, toiled aimlessly through the
+newspaper, and spent long hours lying on his back, doing nothing,
+thinking nothing. He was too dazed to think, though he was aware that
+he did not like himself. He was self-repelled, as though he had
+undergone some degradation or was intrinsically foul. All that was
+god-like in him was blotted out. The spur of ambition was blunted; he
+had no vitality with which to feel the prod of it. He was dead. His
+soul seemed dead. He was a beast, a work-beast. He saw no beauty in the
+sunshine sifting down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault
+of the sky whisper as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets
+trembling to disclosure. Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its
+taste was bad in his mouth. A black screen was drawn across his mirror
+of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sick-room where entered no
+ray of light. He envied Joe, down in the village, rampant, tearing the
+slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin
+ways over maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously drunk and
+forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come.
+
+A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life. He
+was oppressed by a sense of failure. There was reason for the editors
+refusing his stuff. He could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself
+and the dreams he had dreamed. Ruth returned his “Sea Lyrics” by mail.
+He read her letter apathetically. She did her best to say how much she
+liked them and that they were beautiful. But she could not lie, and she
+could not disguise the truth from herself. She knew they were failures,
+and he read her disapproval in every perfunctory and unenthusiastic
+line of her letter. And she was right. He was firmly convinced of it as
+he read the poems over. Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and as
+he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had had in
+mind when he wrote them. His audacities of phrase struck him as
+grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities, and
+everything was absurd, unreal, and impossible. He would have burned the
+“Sea Lyrics” on the spot, had his will been strong enough to set them
+aflame. There was the engine-room, but the exertion of carrying them to
+the furnace was not worth while. All his exertion was used in washing
+other persons’ clothes. He did not have any left for private affairs.
+
+He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together and
+answer Ruth’s letter. But Saturday afternoon, after work was finished
+and he had taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered him. “I guess
+I’ll go down and see how Joe’s getting on,” was the way he put it to
+himself; and in the same moment he knew that he lied. But he did not
+have the energy to consider the lie. If he had had the energy, he would
+have refused to consider the lie, because he wanted to forget. He
+started for the village slowly and casually, increasing his pace in
+spite of himself as he neared the saloon.
+
+“I thought you was on the water-wagon,” was Joe’s greeting.
+
+Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey, filling
+his own glass brimming before he passed the bottle.
+
+“Don’t take all night about it,” he said roughly.
+
+The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin refused to wait for
+him, tossing the glass off in a gulp and refilling it.
+
+“Now, I can wait for you,” he said grimly; “but hurry up.”
+
+Joe hurried, and they drank together.
+
+“The work did it, eh?” Joe queried.
+
+Martin refused to discuss the matter.
+
+“It’s fair hell, I know,” the other went on, “but I kind of hate to see
+you come off the wagon, Mart. Well, here’s how!”
+
+Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and
+awing the barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery blue
+eyes and hair parted in the middle.
+
+“It’s something scandalous the way they work us poor devils,” Joe was
+remarking. “If I didn’t bowl up, I’d break loose an’ burn down the
+shebang. My bowlin’ up is all that saves ’em, I can tell you that.”
+
+But Martin made no answer. A few more drinks, and in his brain he felt
+the maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl. Ah, it was living, the
+first breath of life he had breathed in three weeks. His dreams came
+back to him. Fancy came out of the darkened room and lured him on, a
+thing of flaming brightness. His mirror of vision was silver-clear, a
+flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery. Wonder and beauty walked with
+him, hand in hand, and all power was his. He tried to tell it to Joe,
+but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes whereby he would
+escape the slavery of laundry-work and become himself the owner of a
+great steam laundry.
+
+“I tell yeh, Mart, they won’t be no kids workin’ in my laundry—not on
+yer life. An’ they won’t be no workin’ a livin’ soul after six P.M. You
+hear me talk! They’ll be machinery enough an’ hands enough to do it all
+in decent workin’ hours, an’ Mart, s’help me, I’ll make yeh
+superintendent of the shebang—the whole of it, all of it. Now here’s
+the scheme. I get on the water-wagon an’ save my money for two
+years—save an’ then—”
+
+But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper, until
+that worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers who,
+coming in, accepted Martin’s invitation. Martin dispensed royal
+largess, inviting everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and the
+gardener’s assistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the furtive
+hobo who slid in like a shadow and like a shadow hovered at the end of
+the bar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+
+Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to the
+washer.
+
+“I say,” he began.
+
+“Don’t talk to me,” Martin snarled.
+
+“I’m sorry, Joe,” he said at noon, when they knocked off for dinner.
+
+Tears came into the other’s eyes.
+
+“That’s all right, old man,” he said. “We’re in hell, an’ we can’t help
+ourselves. An’, you know, I kind of like you a whole lot. That’s what
+made it—hurt. I cottoned to you from the first.”
+
+Martin shook his hand.
+
+“Let’s quit,” Joe suggested. “Let’s chuck it, an’ go hoboin’. I ain’t
+never tried it, but it must be dead easy. An’ nothin’ to do. Just think
+of it, nothin’ to do. I was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an’ it
+was beautiful. I wish I’d get sick again.”
+
+The week dragged on. The hotel was full, and extra “fancy starch”
+poured in upon them. They performed prodigies of valor. They fought
+late each night under the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even
+got in a half hour’s work before breakfast. Martin no longer took his
+cold baths. Every moment was drive, drive, drive, and Joe was the
+masterful shepherd of moments, herding them carefully, never losing
+one, counting them over like a miser counting gold, working on in a
+frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish machine, aided ably by that other machine
+that thought of itself as once having been one Martin Eden, a man.
+
+But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think. The
+house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its
+shadowy caretaker. He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were both
+shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a dream?
+Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the heavy irons
+back and forth over the white garments, it came to him that it was a
+dream. In a short while, or maybe after a thousand years or so, he
+would awake, in his little room with the ink-stained table, and take up
+his writing where he had left off the day before. Or maybe that was a
+dream, too, and the awakening would be the changing of the watches,
+when he would drop down out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and
+go up on deck, under the tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the
+cool tradewind blowing through his flesh.
+
+Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o’clock.
+
+“Guess I’ll go down an’ get a glass of beer,” Joe said, in the queer,
+monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.
+
+Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the kit bag and oiled his
+wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the bearings. Joe
+was halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed by, bending low over
+the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-six gear with rhythmic
+strength, his face set for seventy miles of road and grade and dust. He
+slept in Oakland that night, and on Sunday covered the seventy miles
+back. And on Monday morning, weary, he began the new week’s work, but
+he had kept sober.
+
+A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled as a
+machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a glimmering
+bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to scorch off the
+hundred and forty miles. But this was not rest. It was
+super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering bit of
+soul that was all that was left him from former life. At the end of the
+seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, he drifted down
+to the village with Joe and drowned life and found life until Monday
+morning.
+
+Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty miles,
+obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the numbness of
+still greater exertion. At the end of three months he went down a third
+time to the village with Joe. He forgot, and lived again, and, living,
+he saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was making of himself—not
+by the drink, but by the work. The drink was an effect, not a cause. It
+followed inevitably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day.
+Not by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, was the
+message the whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded approbation. The
+whiskey was wise. It told secrets on itself.
+
+He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and while
+they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and scribbled.
+
+“A telegram, Joe,” he said. “Read it.”
+
+Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what he read seemed to
+sober him. He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his
+eyes and down his cheeks.
+
+“You ain’t goin’ back on me, Mart?” he queried hopelessly.
+
+Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the
+message to the telegraph office.
+
+“Hold on,” Joe muttered thickly. “Lemme think.”
+
+He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin’s arm around
+him and supporting him, while he thought.
+
+“Make that two laundrymen,” he said abruptly. “Here, lemme fix it.”
+
+“What are you quitting for?” Martin demanded.
+
+“Same reason as you.”
+
+“But I’m going to sea. You can’t do that.”
+
+“Nope,” was the answer, “but I can hobo all right, all right.”
+
+Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-
+
+“By God, I think you’re right! Better a hobo than a beast of toil. Why,
+man, you’ll live. And that’s more than you ever did before.”
+
+“I was in hospital, once,” Joe corrected. “It was beautiful.
+Typhoid—did I tell you?”
+
+While Martin changed the telegram to “two laundrymen,” Joe went on:-
+
+“I never wanted to drink when I was in hospital. Funny, ain’t it? But
+when I’ve ben workin’ like a slave all week, I just got to bowl up.
+Ever noticed that cooks drink like hell?—an’ bakers, too? It’s the
+work. They’ve sure got to. Here, lemme pay half of that telegram.”
+
+“I’ll shake you for it,” Martin offered.
+
+“Come on, everybody drink,” Joe called, as they rattled the dice and
+rolled them out on the damp bar.
+
+Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation. He did not mind his
+aching head, nor did he take interest in his work. Whole herds of
+moments stole away and were lost while their careless shepherd gazed
+out of the window at the sunshine and the trees.
+
+“Just look at it!” he cried. “An’ it’s all mine! It’s free. I can lie
+down under them trees an’ sleep for a thousan’ years if I want to. Aw,
+come on, Mart, let’s chuck it. What’s the good of waitin’ another
+moment. That’s the land of nothin’ to do out there, an’ I got a ticket
+for it—an’ it ain’t no return ticket, b’gosh!”
+
+A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes for the
+washer, Joe spied the hotel manager’s shirt. He knew its mark, and with
+a sudden glorious consciousness of freedom he threw it on the floor and
+stamped on it.
+
+“I wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!” he shouted. “In it,
+an’ right there where I’ve got you! Take that! an’ that! an’ that! damn
+you! Hold me back, somebody! Hold me back!”
+
+Martin laughed and held him to his work. On Tuesday night the new
+laundrymen arrived, and the rest of the week was spent breaking them
+into the routine. Joe sat around and explained his system, but he did
+no more work.
+
+“Not a tap,” he announced. “Not a tap. They can fire me if they want
+to, but if they do, I’ll quit. No more work in mine, thank you kindly.
+Me for the freight cars an’ the shade under the trees. Go to it, you
+slaves! That’s right. Slave an’ sweat! Slave an’ sweat! An’ when you’re
+dead, you’ll rot the same as me, an’ what’s it matter how you live?—eh?
+Tell me that—what’s it matter in the long run?”
+
+On Saturday they drew their pay and came to the parting of the ways.
+
+“They ain’t no use in me askin’ you to change your mind an’ hit the
+road with me?” Joe asked hopelessly:
+
+Martin shook his head. He was standing by his wheel, ready to start.
+They shook hands, and Joe held on to his for a moment, as he said:-
+
+“I’m goin’ to see you again, Mart, before you an’ me die. That’s
+straight dope. I feel it in my bones. Good-by, Mart, an’ be good. I
+like you like hell, you know.”
+
+He stood, a forlorn figure, in the middle of the road, watching until
+Martin turned a bend and was gone from sight.
+
+“He’s a good Indian, that boy,” he muttered. “A good Indian.”
+
+Then he plodded down the road himself, to the water tank, where half a
+dozen empties lay on a side-track waiting for the up freight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+
+Ruth and her family were home again, and Martin, returned to Oakland,
+saw much of her. Having gained her degree, she was doing no more
+studying; and he, having worked all vitality out of his mind and body,
+was doing no writing. This gave them time for each other that they had
+never had before, and their intimacy ripened fast.
+
+At first, Martin had done nothing but rest. He had slept a great deal,
+and spent long hours musing and thinking and doing nothing. He was like
+one recovering from some terrible bout of hardship. The first signs of
+reawakening came when he discovered more than languid interest in the
+daily paper. Then he began to read again—light novels, and poetry; and
+after several days more he was head over heels in his long-neglected
+Fiske. His splendid body and health made new vitality, and he possessed
+all the resiliency and rebound of youth.
+
+Ruth showed her disappointment plainly when he announced that he was
+going to sea for another voyage as soon as he was well rested.
+
+“Why do you want to do that?” she asked.
+
+“Money,” was the answer. “I’ll have to lay in a supply for my next
+attack on the editors. Money is the sinews of war, in my case—money and
+patience.”
+
+“But if all you wanted was money, why didn’t you stay in the laundry?”
+
+“Because the laundry was making a beast of me. Too much work of that
+sort drives to drink.”
+
+She stared at him with horror in her eyes.
+
+“Do you mean—?” she quavered.
+
+It would have been easy for him to get out of it; but his natural
+impulse was for frankness, and he remembered his old resolve to be
+frank, no matter what happened.
+
+“Yes,” he answered. “Just that. Several times.”
+
+She shivered and drew away from him.
+
+“No man that I have ever known did that—ever did that.”
+
+“Then they never worked in the laundry at Shelly Hot Springs,” he
+laughed bitterly. “Toil is a good thing. It is necessary for human
+health, so all the preachers say, and Heaven knows I’ve never been
+afraid of it. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing,
+and the laundry up there is one of them. And that’s why I’m going to
+sea one more voyage. It will be my last, I think, for when I come back,
+I shall break into the magazines. I am certain of it.”
+
+She was silent, unsympathetic, and he watched her moodily, realizing
+how impossible it was for her to understand what he had been through.
+
+“Some day I shall write it up—‘The Degradation of Toil’ or the
+‘Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,’ or something like that for
+a title.”
+
+Never, since the first meeting, had they seemed so far apart as that
+day. His confession, told in frankness, with the spirit of revolt
+behind, had repelled her. But she was more shocked by the repulsion
+itself than by the cause of it. It pointed out to her how near she had
+drawn to him, and once accepted, it paved the way for greater intimacy.
+Pity, too, was aroused, and innocent, idealistic thoughts of reform.
+She would save this raw young man who had come so far. She would save
+him from the curse of his early environment, and she would save him
+from himself in spite of himself. And all this affected her as a very
+noble state of consciousness; nor did she dream that behind it and
+underlying it were the jealousy and desire of love.
+
+They rode on their wheels much in the delightful fall weather, and out
+in the hills they read poetry aloud, now one and now the other, noble,
+uplifting poetry that turned one’s thoughts to higher things.
+Renunciation, sacrifice, patience, industry, and high endeavor were the
+principles she thus indirectly preached—such abstractions being
+objectified in her mind by her father, and Mr. Butler, and by Andrew
+Carnegie, who, from a poor immigrant boy had arisen to be the
+book-giver of the world. All of which was appreciated and enjoyed by
+Martin. He followed her mental processes more clearly now, and her soul
+was no longer the sealed wonder it had been. He was on terms of
+intellectual equality with her. But the points of disagreement did not
+affect his love. His love was more ardent than ever, for he loved her
+for what she was, and even her physical frailty was an added charm in
+his eyes. He read of sickly Elizabeth Barrett, who for years had not
+placed her feet upon the ground, until that day of flame when she
+eloped with Browning and stood upright, upon the earth, under the open
+sky; and what Browning had done for her, Martin decided he could do for
+Ruth. But first, she must love him. The rest would be easy. He would
+give her strength and health. And he caught glimpses of their life, in
+the years to come, wherein, against a background of work and comfort
+and general well-being, he saw himself and Ruth reading and discussing
+poetry, she propped amid a multitude of cushions on the ground while
+she read aloud to him. This was the key to the life they would live.
+And always he saw that particular picture. Sometimes it was she who
+leaned against him while he read, one arm about her, her head upon his
+shoulder. Sometimes they pored together over the printed pages of
+beauty. Then, too, she loved nature, and with generous imagination he
+changed the scene of their reading—sometimes they read in closed-in
+valleys with precipitous walls, or in high mountain meadows, and,
+again, down by the gray sand-dunes with a wreath of billows at their
+feet, or afar on some volcanic tropic isle where waterfalls descended
+and became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that swayed and
+shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind. But always, in the foreground,
+lords of beauty and eternally reading and sharing, lay he and Ruth, and
+always in the background that was beyond the background of nature, dim
+and hazy, were work and success and money earned that made them free of
+the world and all its treasures.
+
+“I should recommend my little girl to be careful,” her mother warned
+her one day.
+
+“I know what you mean. But it is impossible. He is not—”
+
+Ruth was blushing, but it was the blush of maidenhood called upon for
+the first time to discuss the sacred things of life with a mother held
+equally sacred.
+
+“Your kind.” Her mother finished the sentence for her.
+
+Ruth nodded.
+
+“I did not want to say it, but he is not. He is rough, brutal,
+strong—too strong. He has not—”
+
+She hesitated and could not go on. It was a new experience, talking
+over such matters with her mother. And again her mother completed her
+thought for her.
+
+“He has not lived a clean life, is what you wanted to say.”
+
+Again Ruth nodded, and again a blush mantled her face.
+
+“It is just that,” she said. “It has not been his fault, but he has
+played much with—”
+
+“With pitch?”
+
+“Yes, with pitch. And he frightens me. Sometimes I am positively in
+terror of him, when he talks in that free and easy way of the things he
+has done—as if they did not matter. They do matter, don’t they?”
+
+They sat with their arms twined around each other, and in the pause her
+mother patted her hand and waited for her to go on.
+
+“But I am interested in him dreadfully,” she continued. “In a way he is
+my protégé. Then, too, he is my first boy friend—but not exactly
+friend; rather protégé and friend combined. Sometimes, too, when he
+frightens me, it seems that he is a bulldog I have taken for a
+plaything, like some of the ‘frat’ girls, and he is tugging hard, and
+showing his teeth, and threatening to break loose.”
+
+Again her mother waited.
+
+“He interests me, I suppose, like the bulldog. And there is much good
+in him, too; but there is much in him that I would not like in—in the
+other way. You see, I have been thinking. He swears, he smokes, he
+drinks, he has fought with his fists (he has told me so, and he likes
+it; he says so). He is all that a man should not be—a man I would want
+for my—” her voice sank very low—“husband. Then he is too strong. My
+prince must be tall, and slender, and dark—a graceful, bewitching
+prince. No, there is no danger of my falling in love with Martin Eden.
+It would be the worst fate that could befall me.”
+
+“But it is not that that I spoke about,” her mother equivocated. “Have
+you thought about him? He is so ineligible in every way, you know, and
+suppose he should come to love you?”
+
+“But he does—already,” she cried.
+
+“It was to be expected,” Mrs. Morse said gently. “How could it be
+otherwise with any one who knew you?”
+
+“Olney hates me!” she exclaimed passionately. “And I hate Olney. I feel
+always like a cat when he is around. I feel that I must be nasty to
+him, and even when I don’t happen to feel that way, why, he’s nasty to
+me, anyway. But I am happy with Martin Eden. No one ever loved me
+before—no man, I mean, in that way. And it is sweet to be loved—that
+way. You know what I mean, mother dear. It is sweet to feel that you
+are really and truly a woman.” She buried her face in her mother’s lap,
+sobbing. “You think I am dreadful, I know, but I am honest, and I tell
+you just how I feel.”
+
+Mrs. Morse was strangely sad and happy. Her child-daughter, who was a
+bachelor of arts, was gone; but in her place was a woman-daughter. The
+experiment had succeeded. The strange void in Ruth’s nature had been
+filled, and filled without danger or penalty. This rough sailor-fellow
+had been the instrument, and, though Ruth did not love him, he had made
+her conscious of her womanhood.
+
+“His hand trembles,” Ruth was confessing, her face, for shame’s sake,
+still buried. “It is most amusing and ridiculous, but I feel sorry for
+him, too. And when his hands are too trembly, and his eyes too shiny,
+why, I lecture him about his life and the wrong way he is going about
+it to mend it. But he worships me, I know. His eyes and his hands do
+not lie. And it makes me feel grown-up, the thought of it, the very
+thought of it; and I feel that I am possessed of something that is by
+rights my own—that makes me like the other girls—and—and young women.
+And, then, too, I knew that I was not like them before, and I knew that
+it worried you. You thought you did not let me know that dear worry of
+yours, but I did, and I wanted to—‘to make good,’ as Martin Eden says.”
+
+It was a holy hour for mother and daughter, and their eyes were wet as
+they talked on in the twilight, Ruth all white innocence and frankness,
+her mother sympathetic, receptive, yet calmly explaining and guiding.
+
+“He is four years younger than you,” she said. “He has no place in the
+world. He has neither position nor salary. He is impractical. Loving
+you, he should, in the name of common sense, be doing something that
+would give him the right to marry, instead of paltering around with
+those stories of his and with childish dreams. Martin Eden, I am
+afraid, will never grow up. He does not take to responsibility and a
+man’s work in the world like your father did, or like all our friends,
+Mr. Butler for one. Martin Eden, I am afraid, will never be a
+money-earner. And this world is so ordered that money is necessary to
+happiness—oh, no, not these swollen fortunes, but enough of money to
+permit of common comfort and decency. He—he has never spoken?”
+
+“He has not breathed a word. He has not attempted to; but if he did, I
+would not let him, because, you see, I do not love him.”
+
+“I am glad of that. I should not care to see my daughter, my one
+daughter, who is so clean and pure, love a man like him. There are
+noble men in the world who are clean and true and manly. Wait for them.
+You will find one some day, and you will love him and be loved by him,
+and you will be happy with him as your father and I have been happy
+with each other. And there is one thing you must always carry in mind—”
+
+“Yes, mother.”
+
+Mrs. Morse’s voice was low and sweet as she said, “And that is the
+children.”
+
+“I—have thought about them,” Ruth confessed, remembering the wanton
+thoughts that had vexed her in the past, her face again red with maiden
+shame that she should be telling such things.
+
+“And it is that, the children, that makes Mr. Eden impossible,” Mrs.
+Morse went on incisively. “Their heritage must be clean, and he is, I
+am afraid, not clean. Your father has told me of sailors’ lives,
+and—and you understand.”
+
+Ruth pressed her mother’s hand in assent, feeling that she really did
+understand, though her conception was of something vague, remote, and
+terrible that was beyond the scope of imagination.
+
+“You know I do nothing without telling you,” she began. “—Only,
+sometimes you must ask me, like this time. I wanted to tell you, but I
+did not know how. It is false modesty, I know it is that, but you can
+make it easy for me. Sometimes, like this time, you must ask me, you
+must give me a chance.”
+
+“Why, mother, you are a woman, too!” she cried exultantly, as they
+stood up, catching her mother’s hands and standing erect, facing her in
+the twilight, conscious of a strangely sweet equality between them. “I
+should never have thought of you in that way if we had not had this
+talk. I had to learn that I was a woman to know that you were one,
+too.”
+
+“We are women together,” her mother said, drawing her to her and
+kissing her. “We are women together,” she repeated, as they went out of
+the room, their arms around each other’s waists, their hearts swelling
+with a new sense of companionship.
+
+“Our little girl has become a woman,” Mrs. Morse said proudly to her
+husband an hour later.
+
+“That means,” he said, after a long look at his wife, “that means she
+is in love.”
+
+“No, but that she is loved,” was the smiling rejoinder. “The experiment
+has succeeded. She is awakened at last.”
+
+“Then we’ll have to get rid of him.” Mr. Morse spoke briskly, in
+matter-of-fact, businesslike tones.
+
+But his wife shook her head. “It will not be necessary. Ruth says he is
+going to sea in a few days. When he comes back, she will not be here.
+We will send her to Aunt Clara’s. And, besides, a year in the East,
+with the change in climate, people, ideas, and everything, is just the
+thing she needs.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+
+The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more. Stories and poems
+were springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he made
+notes of them against the future time when he would give them
+expression. But he did not write. This was his little vacation; he had
+resolved to devote it to rest and love, and in both matters he
+prospered. He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each day he saw
+Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experienced the old shock of his
+strength and health.
+
+“Be careful,” her mother warned her once again. “I am afraid you are
+seeing too much of Martin Eden.”
+
+But Ruth laughed from security. She was sure of herself, and in a few
+days he would be off to sea. Then, by the time he returned, she would
+be away on her visit East. There was a magic, however, in the strength
+and health of Martin. He, too, had been told of her contemplated
+Eastern trip, and he felt the need for haste. Yet he did not know how
+to make love to a girl like Ruth. Then, too, he was handicapped by the
+possession of a great fund of experience with girls and women who had
+been absolutely different from her. They had known about love and life
+and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things. Her
+prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of
+speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own
+unworthiness. Also he was handicapped in another way. He had himself
+never been in love before. He had liked women in that turgid past of
+his, and been fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it
+was to love them. He had whistled in a masterful, careless way, and
+they had come to him. They had been diversions, incidents, part of the
+game men play, but a small part at most. And now, and for the first
+time, he was a suppliant, tender and timid and doubting. He did not
+know the way of love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his
+loved one’s clear innocence.
+
+In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling on
+through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of
+conduct which was to the effect that when one played a strange game, he
+should let the other fellow play first. This had stood him in good
+stead a thousand times and trained him as an observer as well. He knew
+how to watch the thing that was strange, and to wait for a weakness,
+for a place of entrance, to divulge itself. It was like sparring for an
+opening in fist-fighting. And when such an opening came, he knew by
+long experience to play for it and to play hard.
+
+So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but not
+daring. He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of himself.
+Had he but known it, he was following the right course with her. Love
+came into the world before articulate speech, and in its own early
+youth it had learned ways and means that it had never forgotten. It was
+in this old, primitive way that Martin wooed Ruth. He did not know he
+was doing it at first, though later he divined it. The touch of his
+hand on hers was vastly more potent than any word he could utter, the
+impact of his strength on her imagination was more alluring than the
+printed poems and spoken passions of a thousand generations of lovers.
+Whatever his tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to her
+judgment; but the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way
+directly to her instinct. Her judgment was as young as she, but her
+instincts were as old as the race and older. They had been young when
+love was young, and they were wiser than convention and opinion and all
+the new-born things. So her judgment did not act. There was no call
+upon it, and she did not realize the strength of the appeal Martin made
+from moment to moment to her love-nature. That he loved her, on the
+other hand, was as clear as day, and she consciously delighted in
+beholding his love-manifestations—the glowing eyes with their tender
+lights, the trembling hands, and the never failing swarthy flush that
+flooded darkly under his sunburn. She even went farther, in a timid way
+inciting him, but doing it so delicately that he never suspected, and
+doing it half-consciously, so that she scarcely suspected herself. She
+thrilled with these proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman,
+and she took an Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon
+him.
+
+Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing unwittingly
+and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by contact. The touch of
+his hand was pleasant to her, and something deliciously more than
+pleasant. Martin did not know it, but he did know that it was not
+distasteful to her. Not that they touched hands often, save at meeting
+and parting; but that in handling the bicycles, in strapping on the
+books of verse they carried into the hills, and in conning the pages of
+books side by side, there were opportunities for hand to stray against
+hand. And there were opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his
+cheek, and for shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over
+the beauty of the books. She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses
+which arose from nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while
+he desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his head in her
+lap and dream with closed eyes about the future that was to be theirs.
+On Sunday picnics at Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park, in the past,
+he had rested his head on many laps, and, usually, he had slept soundly
+and selfishly while the girls shaded his face from the sun and looked
+down and loved him and wondered at his lordly carelessness of their
+love. To rest his head in a girl’s lap had been the easiest thing in
+the world until now, and now he found Ruth’s lap inaccessible and
+impossible. Yet it was right here, in his reticence, that the strength
+of his wooing lay. It was because of this reticence that he never
+alarmed her. Herself fastidious and timid, she never awakened to the
+perilous trend of their intercourse. Subtly and unaware she grew toward
+him and closer to him, while he, sensing the growing closeness, longed
+to dare but was afraid.
+
+Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened living
+room with a blinding headache.
+
+“Nothing can do it any good,” she had answered his inquiries. “And
+besides, I don’t take headache powders. Doctor Hall won’t permit me.”
+
+“I can cure it, I think, and without drugs,” was Martin’s answer. “I am
+not sure, of course, but I’d like to try. It’s simply massage. I
+learned the trick first from the Japanese. They are a race of masseurs,
+you know. Then I learned it all over again with variations from the
+Hawaiians. They call it _lomi-lomi_. It can accomplish most of the
+things drugs accomplish and a few things that drugs can’t.”
+
+Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.
+
+“That is so good,” she said.
+
+She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, “Aren’t you
+tired?”
+
+The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would be.
+Then she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing balm of
+his strength: Life poured from the ends of his fingers, driving the
+pain before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the easement of
+pain, she fell asleep and he stole away.
+
+She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.
+
+“I slept until dinner,” she said. “You cured me completely, Mr. Eden,
+and I don’t know how to thank you.”
+
+He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied to
+her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone
+conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth Barrett.
+What had been done could be done again, and he, Martin Eden, could do
+it and would do it for Ruth Morse. He went back to his room and to the
+volume of Spencer’s “Sociology” lying open on the bed. But he could not
+read. Love tormented him and overrode his will, so that, despite all
+determination, he found himself at the little ink-stained table. The
+sonnet he composed that night was the first of a love-cycle of fifty
+sonnets which was completed within two months. He had the “Love-sonnets
+from the Portuguese” in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best
+conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of
+his own sweet love-madness.
+
+The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the “Love-cycle,” to
+reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got more
+closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature of their
+policy and content. The hours he spent with Ruth were maddening alike
+in promise and in inconclusiveness. It was a week after he cured her
+headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt was proposed by Norman
+and seconded by Arthur and Olney. Martin was the only one capable of
+handling a boat, and he was pressed into service. Ruth sat near him in
+the stern, while the three young fellows lounged amidships, deep in a
+wordy wrangle over “frat” affairs.
+
+The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault of
+the sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a sudden
+feeling of loneliness. She glanced at him. A puff of wind was heeling
+the boat over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand on tiller and
+the other on main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the same time peering
+ahead to make out the near-lying north shore. He was unaware of her
+gaze, and she watched him intently, speculating fancifully about the
+strange warp of soul that led him, a young man with signal powers, to
+fritter away his time on the writing of stories and poems foredoomed to
+mediocrity and failure.
+
+Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen in the starlight,
+and over the firm-poised head, and the old desire to lay her hands upon
+his neck came back to her. The strength she abhorred attracted her. Her
+feeling of loneliness became more pronounced, and she felt tired. Her
+position on the heeling boat irked her, and she remembered the headache
+he had cured and the soothing rest that resided in him. He was sitting
+beside her, quite beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward
+him. Then arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest herself
+against his strength—a vague, half-formed impulse, which, even as she
+considered it, mastered her and made her lean toward him. Or was it the
+heeling of the boat? She did not know. She never knew. She knew only
+that she was leaning against him and that the easement and soothing
+rest were very good. Perhaps it had been the boat’s fault, but she made
+no effort to retrieve it. She leaned lightly against his shoulder, but
+she leaned, and she continued to lean when he shifted his position to
+make it more comfortable for her.
+
+It was a madness, but she refused to consider the madness. She was no
+longer herself but a woman, with a woman’s clinging need; and though
+she leaned ever so lightly, the need seemed satisfied. She was no
+longer tired. Martin did not speak. Had he, the spell would have been
+broken. But his reticence of love prolonged it. He was dazed and dizzy.
+He could not understand what was happening. It was too wonderful to be
+anything but a delirium. He conquered a mad desire to let go sheet and
+tiller and to clasp her in his arms. His intuition told him it was the
+wrong thing to do, and he was glad that sheet and tiller kept his hands
+occupied and fended off temptation. But he luffed the boat less
+delicately, spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as to
+prolong the tack to the north shore. The shore would compel him to go
+about, and the contact would be broken. He sailed with skill, stopping
+way on the boat without exciting the notice of the wranglers, and
+mentally forgiving his hardest voyages in that they had made this
+marvellous night possible, giving him mastery over sea and boat and
+wind so that he could sail with her beside him, her dear weight against
+him on his shoulder.
+
+When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail, illuminating
+the boat with pearly radiance, Ruth moved away from him. And, even as
+she moved, she felt him move away. The impulse to avoid detection was
+mutual. The episode was tacitly and secretly intimate. She sat apart
+from him with burning cheeks, while the full force of it came home to
+her. She had been guilty of something she would not have her brothers
+see, nor Olney see. Why had she done it? She had never done anything
+like it in her life, and yet she had been moonlight-sailing with young
+men before. She had never desired to do anything like it. She was
+overcome with shame and with the mystery of her own burgeoning
+womanhood. She stole a glance at Martin, who was busy putting the boat
+about on the other tack, and she could have hated him for having made
+her do an immodest and shameful thing. And he, of all men! Perhaps her
+mother was right, and she was seeing too much of him. It would never
+happen again, she resolved, and she would see less of him in the
+future. She entertained a wild idea of explaining to him the first time
+they were alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning casually the
+attack of faintness that had overpowered her just before the moon came
+up. Then she remembered how they had drawn mutually away before the
+revealing moon, and she knew he would know it for a lie.
+
+In the days that swiftly followed she was no longer herself but a
+strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment and scornful of
+self-analysis, refusing to peer into the future or to think about
+herself and whither she was drifting. She was in a fever of tingling
+mystery, alternately frightened and charmed, and in constant
+bewilderment. She had one idea firmly fixed, however, which insured her
+security. She would not let Martin speak his love. As long as she did
+this, all would be well. In a few days he would be off to sea. And even
+if he did speak, all would be well. It could not be otherwise, for she
+did not love him. Of course, it would be a painful half hour for him,
+and an embarrassing half hour for her, because it would be her first
+proposal. She thrilled deliciously at the thought. She was really a
+woman, with a man ripe to ask for her in marriage. It was a lure to all
+that was fundamental in her sex. The fabric of her life, of all that
+constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous. The thought fluttered in
+her mind like a flame-attracted moth. She went so far as to imagine
+Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his mouth; and she
+rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness and exhorting him to
+true and noble manhood. And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes.
+She would make a point of that. But no, she must not let him speak at
+all. She could stop him, and she had told her mother that she would.
+All flushed and burning, she regretfully dismissed the conjured
+situation. Her first proposal would have to be deferred to a more
+propitious time and a more eligible suitor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+
+Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the hush of
+the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with hazy sun and
+wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air.
+Filmy purple mists, that were not vapors but fabrics woven of color,
+hid in the recesses of the hills. San Francisco lay like a blur of
+smoke upon her heights. The intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten
+metal, whereon sailing craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy
+tide. Far Tamalpais, barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by
+the Golden Gate, the latter a pale gold pathway under the westering
+sun. Beyond, the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line
+tumbled cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first
+blustering breath of winter.
+
+The erasure of summer was at hand. Yet summer lingered, fading and
+fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning
+a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the
+calm content of having lived and lived well. And among the hills, on
+their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side by side, their heads
+bent over the same pages, he reading aloud from the love-sonnets of the
+woman who had loved Browning as it is given to few men to be loved.
+
+But the reading languished. The spell of passing beauty all about them
+was too strong. The golden year was dying as it had lived, a beautiful
+and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content
+freighted heavily the air. It entered into them, dreamy and languorous,
+weakening the fibres of resolution, suffusing the face of morality, or
+of judgment, with haze and purple mist. Martin felt tender and melting,
+and from time to time warm glows passed over him. His head was very
+near to hers, and when wandering phantoms of breeze stirred her hair so
+that it touched his face, the printed pages swam before his eyes.
+
+“I don’t believe you know a word of what you are reading,” she said
+once when he had lost his place.
+
+He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of becoming
+awkward, when a retort came to his lips.
+
+“I don’t believe you know either. What was the last sonnet about?”
+
+“I don’t know,” she laughed frankly. “I’ve already forgotten. Don’t let
+us read any more. The day is too beautiful.”
+
+“It will be our last in the hills for some time,” he announced gravely.
+“There’s a storm gathering out there on the sea-rim.”
+
+The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and they sat idly and
+silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed and did
+not see. Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck. She did not lean toward
+him. She was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger than
+gravitation, strong as destiny. It was only an inch to lean, and it was
+accomplished without volition on her part. Her shoulder touched his as
+lightly as a butterfly touches a flower, and just as lightly was the
+counter-pressure. She felt his shoulder press hers, and a tremor run
+through him. Then was the time for her to draw back. But she had become
+an automaton. Her actions had passed beyond the control of her will—she
+never thought of control or will in the delicious madness that was upon
+her. His arm began to steal behind her and around her. She waited its
+slow progress in a torment of delight. She waited, she knew not for
+what, panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and a fever of
+expectancy in all her blood. The girdling arm lifted higher and drew
+her toward him, drew her slowly and caressingly. She could wait no
+longer. With a tired sigh, and with an impulsive movement all her own,
+unpremeditated, spasmodic, she rested her head upon his breast. His
+head bent over swiftly, and, as his lips approached, hers flew to meet
+them.
+
+This must be love, she thought, in the one rational moment that was
+vouchsafed her. If it was not love, it was too shameful. It could be
+nothing else than love. She loved the man whose arms were around her
+and whose lips were pressed to hers. She pressed more tightly to him,
+with a snuggling movement of her body. And a moment later, tearing
+herself half out of his embrace, suddenly and exultantly she reached up
+and placed both hands upon Martin Eden’s sunburnt neck. So exquisite
+was the pang of love and desire fulfilled that she uttered a low moan,
+relaxed her hands, and lay half-swooning in his arms.
+
+Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken for a long time.
+Twice he bent and kissed her, and each time her lips met his shyly and
+her body made its happy, nestling movement. She clung to him, unable to
+release herself, and he sat, half supporting her in his arms, as he
+gazed with unseeing eyes at the blur of the great city across the bay.
+For once there were no visions in his brain. Only colors and lights and
+glows pulsed there, warm as the day and warm as his love. He bent over
+her. She was speaking.
+
+“When did you love me?” she whispered.
+
+“From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid eye on you. I
+was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has passed since
+then I have only grown the madder. I am maddest, now, dear. I am almost
+a lunatic, my head is so turned with joy.”
+
+“I am glad I am a woman, Martin—dear,” she said, after a long sigh.
+
+He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then asked:-
+
+“And you? When did you first know?”
+
+“Oh, I knew it all the time, almost, from the first.”
+
+“And I have been as blind as a bat!” he cried, a ring of vexation in
+his voice. “I never dreamed it until just how, when I—when I kissed
+you.”
+
+“I didn’t mean that.” She drew herself partly away and looked at him.
+“I meant I knew you loved almost from the first.”
+
+“And you?” he demanded.
+
+“It came to me suddenly.” She was speaking very slowly, her eyes warm
+and fluttery and melting, a soft flush on her cheeks that did not go
+away. “I never knew until just now when—you put your arms around me.
+And I never expected to marry you, Martin, not until just now. How did
+you make me love you?”
+
+“I don’t know,” he laughed, “unless just by loving you, for I loved you
+hard enough to melt the heart of a stone, much less the heart of the
+living, breathing woman you are.”
+
+“This is so different from what I thought love would be,” she announced
+irrelevantly.
+
+“What did you think it would be like?”
+
+“I didn’t think it would be like this.” She was looking into his eyes
+at the moment, but her own dropped as she continued, “You see, I didn’t
+know what this was like.”
+
+He offered to draw her toward him again, but it was no more than a
+tentative muscular movement of the girdling arm, for he feared that he
+might be greedy. Then he felt her body yielding, and once again she was
+close in his arms and lips were pressed on lips.
+
+“What will my people say?” she queried, with sudden apprehension, in
+one of the pauses.
+
+“I don’t know. We can find out very easily any time we are so minded.”
+
+“But if mamma objects? I am sure I am afraid to tell her.”
+
+“Let me tell her,” he volunteered valiantly. “I think your mother does
+not like me, but I can win her around. A fellow who can win you can win
+anything. And if we don’t—”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Why, we’ll have each other. But there’s no danger not winning your
+mother to our marriage. She loves you too well.”
+
+“I should not like to break her heart,” Ruth said pensively.
+
+He felt like assuring her that mothers’ hearts were not so easily
+broken, but instead he said, “And love is the greatest thing in the
+world.”
+
+“Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me. I am frightened now,
+when I think of you and of what you have been. You must be very, very
+good to me. Remember, after all, that I am only a child. I never loved
+before.”
+
+“Nor I. We are both children together. And we are fortunate above most,
+for we have found our first love in each other.”
+
+“But that is impossible!” she cried, withdrawing herself from his arms
+with a swift, passionate movement. “Impossible for you. You have been a
+sailor, and sailors, I have heard, are—are—”
+
+Her voice faltered and died away.
+
+“Are addicted to having a wife in every port?” he suggested. “Is that
+what you mean?”
+
+“Yes,” she answered in a low voice.
+
+“But that is not love.” He spoke authoritatively. “I have been in many
+ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw you that
+first night. Do you know, when I said good night and went away, I was
+almost arrested.”
+
+“Arrested?”
+
+“Yes. The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too—with love for
+you.”
+
+“But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for you,
+and we have strayed away from the point.”
+
+“I said that I never loved anybody but you,” he replied. “You are my
+first, my very first.”
+
+“And yet you have been a sailor,” she objected.
+
+“But that doesn’t prevent me from loving you the first.”
+
+“And there have been women—other women—oh!”
+
+And to Martin Eden’s supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of tears
+that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive away. And all
+the while there was running through his head Kipling’s line: “_And the
+Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins_.” It was
+true, he decided; though the novels he had read had led him to believe
+otherwise. His idea, for which the novels were responsible, had been
+that only formal proposals obtained in the upper classes. It was all
+right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win
+each other by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the
+heights to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable. Yet the
+novels were wrong. Here was a proof of it. The same pressures and
+caresses, unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious with the girls
+of the working-class, were equally efficacious with the girls above the
+working-class. They were all of the same flesh, after all, sisters
+under their skins; and he might have known as much himself had he
+remembered his Spencer. As he held Ruth in his arms and soothed her, he
+took great consolation in the thought that the Colonel’s lady and Judy
+O’Grady were pretty much alike under their skins. It brought Ruth
+closer to him, made her possible. Her dear flesh was as anybody’s
+flesh, as his flesh. There was no bar to their marriage. Class
+difference was the only difference, and class was extrinsic. It could
+be shaken off. A slave, he had read, had risen to the Roman purple.
+That being so, then he could rise to Ruth. Under her purity, and
+saintliness, and culture, and ethereal beauty of soul, she was, in
+things fundamentally human, just like Lizzie Connolly and all Lizzie
+Connollys. All that was possible of them was possible of her. She could
+love, and hate, maybe have hysterics; and she could certainly be
+jealous, as she was jealous now, uttering her last sobs in his arms.
+
+“Besides, I am older than you,” she remarked suddenly, opening her eyes
+and looking up at him, “three years older.”
+
+“Hush, you are only a child, and I am forty years older than you, in
+experience,” was his answer.
+
+In truth, they were children together, so far as love was concerned,
+and they were as naive and immature in the expression of their love as
+a pair of children, and this despite the fact that she was crammed with
+a university education and that his head was full of scientific
+philosophy and the hard facts of life.
+
+They sat on through the passing glory of the day, talking as lovers are
+prone to talk, marvelling at the wonder of love and at destiny that had
+flung them so strangely together, and dogmatically believing that they
+loved to a degree never attained by lovers before. And they returned
+insistently, again and again, to a rehearsal of their first impressions
+of each other and to hopeless attempts to analyze just precisely what
+they felt for each other and how much there was of it.
+
+The cloud-masses on the western horizon received the descending sun,
+and the circle of the sky turned to rose, while the zenith glowed with
+the same warm color. The rosy light was all about them, flooding over
+them, as she sang, “Good-by, Sweet Day.” She sang softly, leaning in
+the cradle of his arm, her hands in his, their hearts in each other’s
+hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+
+Mrs. Morse did not require a mother’s intuition to read the
+advertisement in Ruth’s face when she returned home. The flush that
+would not leave the cheeks told the simple story, and more eloquently
+did the eyes, large and bright, reflecting an unmistakable inward
+glory.
+
+“What has happened?” Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till Ruth
+had gone to bed.
+
+“You know?” Ruth queried, with trembling lips.
+
+For reply, her mother’s arm went around her, and a hand was softly
+caressing her hair.
+
+“He did not speak,” she blurted out. “I did not intend that it should
+happen, and I would never have let him speak—only he didn’t speak.”
+
+“But if he did not speak, then nothing could have happened, could it?”
+
+“But it did, just the same.”
+
+“In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling about?” Mrs.
+Morse was bewildered. “I don’t think I know what happened, after all.
+What did happen?”
+
+Ruth looked at her mother in surprise.
+
+“I thought you knew. Why, we’re engaged, Martin and I.”
+
+Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation.
+
+“No, he didn’t speak,” Ruth explained. “He just loved me, that was all.
+I was as surprised as you are. He didn’t say a word. He just put his
+arm around me. And—and I was not myself. And he kissed me, and I kissed
+him. I couldn’t help it. I just had to. And then I knew I loved him.”
+
+She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of her mother’s
+kiss, but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent.
+
+“It is a dreadful accident, I know,” Ruth recommenced with a sinking
+voice. “And I don’t know how you will ever forgive me. But I couldn’t
+help it. I did not dream that I loved him until that moment. And you
+must tell father for me.”
+
+“Would it not be better not to tell your father? Let me see Martin
+Eden, and talk with him, and explain. He will understand and release
+you.”
+
+“No! no!” Ruth cried, starting up. “I do not want to be released. I
+love him, and love is very sweet. I am going to marry him—of course, if
+you will let me.”
+
+“We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father and I—oh, no, no;
+no man picked out for you, or anything like that. Our plans go no
+farther than your marrying some man in your own station in life, a good
+and honorable gentleman, whom you will select yourself, when you love
+him.”
+
+“But I love Martin already,” was the plaintive protest.
+
+“We would not influence your choice in any way; but you are our
+daughter, and we could not bear to see you make a marriage such as
+this. He has nothing but roughness and coarseness to offer you in
+exchange for all that is refined and delicate in you. He is no match
+for you in any way. He could not support you. We have no foolish ideas
+about wealth, but comfort is another matter, and our daughter should at
+least marry a man who can give her that—and not a penniless adventurer,
+a sailor, a cowboy, a smuggler, and Heaven knows what else, who, in
+addition to everything, is hare-brained and irresponsible.”
+
+Ruth was silent. Every word she recognized as true.
+
+“He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what
+geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish. A
+man thinking of marriage should be preparing for marriage. But not he.
+As I have said, and I know you agree with me, he is irresponsible. And
+why should he not be? It is the way of sailors. He has never learned to
+be economical or temperate. The spendthrift years have marked him. It
+is not his fault, of course, but that does not alter his nature. And
+have you thought of the years of licentiousness he inevitably has
+lived? Have you thought of that, daughter? You know what marriage
+means.”
+
+Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother.
+
+“I have thought.” Ruth waited a long time for the thought to frame
+itself. “And it is terrible. It sickens me to think of it. I told you
+it was a dreadful accident, my loving him; but I can’t help myself.
+Could you help loving father? Then it is the same with me. There is
+something in me, in him—I never knew it was there until to-day—but it
+is there, and it makes me love him. I never thought to love him, but,
+you see, I do,” she concluded, a certain faint triumph in her voice.
+
+They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion agreeing to wait
+an indeterminate time without doing anything.
+
+The same conclusion was reached, a little later that night, between
+Mrs. Morse and her husband, after she had made due confession of the
+miscarriage of her plans.
+
+“It could hardly have come otherwise,” was Mr. Morse’s judgment. “This
+sailor-fellow has been the only man she was in touch with. Sooner or
+later she was going to awaken anyway; and she did awaken, and lo! here
+was this sailor-fellow, the only accessible man at the moment, and of
+course she promptly loved him, or thought she did, which amounts to the
+same thing.”
+
+Mrs. Morse took it upon herself to work slowly and indirectly upon
+Ruth, rather than to combat her. There would be plenty of time for
+this, for Martin was not in position to marry.
+
+“Let her see all she wants of him,” was Mr. Morse’s advice. “The more
+she knows him, the less she’ll love him, I wager. And give her plenty
+of contrast. Make a point of having young people at the house. Young
+women and young men, all sorts of young men, clever men, men who have
+done something or who are doing things, men of her own class,
+gentlemen. She can gauge him by them. They will show him up for what he
+is. And after all, he is a mere boy of twenty-one. Ruth is no more than
+a child. It is calf love with the pair of them, and they will grow out
+of it.”
+
+So the matter rested. Within the family it was accepted that Ruth and
+Martin were engaged, but no announcement was made. The family did not
+think it would ever be necessary. Also, it was tacitly understood that
+it was to be a long engagement. They did not ask Martin to go to work,
+nor to cease writing. They did not intend to encourage him to mend
+himself. And he aided and abetted them in their unfriendly designs, for
+going to work was farthest from his thoughts.
+
+“I wonder if you’ll like what I have done!” he said to Ruth several
+days later. “I’ve decided that boarding with my sister is too
+expensive, and I am going to board myself. I’ve rented a little room
+out in North Oakland, retired neighborhood and all the rest, you know,
+and I’ve bought an oil-burner on which to cook.”
+
+Ruth was overjoyed. The oil-burner especially pleased her.
+
+“That was the way Mr. Butler began his start,” she said.
+
+Martin frowned inwardly at the citation of that worthy gentleman, and
+went on: “I put stamps on all my manuscripts and started them off to
+the editors again. Then to-day I moved in, and to-morrow I start to
+work.”
+
+“A position!” she cried, betraying the gladness of her surprise in all
+her body, nestling closer to him, pressing his hand, smiling. “And you
+never told me! What is it?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“I meant that I was going to work at my writing.” Her face fell, and he
+went on hastily. “Don’t misjudge me. I am not going in this time with
+any iridescent ideas. It is to be a cold, prosaic, matter-of-fact
+business proposition. It is better than going to sea again, and I shall
+earn more money than any position in Oakland can bring an unskilled
+man.”
+
+“You see, this vacation I have taken has given me perspective. I
+haven’t been working the life out of my body, and I haven’t been
+writing, at least not for publication. All I’ve done has been to love
+you and to think. I’ve read some, too, but it has been part of my
+thinking, and I have read principally magazines. I have generalized
+about myself, and the world, my place in it, and my chance to win to a
+place that will be fit for you. Also, I’ve been reading Spencer’s
+‘Philosophy of Style,’ and found out a lot of what was the matter with
+me—or my writing, rather; and for that matter with most of the writing
+that is published every month in the magazines.”
+
+“But the upshot of it all—of my thinking and reading and loving—is that
+I am going to move to Grub Street. I shall leave masterpieces alone and
+do hack-work—jokes, paragraphs, feature articles, humorous verse, and
+society verse—all the rot for which there seems so much demand. Then
+there are the newspaper syndicates, and the newspaper short-story
+syndicates, and the syndicates for the Sunday supplements. I can go
+ahead and hammer out the stuff they want, and earn the equivalent of a
+good salary by it. There are free-lances, you know, who earn as much as
+four or five hundred a month. I don’t care to become as they; but I’ll
+earn a good living, and have plenty of time to myself, which I wouldn’t
+have in any position.”
+
+“Then, I’ll have my spare time for study and for real work. In between
+the grind I’ll try my hand at masterpieces, and I’ll study and prepare
+myself for the writing of masterpieces. Why, I am amazed at the
+distance I have come already. When I first tried to write, I had
+nothing to write about except a few paltry experiences which I neither
+understood nor appreciated. But I had no thoughts. I really didn’t. I
+didn’t even have the words with which to think. My experiences were so
+many meaningless pictures. But as I began to add to my knowledge, and
+to my vocabulary, I saw something more in my experiences than mere
+pictures. I retained the pictures and I found their interpretation.
+That was when I began to do good work, when I wrote ‘Adventure,’ ‘Joy,’
+‘The Pot,’ ‘The Wine of Life,’ ‘The Jostling Street,’ the ‘Love-cycle,’
+and the ‘Sea Lyrics.’ I shall write more like them, and better; but I
+shall do it in my spare time. My feet are on the solid earth, now.
+Hack-work and income first, masterpieces afterward. Just to show you, I
+wrote half a dozen jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and just as
+I was going to bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at a triolet—a
+humorous one; and inside an hour I had written four. They ought to be
+worth a dollar apiece. Four dollars right there for a few afterthoughts
+on the way to bed.”
+
+“Of course it’s all valueless, just so much dull and sordid plodding;
+but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at sixty dollars a
+month, adding up endless columns of meaningless figures until one dies.
+And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in touch with things literary
+and gives me time to try bigger things.”
+
+“But what good are these bigger things, these masterpieces?” Ruth
+demanded. “You can’t sell them.”
+
+“Oh, yes, I can,” he began; but she interrupted.
+
+“All those you named, and which you say yourself are good—you have not
+sold any of them. We can’t get married on masterpieces that won’t
+sell.”
+
+“Then we’ll get married on triolets that will sell,” he asserted
+stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive
+sweetheart toward him.
+
+“Listen to this,” he went on in attempted gayety. “It’s not art, but
+it’s a dollar.
+
+“He came in
+    When I was out,
+To borrow some tin
+Was why he came in,
+    And he went without;
+So I was in
+    And he was out.”
+
+
+The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at variance
+with the dejection that came into his face as he finished. He had drawn
+no smile from Ruth. She was looking at him in an earnest and troubled
+way.
+
+“It may be a dollar,” she said, “but it is a jester’s dollar, the fee
+of a clown. Don’t you see, Martin, the whole thing is lowering. I want
+the man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than a
+perpetrator of jokes and doggerel.”
+
+“You want him to be like—say Mr. Butler?” he suggested.
+
+“I know you don’t like Mr. Butler,” she began.
+
+“Mr. Butler’s all right,” he interrupted. “It’s only his indigestion I
+find fault with. But to save me I can’t see any difference between
+writing jokes or comic verse and running a type-writer, taking
+dictation, or keeping sets of books. It is all a means to an end. Your
+theory is for me to begin with keeping books in order to become a
+successful lawyer or man of business. Mine is to begin with hack-work
+and develop into an able author.”
+
+“There is a difference,” she insisted.
+
+“What is it?”
+
+“Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can’t sell. You
+have tried, you know that,—but the editors won’t buy it.”
+
+“Give me time, dear,” he pleaded. “The hack-work is only makeshift, and
+I don’t take it seriously. Give me two years. I shall succeed in that
+time, and the editors will be glad to buy my good work. I know what I
+am saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; I know
+what literature is, now; I know the average rot that is poured out by a
+lot of little men; and I know that at the end of two years I shall be
+on the highroad to success. As for business, I shall never succeed at
+it. I am not in sympathy with it. It strikes me as dull, and stupid,
+and mercenary, and tricky. Anyway I am not adapted for it. I’d never
+get beyond a clerkship, and how could you and I be happy on the paltry
+earnings of a clerk? I want the best of everything in the world for
+you, and the only time when I won’t want it will be when there is
+something better. And I’m going to get it, going to get all of it. The
+income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap. A
+‘best-seller’ will earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand
+dollars—sometimes more and sometimes less; but, as a rule, pretty close
+to those figures.”
+
+She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.
+
+“Well?” he asked.
+
+“I had hoped and planned otherwise. I had thought, and I still think,
+that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand—you already
+know type-writing—and go into father’s office. You have a good mind,
+and I am confident you would succeed as a lawyer.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+
+That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter her
+nor diminish her in Martin’s eyes. In the breathing spell of the
+vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self-analysis, and
+thereby learned much of himself. He had discovered that he loved beauty
+more than fame, and that what desire he had for fame was largely for
+Ruth’s sake. It was for this reason that his desire for fame was
+strong. He wanted to be great in the world’s eyes; “to make good,” as
+he expressed it, in order that the woman he loved should be proud of
+him and deem him worthy.
+
+As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of serving
+her was to him sufficient wage. And more than beauty he loved Ruth. He
+considered love the finest thing in the world. It was love that had
+worked the revolution in him, changing him from an uncouth sailor to a
+student and an artist; therefore, to him, the finest and greatest of
+the three, greater than learning and artistry, was love. Already he had
+discovered that his brain went beyond Ruth’s, just as it went beyond
+the brains of her brothers, or the brain of her father. In spite of
+every advantage of university training, and in the face of her
+bachelorship of arts, his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his
+year or so of self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the
+affairs of the world and art and life that she could never hope to
+possess.
+
+All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor her
+love for him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was too loyal a lover
+for him to besmirch love with criticism. What did love have to do with
+Ruth’s divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or
+equal suffrage? They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason;
+it was superrational. He could not belittle love. He worshipped it.
+Love lay on the mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was
+a sublimated condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it
+came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he
+favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined
+process of the same scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that
+the human organism achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must
+not be questioned, but must be accepted as the highest guerdon of life.
+Thus, he considered the lover blessed over all creatures, and it was a
+delight to him to think of “God’s own mad lover,” rising above the
+things of earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and
+applause, rising above life itself and “dying on a kiss.”
+
+Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he
+reasoned out later. In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation
+except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan. He paid two
+dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his
+Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working
+and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and
+drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of
+the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon
+for fifteen cents. From detesting her and her foul tongue at first,
+Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made.
+There were but four rooms in the little house—three, when Martin’s was
+subtracted. One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and
+dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous
+departed babes, was kept strictly for company. The blinds were always
+down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred
+precinct save on state occasions. She cooked, and all ate, in the
+kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and ironed clothes on all
+days of the week except Sunday; for her income came largely from taking
+in washing from her more prosperous neighbors. Remained the bedroom,
+small as the one occupied by Martin, into which she and her seven
+little ones crowded and slept. It was an everlasting miracle to Martin
+how it was accomplished, and from her side of the thin partition he
+heard nightly every detail of the going to bed, the squalls and
+squabbles, the soft chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of
+birds. Another source of income to Maria were her cows, two of them,
+which she milked night and morning and which gained a surreptitious
+livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either side the
+public side walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged boys,
+whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping their eyes out
+for the poundmen.
+
+In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept
+house. Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch, was
+the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-writing stand.
+The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space
+of the room. The table was flanked on one side by a gaudy bureau,
+manufactured for profit and not for service, the thin veneer of which
+was shed day by day. This bureau stood in the corner, and in the
+opposite corner, on the table’s other flank, was the kitchen—the
+oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and cooking
+utensils, a shelf on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of water on
+the floor. Martin had to carry his water from the kitchen sink, there
+being no tap in his room. On days when there was much steam to his
+cooking, the harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous.
+Over the bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle. At
+first he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva,
+loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him out.
+Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling southeaster
+drenched the wheel a night-long. Then he had retreated with it to his
+room and slung it aloft.
+
+A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had accumulated
+and for which there was no room on the table or under the table. Hand
+in hand with reading, he had developed the habit of making notes, and
+so copiously did he make them that there would have been no existence
+for him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several
+clothes-lines across the room on which the notes were hung. Even so, he
+was crowded until navigating the room was a difficult task. He could
+not open the door without first closing the closet door, and _vice
+versa_. It was impossible for him anywhere to traverse the room in a
+straight line. To go from the door to the head of the bed was a zigzag
+course that he was never quite able to accomplish in the dark without
+collisions. Having settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he
+had to steer sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen. Next, he
+sheered to the left, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if
+too generous, brought him against the corner of the table. With a
+sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to the
+right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the other
+the table. When the one chair in the room was at its usual place before
+the table, the canal was unnavigable. When the chair was not in use, it
+reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when
+cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming
+skilful enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying.
+Also, so small was the little corner that constituted the kitchen, he
+was able, sitting down, to reach anything he needed. In fact, it was
+expedient to cook sitting down; standing up, he was too often in his
+own way.
+
+In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything, he
+possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the same time
+nutritious and cheap. Pea-soup was a common article in his diet, as
+well as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown and cooked in
+Mexican style. Rice, cooked as American housewives never cook it and
+can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin’s table at least once a
+day. Dried fruits were less expensive than fresh, and he had usually a
+pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, for they took the place of
+butter on his bread. Occasionally he graced his table with a piece of
+round-steak, or with a soup-bone. Coffee, without cream or milk, he had
+twice a day, in the evening substituting tea; but both coffee and tea
+were excellently cooked.
+
+There was need for him to be economical. His vacation had consumed
+nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his
+market that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the first
+returns from his hack-work. Except at such times as he saw Ruth, or
+dropped in to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in each day
+accomplishing at least three days’ labor of ordinary men. He slept a
+scant five hours, and only one with a constitution of iron could have
+held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, to nineteen
+consecutive hours of toil. He never lost a moment. On the looking-glass
+were lists of definitions and pronunciations; when shaving, or
+dressing, or combing his hair, he conned these lists over. Similar
+lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and they were similarly
+conned while he was engaged in cooking or in washing the dishes. New
+lists continually displaced the old ones. Every strange or partly
+familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately jotted down,
+and later, when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were typed
+and pinned to the wall or looking-glass. He even carried them in his
+pockets, and reviewed them at odd moments on the street, or while
+waiting in butcher shop or grocery to be served.
+
+He went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who had
+arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the
+tricks by which they had been achieved—the tricks of narrative, of
+exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams;
+and of all these he made lists for study. He did not ape. He sought
+principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till
+out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to induce the
+general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for
+new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise
+them properly. In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases,
+the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched
+like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of
+the arid desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle
+that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done;
+after that he could do it for himself. He was not content with the fair
+face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom
+laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of
+the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of
+beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.
+
+He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not
+work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and
+trusting to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced
+should be right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects. He
+wanted to know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and,
+before he began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in
+his brain, with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in
+his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.
+On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and
+phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later
+stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and
+incommunicable connotations. Before such he bowed down and marvelled,
+knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And
+no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of the principles that
+underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the
+innermost mystery of beauty to which he did not penetrate and to which
+no man had ever penetrated. He knew full well, from his Spencer, that
+man can never attain ultimate knowledge of anything, and that the
+mystery of beauty was no less than that of life—nay, more—that the
+fibres of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he himself was
+but a bit of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and
+star-dust and wonder.
+
+In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his essay
+entitled “Star-dust,” in which he had his fling, not at the principles
+of criticism, but at the principal critics. It was brilliant, deep,
+philosophical, and deliciously touched with laughter. Also it was
+promptly rejected by the magazines as often as it was submitted. But
+having cleared his mind of it, he went serenely on his way. It was a
+habit he developed, of incubating and maturing his thought upon a
+subject, and of then rushing into the type-writer with it. That it did
+not see print was a matter of small moment with him. The writing of it
+was the culminating act of a long mental process, the drawing together
+of scattered threads of thought and the final generalizing upon all the
+data with which his mind was burdened. To write such an article was the
+conscious effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh
+material and problems. It was in a way akin to that common habit of men
+and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who periodically and
+volubly break their long-suffering silence and “have their say” till
+the last word is said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+
+The weeks passed. Martin ran out of money, and publishers’ checks were
+far away as ever. All his important manuscripts had come back and been
+started out again, and his hack-work fared no better. His little
+kitchen was no longer graced with a variety of foods. Caught in the
+pinch with a part sack of rice and a few pounds of dried apricots, rice
+and apricots was his menu three times a day for five days hand-running.
+Then he startled to realize on his credit. The Portuguese grocer, to
+whom he had hitherto paid cash, called a halt when Martin’s bill
+reached the magnificent total of three dollars and eighty-five cents.
+
+“For you see,” said the grocer, “you no catcha da work, I losa da
+mon’.”
+
+And Martin could reply nothing. There was no way of explaining. It was
+not true business principle to allow credit to a strong-bodied young
+fellow of the working-class who was too lazy to work.
+
+“You catcha da job, I let you have mora da grub,” the grocer assured
+Martin. “No job, no grub. Thata da business.” And then, to show that it
+was purely business foresight and not prejudice, “Hava da drink on da
+house—good friends justa da same.”
+
+So Martin drank, in his easy way, to show that he was good friends with
+the house, and then went supperless to bed.
+
+The fruit store, where Martin had bought his vegetables, was run by an
+American whose business principles were so weak that he let Martin run
+a bill of five dollars before stopping his credit. The baker stopped at
+two dollars, and the butcher at four dollars. Martin added his debts
+and found that he was possessed of a total credit in all the world of
+fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents. He was up with his type-writer
+rent, but he estimated that he could get two months’ credit on that,
+which would be eight dollars. When that occurred, he would have
+exhausted all possible credit.
+
+The last purchase from the fruit store had been a sack of potatoes, and
+for a week he had potatoes, and nothing but potatoes, three times a
+day. An occasional dinner at Ruth’s helped to keep strength in his
+body, though he found it tantalizing enough to refuse further helping
+when his appetite was raging at sight of so much food spread before it.
+Now and again, though afflicted with secret shame, he dropped in at his
+sister’s at meal-time and ate as much as he dared—more than he dared at
+the Morse table.
+
+Day by day he worked on, and day by day the postman delivered to him
+rejected manuscripts. He had no money for stamps, so the manuscripts
+accumulated in a heap under the table. Came a day when for forty hours
+he had not tasted food. He could not hope for a meal at Ruth’s, for she
+was away to San Rafael on a two weeks’ visit; and for very shame’s sake
+he could not go to his sister’s. To cap misfortune, the postman, in his
+afternoon round, brought him five returned manuscripts. Then it was
+that Martin wore his overcoat down into Oakland, and came back without
+it, but with five dollars tinkling in his pocket. He paid a dollar each
+on account to the four tradesmen, and in his kitchen fried steak and
+onions, made coffee, and stewed a large pot of prunes. And having
+dined, he sat down at his table-desk and completed before midnight an
+essay which he entitled “The Dignity of Usury.” Having typed it out, he
+flung it under the table, for there had been nothing left from the five
+dollars with which to buy stamps.
+
+Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, reducing the
+amount available for food by putting stamps on all his manuscripts and
+sending them out. He was disappointed with his hack-work. Nobody cared
+to buy. He compared it with what he found in the newspapers, weeklies,
+and cheap magazines, and decided that his was better, far better, than
+the average; yet it would not sell. Then he discovered that most of the
+newspapers printed a great deal of what was called “plate” stuff, and
+he got the address of the association that furnished it. His own work
+that he sent in was returned, along with a stereotyped slip informing
+him that the staff supplied all the copy that was needed.
+
+In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of
+incident and anecdote. Here was a chance. His paragraphs were returned,
+and though he tried repeatedly he never succeeded in placing one. Later
+on, when it no longer mattered, he learned that the associate editors
+and sub-editors augmented their salaries by supplying those paragraphs
+themselves. The comic weeklies returned his jokes and humorous verse,
+and the light society verse he wrote for the large magazines found no
+abiding-place. Then there was the newspaper storiette. He knew that he
+could write better ones than were published. Managing to obtain the
+addresses of two newspaper syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes.
+When he had written twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased.
+And yet, from day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and
+weeklies, scores and scores of storiettes, not one of which would
+compare with his. In his despondency, he concluded that he had no
+judgment whatever, that he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he
+was a self-deluded pretender.
+
+The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever. He folded the
+stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and from
+three weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps and
+handed him the manuscript. Surely there were no live, warm editors at
+the other end. It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups—a clever
+mechanism operated by automatons. He reached stages of despair wherein
+he doubted if editors existed at all. He had never received a sign of
+the existence of one, and from absence of judgment in rejecting all he
+wrote it seemed plausible that editors were myths, manufactured and
+maintained by office boys, typesetters, and pressmen.
+
+The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and they
+were not all happy. He was afflicted always with a gnawing
+restlessness, more tantalizing than in the old days before he possessed
+her love; for now that he did possess her love, the possession of her
+was far away as ever. He had asked for two years; time was flying, and
+he was achieving nothing. Again, he was always conscious of the fact
+that she did not approve what he was doing. She did not say so
+directly. Yet indirectly she let him understand it as clearly and
+definitely as she could have spoken it. It was not resentment with her,
+but disapproval; though less sweet-natured women might have resented
+where she was no more than disappointed. Her disappointment lay in that
+this man she had taken to mould, refused to be moulded. To a certain
+extent she had found his clay plastic, then it had developed
+stubbornness, declining to be shaped in the image of her father or of
+Mr. Butler.
+
+What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse yet,
+misunderstood. This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could live
+in any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought wilful and
+most obstinate because she could not shape him to live in her
+pigeonhole, which was the only one she knew. She could not follow the
+flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her, she deemed him
+erratic. Nobody else’s brain ever got beyond her. She could always
+follow her father and mother, her brothers and Olney; wherefore, when
+she could not follow Martin, she believed the fault lay with him. It
+was the old tragedy of insularity trying to serve as mentor to the
+universal.
+
+“You worship at the shrine of the established,” he told her once, in a
+discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater. “I grant that as
+authorities to quote they are most excellent—the two foremost literary
+critics in the United States. Every school teacher in the land looks up
+to Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism. Yet I read his stuff,
+and it seems to me the perfection of the felicitous expression of the
+inane. Why, he is no more than a ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett
+Burgess. And Praps is no better. His ‘Hemlock Mosses,’ for instance is
+beautifully written. Not a comma is out of place; and the tone—ah!—is
+lofty, so lofty. He is the best-paid critic in the United States.
+Though, Heaven forbid! he’s not a critic at all. They do criticism
+better in England.
+
+“But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it so
+beautifully and morally and contentedly. Their reviews remind me of a
+British Sunday. They are the popular mouthpieces. They back up your
+professors of English, and your professors of English back them up. And
+there isn’t an original idea in any of their skulls. They know only the
+established,—in fact, they are the established. They are weak minded,
+and the established impresses itself upon them as easily as the name of
+the brewery is impressed on a beer bottle. And their function is to
+catch all the young fellows attending the university, to drive out of
+their minds any glimmering originality that may chance to be there, and
+to put upon them the stamp of the established.”
+
+“I think I am nearer the truth,” she replied, “when I stand by the
+established, than you are, raging around like an iconoclastic South Sea
+Islander.”
+
+“It was the missionary who did the image breaking,” he laughed. “And
+unfortunately, all the missionaries are off among the heathen, so there
+are none left at home to break those old images, Mr. Vanderwater and
+Mr. Praps.”
+
+“And the college professors, as well,” she added.
+
+He shook his head emphatically. “No; the science professors should
+live. They’re really great. But it would be a good deed to break the
+heads of nine-tenths of the English professors—little,
+microscopic-minded parrots!”
+
+Which was rather severe on the professors, but which to Ruth was
+blasphemy. She could not help but measure the professors, neat,
+scholarly, in fitting clothes, speaking in well-modulated voices,
+breathing of culture and refinement, with this almost indescribable
+young fellow whom somehow she loved, whose clothes never would fit him,
+whose heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew excited when he
+talked, substituting abuse for calm statement and passionate utterance
+for cool self-possession. They at least earned good salaries and
+were—yes, she compelled herself to face it—were gentlemen; while he
+could not earn a penny, and he was not as they.
+
+She did not weigh Martin’s words nor judge his argument by them. Her
+conclusion that his argument was wrong was reached—unconsciously, it is
+true—by a comparison of externals. They, the professors, were right in
+their literary judgments because they were successes. Martin’s literary
+judgments were wrong because he could not sell his wares. To use his
+own phrase, they made good, and he did not make good. And besides, it
+did not seem reasonable that he should be right—he who had stood, so
+short a time before, in that same living room, blushing and awkward,
+acknowledging his introduction, looking fearfully about him at the
+bric-a-brac his swinging shoulders threatened to break, asking how long
+since Swinburne died, and boastfully announcing that he had read
+“Excelsior” and the “Psalm of Life.”
+
+Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she worshipped the
+established. Martin followed the processes of her thoughts, but forbore
+to go farther. He did not love her for what she thought of Praps and
+Vanderwater and English professors, and he was coming to realize, with
+increasing conviction, that he possessed brain-areas and stretches of
+knowledge which she could never comprehend nor know existed.
+
+In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera not
+only unreasonable but wilfully perverse.
+
+“How did you like it?” she asked him one night, on the way home from
+the opera.
+
+It was a night when he had taken her at the expense of a month’s rigid
+economizing on food. After vainly waiting for him to speak about it,
+herself still tremulous and stirred by what she had just seen and
+heard, she had asked the question.
+
+“I liked the overture,” was his answer. “It was splendid.”
+
+“Yes, but the opera itself?”
+
+“That was splendid too; that is, the orchestra was, though I’d have
+enjoyed it more if those jumping-jacks had kept quiet or gone off the
+stage.”
+
+Ruth was aghast.
+
+“You don’t mean Tetralani or Barillo?” she queried.
+
+“All of them—the whole kit and crew.”
+
+“But they are great artists,” she protested.
+
+“They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics and
+unrealities.”
+
+“But don’t you like Barillo’s voice?” Ruth asked. “He is next to
+Caruso, they say.”
+
+“Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even better. Her voice is
+exquisite—or at least I think so.”
+
+“But, but—” Ruth stammered. “I don’t know what you mean, then. You
+admire their voices, yet say they spoiled the music.”
+
+“Precisely that. I’d give anything to hear them in concert, and I’d
+give even a bit more not to hear them when the orchestra is playing.
+I’m afraid I am a hopeless realist. Great singers are not great actors.
+To hear Barillo sing a love passage with the voice of an angel, and to
+hear Tetralani reply like another angel, and to hear it all accompanied
+by a perfect orgy of glowing and colorful music—is ravishing, most
+ravishing. I do not admit it. I assert it. But the whole effect is
+spoiled when I look at them—at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking
+feet and weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a scant
+five feet four, greasy-featured, with the chest of a squat, undersized
+blacksmith, and at the pair of them, attitudinizing, clasping their
+breasts, flinging their arms in the air like demented creatures in an
+asylum; and when I am expected to accept all this as the faithful
+illusion of a love-scene between a slender and beautiful princess and a
+handsome, romantic, young prince—why, I can’t accept it, that’s all.
+It’s rot; it’s absurd; it’s unreal. That’s what’s the matter with it.
+It’s not real. Don’t tell me that anybody in this world ever made love
+that way. Why, if I’d made love to you in such fashion, you’d have
+boxed my ears.”
+
+“But you misunderstand,” Ruth protested. “Every form of art has its
+limitations.” (She was busy recalling a lecture she had heard at the
+university on the conventions of the arts.) “In painting there are only
+two dimensions to the canvas, yet you accept the illusion of three
+dimensions which the art of a painter enables him to throw into the
+canvas. In writing, again, the author must be omnipotent. You accept as
+perfectly legitimate the author’s account of the secret thoughts of the
+heroine, and yet all the time you know that the heroine was alone when
+thinking these thoughts, and that neither the author nor any one else
+was capable of hearing them. And so with the stage, with sculpture,
+with opera, with every art form. Certain irreconcilable things must be
+accepted.”
+
+“Yes, I understood that,” Martin answered. “All the arts have their
+conventions.” (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word. It was as if
+he had studied at the university himself, instead of being ill-equipped
+from browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.) “But even
+the conventions must be real. Trees, painted on flat cardboard and
+stuck up on each side of the stage, we accept as a forest. It is a real
+enough convention. But, on the other hand, we would not accept a sea
+scene as a forest. We can’t do it. It violates our senses. Nor would
+you, or, rather, should you, accept the ravings and writhings and
+agonized contortions of those two lunatics to-night as a convincing
+portrayal of love.”
+
+“But you don’t hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?” she
+protested.
+
+“No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an individual.
+I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the
+elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The
+world’s judges of music may all be right. But I am I, and I won’t
+subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don’t
+like a thing, I don’t like it, that’s all; and there is no reason under
+the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of
+my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can’t
+follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike.”
+
+“But music, you know, is a matter of training,” Ruth argued; “and opera
+is even more a matter of training. May it not be—”
+
+“That I am not trained in opera?” he dashed in.
+
+She nodded.
+
+“The very thing,” he agreed. “And I consider I am fortunate in not
+having been caught when I was young. If I had, I could have wept
+sentimental tears to-night, and the clownish antics of that precious
+pair would have but enhanced the beauty of their voices and the beauty
+of the accompanying orchestra. You are right. It’s mostly a matter of
+training. And I am too old, now. I must have the real or nothing. An
+illusion that won’t convince is a palpable lie, and that’s what grand
+opera is to me when little Barillo throws a fit, clutches mighty
+Tetralani in his arms (also in a fit), and tells her how passionately
+he adores her.”
+
+Again Ruth measured his thoughts by comparison of externals and in
+accordance with her belief in the established. Who was he that he
+should be right and all the cultured world wrong? His words and
+thoughts made no impression upon her. She was too firmly intrenched in
+the established to have any sympathy with revolutionary ideas. She had
+always been used to music, and she had enjoyed opera ever since she was
+a child, and all her world had enjoyed it, too. Then by what right did
+Martin Eden emerge, as he had so recently emerged, from his rag-time
+and working-class songs, and pass judgment on the world’s music? She
+was vexed with him, and as she walked beside him she had a vague
+feeling of outrage. At the best, in her most charitable frame of mind,
+she considered the statement of his views to be a caprice, an erratic
+and uncalled-for prank. But when he took her in his arms at the door
+and kissed her good night in tender lover-fashion, she forgot
+everything in the outrush of her own love to him. And later, on a
+sleepless pillow, she puzzled, as she had often puzzled of late, as to
+how it was that she loved so strange a man, and loved him despite the
+disapproval of her people.
+
+And next day Martin Eden cast hack-work aside, and at white heat
+hammered out an essay to which he gave the title, “The Philosophy of
+Illusion.” A stamp started it on its travels, but it was destined to
+receive many stamps and to be started on many travels in the months
+that followed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+
+Maria Silva was poor, and all the ways of poverty were clear to her.
+Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signifying a not-nice condition of
+existence. That was her total knowledge on the subject. She knew Martin
+was poor, and his condition she associated in her mind with the boyhood
+of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of other men who had become
+successes. Also, while aware that poverty was anything but delectable,
+she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary,
+that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men who were not
+degraded and hopeless drudges. So that her knowledge that Martin was so
+poor that he had pawned his watch and overcoat did not disturb her. She
+even considered it the hopeful side of the situation, believing that
+sooner or later it would arouse him and compel him to abandon his
+writing.
+
+Ruth never read hunger in Martin’s face, which had grown lean and had
+enlarged the slight hollows in the cheeks. In fact, she marked the
+change in his face with satisfaction. It seemed to refine him, to
+remove from him much of the dross of flesh and the too animal-like
+vigor that lured her while she detested it. Sometimes, when with her,
+she noted an unusual brightness in his eyes, and she admired it, for it
+made him appear more the poet and the scholar—the things he would have
+liked to be and which she would have liked him to be. But Maria Silva
+read a different tale in the hollow cheeks and the burning eyes, and
+she noted the changes in them from day to day, by them following the
+ebb and flow of his fortunes. She saw him leave the house with his
+overcoat and return without it, though the day was chill and raw, and
+promptly she saw his cheeks fill out slightly and the fire of hunger
+leave his eyes. In the same way she had seen his wheel and watch go,
+and after each event she had seen his vigor bloom again.
+
+Likewise she watched his toils, and knew the measure of the midnight
+oil he burned. Work! She knew that he outdid her, though his work was
+of a different order. And she was surprised to behold that the less
+food he had, the harder he worked. On occasion, in a casual sort of
+way, when she thought hunger pinched hardest, she would send him in a
+loaf of new baking, awkwardly covering the act with banter to the
+effect that it was better than he could bake. And again, she would send
+one of her toddlers in to him with a great pitcher of hot soup,
+debating inwardly the while whether she was justified in taking it from
+the mouths of her own flesh and blood. Nor was Martin ungrateful,
+knowing as he did the lives of the poor, and that if ever in the world
+there was charity, this was it.
+
+On a day when she had filled her brood with what was left in the house,
+Maria invested her last fifteen cents in a gallon of cheap wine.
+Martin, coming into her kitchen to fetch water, was invited to sit down
+and drink. He drank her very-good health, and in return she drank his.
+Then she drank to prosperity in his undertakings, and he drank to the
+hope that James Grant would show up and pay her for his washing. James
+Grant was a journeymen carpenter who did not always pay his bills and
+who owed Maria three dollars.
+
+Both Maria and Martin drank the sour new wine on empty stomachs, and it
+went swiftly to their heads. Utterly differentiated creatures that they
+were, they were lonely in their misery, and though the misery was
+tacitly ignored, it was the bond that drew them together. Maria was
+amazed to learn that he had been in the Azores, where she had lived
+until she was eleven. She was doubly amazed that he had been in the
+Hawaiian Islands, whither she had migrated from the Azores with her
+people. But her amazement passed all bounds when he told her he had
+been on Maui, the particular island whereon she had attained womanhood
+and married. Kahului, where she had first met her husband,—he, Martin,
+had been there twice! Yes, she remembered the sugar steamers, and he
+had been on them—well, well, it was a small world. And Wailuku! That
+place, too! Did he know the head-luna of the plantation? Yes, and had
+had a couple of drinks with him.
+
+And so they reminiscenced and drowned their hunger in the raw, sour
+wine. To Martin the future did not seem so dim. Success trembled just
+before him. He was on the verge of clasping it. Then he studied the
+deep-lined face of the toil-worn woman before him, remembered her soups
+and loaves of new baking, and felt spring up in him the warmest
+gratitude and philanthropy.
+
+“Maria,” he exclaimed suddenly. “What would you like to have?”
+
+She looked at him, bepuzzled.
+
+“What would you like to have now, right now, if you could get it?”
+
+“Shoe alla da roun’ for da childs—seven pairs da shoe.”
+
+“You shall have them,” he announced, while she nodded her head gravely.
+“But I mean a big wish, something big that you want.”
+
+Her eyes sparkled good-naturedly. He was choosing to make fun with her,
+Maria, with whom few made fun these days.
+
+“Think hard,” he cautioned, just as she was opening her mouth to speak.
+
+“Alla right,” she answered. “I thinka da hard. I lika da house, dis
+house—all mine, no paya da rent, seven dollar da month.”
+
+“You shall have it,” he granted, “and in a short time. Now wish the
+great wish. Make believe I am God, and I say to you anything you want
+you can have. Then you wish that thing, and I listen.”
+
+Maria considered solemnly for a space.
+
+“You no ’fraid?” she asked warningly.
+
+“No, no,” he laughed, “I’m not afraid. Go ahead.”
+
+“Most verra big,” she warned again.
+
+“All right. Fire away.”
+
+“Well, den—” She drew a big breath like a child, as she voiced to the
+uttermost all she cared to demand of life. “I lika da have one milka
+ranch—good milka ranch. Plenty cow, plenty land, plenty grass. I lika
+da have near San Le-an; my sister liva dere. I sella da milk in
+Oakland. I maka da plentee mon. Joe an’ Nick no runna da cow. Dey go-a
+to school. Bimeby maka da good engineer, worka da railroad. Yes, I lika
+da milka ranch.”
+
+She paused and regarded Martin with twinkling eyes.
+
+“You shall have it,” he answered promptly.
+
+She nodded her head and touched her lips courteously to the wine-glass
+and to the giver of the gift she knew would never be given. His heart
+was right, and in her own heart she appreciated his intention as much
+as if the gift had gone with it.
+
+“No, Maria,” he went on; “Nick and Joe won’t have to peddle milk, and
+all the kids can go to school and wear shoes the whole year round. It
+will be a first-class milk ranch—everything complete. There will be a
+house to live in and a stable for the horses, and cow-barns, of course.
+There will be chickens, pigs, vegetables, fruit trees, and everything
+like that; and there will be enough cows to pay for a hired man or two.
+Then you won’t have anything to do but take care of the children. For
+that matter, if you find a good man, you can marry and take it easy
+while he runs the ranch.”
+
+And from such largess, dispensed from his future, Martin turned and
+took his one good suit of clothes to the pawnshop. His plight was
+desperate for him to do this, for it cut him off from Ruth. He had no
+second-best suit that was presentable, and though he could go to the
+butcher and the baker, and even on occasion to his sister’s, it was
+beyond all daring to dream of entering the Morse home so disreputably
+apparelled.
+
+He toiled on, miserable and well-nigh hopeless. It began to appear to
+him that the second battle was lost and that he would have to go to
+work. In doing this he would satisfy everybody—the grocer, his sister,
+Ruth, and even Maria, to whom he owed a month’s room rent. He was two
+months behind with his type-writer, and the agency was clamoring for
+payment or for the return of the machine. In desperation, all but ready
+to surrender, to make a truce with fate until he could get a fresh
+start, he took the civil service examinations for the Railway Mail. To
+his surprise, he passed first. The job was assured, though when the
+call would come to enter upon his duties nobody knew.
+
+It was at this time, at the lowest ebb, that the smooth-running
+editorial machine broke down. A cog must have slipped or an oil-cup run
+dry, for the postman brought him one morning a short, thin envelope.
+Martin glanced at the upper left-hand corner and read the name and
+address of the _Transcontinental Monthly_. His heart gave a great leap,
+and he suddenly felt faint, the sinking feeling accompanied by a
+strange trembling of the knees. He staggered into his room and sat down
+on the bed, the envelope still unopened, and in that moment came
+understanding to him how people suddenly fall dead upon receipt of
+extraordinarily good news.
+
+Of course this was good news. There was no manuscript in that thin
+envelope, therefore it was an acceptance. He knew the story in the
+hands of the _Transcontinental_. It was “The Ring of Bells,” one of his
+horror stories, and it was an even five thousand words. And, since
+first-class magazines always paid on acceptance, there was a check
+inside. Two cents a word—twenty dollars a thousand; the check must be a
+hundred dollars. One hundred dollars! As he tore the envelope open,
+every item of all his debts surged in his brain—$3.85 to the grocer;
+butcher $4.00 flat; baker, $2.00; fruit store, $5.00; total, $14.85.
+Then there was room rent, $2.50; another month in advance, $2.50; two
+months’ type-writer, $8.00; a month in advance, $4.00; total, $31.85.
+And finally to be added, his pledges, plus interest, with the
+pawnbroker—watch, $5.50; overcoat, $5.50; wheel, $7.75; suit of
+clothes, $5.50 (60 % interest, but what did it matter?)—grand total,
+$56.10. He saw, as if visible in the air before him, in illuminated
+figures, the whole sum, and the subtraction that followed and that gave
+a remainder of $43.90. When he had squared every debt, redeemed every
+pledge, he would still have jingling in his pockets a princely $43.90.
+And on top of that he would have a month’s rent paid in advance on the
+type-writer and on the room.
+
+By this time he had drawn the single sheet of type-written letter out
+and spread it open. There was no check. He peered into the envelope,
+held it to the light, but could not trust his eyes, and in trembling
+haste tore the envelope apart. There was no check. He read the letter,
+skimming it line by line, dashing through the editor’s praise of his
+story to the meat of the letter, the statement why the check had not
+been sent. He found no such statement, but he did find that which made
+him suddenly wilt. The letter slid from his hand. His eyes went
+lack-lustre, and he lay back on the pillow, pulling the blanket about
+him and up to his chin.
+
+Five dollars for “The Ring of Bells”—five dollars for five thousand
+words! Instead of two cents a word, ten words for a cent! And the
+editor had praised it, too. And he would receive the check when the
+story was published. Then it was all poppycock, two cents a word for
+minimum rate and payment upon acceptance. It was a lie, and it had led
+him astray. He would never have attempted to write had he known that.
+He would have gone to work—to work for Ruth. He went back to the day he
+first attempted to write, and was appalled at the enormous waste of
+time—and all for ten words for a cent. And the other high rewards of
+writers, that he had read about, must be lies, too. His second-hand
+ideas of authorship were wrong, for here was the proof of it.
+
+The _Transcontinental_ sold for twenty-five cents, and its dignified
+and artistic cover proclaimed it as among the first-class magazines. It
+was a staid, respectable magazine, and it had been published
+continuously since long before he was born. Why, on the outside cover
+were printed every month the words of one of the world’s great writers,
+words proclaiming the inspired mission of the _Transcontinental_ by a
+star of literature whose first coruscations had appeared inside those
+self-same covers. And the high and lofty, heaven-inspired
+_Transcontinental_ paid five dollars for five thousand words! The great
+writer had recently died in a foreign land—in dire poverty, Martin
+remembered, which was not to be wondered at, considering the
+magnificent pay authors receive.
+
+Well, he had taken the bait, the newspaper lies about writers and their
+pay, and he had wasted two years over it. But he would disgorge the
+bait now. Not another line would he ever write. He would do what Ruth
+wanted him to do, what everybody wanted him to do—get a job. The
+thought of going to work reminded him of Joe—Joe, tramping through the
+land of nothing-to-do. Martin heaved a great sigh of envy. The reaction
+of nineteen hours a day for many days was strong upon him. But then,
+Joe was not in love, had none of the responsibilities of love, and he
+could afford to loaf through the land of nothing-to-do. He, Martin, had
+something to work for, and go to work he would. He would start out
+early next morning to hunt a job. And he would let Ruth know, too, that
+he had mended his ways and was willing to go into her father’s office.
+
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent, the market
+price for art. The disappointment of it, the lie of it, the infamy of
+it, were uppermost in his thoughts; and under his closed eyelids, in
+fiery figures, burned the “$3.85” he owed the grocer. He shivered, and
+was aware of an aching in his bones. The small of his back ached
+especially. His head ached, the top of it ached, the back of it ached,
+the brains inside of it ached and seemed to be swelling, while the ache
+over his brows was intolerable. And beneath the brows, planted under
+his lids, was the merciless “$3.85.” He opened his eyes to escape it,
+but the white light of the room seemed to sear the balls and forced him
+to close his eyes, when the “$3.85” confronted him again.
+
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent—that
+particular thought took up its residence in his brain, and he could no
+more escape it than he could the “$3.85” under his eyelids. A change
+seemed to come over the latter, and he watched curiously, till “$2.00”
+burned in its stead. Ah, he thought, that was the baker. The next sum
+that appeared was “$2.50.” It puzzled him, and he pondered it as if
+life and death hung on the solution. He owed somebody two dollars and a
+half, that was certain, but who was it? To find it was the task set him
+by an imperious and malignant universe, and he wandered through the
+endless corridors of his mind, opening all manner of lumber rooms and
+chambers stored with odds and ends of memories and knowledge as he
+vainly sought the answer. After several centuries it came to him,
+easily, without effort, that it was Maria. With a great relief he
+turned his soul to the screen of torment under his lids. He had solved
+the problem; now he could rest. But no, the “$2.50” faded away, and in
+its place burned “$8.00.” Who was that? He must go the dreary round of
+his mind again and find out.
+
+How long he was gone on this quest he did not know, but after what
+seemed an enormous lapse of time, he was called back to himself by a
+knock at the door, and by Maria’s asking if he was sick. He replied in
+a muffled voice he did not recognize, saying that he was merely taking
+a nap. He was surprised when he noted the darkness of night in the
+room. He had received the letter at two in the afternoon, and he
+realized that he was sick.
+
+Then the “$8.00” began to smoulder under his lids again, and he
+returned himself to servitude. But he grew cunning. There was no need
+for him to wander through his mind. He had been a fool. He pulled a
+lever and made his mind revolve about him, a monstrous wheel of
+fortune, a merry-go-round of memory, a revolving sphere of wisdom.
+Faster and faster it revolved, until its vortex sucked him in and he
+was flung whirling through black chaos.
+
+Quite naturally he found himself at a mangle, feeding starched cuffs.
+But as he fed he noticed figures printed in the cuffs. It was a new way
+of marking linen, he thought, until, looking closer, he saw “$3.85” on
+one of the cuffs. Then it came to him that it was the grocer’s bill,
+and that these were his bills flying around on the drum of the mangle.
+A crafty idea came to him. He would throw the bills on the floor and so
+escape paying them. No sooner thought than done, and he crumpled the
+cuffs spitefully as he flung them upon an unusually dirty floor. Ever
+the heap grew, and though each bill was duplicated a thousand times, he
+found only one for two dollars and a half, which was what he owed
+Maria. That meant that Maria would not press for payment, and he
+resolved generously that it would be the only one he would pay; so he
+began searching through the cast-out heap for hers. He sought it
+desperately, for ages, and was still searching when the manager of the
+hotel entered, the fat Dutchman. His face blazed with wrath, and he
+shouted in stentorian tones that echoed down the universe, “I shall
+deduct the cost of those cuffs from your wages!” The pile of cuffs grew
+into a mountain, and Martin knew that he was doomed to toil for a
+thousand years to pay for them. Well, there was nothing left to do but
+kill the manager and burn down the laundry. But the big Dutchman
+frustrated him, seizing him by the nape of the neck and dancing him up
+and down. He danced him over the ironing tables, the stove, and the
+mangles, and out into the wash-room and over the wringer and washer.
+Martin was danced until his teeth rattled and his head ached, and he
+marvelled that the Dutchman was so strong.
+
+And then he found himself before the mangle, this time receiving the
+cuffs an editor of a magazine was feeding from the other side. Each
+cuff was a check, and Martin went over them anxiously, in a fever of
+expectation, but they were all blanks. He stood there and received the
+blanks for a million years or so, never letting one go by for fear it
+might be filled out. At last he found it. With trembling fingers he
+held it to the light. It was for five dollars. “Ha! Ha!” laughed the
+editor across the mangle. “Well, then, I shall kill you,” Martin said.
+He went out into the wash-room to get the axe, and found Joe starching
+manuscripts. He tried to make him desist, then swung the axe for him.
+But the weapon remained poised in mid-air, for Martin found himself
+back in the ironing room in the midst of a snow-storm. No, it was not
+snow that was falling, but checks of large denomination, the smallest
+not less than a thousand dollars. He began to collect them and sort
+them out, in packages of a hundred, tying each package securely with
+twine.
+
+He looked up from his task and saw Joe standing before him juggling
+flat-irons, starched shirts, and manuscripts. Now and again he reached
+out and added a bundle of checks to the flying miscellany that soared
+through the roof and out of sight in a tremendous circle. Martin struck
+at him, but he seized the axe and added it to the flying circle. Then
+he plucked Martin and added him. Martin went up through the roof,
+clutching at manuscripts, so that by the time he came down he had a
+large armful. But no sooner down than up again, and a second and a
+third time and countless times he flew around the circle. From far off
+he could hear a childish treble singing: “Waltz me around again,
+Willie, around, around, around.”
+
+He recovered the axe in the midst of the Milky Way of checks, starched
+shirts, and manuscripts, and prepared, when he came down, to kill Joe.
+But he did not come down. Instead, at two in the morning, Maria, having
+heard his groans through the thin partition, came into his room, to put
+hot flat-irons against his body and damp cloths upon his aching eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+
+Martin Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the morning. It was
+late afternoon before he came out of his delirium and gazed with aching
+eyes about the room. Mary, one of the tribe of Silva, eight years old,
+keeping watch, raised a screech at sight of his returning
+consciousness. Maria hurried into the room from the kitchen. She put
+her work-calloused hand upon his hot forehead and felt his pulse.
+
+“You lika da eat?” she asked.
+
+He shook his head. Eating was farthest from his desire, and he wondered
+that he should ever have been hungry in his life.
+
+“I’m sick, Maria,” he said weakly. “What is it? Do you know?”
+
+“Grip,” she answered. “Two or three days you alla da right. Better you
+no eat now. Bimeby plenty can eat, to-morrow can eat maybe.”
+
+Martin was not used to sickness, and when Maria and her little girl
+left him, he essayed to get up and dress. By a supreme exertion of
+will, with rearing brain and eyes that ached so that he could not keep
+them open, he managed to get out of bed, only to be left stranded by
+his senses upon the table. Half an hour later he managed to regain the
+bed, where he was content to lie with closed eyes and analyze his
+various pains and weaknesses. Maria came in several times to change the
+cold cloths on his forehead. Otherwise she left him in peace, too wise
+to vex him with chatter. This moved him to gratitude, and he murmured
+to himself, “Maria, you getta da milka ranch, all righta, all right.”
+
+Then he remembered his long-buried past of yesterday.
+
+It seemed a life-time since he had received that letter from the
+_Transcontinental_, a life-time since it was all over and done with and
+a new page turned. He had shot his bolt, and shot it hard, and now he
+was down on his back. If he hadn’t starved himself, he wouldn’t have
+been caught by La Grippe. He had been run down, and he had not had the
+strength to throw off the germ of disease which had invaded his system.
+This was what resulted.
+
+“What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own
+life?” he demanded aloud. “This is no place for me. No more literature
+in mine. Me for the counting-house and ledger, the monthly salary, and
+the little home with Ruth.”
+
+Two days later, having eaten an egg and two slices of toast and drunk a
+cup of tea, he asked for his mail, but found his eyes still hurt too
+much to permit him to read.
+
+“You read for me, Maria,” he said. “Never mind the big, long letters.
+Throw them under the table. Read me the small letters.”
+
+“No can,” was the answer. “Teresa, she go to school, she can.”
+
+So Teresa Silva, aged nine, opened his letters and read them to him. He
+listened absently to a long dun from the type-writer people, his mind
+busy with ways and means of finding a job. Suddenly he was shocked back
+to himself.
+
+“‘We offer you forty dollars for all serial rights in your story,’”
+Teresa slowly spelled out, “‘provided you allow us to make the
+alterations suggested.’”
+
+“What magazine is that?” Martin shouted. “Here, give it to me!”
+
+He could see to read, now, and he was unaware of the pain of the
+action. It was the _White Mouse_ that was offering him forty dollars,
+and the story was “The Whirlpool,” another of his early horror stories.
+He read the letter through again and again. The editor told him plainly
+that he had not handled the idea properly, but that it was the idea
+they were buying because it was original. If they could cut the story
+down one-third, they would take it and send him forty dollars on
+receipt of his answer.
+
+He called for pen and ink, and told the editor he could cut the story
+down three-thirds if he wanted to, and to send the forty dollars right
+along.
+
+The letter despatched to the letter-box by Teresa, Martin lay back and
+thought. It wasn’t a lie, after all. The _White Mouse_ paid on
+acceptance. There were three thousand words in “The Whirlpool.” Cut
+down a third, there would be two thousand. At forty dollars that would
+be two cents a word. Pay on acceptance and two cents a word—the
+newspapers had told the truth. And he had thought the _White Mouse_ a
+third-rater! It was evident that he did not know the magazines. He had
+deemed the _Transcontinental_ a first-rater, and it paid a cent for ten
+words. He had classed the _White Mouse_ as of no account, and it paid
+twenty times as much as the_ Transcontinental_ and also had paid on
+acceptance.
+
+Well, there was one thing certain: when he got well, he would not go
+out looking for a job. There were more stories in his head as good as
+“The Whirlpool,” and at forty dollars apiece he could earn far more
+than in any job or position. Just when he thought the battle lost, it
+was won. He had proved for his career. The way was clear. Beginning
+with the _White Mouse_ he would add magazine after magazine to his
+growing list of patrons. Hack-work could be put aside. For that matter,
+it had been wasted time, for it had not brought him a dollar. He would
+devote himself to work, good work, and he would pour out the best that
+was in him. He wished Ruth was there to share in his joy, and when he
+went over the letters left lying on his bed, he found one from her. It
+was sweetly reproachful, wondering what had kept him away for so
+dreadful a length of time. He reread the letter adoringly, dwelling
+over her handwriting, loving each stroke of her pen, and in the end
+kissing her signature.
+
+And when he answered, he told her recklessly that he had not been to
+see her because his best clothes were in pawn. He told her that he had
+been sick, but was once more nearly well, and that inside ten days or
+two weeks (as soon as a letter could travel to New York City and
+return) he would redeem his clothes and be with her.
+
+But Ruth did not care to wait ten days or two weeks. Besides, her lover
+was sick. The next afternoon, accompanied by Arthur, she arrived in the
+Morse carriage, to the unqualified delight of the Silva tribe and of
+all the urchins on the street, and to the consternation of Maria. She
+boxed the ears of the Silvas who crowded about the visitors on the tiny
+front porch, and in more than usual atrocious English tried to
+apologize for her appearance. Sleeves rolled up from soap-flecked arms
+and a wet gunny-sack around her waist told of the task at which she had
+been caught. So flustered was she by two such grand young people asking
+for her lodger, that she forgot to invite them to sit down in the
+little parlor. To enter Martin’s room, they passed through the kitchen,
+warm and moist and steamy from the big washing in progress. Maria, in
+her excitement, jammed the bedroom and bedroom-closet doors together,
+and for five minutes, through the partly open door, clouds of steam,
+smelling of soap-suds and dirt, poured into the sick chamber.
+
+Ruth succeeded in veering right and left and right again, and in
+running the narrow passage between table and bed to Martin’s side; but
+Arthur veered too wide and fetched up with clatter and bang of pots and
+pans in the corner where Martin did his cooking. Arthur did not linger
+long. Ruth occupied the only chair, and having done his duty, he went
+outside and stood by the gate, the centre of seven marvelling Silvas,
+who watched him as they would have watched a curiosity in a side-show.
+All about the carriage were gathered the children from a dozen blocks,
+waiting and eager for some tragic and terrible dénouement. Carriages
+were seen on their street only for weddings and funerals. Here was
+neither marriage nor death: therefore, it was something transcending
+experience and well worth waiting for.
+
+Martin had been wild to see Ruth. His was essentially a love-nature,
+and he possessed more than the average man’s need for sympathy. He was
+starving for sympathy, which, with him, meant intelligent
+understanding; and he had yet to learn that Ruth’s sympathy was largely
+sentimental and tactful, and that it proceeded from gentleness of
+nature rather than from understanding of the objects of her sympathy.
+So it was while Martin held her hand and gladly talked, that her love
+for him prompted her to press his hand in return, and that her eyes
+were moist and luminous at sight of his helplessness and of the marks
+suffering had stamped upon his face.
+
+But while he told her of his two acceptances, of his despair when he
+received the one from the _Transcontinental_, and of the corresponding
+delight with which he received the one from the _White Mouse_, she did
+not follow him. She heard the words he uttered and understood their
+literal import, but she was not with him in his despair and his
+delight. She could not get out of herself. She was not interested in
+selling stories to magazines. What was important to her was matrimony.
+She was not aware of it, however, any more than she was aware that her
+desire that Martin take a position was the instinctive and preparative
+impulse of motherhood. She would have blushed had she been told as much
+in plain, set terms, and next, she might have grown indignant and
+asserted that her sole interest lay in the man she loved and her desire
+for him to make the best of himself. So, while Martin poured out his
+heart to her, elated with the first success his chosen work in the
+world had received, she paid heed to his bare words only, gazing now
+and again about the room, shocked by what she saw.
+
+For the first time Ruth gazed upon the sordid face of poverty. Starving
+lovers had always seemed romantic to her,—but she had had no idea how
+starving lovers lived. She had never dreamed it could be like this.
+Ever her gaze shifted from the room to him and back again. The steamy
+smell of dirty clothes, which had entered with her from the kitchen,
+was sickening. Martin must be soaked with it, Ruth concluded, if that
+awful woman washed frequently. Such was the contagiousness of
+degradation. When she looked at Martin, she seemed to see the smirch
+left upon him by his surroundings. She had never seen him unshaven, and
+the three days’ growth of beard on his face was repulsive to her. Not
+alone did it give him the same dark and murky aspect of the Silva
+house, inside and out, but it seemed to emphasize that animal-like
+strength of his which she detested. And here he was, being confirmed in
+his madness by the two acceptances he took such pride in telling her
+about. A little longer and he would have surrendered and gone to work.
+Now he would continue on in this horrible house, writing and starving
+for a few more months.
+
+“What is that smell?” she asked suddenly.
+
+“Some of Maria’s washing smells, I imagine,” was the answer. “I am
+growing quite accustomed to them.”
+
+“No, no; not that. It is something else. A stale, sickish smell.”
+
+Martin sampled the air before replying.
+
+“I can’t smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke,” he
+announced.
+
+“That’s it. It is terrible. Why do you smoke so much, Martin?”
+
+“I don’t know, except that I smoke more than usual when I am lonely.
+And then, too, it’s such a long-standing habit. I learned when I was
+only a youngster.”
+
+“It is not a nice habit, you know,” she reproved. “It smells to
+heaven.”
+
+“That’s the fault of the tobacco. I can afford only the cheapest. But
+wait until I get that forty-dollar check. I’ll use a brand that is not
+offensive even to the angels. But that wasn’t so bad, was it, two
+acceptances in three days? That forty-five dollars will pay about all
+my debts.”
+
+“For two years’ work?” she queried.
+
+“No, for less than a week’s work. Please pass me that book over on the
+far corner of the table, the account book with the gray cover.” He
+opened it and began turning over the pages rapidly. “Yes, I was right.
+Four days for ‘The Ring of Bells,’ two days for ‘The Whirlpool.’ That’s
+forty-five dollars for a week’s work, one hundred and eighty dollars a
+month. That beats any salary I can command. And, besides, I’m just
+beginning. A thousand dollars a month is not too much to buy for you
+all I want you to have. A salary of five hundred a month would be too
+small. That forty-five dollars is just a starter. Wait till I get my
+stride. Then watch my smoke.”
+
+Ruth misunderstood his slang, and reverted to cigarettes.
+
+“You smoke more than enough as it is, and the brand of tobacco will
+make no difference. It is the smoking itself that is not nice, no
+matter what the brand may be. You are a chimney, a living volcano, a
+perambulating smoke-stack, and you are a perfect disgrace, Martin dear,
+you know you are.”
+
+She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he looked at her
+delicate face and into her pure, limpid eyes, as of old he was struck
+with his own unworthiness.
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t smoke any more,” she whispered. “Please, for—my
+sake.”
+
+“All right, I won’t,” he cried. “I’ll do anything you ask, dear love,
+anything; you know that.”
+
+A great temptation assailed her. In an insistent way she had caught
+glimpses of the large, easy-going side of his nature, and she felt
+sure, if she asked him to cease attempting to write, that he would
+grant her wish. In the swift instant that elapsed, the words trembled
+on her lips. But she did not utter them. She was not quite brave
+enough; she did not quite dare. Instead, she leaned toward him to meet
+him, and in his arms murmured:-
+
+“You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own. I am
+sure smoking hurts you; and besides, it is not good to be a slave to
+anything, to a drug least of all.”
+
+“I shall always be your slave,” he smiled.
+
+“In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands.”
+
+She looked at him mischievously, though deep down she was already
+regretting that she had not preferred her largest request.
+
+“I live but to obey, your majesty.”
+
+“Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not omit to shave
+every day. Look how you have scratched my cheek.”
+
+And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter. But she had made one
+point, and she could not expect to make more than one at a time. She
+felt a woman’s pride in that she had made him stop smoking. Another
+time she would persuade him to take a position, for had he not said he
+would do anything she asked?
+
+She left his side to explore the room, examining the clothes-lines of
+notes overhead, learning the mystery of the tackle used for suspending
+his wheel under the ceiling, and being saddened by the heap of
+manuscripts under the table which represented to her just so much
+wasted time. The oil-stove won her admiration, but on investigating the
+food shelves she found them empty.
+
+“Why, you haven’t anything to eat, you poor dear,” she said with tender
+compassion. “You must be starving.”
+
+“I store my food in Maria’s safe and in her pantry,” he lied. “It keeps
+better there. No danger of my starving. Look at that.”
+
+She had come back to his side, and she saw him double his arm at the
+elbow, the biceps crawling under his shirt-sleeve and swelling into a
+knot of muscle, heavy and hard. The sight repelled her. Sentimentally,
+she disliked it. But her pulse, her blood, every fibre of her, loved it
+and yearned for it, and, in the old, inexplicable way, she leaned
+toward him, not away from him. And in the moment that followed, when he
+crushed her in his arms, the brain of her, concerned with the
+superficial aspects of life, was in revolt; while the heart of her, the
+woman of her, concerned with life itself, exulted triumphantly. It was
+in moments like this that she felt to the uttermost the greatness of
+her love for Martin, for it was almost a swoon of delight to her to
+feel his strong arms about her, holding her tightly, hurting her with
+the grip of their fervor. At such moments she found justification for
+her treason to her standards, for her violation of her own high ideals,
+and, most of all, for her tacit disobedience to her mother and father.
+They did not want her to marry this man. It shocked them that she
+should love him. It shocked her, too, sometimes, when she was apart
+from him, a cool and reasoning creature. With him, she loved him—in
+truth, at times a vexed and worried love; but love it was, a love that
+was stronger than she.
+
+“This La Grippe is nothing,” he was saying. “It hurts a bit, and gives
+one a nasty headache, but it doesn’t compare with break-bone fever.”
+
+“Have you had that, too?” she queried absently, intent on the
+heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms.
+
+And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his words
+startled her.
+
+He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of the
+Hawaiian Islands.
+
+“But why did you go there?” she demanded.
+
+Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal.
+
+“Because I didn’t know,” he answered. “I never dreamed of lepers. When
+I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed inland for
+some place of hiding. For three days I lived off guavas, _ohia_-apples,
+and bananas, all of which grew wild in the jungle. On the fourth day I
+found the trail—a mere foot-trail. It led inland, and it led up. It was
+the way I wanted to go, and it showed signs of recent travel. At one
+place it ran along the crest of a ridge that was no more than a
+knife-edge. The trail wasn’t three feet wide on the crest, and on
+either side the ridge fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep.
+One man, with plenty of ammunition, could have held it against a
+hundred thousand.
+
+“It was the only way in to the hiding-place. Three hours after I found
+the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket in the
+midst of lava peaks. The whole place was terraced for taro-patches,
+fruit trees grew there, and there were eight or ten grass huts. But as
+soon as I saw the inhabitants I knew what I’d struck. One sight of them
+was enough.”
+
+“What did you do?” Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening, like any
+Desdemona, appalled and fascinated.
+
+“Nothing for me to do. Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty far
+gone, but he ruled like a king. He had discovered the little valley and
+founded the settlement—all of which was against the law. But he had
+guns, plenty of ammunition, and those Kanakas, trained to the shooting
+of wild cattle and wild pig, were dead shots. No, there wasn’t any
+running away for Martin Eden. He stayed—for three months.”
+
+“But how did you escape?”
+
+“I’d have been there yet, if it hadn’t been for a girl there, a
+half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian. She was a beauty,
+poor thing, and well educated. Her mother, in Honolulu, was worth a
+million or so. Well, this girl got me away at last. Her mother financed
+the settlement, you see, so the girl wasn’t afraid of being punished
+for letting me go. But she made me swear, first, never to reveal the
+hiding-place; and I never have. This is the first time I have even
+mentioned it. The girl had just the first signs of leprosy. The fingers
+of her right hand were slightly twisted, and there was a small spot on
+her arm. That was all. I guess she is dead, now.”
+
+“But weren’t you frightened? And weren’t you glad to get away without
+catching that dreadful disease?”
+
+“Well,” he confessed, “I was a bit shivery at first; but I got used to
+it. I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though. That made me
+forget to be afraid. She was such a beauty, in spirit as well as in
+appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was doomed to
+lie there, living the life of a primitive savage and rotting slowly
+away. Leprosy is far more terrible than you can imagine it.”
+
+“Poor thing,” Ruth murmured softly. “It’s a wonder she let you get
+away.”
+
+“How do you mean?” Martin asked unwittingly.
+
+“Because she must have loved you,” Ruth said, still softly. “Candidly,
+now, didn’t she?”
+
+Martin’s sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and by
+the indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness had
+made his face even pale; and across this pallor flowed the slow wave of
+a blush. He was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut him off.
+
+“Never mind, don’t answer; it’s not necessary,” she laughed.
+
+But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter, and
+that the light in her eyes was cold. On the spur of the moment it
+reminded him of a gale he had once experienced in the North Pacific.
+And for the moment the apparition of the gale rose before his eyes—a
+gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon, the huge seas
+glinting coldly in the moonlight. Next, he saw the girl in the leper
+refuge and remembered it was for love of him that she had let him go.
+
+“She was noble,” he said simply. “She gave me life.”
+
+That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob in her
+throat, and noticed that she turned her face away to gaze out of the
+window. When she turned it back to him, it was composed, and there was
+no hint of the gale in her eyes.
+
+“I’m such a silly,” she said plaintively. “But I can’t help it. I do so
+love you, Martin, I do, I do. I shall grow more catholic in time, but
+at present I can’t help being jealous of those ghosts of the past, and
+you know your past is full of ghosts.”
+
+“It must be,” she silenced his protest. “It could not be otherwise. And
+there’s poor Arthur motioning me to come. He’s tired waiting. And now
+good-by, dear.”
+
+“There’s some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that helps
+men to stop the use of tobacco,” she called back from the door, “and I
+am going to send you some.”
+
+The door closed, but opened again.
+
+“I do, I do,” she whispered to him; and this time she was really gone.
+
+Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note the
+texture of Ruth’s garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown that
+produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the carriage.
+The crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared
+from view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who had abruptly
+become the most important person on the street. But it was one of her
+progeny who blasted Maria’s reputation by announcing that the grand
+visitors had been for her lodger. After that Maria dropped back into
+her old obscurity and Martin began to notice the respectful manner in
+which he was regarded by the small fry of the neighborhood. As for
+Maria, Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per cent, and had
+the Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would
+have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-and-eighty-five-cents’
+worth of credit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+
+The sun of Martin’s good fortune rose. The day after Ruth’s visit, he
+received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in
+payment for three of his triolets. Two days later a newspaper published
+in Chicago accepted his “Treasure Hunters,” promising to pay ten
+dollars for it on publication. The price was small, but it was the
+first article he had written, his very first attempt to express his
+thought on the printed page. To cap everything, the adventure serial
+for boys, his second attempt, was accepted before the end of the week
+by a juvenile monthly calling itself _Youth and Age_. It was true the
+serial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered to pay him
+sixteen dollars on publication, which was something like seventy-five
+cents a thousand words; but it was equally true that it was the second
+thing he had attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly
+aware of its clumsy worthlessness.
+
+But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of
+mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great
+strength—the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes
+butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a
+war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for
+songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not taken him long
+to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith to was his later
+work. He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of
+magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the tools of
+artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His
+conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of
+strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was
+realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and
+beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism,
+shot through with human aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life
+as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.
+
+He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of
+fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the
+other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and
+divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred, in
+Martin’s estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight
+and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though
+it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the
+brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, “Adventure,”
+which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his
+ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, “God and Clod,”
+that he had expressed his views on the whole general subject.
+
+But “Adventure,” and all that he deemed his best work, still went
+begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in his
+eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of
+which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work. To
+him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with
+all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their power. This investiture
+of the grotesque and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a
+trick—a skilful trick at best. Great literature could not reside in
+such a field. Their artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness
+of artistry when divorced from humanness. The trick had been to fling
+over the face of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done
+in the half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written
+before he emerged upon the high peaks of “Adventure,” “Joy,” “The Pot,”
+and “The Wine of Life.”
+
+The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a
+precarious existence against the arrival of the _White Mouse_ check. He
+cashed the first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a
+dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars between the
+baker and the fruit store. Martin was not yet rich enough to afford
+meat, and he was on slim allowance when the _White Mouse_ check
+arrived. He was divided on the cashing of it. He had never been in a
+bank in his life, much less been in one on business, and he had a naive
+and childlike desire to walk into one of the big banks down in Oakland
+and fling down his indorsed check for forty dollars. On the other hand,
+practical common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer and
+thereby make an impression that would later result in an increase of
+credit. Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying
+his bill with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of
+jingling coin. Also, he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his
+suit and his bicycle, paid one month’s rent on the type-writer, and
+paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month in advance. This
+left him in his pocket, for emergencies, a balance of nearly three
+dollars.
+
+In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. Immediately on recovering
+his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he could not
+refrain from jingling the little handful of silver in his pocket. He
+had been so long without money that, like a rescued starving man who
+cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight, Martin could not keep
+his hand off the silver. He was not mean, nor avaricious, but the money
+meant more than so many dollars and cents. It stood for success, and
+the eagles stamped upon the coins were to him so many winged victories.
+
+It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world. It certainly
+appeared more beautiful to him. For weeks it had been a very dull and
+sombre world; but now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars
+jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success,
+the sun shone bright and warm, and even a rain-squall that soaked
+unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry happening to him. When he
+starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were
+starving the world over; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of
+the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain. He forgot
+about them, and, being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the
+world. Without deliberately thinking about it, _motifs_ for love-lyrics
+began to agitate his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, he got
+off the electric car, without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.
+
+He found a number of persons in the Morse home. Ruth’s two girl-cousins
+were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of
+entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young
+people. The campaign had begun during Martin’s enforced absence, and
+was already in full swing. She was making a point of having at the
+house men who were doing things. Thus, in addition to the cousins
+Dorothy and Florence, Martin encountered two university professors, one
+of Latin, the other of English; a young army officer just back from the
+Philippines, one-time school-mate of Ruth’s; a young fellow named
+Melville, private secretary to Joseph Perkins, head of the San
+Francisco Trust Company; and finally of the men, a live bank cashier,
+Charles Hapgood, a youngish man of thirty-five, graduate of Stanford
+University, member of the Nile Club and the Unity Club, and a
+conservative speaker for the Republican Party during campaigns—in
+short, a rising young man in every way. Among the women was one who
+painted portraits, another who was a professional musician, and still
+another who possessed the degree of Doctor of Sociology and who was
+locally famous for her social settlement work in the slums of San
+Francisco. But the women did not count for much in Mrs. Morse’s plan.
+At the best, they were necessary accessories. The men who did things
+must be drawn to the house somehow.
+
+“Don’t get excited when you talk,” Ruth admonished Martin, before the
+ordeal of introduction began.
+
+He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his own
+awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to their old
+trick of threatening destruction to furniture and ornaments. Also, he
+was rendered self-conscious by the company. He had never before been in
+contact with such exalted beings nor with so many of them. Melville,
+the bank cashier, fascinated him, and he resolved to investigate him at
+the first opportunity. For underneath Martin’s awe lurked his assertive
+ego, and he felt the urge to measure himself with these men and women
+and to find out what they had learned from the books and life which he
+had not learned.
+
+Ruth’s eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on, and
+she was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got
+acquainted with her cousins. He certainly did not grow excited, while
+being seated removed from him the worry of his shoulders. Ruth knew
+them for clever girls, superficially brilliant, and she could scarcely
+understand their praise of Martin later that night at going to bed. But
+he, on the other hand, a wit in his own class, a gay quizzer and
+laughter-maker at dances and Sunday picnics, had found the making of
+fun and the breaking of good-natured lances simple enough in this
+environment. And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him
+on the shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he
+could afford to laugh and make laughter and remain unabashed.
+
+Later, Ruth’s anxiety found justification. Martin and Professor
+Caldwell had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though Martin no
+longer wove the air with his hands, to Ruth’s critical eye he permitted
+his own eyes to flash and glitter too frequently, talked too rapidly
+and warmly, grew too intense, and allowed his aroused blood to redden
+his cheeks too much. He lacked decorum and control, and was in decided
+contrast to the young professor of English with whom he talked.
+
+But Martin was not concerned with appearances! He had been swift to
+note the other’s trained mind and to appreciate his command of
+knowledge. Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize Martin’s
+concept of the average English professor. Martin wanted him to talk
+shop, and, though he seemed averse at first, succeeded in making him do
+it. For Martin did not see why a man should not talk shop.
+
+“It’s absurd and unfair,” he had told Ruth weeks before, “this
+objection to talking shop. For what reason under the sun do men and
+women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is in
+them? And the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the
+thing by which they make their living, the thing they’ve specialized on
+and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed about. Imagine Mr.
+Butler living up to social etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul
+Verlaine or the German drama or the novels of D’Annunzio. We’d be bored
+to death. I, for one, if I must listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear
+him talk about his law. It’s the best that is in him, and life is so
+short that I want the best of every man and woman I meet.”
+
+“But,” Ruth had objected, “there are the topics of general interest to
+all.”
+
+“There, you mistake,” he had rushed on. “All persons in society, all
+cliques in society—or, rather, nearly all persons and cliques—ape their
+betters. Now, who are the best betters? The idlers, the wealthy idlers.
+They do not know, as a rule, the things known by the persons who are
+doing something in the world. To listen to conversation about such
+things would mean to be bored, wherefore the idlers decree that such
+things are shop and must not be talked about. Likewise they decree the
+things that are not shop and which may be talked about, and those
+things are the latest operas, latest novels, cards, billiards,
+cocktails, automobiles, horse shows, trout fishing, tuna-fishing,
+big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and so forth—and mark you, these are
+the things the idlers know. In all truth, they constitute the shop-talk
+of the idlers. And the funniest part of it is that many of the clever
+people, and all the would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to
+impose upon them. As for me, I want the best a man’s got in him, call
+it shop vulgarity or anything you please.”
+
+And Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on the established had
+seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.
+
+So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness,
+challenging him to speak his mind. As Ruth paused beside them she heard
+Martin saying:-
+
+“You surely don’t pronounce such heresies in the University of
+California?”
+
+Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. “The honest taxpayer and the
+politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our appropriations and
+therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to
+the party press, or to the press of both parties.”
+
+“Yes, that’s clear; but how about you?” Martin urged. “You must be a
+fish out of the water.”
+
+“Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Sometimes I am fairly
+sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris, in Grub
+Street, in a hermit’s cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian crowd,
+drinking claret,—dago-red they call it in San Francisco,—dining in
+cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing vociferously
+radical views upon all creation. Really, I am frequently almost sure
+that I was cut out to be a radical. But then, there are so many
+questions on which I am not sure. I grow timid when I am face to face
+with my human frailty, which ever prevents me from grasping all the
+factors in any problem—human, vital problems, you know.”
+
+And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had come
+the “Song of the Trade Wind”:-
+
+“I am strongest at noon,
+But under the moon
+    I stiffen the bunt of the sail.”
+
+
+He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other
+reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and
+cool, and strong. He was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal
+there was a certain bafflement about him. Martin had the feeling that
+he never spoke his full mind, just as he had often had the feeling that
+the trades never blew their strongest but always held reserves of
+strength that were never used. Martin’s trick of visioning was active
+as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact
+and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his
+inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind
+immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which
+ordinarily expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly
+automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the
+living present. Just as Ruth’s face, in a momentary jealousy had called
+before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor Caldwell
+made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white billows across
+the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather
+identifying and classifying, new memory-visions rose before him, or
+spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the screen of his
+consciousness. These visions came out of the actions and sensations of
+the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday and last
+week—a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever
+thronged his mind.
+
+So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell’s easy flow of
+speech—the conversation of a clever, cultured man—that Martin kept
+seeing himself down all his past. He saw himself when he had been quite
+the hoodlum, wearing a “stiff-rim” Stetson hat and a square-cut,
+double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and
+possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police permitted. He did
+not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to palliate it. At one time in
+his life he had been just a common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that
+worried the police and terrorized honest, working-class householders.
+But his ideals had changed. He glanced about him at the well-bred,
+well-dressed men and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere
+of culture and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his
+early youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness,
+stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he saw
+merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual university
+professor.
+
+For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place. He had
+fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and
+everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by his
+willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command respect.
+But he had never taken root. He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy
+his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He had been perturbed always by
+a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from
+beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found
+books and art and love. And here he was, in the midst of all this, the
+only one of all the comrades he had adventured with who could have made
+themselves eligible for the inside of the Morse home.
+
+But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following
+Professor Caldwell closely. And as he followed, comprehendingly and
+critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other’s knowledge. As
+for himself, from moment to moment the conversation showed him gaps and
+open stretches, whole subjects with which he was unfamiliar.
+Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that he possessed the
+outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a matter only of time, when
+he would fill in the outline. Then watch out, he thought—’ware shoal,
+everybody! He felt like sitting at the feet of the professor,
+worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began to discern a
+weakness in the other’s judgments—a weakness so stray and elusive that
+he might not have caught it had it not been ever present. And when he
+did catch it, he leapt to equality at once.
+
+Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.
+
+“I’ll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your
+judgments,” he said. “You lack biology. It has no place in your scheme
+of things.—Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the ground
+up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic
+right on up to the widest aesthetic and sociological generalizations.”
+
+Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses under Professor
+Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all
+knowledge.
+
+“I scarcely follow you,” he said dubiously.
+
+Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.
+
+“Then I’ll try to explain,” he said. “I remember reading in Egyptian
+history something to the effect that understanding could not be had of
+Egyptian art without first studying the land question.”
+
+“Quite right,” the professor nodded.
+
+“And it seems to me,” Martin continued, “that knowledge of the land
+question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had
+without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of life.
+How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and customs,
+without understanding, not merely the nature of the creatures that made
+them, but the nature of the stuff out of which the creatures are made?
+Is literature less human than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt?
+Is there one thing in the known universe that is not subject to the law
+of evolution?—Oh, I know there is an elaborate evolution of the various
+arts laid down, but it seems to me to be too mechanical. The human
+himself is left out. The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music
+and song and dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the
+evolution of the human himself, the development of the basic and
+intrinsic parts that were in him before he made his first tool or
+gibbered his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and
+which I call biology. It is biology in its largest aspects.
+
+“I know I express myself incoherently, but I’ve tried to hammer out the
+idea. It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed and ready
+to deliver it. You spoke yourself of the human frailty that prevented
+one from taking all the factors into consideration. And you, in
+turn,—or so it seems to me,—leave out the biological factor, the very
+stuff out of which has been spun the fabric of all the arts, the warp
+and the woof of all human actions and achievements.”
+
+To Ruth’s amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that the
+professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance for
+Martin’s youth. Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute, silent and
+fingering his watch chain.
+
+“Do you know,” he said at last, “I’ve had that same criticism passed on
+me once before—by a very great man, a scientist and evolutionist,
+Joseph Le Conte. But he is dead, and I thought to remain undetected;
+and now you come along and expose me. Seriously, though—and this is
+confession—I think there is something in your contention—a great deal,
+in fact. I am too classical, not enough up-to-date in the
+interpretative branches of science, and I can only plead the
+disadvantages of my education and a temperamental slothfulness that
+prevents me from doing the work. I wonder if you’ll believe that I’ve
+never been inside a physics or chemistry laboratory? It is true,
+nevertheless. Le Conte was right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to
+an extent—how much I do not know.”
+
+Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him
+aside, whispering:-
+
+“You shouldn’t have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way. There may
+be others who want to talk with him.”
+
+“My mistake,” Martin admitted contritely. “But I’d got him stirred up,
+and he was so interesting that I did not think. Do you know, he is the
+brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked with. And I’ll
+tell you something else. I once thought that everybody who went to
+universities, or who sat in the high places in society, was just as
+brilliant and intelligent as he.”
+
+“He’s an exception,” she answered.
+
+“I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now?—Oh, say, bring me
+up against that cashier-fellow.”
+
+Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have wished
+better behavior on her lover’s part. Not once did his eyes flash nor
+his cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which he talked
+surprised her. But in Martin’s estimation the whole tribe of bank
+cashiers fell a few hundred per cent, and for the rest of the evening
+he labored under the impression that bank cashiers and talkers of
+platitudes were synonymous phrases. The army officer he found
+good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome young fellow, content to
+occupy the place in life into which birth and luck had flung him. On
+learning that he had completed two years in the university, Martin was
+puzzled to know where he had stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked
+him better than the platitudinous bank cashier.
+
+“I really don’t object to platitudes,” he told Ruth later; “but what
+worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior
+certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it. Why,
+I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time
+he took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the
+Democrats. Do you know, he skins his words as a professional
+poker-player skins the cards that are dealt out to him. Some day I’ll
+show you what I mean.”
+
+“I’m sorry you don’t like him,” was her reply. “He’s a favorite of Mr.
+Butler’s. Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest—calls him the Rock,
+Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can well be
+built.”
+
+“I don’t doubt it—from the little I saw of him and the less I heard
+from him; but I don’t think so much of banks as I did. You don’t mind
+my speaking my mind this way, dear?”
+
+“No, no; it is most interesting.”
+
+“Yes,” Martin went on heartily, “I’m no more than a barbarian getting
+my first impressions of civilization. Such impressions must be
+entertainingly novel to the civilized person.”
+
+“What did you think of my cousins?” Ruth queried.
+
+“I liked them better than the other women. There’s plenty of fun in
+them along with paucity of pretence.”
+
+“Then you did like the other women?”
+
+He shook his head.
+
+“That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological
+poll-parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like
+Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought. As for
+the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore. She’d make a good wife
+for the cashier. And the musician woman! I don’t care how nimble her
+fingers are, how perfect her technique, how wonderful her
+expression—the fact is, she knows nothing about music.”
+
+“She plays beautifully,” Ruth protested.
+
+“Yes, she’s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but the
+intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her what music
+meant to her—you know I’m always curious to know that particular thing;
+and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it,
+that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life
+to her.”
+
+“You were making them talk shop,” Ruth charged him.
+
+“I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings
+if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used to think that up
+here, where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed—” He paused for
+a moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and
+square-cut, enter the door and swagger across the room. “As I was
+saying, up here I thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant.
+But now, from what little I’ve seen of them, they strike me as a pack
+of ninnies, most of them, and ninety percent of the remainder as bores.
+Now there’s Professor Caldwell—he’s different. He’s a man, every inch
+of him and every atom of his gray matter.”
+
+Ruth’s face brightened.
+
+“Tell me about him,” she urged. “Not what is large and brilliant—I know
+those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am most curious to
+know.”
+
+“Perhaps I’ll get myself in a pickle.” Martin debated humorously for a
+moment. “Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in him nothing
+less than the best.”
+
+“I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two
+years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression.”
+
+“Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine things
+you think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest specimen of
+intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame.”
+
+“Oh, no, no!” he hastened to cry. “Nothing paltry nor vulgar. What I
+mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of
+things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to
+himself that he never saw it. Perhaps that’s not the clearest way to
+express it. Here’s another way. A man who has found the path to the
+hidden temple but has not followed it; who has, perhaps, caught
+glimpses of the temple and striven afterward to convince himself that
+it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet another way. A man who could have
+done things but who placed no value on the doing, and who, all the
+time, in his innermost heart, is regretting that he has not done them;
+who has secretly laughed at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more
+secretly, has yearned for the rewards and for the joy of doing.”
+
+“I don’t read him that way,” she said. “And for that matter, I don’t
+see just what you mean.”
+
+“It is only a vague feeling on my part,” Martin temporized. “I have no
+reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is wrong. You
+certainly should know him better than I.”
+
+From the evening at Ruth’s Martin brought away with him strange
+confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his goal,
+in the persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was
+encouraged with his success. The climb had been easier than he
+expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false
+modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings among whom
+he had climbed—with the exception, of course, of Professor Caldwell.
+About life and the books he knew more than they, and he wondered into
+what nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations. He did
+not know that he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did
+he know that the persons who were given to probing the depths and to
+thinking ultimate thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of
+the world’s Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely
+eagles sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its
+swarming freight of gregarious life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+
+But success had lost Martin’s address, and her messengers no longer
+came to his door. For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays,
+he toiled on “The Shame of the Sun,” a long essay of some thirty
+thousand words. It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the
+Maeterlinck school—an attack from the citadel of positive science upon
+the wonder-dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of
+beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact. It was
+a little later that he followed up the attack with two short essays,
+“The Wonder-Dreamers” and “The Yardstick of the Ego.” And on essays,
+long and short, he began to pay the travelling expenses from magazine
+to magazine.
+
+During the twenty-five days spent on “The Shame of the Sun,” he sold
+hack-work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents. A joke had
+brought in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-grade comic
+weekly, had fetched a dollar. Then two humorous poems had earned two
+dollars and three dollars respectively. As a result, having exhausted
+his credit with the tradesmen (though he had increased his credit with
+the grocer to five dollars), his wheel and suit of clothes went back to
+the pawnbroker. The type-writer people were again clamoring for money,
+insistently pointing out that according to the agreement rent was to be
+paid strictly in advance.
+
+Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack-work.
+Perhaps there was a living in it, after all. Stored away under his
+table were the twenty storiettes which had been rejected by the
+newspaper short-story syndicate. He read them over in order to find out
+how not to write newspaper storiettes, and so doing, reasoned out the
+perfect formula. He found that the newspaper storiette should never be
+tragic, should never end unhappily, and should never contain beauty of
+language, subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy of sentiment.
+Sentiment it must contain, plenty of it, pure and noble, of the sort
+that in his own early youth had brought his applause from “nigger
+heaven”—the “For-God-my-country-and-the-Czar” and
+“I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest” brand of sentiment.
+
+Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted “The Duchess” for
+tone, and proceeded to mix according to formula. The formula consists
+of three parts: (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart; (2) by some deed
+or event they are reunited; (3) marriage bells. The third part was an
+unvarying quantity, but the first and second parts could be varied an
+infinite number of times. Thus, the pair of lovers could be jarred
+apart by misunderstood motives, by accident of fate, by jealous rivals,
+by irate parents, by crafty guardians, by scheming relatives, and so
+forth and so forth; they could be reunited by a brave deed of the man
+lover, by a similar deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one
+lover or the other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming
+relative, or jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same, by
+discovery of some unguessed secret, by lover storming girl’s heart, by
+lover making long and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly. It
+was very fetching to make the girl propose in the course of being
+reunited, and Martin discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly piquant
+and fetching ruses. But marriage bells at the end was the one thing he
+could take no liberties with; though the heavens rolled up as a scroll
+and the stars fell, the wedding bells must go on ringing just the same.
+In quantity, the formula prescribed twelve hundred words minimum dose,
+fifteen hundred words maximum dose.
+
+Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin worked
+out half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when
+constructing storiettes. These forms were like the cunning tables used
+by mathematicians, which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and
+left, which entrances consist of scores of lines and dozens of columns,
+and from which may be drawn, without reasoning or thinking, thousands
+of different conclusions, all unchallengably precise and true. Thus, in
+the course of half an hour with his forms, Martin could frame up a
+dozen or so storiettes, which he put aside and filled in at his
+convenience. He found that he could fill one in, after a day of serious
+work, in the hour before going to bed. As he later confessed to Ruth,
+he could almost do it in his sleep. The real work was in constructing
+the frames, and that was merely mechanical.
+
+He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for once
+he knew the editorial mind when he said positively to himself that the
+first two he sent off would bring checks. And checks they brought, for
+four dollars each, at the end of twelve days.
+
+In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries concerning
+the magazines. Though the _Transcontinental_ had published “The Ring of
+Bells,” no check was forthcoming. Martin needed it, and he wrote for
+it. An evasive answer and a request for more of his work was all he
+received. He had gone hungry two days waiting for the reply, and it was
+then that he put his wheel back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice a
+week, to the _Transcontinental_ for his five dollars, though it was
+only semi-occasionally that he elicited a reply. He did not know that
+the _Transcontinental_ had been staggering along precariously for
+years, that it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing,
+with a crazy circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and
+partly on patriotic appealing, and with advertisements that were
+scarcely more than charitable donations. Nor did he know that the
+_Transcontinental_ was the sole livelihood of the editor and the
+business manager, and that they could wring their livelihood out of it
+only by moving to escape paying rent and by never paying any bill they
+could evade. Nor could he have guessed that the particular five dollars
+that belonged to him had been appropriated by the business manager for
+the painting of his house in Alameda, which painting he performed
+himself, on week-day afternoons, because he could not afford to pay
+union wages and because the first scab he had employed had had a ladder
+jerked out from under him and been sent to the hospital with a broken
+collar-bone.
+
+The ten dollars for which Martin had sold “Treasure Hunters” to the
+Chicago newspaper did not come to hand. The article had been published,
+as he had ascertained at the file in the Central Reading-room, but no
+word could he get from the editor. His letters were ignored. To satisfy
+himself that they had been received, he registered several of them. It
+was nothing less than robbery, he concluded—a cold-blooded steal; while
+he starved, he was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale
+of which was the sole way of getting bread to eat.
+
+_Youth and Age_ was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his
+twenty-one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business. With it
+went all hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.
+
+To cap the situation, “The Pot,” which he looked upon as one of the
+best things he had written, was lost to him. In despair, casting about
+frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to _The Billow_, a
+society weekly in San Francisco. His chief reason for submitting it to
+that publication was that, having only to travel across the bay from
+Oakland, a quick decision could be reached. Two weeks later he was
+overjoyed to see, in the latest number on the news-stand, his story
+printed in full, illustrated, and in the place of honor. He went home
+with leaping pulse, wondering how much they would pay him for one of
+the best things he had done. Also, the celerity with which it had been
+accepted and published was a pleasant thought to him. That the editor
+had not informed him of the acceptance made the surprise more complete.
+After waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation
+conquered diffidence, and he wrote to the editor of _The Billow_,
+suggesting that possibly through some negligence of the business
+manager his little account had been overlooked.
+
+Even if it isn’t more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself, it
+will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a dozen
+like it, and possibly as good.
+
+Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least elicited Martin’s
+admiration.
+
+“We thank you,” it ran, “for your excellent contribution. All of us in
+the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was given the
+place of honor and immediate publication. We earnestly hope that you
+liked the illustrations.
+
+“On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring under
+the misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts. This is
+not our custom, and of course yours was unsolicited. We assumed,
+naturally, when we received your story, that you understood the
+situation. We can only deeply regret this unfortunate misunderstanding,
+and assure you of our unfailing regard. Again, thanking you for your
+kind contribution, and hoping to receive more from you in the near
+future, we remain, etc.”
+
+There was also a postscript to the effect that though _The Billow_
+carried no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a
+complimentary subscription for the ensuing year.
+
+After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet of
+all his manuscripts: “Submitted at your usual rate.”
+
+Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at _my_ usual
+rate.
+
+He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection,
+under the sway of which he rewrote and polished “The Jostling Street,”
+“The Wine of Life,” “Joy,” the “Sea Lyrics,” and others of his earlier
+work. As of old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all too little to
+suit him. He wrote prodigiously, and he read prodigiously, forgetting
+in his toil the pangs caused by giving up his tobacco. Ruth’s promised
+cure for the habit, flamboyantly labelled, he stowed away in the most
+inaccessible corner of his bureau. Especially during his stretches of
+famine he suffered from lack of the weed; but no matter how often he
+mastered the craving, it remained with him as strong as ever. He
+regarded it as the biggest thing he had ever achieved. Ruth’s point of
+view was that he was doing no more than was right. She brought him the
+anti-tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, and in a few
+days forgot all about it.
+
+His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them,
+were successful. By means of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid
+most of his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel. The
+storiettes at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for
+ambitious work; while the one thing that upheld him was the forty
+dollars he had received from _The White Mouse_. He anchored his faith
+to that, and was confident that the really first-class magazines would
+pay an unknown writer at least an equal rate, if not a better one. But
+the thing was, how to get into the first-class magazines. His best
+stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and yet, each
+month, he read reams of dull, prosy, inartistic stuff between all their
+various covers. If only one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend
+from his high seat of pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if
+my work is unusual, no matter if it is unfit, for prudential reasons,
+for their pages, surely there must be some sparks in it, somewhere, a
+few, to warm them to some sort of appreciation. And thereupon he would
+get out one or another of his manuscripts, such as “Adventure,” and
+read it over and over in a vain attempt to vindicate the editorial
+silence.
+
+As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an
+end. For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the
+part of the newspaper storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to
+him through the mail ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes.
+They were accompanied by a brief letter to the effect that the
+syndicate was overstocked, and that some months would elapse before it
+would be in the market again for manuscripts. Martin had even been
+extravagant on the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last
+the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for them and
+accepting every one he sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as
+sold, and he had lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the
+bank. So it was that he entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he
+continued selling his earlier efforts to publications that would not
+pay and submitting his later work to magazines that would not buy.
+Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker down in Oakland. A few
+jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the New York weeklies,
+made existence barely possible for him. It was at this time that he
+wrote letters of inquiry to the several great monthly and quarterly
+reviews, and learned in reply that they rarely considered unsolicited
+articles, and that most of their contents were written upon order by
+well-known specialists who were authorities in their various fields.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+
+It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers and editors were
+away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a decision
+in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three months or more.
+The consolation he drew from it was that a saving in postage was
+effected by the deadlock. Only the robber-publications seemed to remain
+actively in business, and to them Martin disposed of all his early
+efforts, such as “Pearl-diving,” “The Sea as a Career,”
+“Turtle-catching,” and “The Northeast Trades.” For these manuscripts he
+never received a penny. It is true, after six months’ correspondence,
+he effected a compromise, whereby he received a safety razor for
+“Turtle-catching,” and that _The Acropolis_, having agreed to give him
+five dollars cash and five yearly subscriptions: for “The Northeast
+Trades,” fulfilled the second part of the agreement.
+
+For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a
+Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste
+and a penny-dreadful purse. “The Peri and the Pearl,” a clever skit of
+a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain,
+won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in
+the interest of a great railroad. When the editor wrote, offering him
+payment in transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the
+transportation was transferable. It was not, and so, being prevented
+from peddling it, he asked for the return of the poem. Back it came,
+with the editor’s regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again,
+this time to _The Hornet_, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned
+into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist
+who founded it. But _The Hornet’s_ light had begun to dim long before
+Martin was born. The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the
+poem, but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it. Several of
+his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew a
+reply. It was written by a new editor, who coolly informed Martin that
+he declined to be held responsible for the old editor’s mistakes, and
+that he did not think much of “The Peri and the Pearl” anyway.
+
+But _The Globe_, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel
+treatment of all. He had refrained from offering his “Sea Lyrics” for
+publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having been
+rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in _The Globe_
+office. There were thirty poems in the collection, and he was to
+receive a dollar apiece for them. The first month four were published,
+and he promptly received a check for four dollars; but when he looked
+over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the
+titles had been altered: “Finis,” for instance, being changed to “The
+Finish,” and “The Song of the Outer Reef” to “The Song of the Coral
+Reef.” In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate
+title, was substituted. In place of his own, “Medusa Lights,” the
+editor had printed, “The Backward Track.” But the slaughter in the body
+of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned and sweated and thrust his
+hands through his hair. Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out,
+interchanged, or juggled about in the most incomprehensible manner.
+Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He
+could not believe that a sane editor could be guilty of such
+maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have
+been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote
+immediately, begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to
+return them to him.
+
+He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
+letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till the
+thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a check for
+those which had appeared in the current number.
+
+Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the _White Mouse_
+forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to
+hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural
+weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he
+found he could easily starve. At his lowest ebb, when his black suit
+was in pawn, he made a ten-strike—or so it seemed to him—in a prize
+contest arranged by the County Committee of the Republican Party. There
+were three branches of the contest, and he entered them all, laughing
+at himself bitterly the while in that he was driven to such straits to
+live. His poem won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song
+the second prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the
+Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was very
+gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had gone wrong
+in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a state senator
+were members of it, the money was not forthcoming. While this affair
+was hanging fire, he proved that he understood the principles of the
+Democratic Party by winning the first prize for his essay in a similar
+contest. And, moreover, he received the money, twenty-five dollars. But
+the forty dollars won in the first contest he never received.
+
+Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long walk
+from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too much time,
+he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle. The latter gave
+him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and enabled him to see
+Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck trousers and an old sweater
+made him a presentable wheel costume, so that he could go with Ruth on
+afternoon rides. Besides, he no longer had opportunity to see much of
+her in her own home, where Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her
+campaign of entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and to whom
+he had looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no
+longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times,
+disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of
+such people was maddening. He was not unduly egotistic. He measured the
+narrowness of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he
+read. At Ruth’s home he never met a large mind, with the exception of
+Professor Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the
+rest, they were numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and
+ignorant. It was their ignorance that astounded him. What was the
+matter with them? What had they done with their educations? They had
+had access to the same books he had. How did it happen that they had
+drawn nothing from them?
+
+He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers, existed.
+He had his proofs from the books, the books that had educated him
+beyond the Morse standard. And he knew that higher intellects than
+those of the Morse circle were to be found in the world. He read
+English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses of men and women
+talking politics and philosophy. And he read of salons in great cities,
+even in the United States, where art and intellect congregated.
+Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived that all well-groomed persons
+above the working class were persons with power of intellect and vigor
+of beauty. Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had
+been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were
+the same things.
+
+Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth
+with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would
+shine anywhere. As it was clear to him that he had been handicapped by
+his early environment, so now he perceived that she was similarly
+handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand. The books on her
+father’s shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the
+piano—all was just so much meretricious display. To real literature,
+real painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead. And
+bigger than such things was life, of which they were densely,
+hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their
+masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind
+interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while
+their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
+struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
+youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved
+the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first
+hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam’s rib; that moved
+Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the
+projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British
+ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win
+immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of
+history.
+
+So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that
+the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank
+cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known
+was on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they
+wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of them was
+lacking the something more which he found in himself and in the books.
+The Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce,
+and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a slave to the
+money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the
+Morses’; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he
+moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin
+to what a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.
+
+“You hate and fear the socialists,” he remarked to Mr. Morse, one
+evening at dinner; “but why? You know neither them nor their
+doctrines.”
+
+The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse, who
+had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood. The cashier
+was Martin’s black beast, and his temper was a trifle short where the
+talker of platitudes was concerned.
+
+“Yes,” he had said, “Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising young
+man—somebody told me as much. And it is true. He’ll make the Governor’s
+Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the United States Senate.”
+
+“What makes you think so?” Mrs. Morse had inquired.
+
+“I’ve heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid and
+unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but
+regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the
+platitudes of the average voter that—oh, well, you know you flatter any
+man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to
+him.”
+
+“I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood,” Ruth had chimed in.
+
+“Heaven forbid!”
+
+The look of horror on Martin’s face stirred Mrs. Morse to belligerence.
+
+“You surely don’t mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?” she demanded
+icily.
+
+“No more than the average Republican,” was the retort, “or average
+Democrat, either. They are all stupid when they are not crafty, and
+very few of them are crafty. The only wise Republicans are the
+millionnaires and their conscious henchmen. They know which side their
+bread is buttered on, and they know why.”
+
+“I am a Republican,” Mr. Morse put in lightly. “Pray, how do you
+classify me?”
+
+“Oh, you are an unconscious henchman.”
+
+“Henchman?”
+
+“Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no working-class nor
+criminal practice. You don’t depend upon wife-beaters and pickpockets
+for your income. You get your livelihood from the masters of society,
+and whoever feeds a man is that man’s master. Yes, you are a henchman.
+You are interested in advancing the interests of the aggregations of
+capital you serve.”
+
+Mr. Morse’s face was a trifle red.
+
+“I confess, sir,” he said, “that you talk like a scoundrelly
+socialist.”
+
+Then it was that Martin made his remark:
+
+“You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You know neither them nor
+their doctrines.”
+
+“Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism,” Mr. Morse replied,
+while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed
+happily at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege lord’s
+antagonism.
+
+“Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality,
+and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist,”
+Martin said with a smile. “Because I question Jefferson and the
+unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a
+socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I
+who am its avowed enemy.”
+
+“Now you please to be facetious,” was all the other could say.
+
+“Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in equality,
+and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the corporations, from
+day to day, are busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me a
+socialist because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live
+up to. The Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight
+the battle against equality with the very word itself the slogan on
+their lips. In the name of equality they destroy equality. That was why
+I called them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe
+the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Such is the lesson
+I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned. As I
+said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary and
+eternal foe of socialism.”
+
+“But you frequent socialist meetings,” Mr. Morse challenged.
+
+“Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you to
+learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings. They
+are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books. Any
+one of them knows far more about sociology and all the other ologies
+than the average captain of industry. Yes, I have been to half a dozen
+of their meetings, but that doesn’t make me a socialist any more than
+hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me a Republican.”
+
+“I can’t help it,” Mr. Morse said feebly, “but I still believe you
+incline that way.”
+
+Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn’t know what I was talking
+about. He hasn’t understood a word of it. What did he do with his
+education, anyway?
+
+Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with
+economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him
+a grisly monster. Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more
+offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those
+about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the
+metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.
+
+A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His
+sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young
+mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the
+trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having
+got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous. Marian
+had called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce her
+engagement, during which visit she had playfully inspected Martin’s
+palm and told his fortune. On her next visit she brought Hermann von
+Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and congratulated both of
+them in language so easy and graceful as to affect disagreeably the
+peasant-mind of his sister’s lover. This bad impression was further
+heightened by Martin’s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse
+with which he had commemorated Marian’s previous visit. It was a bit of
+society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named “The Palmist.” He
+was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his
+sister’s face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her
+betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that worthy’s
+asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen disapproval. The
+incident passed over, they made an early departure, and Martin forgot
+all about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any woman,
+even of the working class, should not have been flattered and delighted
+by having poetry written about her.
+
+Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone. Nor
+did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully
+for what he had done.
+
+“Why, Marian,” he chided, “you talk as though you were ashamed of your
+relatives, or of your brother at any rate.”
+
+“And I am, too,” she blurted out.
+
+Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes.
+The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.
+
+“But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry
+about my own sister?”
+
+“He ain’t jealous,” she sobbed. “He says it was indecent, ob—obscene.”
+
+Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to
+resurrect and read a carbon copy of “The Palmist.”
+
+“I can’t see it,” he said finally, proffering the manuscript to her.
+“Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene—that was
+the word, wasn’t it?”
+
+“He says so, and he ought to know,” was the answer, with a wave aside
+of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing. “And he says
+you’ve got to tear it up. He says he won’t have no wife of his with
+such things written about her which anybody can read. He says it’s a
+disgrace, an’ he won’t stand for it.”
+
+“Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense,” Martin began;
+then abruptly changed his mind.
+
+He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to
+convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd
+and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.
+
+“All right,” he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen
+pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.
+
+He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original
+type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York
+magazine. Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself
+nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever
+were published.
+
+Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.
+
+“Can I?” she pleaded.
+
+He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn
+pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her
+jacket—ocular evidence of the success of her mission. She reminded him
+of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous
+flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the working class whom
+he had seen twice. But they were on a par, the pair of them, in dress
+and carriage, and he smiled with inward amusement at the caprice of his
+fancy which suggested the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse’s
+drawing-room. The amusement faded, and he was aware of a great
+loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were
+milestones of the road he had travelled. And he had left them behind.
+He glanced affectionately about him at his few books. They were all the
+comrades left to him.
+
+“Hello, what’s that?” he demanded in startled surprise.
+
+Marian repeated her question.
+
+“Why don’t I go to work?” He broke into a laugh that was only
+half-hearted. “That Hermann of yours has been talking to you.”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Don’t lie,” he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his charge.
+
+“Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business; that
+when I write poetry about the girl he’s keeping company with it’s his
+business, but that outside of that he’s got no say so. Understand?
+
+“So you don’t think I’ll succeed as a writer, eh?” he went on. “You
+think I’m no good?—that I’ve fallen down and am a disgrace to the
+family?”
+
+“I think it would be much better if you got a job,” she said firmly,
+and he saw she was sincere. “Hermann says—”
+
+“Damn Hermann!” he broke out good-naturedly. “What I want to know is
+when you’re going to get married. Also, you find out from your Hermann
+if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from me.”
+
+He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke
+out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her
+betrothed, all the members of his own class and the members of Ruth’s
+class, directing their narrow little lives by narrow little
+formulas—herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives
+by one another’s opinions, failing of being individuals and of really
+living life because of the childlike formulas by which they were
+enslaved. He summoned them before him in apparitional procession:
+Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt
+cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he
+judged them and dismissed them—judged them by the standards of
+intellect and morality he had learned from the books. Vainly he asked:
+Where are the great souls, the great men and women? He found them not
+among the careless, gross, and stupid intelligences that answered the
+call of vision to his narrow room. He felt a loathing for them such as
+Circe must have felt for her swine. When he had dismissed the last one
+and thought himself alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and
+unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut,
+double-breasted coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful
+hoodlum who had once been he.
+
+“You were like all the rest, young fellow,” Martin sneered. “Your
+morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did not
+think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes, were
+ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock of
+your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and
+ruled the gang, not because you liked to,—you know you really despised
+it,—but because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder. You
+licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn’t give in, and you wouldn’t give
+in partly because you were an abysmal brute and for the rest because
+you believed what every one about you believed, that the measure of
+manhood was the carnivorous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring
+fellow-creatures’ anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won other
+fellows’ girls away from them, not because you wanted the girls, but
+because in the marrow of those about you, those who set your moral
+pace, was the instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well,
+the years have passed, and what do you think about it now?”
+
+As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. The
+stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder
+garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of the
+eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from an
+inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge. The apparition was
+very like his present self, and, as he regarded it, he noted the
+student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book over which it
+pored. He glanced at the title and read, “The Science of Æsthetics.”
+Next, he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student-lamp, and
+himself went on reading “The Science of Æsthetics.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+
+On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that which
+had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his
+“Love-cycle” to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before, they had
+ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and again she had
+interrupted his reading with exclamations of pleasure, and now, as he
+laid the last sheet of manuscript with its fellows, he waited her
+judgment.
+
+She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating to
+frame in words the harshness of her thought.
+
+“I think they are beautiful, very beautiful,” she said; “but you can’t
+sell them, can you? You see what I mean,” she said, almost pleaded.
+“This writing of yours is not practical. Something is the matter—maybe
+it is with the market—that prevents you from earning a living by it.
+And please, dear, don’t misunderstand me. I am flattered, and made
+proud, and all that—I could not be a true woman were it otherwise—that
+you should write these poems to me. But they do not make our marriage
+possible. Don’t you see, Martin? Don’t think me mercenary. It is love,
+the thought of our future, with which I am burdened. A whole year has
+gone by since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no
+nearer. Don’t think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
+really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don’t you try to
+get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing? Why
+not become a reporter?—for a while, at least?”
+
+“It would spoil my style,” was his answer, in a low, monotonous voice.
+“You have no idea how I’ve worked for style.”
+
+“But those storiettes,” she argued. “You called them hack-work. You
+wrote many of them. Didn’t they spoil your style?”
+
+“No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out, jaded, at
+the end of a long day of application to style. But a reporter’s work is
+all hack from morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life.
+And it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with neither past
+nor future, and certainly without thought of any style but reportorial
+style, and that certainly is not literature. To become a reporter now,
+just as my style is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit
+literary suicide. As it is, every storiette, every word of every
+storiette, was a violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect
+for beauty. I tell you it was sickening. I was guilty of sin. And I was
+secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go into
+pawn. But the joy of writing the ‘Love-cycle’! The creative joy in its
+noblest form! That was compensation for everything.”
+
+Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the creative
+joy. She used the phrase—it was on her lips he had first heard it. She
+had read about it, studied about it, in the university in the course of
+earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but she was not original, not
+creative, and all manifestations of culture on her part were but
+harpings of the harpings of others.
+
+“May not the editor have been right in his revision of your ‘Sea
+Lyrics’?” she questioned. “Remember, an editor must have proved
+qualifications or else he would not be an editor.”
+
+“That’s in line with the persistence of the established,” he rejoined,
+his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of him. “What is,
+is not only right, but is the best possible. The existence of anything
+is sufficient vindication of its fitness to exist—to exist, mark you,
+as the average person unconsciously believes, not merely in present
+conditions, but in all conditions. It is their ignorance, of course,
+that makes them believe such rot—their ignorance, which is nothing more
+nor less than the henidical mental process described by Weininger. They
+think they think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the
+lives of the few who really think.”
+
+He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking over
+Ruth’s head.
+
+“I’m sure I don’t know who this Weininger is,” she retorted. “And you
+are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you. What I was
+speaking of was the qualification of editors—”
+
+“And I’ll tell you,” he interrupted. “The chief qualification of
+ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. They have failed as
+writers. Don’t think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and the
+slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the joy of
+writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed. And right
+there is the cursed paradox of it. Every portal to success in
+literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures in literature.
+The editors, sub-editors, associate editors, most of them, and the
+manuscript-readers for the magazines and book-publishers, most of them,
+nearly all of them, are men who wanted to write and who have failed.
+And yet they, of all creatures under the sun the most unfit, are the
+very creatures who decide what shall and what shall not find its way
+into print—they, who have proved themselves not original, who have
+demonstrated that they lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon
+originality and genius. And after them come the reviewers, just so many
+more failures. Don’t tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and
+attempted to write poetry or fiction; for they have, and they have
+failed. Why, the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil.
+But you know my opinion on the reviewers and the alleged critics. There
+are great critics, but they are as rare as comets. If I fail as a
+writer, I shall have proved for the career of editorship. There’s bread
+and butter and jam, at any rate.”
+
+Ruth’s mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover’s views was
+buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.
+
+“But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you have
+shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the great writers
+ever arrived?”
+
+“They arrived by achieving the impossible,” he answered. “They did such
+blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed them.
+They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one wager
+against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle’s battle-scarred
+giants who will not be kept down. And that is what I must do; I must
+achieve the impossible.”
+
+“But if you fail? You must consider me as well, Martin.”
+
+“If I fail?” He regarded her for a moment as though the thought she had
+uttered was unthinkable. Then intelligence illumined his eyes. “If I
+fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an editor’s wife.”
+
+She frowned at his facetiousness—a pretty, adorable frown that made him
+put his arm around her and kiss it away.
+
+“There, that’s enough,” she urged, by an effort of will withdrawing
+herself from the fascination of his strength. “I have talked with
+father and mother. I never before asserted myself so against them. I
+demanded to be heard. I was very undutiful. They are against you, you
+know; but I assured them over and over of my abiding love for you, and
+at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you could begin right away
+in his office. And then, of his own accord, he said he would pay you
+enough at the start so that we could get married and have a little
+cottage somewhere. Which I think was very fine of him—don’t you?”
+
+Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically
+reaching for the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to roll
+a cigarette, muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went on.
+
+“Frankly, though, and don’t let it hurt you—I tell you, to show you
+precisely how you stand with him—he doesn’t like your radical views,
+and he thinks you are lazy. Of course I know you are not. I know you
+work hard.”
+
+How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin’s mind.
+
+“Well, then,” he said, “how about my views? Do you think they are so
+radical?”
+
+He held her eyes and waited the answer.
+
+“I think them, well, very disconcerting,” she replied.
+
+The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the
+grayness of life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had made
+for him to go to work. And she, having gone as far as she dared, was
+willing to wait the answer till she should bring the question up again.
+
+She had not long to wait. Martin had a question of his own to propound
+to her. He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith in him, and
+within the week each was answered. Martin precipitated it by reading to
+her his “The Shame of the Sun.”
+
+“Why don’t you become a reporter?” she asked when he had finished. “You
+love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed. You could rise in
+journalism and make a name for yourself. There are a number of great
+special correspondents. Their salaries are large, and their field is
+the world. They are sent everywhere, to the heart of Africa, like
+Stanley, or to interview the Pope, or to explore unknown Thibet.”
+
+“Then you don’t like my essay?” he rejoined. “You believe that I have
+some show in journalism but none in literature?”
+
+“No, no; I do like it. It reads well. But I am afraid it’s over the
+heads of your readers. At least it is over mine. It sounds beautiful,
+but I don’t understand it. Your scientific slang is beyond me. You are
+an extremist, you know, dear, and what may be intelligible to you may
+not be intelligible to the rest of us.”
+
+“I imagine it’s the philosophic slang that bothers you,” was all he
+could say.
+
+He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had
+expressed, and her verdict stunned him.
+
+“No matter how poorly it is done,” he persisted, “don’t you see
+anything in it?—in the thought of it, I mean?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“No, it is so different from anything I have read. I read Maeterlinck
+and understand him—”
+
+“His mysticism, you understand that?” Martin flashed out.
+
+“Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon him, I
+don’t understand. Of course, if originality counts—”
+
+He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by
+speech. He became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that she had
+been speaking for some time.
+
+“After all, your writing has been a toy to you,” she was saying.
+“Surely you have played with it long enough. It is time to take up life
+seriously—_our_ life, Martin. Hitherto you have lived solely your own.”
+
+“You want me to go to work?” he asked.
+
+“Yes. Father has offered—”
+
+“I understand all that,” he broke in; “but what I want to know is
+whether or not you have lost faith in me?”
+
+She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.
+
+“In your writing, dear,” she admitted in a half-whisper.
+
+“You’ve read lots of my stuff,” he went on brutally. “What do you think
+of it? Is it utterly hopeless? How does it compare with other men’s
+work?”
+
+“But they sell theirs, and you—don’t.”
+
+“That doesn’t answer my question. Do you think that literature is not
+at all my vocation?”
+
+“Then I will answer.” She steeled herself to do it. “I don’t think you
+were made to write. Forgive me, dear. You compel me to say it; and you
+know I know more about literature than you do.”
+
+“Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts,” he said meditatively; “and you ought
+to know.”
+
+“But there is more to be said,” he continued, after a pause painful to
+both. “I know what I have in me. No one knows that so well as I. I know
+I shall succeed. I will not be kept down. I am afire with what I have
+to say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not ask you to have faith
+in that, though. I do not ask you to have faith in me, nor in my
+writing. What I do ask of you is to love me and have faith in love.
+
+“A year ago I begged for two years. One of those years is yet to run.
+And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that year is
+run I shall have succeeded. You remember what you told me long ago,
+that I must serve my apprenticeship to writing. Well, I have served it.
+I have crammed it and telescoped it. With you at the end awaiting me, I
+have never shirked. Do you know, I have forgotten what it is to fall
+peacefully asleep. A few million years ago I knew what it was to sleep
+my fill and to awake naturally from very glut of sleep. I am awakened
+always now by an alarm clock. If I fall asleep early or late, I set the
+alarm accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my
+last conscious actions.
+
+“When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading for
+a lighter one. And when I doze over that, I beat my head with my
+knuckles in order to drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a man who
+was afraid to sleep. Kipling wrote the story. This man arranged a spur
+so that when unconsciousness came, his naked body pressed against the
+iron teeth. Well, I’ve done the same. I look at the time, and I resolve
+that not until midnight, or not until one o’clock, or two o’clock, or
+three o’clock, shall the spur be removed. And so it rowels me awake
+until the appointed time. That spur has been my bed-mate for months. I
+have grown so desperate that five and a half hours of sleep is an
+extravagance. I sleep four hours now. I am starved for sleep. There are
+times when I am light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with
+its rest and sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted
+by Longfellow’s lines:
+
+“‘The sea is still and deep;
+All things within its bosom sleep;
+A single step and all is o’er,
+A plunge, a bubble, and no more.’
+
+
+“Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from nervousness, from an
+overwrought mind. But the point is: Why have I done this? For you. To
+shorten my apprenticeship. To compel Success to hasten. And my
+apprenticeship is now served. I know my equipment. I swear that I learn
+more each month than the average college man learns in a year. I know
+it, I tell you. But were my need for you to understand not so desperate
+I should not tell you. It is not boasting. I measure the results by the
+books. Your brothers, to-day, are ignorant barbarians compared with me
+and the knowledge I have wrung from the books in the hours they were
+sleeping. Long ago I wanted to be famous. I care very little for fame
+now. What I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or
+clothing, or recognition. I have a dream of laying my head on your
+breast and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere
+another year is gone.”
+
+His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his will
+opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward him. The
+strength that had always poured out from him to her was now flowering
+in his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the vigor of life and
+intellect surging in him. And in that moment, and for the moment, she
+was aware of a rift that showed in her certitude—a rift through which
+she caught sight of the real Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and
+as animal-trainers have their moments of doubt, so she, for the
+instant, seemed to doubt her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.
+
+“And another thing,” he swept on. “You love me. But why do you love me?
+The thing in me that compels me to write is the very thing that draws
+your love. You love me because I am somehow different from the men you
+have known and might have loved. I was not made for the desk and
+counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling. Make
+me do such things, make me like those other men, doing the work they
+do, breathing the air they breathe, developing the point of view they
+have developed, and you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me,
+destroyed the thing you love. My desire to write is the most vital
+thing in me. Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to
+write, nor would you have desired me for a husband.”
+
+“But you forget,” she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind
+glimpsing a parallel. “There have been eccentric inventors, starving
+their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.
+Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them,
+not because of but in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion.”
+
+“True,” was the reply. “But there have been inventors who were not
+eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical things;
+and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded. Certainly I do not seek
+any impossibilities—”
+
+“You have called it ‘achieving the impossible,’” she interpolated.
+
+“I spoke figuratively. I seek to do what men have done before me—to
+write and to live by my writing.”
+
+Her silence spurred him on.
+
+“To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?” he
+demanded.
+
+He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his—the pitying
+mother-hand for the hurt child. And to her, just then, he was the hurt
+child, the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.
+
+Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the antagonism
+of her father and mother.
+
+“But you love me?” he asked.
+
+“I do! I do!” she cried.
+
+“And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me.” Triumph
+sounded in his voice. “For I have faith in your love, not fear of their
+enmity. All things may go astray in this world, but not love. Love
+cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles by the
+way.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+
+Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway—as it
+proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance. Waiting on the
+corner for a car, she had seen him first, and noted the eager, hungry
+lines of his face and the desperate, worried look of his eyes. In
+truth, he was desperate and worried. He had just come from a fruitless
+interview with the pawnbroker, from whom he had tried to wring an
+additional loan on his wheel. The muddy fall weather having come on,
+Martin had pledged his wheel some time since and retained his black
+suit.
+
+“There’s the black suit,” the pawnbroker, who knew his every asset, had
+answered. “You needn’t tell me you’ve gone and pledged it with that
+Jew, Lipka. Because if you have—”
+
+The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-
+
+“No, no; I’ve got it. But I want to wear it on a matter of business.”
+
+“All right,” the mollified usurer had replied. “And I want it on a
+matter of business before I can let you have any more money. You don’t
+think I’m in it for my health?”
+
+“But it’s a forty-dollar wheel, in good condition,” Martin had argued.
+“And you’ve only let me have seven dollars on it. No, not even seven.
+Six and a quarter; you took the interest in advance.”
+
+“If you want some more, bring the suit,” had been the reply that sent
+Martin out of the stuffy little den, so desperate at heart as to
+reflect it in his face and touch his sister to pity.
+
+Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car came along and
+stopped to take on a crowd of afternoon shoppers. Mrs. Higginbotham
+divined from the grip on her arm as he helped her on, that he was not
+going to follow her. She turned on the step and looked down upon him.
+His haggard face smote her to the heart again.
+
+“Ain’t you comin’?” she asked
+
+The next moment she had descended to his side.
+
+“I’m walking—exercise, you know,” he explained.
+
+“Then I’ll go along for a few blocks,” she announced. “Mebbe it’ll do
+me good. I ain’t ben feelin’ any too spry these last few days.”
+
+Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her general
+slovenly appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the drooping shoulders,
+the tired face with the sagging lines, and in the heavy fall of her
+feet, without elasticity—a very caricature of the walk that belongs to
+a free and happy body.
+
+“You’d better stop here,” he said, though she had already come to a
+halt at the first corner, “and take the next car.”
+
+“My goodness!—if I ain’t all tired a’ready!” she panted. “But I’m just
+as able to walk as you in them soles. They’re that thin they’ll bu’st
+long before you git out to North Oakland.”
+
+“I’ve a better pair at home,” was the answer.
+
+“Come out to dinner to-morrow,” she invited irrelevantly. “Mr.
+Higginbotham won’t be there. He’s goin’ to San Leandro on business.”
+
+Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back the wolfish,
+hungry look that leapt into his eyes at the suggestion of dinner.
+
+“You haven’t a penny, Mart, and that’s why you’re walkin’. Exercise!”
+She tried to sniff contemptuously, but succeeded in producing only a
+sniffle. “Here, lemme see.”
+
+And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar piece into his
+hand. “I guess I forgot your last birthday, Mart,” she mumbled lamely.
+
+Martin’s hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold. In the same
+instant he knew he ought not to accept, and found himself struggling in
+the throes of indecision. That bit of gold meant food, life, and light
+in his body and brain, power to go on writing, and—who was to
+say?—maybe to write something that would bring in many pieces of gold.
+Clear on his vision burned the manuscripts of two essays he had just
+completed. He saw them under the table on top of the heap of returned
+manuscripts for which he had no stamps, and he saw their titles, just
+as he had typed them—“The High Priests of Mystery,” and “The Cradle of
+Beauty.” He had never submitted them anywhere. They were as good as
+anything he had done in that line. If only he had stamps for them! Then
+the certitude of his ultimate success rose up in him, an able ally of
+hunger, and with a quick movement he slipped the coin into his pocket.
+
+“I’ll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over,” he gulped out, his
+throat painfully contracted and in his eyes a swift hint of moisture.
+
+“Mark my words!” he cried with abrupt positiveness. “Before the year is
+out I’ll put an even hundred of those little yellow-boys into your
+hand. I don’t ask you to believe me. All you have to do is wait and
+see.”
+
+Nor did she believe. Her incredulity made her uncomfortable, and
+failing of other expedient, she said:-
+
+“I know you’re hungry, Mart. It’s sticking out all over you. Come in to
+meals any time. I’ll send one of the children to tell you when Mr.
+Higginbotham ain’t to be there. An’ Mart—”
+
+He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she was about to
+say, so visible was her thought process to him.
+
+“Don’t you think it’s about time you got a job?”
+
+“You don’t think I’ll win out?” he asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Nobody has faith in me, Gertrude, except myself.” His voice was
+passionately rebellious. “I’ve done good work already, plenty of it,
+and sooner or later it will sell.”
+
+“How do you know it is good?”
+
+“Because—” He faltered as the whole vast field of literature and the
+history of literature stirred in his brain and pointed the futility of
+his attempting to convey to her the reasons for his faith. “Well,
+because it’s better than ninety-nine per cent of what is published in
+the magazines.”
+
+“I wish’t you’d listen to reason,” she answered feebly, but with
+unwavering belief in the correctness of her diagnosis of what was
+ailing him. “I wish’t you’d listen to reason,” she repeated, “an’ come
+to dinner to-morrow.”
+
+After Martin had helped her on the car, he hurried to the post-office
+and invested three of the five dollars in stamps; and when, later in
+the day, on the way to the Morse home, he stopped in at the post-office
+to weigh a large number of long, bulky envelopes, he affixed to them
+all the stamps save three of the two-cent denomination.
+
+It proved a momentous night for Martin, for after dinner he met Russ
+Brissenden. How he chanced to come there, whose friend he was or what
+acquaintance brought him, Martin did not know. Nor had he the curiosity
+to inquire about him of Ruth. In short, Brissenden struck Martin as
+anaemic and feather-brained, and was promptly dismissed from his mind.
+An hour later he decided that Brissenden was a boor as well, what of
+the way he prowled about from one room to another, staring at the
+pictures or poking his nose into books and magazines he picked up from
+the table or drew from the shelves. Though a stranger in the house he
+finally isolated himself in the midst of the company, huddling into a
+capacious Morris chair and reading steadily from a thin volume he had
+drawn from his pocket. As he read, he abstractedly ran his fingers,
+with a caressing movement, through his hair. Martin noticed him no more
+that evening, except once when he observed him chaffing with great
+apparent success with several of the young women.
+
+It chanced that when Martin was leaving, he overtook Brissenden already
+half down the walk to the street.
+
+“Hello, is that you?” Martin said.
+
+The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung alongside. Martin
+made no further attempt at conversation, and for several blocks
+unbroken silence lay upon them.
+
+“Pompous old ass!”
+
+The suddenness and the virulence of the exclamation startled Martin. He
+felt amused, and at the same time was aware of a growing dislike for
+the other.
+
+“What do you go to such a place for?” was abruptly flung at him after
+another block of silence.
+
+“Why do you?” Martin countered.
+
+“Bless me, I don’t know,” came back. “At least this is my first
+indiscretion. There are twenty-four hours in each day, and I must spend
+them somehow. Come and have a drink.”
+
+“All right,” Martin answered.
+
+The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of his acceptance.
+At home was several hours’ hack-work waiting for him before he went to
+bed, and after he went to bed there was a volume of Weismann waiting
+for him, to say nothing of Herbert Spencer’s Autobiography, which was
+as replete for him with romance as any thrilling novel. Why should he
+waste any time with this man he did not like? was his thought. And yet,
+it was not so much the man nor the drink as was it what was associated
+with the drink—the bright lights, the mirrors and dazzling array of
+glasses, the warm and glowing faces and the resonant hum of the voices
+of men. That was it, it was the voices of men, optimistic men, men who
+breathed success and spent their money for drinks like men. He was
+lonely, that was what was the matter with him; that was why he had
+snapped at the invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook.
+Not since with Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception of
+the wine he took with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a drink at
+a public bar. Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving for liquor
+such as physical exhaustion did, and he had felt no need for it. But
+just now he felt desire for the drink, or, rather, for the atmosphere
+wherein drinks were dispensed and disposed of. Such a place was the
+Grotto, where Brissenden and he lounged in capacious leather chairs and
+drank Scotch and soda.
+
+They talked. They talked about many things, and now Brissenden and now
+Martin took turn in ordering Scotch and soda. Martin, who was extremely
+strong-headed, marvelled at the other’s capacity for liquor, and ever
+and anon broke off to marvel at the other’s conversation. He was not
+long in assuming that Brissenden knew everything, and in deciding that
+here was the second intellectual man he had met. But he noted that
+Brissenden had what Professor Caldwell lacked—namely, fire, the
+flashing insight and perception, the flaming uncontrol of genius.
+Living language flowed from him. His thin lips, like the dies of a
+machine, stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again, pursing
+caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin lips
+shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of
+haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness of
+life; and yet again the thin lips were like a bugle, from which rang
+the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases that sounded clear as
+silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that epitomized the final
+word of science and yet said something more—the poet’s word, the
+transcendental truth, elusive and without words which could express,
+and which none the less found expression in the subtle and all but
+ungraspable connotations of common words. He, by some wonder of vision,
+saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language
+for narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing
+known words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin’s
+consciousness messages that were incommunicable to ordinary souls.
+
+Martin forgot his first impression of dislike. Here was the best the
+books had to offer coming true. Here was an intelligence, a living man
+for him to look up to. “I am down in the dirt at your feet,” Martin
+repeated to himself again and again.
+
+“You’ve studied biology,” he said aloud, in significant allusion.
+
+To his surprise Brissenden shook his head.
+
+“But you are stating truths that are substantiated only by biology,”
+Martin insisted, and was rewarded by a blank stare. “Your conclusions
+are in line with the books which you must have read.”
+
+“I am glad to hear it,” was the answer. “That my smattering of
+knowledge should enable me to short-cut my way to truth is most
+reassuring. As for myself, I never bother to find out if I am right or
+not. It is all valueless anyway. Man can never know the ultimate
+verities.”
+
+“You are a disciple of Spencer!” Martin cried triumphantly.
+
+“I haven’t read him since adolescence, and all I read then was his
+‘Education.’”
+
+“I wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly,” Martin broke out half
+an hour later. He had been closely analyzing Brissenden’s mental
+equipment. “You are a sheer dogmatist, and that’s what makes it so
+marvellous. You state dogmatically the latest facts which science has
+been able to establish only by _à posteriori_ reasoning. You jump at
+correct conclusions. You certainly short-cut with a vengeance. You feel
+your way with the speed of light, by some hyperrational process, to
+truth.”
+
+“Yes, that was what used to bother Father Joseph, and Brother Dutton,”
+Brissenden replied. “Oh, no,” he added; “I am not anything. It was a
+lucky trick of fate that sent me to a Catholic college for my
+education. Where did you pick up what you know?”
+
+And while Martin told him, he was busy studying Brissenden, ranging
+from a long, lean, aristocratic face and drooping shoulders to the
+overcoat on a neighboring chair, its pockets sagged and bulged by the
+freightage of many books. Brissenden’s face and long, slender hands
+were browned by the sun—excessively browned, Martin thought. This
+sunburn bothered Martin. It was patent that Brissenden was no outdoor
+man. Then how had he been ravaged by the sun? Something morbid and
+significant attached to that sunburn, was Martin’s thought as he
+returned to a study of the face, narrow, with high cheek-bones and
+cavernous hollows, and graced with as delicate and fine an aquiline
+nose as Martin had ever seen. There was nothing remarkable about the
+size of the eyes. They were neither large nor small, while their color
+was a nondescript brown; but in them smouldered a fire, or, rather,
+lurked an expression dual and strangely contradictory. Defiant,
+indomitable, even harsh to excess, they at the same time aroused pity.
+Martin found himself pitying him he knew not why, though he was soon to
+learn.
+
+“Oh, I’m a lunger,” Brissenden announced, offhand, a little later,
+having already stated that he came from Arizona. “I’ve been down there
+a couple of years living on the climate.”
+
+“Aren’t you afraid to venture it up in this climate?”
+
+“Afraid?”
+
+There was no special emphasis of his repetition of Martin’s word. But
+Martin saw in that ascetic face the advertisement that there was
+nothing of which it was afraid. The eyes had narrowed till they were
+eagle-like, and Martin almost caught his breath as he noted the eagle
+beak with its dilated nostrils, defiant, assertive, aggressive.
+Magnificent, was what he commented to himself, his blood thrilling at
+the sight. Aloud, he quoted:-
+
+“‘Under the bludgeoning of Chance
+    My head is bloody but unbowed.’”
+
+
+“You like Henley,” Brissenden said, his expression changing swiftly to
+large graciousness and tenderness. “Of course, I couldn’t have expected
+anything else of you. Ah, Henley! A brave soul. He stands out among
+contemporary rhymesters—magazine rhymesters—as a gladiator stands out
+in the midst of a band of eunuchs.”
+
+“You don’t like the magazines,” Martin softly impeached.
+
+“Do you?” was snarled back at him so savagely as to startle him.
+
+“I—I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines,” Martin
+faltered.
+
+“That’s better,” was the mollified rejoinder. “You try to write, but
+you don’t succeed. I respect and admire your failure. I know what you
+write. I can see it with half an eye, and there’s one ingredient in it
+that shuts it out of the magazines. It’s guts, and magazines have no
+use for that particular commodity. What they want is wish-wash and
+slush, and God knows they get it, but not from you.”
+
+“I’m not above hack-work,” Martin contended.
+
+“On the contrary—” Brissenden paused and ran an insolent eye over
+Martin’s objective poverty, passing from the well-worn tie and the
+saw-edged collar to the shiny sleeves of the coat and on to the slight
+fray of one cuff, winding up and dwelling upon Martin’s sunken cheeks.
+“On the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far above you that you can
+never hope to rise to it. Why, man, I could insult you by asking you to
+have something to eat.”
+
+Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and
+Brissenden laughed triumphantly.
+
+“A full man is not insulted by such an invitation,” he concluded.
+
+“You are a devil,” Martin cried irritably.
+
+“Anyway, I didn’t ask you.”
+
+“You didn’t dare.”
+
+“Oh, I don’t know about that. I invite you now.”
+
+Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if with the
+intention of departing to the restaurant forthwith.
+
+Martin’s fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was drumming in his
+temples.
+
+“Bosco! He eats ’em alive! Eats ’em alive!” Brissenden exclaimed,
+imitating the _spieler_ of a locally famous snake-eater.
+
+“I could certainly eat you alive,” Martin said, in turn running
+insolent eyes over the other’s disease-ravaged frame.
+
+“Only I’m not worthy of it?”
+
+“On the contrary,” Martin considered, “because the incident is not
+worthy.” He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome. “I confess you
+made a fool of me, Brissenden. That I am hungry and you are aware of it
+are only ordinary phenomena, and there’s no disgrace. You see, I laugh
+at the conventional little moralities of the herd; then you drift by,
+say a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the slave of the same
+little moralities.”
+
+“You were insulted,” Brissenden affirmed.
+
+“I certainly was, a moment ago. The prejudice of early youth, you know.
+I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have since learned.
+They are the skeletons in my particular closet.”
+
+“But you’ve got the door shut on them now?”
+
+“I certainly have.”
+
+“Sure?”
+
+“Sure.”
+
+“Then let’s go and get something to eat.”
+
+“I’ll go you,” Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current
+Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and seeing
+the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change back on the
+table.
+
+Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly
+weight of Brissenden’s hand upon his shoulder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+
+Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin’s second
+visitor. But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated
+Brissenden in her parlor’s grandeur of respectability.
+
+“Hope you don’t mind my coming?” Brissenden began.
+
+“No, no, not at all,” Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him to
+the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed. “But how did you know
+where I lived?”
+
+“Called up the Morses. Miss Morse answered the ’phone. And here I am.”
+He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the table.
+“There’s a book, by a poet. Read it and keep it.” And then, in reply to
+Martin’s protest: “What have I to do with books? I had another
+hemorrhage this morning. Got any whiskey? No, of course not. Wait a
+minute.”
+
+He was off and away. Martin watched his long figure go down the outside
+steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang the
+shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over the collapsed
+ruin of the chest. Martin got two tumblers, and fell to reading the
+book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow’s latest collection.
+
+“No Scotch,” Brissenden announced on his return. “The beggar sells
+nothing but American whiskey. But here’s a quart of it.”
+
+“I’ll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we’ll make a toddy,”
+Martin offered.
+
+“I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?” he went on, holding
+up the volume in question.
+
+“Possibly fifty dollars,” came the answer. “Though he’s lucky if he
+pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk bringing it
+out.”
+
+“Then one can’t make a living out of poetry?”
+
+Martin’s tone and face alike showed his dejection.
+
+“Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes. There’s
+Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick. They do very nicely. But
+poetry—do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his living?—teaching in a
+boys’ cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania, and of all private little
+hells such a billet is the limit. I wouldn’t trade places with him if
+he had fifty years of life before him. And yet his work stands out from
+the ruck of the contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots.
+And the reviews he gets! Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!”
+
+“Too much is written by the men who can’t write about the men who do
+write,” Martin concurred. “Why, I was appalled at the quantities of
+rubbish written about Stevenson and his work.”
+
+“Ghouls and harpies!” Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth. “Yes,
+I know the spawn—complacently pecking at him for his Father Damien
+letter, analyzing him, weighing him—”
+
+“Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos,” Martin
+broke in.
+
+“Yes, that’s it, a good phrase,—mouthing and besliming the True, and
+Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and saying,
+‘Good dog, Fido.’ Faugh! ‘The little chattering daws of men,’ Richard
+Realf called them the night he died.”
+
+“Pecking at star-dust,” Martin took up the strain warmly; “at the
+meteoric flight of the master-men. I once wrote a squib on them—the
+critics, or the reviewers, rather.”
+
+“Let’s see it,” Brissenden begged eagerly.
+
+So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of “Star-dust,” and during the
+reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to sip
+his toddy.
+
+“Strikes me you’re a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world of
+cowled gnomes who cannot see,” was his comment at the end of it. “Of
+course it was snapped up by the first magazine?”
+
+Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book. “It has been refused
+by twenty-seven of them.”
+
+Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit of
+coughing.
+
+“Say, you needn’t tell me you haven’t tackled poetry,” he gasped. “Let
+me see some of it.”
+
+“Don’t read it now,” Martin pleaded. “I want to talk with you. I’ll
+make up a bundle and you can take it home.”
+
+Brissenden departed with the “Love-cycle,” and “The Peri and the
+Pearl,” returning next day to greet Martin with:-
+
+“I want more.”
+
+Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin learned
+that Brissenden also was one. He was swept off his feet by the other’s
+work, and astounded that no attempt had been made to publish it.
+
+“A plague on all their houses!” was Brissenden’s answer to Martin’s
+volunteering to market his work for him. “Love Beauty for its own
+sake,” was his counsel, “and leave the magazines alone. Back to your
+ships and your sea—that’s my advice to you, Martin Eden. What do you
+want in these sick and rotten cities of men? You are cutting your
+throat every day you waste in them trying to prostitute beauty to the
+needs of magazinedom. What was it you quoted me the other day?—Oh, yes,
+‘Man, the latest of the ephemera.’ Well, what do you, the latest of the
+ephemera, want with fame? If you got it, it would be poison to you. You
+are too simple, too elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to
+prosper on such pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.
+Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her and damn the multitude!
+Success! What in hell’s success if it isn’t right there in your
+Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley’s ‘Apparition,’ in that
+‘Love-cycle,’ in those sea-poems?
+
+“It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in
+the doing of it. You can’t tell me. I know it. You know it. Beauty
+hurts you. It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not
+heal, a knife of flame. Why should you palter with magazines? Let
+beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty into gold? Anyway, you
+can’t; so there’s no use in my getting excited over it. You can read
+the magazines for a thousand years and you won’t find the value of one
+line of Keats. Leave fame and coin alone, sign away on a ship
+to-morrow, and go back to your sea.”
+
+“Not for fame, but for love,” Martin laughed. “Love seems to have no
+place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of Love.”
+
+Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly. “You are so young,
+Martin boy, so young. You will flutter high, but your wings are of the
+finest gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments. Do not scorch them. But
+of course you have scorched them already. It required some glorified
+petticoat to account for that ‘Love-cycle,’ and that’s the shame of
+it.”
+
+“It glorifies love as well as the petticoat,” Martin laughed.
+
+“The philosophy of madness,” was the retort. “So have I assured myself
+when wandering in hasheesh dreams. But beware. These bourgeois cities
+will kill you. Look at that den of traitors where I met you. Dry rot is
+no name for it. One can’t keep his sanity in such an atmosphere. It’s
+degrading. There’s not one of them who is not degrading, man and woman,
+all of them animated stomachs guided by the high intellectual and
+artistic impulses of clams—”
+
+He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin. Then, with a flash of
+divination, he saw the situation. The expression on his face turned to
+wondering horror.
+
+“And you wrote that tremendous ‘Love-cycle’ to her—that pale,
+shrivelled, female thing!”
+
+The next instant Martin’s right hand had shot to a throttling clutch on
+his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth rattled. But Martin,
+looking into his eyes, saw no fear there,—naught but a curious and
+mocking devil. Martin remembered himself, and flung Brissenden, by the
+neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the same moment releasing his hold.
+
+Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to
+chuckle.
+
+“You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the flame,”
+he said.
+
+“My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days,” Martin apologized. “Hope
+I didn’t hurt you. Here, let me mix a fresh toddy.”
+
+“Ah, you young Greek!” Brissenden went on. “I wonder if you take just
+pride in that body of yours. You are devilish strong. You are a young
+panther, a lion cub. Well, well, it is you who must pay for that
+strength.”
+
+“What do you mean?” Martin asked curiously, passing him a glass. “Here,
+down this and be good.”
+
+“Because—” Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of it.
+“Because of the women. They will worry you until you die, as they have
+already worried you, or else I was born yesterday. Now there’s no use
+in your choking me; I’m going to have my say. This is undoubtedly your
+calf love; but for Beauty’s sake show better taste next time. What
+under heaven do you want with a daughter of the bourgeoisie? Leave them
+alone. Pick out some great, wanton flame of a woman, who laughs at life
+and jeers at death and loves one while she may. There are such women,
+and they will love you just as readily as any pusillanimous product of
+bourgeois sheltered life.”
+
+“Pusillanimous?” Martin protested.
+
+“Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have been
+prattled into them, and afraid to live life. They will love you,
+Martin, but they will love their little moralities more. What you want
+is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls, the blazing
+butterflies and not the little gray moths. Oh, you will grow tired of
+them, too, of all the female things, if you are unlucky enough to live.
+But you won’t live. You won’t go back to your ships and sea; therefore,
+you’ll hang around these pest-holes of cities until your bones are
+rotten, and then you’ll die.”
+
+“You can lecture me, but you can’t make me talk back,” Martin said.
+“After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the wisdom
+of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours.”
+
+They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but they
+liked each other, and on Martin’s part it was no less than a profound
+liking. Day after day they were together, if for no more than the hour
+Brissenden spent in Martin’s stuffy room. Brissenden never arrived
+without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined together down-town,
+he drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal. He invariably paid the
+way for both, and it was through him that Martin learned the
+refinements of food, drank his first champagne, and made acquaintance
+with Rhenish wines.
+
+But Brissenden was always an enigma. With the face of an ascetic, he
+was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary. He was
+unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living; and yet,
+dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it. He was possessed by a
+madness to live, to thrill, “to squirm my little space in the cosmic
+dust whence I came,” as he phrased it once himself. He had tampered
+with drugs and done many strange things in quest of new thrills, new
+sensations. As he told Martin, he had once gone three days without
+water, had done so voluntarily, in order to experience the exquisite
+delight of such a thirst assuaged. Who or what he was, Martin never
+learned. He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent
+grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+
+Martin was steadily losing his battle. Economize as he would, the
+earnings from hack-work did not balance expenses. Thanksgiving found
+him with his black suit in pawn and unable to accept the Morses’
+invitation to dinner. Ruth was not made happy by his reason for not
+coming, and the corresponding effect on him was one of desperation. He
+told her that he would come, after all; that he would go over to San
+Francisco, to the _Transcontinental_ office, collect the five dollars
+due him, and with it redeem his suit of clothes.
+
+In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria. He would have borrowed
+it, by preference, from Brissenden, but that erratic individual had
+disappeared. Two weeks had passed since Martin had seen him, and he
+vainly cudgelled his brains for some cause of offence. The ten cents
+carried Martin across the ferry to San Francisco, and as he walked up
+Market Street he speculated upon his predicament in case he failed to
+collect the money. There would then be no way for him to return to
+Oakland, and he knew no one in San Francisco from whom to borrow
+another ten cents.
+
+The door to the _Transcontinental_ office was ajar, and Martin, in the
+act of opening it, was brought to a sudden pause by a loud voice from
+within, which exclaimed:- “But that is not the question, Mr. Ford.”
+(Ford, Martin knew, from his correspondence, to be the editor’s name.)
+“The question is, are you prepared to pay?—cash, and cash down, I mean?
+I am not interested in the prospects of the _Transcontinental_ and what
+you expect to make it next year. What I want is to be paid for what I
+do. And I tell you, right now, the Christmas _Transcontinental_ don’t
+go to press till I have the money in my hand. Good day. When you get
+the money, come and see me.”
+
+The door jerked open, and the man flung past Martin, with an angry
+countenance and went down the corridor, muttering curses and clenching
+his fists. Martin decided not to enter immediately, and lingered in the
+hallways for a quarter of an hour. Then he shoved the door open and
+walked in. It was a new experience, the first time he had been inside
+an editorial office. Cards evidently were not necessary in that office,
+for the boy carried word to an inner room that there was a man who
+wanted to see Mr. Ford. Returning, the boy beckoned him from halfway
+across the room and led him to the private office, the editorial
+sanctum. Martin’s first impression was of the disorder and cluttered
+confusion of the room. Next he noticed a bewhiskered, youthful-looking
+man, sitting at a roll-top desk, who regarded him curiously. Martin
+marvelled at the calm repose of his face. It was evident that the
+squabble with the printer had not affected his equanimity.
+
+“I—I am Martin Eden,” Martin began the conversation. (“And I want my
+five dollars,” was what he would have liked to say.)
+
+But this was his first editor, and under the circumstances he did not
+desire to scare him too abruptly. To his surprise, Mr. Ford leaped into
+the air with a “You don’t say so!” and the next moment, with both
+hands, was shaking Martin’s hand effusively.
+
+“Can’t say how glad I am to see you, Mr. Eden. Often wondered what you
+were like.”
+
+Here he held Martin off at arm’s length and ran his beaming eyes over
+Martin’s second-best suit, which was also his worst suit, and which was
+ragged and past repair, though the trousers showed the careful crease
+he had put in with Maria’s flat-irons.
+
+“I confess, though, I conceived you to be a much older man than you
+are. Your story, you know, showed such breadth, and vigor, such
+maturity and depth of thought. A masterpiece, that story—I knew it when
+I had read the first half-dozen lines. Let me tell you how I first read
+it. But no; first let me introduce you to the staff.”
+
+Still talking, Mr. Ford led him into the general office, where he
+introduced him to the associate editor, Mr. White, a slender, frail
+little man whose hand seemed strangely cold, as if he were suffering
+from a chill, and whose whiskers were sparse and silky.
+
+“And Mr. Ends, Mr. Eden. Mr. Ends is our business manager, you know.”
+
+Martin found himself shaking hands with a cranky-eyed, bald-headed man,
+whose face looked youthful enough from what little could be seen of it,
+for most of it was covered by a snow-white beard, carefully trimmed—by
+his wife, who did it on Sundays, at which times she also shaved the
+back of his neck.
+
+The three men surrounded Martin, all talking admiringly and at once,
+until it seemed to him that they were talking against time for a wager.
+
+“We often wondered why you didn’t call,” Mr. White was saying.
+
+“I didn’t have the carfare, and I live across the Bay,” Martin answered
+bluntly, with the idea of showing them his imperative need for the
+money.
+
+Surely, he thought to himself, my glad rags in themselves are eloquent
+advertisement of my need. Time and again, whenever opportunity offered,
+he hinted about the purpose of his business. But his admirers’ ears
+were deaf. They sang his praises, told him what they had thought of his
+story at first sight, what they subsequently thought, what their wives
+and families thought; but not one hint did they breathe of intention to
+pay him for it.
+
+“Did I tell you how I first read your story?” Mr. Ford said. “Of course
+I didn’t. I was coming west from New York, and when the train stopped
+at Ogden, the train-boy on the new run brought aboard the current
+number of the _Transcontinental_.”
+
+My God! Martin thought; you can travel in a Pullman while I starve for
+the paltry five dollars you owe me. A wave of anger rushed over him.
+The wrong done him by the _Transcontinental_ loomed colossal, for
+strong upon him were all the dreary months of vain yearning, of hunger
+and privation, and his present hunger awoke and gnawed at him,
+reminding him that he had eaten nothing since the day before, and
+little enough then. For the moment he saw red. These creatures were not
+even robbers. They were sneak-thieves. By lies and broken promises they
+had tricked him out of his story. Well, he would show them. And a great
+resolve surged into his will to the effect that he would not leave the
+office until he got his money. He remembered, if he did not get it,
+that there was no way for him to go back to Oakland. He controlled
+himself with an effort, but not before the wolfish expression of his
+face had awed and perturbed them.
+
+They became more voluble than ever. Mr. Ford started anew to tell how
+he had first read “The Ring of Bells,” and Mr. Ends at the same time
+was striving to repeat his niece’s appreciation of “The Ring of Bells,”
+said niece being a school-teacher in Alameda.
+
+“I’ll tell you what I came for,” Martin said finally. “To be paid for
+that story all of you like so well. Five dollars, I believe, is what
+you promised me would be paid on publication.”
+
+Mr. Ford, with an expression on his mobile features of mediate and
+happy acquiescence, started to reach for his pocket, then turned
+suddenly to Mr. Ends, and said that he had left his money home. That
+Mr. Ends resented this, was patent; and Martin saw the twitch of his
+arm as if to protect his trousers pocket. Martin knew that the money
+was there.
+
+“I am sorry,” said Mr. Ends, “but I paid the printer not an hour ago,
+and he took my ready change. It was careless of me to be so short; but
+the bill was not yet due, and the printer’s request, as a favor, to
+make an immediate advance, was quite unexpected.”
+
+Both men looked expectantly at Mr. White, but that gentleman laughed
+and shrugged his shoulders. His conscience was clean at any rate. He
+had come into the _Transcontinental_ to learn magazine-literature,
+instead of which he had principally learned finance. The
+_Transcontinental_ owed him four months’ salary, and he knew that the
+printer must be appeased before the associate editor.
+
+“It’s rather absurd, Mr. Eden, to have caught us in this shape,” Mr.
+Ford preambled airily. “All carelessness, I assure you. But I’ll tell
+you what we’ll do. We’ll mail you a check the first thing in the
+morning. You have Mr. Eden’s address, haven’t you, Mr. Ends?”
+
+Yes, Mr. Ends had the address, and the check would be mailed the first
+thing in the morning. Martin’s knowledge of banks and checks was hazy,
+but he could see no reason why they should not give him the check on
+this day just as well as on the next.
+
+“Then it is understood, Mr. Eden, that we’ll mail you the check
+to-morrow?” Mr. Ford said.
+
+“I need the money to-day,” Martin answered stolidly.
+
+“The unfortunate circumstances—if you had chanced here any other day,”
+Mr. Ford began suavely, only to be interrupted by Mr. Ends, whose
+cranky eyes justified themselves in his shortness of temper.
+
+“Mr. Ford has already explained the situation,” he said with asperity.
+“And so have I. The check will be mailed—”
+
+“I also have explained,” Martin broke in, “and I have explained that I
+want the money to-day.”
+
+He had felt his pulse quicken a trifle at the business manager’s
+brusqueness, and upon him he kept an alert eye, for it was in that
+gentleman’s trousers pocket that he divined the _Transcontinental’s_
+ready cash was reposing.
+
+“It is too bad—” Mr. Ford began.
+
+But at that moment, with an impatient movement, Mr. Ends turned as if
+about to leave the room. At the same instant Martin sprang for him,
+clutching him by the throat with one hand in such fashion that Mr.
+Ends’ snow-white beard, still maintaining its immaculate trimness,
+pointed ceilingward at an angle of forty-five degrees. To the horror of
+Mr. White and Mr. Ford, they saw their business manager shaken like an
+Astrakhan rug.
+
+“Dig up, you venerable discourager of rising young talent!” Martin
+exhorted. “Dig up, or I’ll shake it out of you, even if it’s all in
+nickels.” Then, to the two affrighted onlookers: “Keep away! If you
+interfere, somebody’s liable to get hurt.”
+
+Mr. Ends was choking, and it was not until the grip on his throat was
+eased that he was able to signify his acquiescence in the digging-up
+programme. All together, after repeated digs, its trousers pocket
+yielded four dollars and fifteen cents.
+
+“Inside out with it,” Martin commanded.
+
+An additional ten cents fell out. Martin counted the result of his raid
+a second time to make sure.
+
+“You next!” he shouted at Mr. Ford. “I want seventy-five cents more.”
+
+Mr. Ford did not wait, but ransacked his pockets, with the result of
+sixty cents.
+
+“Sure that is all?” Martin demanded menacingly, possessing himself of
+it. “What have you got in your vest pockets?”
+
+In token of his good faith, Mr. Ford turned two of his pockets inside
+out. A strip of cardboard fell to the floor from one of them. He
+recovered it and was in the act of returning it, when Martin cried:-
+
+“What’s that?—A ferry ticket? Here, give it to me. It’s worth ten
+cents. I’ll credit you with it. I’ve now got four dollars and
+ninety-five cents, including the ticket. Five cents is still due me.”
+
+He looked fiercely at Mr. White, and found that fragile creature in the
+act of handing him a nickel.
+
+“Thank you,” Martin said, addressing them collectively. “I wish you a
+good day.”
+
+“Robber!” Mr. Ends snarled after him.
+
+“Sneak-thief!” Martin retorted, slamming the door as he passed out.
+
+Martin was elated—so elated that when he recollected that _The Hornet_
+owed him fifteen dollars for “The Peri and the Pearl,” he decided
+forthwith to go and collect it. But _The Hornet_ was run by a set of
+clean-shaven, strapping young men, frank buccaneers who robbed
+everything and everybody, not excepting one another. After some
+breakage of the office furniture, the editor (an ex-college athlete),
+ably assisted by the business manager, an advertising agent, and the
+porter, succeeded in removing Martin from the office and in
+accelerating, by initial impulse, his descent of the first flight of
+stairs.
+
+“Come again, Mr. Eden; glad to see you any time,” they laughed down at
+him from the landing above.
+
+Martin grinned as he picked himself up.
+
+“Phew!” he murmured back. “The _Transcontinental_ crowd were
+nanny-goats, but you fellows are a lot of prize-fighters.”
+
+More laughter greeted this.
+
+“I must say, Mr. Eden,” the editor of _The Hornet_ called down, “that
+for a poet you can go some yourself. Where did you learn that right
+cross—if I may ask?”
+
+“Where you learned that half-Nelson,” Martin answered. “Anyway, you’re
+going to have a black eye.”
+
+“I hope your neck doesn’t stiffen up,” the editor wished solicitously:
+“What do you say we all go out and have a drink on it—not the neck, of
+course, but the little rough-house?”
+
+“I’ll go you if I lose,” Martin accepted.
+
+And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably agreeing that the
+battle was to the strong, and that the fifteen dollars for “The Peri
+and the Pearl” belonged by right to _The Hornet’s_ editorial staff.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+
+Arthur remained at the gate while Ruth climbed Maria’s front steps. She
+heard the rapid click of the type-writer, and when Martin let her in,
+found him on the last page of a manuscript. She had come to make
+certain whether or not he would be at their table for Thanksgiving
+dinner; but before she could broach the subject Martin plunged into the
+one with which he was full.
+
+“Here, let me read you this,” he cried, separating the carbon copies
+and running the pages of manuscript into shape. “It’s my latest, and
+different from anything I’ve done. It is so altogether different that I
+am almost afraid of it, and yet I’ve a sneaking idea it is good. You be
+judge. It’s an Hawaiian story. I’ve called it ‘Wiki-wiki.’”
+
+His face was bright with the creative glow, though she shivered in the
+cold room and had been struck by the coldness of his hands at greeting.
+She listened closely while he read, and though he from time to time had
+seen only disapprobation in her face, at the close he asked:-
+
+“Frankly, what do you think of it?”
+
+“I—I don’t know,” she, answered. “Will it—do you think it will sell?”
+
+“I’m afraid not,” was the confession. “It’s too strong for the
+magazines. But it’s true, on my word it’s true.”
+
+“But why do you persist in writing such things when you know they won’t
+sell?” she went on inexorably. “The reason for your writing is to make
+a living, isn’t it?”
+
+“Yes, that’s right; but the miserable story got away with me. I
+couldn’t help writing it. It demanded to be written.”
+
+“But that character, that Wiki-Wiki, why do you make him talk so
+roughly? Surely it will offend your readers, and surely that is why the
+editors are justified in refusing your work.”
+
+“Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way.”
+
+“But it is not good taste.”
+
+“It is life,” he replied bluntly. “It is real. It is true. And I must
+write life as I see it.”
+
+She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they sat silent. It was
+because he loved her that he did not quite understand her, and she
+could not understand him because he was so large that he bulked beyond
+her horizon.
+
+“Well, I’ve collected from the _Transcontinental_,” he said in an
+effort to shift the conversation to a more comfortable subject. The
+picture of the bewhiskered trio, as he had last seen them, mulcted of
+four dollars and ninety cents and a ferry ticket, made him chuckle.
+
+“Then you’ll come!” she cried joyously. “That was what I came to find
+out.”
+
+“Come?” he muttered absently. “Where?”
+
+“Why, to dinner to-morrow. You know you said you’d recover your suit if
+you got that money.”
+
+“I forgot all about it,” he said humbly. “You see, this morning the
+poundman got Maria’s two cows and the baby calf, and—well, it happened
+that Maria didn’t have any money, and so I had to recover her cows for
+her. That’s where the _Transcontinental_ fiver went—‘The Ring of Bells’
+went into the poundman’s pocket.”
+
+“Then you won’t come?”
+
+He looked down at his clothing.
+
+“I can’t.”
+
+Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her blue eyes, but
+she said nothing.
+
+“Next Thanksgiving you’ll have dinner with me in Delmonico’s,” he said
+cheerily; “or in London, or Paris, or anywhere you wish. I know it.”
+
+“I saw in the paper a few days ago,” she announced abruptly, “that
+there had been several local appointments to the Railway Mail. You
+passed first, didn’t you?”
+
+He was compelled to admit that the call had come for him, but that he
+had declined it. “I was so sure—I am so sure—of myself,” he concluded.
+“A year from now I’ll be earning more than a dozen men in the Railway
+Mail. You wait and see.”
+
+“Oh,” was all she said, when he finished. She stood up, pulling at her
+gloves. “I must go, Martin. Arthur is waiting for me.”
+
+He took her in his arms and kissed her, but she proved a passive
+sweetheart. There was no tenseness in her body, her arms did not go
+around him, and her lips met his without their wonted pressure.
+
+She was angry with him, he concluded, as he returned from the gate. But
+why? It was unfortunate that the poundman had gobbled Maria’s cows. But
+it was only a stroke of fate. Nobody could be blamed for it. Nor did it
+enter his head that he could have done aught otherwise than what he had
+done. Well, yes, he was to blame a little, was his next thought, for
+having refused the call to the Railway Mail. And she had not liked
+“Wiki-Wiki.”
+
+He turned at the head of the steps to meet the letter-carrier on his
+afternoon round. The ever recurrent fever of expectancy assailed Martin
+as he took the bundle of long envelopes. One was not long. It was short
+and thin, and outside was printed the address of _The New York
+Outview_. He paused in the act of tearing the envelope open. It could
+not be an acceptance. He had no manuscripts with that publication.
+Perhaps—his heart almost stood still at the—wild thought—perhaps they
+were ordering an article from him; but the next instant he dismissed
+the surmise as hopelessly impossible.
+
+It was a short, formal letter, signed by the office editor, merely
+informing him that an anonymous letter which they had received was
+enclosed, and that he could rest assured the _Outview’s_ staff never
+under any circumstances gave consideration to anonymous correspondence.
+
+The enclosed letter Martin found to be crudely printed by hand. It was
+a hotchpotch of illiterate abuse of Martin, and of assertion that the
+“so-called Martin Eden” who was selling stories to magazines was no
+writer at all, and that in reality he was stealing stories from old
+magazines, typing them, and sending them out as his own. The envelope
+was postmarked “San Leandro.” Martin did not require a second thought
+to discover the author. Higginbotham’s grammar, Higginbotham’s
+colloquialisms, Higginbotham’s mental quirks and processes, were
+apparent throughout. Martin saw in every line, not the fine Italian
+hand, but the coarse grocer’s fist, of his brother-in-law.
+
+But why? he vainly questioned. What injury had he done Bernard
+Higginbotham? The thing was so unreasonable, so wanton. There was no
+explaining it. In the course of the week a dozen similar letters were
+forwarded to Martin by the editors of various Eastern magazines. The
+editors were behaving handsomely, Martin concluded. He was wholly
+unknown to them, yet some of them had even been sympathetic. It was
+evident that they detested anonymity. He saw that the malicious attempt
+to hurt him had failed. In fact, if anything came of it, it was bound
+to be good, for at least his name had been called to the attention of a
+number of editors. Sometime, perhaps, reading a submitted manuscript of
+his, they might remember him as the fellow about whom they had received
+an anonymous letter. And who was to say that such a remembrance might
+not sway the balance of their judgment just a trifle in his favor?
+
+It was about this time that Martin took a great slump in Maria’s
+estimation. He found her in the kitchen one morning groaning with pain,
+tears of weakness running down her cheeks, vainly endeavoring to put
+through a large ironing. He promptly diagnosed her affliction as La
+Grippe, dosed her with hot whiskey (the remnants in the bottles for
+which Brissenden was responsible), and ordered her to bed. But Maria
+was refractory. The ironing had to be done, she protested, and
+delivered that night, or else there would be no food on the morrow for
+the seven small and hungry Silvas.
+
+To her astonishment (and it was something that she never ceased from
+relating to her dying day), she saw Martin Eden seize an iron from the
+stove and throw a fancy shirt-waist on the ironing-board. It was Kate
+Flanagan’s best Sunday waist, than whom there was no more exacting and
+fastidiously dressed woman in Maria’s world. Also, Miss Flanagan had
+sent special instruction that said waist must be delivered by that
+night. As every one knew, she was keeping company with John Collins,
+the blacksmith, and, as Maria knew privily, Miss Flanagan and Mr.
+Collins were going next day to Golden Gate Park. Vain was Maria’s
+attempt to rescue the garment. Martin guided her tottering footsteps to
+a chair, from where she watched him with bulging eyes. In a quarter of
+the time it would have taken her she saw the shirt-waist safely ironed,
+and ironed as well as she could have done it, as Martin made her grant.
+
+“I could work faster,” he explained, “if your irons were only hotter.”
+
+To her, the irons he swung were much hotter than she ever dared to use.
+
+“Your sprinkling is all wrong,” he complained next. “Here, let me teach
+you how to sprinkle. Pressure is what’s wanted. Sprinkle under pressure
+if you want to iron fast.”
+
+He procured a packing-case from the woodpile in the cellar, fitted a
+cover to it, and raided the scrap-iron the Silva tribe was collecting
+for the junkman. With fresh-sprinkled garments in the box, covered with
+the board and pressed by the iron, the device was complete and in
+operation.
+
+“Now you watch me, Maria,” he said, stripping off to his undershirt and
+gripping an iron that was what he called “really hot.”
+
+“An’ when he feenish da iron’ he washa da wools,” as she described it
+afterward. “He say, ‘Maria, you are da greata fool. I showa you how to
+washa da wools,’ an’ he shows me, too. Ten minutes he maka da
+machine—one barrel, one wheel-hub, two poles, justa like dat.”
+
+Martin had learned the contrivance from Joe at the Shelly Hot Springs.
+The old wheel-hub, fixed on the end of the upright pole, constituted
+the plunger. Making this, in turn, fast to the spring-pole attached to
+the kitchen rafters, so that the hub played upon the woollens in the
+barrel, he was able, with one hand, thoroughly to pound them.
+
+“No more Maria washa da wools,” her story always ended. “I maka da kids
+worka da pole an’ da hub an’ da barrel. Him da smarta man, Mister
+Eden.”
+
+Nevertheless, by his masterly operation and improvement of her
+kitchen-laundry he fell an immense distance in her regard. The glamour
+of romance with which her imagination had invested him faded away in
+the cold light of fact that he was an ex-laundryman. All his books, and
+his grand friends who visited him in carriages or with countless
+bottles of whiskey, went for naught. He was, after all, a mere
+workingman, a member of her own class and caste. He was more human and
+approachable, but, he was no longer mystery.
+
+Martin’s alienation from his family continued. Following upon Mr.
+Higginbotham’s unprovoked attack, Mr. Hermann von Schmidt showed his
+hand. The fortunate sale of several storiettes, some humorous verse,
+and a few jokes gave Martin a temporary splurge of prosperity. Not only
+did he partially pay up his bills, but he had sufficient balance left
+to redeem his black suit and wheel. The latter, by virtue of a twisted
+crank-hanger, required repairing, and, as a matter of friendliness with
+his future brother-in-law, he sent it to Von Schmidt’s shop.
+
+The afternoon of the same day Martin was pleased by the wheel being
+delivered by a small boy. Von Schmidt was also inclined to be friendly,
+was Martin’s conclusion from this unusual favor. Repaired wheels
+usually had to be called for. But when he examined the wheel, he
+discovered no repairs had been made. A little later in the day he
+telephoned his sister’s betrothed, and learned that that person didn’t
+want anything to do with him in “any shape, manner, or form.”
+
+“Hermann von Schmidt,” Martin answered cheerfully, “I’ve a good mind to
+come over and punch that Dutch nose of yours.”
+
+“You come to my shop,” came the reply, “an’ I’ll send for the police.
+An’ I’ll put you through, too. Oh, I know you, but you can’t make no
+rough-house with me. I don’t want nothin’ to do with the likes of you.
+You’re a loafer, that’s what, an’ I ain’t asleep. You ain’t goin’ to do
+no spongin’ off me just because I’m marryin’ your sister. Why don’t you
+go to work an’ earn an honest livin’, eh? Answer me that.”
+
+Martin’s philosophy asserted itself, dissipating his anger, and he hung
+up the receiver with a long whistle of incredulous amusement. But after
+the amusement came the reaction, and he was oppressed by his
+loneliness. Nobody understood him, nobody seemed to have any use for
+him, except Brissenden, and Brissenden had disappeared, God alone knew
+where.
+
+Twilight was falling as Martin left the fruit store and turned
+homeward, his marketing on his arm. At the corner an electric car had
+stopped, and at sight of a lean, familiar figure alighting, his heart
+leapt with joy. It was Brissenden, and in the fleeting glimpse, ere the
+car started up, Martin noted the overcoat pockets, one bulging with
+books, the other bulging with a quart bottle of whiskey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+
+Brissenden gave no explanation of his long absence, nor did Martin pry
+into it. He was content to see his friend’s cadaverous face opposite
+him through the steam rising from a tumbler of toddy.
+
+“I, too, have not been idle,” Brissenden proclaimed, after hearing
+Martin’s account of the work he had accomplished.
+
+He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and passed it to
+Martin, who looked at the title and glanced up curiously.
+
+“Yes, that’s it,” Brissenden laughed. “Pretty good title, eh?
+‘Ephemera’—it is the one word. And you’re responsible for it, what of
+your _man_, who is always the erected, the vitalized inorganic, the
+latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature strutting his
+little space on the thermometer. It got into my head and I had to write
+it to get rid of it. Tell me what you think of it.”
+
+Martin’s face, flushed at first, paled as he read on. It was perfect
+art. Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be called where
+the last conceivable atom of substance had found expression in so
+perfect construction as to make Martin’s head swim with delight, to put
+passionate tears into his eyes, and to send chills creeping up and down
+his back. It was a long poem of six or seven hundred lines, and it was
+a fantastic, amazing, unearthly thing. It was terrific, impossible; and
+yet there it was, scrawled in black ink across the sheets of paper. It
+dealt with man and his soul-gropings in their ultimate terms, plumbing
+the abysses of space for the testimony of remotest suns and rainbow
+spectrums. It was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of
+a dying man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the
+wild flutter of fading heart-beats. The poem swung in majestic rhythm
+to the cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry
+hosts, to the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebulae in the
+darkened void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a silver
+shuttle, ran the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous chirp amid the
+screaming of planets and the crash of systems.
+
+“There is nothing like it in literature,” Martin said, when at last he
+was able to speak. “It’s wonderful!—wonderful! It has gone to my head.
+I am drunken with it. That great, infinitesimal question—I can’t shake
+it out of my thoughts. That questing, eternal, ever recurring, thin
+little wailing voice of man is still ringing in my ears. It is like the
+dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring
+of lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I now I’m making a
+fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me. You are—I don’t know
+what you are—you are wonderful, that’s all. But how do you do it? How
+do you do it?”
+
+Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.
+
+“I shall never write again. I am a dauber in clay. You have shown me
+the work of the real artificer-artisan. Genius! This is something more
+than genius. It transcends genius. It is truth gone mad. It is true,
+man, every line of it. I wonder if you realize that, you dogmatist.
+Science cannot give you the lie. It is the truth of the sneer, stamped
+out from the black iron of the Cosmos and interwoven with mighty
+rhythms of sound into a fabric of splendor and beauty. And now I won’t
+say another word. I am overwhelmed, crushed. Yes, I will, too. Let me
+market it for you.”
+
+Brissenden grinned. “There’s not a magazine in Christendom that would
+dare to publish it—you know that.”
+
+“I know nothing of the sort. I know there’s not a magazine in
+Christendom that wouldn’t jump at it. They don’t get things like that
+every day. That’s no mere poem of the year. It’s the poem of the
+century.”
+
+“I’d like to take you up on the proposition.”
+
+“Now don’t get cynical,” Martin exhorted. “The magazine editors are not
+wholly fatuous. I know that. And I’ll close with you on the bet. I’ll
+wager anything you want that ‘Ephemera’ is accepted either on the first
+or second offering.”
+
+“There’s just one thing that prevents me from taking you.” Brissenden
+waited a moment. “The thing is big—the biggest I’ve ever done. I know
+that. It’s my swan song. I am almighty proud of it. I worship it. It’s
+better than whiskey. It is what I dreamed of—the great and perfect
+thing—when I was a simple young man, with sweet illusions and clean
+ideals. And I’ve got it, now, in my last grasp, and I’ll not have it
+pawed over and soiled by a lot of swine. No, I won’t take the bet. It’s
+mine. I made it, and I’ve shared it with you.”
+
+“But think of the rest of the world,” Martin protested. “The function
+of beauty is joy-making.”
+
+“It’s my beauty.”
+
+“Don’t be selfish.”
+
+“I’m not selfish.” Brissenden grinned soberly in the way he had when
+pleased by the thing his thin lips were about to shape. “I’m as
+unselfish as a famished hog.”
+
+In vain Martin strove to shake him from his decision. Martin told him
+that his hatred of the magazines was rabid, fanatical, and that his
+conduct was a thousand times more despicable than that of the youth who
+burned the temple of Diana at Ephesus. Under the storm of denunciation
+Brissenden complacently sipped his toddy and affirmed that everything
+the other said was quite true, with the exception of the magazine
+editors. His hatred of them knew no bounds, and he excelled Martin in
+denunciation when he turned upon them.
+
+“I wish you’d type it for me,” he said. “You know how a thousand times
+better than any stenographer. And now I want to give you some advice.”
+He drew a bulky manuscript from his outside coat pocket. “Here’s your
+‘Shame of the Sun.’ I’ve read it not once, but twice and three
+times—the highest compliment I can pay you. After what you’ve said
+about ‘Ephemera’ I must be silent. But this I will say: when ‘The Shame
+of the Sun’ is published, it will make a hit. It will start a
+controversy that will be worth thousands to you just in advertising.”
+
+Martin laughed. “I suppose your next advice will be to submit it to the
+magazines.”
+
+“By all means no—that is, if you want to see it in print. Offer it to
+the first-class houses. Some publisher’s reader may be mad enough or
+drunk enough to report favorably on it. You’ve read the books. The meat
+of them has been transmuted in the alembic of Martin Eden’s mind and
+poured into ‘The Shame of the Sun,’ and one day Martin Eden will be
+famous, and not the least of his fame will rest upon that work. So you
+must get a publisher for it—the sooner the better.”
+
+Brissenden went home late that night; and just as he mounted the first
+step of the car, he swung suddenly back on Martin and thrust into his
+hand a small, tightly crumpled wad of paper.
+
+“Here, take this,” he said. “I was out to the races to-day, and I had
+the right dope.”
+
+The bell clanged and the car pulled out, leaving Martin wondering as to
+the nature of the crinkly, greasy wad he clutched in his hand. Back in
+his room he unrolled it and found a hundred-dollar bill.
+
+He did not scruple to use it. He knew his friend had always plenty of
+money, and he knew also, with profound certitude, that his success
+would enable him to repay it. In the morning he paid every bill, gave
+Maria three months’ advance on the room, and redeemed every pledge at
+the pawnshop. Next he bought Marian’s wedding present, and simpler
+presents, suitable to Christmas, for Ruth and Gertrude. And finally, on
+the balance remaining to him, he herded the whole Silva tribe down into
+Oakland. He was a winter late in redeeming his promise, but redeemed it
+was, for the last, least Silva got a pair of shoes, as well as Maria
+herself. Also, there were horns, and dolls, and toys of various sorts,
+and parcels and bundles of candies and nuts that filled the arms of all
+the Silvas to overflowing.
+
+It was with this extraordinary procession trooping at his and Maria’s
+heels into a confectioner’s in quest of the biggest candy-cane ever
+made, that he encountered Ruth and her mother. Mrs. Morse was shocked.
+Even Ruth was hurt, for she had some regard for appearances, and her
+lover, cheek by jowl with Maria, at the head of that army of Portuguese
+ragamuffins, was not a pretty sight. But it was not that which hurt so
+much as what she took to be his lack of pride and self-respect.
+Further, and keenest of all, she read into the incident the
+impossibility of his living down his working-class origin. There was
+stigma enough in the fact of it, but shamelessly to flaunt it in the
+face of the world—her world—was going too far. Though her engagement to
+Martin had been kept secret, their long intimacy had not been
+unproductive of gossip; and in the shop, glancing covertly at her lover
+and his following, had been several of her acquaintances. She lacked
+the easy largeness of Martin and could not rise superior to her
+environment. She had been hurt to the quick, and her sensitive nature
+was quivering with the shame of it. So it was, when Martin arrived
+later in the day, that he kept her present in his breast-pocket,
+deferring the giving of it to a more propitious occasion. Ruth in
+tears—passionate, angry tears—was a revelation to him. The spectacle of
+her suffering convinced him that he had been a brute, yet in the soul
+of him he could not see how nor why. It never entered his head to be
+ashamed of those he knew, and to take the Silvas out to a Christmas
+treat could in no way, so it seemed to him, show lack of consideration
+for Ruth. On the other hand, he did see Ruth’s point of view, after she
+had explained it; and he looked upon it as a feminine weakness, such as
+afflicted all women and the best of women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI.
+
+
+“Come on,—I’ll show you the real dirt,” Brissenden said to him, one
+evening in January.
+
+They had dined together in San Francisco, and were at the Ferry
+Building, returning to Oakland, when the whim came to him to show
+Martin the “real dirt.” He turned and fled across the water-front, a
+meagre shadow in a flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to keep up
+with him. At a wholesale liquor store he bought two gallon-demijohns of
+old port, and with one in each hand boarded a Mission Street car,
+Martin at his heels burdened with several quart-bottles of whiskey.
+
+If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he wondered as to what
+constituted the real dirt.
+
+“Maybe nobody will be there,” Brissenden said, when they dismounted and
+plunged off to the right into the heart of the working-class ghetto,
+south of Market Street. “In which case you’ll miss what you’ve been
+looking for so long.”
+
+“And what the deuce is that?” Martin asked.
+
+“Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonentities I found you
+consorting with in that trader’s den. You read the books and you found
+yourself all alone. Well, I’m going to show you to-night some other men
+who’ve read the books, so that you won’t be lonely any more.”
+
+“Not that I bother my head about their everlasting discussions,” he
+said at the end of a block. “I’m not interested in book philosophy. But
+you’ll find these fellows intelligences and not bourgeois swine. But
+watch out, they’ll talk an arm off of you on any subject under the
+sun.”
+
+“Hope Norton’s there,” he panted a little later, resisting Martin’s
+effort to relieve him of the two demijohns. “Norton’s an idealist—a
+Harvard man. Prodigious memory. Idealism led him to philosophic
+anarchy, and his family threw him off. Father’s a railroad president
+and many times millionnaire, but the son’s starving in ’Frisco, editing
+an anarchist sheet for twenty-five a month.”
+
+Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not at all south of
+Market; so he had no idea of where he was being led.
+
+“Go ahead,” he said; “tell me about them beforehand. What do they do
+for a living? How do they happen to be here?”
+
+“Hope Hamilton’s there.” Brissenden paused and rested his hands.
+“Strawn-Hamilton’s his name—hyphenated, you know—comes of old Southern
+stock. He’s a tramp—laziest man I ever knew, though he’s clerking, or
+trying to, in a socialist coöperative store for six dollars a week. But
+he’s a confirmed hobo. Tramped into town. I’ve seen him sit all day on
+a bench and never a bite pass his lips, and in the evening, when I
+invited him to dinner—restaurant two blocks away—have him say, ‘Too
+much trouble, old man. Buy me a package of cigarettes instead.’ He was
+a Spencerian like you till Kreis turned him to materialistic monism.
+I’ll start him on monism if I can. Norton’s another monist—only he
+affirms naught but spirit. He can give Kreis and Hamilton all they
+want, too.”
+
+“Who is Kreis?” Martin asked.
+
+“His rooms we’re going to. One time professor—fired from
+university—usual story. A mind like a steel trap. Makes his living any
+old way. I know he’s been a street fakir when he was down.
+Unscrupulous. Rob a corpse of a shroud—anything. Difference between him
+and the bourgeoisie is that he robs without illusion. He’ll talk
+Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant, or anything, but the only thing in
+this world, not excepting Mary, that he really cares for, is his
+monism. Haeckel is his little tin god. The only way to insult him is to
+take a slap at Haeckel.”
+
+“Here’s the hang-out.” Brissenden rested his demijohn at the upstairs
+entrance, preliminary to the climb. It was the usual two-story corner
+building, with a saloon and grocery underneath. “The gang lives
+here—got the whole upstairs to themselves. But Kreis is the only one
+who has two rooms. Come on.”
+
+No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden threaded the utter
+blackness like a familiar ghost. He stopped to speak to Martin.
+
+“There’s one fellow—Stevens—a theosophist. Makes a pretty tangle when
+he gets going. Just now he’s dish-washer in a restaurant. Likes a good
+cigar. I’ve seen him eat in a ten-cent hash-house and pay fifty cents
+for the cigar he smoked afterward. I’ve got a couple in my pocket for
+him, if he shows up.”
+
+“And there’s another fellow—Parry—an Australian, a statistician and a
+sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay for 1903,
+or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what
+weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight
+champion of the United States in ’68, and you’ll get the correct answer
+with the automatic celerity of a slot-machine. And there’s Andy, a
+stone-mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; and another
+fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot socialist and strong union man. By the
+way, you remember Cooks’ and Waiters’ strike—Hamilton was the chap who
+organized that union and precipitated the strike—planned it all out in
+advance, right here in Kreis’s rooms. Did it just for the fun of it,
+but was too lazy to stay by the union. Yet he could have risen high if
+he wanted to. There’s no end to the possibilities in that man—if he
+weren’t so insuperably lazy.”
+
+Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread of light marked
+the threshold of a door. A knock and an answer opened it, and Martin
+found himself shaking hands with Kreis, a handsome brunette man, with
+dazzling white teeth, a drooping black mustache, and large, flashing
+black eyes. Mary, a matronly young blonde, was washing dishes in the
+little back room that served for kitchen and dining room. The front
+room served as bedchamber and living room. Overhead was the week’s
+washing, hanging in festoons so low that Martin did not see at first
+the two men talking in a corner. They hailed Brissenden and his
+demijohns with acclamation, and, on being introduced, Martin learned
+they were Andy and Parry. He joined them and listened attentively to
+the description of a prize-fight Parry had seen the night before; while
+Brissenden, in his glory, plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and
+the serving of wine and whiskey-and-sodas. At his command, “Bring in
+the clan,” Andy departed to go the round of the rooms for the lodgers.
+
+“We’re lucky that most of them are here,” Brissenden whispered to
+Martin. “There’s Norton and Hamilton; come on and meet them. Stevens
+isn’t around, I hear. I’m going to get them started on monism if I can.
+Wait till they get a few jolts in them and they’ll warm up.”
+
+At first the conversation was desultory. Nevertheless Martin could not
+fail to appreciate the keen play of their minds. They were men with
+opinions, though the opinions often clashed, and, though they were
+witty and clever, they were not superficial. He swiftly saw, no matter
+upon what they talked, that each man applied the correlation of
+knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified conception of society
+and the Cosmos. Nobody manufactured their opinions for them; they were
+all rebels of one variety or another, and their lips were strangers to
+platitudes. Never had Martin, at the Morses’, heard so amazing a range
+of topics discussed. There seemed no limit save time to the things they
+were alive to. The talk wandered from Mrs. Humphry Ward’s new book to
+Shaw’s latest play, through the future of the drama to reminiscences of
+Mansfield. They appreciated or sneered at the morning editorials,
+jumped from labor conditions in New Zealand to Henry James and Brander
+Matthews, passed on to the German designs in the Far East and the
+economic aspect of the Yellow Peril, wrangled over the German elections
+and Bebel’s last speech, and settled down to local politics, the latest
+plans and scandals in the union labor party administration, and the
+wires that were pulled to bring about the Coast Seamen’s strike. Martin
+was struck by the inside knowledge they possessed. They knew what was
+never printed in the newspapers—the wires and strings and the hidden
+hands that made the puppets dance. To Martin’s surprise, the girl,
+Mary, joined in the conversation, displaying an intelligence he had
+never encountered in the few women he had met. They talked together on
+Swinburne and Rossetti, after which she led him beyond his depth into
+the by-paths of French literature. His revenge came when she defended
+Maeterlinck and he brought into action the carefully-thought-out thesis
+of “The Shame of the Sun.”
+
+Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with tobacco
+smoke, when Brissenden waved the red flag.
+
+“Here’s fresh meat for your axe, Kreis,” he said; “a rose-white youth
+with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer. Make a Haeckelite of
+him—if you can.”
+
+Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic thing,
+while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet, girlish
+smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.
+
+Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered,
+until he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle. Martin
+listened and fain would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible that
+this should be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market. The
+books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm,
+the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger
+stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry,
+printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer.
+It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two
+men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again other
+men joined in, and all followed the discussion with cigarettes going
+out in their hands and with alert, intent faces.
+
+Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now received
+at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical plausibility of
+it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and
+Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn,
+sneered back at them as metaphysicians. _Phenomenon_ and _noumenon_
+were bandied back and forth. They charged him with attempting to
+explain consciousness by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery,
+with reasoning from words to theory instead of from facts to theory. At
+this they were aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of
+reasoning to start with facts and to give names to the facts.
+
+When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded him
+that all good little German philosophies when they died went to Oxford.
+A little later Norton reminded them of Hamilton’s Law of Parsimony, the
+application of which they immediately claimed for every reasoning
+process of theirs. And Martin hugged his knees and exulted in it all.
+But Norton was no Spencerian, and he, too, strove for Martin’s
+philosophic soul, talking as much at him as to his two opponents.
+
+“You know Berkeley has never been answered,” he said, looking directly
+at Martin. “Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was not very near.
+Even the stanchest of Spencer’s followers will not go farther. I was
+reading an essay of Saleeby’s the other day, and the best Saleeby could
+say was that Herbert Spencer _nearly_ succeeded in answering Berkeley.”
+
+“You know what Hume said?” Hamilton asked. Norton nodded, but Hamilton
+gave it for the benefit of the rest. “He said that Berkeley’s arguments
+admit of no answer and produce no conviction.”
+
+“In his, Hume’s, mind,” was the reply. “And Hume’s mind was the same as
+yours, with this difference: he was wise enough to admit there was no
+answering Berkeley.”
+
+Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head,
+while Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages,
+seeking out tender places to prod and poke. As the evening grew late,
+Norton, smarting under the repeated charges of being a metaphysician,
+clutching his chair to keep from jumping to his feet, his gray eyes
+snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and sure, made a grand attack
+upon their position.
+
+“All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but,
+pray, how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific
+dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging
+about into places it has no right to be. Long before the school of
+materialistic monism arose, the ground was removed so that there could
+be no foundation. Locke was the man, John Locke. Two hundred years
+ago—more than that, even in his ‘Essay concerning the Human
+Understanding,’ he proved the non-existence of innate ideas. The best
+of it is that that is precisely what you claim. To-night, again and
+again, you have asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.
+
+“And what does that mean? It means that you can never know ultimate
+reality. Your brains are empty when you are born. Appearances, or
+phenomena, are all the content your minds can receive from your five
+senses. Then noumena, which are not in your minds when you are born,
+have no way of getting in—”
+
+“I deny—” Kreis started to interrupt.
+
+“You wait till I’m done,” Norton shouted. “You can know only that much
+of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one way or
+another on our senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of
+the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is to
+efface you by your own argument. I can’t do it any other way, for you
+are both congenitally unable to understand a philosophic abstraction.
+
+“And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive
+science? You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances. You are
+aware only of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in
+your consciousness. Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you
+are foolish enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with
+noumena. Yet, by the very definition of positive science, science is
+concerned only with appearances. As somebody has said, phenomenal
+knowledge cannot transcend phenomena.
+
+“You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and
+yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that
+science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the
+existence of matter.—You know I granted the reality of matter only in
+order to make myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive
+scientists, if you please; but ontology has no place in positive
+science, so leave it alone. Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if
+Spencer—”
+
+But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and
+Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and
+Kreis and Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds as
+soon as he finished.
+
+“You have given me a glimpse of fairyland,” Martin said on the
+ferry-boat. “It makes life worth while to meet people like that. My
+mind is all worked up. I never appreciated idealism before. Yet I can’t
+accept it. I know that I shall always be a realist. I am so made, I
+guess. But I’d like to have made a reply to Kreis and Hamilton, and I
+think I’d have had a word or two for Norton. I didn’t see that Spencer
+was damaged any. I’m as excited as a child on its first visit to the
+circus. I see I must read up some more. I’m going to get hold of
+Saleeby. I still think Spencer is unassailable, and next time I’m going
+to take a hand myself.”
+
+But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his chin
+buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body wrapped in
+the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the propellers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII.
+
+
+The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to
+Brissenden’s advice and command. “The Shame of the Sun” he wrapped and
+mailed to _The Acropolis_. He believed he could find magazine
+publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would
+commend him to the book-publishing houses. “Ephemera” he likewise
+wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden’s prejudice
+against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin
+decided that the great poem should see print. He did not intend,
+however, to publish it without the other’s permission. His plan was to
+get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and, thus armed, again to
+wrestle with Brissenden for consent.
+
+Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a number
+of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him with its
+insistent clamor to be created. Apparently it was to be a rattling sea
+story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and romance, handling real
+characters, in a real world, under real conditions. But beneath the
+swing and go of the story was to be something else—something that the
+superficial reader would never discern and which, on the other hand,
+would not diminish in any way the interest and enjoyment for such a
+reader. It was this, and not the mere story, that impelled Martin to
+write it. For that matter, it was always the great, universal motif
+that suggested plots to him. After having found such a motif, he cast
+about for the particular persons and particular location in time and
+space wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing. “Overdue” was
+the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not
+be more than sixty thousand words—a bagatelle for him with his splendid
+vigor of production. On this first day he took hold of it with
+conscious delight in the mastery of his tools. He no longer worried for
+fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip and mar his work. The
+long months of intense application and study had brought their reward.
+He could now devote himself with sure hand to the larger phases of the
+thing he shaped; and as he worked, hour after hour, he felt, as never
+before, the sure and cosmic grasp with which he held life and the
+affairs of life. “Overdue” would tell a story that would be true of its
+particular characters and its particular events; but it would tell,
+too, he was confident, great vital things that would be true of all
+time, and all sea, and all life—thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought,
+leaning back for a moment from the table. Ay, thanks to Herbert Spencer
+and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had placed in
+his hands.
+
+He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing. “It will go!
+It will go!” was the refrain that kept sounding in his ears. Of course
+it would go. At last he was turning out the thing at which the
+magazines would jump. The whole story worked out before him in
+lightning flashes. He broke off from it long enough to write a
+paragraph in his note-book. This would be the last paragraph in
+“Overdue”; but so thoroughly was the whole book already composed in his
+brain that he could write, weeks before he had arrived at the end, the
+end itself. He compared the tale, as yet unwritten, with the tales of
+the sea-writers, and he felt it to be immeasurably superior. “There’s
+only one man who could touch it,” he murmured aloud, “and that’s
+Conrad. And it ought to make even him sit up and shake hands with me,
+and say, ‘Well done, Martin, my boy.’”
+
+He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was to
+have dinner at the Morses’. Thanks to Brissenden, his black suit was
+out of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties. Down town he
+stopped off long enough to run into the library and search for
+Saleeby’s books. He drew out “The Cycle of Life,” and on the car turned
+to the essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer. As Martin read, he grew
+angry. His face flushed, his jaw set, and unconsciously his hand
+clenched, unclenched, and clenched again as if he were taking fresh
+grips upon some hateful thing out of which he was squeezing the life.
+When he left the car, he strode along the sidewalk as a wrathful man
+will stride, and he rang the Morse bell with such viciousness that it
+roused him to consciousness of his condition, so that he entered in
+good nature, smiling with amusement at himself. No sooner, however, was
+he inside than a great depression descended upon him. He fell from the
+height where he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
+“Bourgeois,” “trader’s den”—Brissenden’s epithets repeated themselves
+in his mind. But what of that? he demanded angrily. He was marrying
+Ruth, not her family.
+
+It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
+spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy. There was
+color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again—the eyes in
+which he had first read immortality. He had forgotten immortality of
+late, and the trend of his scientific reading had been away from it;
+but here, in Ruth’s eyes, he read an argument without words that
+transcended all worded arguments. He saw that in her eyes before which
+all discussion fled away, for he saw love there. And in his own eyes
+was love; and love was unanswerable. Such was his passionate doctrine.
+
+The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left him
+supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life. Nevertheless, at
+table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion consequent upon the hard
+day seized hold of him. He was aware that his eyes were tired and that
+he was irritable. He remembered it was at this table, at which he now
+sneered and was so often bored, that he had first eaten with civilized
+beings in what he had imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and
+refinement. He caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long
+ago, a self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony
+of apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of
+eating-implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a
+leap to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to
+be frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did not
+possess.
+
+He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a
+passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will strive
+to locate the life preservers. Well, that much had come out of it—love
+and Ruth. All the rest had failed to stand the test of the books. But
+Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he found a biological
+sanction. Love was the most exalted expression of life. Nature had been
+busy designing him, as she had been busy with all normal men, for the
+purpose of loving. She had spent ten thousand centuries—ay, a hundred
+thousand and a million centuries—upon the task, and he was the best she
+could do. She had made love the strongest thing in him, increased its
+power a myriad per cent with her gift of imagination, and sent him
+forth into the ephemera to thrill and melt and mate. His hand sought
+Ruth’s hand beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was
+given and received. She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes
+were radiant and melting. So were his in the thrill that pervaded him;
+nor did he realize how much that was radiant and melting in her eyes
+had been aroused by what she had seen in his.
+
+Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse’s right, sat
+Judge Blount, a local superior court judge. Martin had met him a number
+of times and had failed to like him. He and Ruth’s father were
+discussing labor union politics, the local situation, and socialism,
+and Mr. Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the latter topic. At
+last Judge Blount looked across the table with benignant and fatherly
+pity. Martin smiled to himself.
+
+“You’ll grow out of it, young man,” he said soothingly. “Time is the
+best cure for such youthful distempers.” He turned to Mr. Morse. “I do
+not believe discussion is good in such cases. It makes the patient
+obstinate.”
+
+“That is true,” the other assented gravely. “But it is well to warn the
+patient occasionally of his condition.”
+
+Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort. The day had been too
+long, the day’s effort too intense, and he was deep in the throes of
+the reaction.
+
+“Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors,” he said; “but if you care
+a whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that you are
+poor diagnosticians. In fact, you are both suffering from the disease
+you think you find in me. As for me, I am immune. The socialist
+philosophy that riots half-baked in your veins has passed me by.”
+
+“Clever, clever,” murmured the judge. “An excellent ruse in
+controversy, to reverse positions.”
+
+“Out of your mouth.” Martin’s eyes were sparkling, but he kept control
+of himself. “You see, Judge, I’ve heard your campaign speeches. By some
+henidical process—henidical, by the way is a favorite word of mine
+which nobody understands—by some henidical process you persuade
+yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival of
+the strong, and at the same time you indorse with might and main all
+sorts of measures to shear the strength from the strong.”
+
+“My young man—”
+
+“Remember, I’ve heard your campaign speeches,” Martin warned. “It’s on
+record, your position on interstate commerce regulation, on regulation
+of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the conservation of the
+forests, on a thousand and one restrictive measures that are nothing
+else than socialistic.”
+
+“Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
+various outrageous exercises of power?”
+
+“That’s not the point. I mean to tell you that you are a poor
+diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the
+microbe of socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are
+suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As for
+me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate
+opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing else than
+pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that will not stand
+the test of the dictionary.”
+
+“I am a reactionary—so complete a reactionary that my position is
+incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social organization
+and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil. You make believe
+that you believe in the survival of the strong and the rule of the
+strong. I believe. That is the difference. When I was a trifle
+younger,—a few months younger,—I believed the same thing. You see, the
+ideas of you and yours had impressed me. But merchants and traders are
+cowardly rulers at best; they grunt and grub all their days in the
+trough of money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if you
+please. I am the only individualist in this room. I look to the state
+for nothing. I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to
+save the state from its own rotten futility.”
+
+“Nietzsche was right. I won’t take the time to tell you who Nietzsche
+was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong—to the strong
+who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of
+trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the
+great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the ‘yes-sayers.’ And
+they will eat you up, you socialists—who are afraid of socialism and
+who think yourselves individualists. Your slave-morality of the meek
+and lowly will never save you.—Oh, it’s all Greek, I know, and I won’t
+bother you any more with it. But remember one thing. There aren’t half
+a dozen individualists in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them.”
+
+He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to Ruth.
+
+“I’m wrought up to-day,” he said in an undertone. “All I want to do is
+to love, not talk.”
+
+He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-
+
+“I am unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That is the way to tell
+them.”
+
+“We’ll make a good Republican out of you yet,” said Judge Blount.
+
+“The man on horseback will arrive before that time,” Martin retorted
+with good humor, and returned to Ruth.
+
+But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the laziness and the
+disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective
+son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose
+nature he had no understanding. So he turned the conversation to
+Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears
+had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher’s name, listened to
+the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe against Spencer.
+From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as much as to say,
+“There, my boy, you see.”
+
+“Chattering daws,” Martin muttered under his breath, and went on
+talking with Ruth and Arthur.
+
+But the long day and the “real dirt” of the night before were telling
+upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what had made him
+angry when he read it on the car.
+
+“What is the matter?” Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he was
+making to contain himself.
+
+“There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its
+prophet,” Judge Blount was saying at that moment.
+
+Martin turned upon him.
+
+“A cheap judgment,” he remarked quietly. “I heard it first in the City
+Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better.
+I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it
+nauseates me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear that great
+and noble man’s name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a
+cesspool. You are disgusting.”
+
+It was like a thunderbolt. Judge Blount glared at him with apoplectic
+countenance, and silence reigned. Mr. Morse was secretly pleased. He
+could see that his daughter was shocked. It was what he wanted to do—to
+bring out the innate ruffianism of this man he did not like.
+
+Ruth’s hand sought Martin’s beseechingly under the table, but his blood
+was up. He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and fraud of those
+who sat in the high places. A Superior Court Judge! It was only several
+years before that he had looked up from the mire at such glorious
+entities and deemed them gods.
+
+Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing
+himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter
+understood was for the benefit of the ladies. Even this added to his
+anger. Was there no honesty in the world?
+
+“You can’t discuss Spencer with me,” he cried. “You do not know any
+more about Spencer than do his own countrymen. But it is no fault of
+yours, I grant. It is just a phase of the contemptible ignorance of the
+times. I ran across a sample of it on my way here this evening. I was
+reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer. You should read it. It is
+accessible to all men. You can buy it in any book-store or draw it from
+the public library. You would feel ashamed of your paucity of abuse and
+ignorance of that noble man compared with what Saleeby has collected on
+the subject. It is a record of shame that would shame your shame.
+
+“‘The philosopher of the half-educated,’ he was called by an academic
+Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere he breathed. I
+don’t think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but there have been
+critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who have read no more
+than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his followers to adduce
+one single idea from all his writings—from Herbert Spencer’s writings,
+the man who has impressed the stamp of his genius over the whole field
+of scientific research and modern thought; the father of psychology;
+the man who revolutionized pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the
+French peasant is taught the three R’s according to principles laid
+down by him. And the little gnats of men sting his memory when they get
+their very bread and butter from the technical application of his
+ideas. What little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to
+him. It is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in
+their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent.
+
+“And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford—a man who sits in an
+even higher place than you, Judge Blount—has said that Spencer will be
+dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker.
+Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them! ‘“First Principles”
+is not wholly destitute of a certain literary power,’ said one of them.
+And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather
+than an original thinker. Yappers and blatherskites! Yappers and
+blatherskites!”
+
+Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence. Everybody in Ruth’s family
+looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement, and they
+were horrified at Martin’s outbreak. The remainder of the dinner passed
+like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining their talk to each
+other, and the rest of the conversation being extremely desultory. Then
+afterward, when Ruth and Martin were alone, there was a scene.
+
+“You are unbearable,” she wept.
+
+But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, “The beasts! The
+beasts!”
+
+When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-
+
+“By telling the truth about him?”
+
+“I don’t care whether it was true or not,” she insisted. “There are
+certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult anybody.”
+
+“Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?” Martin
+demanded. “Surely to assault truth is a more serious misdemeanor than
+to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge’s. He did worse than
+that. He blackened the name of a great, noble man who is dead. Oh, the
+beasts! The beasts!”
+
+His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him. Never
+had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and unreasonable to
+her comprehension. And yet, through her very terror ran the fibres of
+fascination that had drawn and that still drew her to him—that had
+compelled her to lean towards him, and, in that mad, culminating
+moment, lay her hands upon his neck. She was hurt and outraged by what
+had taken place, and yet she lay in his arms and quivered while he went
+on muttering, “The beasts! The beasts!” And she still lay there when he
+said: “I’ll not bother your table again, dear. They do not like me, and
+it is wrong of me to thrust my objectionable presence upon them.
+Besides, they are just as objectionable to me. Faugh! They are
+sickening. And to think of it, I dreamed in my innocence that the
+persons who sat in the high places, who lived in fine houses and had
+educations and bank accounts, were worth while!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII.
+
+
+“Come on, let’s go down to the local.”
+
+So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before—the
+second hemorrhage in three days. The perennial whiskey glass was in his
+hands, and he drained it with shaking fingers.
+
+“What do I want with socialism?” Martin demanded.
+
+“Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches,” the sick man urged. “Get
+up and spout. Tell them why you don’t want socialism. Tell them what
+you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into them
+and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them
+good. Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see,
+I’d like to see you a socialist before I’m gone. It will give you a
+sanction for your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in
+the time of disappointment that is coming to you.”
+
+“I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist,” Martin
+pondered. “You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the
+canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul.” He pointed an
+accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling.
+“Socialism doesn’t seem to save you.”
+
+“I’m very sick,” was the answer. “With you it is different. You have
+health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life
+somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I’ll tell you. It
+is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and
+irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man
+on horseback. The slaves won’t stand for it. They are too many, and
+willy-nilly they’ll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he
+gets astride. You can’t get away from them, and you’ll have to swallow
+the whole slave-morality. It’s not a nice mess, I’ll allow. But it’s
+been a-brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway,
+with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says
+history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don’t like the crowd, but
+what’s a poor chap to do? We can’t have the man on horseback, and
+anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on,
+anyway. I’m loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer,
+I’ll get drunk. And you know the doctor says—damn the doctor! I’ll fool
+him yet.”
+
+It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the
+Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker,
+a clever Jew, won Martin’s admiration at the same time that he aroused
+his antagonism. The man’s stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened
+chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong
+on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves
+against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would
+rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this withered wisp of a
+creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth
+representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and
+inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged
+confines of life. They were the unfit. In spite of their cunning
+philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for coöperation, Nature
+rejected them for the exceptional man. Out of the plentiful spawn of
+life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best. It
+was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and
+cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better
+method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this
+particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as
+the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the
+perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together
+for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and
+outwit the Cosmos.
+
+So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give
+them hell. He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was
+the custom, and addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice,
+haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain
+while the Jew was speaking. In such meetings five minutes was the time
+allotted to each speaker; but when Martin’s five minutes were up, he
+was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed.
+He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by
+acclamation to extend Martin’s time. They appreciated him as a foeman
+worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every
+word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack
+upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to
+his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and Malthus,
+and enunciated the biological law of development.
+
+“And so,” he concluded, in a swift résumé, “no state composed of the
+slave-types can endure. The old law of development still holds. In the
+struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of
+the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak
+are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the
+progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains,
+the strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you
+slaves—it is too bad to be slaves, I grant—but you slaves dream of a
+society where the law of development will be annulled, where no
+weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will
+have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and
+where all will marry and have progeny—the weak as well as the strong.
+What will be the result? No longer will the strength and life-value of
+each generation increase. On the contrary, it will diminish. There is
+the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your society of slaves—of, by,
+and for, slaves—must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life
+which composes it weakens and goes to pieces.
+
+“Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No
+state of slaves can stand—”
+
+“How about the United States?” a man yelled from the audience.
+
+“And how about it?” Martin retorted. “The thirteen colonies threw off
+their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their
+own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn’t
+get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of
+masters—not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery
+traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again—but not
+frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right
+arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and
+cajolery and lies. They have purchased your slave judges, they have
+debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse
+horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls. Two million of
+your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United
+States. Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor
+properly fed.
+
+“But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure,
+because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of
+development. No sooner can a slave society be organized than
+deterioration sets in. It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law
+of development, but where is the new law of development that will
+maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already formulated? Then
+state it.”
+
+Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on
+their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one,
+encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm
+and excited gestures, they replied to the attack. It was a wild
+night—but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed
+from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin.
+They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him
+insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of
+the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than
+once the chairman rapped and pounded for order.
+
+It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a
+day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for
+sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and
+glib. He was too dense to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a
+comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs
+of the working class. Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in
+the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers.
+Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the
+perfect reporter who is able to make something—even a great deal—out of
+nothing.
+
+He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary.
+Words like _revolution_ gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able
+to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to
+reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_. He did it
+that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest
+stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the
+show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid,
+red-shirt socialist utterance. The cub reporter was an artist, and it
+was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed
+long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices
+shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected
+against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry
+men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX.
+
+
+Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning’s paper.
+It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page
+at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious
+leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the
+cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was
+angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a
+laugh.
+
+“Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious,” he said that
+afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and
+dropped limply into the one chair.
+
+“But what do you care?” Brissenden asked. “Surely you don’t desire the
+approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?”
+
+Martin thought for a while, then said:-
+
+“No, I really don’t care for their approval, not a whit. On the other
+hand, it’s very likely to make my relations with Ruth’s family a trifle
+awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this
+miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his
+opinion—but what’s the odds? I want to read you what I’ve been doing
+to-day. It’s ‘Overdue,’ of course, and I’m just about halfway through.”
+
+He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a
+young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the
+oil-burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to
+Martin.
+
+“Sit down,” Brissenden said.
+
+Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to
+broach his business.
+
+“I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I’ve come to interview
+you,” he began.
+
+Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.
+
+“A brother socialist?” the reporter asked, with a quick glance at
+Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying
+man.
+
+“And he wrote that report,” Martin said softly. “Why, he is only a
+boy!”
+
+“Why don’t you poke him?” Brissenden asked. “I’d give a thousand
+dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes.”
+
+The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and
+around him and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant
+description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to
+get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized
+menace to society.
+
+“You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?” he said.
+“I’ve a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be
+better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can
+have the interview afterward.”
+
+“A photographer,” Brissenden said meditatively. “Poke him, Martin! Poke
+him!”
+
+“I guess I’m getting old,” was the answer. “I know I ought, but I
+really haven’t the heart. It doesn’t seem to matter.”
+
+“For his mother’s sake,” Brissenden urged.
+
+“It’s worth considering,” Martin replied; “but it doesn’t seem worth
+while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it does take
+energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?”
+
+“That’s right—that’s the way to take it,” the cub announced airily,
+though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door.
+
+“But it wasn’t true, not a word of what he wrote,” Martin went on,
+confining his attention to Brissenden.
+
+“It was just in a general way a description, you understand,” the cub
+ventured, “and besides, it’s good advertising. That’s what counts. It
+was a favor to you.”
+
+“It’s good advertising, Martin, old boy,” Brissenden repeated solemnly.
+
+“And it was a favor to me—think of that!” was Martin’s contribution.
+
+“Let me see—where were you born, Mr. Eden?” the cub asked, assuming an
+air of expectant attention.
+
+“He doesn’t take notes,” said Brissenden. “He remembers it all.”
+
+“That is sufficient for me.” The cub was trying not to look worried.
+“No decent reporter needs to bother with notes.”
+
+“That was sufficient—for last night.” But Brissenden was not a disciple
+of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. “Martin, if you
+don’t poke him, I’ll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next
+moment.”
+
+“How will a spanking do?” Martin asked.
+
+Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.
+
+The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub
+face downward across his knees.
+
+“Now don’t bite,” Martin warned, “or else I’ll have to punch your face.
+It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face.”
+
+His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift
+and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did
+not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew
+excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, “Here, just let me
+swat him once.”
+
+“Sorry my hand played out,” Martin said, when at last he desisted. “It
+is quite numb.”
+
+He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.
+
+“I’ll have you arrested for this,” he snarled, tears of boyish
+indignation running down his flushed cheeks. “I’ll make you sweat for
+this. You’ll see.”
+
+“The pretty thing,” Martin remarked. “He doesn’t realize that he has
+entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it
+is not manly, to tell lies about one’s fellow-creatures the way he has
+done, and he doesn’t know it.”
+
+“He has to come to us to be told,” Brissenden filled in a pause.
+
+“Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will
+undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy
+will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class
+newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel.”
+
+“But there is yet time,” quoth Brissenden. “Who knows but what you may
+prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn’t you let me swat him
+just once? I’d like to have had a hand in it.”
+
+“I’ll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes,” sobbed
+the erring soul.
+
+“No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak.” Martin shook his head
+lugubriously. “I’m afraid I’ve numbed my hand in vain. The young man
+cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful
+newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great.”
+
+With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for
+fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still
+clutched.
+
+In the next morning’s paper Martin learned a great deal more about
+himself that was new to him. “We are the sworn enemies of society,” he
+found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. “No, we are not
+anarchists but socialists.” When the reporter pointed out to him that
+there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had
+shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as
+bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were
+described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery
+gleams in his blood-shot eyes.
+
+He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall
+Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed
+the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most
+revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his
+poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the
+death’s-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had
+just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress
+dungeon.
+
+The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out
+Martin’s family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham’s
+Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front.
+That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman
+who had no patience with his brother-in-law’s socialistic views, and no
+patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as
+characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn’t take a job when
+it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann von
+Schmidt, Marian’s husband, had likewise been interviewed. He had called
+Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him. “He tried to
+sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick,” Von Schmidt
+had said to the reporter. “He knows better than to come bumming around
+here. A man who won’t work is no good, take that from me.”
+
+This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair
+as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would
+be no easy task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he
+must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the
+most of it to break off the engagement. How much he would make of it he
+was soon to realize. The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth.
+Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing
+at the open door when he had received it from the postman. As he read,
+mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper
+of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the pocket was empty
+or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a
+cigarette.
+
+It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it.
+But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was
+sounded the note of hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of
+him. She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her
+love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live
+seriously and decently. And now her father and mother had taken a firm
+stand and commanded that the engagement be broken. That they were
+justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could never
+be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret
+she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. “If
+only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make
+something of yourself,” she wrote. “But it was not to be. Your past
+life had been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not
+to be blamed. You could act only according to your nature and your
+early training. So I do not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It
+was simply a mistake. As father and mother have contended, we were not
+made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was
+discovered not too late.” . . “There is no use trying to see me,” she
+said toward the last. “It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us,
+as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is, that I have caused her
+great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to atone for it.”
+
+He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down
+and replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist
+meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what
+the newspaper had put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was
+God’s own lover pleading passionately for love. “Please answer,” he
+said, “and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you
+love me? That is all—the answer to that one question.”
+
+But no answer came the next day, nor the next. “Overdue” lay untouched
+upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the
+table grew larger. For the first time Martin’s glorious sleep was
+interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights.
+Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the
+servant who answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too
+feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not
+worry him with his troubles.
+
+For Martin’s troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub reporter’s
+deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The Portuguese grocer
+refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American
+and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused
+further dealings with him—carrying his patriotism to such a degree that
+he cancelled Martin’s account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay
+it. The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and
+indignation against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do
+with a socialist traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but
+she remained loyal. The children of the neighborhood recovered from the
+awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe
+distances they called him “hobo” and “bum.” The Silva tribe, however,
+stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his
+honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the
+day and added to Maria’s perplexities and troubles.
+
+Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned
+what he knew could not be otherwise—that Bernard Higginbotham was
+furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace,
+and that he had forbidden him the house.
+
+“Why don’t you go away, Martin?” Gertrude had begged. “Go away and get
+a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this all blows over,
+you can come back.”
+
+Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain?
+He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him
+and his people. He could never cross it and explain to them his
+position,—the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were
+not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make
+his attitude and conduct intelligible to them. Their highest concept of
+right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word
+and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job!
+Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.
+Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed
+by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which
+they fell down and worshipped.
+
+He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he
+knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the
+pawnbroker.
+
+“Don’t come near Bernard now,” she admonished him. “After a few months,
+when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin’
+delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just send for me an’ I’ll
+come. Don’t forget.”
+
+She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot
+through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched
+her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The
+slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly
+satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family. And yet, if
+there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his
+sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine
+Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken
+by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along—ay, to be shaken
+by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister
+really was. The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and
+compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the
+slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded
+miserables and weaklings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL.
+
+
+“Overdue” still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every
+manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one
+manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden’s “Ephemera.” His
+bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people
+were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer
+bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was
+found his life must stand still.
+
+After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth
+on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman,
+and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted
+to wave him aside.
+
+“If you interfere with my sister, I’ll call an officer,” Norman
+threatened. “She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence
+is insult.”
+
+“If you persist, you’ll have to call that officer, and then you’ll get
+your name in the papers,” Martin answered grimly. “And now, get out of
+my way and get the officer if you want to. I’m going to talk with
+Ruth.”
+
+“I want to have it from your own lips,” he said to her.
+
+She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.
+
+“The question I asked in my letter,” he prompted.
+
+Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift
+look.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“Is all this of your own free will?” he demanded.
+
+“It is.” She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. “It is
+of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet
+my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can
+tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you
+again.”
+
+“Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not
+stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me.”
+
+A blush drove the pallor from her face.
+
+“After what has passed?” she said faintly. “Martin, you do not know
+what you are saying. I am not common.”
+
+“You see, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with you,” Norman
+blurted out, starting on with her.
+
+Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his
+coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.
+
+It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up
+the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found
+himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an
+awakened somnambulist. He noticed “Overdue” lying on the table and drew
+up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical
+compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been
+deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something
+else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until
+it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did
+know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had
+been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He
+was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it
+held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing
+seemed to matter.
+
+For five days he toiled on at “Overdue,” going nowhere, seeing nobody,
+and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman
+brought him a thin letter from the editor of _The Parthenon_. A glance
+told him that “Ephemera” was accepted. “We have submitted the poem to
+Mr. Cartwright Bruce,” the editor went on to say, “and he has reported
+so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our
+pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it
+for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly
+extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by
+return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is
+unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider
+a fair price.”
+
+Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty
+dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too,
+there was Brissenden’s consent to be gained. Well, he had been right,
+after all. Here was one magazine editor who knew real poetry when he
+saw it. And the price was splendid, even though it was for the poem of
+a century. As for Cartwright Bruce, Martin knew that he was the one
+critic for whose opinions Brissenden had any respect.
+
+Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the houses
+and cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that he was not
+more elated over his friend’s success and over his own signal victory.
+The one critic in the United States had pronounced favorably on the
+poem, while his own contention that good stuff could find its way into
+the magazines had proved correct. But enthusiasm had lost its spring in
+him, and he found that he was more anxious to see Brissenden than he
+was to carry the good news. The acceptance of _The Parthenon_ had
+recalled to him that during his five days’ devotion to “Overdue” he had
+not heard from Brissenden nor even thought about him. For the first
+time Martin realized the daze he had been in, and he felt shame for
+having forgotten his friend. But even the shame did not burn very
+sharply. He was numb to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones
+concerned in the writing of “Overdue.” So far as other affairs were
+concerned, he had been in a trance. For that matter, he was still in a
+trance. All this life through which the electric car whirred seemed
+remote and unreal, and he would have experienced little interest and
+less shock if the great stone steeple of the church he passed had
+suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon his head.
+
+At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden’s room, and hurried down
+again. The room was empty. All luggage was gone.
+
+“Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?” he asked the clerk, who looked
+at him curiously for a moment.
+
+“Haven’t you heard?” he asked.
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+“Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead in bed. Suicide.
+Shot himself through the head.”
+
+“Is he buried yet?” Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one
+else’s voice, from a long way off, asking the question.
+
+“No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. Lawyers engaged by
+his people saw to the arrangements.”
+
+“They were quick about it, I must say,” Martin commented.
+
+“Oh, I don’t know. It happened five days ago.”
+
+“Five days ago?”
+
+“Yes, five days ago.”
+
+“Oh,” Martin said as he turned and went out.
+
+At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram to
+_The Parthenon_, advising them to proceed with the publication of the
+poem. He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare
+home, so he sent the message collect.
+
+Once in his room, he resumed his writing. The days and nights came and
+went, and he sat at his table and wrote on. He went nowhere, save to
+the pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when he was
+hungry and had something to cook, and just as methodically went without
+when he had nothing to cook. Composed as the story was, in advance,
+chapter by chapter, he nevertheless saw and developed an opening that
+increased the power of it, though it necessitated twenty thousand
+additional words. It was not that there was any vital need that the
+thing should be well done, but that his artistic canons compelled him
+to do it well. He worked on in the daze, strangely detached from the
+world around him, feeling like a familiar ghost among these literary
+trappings of his former life. He remembered that some one had said that
+a ghost was the spirit of a man who was dead and who did not have sense
+enough to know it; and he paused for the moment to wonder if he were
+really dead and unaware of it.
+
+Came the day when “Overdue” was finished. The agent of the type-writer
+firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while Martin, on
+the one chair, typed the last pages of the final chapter. “Finis,” he
+wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it was indeed finis. He
+watched the type-writer carried out the door with a feeling of relief,
+then went over and lay down on the bed. He was faint from hunger. Food
+had not passed his lips in thirty-six hours, but he did not think about
+it. He lay on his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all,
+while the daze or stupor slowly welled up, saturating his
+consciousness. Half in delirium, he began muttering aloud the lines of
+an anonymous poem Brissenden had been fond of quoting to him. Maria,
+listening anxiously outside his door, was perturbed by his monotonous
+utterance. The words in themselves were not significant to her, but the
+fact that he was saying them was. “I have done,” was the burden of the
+poem.
+
+“‘I have done—
+Put by the lute.
+Song and singing soon are over
+As the airy shades that hover
+In among the purple clover.
+I have done—
+Put by the lute.
+Once I sang as early thrushes
+Sing among the dewy bushes;
+Now I’m mute.
+I am like a weary linnet,
+For my throat has no song in it;
+I have had my singing minute.
+I have done.
+Put by the lute.’”
+
+
+Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove, where
+she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion’s share of
+chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from the bottom of
+the pot. Martin roused himself and sat up and began to eat, between
+spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been talking in his sleep
+and that he did not have any fever.
+
+After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the
+edge of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw
+nothing until the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the
+morning’s mail and which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into his
+darkened brain. It is _The Parthenon_, he thought, the August
+_Parthenon_, and it must contain “Ephemera.” If only Brissenden were
+here to see!
+
+He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.
+“Ephemera” had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and
+Beardsley-like margin decorations. On one side of the head-piece was
+Brissenden’s photograph, on the other side was the photograph of Sir
+John Value, the British Ambassador. A preliminary editorial note quoted
+Sir John Value as saying that there were no poets in America, and the
+publication of “Ephemera” was _The Parthenon’s_. “There, take that, Sir
+John Value!” Cartwright Bruce was described as the greatest critic in
+America, and he was quoted as saying that “Ephemera” was the greatest
+poem ever written in America. And finally, the editor’s foreword ended
+with: “We have not yet made up our minds entirely as to the merits of
+“Ephemera”; perhaps we shall never be able to do so. But we have read
+it often, wondering at the words and their arrangement, wondering where
+Mr. Brissenden got them, and how he could fasten them together.” Then
+followed the poem.
+
+“Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man,” Martin murmured, letting
+the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.
+
+The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted
+apathetically that he was not nauseated very much. He wished he could
+get angry, but did not have energy enough to try. He was too numb. His
+blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal flow of
+indignation. After all, what did it matter? It was on a par with all
+the rest that Brissenden had condemned in bourgeois society.
+
+“Poor Briss,” Martin communed; “he would never have forgiven me.”
+
+Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which had
+once contained type-writer paper. Going through its contents, he drew
+forth eleven poems which his friend had written. These he tore
+lengthwise and crosswise and dropped into the waste basket. He did it
+languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of the bed
+staring blankly before him.
+
+How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his
+sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white. It was
+curious. But as he watched it grow in definiteness he saw that it was a
+coral reef smoking in the white Pacific surges. Next, in the line of
+breakers he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe. In the stern he
+saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth dipping a flashing paddle.
+He recognized him. He was Moti, the youngest son of Tati, the chief,
+and this was Tahiti, and beyond that smoking reef lay the sweet land of
+Papara and the chief’s grass house by the river’s mouth. It was the end
+of the day, and Moti was coming home from the fishing. He was waiting
+for the rush of a big breaker whereon to jump the reef. Then he saw
+himself, sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the past,
+dipping a paddle that waited Moti’s word to dig in like mad when the
+turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them. Next, he was no
+longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out,
+they were both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the steep
+face of the flying turquoise. Under the bow the water was hissing as
+from a steam jet, the air was filled with driven spray, there was a
+rush and rumble and long-echoing roar, and the canoe floated on the
+placid water of the lagoon. Moti laughed and shook the salt water from
+his eyes, and together they paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where
+Tati’s grass walls through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the
+setting sun.
+
+The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of his
+squalid room. He strove in vain to see Tahiti again. He knew there was
+singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing in the
+moonlight, but he could not see them. He could see only the littered
+writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had stood, and the
+unwashed window-pane. He closed his eyes with a groan, and slept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI.
+
+
+He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the
+postman on his morning round. Martin felt tired and passive, and went
+through his letters aimlessly. One thin envelope, from a robber
+magazine, contained a check for twenty-two dollars. He had been dunning
+for it for a year and a half. He noted its amount apathetically. The
+old-time thrill at receiving a publisher’s check was gone. Unlike his
+earlier checks, this one was not pregnant with promise of great things
+to come. To him it was a check for twenty-two dollars, that was all,
+and it would buy him something to eat.
+
+Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in
+payment for some humorous verse which had been accepted months before.
+It was for ten dollars. An idea came to him, which he calmly
+considered. He did not know what he was going to do, and he felt in no
+hurry to do anything. In the meantime he must live. Also he owed
+numerous debts. Would it not be a paying investment to put stamps on
+the huge pile of manuscripts under the table and start them on their
+travels again? One or two of them might be accepted. That would help
+him to live. He decided on the investment, and, after he had cashed the
+checks at the bank down in Oakland, he bought ten dollars’ worth of
+postage stamps. The thought of going home to cook breakfast in his
+stuffy little room was repulsive to him. For the first time he refused
+to consider his debts. He knew that in his room he could manufacture a
+substantial breakfast at a cost of from fifteen to twenty cents. But,
+instead, he went into the Forum Café and ordered a breakfast that cost
+two dollars. He tipped the waiter a quarter, and spent fifty cents for
+a package of Egyptian cigarettes. It was the first time he had smoked
+since Ruth had asked him to stop. But he could see now no reason why he
+should not, and besides, he wanted to smoke. And what did the money
+matter? For five cents he could have bought a package of Durham and
+brown papers and rolled forty cigarettes—but what of it? Money had no
+meaning to him now except what it would immediately buy. He was
+chartless and rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting
+involved the least living, and it was living that hurt.
+
+The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every night.
+Though now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the Japanese
+restaurants where meals were served for ten cents, his wasted body
+filled out, as did the hollows in his cheeks. He no longer abused
+himself with short sleep, overwork, and overstudy. He wrote nothing,
+and the books were closed. He walked much, out in the hills, and loafed
+long hours in the quiet parks. He had no friends nor acquaintances, nor
+did he make any. He had no inclination. He was waiting for some
+impulse, from he knew not where, to put his stopped life into motion
+again. In the meantime his life remained run down, planless, and empty
+and idle.
+
+Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the “real dirt.” But at
+the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance, he recoiled
+and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto. He was frightened at
+the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and he fled furtively, for
+fear that some one of the “real dirt” might chance along and recognize
+him.
+
+Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how
+“Ephemera” was being maltreated. It had made a hit. But what a hit!
+Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether or not it
+was really poetry. The local papers had taken it up, and daily there
+appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious editorials, and
+serious letters from subscribers. Helen Della Delmar (proclaimed with a
+flourish of trumpets and rolling of tomtoms to be the greatest woman
+poet in the United States) denied Brissenden a seat beside her on
+Pegasus and wrote voluminous letters to the public, proving that he was
+no poet.
+
+_The Parthenon_ came out in its next number patting itself on the back
+for the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and exploiting
+Brissenden’s death with ruthless commercialism. A newspaper with a
+sworn circulation of half a million published an original and
+spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in which she gibed and sneered
+at Brissenden. Also, she was guilty of a second poem, in which she
+parodied him.
+
+Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead. He had hated
+the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of him had
+been thrown to the crowd. Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on.
+Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print, floating their
+wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge of Brissenden’s
+greatness. Quoth one paper: “We have received a letter from a gentleman
+who wrote a poem just like it, only better, some time ago.” Another
+paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving Helen Della Delmar for her
+parody, said: “But unquestionably Miss Delmar wrote it in a moment of
+badinage and not quite with the respect that one great poet should show
+to another and perhaps to the greatest. However, whether Miss Delmar be
+jealous or not of the man who invented ‘Ephemera,’ it is certain that
+she, like thousands of others, is fascinated by his work, and that the
+day may come when she will try to write lines like his.”
+
+Ministers began to preach sermons against “Ephemera,” and one, who too
+stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy. The
+great poem contributed to the gayety of the world. The comic
+verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming
+laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes were
+perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told Archie
+Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of “Ephemera” would drive a
+man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to the bottom
+of the river.
+
+Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger. The effect
+produced upon him was one of great sadness. In the crash of his whole
+world, with love on the pinnacle, the crash of magazinedom and the dear
+public was a small crash indeed. Brissenden had been wholly right in
+his judgment of the magazines, and he, Martin, had spent arduous and
+futile years in order to find it out for himself. The magazines were
+all Brissenden had said they were and more. Well, he was done, he
+solaced himself. He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in
+a pestiferous marsh. The visions of Tahiti—clean, sweet Tahiti—were
+coming to him more frequently. And there were the low Paumotus, and the
+high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners
+or frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at
+Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to
+Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a
+pig in honor of his coming, and where Tamari’s flower-garlanded
+daughters would seize his hands and with song and laughter garland him
+with flowers. The South Seas were calling, and he knew that sooner or
+later he would answer the call.
+
+In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long
+traverse he had made through the realm of knowledge. When _The
+Parthenon_ check of three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to
+him, he turned it over to the local lawyer who had attended to
+Brissenden’s affairs for his family. Martin took a receipt for the
+check, and at the same time gave a note for the hundred dollars
+Brissenden had let him have.
+
+The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese
+restaurants. At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight, the
+tide turned. But it had turned too late. Without a thrill he opened a
+thick envelope from _The Millennium_, scanned the face of a check that
+represented three hundred dollars, and noted that it was the payment on
+acceptance for “Adventure.” Every debt he owed in the world, including
+the pawnshop, with its usurious interest, amounted to less than a
+hundred dollars. And when he had paid everything, and lifted the
+hundred-dollar note with Brissenden’s lawyer, he still had over a
+hundred dollars in pocket. He ordered a suit of clothes from the tailor
+and ate his meals in the best cafés in town. He still slept in his
+little room at Maria’s, but the sight of his new clothes caused the
+neighborhood children to cease from calling him “hobo” and “tramp” from
+the roofs of woodsheds and over back fences.
+
+“Wiki-Wiki,” his Hawaiian short story, was bought by _Warren’s Monthly_
+for two hundred and fifty dollars. _The Northern Review_ took his
+essay, “The Cradle of Beauty,” and _Mackintosh’s Magazine_ took “The
+Palmist”—the poem he had written to Marian. The editors and readers
+were back from their summer vacations, and manuscripts were being
+handled quickly. But Martin could not puzzle out what strange whim
+animated them to this general acceptance of the things they had
+persistently rejected for two years. Nothing of his had been published.
+He was not known anywhere outside of Oakland, and in Oakland, with the
+few who thought they knew him, he was notorious as a red-shirt and a
+socialist. So there was no explaining this sudden acceptability of his
+wares. It was sheer jugglery of fate.
+
+After it had been refused by a number of magazines, he had taken
+Brissenden’s rejected advice and started “The Shame of the Sun” on the
+round of publishers. After several refusals, Singletree, Darnley & Co.
+accepted it, promising fall publication. When Martin asked for an
+advance on royalties, they wrote that such was not their custom, that
+books of that nature rarely paid for themselves, and that they doubted
+if his book would sell a thousand copies. Martin figured what the book
+would earn him on such a sale. Retailed at a dollar, on a royalty of
+fifteen per cent, it would bring him one hundred and fifty dollars. He
+decided that if he had it to do over again he would confine himself to
+fiction. “Adventure,” one-fourth as long, had brought him twice as much
+from _The Millennium_. That newspaper paragraph he had read so long ago
+had been true, after all. The first-class magazines did not pay on
+acceptance, and they paid well. Not two cents a word, but four cents a
+word, had _The Millennium_ paid him. And, furthermore, they bought good
+stuff, too, for were they not buying his? This last thought he
+accompanied with a grin.
+
+He wrote to Singletree, Darnley & Co., offering to sell out his rights
+in “The Shame of the Sun” for a hundred dollars, but they did not care
+to take the risk. In the meantime he was not in need of money, for
+several of his later stories had been accepted and paid for. He
+actually opened a bank account, where, without a debt in the world, he
+had several hundred dollars to his credit. “Overdue,” after having been
+declined by a number of magazines, came to rest at the Meredith-Lowell
+Company. Martin remembered the five dollars Gertrude had given him, and
+his resolve to return it to her a hundred times over; so he wrote for
+an advance on royalties of five hundred dollars. To his surprise a
+check for that amount, accompanied by a contract, came by return mail.
+He cashed the check into five-dollar gold pieces and telephoned
+Gertrude that he wanted to see her.
+
+She arrived at the house panting and short of breath from the haste she
+had made. Apprehensive of trouble, she had stuffed the few dollars she
+possessed into her hand-satchel; and so sure was she that disaster had
+overtaken her brother, that she stumbled forward, sobbing, into his
+arms, at the same time thrusting the satchel mutely at him.
+
+“I’d have come myself,” he said. “But I didn’t want a row with Mr.
+Higginbotham, and that is what would have surely happened.”
+
+“He’ll be all right after a time,” she assured him, while she wondered
+what the trouble was that Martin was in. “But you’d best get a job
+first an’ steady down. Bernard does like to see a man at honest work.
+That stuff in the newspapers broke ’m all up. I never saw ’m so mad
+before.”
+
+“I’m not going to get a job,” Martin said with a smile. “And you can
+tell him so from me. I don’t need a job, and there’s the proof of it.”
+
+He emptied the hundred gold pieces into her lap in a glinting, tinkling
+stream.
+
+“You remember that fiver you gave me the time I didn’t have carfare?
+Well, there it is, with ninety-nine brothers of different ages but all
+of the same size.”
+
+If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she was now in a
+panic of fear. Her fear was such that it was certitude. She was not
+suspicious. She was convinced. She looked at Martin in horror, and her
+heavy limbs shrank under the golden stream as though it were burning
+her.
+
+“It’s yours,” he laughed.
+
+She burst into tears, and began to moan, “My poor boy, my poor boy!”
+
+He was puzzled for a moment. Then he divined the cause of her agitation
+and handed her the Meredith-Lowell letter which had accompanied the
+check. She stumbled through it, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes,
+and when she had finished, said:-
+
+“An’ does it mean that you come by the money honestly?”
+
+“More honestly than if I’d won it in a lottery. I earned it.”
+
+Slowly faith came back to her, and she reread the letter carefully. It
+took him long to explain to her the nature of the transaction which had
+put the money into his possession, and longer still to get her to
+understand that the money was really hers and that he did not need it.
+
+“I’ll put it in the bank for you,” she said finally.
+
+“You’ll do nothing of the sort. It’s yours, to do with as you please,
+and if you won’t take it, I’ll give it to Maria. She’ll know what to do
+with it. I’d suggest, though, that you hire a servant and take a good
+long rest.”
+
+“I’m goin’ to tell Bernard all about it,” she announced, when she was
+leaving.
+
+Martin winced, then grinned.
+
+“Yes, do,” he said. “And then, maybe, he’ll invite me to dinner again.”
+
+“Yes, he will—I’m sure he will!” she exclaimed fervently, as she drew
+him to her and kissed and hugged him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII.
+
+
+One day Martin became aware that he was lonely. He was healthy and
+strong, and had nothing to do. The cessation from writing and studying,
+the death of Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big
+hole in his life; and his life refused to be pinned down to good living
+in cafés and the smoking of Egyptian cigarettes. It was true the South
+Seas were calling to him, but he had a feeling that the game was not
+yet played out in the United States. Two books were soon to be
+published, and he had more books that might find publication. Money
+could be made out of them, and he would wait and take a sackful of it
+into the South Seas. He knew a valley and a bay in the Marquesas that
+he could buy for a thousand Chili dollars. The valley ran from the
+horseshoe, land-locked bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks
+and contained perhaps ten thousand acres. It was filled with tropical
+fruits, wild chickens, and wild pigs, with an occasional herd of wild
+cattle, while high up among the peaks were herds of wild goats harried
+by packs of wild dogs. The whole place was wild. Not a human lived in
+it. And he could buy it and the bay for a thousand Chili dollars.
+
+The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with water deep enough
+to accommodate the largest vessel afloat, and so safe that the South
+Pacific Directory recommended it as the best careening place for ships
+for hundreds of miles around. He would buy a schooner—one of those
+yacht-like, coppered crafts that sailed like witches—and go trading
+copra and pearling among the islands. He would make the valley and the
+bay his headquarters. He would build a patriarchal grass house like
+Tati’s, and have it and the valley and the schooner filled with
+dark-skinned servitors. He would entertain there the factor of Taiohae,
+captains of wandering traders, and all the best of the South Pacific
+riffraff. He would keep open house and entertain like a prince. And he
+would forget the books he had opened and the world that had proved an
+illusion.
+
+To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money.
+Already it was beginning to flow in. If one of the books made a strike,
+it might enable him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts. Also he
+could collect the stories and the poems into books, and make sure of
+the valley and the bay and the schooner. He would never write again.
+Upon that he was resolved. But in the meantime, awaiting the
+publication of the books, he must do something more than live dazed and
+stupid in the sort of uncaring trance into which he had fallen.
+
+He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers’ Picnic took place
+that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he went. He had
+been to the working-class picnics too often in his earlier life not to
+know what they were like, and as he entered the park he experienced a
+recrudescence of all the old sensations. After all, they were his kind,
+these working people. He had been born among them, he had lived among
+them, and though he had strayed for a time, it was well to come back
+among them.
+
+“If it ain’t Mart!” he heard some one say, and the next moment a hearty
+hand was on his shoulder. “Where you ben all the time? Off to sea? Come
+on an’ have a drink.”
+
+It was the old crowd in which he found himself—the old crowd, with here
+and there a gap, and here and there a new face. The fellows were not
+bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics
+for the dancing, and the fighting, and the fun. Martin drank with them,
+and began to feel really human once more. He was a fool to have ever
+left them, he thought; and he was very certain that his sum of
+happiness would have been greater had he remained with them and let
+alone the books and the people who sat in the high places. Yet the beer
+seemed not so good as of yore. It didn’t taste as it used to taste.
+Brissenden had spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded, and wondered
+if, after all, the books had spoiled him for companionship with these
+friends of his youth. He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and
+he went on to the dancing pavilion. Jimmy, the plumber, he met there,
+in the company of a tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for
+Martin.
+
+“Gee, it’s like old times,” Jimmy explained to the gang that gave him
+the laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled away in a waltz. “An’ I
+don’t give a rap. I’m too damned glad to see ’m back. Watch ’m waltz,
+eh? It’s like silk. Who’d blame any girl?”
+
+But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three of them, with
+half a dozen friends, watched the revolving couples and laughed and
+joked with one another. Everybody was glad to see Martin back. No book
+of his been published; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes.
+They liked him for himself. He felt like a prince returned from excile,
+and his lonely heart burgeoned in the geniality in which it bathed. He
+made a mad day of it, and was at his best. Also, he had money in his
+pockets, and, as in the old days when he returned from sea with a
+pay-day, he made the money fly.
+
+Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go by in the arms of
+a young workingman; and, later, when he made the round of the pavilion,
+he came upon her sitting by a refreshment table. Surprise and greetings
+over, he led her away into the grounds, where they could talk without
+shouting down the music. From the instant he spoke to her, she was his.
+He knew it. She showed it in the proud humility of her eyes, in every
+caressing movement of her proudly carried body, and in the way she hung
+upon his speech. She was not the young girl as he had known her. She
+was a woman, now, and Martin noted that her wild, defiant beauty had
+improved, losing none of its wildness, while the defiance and the fire
+seemed more in control. “A beauty, a perfect beauty,” he murmured
+admiringly under his breath. And he knew she was his, that all he had
+to do was to say “Come,” and she would go with him over the world
+wherever he led.
+
+Even as the thought flashed through his brain he received a heavy blow
+on the side of his head that nearly knocked him down. It was a man’s
+fist, directed by a man so angry and in such haste that the fist had
+missed the jaw for which it was aimed. Martin turned as he staggered,
+and saw the fist coming at him in a wild swing. Quite as a matter of
+course he ducked, and the fist flew harmlessly past, pivoting the man
+who had driven it. Martin hooked with his left, landing on the pivoting
+man with the weight of his body behind the blow. The man went to the
+ground sidewise, leaped to his feet, and made a mad rush. Martin saw
+his passion-distorted face and wondered what could be the cause of the
+fellow’s anger. But while he wondered, he shot in a straight left, the
+weight of his body behind the blow. The man went over backward and fell
+in a crumpled heap. Jimmy and others of the gang were running toward
+them.
+
+Martin was thrilling all over. This was the old days with a vengeance,
+with their dancing, and their fighting, and their fun. While he kept a
+wary eye on his antagonist, he glanced at Lizzie. Usually the girls
+screamed when the fellows got to scrapping, but she had not screamed.
+She was looking on with bated breath, leaning slightly forward, so keen
+was her interest, one hand pressed to her breast, her cheek flushed,
+and in her eyes a great and amazed admiration.
+
+The man had gained his feet and was struggling to escape the
+restraining arms that were laid on him.
+
+“She was waitin’ for me to come back!” he was proclaiming to all and
+sundry. “She was waitin’ for me to come back, an’ then that fresh guy
+comes buttin’ in. Let go o’ me, I tell yeh. I’m goin’ to fix ’m.”
+
+“What’s eatin’ yer?” Jimmy was demanding, as he helped hold the young
+fellow back. “That guy’s Mart Eden. He’s nifty with his mits, lemme
+tell you that, an’ he’ll eat you alive if you monkey with ’m.”
+
+“He can’t steal her on me that way,” the other interjected.
+
+“He licked the Flyin’ Dutchman, an’ you know _him_,” Jimmy went on
+expostulating. “An’ he did it in five rounds. You couldn’t last a
+minute against him. See?”
+
+This information seemed to have a mollifying effect, and the irate
+young man favored Martin with a measuring stare.
+
+“He don’t look it,” he sneered; but the sneer was without passion.
+
+“That’s what the Flyin’ Dutchman thought,” Jimmy assured him. “Come on,
+now, let’s get outa this. There’s lots of other girls. Come on.”
+
+The young fellow allowed himself to be led away toward the pavilion,
+and the gang followed after him.
+
+“Who is he?” Martin asked Lizzie. “And what’s it all about, anyway?”
+
+Already the zest of combat, which of old had been so keen and lasting,
+had died down, and he discovered that he was self-analytical, too much
+so to live, single heart and single hand, so primitive an existence.
+
+Lizzie tossed her head.
+
+“Oh, he’s nobody,” she said. “He’s just ben keepin’ company with me.”
+
+“I had to, you see,” she explained after a pause. “I was gettin’ pretty
+lonesome. But I never forgot.” Her voice sank lower, and she looked
+straight before her. “I’d throw ’m down for you any time.”
+
+Martin looking at her averted face, knowing that all he had to do was
+to reach out his hand and pluck her, fell to pondering whether, after
+all, there was any real worth in refined, grammatical English, and, so,
+forgot to reply to her.
+
+“You put it all over him,” she said tentatively, with a laugh.
+
+“He’s a husky young fellow, though,” he admitted generously. “If they
+hadn’t taken him away, he might have given me my hands full.”
+
+“Who was that lady friend I seen you with that night?” she asked
+abruptly.
+
+“Oh, just a lady friend,” was his answer.
+
+“It was a long time ago,” she murmured contemplatively. “It seems like
+a thousand years.”
+
+But Martin went no further into the matter. He led the conversation off
+into other channels. They had lunch in the restaurant, where he ordered
+wine and expensive delicacies and afterward he danced with her and with
+no one but her, till she was tired. He was a good dancer, and she
+whirled around and around with him in a heaven of delight, her head
+against his shoulder, wishing that it could last forever. Later in the
+afternoon they strayed off among the trees, where, in the good old
+fashion, she sat down while he sprawled on his back, his head in her
+lap. He lay and dozed, while she fondled his hair, looked down on his
+closed eyes, and loved him without reserve. Looking up suddenly, he
+read the tender advertisement in her face. Her eyes fluttered down,
+then they opened and looked into his with soft defiance.
+
+“I’ve kept straight all these years,” she said, her voice so low that
+it was almost a whisper.
+
+In his heart Martin knew that it was the miraculous truth. And at his
+heart pleaded a great temptation. It was in his power to make her
+happy. Denied happiness himself, why should he deny happiness to her?
+He could marry her and take her down with him to dwell in the
+grass-walled castle in the Marquesas. The desire to do it was strong,
+but stronger still was the imperative command of his nature not to do
+it. In spite of himself he was still faithful to Love. The old days of
+license and easy living were gone. He could not bring them back, nor
+could he go back to them. He was changed—how changed he had not
+realized until now.
+
+“I am not a marrying man, Lizzie,” he said lightly.
+
+The hand caressing his hair paused perceptibly, then went on with the
+same gentle stroke. He noticed her face harden, but it was with the
+hardness of resolution, for still the soft color was in her cheeks and
+she was all glowing and melting.
+
+“I did not mean that—” she began, then faltered. “Or anyway I don’t
+care.”
+
+“I don’t care,” she repeated. “I’m proud to be your friend. I’d do
+anything for you. I’m made that way, I guess.”
+
+Martin sat up. He took her hand in his. He did it deliberately, with
+warmth but without passion; and such warmth chilled her.
+
+“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said.
+
+“You are a great and noble woman,” he said. “And it is I who should be
+proud to know you. And I am, I am. You are a ray of light to me in a
+very dark world, and I’ve got to be straight with you, just as straight
+as you have been.”
+
+“I don’t care whether you’re straight with me or not. You could do
+anything with me. You could throw me in the dirt an’ walk on me. An’
+you’re the only man in the world that can,” she added with a defiant
+flash. “I ain’t taken care of myself ever since I was a kid for
+nothin’.”
+
+“And it’s just because of that that I’m not going to,” he said gently.
+“You are so big and generous that you challenge me to equal
+generousness. I’m not marrying, and I’m not—well, loving without
+marrying, though I’ve done my share of that in the past. I’m sorry I
+came here to-day and met you. But it can’t be helped now, and I never
+expected it would turn out this way.
+
+“But look here, Lizzie. I can’t begin to tell you how much I like you.
+I do more than like you. I admire and respect you. You are magnificent,
+and you are magnificently good. But what’s the use of words? Yet
+there’s something I’d like to do. You’ve had a hard life; let me make
+it easy for you.” (A joyous light welled into her eyes, then faded out
+again.) “I’m pretty sure of getting hold of some money soon—lots of
+it.”
+
+In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley and the bay, the
+grass-walled castle and the trim, white schooner. After all, what did
+it matter? He could go away, as he had done so often, before the mast,
+on any ship bound anywhere.
+
+“I’d like to turn it over to you. There must be something you want—to
+go to school or business college. You might like to study and be a
+stenographer. I could fix it for you. Or maybe your father and mother
+are living—I could set them up in a grocery store or something.
+Anything you want, just name it, and I can fix it for you.”
+
+She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, dry-eyed and
+motionless, but with an ache in the throat which Martin divined so
+strongly that it made his own throat ache. He regretted that he had
+spoken. It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her—mere money—compared
+with what she offered him. He offered her an extraneous thing with
+which he could part without a pang, while she offered him herself,
+along with disgrace and shame, and sin, and all her hopes of heaven.
+
+“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said with a catch in her voice that
+she changed to a cough. She stood up. “Come on, let’s go home. I’m all
+tired out.”
+
+The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly all departed. But as
+Martin and Lizzie emerged from the trees they found the gang waiting
+for them. Martin knew immediately the meaning of it. Trouble was
+brewing. The gang was his body-guard. They passed out through the gates
+of the park with, straggling in the rear, a second gang, the friends
+that Lizzie’s young man had collected to avenge the loss of his lady.
+Several constables and special police officers, anticipating trouble,
+trailed along to prevent it, and herded the two gangs separately aboard
+the train for San Francisco. Martin told Jimmy that he would get off at
+Sixteenth Street Station and catch the electric car into Oakland.
+Lizzie was very quiet and without interest in what was impending. The
+train pulled in to Sixteenth Street Station, and the waiting electric
+car could be seen, the conductor of which was impatiently clanging the
+gong.
+
+“There she is,” Jimmy counselled. “Make a run for it, an’ we’ll hold
+’em back. Now you go! Hit her up!”
+
+The hostile gang was temporarily disconcerted by the manoeuvre, then it
+dashed from the train in pursuit. The staid and sober Oakland folk who
+sat upon the car scarcely noted the young fellow and the girl who ran
+for it and found a seat in front on the outside. They did not connect
+the couple with Jimmy, who sprang on the steps, crying to the
+motorman:-
+
+“Slam on the juice, old man, and beat it outa here!”
+
+The next moment Jimmy whirled about, and the passengers saw him land
+his fist on the face of a running man who was trying to board the car.
+But fists were landing on faces the whole length of the car. Thus,
+Jimmy and his gang, strung out on the long, lower steps, met the
+attacking gang. The car started with a great clanging of its gong, and,
+as Jimmy’s gang drove off the last assailants, they, too, jumped off to
+finish the job. The car dashed on, leaving the flurry of combat far
+behind, and its dumfounded passengers never dreamed that the quiet
+young man and the pretty working-girl sitting in the corner on the
+outside seat had been the cause of the row.
+
+Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the old fighting
+thrills. But they quickly died away, and he was oppressed by a great
+sadness. He felt very old—centuries older than those careless,
+care-free young companions of his others days. He had travelled far,
+too far to go back. Their mode of life, which had once been his, was
+now distasteful to him. He was disappointed in it all. He had developed
+into an alien. As the steam beer had tasted raw, so their companionship
+seemed raw to him. He was too far removed. Too many thousands of opened
+books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself. He had
+travelled in the vast realm of intellect until he could no longer
+return home. On the other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need
+for companionship remained unsatisfied. He had found no new home. As
+the gang could not understand him, as his own family could not
+understand him, as the bourgeoisie could not understand him, so this
+girl beside him, whom he honored high, could not understand him nor the
+honor he paid her. His sadness was not untouched with bitterness as he
+thought it over.
+
+“Make it up with him,” he advised Lizzie, at parting, as they stood in
+front of the workingman’s shack in which she lived, near Sixth and
+Market. He referred to the young fellow whose place he had usurped that
+day.
+
+“I can’t—now,” she said.
+
+“Oh, go on,” he said jovially. “All you have to do is whistle and he’ll
+come running.”
+
+“I didn’t mean that,” she said simply.
+
+And he knew what she had meant.
+
+She leaned toward him as he was about to say good night. But she leaned
+not imperatively, not seductively, but wistfully and humbly. He was
+touched to the heart. His large tolerance rose up in him. He put his
+arms around her, and kissed her, and knew that upon his own lips rested
+as true a kiss as man ever received.
+
+“My God!” she sobbed. “I could die for you. I could die for you.”
+
+She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps. He felt a
+quick moisture in his eyes.
+
+“Martin Eden,” he communed. “You’re not a brute, and you’re a damn poor
+Nietzscheman. You’d marry her if you could and fill her quivering heart
+full with happiness. But you can’t, you can’t. And it’s a damn shame.”
+
+“‘A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers,’” he muttered,
+remembering his Henly. “‘Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.’ It
+is—a blunder and a shame.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII.
+
+
+“The Shame of the Sun” was published in October. As Martin cut the
+cords of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary copies
+from the publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy sadness fell upon
+him. He thought of the wild delight that would have been his had this
+happened a few short months before, and he contrasted that delight that
+should have been with his present uncaring coldness. His book, his
+first book, and his pulse had not gone up a fraction of a beat, and he
+was only sad. It meant little to him now. The most it meant was that it
+might bring some money, and little enough did he care for money.
+
+He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.
+
+“I did it,” he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment. “I
+wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your
+vegetable soup went into the making of it. Keep it. It’s yours. Just to
+remember me by, you know.”
+
+He was not bragging, not showing off. His sole motive was to make her
+happy, to make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in him. She
+put the book in the front room on top of the family Bible. A sacred
+thing was this book her lodger had made, a fetich of friendship. It
+softened the blow of his having been a laundryman, and though she could
+not understand a line of it, she knew that every line of it was great.
+She was a simple, practical, hard-working woman, but she possessed
+faith in large endowment.
+
+Just as emotionlessly as he had received “The Shame of the Sun” did he
+read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping bureau.
+The book was making a hit, that was evident. It meant more gold in the
+money sack. He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all his promises, and still
+have enough left to build his grass-walled castle.
+
+Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of
+fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second
+edition of twice the size through the presses; and ere this was
+delivered a third edition of five thousand had been ordered. A London
+firm made arrangements by cable for an English edition, and hot-footed
+upon this came the news of French, German, and Scandinavian
+translations in progress. The attack upon the Maeterlinck school could
+not have been made at a more opportune moment. A fierce controversy was
+precipitated. Saleeby and Haeckel indorsed and defended “The Shame of
+the Sun,” for once finding themselves on the same side of a question.
+Crookes and Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver
+Lodge attempted to formulate a compromise that would jibe with his
+particular cosmic theories. Maeterlinck’s followers rallied around the
+standard of mysticism. Chesterton set the whole world laughing with a
+series of alleged non-partisan essays on the subject, and the whole
+affair, controversy and controversialists, was well-nigh swept into the
+pit by a thundering broadside from George Bernard Shaw. Needless to say
+the arena was crowded with hosts of lesser lights, and the dust and
+sweat and din became terrific.
+
+“It is a most marvellous happening,” Singletree, Darnley & Co. wrote
+Martin, “a critical philosophic essay selling like a novel. You could
+not have chosen your subject better, and all contributory factors have
+been unwarrantedly propitious. We need scarcely to assure you that we
+are making hay while the sun shines. Over forty thousand copies have
+already been sold in the United States and Canada, and a new edition of
+twenty thousand is on the presses. We are overworked, trying to supply
+the demand. Nevertheless we have helped to create that demand. We have
+already spent five thousand dollars in advertising. The book is bound
+to be a record-breaker.”
+
+“Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book which
+we have taken the liberty of forwarding to you. You will please note
+that we have increased your royalties to twenty per cent, which is
+about as high as a conservative publishing house dares go. If our offer
+is agreeable to you, please fill in the proper blank space with the
+title of your book. We make no stipulations concerning its nature. Any
+book on any subject. If you have one already written, so much the
+better. Now is the time to strike. The iron could not be hotter.”
+
+“On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an
+advance on royalties of five thousand dollars. You see, we have faith
+in you, and we are going in on this thing big. We should like, also, to
+discuss with you the drawing up of a contract for a term of years, say
+ten, during which we shall have the exclusive right of publishing in
+book-form all that you produce. But more of this anon.”
+
+Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental arithmetic,
+finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty thousand to be nine
+thousand dollars. He signed the new contract, inserting “The Smoke of
+Joy” in the blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers along
+with the twenty storiettes he had written in the days before he
+discovered the formula for the newspaper storiette. And promptly as the
+United States mail could deliver and return, came Singletree, Darnley &
+Co.’s check for five thousand dollars.
+
+“I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about two
+o’clock,” Martin said, the morning the check arrived. “Or, better, meet
+me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o’clock. I’ll be looking out for
+you.”
+
+At the appointed time she was there; but _shoes_ was the only clew to
+the mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered a
+distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by a
+shoe-store and dived into a real estate office. What happened thereupon
+resided forever after in her memory as a dream. Fine gentlemen smiled
+at her benevolently as they talked with Martin and one another; a
+type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an imposing document;
+her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his signature; and when
+all was over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her landlord spoke to
+her, saying, “Well, Maria, you won’t have to pay me no seven dollars
+and a half this month.”
+
+Maria was too stunned for speech.
+
+“Or next month, or the next, or the next,” her landlord said.
+
+She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor. And it was not until
+she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her own kind,
+and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she really knew that
+she was the owner of the little house in which she had lived and for
+which she had paid rent so long.
+
+“Why don’t you trade with me no more?” the Portuguese grocer asked
+Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the car;
+and Martin explained that he wasn’t doing his own cooking any more, and
+then went in and had a drink of wine on the house. He noted it was the
+best wine the grocer had in stock.
+
+“Maria,” Martin announced that night, “I’m going to leave you. And
+you’re going to leave here yourself soon. Then you can rent the house
+and be a landlord yourself. You’ve a brother in San Leandro or
+Haywards, and he’s in the milk business. I want you to send all your
+washing back unwashed—understand?—unwashed, and to go out to San
+Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see that brother
+of yours. Tell him to come to see me. I’ll be stopping at the Metropole
+down in Oakland. He’ll know a good milk-ranch when he sees one.”
+
+And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a
+dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account
+that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore
+shoes and went to school. Few persons ever meet the fairy princes they
+dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was hard, never
+dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the guise of an
+ex-laundryman.
+
+In the meantime the world had begun to ask: “Who is this Martin Eden?”
+He had declined to give any biographical data to his publishers, but
+the newspapers were not to be denied. Oakland was his own town, and the
+reporters nosed out scores of individuals who could supply information.
+All that he was and was not, all that he had done and most of what he
+had not done, was spread out for the delectation of the public,
+accompanied by snapshots and photographs—the latter procured from the
+local photographer who had once taken Martin’s picture and who promptly
+copyrighted it and put it on the market. At first, so great was his
+disgust with the magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought
+against publicity; but in the end, because it was easier than not to,
+he surrendered. He found that he could not refuse himself to the
+special writers who travelled long distances to see him. Then again,
+each day was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was occupied
+with writing and studying, those hours had to be occupied somehow; so
+he yielded to what was to him a whim, permitted interviews, gave his
+opinions on literature and philosophy, and even accepted invitations of
+the bourgeoisie. He had settled down into a strange and comfortable
+state of mind. He no longer cared. He forgave everybody, even the cub
+reporter who had painted him red and to whom he now granted a full page
+with specially posed photographs.
+
+He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she regretted the
+greatness that had come to him. It widened the space between them.
+Perhaps it was with the hope of narrowing it that she yielded to his
+persuasions to go to night school and business college and to have
+herself gowned by a wonderful dressmaker who charged outrageous prices.
+She improved visibly from day to day, until Martin wondered if he was
+doing right, for he knew that all her compliance and endeavor was for
+his sake. She was trying to make herself of worth in his eyes—of the
+sort of worth he seemed to value. Yet he gave her no hope, treating her
+in brotherly fashion and rarely seeing her.
+
+“Overdue” was rushed upon the market by the Meredith-Lowell Company in
+the height of his popularity, and being fiction, in point of sales it
+made even a bigger strike than “The Shame of the Sun.” Week after week
+his was the credit of the unprecedented performance of having two books
+at the head of the list of best-sellers. Not only did the story take
+with the fiction-readers, but those who read “The Shame of the Sun”
+with avidity were likewise attracted to the sea-story by the cosmic
+grasp of mastery with which he had handled it. First he had attacked
+the literature of mysticism, and had done it exceeding well; and, next,
+he had successfully supplied the very literature he had exposited, thus
+proving himself to be that rare genius, a critic and a creator in one.
+
+Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like,
+through the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested
+by the stir he was making. One thing was puzzling him, a little thing
+that would have puzzled the world had it known. But the world would
+have puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather than over the little thing
+that to him loomed gigantic. Judge Blount invited him to dinner. That
+was the little thing, or the beginning of the little thing, that was
+soon to become the big thing. He had insulted Judge Blount, treated him
+abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street, invited him to
+dinner. Martin bethought himself of the numerous occasions on which he
+had met Judge Blount at the Morses’ and when Judge Blount had not
+invited him to dinner. Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he
+asked himself. He had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What
+made the difference? The fact that the stuff he had written had
+appeared inside the covers of books? But it was work performed. It was
+not something he had done since. It was achievement accomplished at the
+very time Judge Blount was sharing this general view and sneering at
+his Spencer and his intellect. Therefore it was not for any real value,
+but for a purely fictitious value that Judge Blount invited him to
+dinner.
+
+Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at his
+complacence. And at the dinner, where, with their womankind, were half
+a dozen of those that sat in high places, and where Martin found
+himself quite the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded by Judge Hanwell,
+urged privately that Martin should permit his name to be put up for the
+Styx—the ultra-select club to which belonged, not the mere men of
+wealth, but the men of attainment. And Martin declined, and was more
+puzzled than ever.
+
+He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts. He was
+overwhelmed by requests from editors. It had been discovered that he
+was a stylist, with meat under his style. _The Northern Review_, after
+publishing “The Cradle of Beauty,” had written him for half a dozen
+similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not
+_Burton’s Magazine_, in a speculative mood, offered him five hundred
+dollars each for five essays. He wrote back that he would supply the
+demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay. He remembered that all
+these manuscripts had been refused by the very magazines that were now
+clamoring for them. And their refusals had been cold-blooded,
+automatic, stereotyped. They had made him sweat, and now he intended to
+make them sweat. _Burton’s Magazine_ paid his price for five essays,
+and the remaining four, at the same rate, were snapped up by
+_Mackintosh’s Monthly, The Northern Review_ being too poor to stand the
+pace. Thus went out to the world “The High Priests of Mystery,” “The
+Wonder-Dreamers,” “The Yardstick of the Ego,” “Philosophy of Illusion,”
+“God and Clod,” “Art and Biology,” “Critics and Test-tubes,”
+“Star-dust,” and “The Dignity of Usury,”—to raise storms and rumblings
+and mutterings that were many a day in dying down.
+
+Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, which he did,
+but it was always for work performed. He refused resolutely to pledge
+himself to any new thing. The thought of again setting pen to paper
+maddened him. He had seen Brissenden torn to pieces by the crowd, and
+despite the fact that him the crowd acclaimed, he could not get over
+the shock nor gather any respect for the crowd. His very popularity
+seemed a disgrace and a treason to Brissenden. It made him wince, but
+he made up his mind to go on and fill the money-bag.
+
+He received letters from editors like the following: “About a year ago
+we were unfortunate enough to refuse your collection of love-poems. We
+were greatly impressed by them at the time, but certain arrangements
+already entered into prevented our taking them. If you still have them,
+and if you will be kind enough to forward them, we shall be glad to
+publish the entire collection on your own terms. We are also prepared
+to make a most advantageous offer for bringing them out in book-form.”
+
+Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it instead. He
+read it over before mailing, and was particularly impressed by its
+sophomoric amateurishness and general worthlessness. But he sent it;
+and it was published, to the everlasting regret of the editor. The
+public was indignant and incredulous. It was too far a cry from Martin
+Eden’s high standard to that serious bosh. It was asserted that he had
+never written it, that the magazine had faked it very clumsily, or that
+Martin Eden was emulating the elder Dumas and at the height of success
+was hiring his writing done for him. But when he explained that the
+tragedy was an early effort of his literary childhood, and that the
+magazine had refused to be happy unless it got it, a great laugh went
+up at the magazine’s expense and a change in the editorship followed.
+The tragedy was never brought out in book-form, though Martin pocketed
+the advance royalties that had been paid.
+
+_Coleman’s Weekly_ sent Martin a lengthy telegram, costing nearly three
+hundred dollars, offering him a thousand dollars an article for twenty
+articles. He was to travel over the United States, with all expenses
+paid, and select whatever topics interested him. The body of the
+telegram was devoted to hypothetical topics in order to show him the
+freedom of range that was to be his. The only restriction placed upon
+him was that he must confine himself to the United States. Martin sent
+his inability to accept and his regrets by wire “collect.”
+
+“Wiki-Wiki,” published in _Warren’s Monthly_, was an instantaneous
+success. It was brought out forward in a wide-margined, beautifully
+decorated volume that struck the holiday trade and sold like wildfire.
+The critics were unanimous in the belief that it would take its place
+with those two classics by two great writers, “The Bottle Imp” and “The
+Magic Skin.”
+
+The public, however, received the “Smoke of Joy” collection rather
+dubiously and coldly. The audacity and unconventionality of the
+storiettes was a shock to bourgeois morality and prejudice; but when
+Paris went mad over the immediate translation that was made, the
+American and English reading public followed suit and bought so many
+copies that Martin compelled the conservative house of Singletree,
+Darnley & Co. to pay a flat royalty of twenty-five per cent for a third
+book, and thirty per cent flat for a fourth. These two volumes
+comprised all the short stories he had written and which had received,
+or were receiving, serial publication. “The Ring of Bells” and his
+horror stories constituted one collection; the other collection was
+composed of “Adventure,” “The Pot,” “The Wine of Life,” “The
+Whirlpool,” “The Jostling Street,” and four other stories. The
+Lowell-Meredith Company captured the collection of all his essays, and
+the Maxmillian Company got his “Sea Lyrics” and the “Love-cycle,” the
+latter receiving serial publication in the _Ladies’ Home Companion_
+after the payment of an extortionate price.
+
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of the last
+manuscript. The grass-walled castle and the white, coppered schooner
+were very near to him. Well, at any rate he had discovered Brissenden’s
+contention that nothing of merit found its way into the magazines. His
+own success demonstrated that Brissenden had been wrong.
+
+And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had been right,
+after all. “The Shame of the Sun” had been the cause of his success
+more than the stuff he had written. That stuff had been merely
+incidental. It had been rejected right and left by the magazines. The
+publication of “The Shame of the Sun” had started a controversy and
+precipitated the landslide in his favor. Had there been no “Shame of
+the Sun” there would have been no landslide, and had there been no
+miracle in the go of “The Shame of the Sun” there would have been no
+landslide. Singletree, Darnley & Co. attested that miracle. They had
+brought out a first edition of fifteen hundred copies and been dubious
+of selling it. They were experienced publishers and no one had been
+more astounded than they at the success which had followed. To them it
+had been in truth a miracle. They never got over it, and every letter
+they wrote him reflected their reverent awe of that first mysterious
+happening. They did not attempt to explain it. There was no explaining
+it. It had happened. In the face of all experience to the contrary, it
+had happened.
+
+So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of his
+popularity. It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and poured its
+gold into his money-sack, and from what little he knew of the
+bourgeoisie it was not clear to him how it could possibly appreciate or
+comprehend what he had written. His intrinsic beauty and power meant
+nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying
+his books. He was the fad of the hour, the adventurer who had stormed
+Parnassus while the gods nodded. The hundreds of thousands read him and
+acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding with which they had
+flung themselves on Brissenden’s “Ephemera” and torn it to pieces—a
+wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him. Fawn or fang, it
+was all a matter of chance. One thing he knew with absolute certitude:
+“Ephemera” was infinitely greater than anything he had done. It was
+infinitely greater than anything he had in him. It was a poem of
+centuries. Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry tribute
+indeed, for that same mob had wallowed “Ephemera” into the mire. He
+sighed heavily and with satisfaction. He was glad the last manuscript
+was sold and that he would soon be done with it all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV.
+
+
+Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metropole. Whether he
+had happened there just casually, intent on other affairs, or whether
+he had come there for the direct purpose of inviting him to dinner,
+Martin never could quite make up his mind, though he inclined toward
+the second hypothesis. At any rate, invited to dinner he was by Mr.
+Morse—Ruth’s father, who had forbidden him the house and broken off the
+engagement.
+
+Martin was not angry. He was not even on his dignity. He tolerated Mr.
+Morse, wondering the while how it felt to eat such humble pie. He did
+not decline the invitation. Instead, he put it off with vagueness and
+indefiniteness and inquired after the family, particularly after Mrs.
+Morse and Ruth. He spoke her name without hesitancy, naturally, though
+secretly surprised that he had had no inward quiver, no old, familiar
+increase of pulse and warm surge of blood.
+
+He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he accepted. Persons
+got themselves introduced to him in order to invite him to dinner. And
+he went on puzzling over the little thing that was becoming a great
+thing. Bernard Higginbotham invited him to dinner. He puzzled the
+harder. He remembered the days of his desperate starvation when no one
+invited him to dinner. That was the time he needed dinners, and went
+weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine. That
+was the paradox of it. When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him,
+and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners and was losing his
+appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left. But why? There
+was no justice in it, no merit on his part. He was no different. All
+the work he had done was even at that time work performed. Mr. and Mrs.
+Morse had condemned him for an idler and a shirk and through Ruth had
+urged that he take a clerk’s position in an office. Furthermore, they
+had been aware of his work performed. Manuscript after manuscript of
+his had been turned over to them by Ruth. They had read them. It was
+the very same work that had put his name in all the papers, and, it was
+his name being in all the papers that led them to invite him.
+
+One thing was certain: the Morses had not cared to have him for himself
+or for his work. Therefore they could not want him now for himself or
+for his work, but for the fame that was his, because he was somebody
+amongst men, and—why not?—because he had a hundred thousand dollars or
+so. That was the way bourgeois society valued a man, and who was he to
+expect it otherwise? But he was proud. He disdained such valuation. He
+desired to be valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all,
+was an expression of himself. That was the way Lizzie valued him. The
+work, with her, did not even count. She valued him, himself. That was
+the way Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued him. That had
+been proved often enough in the days when he ran with them; it had been
+proved that Sunday at Shell Mound Park. His work could go hang. What
+they liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart Eden, one of
+the bunch and a pretty good guy.
+
+Then there was Ruth. She had liked him for himself, that was
+indisputable. And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the
+bourgeois standard of valuation more. She had opposed his writing, and
+principally, it seemed to him, because it did not earn money. That had
+been her criticism of his “Love-cycle.” She, too, had urged him to get
+a job. It was true, she refined it to “position,” but it meant the same
+thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature stuck. He had read her
+all that he wrote—poems, stories, essays—“Wiki-Wiki,” “The Shame of the
+Sun,” everything. And she had always and consistently urged him to get
+a job, to go to work—good God!—as if he hadn’t been working, robbing
+sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.
+
+So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate
+regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was
+becoming an obsession. _Work performed_. The phrase haunted his brain.
+He sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over
+Higginbotham’s Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain
+himself from shouting out:-
+
+“It was work performed! And now you feed me, when then you let me
+starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn’t get a
+job. And the work was already done, all done. And now, when I speak,
+you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and
+pay respectful attention to whatever I choose to say. I tell you your
+party is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a
+rage you hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say. And
+why? Because I’m famous; because I’ve a lot of money. Not because I’m
+Martin Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool. I could
+tell you the moon is made of green cheese and you would subscribe to
+the notion, at least you would not repudiate it, because I’ve got
+dollars, mountains of them. And it was all done long ago; it was work
+performed, I tell you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your
+feet.”
+
+But Martin did not shout out. The thought gnawed in his brain, an
+unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant. As
+he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking.
+He was a success himself, and proud of it. He was self-made. No one had
+helped him. He owed no man. He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and
+bringing up a large family. And there was Higginbotham’s Cash Store,
+that monument of his own industry and ability. He loved Higginbotham’s
+Cash Store as some men loved their wives. He opened up his heart to
+Martin, showed with what keenness and with what enormous planning he
+had made the store. And he had plans for it, ambitious plans. The
+neighborhood was growing up fast. The store was really too small. If he
+had more room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving and
+money-saving improvements. And he would do it yet. He was straining
+every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and put up
+another two-story frame building. The upstairs he could rent, and the
+whole ground-floor of both buildings would be Higginbotham’s Cash
+Store. His eyes glistened when he spoke of the new sign that would
+stretch clear across both buildings.
+
+Martin forgot to listen. The refrain of “Work performed,” in his own
+brain, was drowning the other’s clatter. The refrain maddened him, and
+he tried to escape from it.
+
+“How much did you say it would cost?” he asked suddenly.
+
+His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the
+business opportunities of the neighborhood. He hadn’t said how much it
+would cost. But he knew. He had figured it out a score of times.
+
+“At the way lumber is now,” he said, “four thousand could do it.”
+
+“Including the sign?”
+
+“I didn’t count on that. It’d just have to come, onc’t the buildin’ was
+there.”
+
+“And the ground?”
+
+“Three thousand more.”
+
+He leaned forward, licking his lips, nervously spreading and closing
+his fingers, while he watched Martin write a check. When it was passed
+over to him, he glanced at the amount-seven thousand dollars.
+
+“I—I can’t afford to pay more than six per cent,” he said huskily.
+
+Martin wanted to laugh, but, instead, demanded:-
+
+“How much would that be?”
+
+“Lemme see. Six per cent—six times seven—four hundred an’ twenty.”
+
+“That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn’t it?”
+
+Higginbotham nodded.
+
+“Then, if you’ve no objection, we’ll arrange it this way.” Martin
+glanced at Gertrude. “You can have the principal to keep for yourself,
+if you’ll use the thirty-five dollars a month for cooking and washing
+and scrubbing. The seven thousand is yours if you’ll guarantee that
+Gertrude does no more drudgery. Is it a go?”
+
+Mr. Higginbotham swallowed hard. That his wife should do no more
+housework was an affront to his thrifty soul. The magnificent present
+was the coating of a pill, a bitter pill. That his wife should not
+work! It gagged him.
+
+“All right, then,” Martin said. “I’ll pay the thirty-five a month,
+and—”
+
+He reached across the table for the check. But Bernard Higginbotham got
+his hand on it first, crying:
+
+“I accept! I accept!”
+
+When Martin got on the electric car, he was very sick and tired. He
+looked up at the assertive sign.
+
+“The swine,” he groaned. “The swine, the swine.”
+
+When _Mackintosh’s Magazine_ published “The Palmist,” featuring it with
+decorations by Berthier and with two pictures by Wenn, Hermann von
+Schmidt forgot that he had called the verses obscene. He announced that
+his wife had inspired the poem, saw to it that the news reached the
+ears of a reporter, and submitted to an interview by a staff writer who
+was accompanied by a staff photographer and a staff artist. The result
+was a full page in a Sunday supplement, filled with photographs and
+idealized drawings of Marian, with many intimate details of Martin Eden
+and his family, and with the full text of “The Palmist” in large type,
+and republished by special permission of _Mackintosh’s Magazine_. It
+caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, and good housewives were proud
+to have the acquaintances of the great writer’s sister, while those who
+had not made haste to cultivate it. Hermann von Schmidt chuckled in his
+little repair shop and decided to order a new lathe. “Better than
+advertising,” he told Marian, “and it costs nothing.”
+
+“We’d better have him to dinner,” she suggested.
+
+And to dinner Martin came, making himself agreeable with the fat
+wholesale butcher and his fatter wife—important folk, they, likely to
+be of use to a rising young man like Hermann von Schmidt. No less a
+bait, however, had been required to draw them to his house than his
+great brother-in-law. Another man at table who had swallowed the same
+bait was the superintendent of the Pacific Coast agencies for the Asa
+Bicycle Company. Him Von Schmidt desired to please and propitiate
+because from him could be obtained the Oakland agency for the bicycle.
+So Hermann von Schmidt found it a goodly asset to have Martin for a
+brother-in-law, but in his heart of hearts he couldn’t understand where
+it all came in. In the silent watches of the night, while his wife
+slept, he had floundered through Martin’s books and poems, and decided
+that the world was a fool to buy them.
+
+And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situation only too
+well, as he leaned back and gloated at Von Schmidt’s head, in fancy
+punching it well-nigh off of him, sending blow after blow home just
+right—the chuckle-headed Dutchman! One thing he did like about him,
+however. Poor as he was, and determined to rise as he was, he
+nevertheless hired one servant to take the heavy work off of Marian’s
+hands. Martin talked with the superintendent of the Asa agencies, and
+after dinner he drew him aside with Hermann, whom he backed financially
+for the best bicycle store with fittings in Oakland. He went further,
+and in a private talk with Hermann told him to keep his eyes open for
+an automobile agency and garage, for there was no reason that he should
+not be able to run both establishments successfully.
+
+With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, Marian, at
+parting, told Martin how much she loved him and always had loved him.
+It was true, there was a perceptible halt midway in her assertion,
+which she glossed over with more tears and kisses and incoherent
+stammerings, and which Martin inferred to be her appeal for forgiveness
+for the time she had lacked faith in him and insisted on his getting a
+job.
+
+“He can’t never keep his money, that’s sure,” Hermann von Schmidt
+confided to his wife. “He got mad when I spoke of interest, an’ he said
+damn the principal and if I mentioned it again, he’d punch my Dutch
+head off. That’s what he said—my Dutch head. But he’s all right, even
+if he ain’t no business man. He’s given me my chance, an’ he’s all
+right.”
+
+Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the more they poured,
+the more he puzzled. He sat, the guest of honor, at an Arden Club
+banquet, with men of note whom he had heard about and read about all
+his life; and they told him how, when they had read “The Ring of Bells”
+in the _Transcontinental_, and “The Peri and the Pearl” in _The
+Hornet_, they had immediately picked him for a winner. My God! and I
+was hungry and in rags, he thought to himself. Why didn’t you give me a
+dinner then? Then was the time. It was work performed. If you are
+feeding me now for work performed, why did you not feed me then when I
+needed it? Not one word in “The Ring of Bells,” nor in “The Peri and
+the Pearl” has been changed. No; you’re not feeding me now for work
+performed. You are feeding me because everybody else is feeding me and
+because it is an honor to feed me. You are feeding me now because you
+are herd animals; because you are part of the mob; because the one
+blind, automatic thought in the mob-mind just now is to feed me. And
+where does Martin Eden and the work Martin Eden performed come in in
+all this? he asked himself plaintively, then arose to respond cleverly
+and wittily to a clever and witty toast.
+
+So it went. Wherever he happened to be—at the Press Club, at the
+Redwood Club, at pink teas and literary gatherings—always were
+remembered “The Ring of Bells” and “The Peri and the Pearl” when they
+were first published. And always was Martin’s maddening and unuttered
+demand: Why didn’t you feed me then? It was work performed. “The Ring
+of Bells” and “The Peri and the Pearl” are not changed one iota. They
+were just as artistic, just as worth while, then as now. But you are
+not feeding me for their sake, nor for the sake of anything else I have
+written. You’re feeding me because it is the style of feeding just now,
+because the whole mob is crazy with the idea of feeding Martin Eden.
+
+And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch in among the
+company a young hoodlum in square-cut coat and under a stiff-rim
+Stetson hat. It happened to him at the Gallina Society in Oakland one
+afternoon. As he rose from his chair and stepped forward across the
+platform, he saw stalk through the wide door at the rear of the great
+room the young hoodlum with the square-cut coat and stiff-rim hat. Five
+hundred fashionably gowned women turned their heads, so intent and
+steadfast was Martin’s gaze, to see what he was seeing. But they saw
+only the empty centre aisle. He saw the young tough lurching down that
+aisle and wondered if he would remove the stiff-rim which never yet had
+he seen him without. Straight down the aisle he came, and up the
+platform. Martin could have wept over that youthful shade of himself,
+when he thought of all that lay before him. Across the platform he
+swaggered, right up to Martin, and into the foreground of Martin’s
+consciousness disappeared. The five hundred women applauded softly with
+gloved hands, seeking to encourage the bashful great man who was their
+guest. And Martin shook the vision from his brain, smiled, and began to
+speak.
+
+The Superintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Martin on the
+street and remembered him, recalling seances in his office when Martin
+was expelled from school for fighting.
+
+“I read your ‘Ring of Bells’ in one of the magazines quite a time ago,”
+he said. “It was as good as Poe. Splendid, I said at the time,
+splendid!”
+
+Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed me on the street
+and did not know me, Martin almost said aloud. Each time I was hungry
+and heading for the pawnbroker. Yet it was work performed. You did not
+know me then. Why do you know me now?
+
+“I was remarking to my wife only the other day,” the other was saying,
+“wouldn’t it be a good idea to have you out to dinner some time? And
+she quite agreed with me. Yes, she quite agreed with me.”
+
+“Dinner?” Martin said so sharply that it was almost a snarl.
+
+“Why, yes, yes, dinner, you know—just pot luck with us, with your old
+superintendent, you rascal,” he uttered nervously, poking Martin in an
+attempt at jocular fellowship.
+
+Martin went down the street in a daze. He stopped at the corner and
+looked about him vacantly.
+
+“Well, I’ll be damned!” he murmured at last. “The old fellow was afraid
+of me.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV.
+
+
+Kreis came to Martin one day—Kreis, of the “real dirt”; and Martin
+turned to him with relief, to receive the glowing details of a scheme
+sufficiently wild-catty to interest him as a fictionist rather than an
+investor. Kreis paused long enough in the midst of his exposition to
+tell him that in most of his “Shame of the Sun” he had been a chump.
+
+“But I didn’t come here to spout philosophy,” Kreis went on. “What I
+want to know is whether or not you will put a thousand dollars in on
+this deal?”
+
+“No, I’m not chump enough for that, at any rate,” Martin answered. “But
+I’ll tell you what I will do. You gave me the greatest night of my
+life. You gave me what money cannot buy. Now I’ve got money, and it
+means nothing to me. I’d like to turn over to you a thousand dollars of
+what I don’t value for what you gave me that night and which was beyond
+price. You need the money. I’ve got more than I need. You want it. You
+came for it. There’s no use scheming it out of me. Take it.”
+
+Kreis betrayed no surprise. He folded the check away in his pocket.
+
+“At that rate I’d like the contract of providing you with many such
+nights,” he said.
+
+“Too late.” Martin shook his head. “That night was the one night for
+me. I was in paradise. It’s commonplace with you, I know. But it wasn’t
+to me. I shall never live at such a pitch again. I’m done with
+philosophy. I want never to hear another word of it.”
+
+“The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my philosophy,” Kreis
+remarked, as he paused in the doorway. “And then the market broke.”
+
+Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and smiled and
+nodded. He smiled back and lifted his hat. The episode did not affect
+him. A month before it might have disgusted him, or made him curious
+and set him to speculating about her state of consciousness at that
+moment. But now it was not provocative of a second thought. He forgot
+about it the next moment. He forgot about it as he would have forgotten
+the Central Bank Building or the City Hall after having walked past
+them. Yet his mind was preternaturally active. His thoughts went ever
+around and around in a circle. The centre of that circle was “work
+performed”; it ate at his brain like a deathless maggot. He awoke to it
+in the morning. It tormented his dreams at night. Every affair of life
+around him that penetrated through his senses immediately related
+itself to “work performed.” He drove along the path of relentless logic
+to the conclusion that he was nobody, nothing. Mart Eden, the hoodlum,
+and Mart Eden, the sailor, had been real, had been he; but Martin Eden!
+the famous writer, did not exist. Martin Eden, the famous writer, was a
+vapor that had arisen in the mob-mind and by the mob-mind had been
+thrust into the corporeal being of Mart Eden, the hoodlum and sailor.
+But it couldn’t fool him. He was not that sun-myth that the mob was
+worshipping and sacrificing dinners to. He knew better.
+
+He read the magazines about himself, and pored over portraits of
+himself published therein until he was unable to associate his identity
+with those portraits. He was the fellow who had lived and thrilled and
+loved; who had been easy-going and tolerant of the frailties of life;
+who had served in the forecastle, wandered in strange lands, and led
+his gang in the old fighting days. He was the fellow who had been
+stunned at first by the thousands of books in the free library, and who
+had afterward learned his way among them and mastered them; he was the
+fellow who had burned the midnight oil and bedded with a spur and
+written books himself. But the one thing he was not was that colossal
+appetite that all the mob was bent upon feeding.
+
+There were things, however, in the magazines that amused him. All the
+magazines were claiming him. _Warren’s Monthly_ advertised to its
+subscribers that it was always on the quest after new writers, and
+that, among others, it had introduced Martin Eden to the reading
+public. _The White Mouse_ claimed him; so did _The Northern Review_ and
+_Mackintosh’s Magazine_, until silenced by _The Globe_, which pointed
+triumphantly to its files where the mangled “Sea Lyrics” lay buried.
+_Youth and Age_, which had come to life again after having escaped
+paying its bills, put in a prior claim, which nobody but farmers’
+children ever read. The _Transcontinental_ made a dignified and
+convincing statement of how it first discovered Martin Eden, which was
+warmly disputed by _The Hornet_, with the exhibit of “The Peri and the
+Pearl.” The modest claim of Singletree, Darnley & Co. was lost in the
+din. Besides, that publishing firm did not own a magazine wherewith to
+make its claim less modest.
+
+The newspapers calculated Martin’s royalties. In some way the
+magnificent offers certain magazines had made him leaked out, and
+Oakland ministers called upon him in a friendly way, while professional
+begging letters began to clutter his mail. But worse than all this were
+the women. His photographs were published broadcast, and special
+writers exploited his strong, bronzed face, his scars, his heavy
+shoulders, his clear, quiet eyes, and the slight hollows in his cheeks
+like an ascetic’s. At this last he remembered his wild youth and
+smiled. Often, among the women he met, he would see now one, now
+another, looking at him, appraising him, selecting him. He laughed to
+himself. He remembered Brissenden’s warning and laughed again. The
+women would never destroy him, that much was certain. He had gone past
+that stage.
+
+Once, walking with Lizzie toward night school, she caught a glance
+directed toward him by a well-gowned, handsome woman of the
+bourgeoisie. The glance was a trifle too long, a shade too
+considerative. Lizzie knew it for what it was, and her body tensed
+angrily. Martin noticed, noticed the cause of it, told her how used he
+was becoming to it and that he did not care anyway.
+
+“You ought to care,” she answered with blazing eyes. “You’re sick.
+That’s what’s the matter.”
+
+“Never healthier in my life. I weigh five pounds more than I ever did.”
+
+“It ain’t your body. It’s your head. Something’s wrong with your
+think-machine. Even I can see that, an’ I ain’t nobody.”
+
+He walked on beside her, reflecting.
+
+“I’d give anything to see you get over it,” she broke out impulsively.
+“You ought to care when women look at you that way, a man like you.
+It’s not natural. It’s all right enough for sissy-boys. But you ain’t
+made that way. So help me, I’d be willing an’ glad if the right woman
+came along an’ made you care.”
+
+When he left Lizzie at night school, he returned to the Metropole.
+
+Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and sat staring
+straight before him. He did not doze. Nor did he think. His mind was a
+blank, save for the intervals when unsummoned memory pictures took form
+and color and radiance just under his eyelids. He saw these pictures,
+but he was scarcely conscious of them—no more so than if they had been
+dreams. Yet he was not asleep. Once, he roused himself and glanced at
+his watch. It was just eight o’clock. He had nothing to do, and it was
+too early for bed. Then his mind went blank again, and the pictures
+began to form and vanish under his eyelids. There was nothing
+distinctive about the pictures. They were always masses of leaves and
+shrub-like branches shot through with hot sunshine.
+
+A knock at the door aroused him. He was not asleep, and his mind
+immediately connected the knock with a telegram, or letter, or perhaps
+one of the servants bringing back clean clothes from the laundry. He
+was thinking about Joe and wondering where he was, as he said, “Come
+in.”
+
+He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn toward the door. He
+heard it close softly. There was a long silence. He forgot that there
+had been a knock at the door, and was still staring blankly before him
+when he heard a woman’s sob. It was involuntary, spasmodic, checked,
+and stifled—he noted that as he turned about. The next instant he was
+on his feet.
+
+“Ruth!” he said, amazed and bewildered.
+
+Her face was white and strained. She stood just inside the door, one
+hand against it for support, the other pressed to her side. She
+extended both hands toward him piteously, and started forward to meet
+him. As he caught her hands and led her to the Morris chair he noticed
+how cold they were. He drew up another chair and sat down on the broad
+arm of it. He was too confused to speak. In his own mind his affair
+with Ruth was closed and sealed. He felt much in the same way that he
+would have felt had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry suddenly invaded the
+Hotel Metropole with a whole week’s washing ready for him to pitch
+into. Several times he was about to speak, and each time he hesitated.
+
+“No one knows I am here,” Ruth said in a faint voice, with an appealing
+smile.
+
+“What did you say?”
+
+He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.
+
+She repeated her words.
+
+“Oh,” he said, then wondered what more he could possibly say.
+
+“I saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes.”
+
+“Oh,” he said again.
+
+He had never been so tongue-tied in his life. Positively he did not
+have an idea in his head. He felt stupid and awkward, but for the life
+of him he could think of nothing to say. It would have been easier had
+the intrusion been the Shelly Hot Springs laundry. He could have rolled
+up his sleeves and gone to work.
+
+“And then you came in,” he said finally.
+
+She nodded, with a slightly arch expression, and loosened the scarf at
+her throat.
+
+“I saw you first from across the street when you were with that girl.”
+
+“Oh, yes,” he said simply. “I took her down to night school.”
+
+“Well, aren’t you glad to see me?” she said at the end of another
+silence.
+
+“Yes, yes.” He spoke hastily. “But wasn’t it rash of you to come here?”
+
+“I slipped in. Nobody knows I am here. I wanted to see you. I came to
+tell you I have been very foolish. I came because I could no longer
+stay away, because my heart compelled me to come, because—because I
+wanted to come.”
+
+She came forward, out of her chair and over to him. She rested her hand
+on his shoulder a moment, breathing quickly, and then slipped into his
+arms. And in his large, easy way, desirous of not inflicting hurt,
+knowing that to repulse this proffer of herself was to inflict the most
+grievous hurt a woman could receive, he folded his arms around her and
+held her close. But there was no warmth in the embrace, no caress in
+the contact. She had come into his arms, and he held her, that was all.
+She nestled against him, and then, with a change of position, her hands
+crept up and rested upon his neck. But his flesh was not fire beneath
+those hands, and he felt awkward and uncomfortable.
+
+“What makes you tremble so?” he asked. “Is it a chill? Shall I light
+the grate?”
+
+He made a movement to disengage himself, but she clung more closely to
+him, shivering violently.
+
+“It is merely nervousness,” she said with chattering teeth. “I’ll
+control myself in a minute. There, I am better already.”
+
+Slowly her shivering died away. He continued to hold her, but he was no
+longer puzzled. He knew now for what she had come.
+
+“My mother wanted me to marry Charley Hapgood,” she announced.
+
+“Charley Hapgood, that fellow who speaks always in platitudes?” Martin
+groaned. Then he added, “And now, I suppose, your mother wants you to
+marry me.”
+
+He did not put it in the form of a question. He stated it as a
+certitude, and before his eyes began to dance the rows of figures of
+his royalties.
+
+“She will not object, I know that much,” Ruth said.
+
+“She considers me quite eligible?”
+
+Ruth nodded.
+
+“And yet I am not a bit more eligible now than I was when she broke our
+engagement,” he meditated. “I haven’t changed any. I’m the same Martin
+Eden, though for that matter I’m a bit worse—I smoke now. Don’t you
+smell my breath?”
+
+In reply she pressed her open fingers against his lips, placed them
+graciously and playfully, and in expectancy of the kiss that of old had
+always been a consequence. But there was no caressing answer of
+Martin’s lips. He waited until the fingers were removed and then went
+on.
+
+“I am not changed. I haven’t got a job. I’m not looking for a job.
+Furthermore, I am not going to look for a job. And I still believe that
+Herbert Spencer is a great and noble man and that Judge Blount is an
+unmitigated ass. I had dinner with him the other night, so I ought to
+know.”
+
+“But you didn’t accept father’s invitation,” she chided.
+
+“So you know about that? Who sent him? Your mother?”
+
+She remained silent.
+
+“Then she did send him. I thought so. And now I suppose she has sent
+you.”
+
+“No one knows that I am here,” she protested. “Do you think my mother
+would permit this?”
+
+“She’d permit you to marry me, that’s certain.”
+
+She gave a sharp cry. “Oh, Martin, don’t be cruel. You have not kissed
+me once. You are as unresponsive as a stone. And think what I have
+dared to do.” She looked about her with a shiver, though half the look
+was curiosity. “Just think of where I am.”
+
+“_I could die for you! I could die for you_!”—Lizzie’s words were
+ringing in his ears.
+
+“Why didn’t you dare it before?” he asked harshly. “When I hadn’t a
+job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an
+artist, the same Martin Eden? That’s the question I’ve been propounding
+to myself for many a day—not concerning you merely, but concerning
+everybody. You see I have not changed, though my sudden apparent
+appreciation in value compels me constantly to reassure myself on that
+point. I’ve got the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and
+toes. I am the same. I have not developed any new strength nor virtue.
+My brain is the same old brain. I haven’t made even one new
+generalization on literature or philosophy. I am personally of the same
+value that I was when nobody wanted me. And what is puzzling me is why
+they want me now. Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself is
+the same old self they did not want. Then they must want me for
+something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that
+is not I! Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the
+recognition I have received. That recognition is not I. It resides in
+the minds of others. Then again for the money I have earned and am
+earning. But that money is not I. It resides in banks and in the
+pockets of Tom, Dick, and Harry. And is it for that, for the
+recognition and the money, that you now want me?”
+
+“You are breaking my heart,” she sobbed. “You know I love you, that I
+am here because I love you.”
+
+“I am afraid you don’t see my point,” he said gently. “What I mean is:
+if you love me, how does it happen that you love me now so much more
+than you did when your love was weak enough to deny me?”
+
+“Forget and forgive,” she cried passionately. “I loved you all the
+time, remember that, and I am here, now, in your arms.”
+
+“I’m afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying to
+weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is.”
+
+She withdrew herself from his arms, sat upright, and looked at him long
+and searchingly. She was about to speak, then faltered and changed her
+mind.
+
+“You see, it appears this way to me,” he went on. “When I was all that
+I am now, nobody out of my own class seemed to care for me. When my
+books were all written, no one who had read the manuscripts seemed to
+care for them. In point of fact, because of the stuff I had written
+they seemed to care even less for me. In writing the stuff it seemed
+that I had committed acts that were, to say the least, derogatory. ‘Get
+a job,’ everybody said.”
+
+She made a movement of dissent.
+
+“Yes, yes,” he said; “except in your case you told me to get a
+position. The homely word _job_, like much that I have written, offends
+you. It is brutal. But I assure you it was no less brutal to me when
+everybody I knew recommended it to me as they would recommend right
+conduct to an immoral creature. But to return. The publication of what
+I had written, and the public notice I received, wrought a change in
+the fibre of your love. Martin Eden, with his work all performed, you
+would not marry. Your love for him was not strong enough to enable you
+to marry him. But your love is now strong enough, and I cannot avoid
+the conclusion that its strength arises from the publication and the
+public notice. In your case I do not mention royalties, though I am
+certain that they apply to the change wrought in your mother and
+father. Of course, all this is not flattering to me. But worst of all,
+it makes me question love, sacred love. Is love so gross a thing that
+it must feed upon publication and public notice? It would seem so. I
+have sat and thought upon it till my head went around.”
+
+“Poor, dear head.” She reached up a hand and passed the fingers
+soothingly through his hair. “Let it go around no more. Let us begin
+anew, now. I loved you all the time. I know that I was weak in yielding
+to my mother’s will. I should not have done so. Yet I have heard you
+speak so often with broad charity of the fallibility and frailty of
+humankind. Extend that charity to me. I acted mistakenly. Forgive me.”
+
+“Oh, I do forgive,” he said impatiently. “It is easy to forgive where
+there is really nothing to forgive. Nothing that you have done requires
+forgiveness. One acts according to one’s lights, and more than that one
+cannot do. As well might I ask you to forgive me for my not getting a
+job.”
+
+“I meant well,” she protested. “You know that I could not have loved
+you and not meant well.”
+
+“True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning.”
+
+“Yes, yes,” he shut off her attempted objection. “You would have
+destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature,
+and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It
+is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life.
+You would have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a
+two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life’s values are unreal, and
+false, and vulgar.” He felt her stir protestingly. “Vulgarity—a hearty
+vulgarity, I’ll admit—is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture.
+As I say, you wanted to formalize me, to make me over into one of your
+own class, with your class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices.”
+He shook his head sadly. “And you do not understand, even now, what I
+am saying. My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them
+mean. What I say is so much fantasy to you. Yet to me it is vital
+reality. At the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this raw
+boy, crawling up out of the mire of the abyss, should pass judgment
+upon your class and call it vulgar.”
+
+She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body shivered
+with recurrent nervousness. He waited for a time for her to speak, and
+then went on.
+
+“And now you want to renew our love. You want us to be married. You
+want me. And yet, listen—if my books had not been noticed, I’d
+nevertheless have been just what I am now. And you would have stayed
+away. It is all those damned books—”
+
+“Don’t swear,” she interrupted.
+
+Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh laugh.
+
+“That’s it,” he said, “at a high moment, when what seems your life’s
+happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same old
+way—afraid of life and a healthy oath.”
+
+She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her
+act, and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was
+consequently resentful. They sat in silence for a long time, she
+thinking desperately and he pondering upon his love which had departed.
+He knew, now, that he had not really loved her. It was an idealized
+Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright
+and luminous spirit of his love-poems. The real bourgeois Ruth, with
+all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois
+psychology in her mind, he had never loved.
+
+She suddenly began to speak.
+
+“I know that much you have said is so. I have been afraid of life. I
+did not love you well enough. I have learned to love better. I love you
+for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by which you
+have become. I love you for the ways wherein you differ from what you
+call my class, for your beliefs which I do not understand but which I
+know I can come to understand. I shall devote myself to understanding
+them. And even your smoking and your swearing—they are part of you and
+I will love you for them, too. I can still learn. In the last ten
+minutes I have learned much. That I have dared to come here is a token
+of what I have already learned. Oh, Martin!—”
+
+She was sobbing and nestling close against him.
+
+For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy, and
+she acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening face.
+
+“It is too late,” he said. He remembered Lizzie’s words. “I am a sick
+man—oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all
+values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago,
+it would have been different. It is too late, now.”
+
+“It is not too late,” she cried. “I will show you. I will prove to you
+that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and all
+that is dearest to me. All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will
+flout. I am no longer afraid of life. I will leave my father and
+mother, and let my name become a by-word with my friends. I will come
+to you here and now, in free love if you will, and I will be proud and
+glad to be with you. If I have been a traitor to love, I will now, for
+love’s sake, be a traitor to all that made that earlier treason.”
+
+She stood before him, with shining eyes.
+
+“I am waiting, Martin,” she whispered, “waiting for you to accept me.
+Look at me.”
+
+It was splendid, he thought, looking at her. She had redeemed herself
+for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman, superior to
+the iron rule of bourgeois convention. It was splendid, magnificent,
+desperate. And yet, what was the matter with him? He was not thrilled
+nor stirred by what she had done. It was splendid and magnificent only
+intellectually. In what should have been a moment of fire, he coldly
+appraised her. His heart was untouched. He was unaware of any desire
+for her. Again he remembered Lizzie’s words.
+
+“I am sick, very sick,” he said with a despairing gesture. “How sick I
+did not know till now. Something has gone out of me. I have always been
+unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life
+has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything. If there
+were room, I should want you, now. You see how sick I am.”
+
+He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child, crying,
+that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate through the
+tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the
+presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses of vegetation,
+shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and blazed against this
+background of his eyelids. It was not restful, that green foliage. The
+sunlight was too raw and glaring. It hurt him to look at it, and yet he
+looked, he knew not why.
+
+He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob. Ruth was
+at the door.
+
+“How shall I get out?” she questioned tearfully. “I am afraid.”
+
+“Oh, forgive me,” he cried, springing to his feet. “I’m not myself, you
+know. I forgot you were here.” He put his hand to his head. “You see,
+I’m not just right. I’ll take you home. We can go out by the servants’
+entrance. No one will see us. Pull down that veil and everything will
+be all right.”
+
+She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the
+narrow stairs.
+
+“I am safe now,” she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at the
+same time starting to take her hand from his arm.
+
+“No, no, I’ll see you home,” he answered.
+
+“No, please don’t,” she objected. “It is unnecessary.”
+
+Again she started to remove her hand. He felt a momentary curiosity.
+Now that she was out of danger she was afraid. She was in almost a
+panic to be quit of him. He could see no reason for it and attributed
+it to her nervousness. So he restrained her withdrawing hand and
+started to walk on with her. Halfway down the block, he saw a man in a
+long overcoat shrink back into a doorway. He shot a glance in as he
+passed by, and, despite the high turned-up collar, he was certain that
+he recognized Ruth’s brother, Norman.
+
+During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversation. She was
+stunned. He was apathetic. Once, he mentioned that he was going away,
+back to the South Seas, and, once, she asked him to forgive her having
+come to him. And that was all. The parting at her door was
+conventional. They shook hands, said good night, and he lifted his hat.
+The door swung shut, and he lighted a cigarette and turned back for his
+hotel. When he came to the doorway into which he had seen Norman
+shrink, he stopped and looked in in a speculative humor.
+
+“She lied,” he said aloud. “She made believe to me that she had dared
+greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought her was
+waiting to take her back.” He burst into laughter. “Oh, these
+bourgeois! When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with his sister.
+When I have a bank account, he brings her to me.”
+
+As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same direction,
+begged him over his shoulder.
+
+“Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?” were the words.
+
+But it was the voice that made Martin turn around. The next instant he
+had Joe by the hand.
+
+“D’ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?” the other was
+saying. “I said then we’d meet again. I felt it in my bones. An’ here
+we are.”
+
+“You’re looking good,” Martin said admiringly, “and you’ve put on
+weight.”
+
+“I sure have.” Joe’s face was beaming. “I never knew what it was to
+live till I hit hoboin’. I’m thirty pounds heavier an’ feel tiptop all
+the time. Why, I was worked to skin an’ bone in them old days. Hoboin’
+sure agrees with me.”
+
+“But you’re looking for a bed just the same,” Martin chided, “and it’s
+a cold night.”
+
+“Huh? Lookin’ for a bed?” Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket and
+brought it out filled with small change. “That beats hard graft,” he
+exulted. “You just looked good; that’s why I battered you.”
+
+Martin laughed and gave in.
+
+“You’ve several full-sized drunks right there,” he insinuated.
+
+Joe slid the money back into his pocket.
+
+“Not in mine,” he announced. “No gettin’ oryide for me, though there
+ain’t nothin’ to stop me except I don’t want to. I’ve ben drunk once
+since I seen you last, an’ then it was unexpected, bein’ on an empty
+stomach. When I work like a beast, I drink like a beast. When I live
+like a man, I drink like a man—a jolt now an’ again when I feel like
+it, an’ that’s all.”
+
+Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to the hotel. He
+paused in the office to look up steamer sailings. The _Mariposa_ sailed
+for Tahiti in five days.
+
+“Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me,” he told the
+clerk. “No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the weather-side,—the
+port-side, remember that, the port-side. You’d better write it down.”
+
+Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently as
+a child. The occurrences of the evening had made no impression on him.
+His mind was dead to impressions. The glow of warmth with which he met
+Joe had been most fleeting. The succeeding minute he had been bothered
+by the ex-laundryman’s presence and by the compulsion of conversation.
+That in five more days he sailed for his loved South Seas meant nothing
+to him. So he closed his eyes and slept normally and comfortably for
+eight uninterrupted hours. He was not restless. He did not change his
+position, nor did he dream. Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each
+day that he awoke, he awoke with regret. Life worried and bored him,
+and time was a vexation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI.
+
+
+“Say, Joe,” was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next morning,
+“there’s a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street. He’s made a pot of
+money, and he’s going back to France. It’s a dandy, well-appointed,
+small steam laundry. There’s a start for you if you want to settle
+down. Here, take this; buy some clothes with it and be at this man’s
+office by ten o’clock. He looked up the laundry for me, and he’ll take
+you out and show you around. If you like it, and think it is worth the
+price—twelve thousand—let me know and it is yours. Now run along. I’m
+busy. I’ll see you later.”
+
+“Now look here, Mart,” the other said slowly, with kindling anger, “I
+come here this mornin’ to see you. Savve? I didn’t come here to get no
+laundry. I come here for a talk for old friends’ sake, and you shove a
+laundry at me. I tell you what you can do. You can take that laundry
+an’ go to hell.”
+
+He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him around.
+
+“Now look here, Joe,” he said; “if you act that way, I’ll punch your
+head. And for old friends’ sake I’ll punch it hard. Savve?—you will,
+will you?”
+
+Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and
+writhing out of the advantage of the other’s hold. They reeled about
+the room, locked in each other’s arms, and came down with a crash
+across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath,
+with arms spread out and held and with Martin’s knee on his chest. He
+was panting and gasping for breath when Martin released him.
+
+“Now we’ll talk a moment,” Martin said. “You can’t get fresh with me. I
+want that laundry business finished first of all. Then you can come
+back and we’ll talk for old sake’s sake. I told you I was busy. Look at
+that.”
+
+A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of
+letters and magazines.
+
+“How can I wade through that and talk with you? You go and fix up that
+laundry, and then we’ll get together.”
+
+“All right,” Joe admitted reluctantly. “I thought you was turnin’ me
+down, but I guess I was mistaken. But you can’t lick me, Mart, in a
+stand-up fight. I’ve got the reach on you.”
+
+“We’ll put on the gloves sometime and see,” Martin said with a smile.
+
+“Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going.” Joe extended his arm. “You
+see that reach? It’ll make you go a few.”
+
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the
+laundryman. He was becoming anti-social. Daily he found it a severer
+strain to be decent with people. Their presence perturbed him, and the
+effort of conversation irritated him. They made him restless, and no
+sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for
+excuses to get rid of them.
+
+He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in
+his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-formed
+thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at
+wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of his
+intelligence.
+
+He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. There were a
+dozen requests for autographs—he knew them at sight; there were
+professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks,
+ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the
+man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a
+hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to purchase the
+Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of communist
+colonization. There were letters from women seeking to know him, and
+over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt for pew-rent,
+sent as evidence of her good faith and as proof of her respectability.
+
+Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters, the
+former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their knees
+for his books—his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept all he
+possessed in pawn for so many dreary months in order to fund them in
+postage. There were unexpected checks for English serial rights and for
+advance payments on foreign translations. His English agent announced
+the sale of German translation rights in three of his books, and
+informed him that Swedish editions, from which he could expect nothing
+because Sweden was not a party to the Berne Convention, were already on
+the market. Then there was a nominal request for his permission for a
+Russian translation, that country being likewise outside the Berne
+Convention.
+
+He turned to the huge bundle of clippings which had come in from his
+press bureau, and read about himself and his vogue, which had become a
+furore. All his creative output had been flung to the public in one
+magnificent sweep. That seemed to account for it. He had taken the
+public off its feet, the way Kipling had, that time when he lay near to
+death and all the mob, animated by a mob-mind thought, began suddenly
+to read him. Martin remembered how that same world-mob, having read him
+and acclaimed him and not understood him in the least, had, abruptly, a
+few months later, flung itself upon him and torn him to pieces. Martin
+grinned at the thought. Who was he that he should not be similarly
+treated in a few more months? Well, he would fool the mob. He would be
+away, in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls
+and copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and
+bonitas, hunting wild goats among the cliffs of the valley that lay
+next to the valley of Taiohae.
+
+In the moment of that thought the desperateness of his situation dawned
+upon him. He saw, cleared eyed, that he was in the Valley of the
+Shadow. All the life that was in him was fading, fainting, making
+toward death.
+
+He realized how much he slept, and how much he desired to sleep. Of
+old, he had hated sleep. It had robbed him of precious moments of
+living. Four hours of sleep in the twenty-four had meant being robbed
+of four hours of life. How he had grudged sleep! Now it was life he
+grudged. Life was not good; its taste in his mouth was without tang,
+and bitter. This was his peril. Life that did not yearn toward life was
+in fair way toward ceasing. Some remote instinct for preservation
+stirred in him, and he knew he must get away. He glanced about the
+room, and the thought of packing was burdensome. Perhaps it would be
+better to leave that to the last. In the meantime he might be getting
+an outfit.
+
+He put on his hat and went out, stopping in at a gun-store, where he
+spent the remainder of the morning buying automatic rifles, ammunition,
+and fishing tackle. Fashions changed in trading, and he knew he would
+have to wait till he reached Tahiti before ordering his trade-goods.
+They could come up from Australia, anyway. This solution was a source
+of pleasure. He had avoided doing something, and the doing of anything
+just now was unpleasant. He went back to the hotel gladly, with a
+feeling of satisfaction in that the comfortable Morris chair was
+waiting for him; and he groaned inwardly, on entering his room, at
+sight of Joe in the Morris chair.
+
+Joe was delighted with the laundry. Everything was settled, and he
+would enter into possession next day. Martin lay on the bed, with
+closed eyes, while the other talked on. Martin’s thoughts were far
+away—so far away that he was rarely aware that he was thinking. It was
+only by an effort that he occasionally responded. And yet this was Joe,
+whom he had always liked. But Joe was too keen with life. The
+boisterous impact of it on Martin’s jaded mind was a hurt. It was an
+aching probe to his tired sensitiveness. When Joe reminded him that
+sometime in the future they were going to put on the gloves together,
+he could almost have screamed.
+
+“Remember, Joe, you’re to run the laundry according to those old rules
+you used to lay down at Shelly Hot Springs,” he said. “No overworking.
+No working at night. And no children at the mangles. No children
+anywhere. And a fair wage.”
+
+Joe nodded and pulled out a note-book.
+
+“Look at here. I was workin’ out them rules before breakfast this A.M.
+What d’ye think of them?”
+
+He read them aloud, and Martin approved, worrying at the same time as
+to when Joe would take himself off.
+
+It was late afternoon when he awoke. Slowly the fact of life came back
+to him. He glanced about the room. Joe had evidently stolen away after
+he had dozed off. That was considerate of Joe, he thought. Then he
+closed his eyes and slept again.
+
+In the days that followed Joe was too busy organizing and taking hold
+of the laundry to bother him much; and it was not until the day before
+sailing that the newspapers made the announcement that he had taken
+passage on the _Mariposa_. Once, when the instinct of preservation
+fluttered, he went to a doctor and underwent a searching physical
+examination. Nothing could be found the matter with him. His heart and
+lungs were pronounced magnificent. Every organ, so far as the doctor
+could know, was normal and was working normally.
+
+“There is nothing the matter with you, Mr. Eden,” he said, “positively
+nothing the matter with you. You are in the pink of condition.
+Candidly, I envy you your health. It is superb. Look at that chest.
+There, and in your stomach, lies the secret of your remarkable
+constitution. Physically, you are a man in a thousand—in ten thousand.
+Barring accidents, you should live to be a hundred.”
+
+And Martin knew that Lizzie’s diagnosis had been correct. Physically he
+was all right. It was his “think-machine” that had gone wrong, and
+there was no cure for that except to get away to the South Seas. The
+trouble was that now, on the verge of departure, he had no desire to
+go. The South Seas charmed him no more than did bourgeois civilization.
+There was no zest in the thought of departure, while the act of
+departure appalled him as a weariness of the flesh. He would have felt
+better if he were already on board and gone.
+
+The last day was a sore trial. Having read of his sailing in the
+morning papers, Bernard Higginbotham, Gertrude, and all the family came
+to say good-by, as did Hermann von Schmidt and Marian. Then there was
+business to be transacted, bills to be paid, and everlasting reporters
+to be endured. He said good-by to Lizzie Connolly, abruptly, at the
+entrance to night school, and hurried away. At the hotel he found Joe,
+too busy all day with the laundry to have come to him earlier. It was
+the last straw, but Martin gripped the arms of his chair and talked and
+listened for half an hour.
+
+“You know, Joe,” he said, “that you are not tied down to that laundry.
+There are no strings on it. You can sell it any time and blow the
+money. Any time you get sick of it and want to hit the road, just pull
+out. Do what will make you the happiest.”
+
+Joe shook his head.
+
+“No more road in mine, thank you kindly. Hoboin’s all right, exceptin’
+for one thing—the girls. I can’t help it, but I’m a ladies’ man. I
+can’t get along without ’em, and you’ve got to get along without ’em
+when you’re hoboin’. The times I’ve passed by houses where dances an’
+parties was goin’ on, an’ heard the women laugh, an’ saw their white
+dresses and smiling faces through the windows—Gee! I tell you them
+moments was plain hell. I like dancin’ an’ picnics, an’ walking in the
+moonlight, an’ all the rest too well. Me for the laundry, and a good
+front, with big iron dollars clinkin’ in my jeans. I seen a girl
+already, just yesterday, and, d’ye know, I’m feelin’ already I’d just
+as soon marry her as not. I’ve ben whistlin’ all day at the thought of
+it. She’s a beaut, with the kindest eyes and softest voice you ever
+heard. Me for her, you can stack on that. Say, why don’t you get
+married with all this money to burn? You could get the finest girl in
+the land.”
+
+Martin shook his head with a smile, but in his secret heart he was
+wondering why any man wanted to marry. It seemed an amazing and
+incomprehensible thing.
+
+From the deck of the _Mariposa_, at the sailing hour, he saw Lizzie
+Connolly hiding in the skirts of the crowd on the wharf. Take her with
+you, came the thought. It is easy to be kind. She will be supremely
+happy. It was almost a temptation one moment, and the succeeding moment
+it became a terror. He was in a panic at the thought of it. His tired
+soul cried out in protest. He turned away from the rail with a groan,
+muttering, “Man, you are too sick, you are too sick.”
+
+He fled to his stateroom, where he lurked until the steamer was clear
+of the dock. In the dining saloon, at luncheon, he found himself in the
+place of honor, at the captain’s right; and he was not long in
+discovering that he was the great man on board. But no more
+unsatisfactory great man ever sailed on a ship. He spent the afternoon
+in a deck-chair, with closed eyes, dozing brokenly most of the time,
+and in the evening went early to bed.
+
+After the second day, recovered from seasickness, the full passenger
+list was in evidence, and the more he saw of the passengers the more he
+disliked them. Yet he knew that he did them injustice. They were good
+and kindly people, he forced himself to acknowledge, and in the moment
+of acknowledgment he qualified—good and kindly like all the
+bourgeoisie, with all the psychological cramp and intellectual futility
+of their kind, they bored him when they talked with him, their little
+superficial minds were so filled with emptiness; while the boisterous
+high spirits and the excessive energy of the younger people shocked
+him. They were never quiet, ceaselessly playing deck-quoits, tossing
+rings, promenading, or rushing to the rail with loud cries to watch the
+leaping porpoises and the first schools of flying fish.
+
+He slept much. After breakfast he sought his deck-chair with a magazine
+he never finished. The printed pages tired him. He puzzled that men
+found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair. When
+the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he must awaken.
+There was no satisfaction in being awake.
+
+Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and went forward
+into the forecastle with the sailors. But the breed of sailors seemed
+to have changed since the days he had lived in the forecastle. He could
+find no kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures.
+He was in despair. Up above nobody had wanted Martin Eden for his own
+sake, and he could not go back to those of his own class who had wanted
+him in the past. He did not want them. He could not stand them any more
+than he could stand the stupid first-cabin passengers and the riotous
+young people.
+
+Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a
+sick person. During every conscious moment life blazed in a raw glare
+around him and upon him. It hurt. It hurt intolerably. It was the first
+time in his life that Martin had travelled first class. On ships at sea
+he had always been in the forecastle, the steerage, or in the black
+depths of the coal-hold, passing coal. In those days, climbing up the
+iron ladders out the pit of stifling heat, he had often caught glimpses
+of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing but enjoy themselves,
+under awnings spread to keep the sun and wind away from them, with
+subservient stewards taking care of their every want and whim, and it
+had seemed to him that the realm in which they moved and had their
+being was nothing else than paradise. Well, here he was, the great man
+on board, in the midmost centre of it, sitting at the captain’s right
+hand, and yet vainly harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest
+of the Paradise he had lost. He had found no new one, and now he could
+not find the old one.
+
+He strove to stir himself and find something to interest him. He
+ventured the petty officers’ mess, and was glad to get away. He talked
+with a quartermaster off duty, an intelligent man who promptly prodded
+him with the socialist propaganda and forced into his hands a bunch of
+leaflets and pamphlets. He listened to the man expounding the
+slave-morality, and as he listened, he thought languidly of his own
+Nietzsche philosophy. But what was it worth, after all? He remembered
+one of Nietzsche’s mad utterances wherein that madman had doubted
+truth. And who was to say? Perhaps Nietzsche had been right. Perhaps
+there was no truth in anything, no truth in truth—no such thing as
+truth. But his mind wearied quickly, and he was content to go back to
+his chair and doze.
+
+Miserable as he was on the steamer, a new misery came upon him. What
+when the steamer reached Tahiti? He would have to go ashore. He would
+have to order his trade-goods, to find a passage on a schooner to the
+Marquesas, to do a thousand and one things that were awful to
+contemplate. Whenever he steeled himself deliberately to think, he
+could see the desperate peril in which he stood. In all truth, he was
+in the Valley of the Shadow, and his danger lay in that he was not
+afraid. If he were only afraid, he would make toward life. Being
+unafraid, he was drifting deeper into the shadow. He found no delight
+in the old familiar things of life. The _Mariposa_ was now in the
+northeast trades, and this wine of wind, surging against him, irritated
+him. He had his chair moved to escape the embrace of this lusty comrade
+of old days and nights.
+
+The day the _Mariposa_ entered the doldrums, Martin was more miserable
+than ever. He could no longer sleep. He was soaked with sleep, and
+perforce he must now stay awake and endure the white glare of life. He
+moved about restlessly. The air was sticky and humid, and the
+rain-squalls were unrefreshing. He ached with life. He walked around
+the deck until that hurt too much, then sat in his chair until he was
+compelled to walk again. He forced himself at last to finish the
+magazine, and from the steamer library he culled several volumes of
+poetry. But they could not hold him, and once more he took to walking.
+
+He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him, for
+when he went below, he could not sleep. This surcease from life had
+failed him. It was too much. He turned on the electric light and tried
+to read. One of the volumes was a Swinburne. He lay in bed, glancing
+through its pages, until suddenly he became aware that he was reading
+with interest. He finished the stanza, attempted to read on, then came
+back to it. He rested the book face downward on his breast and fell to
+thinking. That was it. The very thing. Strange that it had never come
+to him before. That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting
+that way all the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the
+happy way out. He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him. He
+glanced at the open port-hole. Yes, it was large enough. For the first
+time in weeks he felt happy. At last he had discovered the cure of his
+ill. He picked up the book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-
+
+“‘From too much love of living,
+    From hope and fear set free,
+We thank with brief thanksgiving
+    Whatever gods may be
+That no life lives forever;
+That dead men rise up never;
+    That even the weariest river
+    Winds somewhere safe to sea.’”
+
+
+He looked again at the open port. Swinburne had furnished the key. Life
+was ill, or, rather, it had become ill—an unbearable thing. “That dead
+men rise up never!” That line stirred him with a profound feeling of
+gratitude. It was the one beneficent thing in the universe. When life
+became an aching weariness, death was ready to soothe away to
+everlasting sleep. But what was he waiting for? It was time to go.
+
+He arose and thrust his head out the port-hole, looking down into the
+milky wash. The _Mariposa_ was deeply loaded, and, hanging by his
+hands, his feet would be in the water. He could slip in noiselessly. No
+one would hear. A smother of spray dashed up, wetting his face. It
+tasted salt on his lips, and the taste was good. He wondered if he
+ought to write a swan-song, but laughed the thought away. There was no
+time. He was too impatient to be gone.
+
+Turning off the light in his room so that it might not betray him, he
+went out the port-hole feet first. His shoulders stuck, and he forced
+himself back so as to try it with one arm down by his side. A roll of
+the steamer aided him, and he was through, hanging by his hands. When
+his feet touched the sea, he let go. He was in a milky froth of water.
+The side of the _Mariposa_ rushed past him like a dark wall, broken
+here and there by lighted ports. She was certainly making time. Almost
+before he knew it, he was astern, swimming gently on the foam-crackling
+surface.
+
+A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed aloud. It had taken a
+piece out, and the sting of it reminded him of why he was there. In the
+work to do he had forgotten the purpose of it. The lights of the
+_Mariposa_ were growing dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming
+confidently, as though it were his intention to make for the nearest
+land a thousand miles or so away.
+
+It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swimming, but the
+moment he felt the water rising above his mouth the hands struck out
+sharply with a lifting movement. The will to live, was his thought, and
+the thought was accompanied by a sneer. Well, he had will,—ay, will
+strong enough that with one last exertion it could destroy itself and
+cease to be.
+
+He changed his position to a vertical one. He glanced up at the quiet
+stars, at the same time emptying his lungs of air. With swift, vigorous
+propulsion of hands and feet, he lifted his shoulders and half his
+chest out of water. This was to gain impetus for the descent. Then he
+let himself go and sank without movement, a white statue, into the sea.
+He breathed in the water deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a
+man taking an anaesthetic. When he strangled, quite involuntarily his
+arms and legs clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and into
+the clear sight of the stars.
+
+The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly endeavoring not to
+breathe the air into his bursting lungs. Well, he would have to try a
+new way. He filled his lungs with air, filled them full. This supply
+would take him far down. He turned over and went down head first,
+swimming with all his strength and all his will. Deeper and deeper he
+went. His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent
+trails of the darting bonita. As he swam, he hoped that they would not
+strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will. But they did
+not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last kindness of
+life.
+
+Down, down, he swam till his arms and legs grew tired and hardly moved.
+He knew that he was deep. The pressure on his ear-drums was a pain, and
+there was a buzzing in his head. His endurance was faltering, but he
+compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped
+and the air drove from his lungs in a great explosive rush. The bubbles
+rubbed and bounded like tiny balloons against his cheeks and eyes as
+they took their upward flight. Then came pain and strangulation. This
+hurt was not death, was the thought that oscillated through his reeling
+consciousness. Death did not hurt. It was life, the pangs of life, this
+awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him.
+
+His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically
+and feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them
+beat and churn. He was too deep down. They could never bring him to the
+surface. He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision. Colors
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+rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast
+and interminable stairway. And somewhere at the bottom he fell into
+darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the
+instant he knew, he ceased to know.
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Martin Eden, by Jack London</title>
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+
+<div style='text-align:center; font-size:1.2em; font-weight:bold;'>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Martin Eden, by Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
+at <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a>. If you
+are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the
+country where you are located before using this eBook.
+</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: Martin Eden</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Jack London</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Release Date: September, 1997 [eBook #1056]<br />
+[Most recently updated: April 20, 2021]</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Language: English</div>
+<div style='display:block;margin:1em 0'>Character set encoding: UTF-8</div>
+<div style='display:block; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Produced by: David Price</div>
+<div style='margin-top:2em;margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTIN EDEN ***</div>
+
+<div class="fig" style="width:55%;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" style="width:100%;" alt="[Illustration]" />
+</div>
+
+<h1>Martin Eden</h1>
+
+<h2 class="no-break">by Jack London</h2>
+
+<hr />
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table summary="" style="">
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap01">CHAPTER I. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap02">CHAPTER II. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap03">CHAPTER III. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap04">CHAPTER IV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap05">CHAPTER V. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap06">CHAPTER VI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap07">CHAPTER VII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap08">CHAPTER VIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap09">CHAPTER IX. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap10">CHAPTER X. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap11">CHAPTER XI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap12">CHAPTER XII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap13">CHAPTER XIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap14">CHAPTER XIV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap15">CHAPTER XV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap16">CHAPTER XVI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap17">CHAPTER XVII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap18">CHAPTER XVIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap19">CHAPTER XIX. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap20">CHAPTER XX. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap21">CHAPTER XXI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap22">CHAPTER XXII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap23">CHAPTER XXIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap24">CHAPTER XXIV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap25">CHAPTER XXV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap26">CHAPTER XXVI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap27">CHAPTER XXVII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap28">CHAPTER XXVIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap29">CHAPTER XXIX. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap30">CHAPTER XXX. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap31">CHAPTER XXXI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap32">CHAPTER XXXII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap33">CHAPTER XXXIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap34">CHAPTER XXXIV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap35">CHAPTER XXXV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap36">CHAPTER XXXVI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap37">CHAPTER XXXVII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap38">CHAPTER XXXVIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap39">CHAPTER XXXIX. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap40">CHAPTER XL. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap41">CHAPTER XLI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap42">CHAPTER XLII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap43">CHAPTER XLIII. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap44">CHAPTER XLIV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap45">CHAPTER XLV. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+<tr>
+<td> <a href="#chap46">CHAPTER XLVI. </a></td>
+</tr>
+
+</table>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p class="letter">
+&ldquo;Let me live out my years in heat of blood!<br />
+    Let me lie drunken with the dreamer&rsquo;s wine!<br />
+Let me not see this soul-house built of mud<br />
+    Go toppling to the dust a vacant shrine!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap01"></a>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young
+fellow who awkwardly removed his cap. He wore rough clothes that smacked of the
+sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in which he found
+himself. He did not know what to do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his
+coat pocket when the other took it from him. The act was done quietly and
+naturally, and the awkward young fellow appreciated it. &ldquo;He
+understands,&rdquo; was his thought. &ldquo;He&rsquo;ll see me through all
+right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He walked at the other&rsquo;s heels with a swing to his shoulders, and his
+legs spread unwittingly, as if the level floors were tilting up and sinking
+down to the heave and lunge of the sea. The wide rooms seemed too narrow for
+his rolling gait, and to himself he was in terror lest his broad shoulders
+should collide with the doorways or sweep the bric-a-brac from the low mantel.
+He recoiled from side to side between the various objects and multiplied the
+hazards that in reality lodged only in his mind. Between a grand piano and a
+centre-table piled high with books was space for a half a dozen to walk
+abreast, yet he essayed it with trepidation. His heavy arms hung loosely at his
+sides. He did not know what to do with those arms and hands, and when, to his
+excited vision, one arm seemed liable to brush against the books on the table,
+he lurched away like a frightened horse, barely missing the piano stool. He
+watched the easy walk of the other in front of him, and for the first time
+realized that his walk was different from that of other men. He experienced a
+momentary pang of shame that he should walk so uncouthly. The sweat burst
+through the skin of his forehead in tiny beads, and he paused and mopped his
+bronzed face with his handkerchief.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hold on, Arthur, my boy,&rdquo; he said, attempting to mask his anxiety
+with facetious utterance. &ldquo;This is too much all at once for yours truly.
+Give me a chance to get my nerve. You know I didn&rsquo;t want to come,
+an&rsquo; I guess your fam&rsquo;ly ain&rsquo;t hankerin&rsquo; to see me
+neither.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; was the reassuring answer. &ldquo;You
+mustn&rsquo;t be frightened at us. We&rsquo;re just homely people&mdash;Hello,
+there&rsquo;s a letter for me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stepped back to the table, tore open the envelope, and began to read, giving
+the stranger an opportunity to recover himself. And the stranger understood and
+appreciated. His was the gift of sympathy, understanding; and beneath his
+alarmed exterior that sympathetic process went on. He mopped his forehead dry
+and glanced about him with a controlled face, though in the eyes there was an
+expression such as wild animals betray when they fear the trap. He was
+surrounded by the unknown, apprehensive of what might happen, ignorant of what
+he should do, aware that he walked and bore himself awkwardly, fearful that
+every attribute and power of him was similarly afflicted. He was keenly
+sensitive, hopelessly self-conscious, and the amused glance that the other
+stole privily at him over the top of the letter burned into him like a
+dagger-thrust. He saw the glance, but he gave no sign, for among the things he
+had learned was discipline. Also, that dagger-thrust went to his pride. He
+cursed himself for having come, and at the same time resolved that, happen what
+would, having come, he would carry it through. The lines of his face hardened,
+and into his eyes came a fighting light. He looked about more unconcernedly,
+sharply observant, every detail of the pretty interior registering itself on
+his brain. His eyes were wide apart; nothing in their field of vision escaped;
+and as they drank in the beauty before them the fighting light died out and a
+warm glow took its place. He was responsive to beauty, and here was cause to
+respond.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An oil painting caught and held him. A heavy surf thundered and burst over an
+outjutting rock; lowering storm-clouds covered the sky; and, outside the line
+of surf, a pilot-schooner, close-hauled, heeled over till every detail of her
+deck was visible, was surging along against a stormy sunset sky. There was
+beauty, and it drew him irresistibly. He forgot his awkward walk and came
+closer to the painting, very close. The beauty faded out of the canvas. His
+face expressed his bepuzzlement. He stared at what seemed a careless daub of
+paint, then stepped away. Immediately all the beauty flashed back into the
+canvas. &ldquo;A trick picture,&rdquo; was his thought, as he dismissed it,
+though in the midst of the multitudinous impressions he was receiving he found
+time to feel a prod of indignation that so much beauty should be sacrificed to
+make a trick. He did not know painting. He had been brought up on chromos and
+lithographs that were always definite and sharp, near or far. He had seen oil
+paintings, it was true, in the show windows of shops, but the glass of the
+windows had prevented his eager eyes from approaching too near.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and saw the books on the
+table. Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as promptly as the
+yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food. An impulsive
+stride, with one lurch to right and left of the shoulders, brought him to the
+table, where he began affectionately handling the books. He glanced at the
+titles and the authors&rsquo; names, read fragments of text, caressing the
+volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once, recognized a book he had read. For
+the rest, they were strange books and strange authors. He chanced upon a volume
+of Swinburne and began reading steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face
+glowing. Twice he closed the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the
+author. Swinburne! he would remember that name. That fellow had eyes, and he
+had certainly seen color and flashing light. But who was Swinburne? Was he dead
+a hundred years or so, like most of the poets? Or was he alive still, and
+writing? He turned to the title-page . . . yes, he had written other books;
+well, he would go to the free library the first thing in the morning and try to
+get hold of some of Swinburne&rsquo;s stuff. He went back to the text and lost
+himself. He did not notice that a young woman had entered the room. The first
+he knew was when he heard Arthur&rsquo;s voice saying:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ruth, this is Mr. Eden.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he turned he was thrilling to
+the first new impression, which was not of the girl, but of her brother&rsquo;s
+words. Under that muscled body of his he was a mass of quivering sensibilities.
+At the slightest impact of the outside world upon his consciousness, his
+thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame. He was
+extraordinarily receptive and responsive, while his imagination, pitched high,
+was ever at work establishing relations of likeness and difference. &ldquo;Mr.
+Eden,&rdquo; was what he had thrilled to&mdash;he who had been called
+&ldquo;Eden,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Martin Eden,&rdquo; or just &ldquo;Martin,&rdquo;
+all his life. And &ldquo;<i>Mister</i>!&rdquo; It was certainly going some, was
+his internal comment. His mind seemed to turn, on the instant, into a vast
+camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness endless pictures
+from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and beaches, jails and
+boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets, wherein the thread of
+association was the fashion in which he had been addressed in those various
+situations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he turned and saw the girl. The phantasmagoria of his brain vanished
+at sight of her. She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide, spiritual blue
+eyes and a wealth of golden hair. He did not know how she was dressed, except
+that the dress was as wonderful as she. He likened her to a pale gold flower
+upon a slender stem. No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such
+sublimated beauty was not of the earth. Or perhaps the books were right, and
+there were many such as she in the upper walks of life. She might well be sung
+by that chap, Swinburne. Perhaps he had had somebody like her in mind when he
+painted that girl, Iseult, in the book there on the table. All this plethora of
+sight, and feeling, and thought occurred on the instant. There was no pause of
+the realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand coming out to his, and she
+looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly, like a man. The
+women he had known did not shake hands that way. For that matter, most of them
+did not shake hands at all. A flood of associations, visions of various ways he
+had made the acquaintance of women, rushed into his mind and threatened to
+swamp it. But he shook them aside and looked at her. Never had he seen such a
+woman. The women he had known! Immediately, beside her, on either hand, ranged
+the women he had known. For an eternal second he stood in the midst of a
+portrait gallery, wherein she occupied the central place, while about her were
+limned many women, all to be weighed and measured by a fleeting glance, herself
+the unit of weight and measure. He saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls
+of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the south of Market.
+There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of
+Old Mexico. These, in turn, were crowded out by Japanese women, doll-like,
+stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped
+with degeneracy; by full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and
+brown-skinned. All these were blotted out by a grotesque and terrible nightmare
+brood&mdash;frowsy, shuffling creatures from the pavements of Whitechapel,
+gin-bloated hags of the stews, and all the vast hell&rsquo;s following of
+harpies, vile-mouthed and filthy, that under the guise of monstrous female form
+prey upon sailors, the scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human
+pit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Won&rsquo;t you sit down, Mr. Eden?&rdquo; the girl was saying. &ldquo;I
+have been looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us. It was
+brave of you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at all, what
+he had done, and that any fellow would have done it. She noticed that the hand
+he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in the process of healing, and a
+glance at the other loose-hanging hand showed it to be in the same condition.
+Also, with quick, critical eye, she noted a scar on his cheek, another that
+peeped out from under the hair of the forehead, and a third that ran down and
+disappeared under the starched collar. She repressed a smile at sight of the
+red line that marked the chafe of the collar against the bronzed neck. He was
+evidently unused to stiff collars. Likewise her feminine eye took in the
+clothes he wore, the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of the coat
+across the shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that advertised
+bulging biceps muscles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at all, he was
+obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair. He found time to admire the
+ease with which she sat down, then lurched toward a chair facing her,
+overwhelmed with consciousness of the awkward figure he was cutting. This was a
+new experience for him. All his life, up to then, he had been unaware of being
+either graceful or awkward. Such thoughts of self had never entered his mind.
+He sat down gingerly on the edge of the chair, greatly worried by his hands.
+They were in the way wherever he put them. Arthur was leaving the room, and
+Martin Eden followed his exit with longing eyes. He felt lost, alone there in
+the room with that pale spirit of a woman. There was no bar-keeper upon whom to
+call for drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a can of beer and
+by means of that social fluid start the amenities of friendship flowing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden,&rdquo; the girl was saying.
+&ldquo;How did it happen? I am sure it must have been some adventure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A Mexican with a knife, miss,&rdquo; he answered, moistening his parched
+lips and clearing his throat. &ldquo;It was just a fight. After I got the knife
+away, he tried to bite off my nose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision of that hot, starry
+night at Salina Cruz, the white strip of beach, the lights of the sugar
+steamers in the harbor, the voices of the drunken sailors in the distance, the
+jostling stevedores, the flaming passion in the Mexican&rsquo;s face, the glint
+of the beast-eyes in the starlight, the sting of the steel in his neck, and the
+rush of blood, the crowd and the cries, the two bodies, his and the
+Mexican&rsquo;s, locked together, rolling over and over and tearing up the
+sand, and from away off somewhere the mellow tinkling of a guitar. Such was the
+picture, and he thrilled to the memory of it, wondering if the man could paint
+it who had painted the pilot-schooner on the wall. The white beach, the stars,
+and the lights of the sugar steamers would look great, he thought, and midway
+on the sand the dark group of figures that surrounded the fighters. The knife
+occupied a place in the picture, he decided, and would show well, with a sort
+of gleam, in the light of the stars. But of all this no hint had crept into his
+speech. &ldquo;He tried to bite off my nose,&rdquo; he concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed the
+shock in her sensitive face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment shone faintly on his
+sunburned cheeks, though to him it burned as hotly as when his cheeks had been
+exposed to the open furnace-door in the fire-room. Such sordid things as
+stabbing affrays were evidently not fit subjects for conversation with a lady.
+People in the books, in her walk of life, did not talk about such
+things&mdash;perhaps they did not know about them, either.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get started.
+Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek. Even as she asked, he
+realized that she was making an effort to talk his talk, and he resolved to get
+away from it and talk hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was just an accident,&rdquo; he said, putting his hand to his cheek.
+&ldquo;One night, in a calm, with a heavy sea running, the main-boom-lift
+carried away, an&rsquo; next the tackle. The lift was wire, an&rsquo; it was
+threshin&rsquo; around like a snake. The whole watch was tryin&rsquo; to grab
+it, an&rsquo; I rushed in an&rsquo; got swatted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she said, this time with an accent of comprehension, though
+secretly his speech had been so much Greek to her and she was wondering what a
+<i>lift</i> was and what <i>swatted</i> meant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This man Swineburne,&rdquo; he began, attempting to put his plan into
+execution and pronouncing the <i>i</i> long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Swineburne,&rdquo; he repeated, with the same mispronunciation.
+&ldquo;The poet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Swinburne,&rdquo; she corrected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s the chap,&rdquo; he stammered, his cheeks hot again.
+&ldquo;How long since he died?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, I haven&rsquo;t heard that he was dead.&rdquo; She looked at him
+curiously. &ldquo;Where did you make his acquaintance?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never clapped eyes on him,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;But I read
+some of his poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come in.
+How do you like his poetry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject he had
+suggested. He felt better, and settled back slightly from the edge of the
+chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands, as if it might get away from
+him and buck him to the floor. He had succeeded in making her talk her talk,
+and while she rattled on, he strove to follow her, marvelling at all the
+knowledge that was stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the
+pale beauty of her face. Follow her he did, though bothered by unfamiliar words
+that fell glibly from her lips and by critical phrases and thought-processes
+that were foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless stimulated his mind and
+set it tingling. Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty,
+warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself and
+stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live for, to win to, to
+fight for&mdash;ay, and die for. The books were true. There were such women in
+the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to his imagination, and great,
+luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic
+figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman&rsquo;s
+sake&mdash;for a pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying,
+palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman,
+sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as well, but he
+stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that was
+essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes. But she, who knew
+little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning
+eyes. She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed
+her. She stumbled and halted in her utterance. The thread of argument slipped
+from her. He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to
+be so looked upon. Her training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle,
+mysterious, luring; while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being,
+impelling her to hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another
+world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red
+caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was
+soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She was clean, and her cleanness
+revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of
+woman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;As I was saying&mdash;what was I saying?&rdquo; She broke off abruptly
+and laughed merrily at her predicament.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You was saying that this man Swinburne failed bein&rsquo; a great poet
+because&mdash;an&rsquo; that was as far as you got, miss,&rdquo; he prompted,
+while to himself he seemed suddenly hungry, and delicious little thrills
+crawled up and down his spine at the sound of her laughter. Like silver, he
+thought to himself, like tinkling silver bells; and on the instant, and for an
+instant, he was transported to a far land, where under pink cherry blossoms, he
+smoked a cigarette and listened to the bells of the peaked pagoda calling
+straw-sandalled devotees to worship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, thank you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Swinburne fails, when all is
+said, because he is, well, indelicate. There are many of his poems that should
+never be read. Every line of the really great poets is filled with beautiful
+truth, and calls to all that is high and noble in the human. Not a line of the
+great poets can be spared without impoverishing the world by that much.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought it was great,&rdquo; he said hesitatingly, &ldquo;the little I
+read. I had no idea he was such a&mdash;a scoundrel. I guess that crops out in
+his other books.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There are many lines that could be spared from the book you were
+reading,&rdquo; she said, her voice primly firm and dogmatic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must &rsquo;a&rsquo; missed &rsquo;em,&rdquo; he announced.
+&ldquo;What I read was the real goods. It was all lighted up an&rsquo; shining,
+an&rsquo; it shun right into me an&rsquo; lighted me up inside, like the sun or
+a searchlight. That&rsquo;s the way it landed on me, but I guess I ain&rsquo;t
+up much on poetry, miss.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke off lamely. He was confused, painfully conscious of his
+inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he had read,
+but his speech was inadequate. He could not express what he felt, and to
+himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night,
+groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging. Well, he decided, it was up to
+him to get acquainted in this new world. He had never seen anything that he
+couldn&rsquo;t get the hang of when he wanted to and it was about time for him
+to want to learn to talk the things that were inside of him so that she could
+understand. <i>She</i> was bulking large on his horizon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now Longfellow&mdash;&rdquo; she was saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I&rsquo;ve read &rsquo;m,&rdquo; he broke in impulsively, spurred
+on to exhibit and make the most of his little store of book knowledge, desirous
+of showing her that he was not wholly a stupid clod. &ldquo;&lsquo;The Psalm of
+Life,&rsquo; &lsquo;Excelsior,&rsquo; an&rsquo; . . . I guess that&rsquo;s
+all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head and smiled, and he felt, somehow, that her smile was
+tolerant, pitifully tolerant. He was a fool to attempt to make a pretence that
+way. That Longfellow chap most likely had written countless books of poetry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Excuse me, miss, for buttin&rsquo; in that way. I guess the real facts
+is that I don&rsquo;t know nothin&rsquo; much about such things. It ain&rsquo;t
+in my class. But I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to make it in my class.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It sounded like a threat. His voice was determined, his eyes were flashing, the
+lines of his face had grown harsh. And to her it seemed that the angle of his
+jaw had changed; its pitch had become unpleasantly aggressive. At the same time
+a wave of intense virility seemed to surge out from him and impinge upon her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think you could make it in&mdash;in your class,&rdquo; she finished
+with a laugh. &ldquo;You are very strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, heavy corded, almost
+bull-like, bronzed by the sun, spilling over with rugged health and strength.
+And though he sat there, blushing and humble, again she felt drawn to him. She
+was surprised by a wanton thought that rushed into her mind. It seemed to her
+that if she could lay her two hands upon that neck that all its strength and
+vigor would flow out to her. She was shocked by this thought. It seemed to
+reveal to her an undreamed depravity in her nature. Besides, strength to her
+was a gross and brutish thing. Her ideal of masculine beauty had always been
+slender gracefulness. Yet the thought still persisted. It bewildered her that
+she should desire to place her hands on that sunburned neck. In truth, she was
+far from robust, and the need of her body and mind was for strength. But she
+did not know it. She knew only that no man had ever affected her before as this
+one had, who shocked her from moment to moment with his awful grammar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I ain&rsquo;t no invalid,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;When it comes down
+to hard-pan, I can digest scrap-iron. But just now I&rsquo;ve got dyspepsia.
+Most of what you was sayin&rsquo; I can&rsquo;t digest. Never trained that way,
+you see. I like books and poetry, and what time I&rsquo;ve had I&rsquo;ve read
+&rsquo;em, but I&rsquo;ve never thought about &rsquo;em the way you have.
+That&rsquo;s why I can&rsquo;t talk about &rsquo;em. I&rsquo;m like a navigator
+adrift on a strange sea without chart or compass. Now I want to get my
+bearin&rsquo;s. Mebbe you can put me right. How did you learn all this
+you&rsquo;ve ben talkin&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By going to school, I fancy, and by studying,&rdquo; she answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I went to school when I was a kid,&rdquo; he began to object.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes; but I mean high school, and lectures, and the university.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve gone to the university?&rdquo; he demanded in frank
+amazement. He felt that she had become remoter from him by at least a million
+miles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m going there now. I&rsquo;m taking special courses in
+English.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not know what &ldquo;English&rdquo; meant, but he made a mental note of
+that item of ignorance and passed on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How long would I have to study before I could go to the
+university?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She beamed encouragement upon his desire for knowledge, and said: &ldquo;That
+depends upon how much studying you have already done. You have never attended
+high school? Of course not. But did you finish grammar school?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had two years to run, when I left,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;But I
+was always honorably promoted at school.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he had gripped the arms of
+the chair so savagely that every finger-end was stinging. At the same moment he
+became aware that a woman was entering the room. He saw the girl leave her
+chair and trip swiftly across the floor to the newcomer. They kissed each
+other, and, with arms around each other&rsquo;s waists, they advanced toward
+him. That must be her mother, he thought. She was a tall, blond woman, slender,
+and stately, and beautiful. Her gown was what he might expect in such a house.
+His eyes delighted in the graceful lines of it. She and her dress together
+reminded him of women on the stage. Then he remembered seeing similar grand
+ladies and gowns entering the London theatres while he stood and watched and
+the policemen shoved him back into the drizzle beyond the awning. Next his mind
+leaped to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too, from the sidewalk, he had
+seen grand ladies. Then the city and the harbor of Yokohama, in a thousand
+pictures, began flashing before his eyes. But he swiftly dismissed the
+kaleidoscope of memory, oppressed by the urgent need of the present. He knew
+that he must stand up to be introduced, and he struggled painfully to his feet,
+where he stood with trousers bagging at the knees, his arms loose-hanging and
+ludicrous, his face set hard for the impending ordeal.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap02"></a>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him. Between
+halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times seemed
+impossible. But at last he had made it, and was seated alongside of Her. The
+array of knives and forks frightened him. They bristled with unknown perils,
+and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across
+which moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates sat
+eating salt beef with sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out
+of pannikins by means of battered iron spoons. The stench of bad beef was in
+his nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers and
+groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He watched them
+eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he would be careful here. He
+would make no noise. He would keep his mind upon it all the time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur&rsquo;s
+brother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his heart
+warmed toward them. How they loved each other, the members of this family!
+There flashed into his mind the picture of her mother, of the kiss of greeting,
+and of the pair of them walking toward him with arms entwined. Not in his world
+were such displays of affection between parents and children made. It was a
+revelation of the heights of existence that were attained in the world above.
+It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that
+world. He was moved deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting
+with sympathetic tenderness. He had starved for love all his life. His nature
+craved love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without,
+and hardened himself in the process. He had not known that he needed love. Nor
+did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation, and thrilled to it, and
+thought it fine, and high, and splendid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough getting
+acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman. Arthur he already
+knew somewhat. The father would have been too much for him, he felt sure. It
+seemed to him that he had never worked so hard in his life. The severest toil
+was child&rsquo;s play compared with this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood out
+on his forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from the exertion of doing so
+many unaccustomed things at once. He had to eat as he had never eaten before,
+to handle strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and learn how to
+accomplish each new thing, to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring
+in upon him and being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a
+yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, aching restlessness;
+to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life whereon she trod, and to
+have his mind ever and again straying off in speculation and vague plans of how
+to reach to her. Also, when his secret glance went across to Norman opposite
+him, or to any one else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in
+any particular occasion, that person&rsquo;s features were seized upon by his
+mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine what they
+were&mdash;all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to hear what was said
+to him and what was said back and forth, and to answer, when it was necessary,
+with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required a constant curb. And
+to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that
+appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and
+conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was oppressed throughout the
+meal by the thought of finger-bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of
+times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like. He had
+heard of such things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next few
+minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings who used
+them&mdash;ay, and he would use them himself. And most important of all, far
+down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was the problem of how he
+should comport himself toward these persons. What should his attitude be? He
+wrestled continually and anxiously with the problem. There were cowardly
+suggestions that he should make believe, assume a part; and there were still
+more cowardly suggestions that warned him he would fail in such course, that
+his nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that he would make a fool of
+himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide upon his
+attitude, that he was very quiet. He did not know that his quietness was giving
+the lie to Arthur&rsquo;s words of the day before, when that brother of hers
+had announced that he was going to bring a wild man home to dinner and for them
+not to be alarmed, because they would find him an interesting wild man. Martin
+Eden could not have found it in him, just then, to believe that her brother
+could be guilty of such treachery&mdash;especially when he had been the means
+of getting this particular brother out of an unpleasant row. So he sat at
+table, perturbed by his own unfitness and at the same time charmed by all that
+went on about him. For the first time he realized that eating was something
+more than a utilitarian function. He was unaware of what he ate. It was merely
+food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this table where eating was an
+aesthetic function. It was an intellectual function, too. His mind was stirred.
+He heard words spoken that were meaningless to him, and other words that he had
+seen only in books and that no man or woman he had known was of large enough
+mental caliber to pronounce. When he heard such words dropping carelessly from
+the lips of the members of this marvellous family, her family, he thrilled with
+delight. The romance, and beauty, and high vigor of the books were coming true.
+He was in that rare and blissful state wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out
+from the crannies of fantasy and become fact.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept himself in the
+background, listening, observing, and pleasuring, replying in reticent
+monosyllables, saying, &ldquo;Yes, miss,&rdquo; and &ldquo;No, miss,&rdquo; to
+her, and &ldquo;Yes, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; and &ldquo;No, ma&rsquo;am,&rdquo; to
+her mother. He curbed the impulse, arising out of his sea-training, to say
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; and &ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; to her brothers. He felt
+that it would be inappropriate and a confession of inferiority on his
+part&mdash;which would never do if he was to win to her. Also, it was a dictate
+of his pride. &ldquo;By God!&rdquo; he cried to himself, once; &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+just as good as them, and if they do know lots that I don&rsquo;t, I could
+learn &rsquo;m a few myself, all the same!&rdquo; And the next moment, when she
+or her mother addressed him as &ldquo;Mr. Eden,&rdquo; his aggressive pride was
+forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with delight. He was a civilized man,
+that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, at dinner, with people he had read
+about in books. He was in the books himself, adventuring through the printed
+pages of bound volumes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But while he belied Arthur&rsquo;s description, and appeared a gentle lamb
+rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course of action. He
+was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle would never do for the
+high-pitched dominance of his nature. He talked only when he had to, and then
+his speech was like his walk to the table, filled with jerks and halts as he
+groped in his polyglot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew were
+fit but which he feared he could not pronounce, rejecting other words he knew
+would not be understood or would be raw and harsh. But all the time he was
+oppressed by the consciousness that this carefulness of diction was making a
+booby of him, preventing him from expressing what he had in him. Also, his love
+of freedom chafed against the restriction in much the same way his neck chafed
+against the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he was confident that he
+could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, and
+the creative spirit was restive and urgent. He was swiftly mastered by the
+concept or sensation in him that struggled in birth-throes to receive
+expression and form, and then he forgot himself and where he was, and the old
+words&mdash;the tools of speech he knew&mdash;slipped out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, he declined something from the servant who interrupted and pestered at
+his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically, &ldquo;Pow!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On the instant those at the table were keyed up and expectant, the servant was
+smugly pleased, and he was wallowing in mortification. But he recovered himself
+quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s the Kanaka for &lsquo;finish,&rsquo;&rdquo; he explained,
+&ldquo;and it just come out naturally. It&rsquo;s spelt p-a-u.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught her curious and speculative eyes fixed on his hands, and, being in
+explanatory mood, he said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I just come down the Coast on one of the Pacific mail steamers. She was
+behind time, an&rsquo; around the Puget Sound ports we worked like niggers,
+storing cargo&mdash;mixed freight, if you know what that means. That&rsquo;s
+how the skin got knocked off.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, it wasn&rsquo;t that,&rdquo; she hastened to explain, in turn.
+&ldquo;Your hands seemed too small for your body.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of another of his deficiencies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said depreciatingly. &ldquo;They ain&rsquo;t big enough
+to stand the strain. I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders. They are
+too strong, an&rsquo; when I smash a man on the jaw the hands get smashed,
+too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled with disgust at himself. He
+had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked about things that were not
+nice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did&mdash;and you a
+stranger,&rdquo; she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though not of
+the reason for it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warm surge of
+gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-worded tongue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t nothin&rsquo; at all,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Any guy
+&rsquo;ud do it for another. That bunch of hoodlums was lookin&rsquo; for
+trouble, an&rsquo; Arthur wasn&rsquo;t botherin&rsquo; &rsquo;em none. They
+butted in on &rsquo;m, an&rsquo; then I butted in on them an&rsquo; poked a
+few. That&rsquo;s where some of the skin off my hands went, along with some of
+the teeth of the gang. I wouldn&rsquo;t &rsquo;a&rsquo; missed it for anything.
+When I seen&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own depravity and utter
+worthlessness to breathe the same air she did. And while Arthur took up the
+tale, for the twentieth time, of his adventure with the drunken hoodlums on the
+ferry-boat and of how Martin Eden had rushed in and rescued him, that
+individual, with frowning brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of
+himself, and wrestled more determinedly with the problem of how he should
+conduct himself toward these people. He certainly had not succeeded so far. He
+wasn&rsquo;t of their tribe, and he couldn&rsquo;t talk their lingo, was the
+way he put it to himself. He couldn&rsquo;t fake being their kind. The
+masquerade would fail, and besides, masquerade was foreign to his nature. There
+was no room in him for sham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He
+couldn&rsquo;t talk their talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that he
+was resolved. But in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be his own talk,
+toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible to them and so as not to
+shock them too much. And furthermore, he wouldn&rsquo;t claim, not even by
+tacit acceptance, to be familiar with anything that was unfamiliar. In
+pursuance of this decision, when the two brothers, talking university shop, had
+used &ldquo;trig&rdquo; several times, Martin Eden demanded:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is <i>trig</i>?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Trignometry,&rdquo; Norman said; &ldquo;a higher form of math.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what is math?&rdquo; was the next question, which, somehow, brought
+the laugh on Norman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mathematics, arithmetic,&rdquo; was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin Eden nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the apparently illimitable
+vistas of knowledge. What he saw took on tangibility. His abnormal power of
+vision made abstractions take on concrete form. In the alchemy of his brain,
+trigonometry and mathematics and the whole field of knowledge which they
+betokened were transmuted into so much landscape. The vistas he saw were vistas
+of green foliage and forest glades, all softly luminous or shot through with
+flashing lights. In the distance, detail was veiled and blurred by a purple
+haze, but behind this purple haze, he knew, was the glamour of the unknown, the
+lure of romance. It was like wine to him. Here was adventure, something to do
+with head and hand, a world to conquer&mdash;and straightway from the back of
+his consciousness rushed the thought, <i>conquering, to win to her, that
+lily-pale spirit sitting beside him</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur, who, all
+evening, had been trying to draw his wild man out. Martin Eden remembered his
+decision. For the first time he became himself, consciously and deliberately at
+first, but soon lost in the joy of creating in making life as he knew it appear
+before his listeners&rsquo; eyes. He had been a member of the crew of the
+smuggling schooner <i>Halcyon</i> when she was captured by a revenue cutter. He
+saw with wide eyes, and he could tell what he saw. He brought the pulsing sea
+before them, and the men and the ships upon the sea. He communicated his power
+of vision, till they saw with his eyes what he had seen. He selected from the
+vast mass of detail with an artist&rsquo;s touch, drawing pictures of life that
+glowed and burned with light and color, injecting movement so that his
+listeners surged along with him on the flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm,
+and power. At times he shocked them with the vividness of the narrative and his
+terms of speech, but beauty always followed fast upon the heels of violence,
+and tragedy was relieved by humor, by interpretations of the strange twists and
+quirks of sailors&rsquo; minds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes. His fire warmed
+her. She wondered if she had been cold all her days. She wanted to lean toward
+this burning, blazing man that was like a volcano spouting forth strength,
+robustness, and health. She felt that she must lean toward him, and resisted by
+an effort. Then, too, there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him.
+She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by toil so that the very dirt
+of life was ingrained in the flesh itself, by that red chafe of the collar and
+those bulging muscles. His roughness frightened her; each roughness of speech
+was an insult to her ear, each rough phase of his life an insult to her soul.
+And ever and again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil
+to have such power over her. All that was most firmly established in her mind
+was rocking. His romance and adventure were battering at the conventions.
+Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life was no longer an affair of
+serious effort and restraint, but a toy, to be played with and turned
+topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived and pleasured in, and carelessly to be
+flung aside. &ldquo;Therefore, play!&rdquo; was the cry that rang through her.
+&ldquo;Lean toward him, if so you will, and place your two hands upon his
+neck!&rdquo; She wanted to cry out at the recklessness of the thought, and in
+vain she appraised her own cleanness and culture and balanced all that she was
+against what he was not. She glanced about her and saw the others gazing at him
+with rapt attention; and she would have despaired had not she seen horror in
+her mother&rsquo;s eyes&mdash;fascinated horror, it was true, but none the less
+horror. This man from outer darkness was evil. Her mother saw it, and her
+mother was right. She would trust her mother&rsquo;s judgment in this as she
+had always trusted it in all things. The fire of him was no longer warm, and
+the fear of him was no longer poignant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, aggressively, with the
+vague intent of emphasizing the impassableness of the gulf that separated them.
+Her music was a club that she swung brutally upon his head; and though it
+stunned him and crushed him down, it incited him. He gazed upon her in awe. In
+his mind, as in her own, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered
+his ambition to win across it. But he was too complicated a plexus of
+sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a whole evening, especially when there
+was music. He was remarkably susceptible to music. It was like strong drink,
+firing him to audacities of feeling,&mdash;a drug that laid hold of his
+imagination and went cloud-soaring through the sky. It banished sordid fact,
+flooded his mind with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He
+did not understand the music she played. It was different from the dance-hall
+piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard. But he had caught hints of
+such music from the books, and he accepted her playing largely on faith,
+patiently waiting, at first, for the lilting measures of pronounced and simple
+rhythm, puzzled because those measures were not long continued. Just as he
+caught the swing of them and started, his imagination attuned in flight, always
+they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was meaningless to him,
+and that dropped his imagination, an inert weight, back to earth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all this. He
+caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the message that her hands
+pronounced upon the keys. Then he dismissed the thought as unworthy and
+impossible, and yielded himself more freely to the music. The old delightful
+condition began to be induced. His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh
+became spirit; before his eyes and behind his eyes shone a great glory; and
+then the scene before him vanished and he was away, rocking over the world that
+was to him a very dear world. The known and the unknown were commingled in the
+dream-pageant that thronged his vision. He entered strange ports of sun-washed
+lands, and trod market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen.
+The scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had known it on warm,
+breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against the southeast trades through
+long tropic days, sinking palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea behind
+and lifting palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. Swift as
+thought the pictures came and went. One instant he was astride a broncho and
+flying through the fairy-colored Painted Desert country; the next instant he
+was gazing down through shimmering heat into the whited sepulchre of Death
+Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing ocean where great ice islands towered
+and glistened in the sun. He lay on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down
+to the mellow-sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue
+fires, in the light of which danced the <i>hula</i> dancers to the barbaric
+love-calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling <i>ukuleles</i> and rumbling
+tom-toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a volcano crater
+was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and
+the Southern Cross burned low in the sky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his consciousness was
+the strings; and the flood of music was a wind that poured against those
+strings and set them vibrating with memories and dreams. He did not merely
+feel. Sensation invested itself in form and color and radiance, and what his
+imagination dared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way. Past,
+present, and future mingled; and he went on oscillating across the broad, warm
+world, through high adventure and noble deeds to Her&mdash;ay, and with her,
+winning her, his arm about her, and carrying her on in flight through the
+empery of his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all this in his
+face. It was a transfigured face, with great shining eyes that gazed beyond the
+veil of sound and saw behind it the leap and pulse of life and the gigantic
+phantoms of the spirit. She was startled. The raw, stumbling lout was gone. The
+ill-fitting clothes, battered hands, and sunburned face remained; but these
+seemed the prison-bars through which she saw a great soul looking forth,
+inarticulate and dumb because of those feeble lips that would not give it
+speech. Only for a flashing moment did she see this, then she saw the lout
+returned, and she laughed at the whim of her fancy. But the impression of that
+fleeting glimpse lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling
+retreat and go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another of
+Browning&mdash;she was studying Browning in one of her English courses. He
+seemed such a boy, as he stood blushing and stammering his thanks, that a wave
+of pity, maternal in its prompting, welled up in her. She did not remember the
+lout, nor the imprisoned soul, nor the man who had stared at her in all
+masculineness and delighted and frightened her. She saw before her only a boy,
+who was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt like a
+nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and who was saying jerkily:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The greatest time of my life. You see, I ain&rsquo;t used to things. . .
+&rdquo; He looked about him helplessly. &ldquo;To people and houses like this.
+It&rsquo;s all new to me, and I like it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope you&rsquo;ll call again,&rdquo; she said, as he was saying good
+night to her brothers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what do you think of him?&rdquo; Arthur demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone,&rdquo; she answered.
+&ldquo;How old is he?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Twenty&mdash;almost twenty-one. I asked him this afternoon. I
+didn&rsquo;t think he was that young.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she kissed her
+brothers goodnight.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap03"></a>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+<p>
+As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat pocket. It
+came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican tobacco, which were
+deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He drew the first whiff of smoke deep
+into his lungs and expelled it in a long and lingering exhalation. &ldquo;By
+God!&rdquo; he said aloud, in a voice of awe and wonder. &ldquo;By God!&rdquo;
+he repeated. And yet again he murmured, &ldquo;By God!&rdquo; Then his hand
+went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his
+pocket. A cold drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned
+his vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly aware that it
+was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams and reconstructing the
+scenes just past.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had met the woman at last&mdash;the woman that he had thought little about,
+not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had expected, in a remote
+way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next to her at table. He had felt her
+hand in his, he had looked into her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful
+spirit;&mdash;but no more beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor
+than the flesh that gave it expression and form. He did not think of her flesh
+as flesh,&mdash;which was new to him; for of the women he had known that was
+the only way he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He did not conceive
+of her body as a body, subject to the ills and frailties of bodies. Her body
+was more than the garb of her spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure
+and gracious crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine
+startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No word, no
+clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before. He had never believed
+in the divine. He had always been irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the
+sky-pilots and their immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had
+contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But what he had seen
+in her eyes was soul&mdash;immortal soul that could never die. No man he had
+known, nor any woman, had given him the message of immortality. But she had.
+She had whispered it to him the first moment she looked at him. Her face
+shimmered before his eyes as he walked along,&mdash;pale and serious, sweet and
+sensitive, smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and
+pure as he had never dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him like a blow.
+It startled him. He had known good and bad; but purity, as an attribute of
+existence, had never entered his mind. And now, in her, he conceived purity to
+be the superlative of goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted
+eternal life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was not fit to
+carry water for her&mdash;he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a
+fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and talk with
+her that night. It was accidental. There was no merit in it. He did not deserve
+such fortune. His mood was essentially religious. He was humble and meek,
+filled with self-disparagement and abasement. In such frame of mind sinners
+come to the penitent form. He was convicted of sin. But as the meek and lowly
+at the penitent form catch splendid glimpses of their future lordly existence,
+so did he catch similar glimpses of the state he would gain to by possessing
+her. But this possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from
+possession as he had known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw himself
+climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her, pleasuring in
+beautiful and noble things with her. It was a soul-possession he dreamed,
+refined beyond any grossness, a free comradeship of spirit that he could not
+put into definite thought. He did not think it. For that matter, he did not
+think at all. Sensation usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with
+emotions he had never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility where
+feeling itself was exalted and spiritualized and carried beyond the summits of
+life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud: &ldquo;By
+God! By God!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted his sailor
+roll.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where did you get it?&rdquo; the policeman demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin Eden came back to earth. His was a fluid organism, swiftly adjustable,
+capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and crannies. With the
+policeman&rsquo;s hail he was immediately his ordinary self, grasping the
+situation clearly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a beaut, ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; he laughed back. &ldquo;I
+didn&rsquo;t know I was talkin&rsquo; out loud.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll be singing next,&rdquo; was the policeman&rsquo;s
+diagnosis.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I won&rsquo;t. Gimme a match an&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll catch the next car
+home.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on. &ldquo;Now
+wouldn&rsquo;t that rattle you?&rdquo; he ejaculated under his breath.
+&ldquo;That copper thought I was drunk.&rdquo; He smiled to himself and
+meditated. &ldquo;I guess I was,&rdquo; he added; &ldquo;but I didn&rsquo;t
+think a woman&rsquo;s face&rsquo;d do it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley. It was crowded
+with youths and young men who were singing songs and ever and again barking out
+college yells. He studied them curiously. They were university boys. They went
+to the same university that she did, were in her class socially, could know
+her, could see her every day if they wanted to. He wondered that they did not
+want to, that they had been out having a good time instead of being with her
+that evening, talking with her, sitting around her in a worshipful and adoring
+circle. His thoughts wandered on. He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a
+loose-lipped mouth. That fellow was vicious, he decided. On shipboard he would
+be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a better man than that
+fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed to draw him nearer to Her. He began
+comparing himself with the students. He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism
+of his body and felt confident that he was physically their master. But their
+heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk,&mdash;the
+thought depressed him. But what was a brain for? he demanded passionately. What
+they had done, he could do. They had been studying about life from the books
+while he had been busy living life. His brain was just as full of knowledge as
+theirs, though it was a different kind of knowledge. How many of them could tie
+a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout? His life spread out before him in
+a series of pictures of danger and daring, hardship and toil. He remembered his
+failures and scrapes in the process of learning. He was that much to the good,
+anyway. Later on they would have to begin living life and going through the
+mill as he had gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he could be
+learning the other side of life from the books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated Oakland from
+Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story building along the front
+of which ran the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAM&rsquo;S CASH STORE. Martin Eden got
+off at this corner. He stared up for a moment at the sign. It carried a message
+to him beyond its mere wording. A personality of smallness and egotism and
+petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters themselves. Bernard
+Higginbotham had married his sister, and he knew him well. He let himself in
+with a latch-key and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Here lived his
+brother-in-law. The grocery was below. There was a smell of stale vegetables in
+the air. As he groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-cart, left
+there by one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and brought up against a door
+with a resounding bang. &ldquo;The pincher,&rdquo; was his thought; &ldquo;too
+miserly to burn two cents&rsquo; worth of gas and save his boarders&rsquo;
+necks.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his sister and
+Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his trousers, while his lean
+body was distributed over two chairs, his feet dangling in dilapidated
+carpet-slippers over the edge of the second chair. He glanced across the top of
+the paper he was reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring
+eyes. Martin Eden never looked at him without experiencing a sense of
+repulsion. What his sister had seen in the man was beyond him. The other
+affected him as so much vermin, and always aroused in him an impulse to crush
+him under his foot. &ldquo;Some day I&rsquo;ll beat the face off of him,&rdquo;
+was the way he often consoled himself for enduring the man&rsquo;s existence.
+The eyes, weasel-like and cruel, were looking at him complainingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; Martin demanded. &ldquo;Out with it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had that door painted only last week,&rdquo; Mr. Higginbotham half
+whined, half bullied; &ldquo;and you know what union wages are. You should be
+more careful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of it. He
+gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the wall. It
+surprised him. He had always liked it, but it seemed that now he was seeing it
+for the first time. It was cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in
+this house. His mind went back to the house he had just left, and he saw,
+first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting sweetness as
+she shook his hand at leaving. He forgot where he was and Bernard
+Higginbotham&rsquo;s existence, till that gentleman demanded:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Seen a ghost?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent, cowardly,
+and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same eyes when their
+owner was making a sale in the store below&mdash;subservient eyes, smug, and
+oily, and flattering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Martin answered. &ldquo;I seen a ghost. Good night. Good
+night, Gertrude.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the slatternly
+carpet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t bang the door,&rdquo; Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and closed the
+door softly behind him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s ben drinkin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper.
+&ldquo;I told you he would.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head resignedly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His eyes was pretty shiny,&rdquo; she confessed; &ldquo;and he
+didn&rsquo;t have no collar, though he went away with one. But mebbe he
+didn&rsquo;t have more&rsquo;n a couple of glasses.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He couldn&rsquo;t stand up straight,&rdquo; asserted her husband.
+&ldquo;I watched him. He couldn&rsquo;t walk across the floor without
+stumblin&rsquo;. You heard &rsquo;m yourself almost fall down in the
+hall.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think it was over Alice&rsquo;s cart,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He
+couldn&rsquo;t see it in the dark.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Higginbotham&rsquo;s voice and wrath began to rise. All day he effaced
+himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the privilege
+of being himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation of each
+word like the die of a machine. His wife sighed and remained silent. She was a
+large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens
+of her flesh, her work, and her husband.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s got it in him, I tell you, from his father,&rdquo; Mr.
+Higginbotham went on accusingly. &ldquo;An&rsquo; he&rsquo;ll croak in the
+gutter the same way. You know that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were agreed that Martin had
+come home drunk. They did not have it in their souls to know beauty, or they
+would have known that those shining eyes and that glowing face betokened
+youth&rsquo;s first vision of love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Settin&rsquo; a fine example to the children,&rdquo; Mr. Higginbotham
+snorted, suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and which
+he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him more. &ldquo;If he
+does it again, he&rsquo;s got to get out. Understand! I won&rsquo;t put up with
+his shinanigan&mdash;debotchin&rsquo; innocent children with his
+boozing.&rdquo; Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which was a new one in his
+vocabulary, recently gleaned from a newspaper column. &ldquo;That&rsquo;s what
+it is, debotchin&rsquo;&mdash;there ain&rsquo;t no other name for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on. Mr.
+Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Has he paid last week&rsquo;s board?&rdquo; he shot across the top of
+the newspaper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded, then added, &ldquo;He still has some money.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When is he goin&rsquo; to sea again?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When his pay-day&rsquo;s spent, I guess,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;He
+was over to San Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But he&rsquo;s got
+money, yet, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;s particular about the kind of ship he signs
+for.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs,&rdquo; Mr.
+Higginbotham snorted. &ldquo;Particular! Him!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He said something about a schooner that&rsquo;s gettin&rsquo; ready to
+go off to some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he&rsquo;d
+sail on her if his money held out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If he only wanted to steady down, I&rsquo;d give him a job drivin&rsquo;
+the wagon,&rdquo; her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his
+voice. &ldquo;Tom&rsquo;s quit.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His wife looked alarm and interrogation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quit to-night. Is goin&rsquo; to work for Carruthers. They paid &rsquo;m
+more&rsquo;n I could afford.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I told you you&rsquo;d lose &rsquo;m,&rdquo; she cried out. &ldquo;He
+was worth more&rsquo;n you was giving him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now look here, old woman,&rdquo; Higginbotham bullied, &ldquo;for the
+thousandth time I&rsquo;ve told you to keep your nose out of the business. I
+won&rsquo;t tell you again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care,&rdquo; she sniffled. &ldquo;Tom was a good
+boy.&rdquo; Her husband glared at her. This was unqualified defiance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the
+wagon,&rdquo; he snorted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He pays his board, just the same,&rdquo; was the retort.
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; he&rsquo;s my brother, an&rsquo; so long as he don&rsquo;t owe
+you money you&rsquo;ve got no right to be jumping on him all the time.
+I&rsquo;ve got some feelings, if I have been married to you for seven
+years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you tell &rsquo;m you&rsquo;d charge him for gas if he goes on
+readin&rsquo; in bed?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded away, her spirit wilting down
+into her tired flesh. Her husband was triumphant. He had her. His eyes snapped
+vindictively, while his ears joyed in the sniffles she emitted. He extracted
+great happiness from squelching her, and she squelched easily these days,
+though it had been different in the first years of their married life, before
+the brood of children and his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you tell &rsquo;m to-morrow, that&rsquo;s all,&rdquo; he said.
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; I just want to tell you, before I forget it, that you&rsquo;d
+better send for Marian to-morrow to take care of the children. With Tom quit,
+I&rsquo;ll have to be out on the wagon, an&rsquo; you can make up your mind to
+it to be down below waitin&rsquo; on the counter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But to-morrow&rsquo;s wash day,&rdquo; she objected weakly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Get up early, then, an&rsquo; do it first. I won&rsquo;t start out till
+ten o&rsquo;clock.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap04"></a>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his brother-in-law,
+felt his way along the unlighted back hall and entered his room, a tiny
+cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-stand, and one chair. Mr. Higginbotham
+was too thrifty to keep a servant when his wife could do the work. Besides, the
+servant&rsquo;s room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one.
+Martin placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat, and
+sat down on the bed. A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted the weight of
+his body, but he did not notice them. He started to take off his shoes, but
+fell to staring at the white plaster wall opposite him, broken by long streaks
+of dirty brown where rain had leaked through the roof. On this befouled
+background visions began to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and stared long,
+till his lips began to move and he murmured, &ldquo;Ruth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ruth.&rdquo; He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful. It
+delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition of it.
+&ldquo;Ruth.&rdquo; It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with. Each time
+he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing the foul wall with a
+golden radiance. This radiance did not stop at the wall. It extended on into
+infinity, and through its golden depths his soul went questing after hers. The
+best that was in him was out in splendid flood. The very thought of her
+ennobled and purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.
+This was new to him. He had never known women who had made him better. They had
+always had the counter effect of making him beastly. He did not know that many
+of them had done their best, bad as it was. Never having been conscious of
+himself, he did not know that he had that in his being that drew love from
+women and which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth. Though
+they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about them; and he would
+never have dreamed that there were women who had been better because of him.
+Always in sublime carelessness had he lived, till now, and now it seemed to him
+that they had always reached out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was
+not just to them, nor to himself. But he, who for the first time was becoming
+conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he burned with shame as
+he stared at the vision of his infamy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-glass over the
+wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked again, long and carefully. It
+was the first time he had ever really seen himself. His eyes were made for
+seeing, but up to that moment they had been filled with the ever changing
+panorama of the world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at
+himself. He saw the head and face of a young fellow of twenty, but, being
+unused to such appraisement, he did not know how to value it. Above a
+square-domed forehead he saw a mop of brown hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it
+and hints of curls that were a delight to any woman, making hands tingle to
+stroke it and fingers tingle to pass caresses through it. But he passed it by
+as without merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high,
+square forehead,&mdash;striving to penetrate it and learn the quality of its
+content. What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his insistent
+interrogation. What was it capable of? How far would it take him? Would it take
+him to her?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were often quite
+blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs of the sun-washed deep.
+He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to her. He tried to imagine himself she,
+gazing into those eyes of his, but failed in the jugglery. He could
+successfully put himself inside other men&rsquo;s minds, but they had to be men
+whose ways of life he knew. He did not know her way of life. She was wonder and
+mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers? Well, they were honest
+eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness nor meanness. The brown
+sunburn of his face surprised him. He had not dreamed he was so black. He
+rolled up his shirt-sleeve and compared the white underside of the arm with his
+face. Yes, he was a white man, after all. But the arms were sunburned, too. He
+twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and gazed
+underneath where he was least touched by the sun. It was very white. He laughed
+at his bronzed face in the glass at the thought that it was once as white as
+the underside of his arm; nor did he dream that in the world there were few
+pale spirits of women who could boast fairer or smoother skins than
+he&mdash;fairer than where he had escaped the ravages of the sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His might have been a cherub&rsquo;s mouth, had not the full, sensuous lips a
+trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth. At times, so tightly
+did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic. They were the
+lips of a fighter and of a lover. They could taste the sweetness of life with
+relish, and they could put the sweetness aside and command life. The chin and
+jaw, strong and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped the lips to
+command life. Strength balanced sensuousness and had upon it a tonic effect,
+compelling him to love beauty that was healthy and making him vibrate to
+sensations that were wholesome. And between the lips were teeth that had never
+known nor needed the dentist&rsquo;s care. They were white and strong and
+regular, he decided, as he looked at them. But as he looked, he began to be
+troubled. Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and vaguely
+remembered, was the impression that there were people who washed their teeth
+every day. They were the people from up above&mdash;people in her class. She
+must wash her teeth every day, too. What would she think if she learned that he
+had never washed his teeth in all the days of his life? He resolved to get a
+tooth-brush and form the habit. He would begin at once, to-morrow. It was not
+by mere achievement that he could hope to win to her. He must make a personal
+reform in all things, even to tooth-washing and neck-gear, though a starched
+collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over the calloused palm and
+gazing at the dirt that was ingrained in the flesh itself and which no brush
+could scrub away. How different was her palm! He thrilled deliciously at the
+remembrance. Like a rose-petal, he thought; cool and soft as a snowflake. He
+had never thought that a mere woman&rsquo;s hand could be so sweetly soft. He
+caught himself imagining the wonder of a caress from such a hand, and flushed
+guiltily. It was too gross a thought for her. In ways it seemed to impugn her
+high spirituality. She was a pale, slender spirit, exalted far beyond the
+flesh; but nevertheless the softness of her palm persisted in his thoughts. He
+was used to the harsh callousness of factory girls and working women. Well he
+knew why their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was soft
+because she had never used it to work with. The gulf yawned between her and him
+at the awesome thought of a person who did not have to work for a living. He
+suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who did not labor. It towered before
+him on the wall, a figure in brass, arrogant and powerful. He had worked
+himself; his first memories seemed connected with work, and all his family had
+worked. There was Gertrude. When her hands were not hard from the endless
+housework, they were swollen and red like boiled beef, what of the washing. And
+there was his sister Marian. She had worked in the cannery the preceding
+summer, and her slim, pretty hands were all scarred with the tomato-knives.
+Besides, the tips of two of her fingers had been left in the cutting machine at
+the paper-box factory the preceding winter. He remembered the hard palms of his
+mother as she lay in her coffin. And his father had worked to the last fading
+gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been half an inch thick when he
+died. But Her hands were soft, and her mother&rsquo;s hands, and her
+brothers&rsquo;. This last came to him as a surprise; it was tremendously
+indicative of the highness of their caste, of the enormous distance that
+stretched between her and him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off his shoes.
+He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman&rsquo;s face and by a
+woman&rsquo;s soft, white hands. And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on the
+foul plaster-wall appeared a vision. He stood in front of a gloomy tenement
+house. It was night-time, in the East End of London, and before him stood
+Margey, a little factory girl of fifteen. He had seen her home after the
+bean-feast. She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit for swine. His
+hand was going out to hers as he said good night. She had put her lips up to be
+kissed, but he wasn&rsquo;t going to kiss her. Somehow he was afraid of her.
+And then her hand closed on his and pressed feverishly. He felt her callouses
+grind and grate on his, and a great wave of pity welled over him. He saw her
+yearning, hungry eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed from
+childhood into a frightened and ferocious maturity; then he put his arms about
+her in large tolerance and stooped and kissed her on the lips. Her glad little
+cry rang in his ears, and he felt her clinging to him like a cat. Poor little
+starveling! He continued to stare at the vision of what had happened in the
+long ago. His flesh was crawling as it had crawled that night when she clung to
+him, and his heart was warm with pity. It was a gray scene, greasy gray, and
+the rain drizzled greasily on the pavement stones. And then a radiant glory
+shone on the wall, and up through the other vision, displacing it, glimmered
+Her pale face under its crown of golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a
+star.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed them. Just the
+same, she told me to call again, he thought. He took another look at himself in
+the glass, and said aloud, with great solemnity:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the free library
+an&rsquo; read up on etiquette. Understand!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under his body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ve got to quit cussin&rsquo;, Martin, old boy;
+you&rsquo;ve got to quit cussin&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said aloud.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and audacity
+rivalled those of poppy-eaters.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap05"></a>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+
+<p>
+He awoke next morning from rosy scenes of dream to a steamy atmosphere that
+smelled of soapsuds and dirty clothes, and that was vibrant with the jar and
+jangle of tormented life. As he came out of his room he heard the slosh of
+water, a sharp exclamation, and a resounding smack as his sister visited her
+irritation upon one of her numerous progeny. The squall of the child went
+through him like a knife. He was aware that the whole thing, the very air he
+breathed, was repulsive and mean. How different, he thought, from the
+atmosphere of beauty and repose of the house wherein Ruth dwelt. There it was
+all spiritual. Here it was all material, and meanly material.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come here, Alfred,&rdquo; he called to the crying child, at the same
+time thrusting his hand into his trousers pocket, where he carried his money
+loose in the same large way that he lived life in general. He put a quarter in
+the youngster&rsquo;s hand and held him in his arms a moment, soothing his
+sobs. &ldquo;Now run along and get some candy, and don&rsquo;t forget to give
+some to your brothers and sisters. Be sure and get the kind that lasts
+longest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His sister lifted a flushed face from the wash-tub and looked at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A nickel&rsquo;d ha&rsquo; ben enough,&rdquo; she said.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s just like you, no idea of the value of money. The
+child&rsquo;ll eat himself sick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, sis,&rdquo; he answered jovially. &ldquo;My
+money&rsquo;ll take care of itself. If you weren&rsquo;t so busy, I&rsquo;d
+kiss you good morning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wanted to be affectionate to this sister, who was good, and who, in her way,
+he knew, loved him. But, somehow, she grew less herself as the years went by,
+and more and more baffling. It was the hard work, the many children, and the
+nagging of her husband, he decided, that had changed her. It came to him, in a
+flash of fancy, that her nature seemed taking on the attributes of stale
+vegetables, smelly soapsuds, and of the greasy dimes, nickels, and quarters she
+took in over the counter of the store.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go along an&rsquo; get your breakfast,&rdquo; she said roughly, though
+secretly pleased. Of all her wandering brood of brothers he had always been her
+favorite. &ldquo;I declare I <i>will</i> kiss you,&rdquo; she said, with a
+sudden stir at her heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With thumb and forefinger she swept the dripping suds first from one arm and
+then from the other. He put his arms round her massive waist and kissed her wet
+steamy lips. The tears welled into her eyes&mdash;not so much from strength of
+feeling as from the weakness of chronic overwork. She shoved him away from her,
+but not before he caught a glimpse of her moist eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find breakfast in the oven,&rdquo; she said hurriedly.
+&ldquo;Jim ought to be up now. I had to get up early for the washing. Now get
+along with you and get out of the house early. It won&rsquo;t be nice to-day,
+what of Tom quittin&rsquo; an&rsquo; nobody but Bernard to drive the
+wagon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin went into the kitchen with a sinking heart, the image of her red face
+and slatternly form eating its way like acid into his brain. She might love him
+if she only had some time, he concluded. But she was worked to death. Bernard
+Higginbotham was a brute to work her so hard. But he could not help but feel,
+on the other hand, that there had not been anything beautiful in that kiss. It
+was true, it was an unusual kiss. For years she had kissed him only when he
+returned from voyages or departed on voyages. But this kiss had tasted of
+soapsuds, and the lips, he had noticed, were flabby. There had been no quick,
+vigorous lip-pressure such as should accompany any kiss. Hers was the kiss of a
+tired woman who had been tired so long that she had forgotten how to kiss. He
+remembered her as a girl, before her marriage, when she would dance with the
+best, all night, after a hard day&rsquo;s work at the laundry, and think
+nothing of leaving the dance to go to another day&rsquo;s hard work. And then
+he thought of Ruth and the cool sweetness that must reside in her lips as it
+resided in all about her. Her kiss would be like her hand-shake or the way she
+looked at one, firm and frank. In imagination he dared to think of her lips on
+his, and so vividly did he imagine that he went dizzy at the thought and seemed
+to rift through clouds of rose-petals, filling his brain with their perfume.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the kitchen he found Jim, the other boarder, eating mush very languidly,
+with a sick, far-away look in his eyes. Jim was a plumber&rsquo;s apprentice
+whose weak chin and hedonistic temperament, coupled with a certain nervous
+stupidity, promised to take him nowhere in the race for bread and butter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you eat?&rdquo; he demanded, as Martin dipped dolefully
+into the cold, half-cooked oatmeal mush. &ldquo;Was you drunk again last
+night?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head. He was oppressed by the utter squalidness of it all.
+Ruth Morse seemed farther removed than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was,&rdquo; Jim went on with a boastful, nervous giggle. &ldquo;I was
+loaded right to the neck. Oh, she was a daisy. Billy brought me home.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin nodded that he heard,&mdash;it was a habit of nature with him to pay
+heed to whoever talked to him,&mdash;and poured a cup of lukewarm coffee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Goin&rsquo; to the Lotus Club dance to-night?&rdquo; Jim demanded.
+&ldquo;They&rsquo;re goin&rsquo; to have beer, an&rsquo; if that Temescal bunch
+comes, there&rsquo;ll be a rough-house. I don&rsquo;t care, though. I&rsquo;m
+takin&rsquo; my lady friend just the same. Cripes, but I&rsquo;ve got a taste
+in my mouth!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made a wry face and attempted to wash the taste away with coffee.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;ye know Julia?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;s my lady friend,&rdquo; Jim explained, &ldquo;and she&rsquo;s
+a peach. I&rsquo;d introduce you to her, only you&rsquo;d win her. I
+don&rsquo;t see what the girls see in you, honest I don&rsquo;t; but the way
+you win them away from the fellers is sickenin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never got any away from you,&rdquo; Martin answered uninterestedly.
+The breakfast had to be got through somehow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, you did, too,&rdquo; the other asserted warmly. &ldquo;There was
+Maggie.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never had anything to do with her. Never danced with her except that one
+night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, an&rsquo; that&rsquo;s just what did it,&rdquo; Jim cried out.
+&ldquo;You just danced with her an&rsquo; looked at her, an&rsquo; it was all
+off. Of course you didn&rsquo;t mean nothin&rsquo; by it, but it settled me for
+keeps. Wouldn&rsquo;t look at me again. Always askin&rsquo; about you.
+She&rsquo;d have made fast dates enough with you if you&rsquo;d wanted
+to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I didn&rsquo;t want to.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wasn&rsquo;t necessary. I was left at the pole.&rdquo; Jim looked at him
+admiringly. &ldquo;How d&rsquo;ye do it, anyway, Mart?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By not carin&rsquo; about &rsquo;em,&rdquo; was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean makin&rsquo; b&rsquo;lieve you don&rsquo;t care about
+them?&rdquo; Jim queried eagerly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin considered for a moment, then answered, &ldquo;Perhaps that will do, but
+with me I guess it&rsquo;s different. I never have cared&mdash;much. If you can
+put it on, it&rsquo;s all right, most likely.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You should &rsquo;a&rsquo; ben up at Riley&rsquo;s barn last
+night,&rdquo; Jim announced inconsequently. &ldquo;A lot of the fellers put on
+the gloves. There was a peach from West Oakland. They called &rsquo;m
+&lsquo;The Rat.&rsquo; Slick as silk. No one could touch &rsquo;m. We was all
+wishin&rsquo; you was there. Where was you anyway?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Down in Oakland,&rdquo; Martin replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To the show?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shoved his plate away and got up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Comin&rsquo; to the dance to-night?&rdquo; the other called after him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I think not,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went downstairs and out into the street, breathing great breaths of air. He
+had been suffocating in that atmosphere, while the apprentice&rsquo;s chatter
+had driven him frantic. There had been times when it was all he could do to
+refrain from reaching over and mopping Jim&rsquo;s face in the mush-plate. The
+more he had chattered, the more remote had Ruth seemed to him. How could he,
+herding with such cattle, ever become worthy of her? He was appalled at the
+problem confronting him, weighted down by the incubus of his working-class
+station. Everything reached out to hold him down&mdash;his sister, his
+sister&rsquo;s house and family, Jim the apprentice, everybody he knew, every
+tie of life. Existence did not taste good in his mouth. Up to then he had
+accepted existence, as he had lived it with all about him, as a good thing. He
+had never questioned it, except when he read books; but then, they were only
+books, fairy stories of a fairer and impossible world. But now he had seen that
+world, possible and real, with a flower of a woman called Ruth in the midmost
+centre of it; and thenceforth he must know bitter tastes, and longings sharp as
+pain, and hopelessness that tantalized because it fed on hope.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had debated between the Berkeley Free Library and the Oakland Free Library,
+and decided upon the latter because Ruth lived in Oakland. Who could
+tell?&mdash;a library was a most likely place for her, and he might see her
+there. He did not know the way of libraries, and he wandered through endless
+rows of fiction, till the delicate-featured French-looking girl who seemed in
+charge, told him that the reference department was upstairs. He did not know
+enough to ask the man at the desk, and began his adventures in the philosophy
+alcove. He had heard of book philosophy, but had not imagined there had been so
+much written about it. The high, bulging shelves of heavy tomes humbled him and
+at the same time stimulated him. Here was work for the vigor of his brain. He
+found books on trigonometry in the mathematics section, and ran the pages, and
+stared at the meaningless formulas and figures. He could read English, but he
+saw there an alien speech. Norman and Arthur knew that speech. He had heard
+them talking it. And they were her brothers. He left the alcove in despair.
+From every side the books seemed to press upon him and crush him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge bulked so big. He was
+frightened. How could his brain ever master it all? Later, he remembered that
+there were other men, many men, who had mastered it; and he breathed a great
+oath, passionately, under his breath, swearing that his brain could do what
+theirs had done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so he wandered on, alternating between depression and elation as he stared
+at the shelves packed with wisdom. In one miscellaneous section he came upon a
+&ldquo;Norrie&rsquo;s Epitome.&rdquo; He turned the pages reverently. In a way,
+it spoke a kindred speech. Both he and it were of the sea. Then he found a
+&ldquo;Bowditch&rdquo; and books by Lecky and Marshall. There it was; he would
+teach himself navigation. He would quit drinking, work up, and become a
+captain. Ruth seemed very near to him in that moment. As a captain, he could
+marry her (if she would have him). And if she wouldn&rsquo;t, well&mdash;he
+would live a good life among men, because of Her, and he would quit drinking
+anyway. Then he remembered the underwriters and the owners, the two masters a
+captain must serve, either of which could and would break him and whose
+interests were diametrically opposed. He cast his eyes about the room and
+closed the lids down on a vision of ten thousand books. No; no more of the sea
+for him. There was power in all that wealth of books, and if he would do great
+things, he must do them on the land. Besides, captains were not allowed to take
+their wives to sea with them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Noon came, and afternoon. He forgot to eat, and sought on for the books on
+etiquette; for, in addition to career, his mind was vexed by a simple and very
+concrete problem: <i>When you meet a young lady and she asks you to call, how
+soon can you call</i>? was the way he worded it to himself. But when he found
+the right shelf, he sought vainly for the answer. He was appalled at the vast
+edifice of etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes of visiting-card conduct
+between persons in polite society. He abandoned his search. He had not found
+what he wanted, though he had found that it would take all of a man&rsquo;s
+time to be polite, and that he would have to live a preliminary life in which
+to learn how to be polite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did you find what you wanted?&rdquo; the man at the desk asked him as he
+was leaving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;You have a fine library
+here.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man nodded. &ldquo;We should be glad to see you here often. Are you a
+sailor?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll come again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Now, how did he know that? he asked himself as he went down the stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And for the first block along the street he walked very stiff and straight and
+awkwardly, until he forgot himself in his thoughts, whereupon his rolling gait
+gracefully returned to him.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap06"></a>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin Eden. He was
+famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands had gripped his life with
+a giant&rsquo;s grasp. He could not steel himself to call upon her. He was
+afraid that he might call too soon, and so be guilty of an awful breach of that
+awful thing called etiquette. He spent long hours in the Oakland and Berkeley
+libraries, and made out application blanks for membership for himself, his
+sisters Gertrude and Marian, and Jim, the latter&rsquo;s consent being obtained
+at the expense of several glasses of beer. With four cards permitting him to
+draw books, he burned the gas late in the servant&rsquo;s room, and was charged
+fifty cents a week for it by Mr. Higginbotham.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The many books he read but served to whet his unrest. Every page of every book
+was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read,
+and increased. Also, he did not know where to begin, and continually suffered
+from lack of preparation. The commonest references, that he could see plainly
+every reader was expected to know, he did not know. And the same was true of
+the poetry he read which maddened him with delight. He read more of Swinburne
+than was contained in the volume Ruth had lent him; and &ldquo;Dolores&rdquo;
+he understood thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not understand it, he concluded.
+How could she, living the refined life she did? Then he chanced upon
+Kipling&rsquo;s poems, and was swept away by the lilt and swing and glamour
+with which familiar things had been invested. He was amazed at the man&rsquo;s
+sympathy with life and at his incisive psychology. <i>Psychology</i> was a new
+word in Martin&rsquo;s vocabulary. He had bought a dictionary, which deed had
+decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day on which he must sail
+in search of more. Also, it incensed Mr. Higginbotham, who would have preferred
+the money taking the form of board.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He dared not go near Ruth&rsquo;s neighborhood in the daytime, but night found
+him lurking like a thief around the Morse home, stealing glimpses at the
+windows and loving the very walls that sheltered her. Several times he barely
+escaped being caught by her brothers, and once he trailed Mr. Morse down town
+and studied his face in the lighted streets, longing all the while for some
+quick danger of death to threaten so that he might spring in and save her
+father. On another night, his vigil was rewarded by a glimpse of Ruth through a
+second-story window. He saw only her head and shoulders, and her arms raised as
+she fixed her hair before a mirror. It was only for a moment, but it was a long
+moment to him, during which his blood turned to wine and sang through his
+veins. Then she pulled down the shade. But it was her room&mdash;he had learned
+that; and thereafter he strayed there often, hiding under a dark tree on the
+opposite side of the street and smoking countless cigarettes. One afternoon he
+saw her mother coming out of a bank, and received another proof of the enormous
+distance that separated Ruth from him. She was of the class that dealt with
+banks. He had never been inside a bank in his life, and he had an idea that
+such institutions were frequented only by the very rich and the very powerful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution. Her cleanness and purity had
+reacted upon him, and he felt in his being a crying need to be clean. He must
+be that if he were ever to be worthy of breathing the same air with her. He
+washed his teeth, and scrubbed his hands with a kitchen scrub-brush till he saw
+a nail-brush in a drug-store window and divined its use. While purchasing it,
+the clerk glanced at his nails, suggested a nail-file, and so he became
+possessed of an additional toilet-tool. He ran across a book in the library on
+the care of the body, and promptly developed a penchant for a cold-water bath
+every morning, much to the amazement of Jim, and to the bewilderment of Mr.
+Higginbotham, who was not in sympathy with such high-fangled notions and who
+seriously debated whether or not he should charge Martin extra for the water.
+Another stride was in the direction of creased trousers. Now that Martin was
+aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the difference between the baggy
+knees of the trousers worn by the working class and the straight line from knee
+to foot of those worn by the men above the working class. Also, he learned the
+reason why, and invaded his sister&rsquo;s kitchen in search of irons and
+ironing-board. He had misadventures at first, hopelessly burning one pair and
+buying another, which expenditure again brought nearer the day on which he must
+put to sea.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the reform went deeper than mere outward appearance. He still smoked, but
+he drank no more. Up to that time, drinking had seemed to him the proper thing
+for men to do, and he had prided himself on his strong head which enabled him
+to drink most men under the table. Whenever he encountered a chance shipmate,
+and there were many in San Francisco, he treated them and was treated in turn,
+as of old, but he ordered for himself root beer or ginger ale and
+good-naturedly endured their chaffing. And as they waxed maudlin he studied
+them, watching the beast rise and master them and thanking God that he was no
+longer as they. They had their limitations to forget, and when they were drunk,
+their dim, stupid spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his heaven of
+intoxicated desire. With Martin the need for strong drink had vanished. He was
+drunken in new and more profound ways&mdash;with Ruth, who had fired him with
+love and with a glimpse of higher and eternal life; with books, that had set a
+myriad maggots of desire gnawing in his brain; and with the sense of personal
+cleanliness he was achieving, that gave him even more superb health than what
+he had enjoyed and that made his whole body sing with physical well-being.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One night he went to the theatre, on the blind chance that he might see her
+there, and from the second balcony he did see her. He saw her come down the
+aisle, with Arthur and a strange young man with a football mop of hair and
+eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him to instant apprehension and jealousy.
+He saw her take her seat in the orchestra circle, and little else than her did
+he see that night&mdash;a pair of slender white shoulders and a mass of pale
+gold hair, dim with distance. But there were others who saw, and now and again,
+glancing at those about him, he noted two young girls who looked back from the
+row in front, a dozen seats along, and who smiled at him with bold eyes. He had
+always been easy-going. It was not in his nature to give rebuff. In the old
+days he would have smiled back, and gone further and encouraged smiling. But
+now it was different. He did smile back, then looked away, and looked no more
+deliberately. But several times, forgetting the existence of the two girls, his
+eyes caught their smiles. He could not re-thumb himself in a day, nor could he
+violate the intrinsic kindliness of his nature; so, at such moments, he smiled
+at the girls in warm human friendliness. It was nothing new to him. He knew
+they were reaching out their woman&rsquo;s hands to him. But it was different
+now. Far down there in the orchestra circle was the one woman in all the world,
+so different, so terrifically different, from these two girls of his class,
+that he could feel for them only pity and sorrow. He had it in his heart to
+wish that they could possess, in some small measure, her goodness and glory.
+And not for the world could he hurt them because of their outreaching. He was
+not flattered by it; he even felt a slight shame at his lowliness that
+permitted it. He knew, did he belong in Ruth&rsquo;s class, that there would be
+no overtures from these girls; and with each glance of theirs he felt the
+fingers of his own class clutching at him to hold him down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He left his seat before the curtain went down on the last act, intent on seeing
+Her as she passed out. There were always numbers of men who stood on the
+sidewalk outside, and he could pull his cap down over his eyes and screen
+himself behind some one&rsquo;s shoulder so that she should not see him. He
+emerged from the theatre with the first of the crowd; but scarcely had he taken
+his position on the edge of the sidewalk when the two girls appeared. They were
+looking for him, he knew; and for the moment he could have cursed that in him
+which drew women. Their casual edging across the sidewalk to the curb, as they
+drew near, apprised him of discovery. They slowed down, and were in the thick
+of the crowd as they came up with him. One of them brushed against him and
+apparently for the first time noticed him. She was a slender, dark girl, with
+black, defiant eyes. But they smiled at him, and he smiled back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was automatic; he had said it so often before under similar circumstances of
+first meetings. Besides, he could do no less. There was that large tolerance
+and sympathy in his nature that would permit him to do no less. The black-eyed
+girl smiled gratification and greeting, and showed signs of stopping, while her
+companion, arm linked in arm, giggled and likewise showed signs of halting. He
+thought quickly. It would never do for Her to come out and see him talking
+there with them. Quite naturally, as a matter of course, he swung in along-side
+the dark-eyed one and walked with her. There was no awkwardness on his part, no
+numb tongue. He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the badinage,
+bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the preliminary to getting
+acquainted in these swift-moving affairs. At the corner where the main stream
+of people flowed onward, he started to edge out into the cross street. But the
+girl with the black eyes caught his arm, following him and dragging her
+companion after her, as she cried:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hold on, Bill! What&rsquo;s yer rush? You&rsquo;re not goin&rsquo; to
+shake us so sudden as all that?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He halted with a laugh, and turned, facing them. Across their shoulders he
+could see the moving throng passing under the street lamps. Where he stood it
+was not so light, and, unseen, he would be able to see Her as she passed by.
+She would certainly pass by, for that way led home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s her name?&rdquo; he asked of the giggling girl, nodding at
+the dark-eyed one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ask her,&rdquo; was the convulsed response.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, what is it?&rdquo; he demanded, turning squarely on the girl in
+question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t told me yours, yet,&rdquo; she retorted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You never asked it,&rdquo; he smiled. &ldquo;Besides, you guessed the
+first rattle. It&rsquo;s Bill, all right, all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aw, go &rsquo;long with you.&rdquo; She looked him in the eyes, her own
+sharply passionate and inviting. &ldquo;What is it, honest?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again she looked. All the centuries of woman since sex began were eloquent in
+her eyes. And he measured her in a careless way, and knew, bold now, that she
+would begin to retreat, coyly and delicately, as he pursued, ever ready to
+reverse the game should he turn fainthearted. And, too, he was human, and could
+feel the draw of her, while his ego could not but appreciate the flattery of
+her kindness. Oh, he knew it all, and knew them well, from A to Z. Good, as
+goodness might be measured in their particular class, hard-working for meagre
+wages and scorning the sale of self for easier ways, nervously desirous for
+some small pinch of happiness in the desert of existence, and facing a future
+that was a gamble between the ugliness of unending toil and the black pit of
+more terrible wretchedness, the way whereto being briefer though better paid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bill,&rdquo; he answered, nodding his head. &ldquo;Sure, Pete, Bill
+an&rsquo; no other.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No joshin&rsquo;?&rdquo; she queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It ain&rsquo;t Bill at all,&rdquo; the other broke in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you know?&rdquo; he demanded. &ldquo;You never laid eyes on me
+before.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No need to, to know you&rsquo;re lyin&rsquo;,&rdquo; was the retort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Straight, Bill, what is it?&rdquo; the first girl asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bill&rsquo;ll do,&rdquo; he confessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She reached out to his arm and shook him playfully. &ldquo;I knew you was
+lyin&rsquo;, but you look good to me just the same.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He captured the hand that invited, and felt on the palm familiar markings and
+distortions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When&rsquo;d you chuck the cannery?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How&rsquo;d yeh know?&rdquo; and, &ldquo;My, ain&rsquo;t cheh a
+mind-reader!&rdquo; the girls chorussed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while he exchanged the stupidities of stupid minds with them, before his
+inner sight towered the book-shelves of the library, filled with the wisdom of
+the ages. He smiled bitterly at the incongruity of it, and was assailed by
+doubts. But between inner vision and outward pleasantry he found time to watch
+the theatre crowd streaming by. And then he saw Her, under the lights, between
+her brother and the strange young man with glasses, and his heart seemed to
+stand still. He had waited long for this moment. He had time to note the light,
+fluffy something that hid her queenly head, the tasteful lines of her wrapped
+figure, the gracefulness of her carriage and of the hand that caught up her
+skirts; and then she was gone and he was left staring at the two girls of the
+cannery, at their tawdry attempts at prettiness of dress, their tragic efforts
+to be clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap ribbons, and the cheap rings
+on the fingers. He felt a tug at his arm, and heard a voice saying:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wake up, Bill! What&rsquo;s the matter with you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What was you sayin&rsquo;?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, nothin&rsquo;,&rdquo; the dark girl answered, with a toss of her
+head. &ldquo;I was only remarkin&rsquo;&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I was whisperin&rsquo; it&rsquo;d be a good idea if you could dig
+up a gentleman friend&mdash;for her&rdquo; (indicating her companion),
+&ldquo;and then, we could go off an&rsquo; have ice-cream soda somewhere, or
+coffee, or anything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was afflicted by a sudden spiritual nausea. The transition from Ruth to this
+had been too abrupt. Ranged side by side with the bold, defiant eyes of the
+girl before him, he saw Ruth&rsquo;s clear, luminous eyes, like a
+saint&rsquo;s, gazing at him out of unplumbed depths of purity. And, somehow,
+he felt within him a stir of power. He was better than this. Life meant more to
+him than it meant to these two girls whose thoughts did not go beyond ice-cream
+and a gentleman friend. He remembered that he had led always a secret life in
+his thoughts. These thoughts he had tried to share, but never had he found a
+woman capable of understanding&mdash;nor a man. He had tried, at times, but had
+only puzzled his listeners. And as his thoughts had been beyond them, so, he
+argued now, he must be beyond them. He felt power move in him, and clenched his
+fists. If life meant more to him, then it was for him to demand more from life,
+but he could not demand it from such companionship as this. Those bold black
+eyes had nothing to offer. He knew the thoughts behind them&mdash;of ice-cream
+and of something else. But those saint&rsquo;s eyes alongside&mdash;they
+offered all he knew and more than he could guess. They offered books and
+painting, beauty and repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence.
+Behind those black eyes he knew every thought process. It was like clockwork.
+He could watch every wheel go around. Their bid was low pleasure, narrow as the
+grave, that palled, and the grave was at the end of it. But the bid of the
+saint&rsquo;s eyes was mystery, and wonder unthinkable, and eternal life. He
+had caught glimpses of the soul in them, and glimpses of his own soul, too.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only one thing wrong with the programme,&rdquo; he said
+aloud. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got a date already.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The girl&rsquo;s eyes blazed her disappointment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To sit up with a sick friend, I suppose?&rdquo; she sneered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, a real, honest date with&mdash;&rdquo; he faltered, &ldquo;with a
+girl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re not stringin&rsquo; me?&rdquo; she asked earnestly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked her in the eyes and answered: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s straight, all right.
+But why can&rsquo;t we meet some other time? You ain&rsquo;t told me your name
+yet. An&rsquo; where d&rsquo;ye live?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lizzie,&rdquo; she replied, softening toward him, her hand pressing his
+arm, while her body leaned against his. &ldquo;Lizzie Connolly. And I live at
+Fifth an&rsquo; Market.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He talked on a few minutes before saying good night. He did not go home
+immediately; and under the tree where he kept his vigils he looked up at a
+window and murmured: &ldquo;That date was with you, Ruth. I kept it for
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap07"></a>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met Ruth Morse,
+and still he dared not call. Time and again he nerved himself up to call, but
+under the doubts that assailed him his determination died away. He did not know
+the proper time to call, nor was there any one to tell him, and he was afraid
+of committing himself to an irretrievable blunder. Having shaken himself free
+from his old companions and old ways of life, and having no new companions,
+nothing remained for him but to read, and the long hours he devoted to it would
+have ruined a dozen pairs of ordinary eyes. But his eyes were strong, and they
+were backed by a body superbly strong. Furthermore, his mind was fallow. It had
+lain fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the books was
+concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing. It had never been jaded by study,
+and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp teeth that would not
+let go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived centuries, so far
+behind were the old life and outlook. But he was baffled by lack of
+preparation. He attempted to read books that required years of preliminary
+specialization. One day he would read a book of antiquated philosophy, and the
+next day one that was ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the
+conflict and contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the economists. On
+the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill,
+and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another
+were obsolete. He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to know. He had become
+interested, in a day, in economics, industry, and politics. Passing through the
+City Hall Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of which were half
+a dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly carrying on a
+discussion. He joined the listeners, and heard a new, alien tongue in the
+mouths of the philosophers of the people. One was a tramp, another was a labor
+agitator, a third was a law-school student, and the remainder was composed of
+wordy workingmen. For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and
+single tax, and learned that there were warring social philosophies. He heard
+hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging to fields of
+thought that his meagre reading had never touched upon. Because of this he
+could not follow the arguments closely, and he could only guess at and surmise
+the ideas wrapped up in such strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed
+restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an
+old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that <i>what is is
+right</i>, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and
+the father-atom and the mother-atom.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin Eden&rsquo;s head was in a state of addlement when he went away after
+several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the definitions of a
+dozen unusual words. And when he left the library, he carried under his arm
+four volumes: Madam Blavatsky&rsquo;s &ldquo;Secret Doctrine,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Progress and Poverty,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Quintessence of
+Socialism,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Warfare of Religion and Science.&rdquo;
+Unfortunately, he began on the &ldquo;Secret Doctrine.&rdquo; Every line
+bristled with many-syllabled words he did not understand. He sat up in bed, and
+the dictionary was in front of him more often than the book. He looked up so
+many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten their meaning and had
+to look them up again. He devised the plan of writing the definitions in a
+note-book, and filled page after page with them. And still he could not
+understand. He read until three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil,
+but not one essential thought in the text had he grasped. He looked up, and it
+seemed that the room was lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship upon the
+sea. Then he hurled the &ldquo;Secret Doctrine&rdquo; and many curses across
+the room, turned off the gas, and composed himself to sleep. Nor did he have
+much better luck with the other three books. It was not that his brain was weak
+or incapable; it could think these thoughts were it not for lack of training in
+thinking and lack of the thought-tools with which to think. He guessed this,
+and for a while entertained the idea of reading nothing but the dictionary
+until he had mastered every word in it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, finding his greatest
+joy in the simpler poets, who were more understandable. He loved beauty, and
+there he found beauty. Poetry, like music, stirred him profoundly, and, though
+he did not know it, he was preparing his mind for the heavier work that was to
+come. The pages of his mind were blank, and, without effort, much he read and
+liked, stanza by stanza, was impressed upon those pages, so that he was soon
+able to extract great joy from chanting aloud or under his breath the music and
+the beauty of the printed words he had read. Then he stumbled upon
+Gayley&rsquo;s &ldquo;Classic Myths&rdquo; and Bulfinch&rsquo;s &ldquo;Age of
+Fable,&rdquo; side by side on a library shelf. It was illumination, a great
+light in the darkness of his ignorance, and he read poetry more avidly than
+ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man at the desk in the library had seen Martin there so often that he had
+become quite cordial, always greeting him with a smile and a nod when he
+entered. It was because of this that Martin did a daring thing. Drawing out
+some books at the desk, and while the man was stamping the cards, Martin
+blurted out:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, there&rsquo;s something I&rsquo;d like to ask you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man smiled and paid attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you meet a young lady an&rsquo; she asks you to call, how soon can
+you call?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin felt his shirt press and cling to his shoulders, what of the sweat of
+the effort.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why I&rsquo;d say any time,&rdquo; the man answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but this is different,&rdquo; Martin objected.
+&ldquo;She&mdash;I&mdash;well, you see, it&rsquo;s this way: maybe she
+won&rsquo;t be there. She goes to the university.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then call again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I said ain&rsquo;t what I meant,&rdquo; Martin confessed
+falteringly, while he made up his mind to throw himself wholly upon the
+other&rsquo;s mercy. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m just a rough sort of a fellow, an&rsquo;
+I ain&rsquo;t never seen anything of society. This girl is all that I
+ain&rsquo;t, an&rsquo; I ain&rsquo;t anything that she is. You don&rsquo;t
+think I&rsquo;m playin&rsquo; the fool, do you?&rdquo; he demanded abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no; not at all, I assure you,&rdquo; the other protested.
+&ldquo;Your request is not exactly in the scope of the reference department,
+but I shall be only too pleased to assist you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin looked at him admiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I could tear it off that way, I&rsquo;d be all right,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I beg pardon?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean if I could talk easy that way, an&rsquo; polite, an&rsquo; all
+the rest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; said the other, with comprehension.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the best time to call? The afternoon?&mdash;not too close to
+meal-time? Or the evening? Or Sunday?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you,&rdquo; the librarian said with a brightening face.
+&ldquo;You call her up on the telephone and find out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do it,&rdquo; he said, picking up his books and starting
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned back and asked:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When you&rsquo;re speakin&rsquo; to a young lady&mdash;say, for
+instance, Miss Lizzie Smith&mdash;do you say &lsquo;Miss Lizzie&rsquo;? or
+&lsquo;Miss Smith&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say &lsquo;Miss Smith,&rsquo;&rdquo; the librarian stated
+authoritatively. &ldquo;Say &lsquo;Miss Smith&rsquo; always&mdash;until you
+come to know her better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come down any time; I&rsquo;ll be at home all afternoon,&rdquo; was
+Ruth&rsquo;s reply over the telephone to his stammered request as to when he
+could return the borrowed books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She met him at the door herself, and her woman&rsquo;s eyes took in immediately
+the creased trousers and the certain slight but indefinable change in him for
+the better. Also, she was struck by his face. It was almost violent, this
+health of his, and it seemed to rush out of him and at her in waves of force.
+She felt the urge again of the desire to lean toward him for warmth, and
+marvelled again at the effect his presence produced upon her. And he, in turn,
+knew again the swimming sensation of bliss when he felt the contact of her hand
+in greeting. The difference between them lay in that she was cool and
+self-possessed while his face flushed to the roots of the hair. He stumbled
+with his old awkwardness after her, and his shoulders swung and lurched
+perilously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on easily&mdash;more
+easily by far than he had expected. She made it easy for him; and the gracious
+spirit with which she did it made him love her more madly than ever. They
+talked first of the borrowed books, of the Swinburne he was devoted to, and of
+the Browning he did not understand; and she led the conversation on from
+subject to subject, while she pondered the problem of how she could be of help
+to him. She had thought of this often since their first meeting. She wanted to
+help him. He made a call upon her pity and tenderness that no one had ever made
+before, and the pity was not so much derogatory of him as maternal in her. Her
+pity could not be of the common sort, when the man who drew it was so much man
+as to shock her with maidenly fears and set her mind and pulse thrilling with
+strange thoughts and feelings. The old fascination of his neck was there, and
+there was sweetness in the thought of laying her hands upon it. It seemed still
+a wanton impulse, but she had grown more used to it. She did not dream that in
+such guise new-born love would epitomize itself. Nor did she dream that the
+feeling he excited in her was love. She thought she was merely interested in
+him as an unusual type possessing various potential excellencies, and she even
+felt philanthropic about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different. He knew that
+he loved her, and he desired her as he had never before desired anything in his
+life. He had loved poetry for beauty&rsquo;s sake; but since he met her the
+gates to the vast field of love-poetry had been opened wide. She had given him
+understanding even more than Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week
+before he would not have favored with a second thought&mdash;&ldquo;God&rsquo;s
+own mad lover dying on a kiss&rdquo;; but now it was ever insistent in his
+mind. He marvelled at the wonder of it and the truth; and as he gazed upon her
+he knew that he could die gladly upon a kiss. He felt himself God&rsquo;s own
+mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood could have given him greater pride.
+And at last he knew the meaning of life and why he had been born.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring. He reviewed all the
+wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at the door, and longed for it
+again. His gaze wandered often toward her lips, and he yearned for them
+hungrily. But there was nothing gross or earthly about this yearning. It gave
+him exquisite delight to watch every movement and play of those lips as they
+enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were not ordinary lips such as all men
+and women had. Their substance was not mere human clay. They were lips of pure
+spirit, and his desire for them seemed absolutely different from the desire
+that had led him to other women&rsquo;s lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his
+own physical lips upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor
+with which one would kiss the robe of God. He was not conscious of this
+transvaluation of values that had taken place in him, and was unaware that the
+light that shone in his eyes when he looked at her was quite the same light
+that shines in all men&rsquo;s eyes when the desire of love is upon them. He
+did not dream how ardent and masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of
+it was affecting the alchemy of her spirit. Her penetrative virginity exalted
+and disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool chastity,
+and he would have been startled to learn that there was that shining out of his
+eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through her and kindled a kindred warmth.
+She was subtly perturbed by it, and more than once, though she knew not why, it
+disrupted her train of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her
+to grope for the remainder of ideas partly uttered. Speech was always easy with
+her, and these interruptions would have puzzled her had she not decided that it
+was because he was a remarkable type. She was very sensitive to impressions,
+and it was not strange, after all, that this aura of a traveller from another
+world should so affect her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help him, and she
+turned the conversation in that direction; but it was Martin who came to the
+point first.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder if I can get some advice from you,&rdquo; he began, and
+received an acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound. &ldquo;You
+remember the other time I was here I said I couldn&rsquo;t talk about books
+an&rsquo; things because I didn&rsquo;t know how? Well, I&rsquo;ve ben
+doin&rsquo; a lot of thinkin&rsquo; ever since. I&rsquo;ve ben to the library a
+whole lot, but most of the books I&rsquo;ve tackled have ben over my head.
+Mebbe I&rsquo;d better begin at the beginnin&rsquo;. I ain&rsquo;t never had no
+advantages. I&rsquo;ve worked pretty hard ever since I was a kid, an&rsquo;
+since I&rsquo;ve ben to the library, lookin&rsquo; with new eyes at
+books&mdash;an&rsquo; lookin&rsquo; at new books, too&mdash;I&rsquo;ve just
+about concluded that I ain&rsquo;t ben reading the right kind. You know the
+books you find in cattle-camps an&rsquo; fo&rsquo;c&rsquo;s&rsquo;ls
+ain&rsquo;t the same you&rsquo;ve got in this house, for instance. Well,
+that&rsquo;s the sort of readin&rsquo; matter I&rsquo;ve ben accustomed to. And
+yet&mdash;an&rsquo; I ain&rsquo;t just makin&rsquo; a brag of
+it&mdash;I&rsquo;ve ben different from the people I&rsquo;ve herded with. Not
+that I&rsquo;m any better than the sailors an&rsquo; cow-punchers I travelled
+with,&mdash;I was cow-punchin&rsquo; for a short time, you know,&mdash;but I
+always liked books, read everything I could lay hands on, an&rsquo;&mdash;well,
+I guess I think differently from most of &rsquo;em.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, to come to what I&rsquo;m drivin&rsquo; at. I was never inside a
+house like this. When I come a week ago, an&rsquo; saw all this, an&rsquo; you,
+an&rsquo; your mother, an&rsquo; brothers, an&rsquo; everything&mdash;well, I
+liked it. I&rsquo;d heard about such things an&rsquo; read about such things in
+some of the books, an&rsquo; when I looked around at your house, why, the books
+come true. But the thing I&rsquo;m after is I liked it. I wanted it. I want it
+now. I want to breathe air like you get in this house&mdash;air that is filled
+with books, and pictures, and beautiful things, where people talk in low voices
+an&rsquo; are clean, an&rsquo; their thoughts are clean. The air I always
+breathed was mixed up with grub an&rsquo; house-rent an&rsquo; scrappin&rsquo;
+an booze an&rsquo; that&rsquo;s all they talked about, too. Why, when you was
+crossin&rsquo; the room to kiss your mother, I thought it was the most
+beautiful thing I ever seen. I&rsquo;ve seen a whole lot of life, an&rsquo;
+somehow I&rsquo;ve seen a whole lot more of it than most of them that was with
+me. I like to see, an&rsquo; I want to see more, an&rsquo; I want to see it
+different.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I ain&rsquo;t got to the point yet. Here it is. I want to make my
+way to the kind of life you have in this house. There&rsquo;s more in life than
+booze, an&rsquo; hard work, an&rsquo; knockin&rsquo; about. Now, how am I
+goin&rsquo; to get it? Where do I take hold an&rsquo; begin? I&rsquo;m
+willin&rsquo; to work my passage, you know, an&rsquo; I can make most men sick
+when it comes to hard work. Once I get started, I&rsquo;ll work night an&rsquo;
+day. Mebbe you think it&rsquo;s funny, me askin&rsquo; you about all this. I
+know you&rsquo;re the last person in the world I ought to ask, but I
+don&rsquo;t know anybody else I could ask&mdash;unless it&rsquo;s Arthur. Mebbe
+I ought to ask him. If I was&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His voice died away. His firmly planned intention had come to a halt on the
+verge of the horrible probability that he should have asked Arthur and that he
+had made a fool of himself. Ruth did not speak immediately. She was too
+absorbed in striving to reconcile the stumbling, uncouth speech and its
+simplicity of thought with what she saw in his face. She had never looked in
+eyes that expressed greater power. Here was a man who could do anything, was
+the message she read there, and it accorded ill with the weakness of his spoken
+thought. And for that matter so complex and quick was her own mind that she did
+not have a just appreciation of simplicity. And yet she had caught an
+impression of power in the very groping of this mind. It had seemed to her like
+a giant writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down. Her face was
+all sympathy when she did speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What you need, you realize yourself, and it is education. You should go
+back and finish grammar school, and then go through to high school and
+university.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that takes money,&rdquo; he interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I had not thought of that. But then you
+have relatives, somebody who could assist you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My father and mother are dead. I&rsquo;ve two sisters, one married,
+an&rsquo; the other&rsquo;ll get married soon, I suppose. Then I&rsquo;ve a
+string of brothers,&mdash;I&rsquo;m the youngest,&mdash;but they never helped
+nobody. They&rsquo;ve just knocked around over the world, lookin&rsquo; out for
+number one. The oldest died in India. Two are in South Africa now, an&rsquo;
+another&rsquo;s on a whaling voyage, an&rsquo; one&rsquo;s travellin&rsquo;
+with a circus&mdash;he does trapeze work. An&rsquo; I guess I&rsquo;m just like
+them. I&rsquo;ve taken care of myself since I was eleven&mdash;that&rsquo;s
+when my mother died. I&rsquo;ve got to study by myself, I guess, an&rsquo; what
+I want to know is where to begin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar. Your
+grammar is&mdash;&rdquo; She had intended saying &ldquo;awful,&rdquo; but she
+amended it to &ldquo;is not particularly good.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He flushed and sweated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know I must talk a lot of slang an&rsquo; words you don&rsquo;t
+understand. But then they&rsquo;re the only words I know&mdash;how to speak.
+I&rsquo;ve got other words in my mind, picked &rsquo;em up from books, but I
+can&rsquo;t pronounce &rsquo;em, so I don&rsquo;t use &rsquo;em.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It isn&rsquo;t what you say, so much as how you say it. You don&rsquo;t
+mind my being frank, do you? I don&rsquo;t want to hurt you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness.
+&ldquo;Fire away. I&rsquo;ve got to know, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;d sooner know from
+you than anybody else.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, then, you say, &lsquo;You was&rsquo;; it should be, &lsquo;You
+were.&rsquo; You say &lsquo;I seen&rsquo; for &lsquo;I saw.&rsquo; You use the
+double negative&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s the double negative?&rdquo; he demanded; then added humbly,
+&ldquo;You see, I don&rsquo;t even understand your explanations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I didn&rsquo;t explain that,&rdquo; she smiled.
+&ldquo;A double negative is&mdash;let me see&mdash;well, you say, &lsquo;never
+helped nobody.&rsquo; &lsquo;Never&rsquo; is a negative. &lsquo;Nobody&rsquo;
+is another negative. It is a rule that two negatives make a positive.
+&lsquo;Never helped nobody&rsquo; means that, not helping nobody, they must
+have helped somebody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s pretty clear,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I never thought of it
+before. But it don&rsquo;t mean they <i>must</i> have helped somebody, does it?
+Seems to me that &lsquo;never helped nobody&rsquo; just naturally fails to say
+whether or not they helped somebody. I never thought of it before, and
+I&rsquo;ll never say it again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his mind. As
+soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but corrected her error.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll find it all in the grammar,&rdquo; she went on.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s something else I noticed in your speech. You say
+&lsquo;don&rsquo;t&rsquo; when you shouldn&rsquo;t. &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t&rsquo;
+is a contraction and stands for two words. Do you know them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He thought a moment, then answered, &ldquo;&lsquo;Do not.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head, and said, &ldquo;And you use &lsquo;don&rsquo;t&rsquo;
+when you mean &lsquo;does not.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give me an illustration,&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well&mdash;&rdquo; She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she
+thought, while he looked on and decided that her expression was most adorable.
+&ldquo;&lsquo;It don&rsquo;t do to be hasty.&rsquo; Change
+&lsquo;don&rsquo;t&rsquo; to &lsquo;do not,&rsquo; and it reads, &lsquo;It do
+not do to be hasty,&rsquo; which is perfectly absurd.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned it over in his mind and considered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doesn&rsquo;t it jar on your ear?&rdquo; she suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t say that it does,&rdquo; he replied judicially.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you say, &lsquo;Can&rsquo;t say that it
+do&rsquo;?&rdquo; she queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That sounds wrong,&rdquo; he said slowly. &ldquo;As for the other I
+can&rsquo;t make up my mind. I guess my ear ain&rsquo;t had the trainin&rsquo;
+yours has.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no such word as &lsquo;ain&rsquo;t,&rsquo;&rdquo; she said,
+prettily emphatic.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin flushed again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you say &lsquo;ben&rsquo; for &lsquo;been,&rsquo;&rdquo; she
+continued; &ldquo;&lsquo;come&rsquo; for &lsquo;came&rsquo;; and the way you
+chop your endings is something dreadful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you mean?&rdquo; He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get
+down on his knees before so marvellous a mind. &ldquo;How do I chop?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t complete the endings. &lsquo;A-n-d&rsquo; spells
+&lsquo;and.&rsquo; You pronounce it &lsquo;an&rsquo;.&rsquo;
+&lsquo;I-n-g&rsquo; spells &lsquo;ing.&rsquo; Sometimes you pronounce it
+&lsquo;ing&rsquo; and sometimes you leave off the &lsquo;g.&rsquo; And then you
+slur by dropping initial letters and diphthongs. &lsquo;T-h-e-m&rsquo; spells
+&lsquo;them.&rsquo; You pronounce it&mdash;oh, well, it is not necessary to go
+over all of them. What you need is the grammar. I&rsquo;ll get one and show you
+how to begin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had read in the
+etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as to whether he was doing
+the right thing, and fearing that she might take it as a sign that he was about
+to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By the way, Mr. Eden,&rdquo; she called back, as she was leaving the
+room. &ldquo;What is <i>booze</i>? You used it several times, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, booze,&rdquo; he laughed. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s slang. It means whiskey
+an&rsquo; beer&mdash;anything that will make you drunk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And another thing,&rdquo; she laughed back. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t use
+&lsquo;you&rsquo; when you are impersonal. &lsquo;You&rsquo; is very personal,
+and your use of it just now was not precisely what you meant.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t just see that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, you said just now, to me, &lsquo;whiskey and beer&mdash;anything
+that will make you drunk&rsquo;&mdash;make me drunk, don&rsquo;t you
+see?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, it would, wouldn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, of course,&rdquo; she smiled. &ldquo;But it would be nicer not to
+bring me into it. Substitute &lsquo;one&rsquo; for &lsquo;you&rsquo; and see
+how much better it sounds.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair near his&mdash;he wondered
+if he should have helped her with the chair&mdash;and sat down beside him. She
+turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads were inclined toward each
+other. He could hardly follow her outlining of the work he must do, so amazed
+was he by her delightful propinquity. But when she began to lay down the
+importance of conjugation, he forgot all about her. He had never heard of
+conjugation, and was fascinated by the glimpse he was catching into the
+tie-ribs of language. He leaned closer to the page, and her hair touched his
+cheek. He had fainted but once in his life, and he thought he was going to
+faint again. He could scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up
+into his throat and suffocating him. Never had she seemed so accessible as now.
+For the moment the great gulf that separated them was bridged. But there was no
+diminution in the loftiness of his feeling for her. She had not descended to
+him. It was he who had been caught up into the clouds and carried to her. His
+reverence for her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious awe and
+fervor. It seemed to him that he had intruded upon the holy of holies, and
+slowly and carefully he moved his head aside from the contact which thrilled
+him like an electric shock and of which she had not been aware.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap08"></a>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar, reviewed
+the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the books that caught his fancy.
+Of his own class he saw nothing. The girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had
+become of him and worried Jim with questions, and some of the fellows who put
+on the glove at Riley&rsquo;s were glad that Martin came no more. He made
+another discovery of treasure-trove in the library. As the grammar had shown
+him the tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the tie-ribs of poetry,
+and he began to learn metre and construction and form, beneath the beauty he
+loved finding the why and wherefore of that beauty. Another modern book he
+found treated poetry as a representative art, treated it exhaustively, with
+copious illustrations from the best in literature. Never had he read fiction
+with so keen zest as he studied these books. And his fresh mind, untaxed for
+twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire, gripped hold of what he read
+with a virility unusual to the student mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he had known,
+the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and harpy-women, seemed a
+very small world; and yet it blended in with this new world and expanded. His
+mind made for unity, and he was surprised when at first he began to see points
+of contact between the two worlds. And he was ennobled, as well, by the
+loftiness of thought and beauty he found in the books. This led him to believe
+more firmly than ever that up above him, in society like Ruth and her family,
+all men and women thought these thoughts and lived them. Down below where he
+lived was the ignoble, and he wanted to purge himself of the ignoble that had
+soiled all his days, and to rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt the upper
+classes. All his childhood and youth had been troubled by a vague unrest; he
+had never known what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he had hunted
+vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his unrest had become sharp and painful,
+and he knew at last, clearly and definitely, that it was beauty, and intellect,
+and love that he must have.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each time was an
+added inspiration. She helped him with his English, corrected his
+pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But their intercourse was not all
+devoted to elementary study. He had seen too much of life, and his mind was too
+matured, to be wholly content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis;
+and there were times when their conversation turned on other themes&mdash;the
+last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied. And when she read
+aloud to him her favorite passages, he ascended to the topmost heaven of
+delight. Never, in all the women he had heard speak, had he heard a voice like
+hers. The least sound of it was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and
+throbbed with every word she uttered. It was the quality of it, the repose, and
+the musical modulation&mdash;the soft, rich, indefinable product of culture and
+a gentle soul. As he listened to her, there rang in the ears of his memory the
+harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and, in lesser degrees of
+harshness, the strident voices of working women and of the girls of his own
+class. Then the chemistry of vision would begin to work, and they would troop
+in review across his mind, each, by contrast, multiplying Ruth&rsquo;s glories.
+Then, too, his bliss was heightened by the knowledge that her mind was
+comprehending what she read and was quivering with appreciation of the beauty
+of the written thought. She read to him much from &ldquo;The Princess,&rdquo;
+and often he saw her eyes swimming with tears, so finely was her aesthetic
+nature strung. At such moments her own emotions elevated him till he was as a
+god, and, as he gazed at her and listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life
+and reading its deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the heights of
+exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided that this was love and that love
+was the greatest thing in the world. And in review would pass along the
+corridors of memory all previous thrills and burnings he had known,&mdash;the
+drunkenness of wine, the caresses of women, the rough play and give and take of
+physical contests,&mdash;and they seemed trivial and mean compared with this
+sublime ardor he now enjoyed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never had any experiences of the
+heart. Her only experiences in such matters were of the books, where the facts
+of ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality; and
+she little knew that this rough sailor was creeping into her heart and storing
+there pent forces that would some day burst forth and surge through her in
+waves of fire. She did not know the actual fire of love. Her knowledge of love
+was purely theoretical, and she conceived of it as lambent flame, gentle as the
+fall of dew or the ripple of quiet water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer
+nights. Her idea of love was more that of placid affection, serving the loved
+one softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of ethereal calm.
+She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its scorching heat and
+sterile wastes of parched ashes. She knew neither her own potencies, nor the
+potencies of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion. The
+conjugal affection of her father and mother constituted her ideal of
+love-affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging, without shock or
+friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence with a loved one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange individual,
+and she identified with novelty and strangeness the effects he produced upon
+her. It was only natural. In similar ways she had experienced unusual feelings
+when she looked at wild animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm
+of wind, or shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning. There was something
+cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him. He came to her
+breathing of large airs and great spaces. The blaze of tropic suns was in his
+face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life.
+He was marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher
+deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed, wild,
+and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so mildly to
+her hand. Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse to tame the wild
+thing. It was an unconscious impulse, and farthest from her thoughts that her
+desire was to re-thumb the clay of him into a likeness of her father&rsquo;s
+image, which image she believed to be the finest in the world. Nor was there
+any way, out of her inexperience, for her to know that the cosmic feel she
+caught of him was that most cosmic of things, love, which with equal power drew
+men and women together across the world, compelled stags to kill each other in
+the rutting season, and drove even the elements irresistibly to unite.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His swift development was a source of surprise and interest. She detected
+unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by day, like flowers in
+congenial soil. She read Browning aloud to him, and was often puzzled by the
+strange interpretations he gave to mooted passages. It was beyond her to
+realize that, out of his experience of men and women and life, his
+interpretations were far more frequently correct than hers. His conceptions
+seemed naive to her, though she was often fired by his daring flights of
+comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide among the stars that she could not
+follow and could only sit and thrill to the impact of unguessed power. Then she
+played to him&mdash;no longer at him&mdash;and probed him with music that sank
+to depths beyond her plumb-line. His nature opened to music as a flower to the
+sun, and the transition was quick from his working-class rag-time and jingles
+to her classical display pieces that she knew nearly by heart. Yet he betrayed
+a democratic fondness for Wagner, and the &ldquo;Tannhäuser&rdquo; overture,
+when she had given him the clew to it, claimed him as nothing else she played.
+In an immediate way it personified his life. All his past was the
+<i>Venusburg</i> motif, while her he identified somehow with the
+<i>Pilgrim&rsquo;s Chorus</i> motif; and from the exalted state this elevated
+him to, he swept onward and upward into that vast shadow-realm of
+spirit-groping, where good and evil war eternally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind temporary doubts as to the
+correctness of her own definitions and conceptions of music. But her singing he
+did not question. It was too wholly her, and he sat always amazed at the divine
+melody of her pure soprano voice. And he could not help but contrast it with
+the weak pipings and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and
+untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the
+women of the seaport towns. She enjoyed singing and playing to him. In truth,
+it was the first time she had ever had a human soul to play with, and the
+plastic clay of him was a delight to mould; for she thought she was moulding
+it, and her intentions were good. Besides, it was pleasant to be with him. He
+did not repel her. That first repulsion had been really a fear of her
+undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep. Though she did not know it,
+she had a feeling in him of proprietary right. Also, he had a tonic effect upon
+her. She was studying hard at the university, and it seemed to strengthen her
+to emerge from the dusty books and have the fresh sea-breeze of his personality
+blow upon her. Strength! Strength was what she needed, and he gave it to her in
+generous measure. To come into the same room with him, or to meet him at the
+door, was to take heart of life. And when he had gone, she would return to her
+books with a keener zest and fresh store of energy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was an awkward
+thing to play with souls. As her interest in Martin increased, the remodelling
+of his life became a passion with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is Mr. Butler,&rdquo; she said one afternoon, when grammar and
+arithmetic and poetry had been put aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He had comparatively no advantages at first. His father had been a bank
+cashier, but he lingered for years, dying of consumption in Arizona, so that
+when he was dead, Mr. Butler, Charles Butler he was called, found himself alone
+in the world. His father had come from Australia, you know, and so he had no
+relatives in California. He went to work in a printing-office,&mdash;I have
+heard him tell of it many times,&mdash;and he got three dollars a week, at
+first. His income to-day is at least thirty thousand a year. How did he do it?
+He was honest, and faithful, and industrious, and economical. He denied himself
+the enjoyments that most boys indulge in. He made it a point to save so much
+every week, no matter what he had to do without in order to save it. Of course,
+he was soon earning more than three dollars a week, and as his wages increased
+he saved more and more.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to night school. He had
+his eyes fixed always on the future. Later on he went to night high school.
+When he was only seventeen, he was earning excellent wages at setting type, but
+he was ambitious. He wanted a career, not a livelihood, and he was content to
+make immediate sacrifices for his ultimate gain. He decided upon the law, and
+he entered father&rsquo;s office as an office boy&mdash;think of
+that!&mdash;and got only four dollars a week. But he had learned how to be
+economical, and out of that four dollars he went on saving money.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it. His face was
+lighted up with interest in the youthful struggles of Mr. Butler; but there was
+a frown upon his face as well.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d say they was pretty hard lines for a young fellow,&rdquo; he
+remarked. &ldquo;Four dollars a week! How could he live on it? You can bet he
+didn&rsquo;t have any frills. Why, I pay five dollars a week for board now,
+an&rsquo; there&rsquo;s nothin&rsquo; excitin&rsquo; about it, you can lay to
+that. He must have lived like a dog. The food he ate&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He cooked for himself,&rdquo; she interrupted, &ldquo;on a little
+kerosene stove.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The food he ate must have been worse than what a sailor gets on the
+worst-feedin&rsquo; deep-water ships, than which there ain&rsquo;t much that
+can be possibly worse.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think of him now!&rdquo; she cried enthusiastically. &ldquo;Think of
+what his income affords him. His early denials are paid for a
+thousand-fold.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin looked at her sharply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s one thing I&rsquo;ll bet you,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and
+it is that Mr. Butler is nothin&rsquo; gay-hearted now in his fat days. He fed
+himself like that for years an&rsquo; years, on a boy&rsquo;s stomach,
+an&rsquo; I bet his stomach&rsquo;s none too good now for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll bet he&rsquo;s got dyspepsia right now!&rdquo; Martin
+challenged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, he has,&rdquo; she confessed; &ldquo;but&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; I bet,&rdquo; Martin dashed on, &ldquo;that he&rsquo;s solemn
+an&rsquo; serious as an old owl, an&rsquo; doesn&rsquo;t care a rap for a good
+time, for all his thirty thousand a year. An&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll bet he&rsquo;s
+not particularly joyful at seein&rsquo; others have a good time. Ain&rsquo;t I
+right?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he is not that type of man. By nature he is sober and serious. He
+always was that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can bet he was,&rdquo; Martin proclaimed. &ldquo;Three dollars a
+week, an&rsquo; four dollars a week, an&rsquo; a young boy cookin&rsquo; for
+himself on an oil-burner an&rsquo; layin&rsquo; up money, workin&rsquo; all day
+an&rsquo; studyin&rsquo; all night, just workin&rsquo; an&rsquo; never
+playin&rsquo;, never havin&rsquo; a good time, an&rsquo; never learnin&rsquo;
+how to have a good time&mdash;of course his thirty thousand came along too
+late.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner sight all the thousands
+of details of the boy&rsquo;s existence and of his narrow spiritual development
+into a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year man. With the swiftness and wide-reaching
+of multitudinous thought Charles Butler&rsquo;s whole life was telescoped upon
+his vision.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;I feel sorry for Mr. Butler. He was
+too young to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of thirty
+thousand a year that&rsquo;s clean wasted upon him. Why, thirty thousand, lump
+sum, wouldn&rsquo;t buy for him right now what ten cents he was layin&rsquo; up
+would have bought him, when he was a kid, in the way of candy an&rsquo; peanuts
+or a seat in nigger heaven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth. Not only were
+they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but she always felt in them
+germs of truth that threatened to unseat or modify her own convictions. Had she
+been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she might have been changed by them; but
+she was twenty-four, conservative by nature and upbringing, and already
+crystallized into the cranny of life where she had been born and formed. It was
+true, his bizarre judgments troubled her in the moments they were uttered, but
+she ascribed them to his novelty of type and strangeness of living, and they
+were soon forgotten. Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength
+of their utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that
+accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him. She would never
+have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her horizon, was, in such
+moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with wider and deeper concepts. Her own
+limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize
+limitations only in others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide
+indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she
+dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was
+identified with hers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I have not finished my story,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He worked, so
+father says, as no other office boy he ever had. Mr. Butler was always eager to
+work. He never was late, and he was usually at the office a few minutes before
+his regular time. And yet he saved his time. Every spare moment was devoted to
+study. He studied book-keeping and type-writing, and he paid for lessons in
+shorthand by dictating at night to a court reporter who needed practice. He
+quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable. Father appreciated him
+and saw that he was bound to rise. It was on father&rsquo;s suggestion that he
+went to law college. He became a lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office
+when father took him in as junior partner. He is a great man. He refused the
+United States Senate several times, and father says he could become a justice
+of the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants to. Such a life is
+an inspiration to all of us. It shows us that a man with will may rise superior
+to his environment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is a great man,&rdquo; Martin said sincerely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred upon his
+sense of beauty and life. He could not find an adequate motive in Mr.
+Butler&rsquo;s life of pinching and privation. Had he done it for love of a
+woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would have understood. God&rsquo;s
+own mad lover should do anything for the kiss, but not for thirty thousand
+dollars a year. He was dissatisfied with Mr. Butler&rsquo;s career. There was
+something paltry about it, after all. Thirty thousand a year was all right, but
+dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all
+its value.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made it clear
+that more remodelling was necessary. Hers was that common insularity of mind
+that makes human creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics are
+best and right and that other human creatures scattered over the world are less
+fortunately placed than they. It was the same insularity of mind that made the
+ancient Jew thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary
+god-substituting to the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire to shape
+this man from other crannies of life into the likeness of the men who lived in
+her particular cranny of life.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap09"></a>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a lover&rsquo;s
+desire. His store of money exhausted, he had shipped before the mast on the
+treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon Islands, after eight months of
+failure to find treasure, had witnessed the breaking up of the expedition. The
+men had been paid off in Australia, and Martin had immediately shipped on a
+deep-water vessel for San Francisco. Not alone had those eight months earned
+him enough money to stay on land for many weeks, but they had enabled him to do
+a great deal of studying and reading.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His was the student&rsquo;s mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
+indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth. The grammar he had taken
+along he went through again and again until his unjaded brain had mastered it.
+He noticed the bad grammar used by his shipmates, and made a point of mentally
+correcting and reconstructing their crudities of speech. To his great joy he
+discovered that his ear was becoming sensitive and that he was developing
+grammatical nerves. A double negative jarred him like a discord, and often,
+from lack of practice, it was from his own lips that the jar came. His tongue
+refused to learn new tricks in a day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the dictionary and
+added twenty words a day to his vocabulary. He found that this was no light
+task, and at wheel or lookout he steadily went over and over his lengthening
+list of pronunciations and definitions, while he invariably memorized himself
+to sleep. &ldquo;Never did anything,&rdquo; &ldquo;if I were,&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;those things,&rdquo; were phrases, with many variations, that he
+repeated under his breath in order to accustom his tongue to the language
+spoken by Ruth. &ldquo;And&rdquo; and &ldquo;ing,&rdquo; with the
+&ldquo;d&rdquo; and &ldquo;g&rdquo; pronounced emphatically, he went over
+thousands of times; and to his surprise he noticed that he was beginning to
+speak cleaner and more correct English than the officers themselves and the
+gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who had financed the expedition.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into possession
+of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and Martin had washed his
+clothes for him and in return been permitted access to the precious volumes.
+For a time, so steeped was he in the plays and in the many favorite passages
+that impressed themselves almost without effort on his brain, that all the
+world seemed to shape itself into forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy and
+his very thoughts were in blank verse. It trained his ear and gave him a fine
+appreciation for noble English; withal it introduced into his mind much that
+was archaic and obsolete.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he had learned
+of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned much of himself. Along with
+his humbleness because he knew so little, there arose a conviction of power. He
+felt a sharp gradation between himself and his shipmates, and was wise enough
+to realize that the difference lay in potentiality rather than achievement.
+What he could do,&mdash;they could do; but within him he felt a confused
+ferment working that told him there was more in him than he had done. He was
+tortured by the exquisite beauty of the world, and wished that Ruth were there
+to share it with him. He decided that he would describe to her many of the bits
+of South Sea beauty. The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and
+urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth. And then, in
+splendor and glory, came the great idea. He would write. He would be one of the
+eyes through which the world saw, one of the ears through which it heard, one
+of the hearts through which it felt. He would
+write&mdash;everything&mdash;poetry and prose, fiction and description, and
+plays like Shakespeare. There was career and the way to win to Ruth. The men of
+literature were the world&rsquo;s giants, and he conceived them to be far finer
+than the Mr. Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and could be Supreme
+Court justices if they wanted to.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to San
+Francisco was like a dream. He was drunken with unguessed power and felt that
+he could do anything. In the midst of the great and lonely sea he gained
+perspective. Clearly, and for the first time, he saw Ruth and her world. It was
+all visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which he could take up in his
+two hands and turn around and about and examine. There was much that was dim
+and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as a whole and not in detail, and he
+saw, also, the way to master it. To write! The thought was fire in him. He
+would begin as soon as he got back. The first thing he would do would be to
+describe the voyage of the treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San
+Francisco newspaper. He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she would be
+surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print. While he wrote, he could
+go on studying. There were twenty-four hours in each day. He was invincible. He
+knew how to work, and the citadels would go down before him. He would not have
+to go to sea again&mdash;as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a vision of
+a steam yacht. There were other writers who possessed steam yachts. Of course,
+he cautioned himself, it would be slow succeeding at first, and for a time he
+would be content to earn enough money by his writing to enable him to go on
+studying. And then, after some time,&mdash;a very indeterminate
+time,&mdash;when he had learned and prepared himself, he would write the great
+things and his name would be on all men&rsquo;s lips. But greater than that,
+infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have proved himself worthy of
+Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for Ruth that his splendid dream
+arose. He was not a fame-monger, but merely one of God&rsquo;s mad lovers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up his old
+room at Bernard Higginbotham&rsquo;s and set to work. He did not even let Ruth
+know he was back. He would go and see her when he finished the article on the
+treasure-hunters. It was not so difficult to abstain from seeing her, because
+of the violent heat of creative fever that burned in him. Besides, the very
+article he was writing would bring her nearer to him. He did not know how long
+an article he should write, but he counted the words in a double-page article
+in the Sunday supplement of the <i>San Francisco Examiner</i>, and guided
+himself by that. Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when
+he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned
+from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as
+paragraphs and quotation marks. He had never thought of such things before; and
+he promptly set to work writing the article over, referring continually to the
+pages of the rhetoric and learning more in a day about composition than the
+average schoolboy in a year. When he had copied the article a second time and
+rolled it up carefully, he read in a newspaper an item on hints to beginners,
+and discovered the iron law that manuscripts should never be rolled and that
+they should be written on one side of the paper. He had violated the law on
+both counts. Also, he learned from the item that first-class papers paid a
+minimum of ten dollars a column. So, while he copied the manuscript a third
+time, he consoled himself by multiplying ten columns by ten dollars. The
+product was always the same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was
+better than seafaring. If it hadn&rsquo;t been for his blunders, he would have
+finished the article in three days. One hundred dollars in three days! It would
+have taken him three months and longer on the sea to earn a similar amount. A
+man was a fool to go to sea when he could write, he concluded, though the money
+in itself meant nothing to him. Its value was in the liberty it would get him,
+the presentable garments it would buy him, all of which would bring him nearer,
+swiftly nearer, to the slender, pale girl who had turned his life back upon
+itself and given him inspiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to the editor of
+the <i>San Francisco Examiner</i>. He had an idea that anything accepted by a
+paper was published immediately, and as he had sent the manuscript in on Friday
+he expected it to come out on the following Sunday. He conceived that it would
+be fine to let that event apprise Ruth of his return. Then, Sunday afternoon,
+he would call and see her. In the meantime he was occupied by another idea,
+which he prided himself upon as being a particularly sane, careful, and modest
+idea. He would write an adventure story for boys and sell it to <i>The
+Youth&rsquo;s Companion</i>. He went to the free reading-room and looked
+through the files of <i>The Youth&rsquo;s Companion</i>. Serial stories, he
+found, were usually published in that weekly in five instalments of about three
+thousand words each. He discovered several serials that ran to seven
+instalments, and decided to write one of that length.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once&mdash;a voyage that was to
+have been for three years and which had terminated in shipwreck at the end of
+six months. While his imagination was fanciful, even fantastic at times, he had
+a basic love of reality that compelled him to write about the things he knew.
+He knew whaling, and out of the real materials of his knowledge he proceeded to
+manufacture the fictitious adventures of the two boys he intended to use as
+joint heroes. It was easy work, he decided on Saturday evening. He had
+completed on that day the first instalment of three thousand words&mdash;much
+to the amusement of Jim, and to the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who
+sneered throughout meal-time at the &ldquo;litery&rdquo; person they had
+discovered in the family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in-law&rsquo;s surprise on
+Sunday morning when he opened his <i>Examiner</i> and saw the article on the
+treasure-hunters. Early that morning he was out himself to the front door,
+nervously racing through the many-sheeted newspaper. He went through it a
+second time, very carefully, then folded it up and left it where he had found
+it. He was glad he had not told any one about his article. On second thought he
+concluded that he had been wrong about the speed with which things found their
+way into newspaper columns. Besides, there had not been any news value in his
+article, and most likely the editor would write to him about it first.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After breakfast he went on with his serial. The words flowed from his pen,
+though he broke off from the writing frequently to look up definitions in the
+dictionary or to refer to the rhetoric. He often read or re-read a chapter at a
+time, during such pauses; and he consoled himself that while he was not writing
+the great things he felt to be in him, he was learning composition, at any
+rate, and training himself to shape up and express his thoughts. He toiled on
+till dark, when he went out to the reading-room and explored magazines and
+weeklies until the place closed at ten o&rsquo;clock. This was his programme
+for a week. Each day he did three thousand words, and each evening he puzzled
+his way through the magazines, taking note of the stories, articles, and poems
+that editors saw fit to publish. One thing was certain: What these
+multitudinous writers did he could do, and only give him time and he would do
+what they could not do. He was cheered to read in <i>Book News</i>, in a
+paragraph on the payment of magazine writers, not that Rudyard Kipling received
+a dollar per word, but that the minimum rate paid by first-class magazines was
+two cents a word. <i>The Youth&rsquo;s Companion</i> was certainly first class,
+and at that rate the three thousand words he had written that day would bring
+him sixty dollars&mdash;two months&rsquo; wages on the sea!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words long. At two
+cents a word, he calculated, that would bring him four hundred and twenty
+dollars. Not a bad week&rsquo;s work. It was more money than he had ever
+possessed at one time. He did not know how he could spend it all. He had tapped
+a gold mine. Where this came from he could always get more. He planned to buy
+some more clothes, to subscribe to many magazines, and to buy dozens of
+reference books that at present he was compelled to go to the library to
+consult. And still there was a large portion of the four hundred and twenty
+dollars unspent. This worried him until the thought came to him of hiring a
+servant for Gertrude and of buying a bicycle for Marian.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He mailed the bulky manuscript to <i>The Youth&rsquo;s Companion</i>, and on
+Saturday afternoon, after having planned an article on pearl-diving, he went to
+see Ruth. He had telephoned, and she went herself to greet him at the door. The
+old familiar blaze of health rushed out from him and struck her like a blow. It
+seemed to enter into her body and course through her veins in a liquid glow,
+and to set her quivering with its imparted strength. He flushed warmly as he
+took her hand and looked into her blue eyes, but the fresh bronze of eight
+months of sun hid the flush, though it did not protect the neck from the
+gnawing chafe of the stiff collar. She noted the red line of it with amusement
+which quickly vanished as she glanced at his clothes. They really fitted
+him,&mdash;it was his first made-to-order suit,&mdash;and he seemed slimmer and
+better modelled. In addition, his cloth cap had been replaced by a soft hat,
+which she commanded him to put on and then complimented him on his appearance.
+She did not remember when she had felt so happy. This change in him was her
+handiwork, and she was proud of it and fired with ambition further to help him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the most radical change of all, and the one that pleased her most, was the
+change in his speech. Not only did he speak more correctly, but he spoke more
+easily, and there were many new words in his vocabulary. When he grew excited
+or enthusiastic, however, he dropped back into the old slurring and the
+dropping of final consonants. Also, there was an awkward hesitancy, at times,
+as he essayed the new words he had learned. On the other hand, along with his
+ease of expression, he displayed a lightness and facetiousness of thought that
+delighted her. It was his old spirit of humor and badinage that had made him a
+favorite in his own class, but which he had hitherto been unable to use in her
+presence through lack of words and training. He was just beginning to orientate
+himself and to feel that he was not wholly an intruder. But he was very
+tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set the pace of sprightliness and
+fancy, keeping up with her but never daring to go beyond her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan to write for a
+livelihood and of going on with his studies. But he was disappointed at her
+lack of approval. She did not think much of his plan.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see,&rdquo; she said frankly, &ldquo;writing must be a trade, like
+anything else. Not that I know anything about it, of course. I only bring
+common judgment to bear. You couldn&rsquo;t hope to be a blacksmith without
+spending three years at learning the trade&mdash;or is it five years! Now
+writers are so much better paid than blacksmiths that there must be ever so
+many more men who would like to write, who&mdash;try to write.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But then, may not I be peculiarly constituted to write?&rdquo; he
+queried, secretly exulting at the language he had used, his swift imagination
+throwing the whole scene and atmosphere upon a vast screen along with a
+thousand other scenes from his life&mdash;scenes that were rough and raw, gross
+and bestial.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The whole composite vision was achieved with the speed of light, producing no
+pause in the conversation, nor interrupting his calm train of thought. On the
+screen of his imagination he saw himself and this sweet and beautiful girl,
+facing each other and conversing in good English, in a room of books and
+paintings and tone and culture, and all illuminated by a bright light of
+steadfast brilliance; while ranged about and fading away to the remote edges of
+the screen were antithetical scenes, each scene a picture, and he the onlooker,
+free to look at will upon what he wished. He saw these other scenes through
+drifting vapors and swirls of sullen fog dissolving before shafts of red and
+garish light. He saw cowboys at the bar, drinking fierce whiskey, the air
+filled with obscenity and ribald language, and he saw himself with them
+drinking and cursing with the wildest, or sitting at table with them, under
+smoking kerosene lamps, while the chips clicked and clattered and the cards
+were dealt around. He saw himself, stripped to the waist, with naked fists,
+fighting his great fight with Liverpool Red in the forecastle of the
+<i>Susquehanna</i>; and he saw the bloody deck of the <i>John Rogers</i>, that
+gray morning of attempted mutiny, the mate kicking in death-throes on the
+main-hatch, the revolver in the old man&rsquo;s hand spitting fire and smoke,
+the men with passion-wrenched faces, of brutes screaming vile blasphemies and
+falling about him&mdash;and then he returned to the central scene, calm and
+clean in the steadfast light, where Ruth sat and talked with him amid books and
+paintings; and he saw the grand piano upon which she would later play to him;
+and he heard the echoes of his own selected and correct words, &ldquo;But then,
+may I not be peculiarly constituted to write?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for
+blacksmithing,&rdquo; she was laughing, &ldquo;I never heard of one becoming a
+blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What would you advise?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;And don&rsquo;t forget
+that I feel in me this capacity to write&mdash;I can&rsquo;t explain it; I just
+know that it is in me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You must get a thorough education,&rdquo; was the answer, &ldquo;whether
+or not you ultimately become a writer. This education is indispensable for
+whatever career you select, and it must not be slipshod or sketchy. You should
+go to high school.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes&mdash;&rdquo; he began; but she interrupted with an afterthought:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, you could go on with your writing, too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I would have to,&rdquo; he said grimly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why?&rdquo; She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did not quite
+like the persistence with which he clung to his notion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because, without writing there wouldn&rsquo;t be any high school. I must
+live and buy books and clothes, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d forgotten that,&rdquo; she laughed. &ldquo;Why weren&rsquo;t
+you born with an income?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d rather have good health and imagination,&rdquo; he answered.
+&ldquo;I can make good on the income, but the other things have to be made good
+for&mdash;&rdquo; He almost said &ldquo;you,&rdquo; then amended his sentence
+to, &ldquo;have to be made good for one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t say &lsquo;make good,&rsquo;&rdquo; she cried, sweetly
+petulant. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s slang, and it&rsquo;s horrid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He flushed, and stammered, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right, and I only wish
+you&rsquo;d correct me every time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I&rsquo;d like to,&rdquo; she said haltingly. &ldquo;You have so
+much in you that is good that I want to see you perfect.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of being moulded
+by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the image of her ideal of man.
+And when she pointed out the opportuneness of the time, that the entrance
+examinations to high school began on the following Monday, he promptly
+volunteered that he would take them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she played and sang to him, while he gazed with hungry yearning at her,
+drinking in her loveliness and marvelling that there should not be a hundred
+suitors listening there and longing for her as he listened and longed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap10"></a>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+<p>
+He stopped to dinner that evening, and, much to Ruth&rsquo;s satisfaction, made
+a favorable impression on her father. They talked about the sea as a career, a
+subject which Martin had at his finger-ends, and Mr. Morse remarked afterward
+that he seemed a very clear-headed young man. In his avoidance of slang and his
+search after right words, Martin was compelled to talk slowly, which enabled
+him to find the best thoughts that were in him. He was more at ease than that
+first night at dinner, nearly a year before, and his shyness and modesty even
+commended him to Mrs. Morse, who was pleased at his manifest improvement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is the first man that ever drew passing notice from Ruth,&rdquo; she
+told her husband. &ldquo;She has been so singularly backward where men are
+concerned that I have been worried greatly.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Morse looked at his wife curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You mean to use this young sailor to wake her up?&rdquo; he questioned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I mean that she is not to die an old maid if I can help it,&rdquo; was
+the answer. &ldquo;If this young Eden can arouse her interest in mankind in
+general, it will be a good thing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A very good thing,&rdquo; he commented. &ldquo;But suppose,&mdash;and we
+must suppose, sometimes, my dear,&mdash;suppose he arouses her interest too
+particularly in him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Impossible,&rdquo; Mrs. Morse laughed. &ldquo;She is three years older
+than he, and, besides, it is impossible. Nothing will ever come of it. Trust
+that to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so Martin&rsquo;s r&ocirc;le was arranged for him, while he, led on by
+Arthur and Norman, was meditating an extravagance. They were going out for a
+ride into the hills Sunday morning on their wheels, which did not interest
+Martin until he learned that Ruth, too, rode a wheel and was going along. He
+did not ride, nor own a wheel, but if Ruth rode, it was up to him to begin, was
+his decision; and when he said good night, he stopped in at a cyclery on his
+way home and spent forty dollars for a wheel. It was more than a month&rsquo;s
+hard-earned wages, and it reduced his stock of money amazingly; but when he
+added the hundred dollars he was to receive from the <i>Examiner</i> to the
+four hundred and twenty dollars that was the least <i>The Youth&rsquo;s
+Companion</i> could pay him, he felt that he had reduced the perplexity the
+unwonted amount of money had caused him. Nor did he mind, in the course of
+learning to ride the wheel home, the fact that he ruined his suit of clothes.
+He caught the tailor by telephone that night from Mr. Higginbotham&rsquo;s
+store and ordered another suit. Then he carried the wheel up the narrow
+stairway that clung like a fire-escape to the rear wall of the building, and
+when he had moved his bed out from the wall, found there was just space enough
+in the small room for himself and the wheel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school examination,
+but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he spent the day in the
+white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and romance that burned in him. The
+fact that the <i>Examiner</i> of that morning had failed to publish his
+treasure-hunting article did not dash his spirits. He was at too great a height
+for that, and having been deaf to a twice-repeated summons, he went without the
+heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr. Higginbotham invariably graced his table. To
+Mr. Higginbotham such a dinner was advertisement of his worldly achievement and
+prosperity, and he honored it by delivering platitudinous sermonettes upon
+American institutions and the opportunity said institutions gave to any
+hard-working man to rise&mdash;the rise, in his case, which he pointed out
+unfailingly, being from a grocer&rsquo;s clerk to the ownership of
+Higginbotham&rsquo;s Cash Store.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished &ldquo;Pearl-diving&rdquo; on
+Monday morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high school. And when,
+days later, he applied for the results of his examinations, he learned that he
+had failed in everything save grammar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your grammar is excellent,&rdquo; Professor Hilton informed him, staring
+at him through heavy spectacles; &ldquo;but you know nothing, positively
+nothing, in the other branches, and your United States history is
+abominable&mdash;there is no other word for it, abominable. I should advise
+you&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and unimaginative as
+one of his own test-tubes. He was professor of physics in the high school,
+possessor of a large family, a meagre salary, and a select fund of
+parrot-learned knowledge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, sir,&rdquo; Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at the
+desk in the library was in Professor Hilton&rsquo;s place just then.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I should advise you to go back to the grammar school for at least
+two years. Good day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though he was surprised at
+Ruth&rsquo;s shocked expression when he told her Professor Hilton&rsquo;s
+advice. Her disappointment was so evident that he was sorry he had failed, but
+chiefly so for her sake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see I was right,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You know far more than any
+of the students entering high school, and yet you can&rsquo;t pass the
+examinations. It is because what education you have is fragmentary, sketchy.
+You need the discipline of study, such as only skilled teachers can give you.
+You must be thoroughly grounded. Professor Hilton is right, and if I were you,
+I&rsquo;d go to night school. A year and a half of it might enable you to catch
+up that additional six months. Besides, that would leave you your days in which
+to write, or, if you could not make your living by your pen, you would have
+your days in which to work in some position.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school, when am I
+going to see you?&mdash;was Martin&rsquo;s first thought, though he refrained
+from uttering it. Instead, he said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school. But I
+wouldn&rsquo;t mind that if I thought it would pay. But I don&rsquo;t think it
+will pay. I can do the work quicker than they can teach me. It would be a loss
+of time&mdash;&rdquo; he thought of her and his desire to have
+her&mdash;&ldquo;and I can&rsquo;t afford the time. I haven&rsquo;t the time to
+spare, in fact.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is so much that is necessary.&rdquo; She looked at him gently, and
+he was a brute to oppose her. &ldquo;Physics and chemistry&mdash;you
+can&rsquo;t do them without laboratory study; and you&rsquo;ll find algebra and
+geometry almost hopeless without instruction. You need the skilled teachers,
+the specialists in the art of imparting knowledge.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least vainglorious way in
+which to express himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;m bragging,&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t intend it that way at all. But I have a feeling that I am what I
+may call a natural student. I can study by myself. I take to it kindly, like a
+duck to water. You see yourself what I did with grammar. And I&rsquo;ve learned
+much of other things&mdash;you would never dream how much. And I&rsquo;m only
+getting started. Wait till I get&mdash;&rdquo; He hesitated and assured himself
+of the pronunciation before he said &ldquo;momentum. I&rsquo;m getting my first
+real feel of things now. I&rsquo;m beginning to size up the
+situation&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t say &lsquo;size up,&rsquo;&rdquo; she interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To get a line on things,&rdquo; he hastily amended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t mean anything in correct English,&rdquo; she
+objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He floundered for a fresh start.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What I&rsquo;m driving at is that I&rsquo;m beginning to get the lay of
+the land.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room. Whenever I go into the library,
+I am impressed that way. The part played by teachers is to teach the student
+the contents of the chart-room in a systematic way. The teachers are guides to
+the chart-room, that&rsquo;s all. It&rsquo;s not something that they have in
+their own heads. They don&rsquo;t make it up, don&rsquo;t create it. It&rsquo;s
+all in the chart-room and they know their way about in it, and it&rsquo;s their
+business to show the place to strangers who might else get lost. Now I
+don&rsquo;t get lost easily. I have the bump of location. I usually know where
+I&rsquo;m at&mdash;What&rsquo;s wrong now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t say &lsquo;where I&rsquo;m at.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s right,&rdquo; he said gratefully, &ldquo;where I am. But
+where am I at&mdash;I mean, where am I? Oh, yes, in the chart-room. Well, some
+people&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Persons,&rdquo; she corrected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get along
+without them. I&rsquo;ve spent a lot of time in the chart-room now, and
+I&rsquo;m on the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to,
+what coasts I want to explore. And from the way I line it up, I&rsquo;ll
+explore a whole lot more quickly by myself. The speed of a fleet, you know, is
+the speed of the slowest ship, and the speed of the teachers is affected the
+same way. They can&rsquo;t go any faster than the ruck of their scholars, and I
+can set a faster pace for myself than they set for a whole schoolroom.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;He travels the fastest who travels alone,&rsquo;&rdquo; she
+quoted at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But I&rsquo;d travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to blurt
+out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit spaces and starry
+voids through which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her pale gold hair
+blowing about his face. In the same instant he was aware of the pitiful
+inadequacy of speech. God! If he could so frame words that she could see what
+he then saw! And he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the
+desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his
+mind. Ah, that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very
+thing that the great writers and master-poets did. That was why they were
+giants. They knew how to express what they thought, and felt, and saw. Dogs
+asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what
+they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And
+that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun. He saw noble and beautiful
+visions, but he could only whine and bark at Ruth. But he would cease sleeping
+in the sun. He would stand up, with open eyes, and he would struggle and toil
+and learn until, with eyes unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her
+his visioned wealth. Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of
+making words obedient servitors, and of making combinations of words mean more
+than the sum of their separate meanings. He was stirred profoundly by the
+passing glimpse at the secret, and he was again caught up in the vision of
+sunlit spaces and starry voids&mdash;until it came to him that it was very
+quiet, and he saw Ruth regarding him with an amused expression and a smile in
+her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have had a great visioning,&rdquo; he said, and at the sound of his
+words in his own ears his heart gave a leap. Where had those words come from?
+They had adequately expressed the pause his vision had put in the conversation.
+It was a miracle. Never had he so loftily framed a lofty thought. But never had
+he attempted to frame lofty thoughts in words. That was it. That explained it.
+He had never tried. But Swinburne had, and Tennyson, and Kipling, and all the
+other poets. His mind flashed on to his &ldquo;Pearl-diving.&rdquo; He had
+never dared the big things, the spirit of the beauty that was a fire in him.
+That article would be a different thing when he was done with it. He was
+appalled by the vastness of the beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and
+again his mind flashed and dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not
+chant that beauty in noble verse as the great poets did. And there was all the
+mysterious delight and spiritual wonder of his love for Ruth. Why could he not
+chant that, too, as the poets did? They had sung of love. So would he. By
+God!&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing. Carried away, he
+had breathed it aloud. The blood surged into his face, wave upon wave,
+mastering the bronze of it till the blush of shame flaunted itself from
+collar-rim to the roots of his hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I&mdash;beg your pardon,&rdquo; he stammered. &ldquo;I was
+thinking.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It sounded as if you were praying,&rdquo; she said bravely, but she felt
+herself inside to be withering and shrinking. It was the first time she had
+heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she was shocked, not merely
+as a matter of principle and training, but shocked in spirit by this rough
+blast of life in the garden of her sheltered maidenhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness. Somehow it
+was not so difficult to forgive him anything. He had not had a chance to be as
+other men, and he was trying so hard, and succeeding, too. It never entered her
+head that there could be any other reason for her being kindly disposed toward
+him. She was tenderly disposed toward him, but she did not know it. She had no
+way of knowing it. The placid poise of twenty-four years without a single love
+affair did not fit her with a keen perception of her own feelings, and she who
+had never warmed to actual love was unaware that she was warming now.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap11"></a>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been finished
+sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by his attempts to write
+poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth, but they were never
+completed. Not in a day could he learn to chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre
+and structure were serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond
+them, an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great poetry,
+but which he could not catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit
+of poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture. It
+seemed a glow to him, a warm and trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching,
+though sometimes he was rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving them
+into phrases that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted across his
+vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty. It was baffling. He ached with desire
+to express and could but gibber prosaically as everybody gibbered. He read his
+fragments aloud. The metre marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded
+a longer and equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he
+felt within were lacking. He could not understand, and time and again, in
+despair, defeated and depressed, he returned to his article. Prose was
+certainly an easier medium.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Following the &ldquo;Pearl-diving,&rdquo; he wrote an article on the sea as a
+career, another on turtle-catching, and a third on the northeast trades. Then
+he tried, as an experiment, a short story, and before he broke his stride he
+had finished six short stories and despatched them to various magazines. He
+wrote prolifically, intensely, from morning till night, and late at night,
+except when he broke off to go to the reading-room, draw books from the
+library, or to call on Ruth. He was profoundly happy. Life was pitched high. He
+was in a fever that never broke. The joy of creation that is supposed to belong
+to the gods was his. All the life about him&mdash;the odors of stale vegetables
+and soapsuds, the slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr.
+Higginbotham&mdash;was a dream. The real world was in his mind, and the stories
+he wrote were so many pieces of reality out of his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days were too short. There was so much he wanted to study. He cut his sleep
+down to five hours and found that he could get along upon it. He tried four
+hours and a half, and regretfully came back to five. He could joyfully have
+spent all his waking hours upon any one of his pursuits. It was with regret
+that he ceased from writing to study, that he ceased from study to go to the
+library, that he tore himself away from that chart-room of knowledge or from
+the magazines in the reading-room that were filled with the secrets of writers
+who succeeded in selling their wares. It was like severing heart strings, when
+he was with Ruth, to stand up and go; and he scorched through the dark streets
+so as to get home to his books at the least possible expense of time. And
+hardest of all was it to shut up the algebra or physics, put note-book and
+pencil aside, and close his tired eyes in sleep. He hated the thought of
+ceasing to live, even for so short a time, and his sole consolation was that
+the alarm clock was set five hours ahead. He would lose only five hours anyway,
+and then the jangling bell would jerk him out of unconsciousness and he would
+have before him another glorious day of nineteen hours.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was ebbing low, and there was
+no money coming in. A month after he had mailed it, the adventure serial for
+boys was returned to him by <i>The Youth&rsquo;s Companion</i>. The rejection
+slip was so tactfully worded that he felt kindly toward the editor. But he did
+not feel so kindly toward the editor of the <i>San Francisco Examiner</i>.
+After waiting two whole weeks, Martin had written to him. A week later he wrote
+again. At the end of the month, he went over to San Francisco and personally
+called upon the editor. But he did not meet that exalted personage, thanks to a
+Cerberus of an office boy, of tender years and red hair, who guarded the
+portals. At the end of the fifth week the manuscript came back to him, by mail,
+without comment. There was no rejection slip, no explanation, nothing. In the
+same way his other articles were tied up with the other leading San Francisco
+papers. When he recovered them, he sent them to the magazines in the East, from
+which they were returned more promptly, accompanied always by the printed
+rejection slips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The short stories were returned in similar fashion. He read them over and over,
+and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out the cause of their
+rejection, until, one day, he read in a newspaper that manuscripts should
+always be typewritten. That explained it. Of course editors were so busy that
+they could not afford the time and strain of reading handwriting. Martin rented
+a typewriter and spent a day mastering the machine. Each day he typed what he
+composed, and he typed his earlier manuscripts as fast as they were returned
+him. He was surprised when the typed ones began to come back. His jaw seemed to
+become squarer, his chin more aggressive, and he bundled the manuscripts off to
+new editors.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own work. He tried
+it out on Gertrude. He read his stories aloud to her. Her eyes glistened, and
+she looked at him proudly as she said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t it grand, you writin&rsquo; those sort of things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he demanded impatiently. &ldquo;But the story&mdash;how
+did you like it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just grand,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;Just grand, an&rsquo;
+thrilling, too. I was all worked up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could see that her mind was not clear. The perplexity was strong in her
+good-natured face. So he waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, say, Mart,&rdquo; after a long pause, &ldquo;how did it end? Did
+that young man who spoke so highfalutin&rsquo; get her?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made artistically
+obvious, she would say:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what I wanted to know. Why didn&rsquo;t you write that way
+in the story?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories, namely, that
+she liked happy endings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That story was perfectly grand,&rdquo; she announced, straightening up
+from the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her forehead with
+a red, steamy hand; &ldquo;but it makes me sad. I want to cry. There is too
+many sad things in the world anyway. It makes me happy to think about happy
+things. Now if he&rsquo;d married her, and&mdash;You don&rsquo;t mind,
+Mart?&rdquo; she queried apprehensively. &ldquo;I just happen to feel that way,
+because I&rsquo;m tired, I guess. But the story was grand just the same,
+perfectly grand. Where are you goin&rsquo; to sell it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s a horse of another color,&rdquo; he laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if you <i>did</i> sell it, what do you think you&rsquo;d get for
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the way prices
+go.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My! I do hope you&rsquo;ll sell it!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Easy money, eh?&rdquo; Then he added proudly: &ldquo;I wrote it in two
+days. That&rsquo;s fifty dollars a day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare. He would wait till
+some were published, he decided, then she would understand what he had been
+working for. In the meantime he toiled on. Never had the spirit of adventure
+lured him more strongly than on this amazing exploration of the realm of mind.
+He bought the text-books on physics and chemistry, and, along with his algebra,
+worked out problems and demonstrations. He took the laboratory proofs on faith,
+and his intense power of vision enabled him to see the reactions of chemicals
+more understandingly than the average student saw them in the laboratory.
+Martin wandered on through the heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he was
+getting to the nature of things. He had accepted the world as the world, but
+now he was comprehending the organization of it, the play and interplay of
+force and matter. Spontaneous explanations of old matters were continually
+arising in his mind. Levers and purchases fascinated him, and his mind roved
+backward to hand-spikes and blocks and tackles at sea. The theory of
+navigation, which enabled the ships to travel unerringly their courses over the
+pathless ocean, was made clear to him. The mysteries of storm, and rain, and
+tide were revealed, and the reason for the existence of trade-winds made him
+wonder whether he had written his article on the northeast trade too soon. At
+any rate he knew he could write it better now. One afternoon he went out with
+Arthur to the University of California, and, with bated breath and a feeling of
+religious awe, went through the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened
+to a physics professor lecturing to his classes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he did not neglect his writing. A stream of short stories flowed from his
+pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of verse&mdash;the kind he saw
+printed in the magazines&mdash;though he lost his head and wasted two weeks on
+a tragedy in blank verse, the swift rejection of which, by half a dozen
+magazines, dumfounded him. Then he discovered Henley and wrote a series of
+sea-poems on the model of &ldquo;Hospital Sketches.&rdquo; They were simple
+poems, of light and color, and romance and adventure. &ldquo;Sea Lyrics,&rdquo;
+he called them, and he judged them to be the best work he had yet done. There
+were thirty, and he completed them in a month, doing one a day after having
+done his regular day&rsquo;s work on fiction, which day&rsquo;s work was the
+equivalent to a week&rsquo;s work of the average successful writer. The toil
+meant nothing to him. It was not toil. He was finding speech, and all the
+beauty and wonder that had been pent for years behind his inarticulate lips was
+now pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He showed the &ldquo;Sea Lyrics&rdquo; to no one, not even to the editors. He
+had become distrustful of editors. But it was not distrust that prevented him
+from submitting the &ldquo;Lyrics.&rdquo; They were so beautiful to him that he
+was impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some glorious, far-off time
+when he would dare to read to her what he had written. Against that time he
+kept them with him, reading them aloud, going over them until he knew them by
+heart.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his sleep, his
+subjective mind rioting through his five hours of surcease and combining the
+thoughts and events of the day into grotesque and impossible marvels. In
+reality, he never rested, and a weaker body or a less firmly poised brain would
+have been prostrated in a general break-down. His late afternoon calls on Ruth
+were rarer now, for June was approaching, when she would take her degree and
+finish with the university. Bachelor of Arts!&mdash;when he thought of her
+degree, it seemed she fled beyond him faster than he could pursue.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually stayed for
+dinner and for music afterward. Those were his red-letter days. The atmosphere
+of the house, in such contrast with that in which he lived, and the mere
+nearness to her, sent him forth each time with a firmer grip on his resolve to
+climb the heights. In spite of the beauty in him, and the aching desire to
+create, it was for her that he struggled. He was a lover first and always. All
+other things he subordinated to love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his love-adventure. The
+world itself was not so amazing because of the atoms and molecules that
+composed it according to the propulsions of irresistible force; what made it
+amazing was the fact that Ruth lived in it. She was the most amazing thing he
+had ever known, or dreamed, or guessed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was oppressed always by her remoteness. She was so far from him, and he
+did not know how to approach her. He had been a success with girls and women in
+his own class; but he had never loved any of them, while he did love her, and
+besides, she was not merely of another class. His very love elevated her above
+all classes. She was a being apart, so far apart that he did not know how to
+draw near to her as a lover should draw near. It was true, as he acquired
+knowledge and language, that he was drawing nearer, talking her speech,
+discovering ideas and delights in common; but this did not satisfy his
+lover&rsquo;s yearning. His lover&rsquo;s imagination had made her holy, too
+holy, too spiritualized, to have any kinship with him in the flesh. It was his
+own love that thrust her from him and made her seem impossible for him. Love
+itself denied him the one thing that it desired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was bridged for a
+moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it was ever narrower. They
+had been eating cherries&mdash;great, luscious, black cherries with a juice of
+the color of dark wine. And later, as she read aloud to him from &ldquo;The
+Princess,&rdquo; he chanced to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips.
+For the moment her divinity was shattered. She was clay, after all, mere clay,
+subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or anybody&rsquo;s
+clay. Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed them as cherries dyed
+his. And if so with her lips, then was it so with all of her. She was woman,
+all woman, just like any woman. It came upon him abruptly. It was a revelation
+that stunned him. It was as if he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had
+seen worshipped purity polluted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began pounding and
+challenging him to play the lover with this woman who was not a spirit from
+other worlds but a mere woman with lips a cherry could stain. He trembled at
+the audacity of his thought; but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a
+triumphant paean, assured him he was right. Something of this change in him
+must have reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at him, and
+smiled. His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to her lips, and the sight of the
+stain maddened him. His arms all but flashed out to her and around her, in the
+way of his old careless life. She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all
+his will fought to hold him back.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were not following a word,&rdquo; she pouted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he looked into her
+frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of what he felt, he became
+abashed. He had indeed in thought dared too far. Of all the women he had known
+there was no woman who would not have guessed&mdash;save her. And she had not
+guessed. There was the difference. She was different. He was appalled by his
+own grossness, awed by her clear innocence, and he gazed again at her across
+the gulf. The bridge had broken down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But still the incident had brought him nearer. The memory of it persisted, and
+in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt upon it eagerly. The gulf
+was never again so wide. He had accomplished a distance vastly greater than a
+bachelorship of arts, or a dozen bachelorships. She was pure, it was true, as
+he had never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips. She was subject
+to the laws of the universe just as inexorably as he was. She had to eat to
+live, and when she got her feet wet, she caught cold. But that was not the
+point. If she could feel hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, then could she
+feel love&mdash;and love for a man. Well, he was a man. And why could he not be
+the man? &ldquo;It&rsquo;s up to me to make good,&rdquo; he would murmur
+fervently. &ldquo;I will be <i>the</i> man. I will make myself <i>the</i> man.
+I will make good.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap12"></a>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry the beauty
+and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain, Martin was called
+to the telephone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s a lady&rsquo;s voice, a fine lady&rsquo;s,&rdquo; Mr.
+Higginbotham, who had called him, jeered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a wave of
+warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth&rsquo;s voice. In his battle with the
+sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the sound of her voice his love
+for her smote him like a sudden blow. And such a voice!&mdash;delicate and
+sweet, like a strain of music heard far off and faint, or, better, like a bell
+of silver, a perfect tone, crystal-pure. No mere woman had a voice like that.
+There was something celestial about it, and it came from other worlds. He could
+scarcely hear what it said, so ravished was he, though he controlled his face,
+for he knew that Mr. Higginbotham&rsquo;s ferret eyes were fixed upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not much that Ruth wanted to say&mdash;merely that Norman had been going
+to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a headache, and she was so
+disappointed, and she had the tickets, and that if he had no other engagement,
+would he be good enough to take her?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Would he! He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice. It was amazing. He
+had always seen her in her own house. And he had never dared to ask her to go
+anywhere with him. Quite irrelevantly, still at the telephone and talking with
+her, he felt an overpowering desire to die for her, and visions of heroic
+sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his whirling brain. He loved her so much, so
+terribly, so hopelessly. In that moment of mad happiness that she should go out
+with him, go to a lecture with him&mdash;with him, Martin Eden&mdash;she soared
+so far above him that there seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her.
+It was the only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty
+emotion he felt for her. It was the sublime abnegation of true love that comes
+to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone, in a whirlwind of
+fire and glory; and to die for her, he felt, was to have lived and loved well.
+And he was only twenty-one, and he had never been in love before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from the organ
+which had stirred him. His eyes were shining like an angel&rsquo;s, and his
+face was transfigured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and holy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Makin&rsquo; dates outside, eh?&rdquo; his brother-in-law sneered.
+&ldquo;You know what that means. You&rsquo;ll be in the police court
+yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin could not come down from the height. Not even the bestiality of the
+allusion could bring him back to earth. Anger and hurt were beneath him. He had
+seen a great vision and was as a god, and he could feel only profound and awful
+pity for this maggot of a man. He did not look at him, and though his eyes
+passed over him, he did not see him; and as in a dream he passed out of the
+room to dress. It was not until he had reached his own room and was tying his
+necktie that he became aware of a sound that lingered unpleasantly in his ears.
+On investigating this sound he identified it as the final snort of Bernard
+Higginbotham, which somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As Ruth&rsquo;s front door closed behind them and he came down the steps with
+her, he found himself greatly perturbed. It was not unalloyed bliss, taking her
+to the lecture. He did not know what he ought to do. He had seen, on the
+streets, with persons of her class, that the women took the men&rsquo;s arms.
+But then, again, he had seen them when they didn&rsquo;t; and he wondered if it
+was only in the evening that arms were taken, or only between husbands and
+wives and relatives.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie. Minnie had always
+been a stickler. She had called him down the second time she walked out with
+him, because he had gone along on the inside, and she had laid the law down to
+him that a gentleman always walked on the outside&mdash;when he was with a
+lady. And Minnie had made a practice of kicking his heels, whenever they
+crossed from one side of the street to the other, to remind him to get over on
+the outside. He wondered where she had got that item of etiquette, and whether
+it had filtered down from above and was all right.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It wouldn&rsquo;t do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had
+reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind Ruth and took up his station on the
+outside. Then the other problem presented itself. Should he offer her his arm?
+He had never offered anybody his arm in his life. The girls he had known never
+took the fellows&rsquo; arms. For the first several times they walked freely,
+side by side, and after that it was arms around the waists, and heads against
+the fellows&rsquo; shoulders where the streets were unlighted. But this was
+different. She wasn&rsquo;t that kind of a girl. He must do something.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crooked the arm next to her&mdash;crooked it very slightly and with secret
+tentativeness, not invitingly, but just casually, as though he was accustomed
+to walk that way. And then the wonderful thing happened. He felt her hand upon
+his arm. Delicious thrills ran through him at the contact, and for a few sweet
+moments it seemed that he had left the solid earth and was flying with her
+through the air. But he was soon back again, perturbed by a new complication.
+They were crossing the street. This would put him on the inside. He should be
+on the outside. Should he therefore drop her arm and change over? And if he did
+so, would he have to repeat the manoeuvre the next time? And the next? There
+was something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about and play the
+fool. Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and when he found himself
+on the inside, he talked quickly and earnestly, making a show of being carried
+away by what he was saying, so that, in case he was wrong in not changing
+sides, his enthusiasm would seem the cause for his carelessness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem. In the blaze
+of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her giggly friend. Only for
+an instant he hesitated, then his hand went up and his hat came off. He could
+not be disloyal to his kind, and it was to more than Lizzie Connolly that his
+hat was lifted. She nodded and looked at him boldly, not with soft and gentle
+eyes like Ruth&rsquo;s, but with eyes that were handsome and hard, and that
+swept on past him to Ruth and itemized her face and dress and station. And he
+was aware that Ruth looked, too, with quick eyes that were timid and mild as a
+dove&rsquo;s, but which saw, in a look that was a flutter on and past, the
+working-class girl in her cheap finery and under the strange hat that all
+working-class girls were wearing just then.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What a pretty girl!&rdquo; Ruth said a moment later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. I guess it&rsquo;s all a matter of personal taste,
+but she doesn&rsquo;t strike me as being particularly pretty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, there isn&rsquo;t one woman in ten thousand with features as
+regular as hers. They are splendid. Her face is as clear-cut as a cameo. And
+her eyes are beautiful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you think so?&rdquo; Martin queried absently, for to him there was
+only one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her hand upon
+his arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do I think so? If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr. Eden,
+and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be fairly dazzled by
+her, and so would all men.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She would have to be taught how to speak,&rdquo; he commented, &ldquo;or
+else most of the men wouldn&rsquo;t understand her. I&rsquo;m sure you
+couldn&rsquo;t understand a quarter of what she said if she just spoke
+naturally.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nonsense! You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your
+point.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You forget how I talked when you first met me. I have learned a new
+language since then. Before that time I talked as that girl talks. Now I can
+manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to explain that
+you do not know that other girl&rsquo;s language. And do you know why she
+carries herself the way she does? I think about such things now, though I never
+used to think about them, and I am beginning to understand&mdash;much.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why does she?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She has worked long hours for years at machines. When one&rsquo;s body
+is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like putty according
+to the nature of the work. I can tell at a glance the trades of many workingmen
+I meet on the street. Look at me. Why am I rolling all about the shop? Because
+of the years I put in on the sea. If I&rsquo;d put in the same years
+cow-punching, with my body young and pliable, I wouldn&rsquo;t be rolling now,
+but I&rsquo;d be bow-legged. And so with that girl. You noticed that her eyes
+were what I might call hard. She has never been sheltered. She has had to take
+care of herself, and a young girl can&rsquo;t take care of herself and keep her
+eyes soft and gentle like&mdash;like yours, for example.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think you are right,&rdquo; Ruth said in a low voice. &ldquo;And it is
+too bad. She is such a pretty girl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity. And then he remembered
+that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his fortune that permitted him
+to love her and to take her on his arm to a lecture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass, that
+night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who
+are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong by rights to girls like
+Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
+vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty
+surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the stale vegetables now.
+Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare
+to open the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful
+paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
+thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to
+love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you and who lives
+in the stars! Who are you? and what are you? damn you! And are you going to
+make good?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge of the bed
+to dream for a space with wide eyes. Then he got out note-book and algebra and
+lost himself in quadratic equations, while the hours slipped by, and the stars
+dimmed, and the gray of dawn flooded against his window.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap13"></a>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers that held
+forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was responsible for the
+great discovery. Once or twice in the month, while riding through the park on
+his way to the library, Martin dismounted from his wheel and listened to the
+arguments, and each time he tore himself away reluctantly. The tone of
+discussion was much lower than at Mr. Morse&rsquo;s table. The men were not
+grave and dignified. They lost their tempers easily and called one another
+names, while oaths and obscene allusions were frequent on their lips. Once or
+twice he had seen them come to blows. And yet, he knew not why, there seemed
+something vital about the stuff of these men&rsquo;s thoughts. Their logomachy
+was far more stimulating to his intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism
+of Mr. Morse. These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics,
+and fought one another&rsquo;s ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to be
+more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park, but one
+afternoon a disciple of Spencer&rsquo;s appeared, a seedy tramp with a dirty
+coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the absence of a shirt. Battle
+royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and the expectoration of
+much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a
+socialist workman sneered, &ldquo;There is no god but the Unknowable, and
+Herbert Spencer is his prophet.&rdquo; Martin was puzzled as to what the
+discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried with him a
+new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the frequency with which
+the tramp had mentioned &ldquo;First Principles,&rdquo; Martin drew out that
+volume.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried Spencer, and choosing
+the &ldquo;Principles of Psychology&rdquo; to begin with, he had failed as
+abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There had been no understanding
+the book, and he had returned it unread. But this night, after algebra and
+physics, and an attempt at a sonnet, he got into bed and opened &ldquo;First
+Principles.&rdquo; Morning found him still reading. It was impossible for him
+to sleep. Nor did he write that day. He lay on the bed till his body grew
+tired, when he tried the hard floor, reading on his back, the book held in the
+air above him, or changing from side to side. He slept that night, and did his
+writing next morning, and then the book tempted him and he fell, reading all
+afternoon, oblivious to everything and oblivious to the fact that that was the
+afternoon Ruth gave to him. His first consciousness of the immediate world
+about him was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to
+know if he thought they were running a restaurant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. He wanted to know, and
+it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the world. But he was now
+learning from Spencer that he never had known, and that he never could have
+known had he continued his sailing and wandering forever. He had merely skimmed
+over the surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating
+fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations&mdash;and all and
+everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and
+chance. The mechanism of the flight of birds he had watched and reasoned about
+with understanding; but it had never entered his head to try to explain the
+process whereby birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been developed. He had
+never dreamed there was such a process. That birds should have come to be, was
+unguessed. They always had been. They just happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything. His ignorant and
+unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless. The medieval metaphysics
+of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served the sole purpose of
+making him doubt his own intellectual powers. In similar manner his attempt to
+study evolution had been confined to a hopelessly technical volume by Romanes.
+He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had gathered was that evolution
+was a dry-as-dust theory, of a lot of little men possessed of huge and
+unintelligible vocabularies. And now he learned that evolution was no mere
+theory but an accepted process of development; that scientists no longer
+disagreed about it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing
+everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to his
+startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization that it was like the model
+of a ship such as sailors make and put into glass bottles. There was no
+caprice, no chance. All was law. It was in obedience to law that the bird flew,
+and it was in obedience to the same law that fermenting slime had writhed and
+squirmed and put out legs and wings and become a bird.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and here he was
+at a higher pitch than ever. All the hidden things were laying their secrets
+bare. He was drunken with comprehension. At night, asleep, he lived with the
+gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in the day, he went around like a
+somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered.
+At table he failed to hear the conversation about petty and ignoble things, his
+eager mind seeking out and following cause and effect in everything before him.
+In the meat on the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its energy back
+through all its transformations to its source a hundred million miles away, or
+traced its energy ahead to the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to
+cut the meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to cut
+the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his brain. He
+was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the &ldquo;Bughouse,&rdquo;
+whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister&rsquo;s face, nor notice
+the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham&rsquo;s finger, whereby he imparted
+the suggestion of wheels revolving in his brother-in-law&rsquo;s head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the correlation of
+knowledge&mdash;of all knowledge. He had been curious to know things, and
+whatever he acquired he had filed away in separate memory compartments in his
+brain. Thus, on the subject of sailing he had an immense store. On the subject
+of woman he had a fairly large store. But these two subjects had been
+unrelated. Between the two memory compartments there had been no connection.
+That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any connection whatever
+between a woman with hysterics and a schooner carrying a weather-helm or
+heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as ridiculous and impossible. But
+Herbert Spencer had shown him not only that it was not ridiculous, but that it
+was impossible for there to be no connection. All things were related to all
+other things from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the myriads of
+atoms in the grain of sand under one&rsquo;s foot. This new concept was a
+perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually in
+tracing the relationship between all things under the sun and on the other side
+of the sun. He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and was unhappy
+until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them all&mdash;kinship
+between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems,
+monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas, cannibalism,
+beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco. Thus, he unified the universe
+and held it up and looked at it, or wandered through its byways and alleys and
+jungles, not as a terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an
+unknown goal, but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there
+was to know. And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the
+universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it all.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You fool!&rdquo; he cried at his image in the looking-glass. &ldquo;You
+wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write
+about. What did you have in you?&mdash;some childish notions, a few half-baked
+sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a
+heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as
+futile as your ignorance. And you wanted to write! Why, you&rsquo;re just on
+the edge of beginning to get something in you to write about. You wanted to
+create beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of
+beauty? You wanted to write about life when you knew nothing of the essential
+characteristics of life. You wanted to write about the world and the scheme of
+existence when the world was a Chinese puzzle to you and all that you could
+have written would have been about what you did not know of the scheme of
+existence. But cheer up, Martin, my boy. You&rsquo;ll write yet. You know a
+little, a very little, and you&rsquo;re on the right road now to know more.
+Some day, if you&rsquo;re lucky, you may come pretty close to knowing all that
+may be known. Then you will write.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his joy and wonder
+in it. But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic over it. She tacitly accepted
+it and, in a way, seemed aware of it from her own studies. It did not stir her
+deeply, as it did him, and he would have been surprised had he not reasoned it
+out that it was not new and fresh to her as it was to him. Arthur and Norman,
+he found, believed in evolution and had read Spencer, though it did not seem to
+have made any vital impression upon them, while the young fellow with the
+glasses and the mop of hair, Will Olney, sneered disagreeably at Spencer and
+repeated the epigram, &ldquo;There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert
+Spencer is his prophet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that Olney was
+not in love with Ruth. Later, he was dumfounded to learn from various little
+happenings not only that Olney did not care for Ruth, but that he had a
+positive dislike for her. Martin could not understand this. It was a bit of
+phenomena that he could not correlate with all the rest of the phenomena in the
+universe. But nevertheless he felt sorry for the young fellow because of the
+great lack in his nature that prevented him from a proper appreciation of
+Ruth&rsquo;s fineness and beauty. They rode out into the hills several Sundays
+on their wheels, and Martin had ample opportunity to observe the armed truce
+that existed between Ruth and Olney. The latter chummed with Norman, throwing
+Arthur and Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was with Ruth,
+and great, also, because they were putting him more on a par with the young men
+of her class. In spite of their long years of disciplined education, he was
+finding himself their intellectual equal, and the hours spent with them in
+conversation was so much practice for him in the use of the grammar he had
+studied so hard. He had abandoned the etiquette books, falling back upon
+observation to show him the right things to do. Except when carried away by his
+enthusiasm, he was always on guard, keenly watchful of their actions and
+learning their little courtesies and refinements of conduct.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a source of
+surprise to Martin. &ldquo;Herbert Spencer,&rdquo; said the man at the desk in
+the library, &ldquo;oh, yes, a great mind.&rdquo; But the man did not seem to
+know anything of the content of that great mind. One evening, at dinner, when
+Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the conversation upon Spencer. Mr. Morse
+bitterly arraigned the English philosopher&rsquo;s agnosticism, but confessed
+that he had not read &ldquo;First Principles&rdquo;; while Mr. Butler stated
+that he had no patience with Spencer, had never read a line of him, and had
+managed to get along quite well without him. Doubts arose in Martin&rsquo;s
+mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would have accepted the
+general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up. As it was, he found
+Spencer&rsquo;s explanation of things convincing; and, as he phrased it to
+himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent to a navigator throwing the
+compass and chronometer overboard. So Martin went on into a thorough study of
+evolution, mastering more and more the subject himself, and being convinced by
+the corroborative testimony of a thousand independent writers. The more he
+studied, the more vistas he caught of fields of knowledge yet unexplored, and
+the regret that days were only twenty-four hours long became a chronic
+complaint with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up algebra and
+geometry. Trigonometry he had not even attempted. Then he cut chemistry from
+his study-list, retaining only physics.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not a specialist,&rdquo; he said, in defence, to Ruth. &ldquo;Nor
+am I going to try to be a specialist. There are too many special fields for any
+one man, in a whole lifetime, to master a tithe of them. I must pursue general
+knowledge. When I need the work of specialists, I shall refer to their
+books.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that is not like having the knowledge yourself,&rdquo; she
+protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it is unnecessary to have it. We profit from the work of the
+specialists. That&rsquo;s what they are for. When I came in, I noticed the
+chimney-sweeps at work. They&rsquo;re specialists, and when they get done, you
+will enjoy clean chimneys without knowing anything about the construction of
+chimneys.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s far-fetched, I am afraid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in her gaze and manner. But
+he was convinced of the rightness of his position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in the world, in
+fact, rely on the specialists. Herbert Spencer did that. He generalized upon
+the findings of thousands of investigators. He would have had to live a
+thousand lives in order to do it all himself. And so with Darwin. He took
+advantage of all that had been learned by the florists and
+cattle-breeders.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re right, Martin,&rdquo; Olney said. &ldquo;You know what
+you&rsquo;re after, and Ruth doesn&rsquo;t. She doesn&rsquo;t know what she is
+after for herself even.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&mdash;Oh, yes,&rdquo; Olney rushed on, heading off her objection,
+&ldquo;I know you call it general culture. But it doesn&rsquo;t matter what you
+study if you want general culture. You can study French, or you can study
+German, or cut them both out and study Esperanto, you&rsquo;ll get the culture
+tone just the same. You can study Greek or Latin, too, for the same purpose,
+though it will never be any use to you. It will be culture, though. Why, Ruth
+studied Saxon, became clever in it,&mdash;that was two years ago,&mdash;and all
+that she remembers of it now is &lsquo;Whan that sweet Aprile with his schowers
+soote&rsquo;&mdash;isn&rsquo;t that the way it goes?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it&rsquo;s given you the culture tone just the same,&rdquo; he
+laughed, again heading her off. &ldquo;I know. We were in the same
+classes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to something,&rdquo;
+Ruth cried out. Her eyes were flashing, and in her cheeks were two spots of
+color. &ldquo;Culture is the end in itself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that is not what Martin wants.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you want, Martin?&rdquo; Olney demanded, turning squarely upon
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, what do you want?&rdquo; Ruth asked. &ldquo;That will settle
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, of course, I want culture,&rdquo; Martin faltered. &ldquo;I love
+beauty, and culture will give me a finer and keener appreciation of
+beauty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head and looked triumph.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rot, and you know it,&rdquo; was Olney&rsquo;s comment.
+&ldquo;Martin&rsquo;s after career, not culture. It just happens that culture,
+in his case, is incidental to career. If he wanted to be a chemist, culture
+would be unnecessary. Martin wants to write, but he&rsquo;s afraid to say so
+because it will put you in the wrong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And why does Martin want to write?&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Because he
+isn&rsquo;t rolling in wealth. Why do you fill your head with Saxon and general
+culture? Because you don&rsquo;t have to make your way in the world. Your
+father sees to that. He buys your clothes for you, and all the rest. What
+rotten good is our education, yours and mine and Arthur&rsquo;s and
+Norman&rsquo;s? We&rsquo;re soaked in general culture, and if our daddies went
+broke to-day, we&rsquo;d be falling down to-morrow on teachers&rsquo;
+examinations. The best job you could get, Ruth, would be a country school or
+music teacher in a girls&rsquo; boarding-school.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And pray what would you do?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a blessed thing. I could earn a dollar and a half a day, common
+labor, and I might get in as instructor in Hanley&rsquo;s cramming
+joint&mdash;I say might, mind you, and I might be chucked out at the end of the
+week for sheer inability.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced that Olney
+was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he accorded Ruth. A new
+conception of love formed in his mind as he listened. Reason had nothing to do
+with love. It mattered not whether the woman he loved reasoned correctly or
+incorrectly. Love was above reason. If it just happened that she did not fully
+appreciate his necessity for a career, that did not make her a bit less
+lovable. She was all lovable, and what she thought had nothing to do with her
+lovableness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; he replied to a question from Olney that broke
+in upon his train of thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was saying that I hoped you wouldn&rsquo;t be fool enough to tackle
+Latin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But Latin is more than culture,&rdquo; Ruth broke in. &ldquo;It is
+equipment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, are you going to tackle it?&rdquo; Olney persisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was sore beset. He could see that Ruth was hanging eagerly upon his
+answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am afraid I won&rsquo;t have time,&rdquo; he said finally.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to, but I won&rsquo;t have time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, Martin&rsquo;s not seeking culture,&rdquo; Olney exulted.
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s trying to get somewhere, to do something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, but it&rsquo;s mental training. It&rsquo;s mind discipline.
+It&rsquo;s what makes disciplined minds.&rdquo; Ruth looked expectantly at
+Martin, as if waiting for him to change his judgment. &ldquo;You know, the
+foot-ball players have to train before the big game. And that is what Latin
+does for the thinker. It trains.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rot and bosh! That&rsquo;s what they told us when we were kids. But
+there is one thing they didn&rsquo;t tell us then. They let us find it out for
+ourselves afterwards.&rdquo; Olney paused for effect, then added, &ldquo;And
+what they didn&rsquo;t tell us was that every gentleman should have studied
+Latin, but that no gentleman should know Latin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now that&rsquo;s unfair,&rdquo; Ruth cried. &ldquo;I knew you were
+turning the conversation just in order to get off something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s clever all right,&rdquo; was the retort, &ldquo;but
+it&rsquo;s fair, too. The only men who know their Latin are the apothecaries,
+the lawyers, and the Latin professors. And if Martin wants to be one of them, I
+miss my guess. But what&rsquo;s all that got to do with Herbert Spencer anyway?
+Martin&rsquo;s just discovered Spencer, and he&rsquo;s wild over him. Why?
+Because Spencer is taking him somewhere. Spencer couldn&rsquo;t take me
+anywhere, nor you. We haven&rsquo;t got anywhere to go. You&rsquo;ll get
+married some day, and I&rsquo;ll have nothing to do but keep track of the
+lawyers and business agents who will take care of the money my father&rsquo;s
+going to leave me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting shot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You leave Martin alone, Ruth. He knows what&rsquo;s best for himself.
+Look at what he&rsquo;s done already. He makes me sick sometimes, sick and
+ashamed of myself. He knows more now about the world, and life, and man&rsquo;s
+place, and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or I, or you, too, for that
+matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and French, and Saxon, and
+culture.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But Ruth is my teacher,&rdquo; Martin answered chivalrously. &ldquo;She
+is responsible for what little I have learned.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rats!&rdquo; Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious.
+&ldquo;I suppose you&rsquo;ll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her
+recommendation&mdash;only you didn&rsquo;t. And she doesn&rsquo;t know anything
+more about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon&rsquo;s mines.
+What&rsquo;s that jawbreaker definition about something or other, of
+Spencer&rsquo;s, that you sprang on us the other day&mdash;that indefinite,
+incoherent homogeneity thing? Spring it on her, and see if she understands a
+word of it. That isn&rsquo;t culture, you see. Well, tra la, and if you tackle
+Latin, Martin, I won&rsquo;t have any respect for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been aware of an
+irk in it as well. It was about studies and lessons, dealing with the rudiments
+of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted with the big things
+that were stirring in him&mdash;with the grip upon life that was even then
+crooking his fingers like eagle&rsquo;s talons, with the cosmic thrills that
+made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all. He
+likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a strange land, filled with
+power of beauty, stumbling and stammering and vainly trying to sing in the
+rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren in the new land. And so with him. He was
+alive, painfully alive, to the great universal things, and yet he was compelled
+to potter and grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should
+study Latin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What in hell has Latin to do with it?&rdquo; he demanded before his
+mirror that night. &ldquo;I wish dead people would stay dead. Why should I and
+the beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is alive and everlasting.
+Languages come and go. They are the dust of the dead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very well, and he
+went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar fashion when he was with
+Ruth. He was only a schoolboy, with a schoolboy&rsquo;s tongue, when he was in
+her presence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give me time,&rdquo; he said aloud. &ldquo;Only give me time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Time! Time! Time! was his unending plaint.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap14"></a>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and his love for Ruth, that
+he finally decided not to take up Latin. His money meant time. There was so
+much that was more important than Latin, so many studies that clamored with
+imperious voices. And he must write. He must earn money. He had had no
+acceptances. Twoscore of manuscripts were travelling the endless round of the
+magazines. How did the others do it? He spent long hours in the free
+reading-room, going over what others had written, studying their work eagerly
+and critically, comparing it with his own, and wondering, wondering, about the
+secret trick they had discovered which enabled them to sell their work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead. No light,
+no life, no color, was shot through it. There was no breath of life in it, and
+yet it sold, at two cents a word, twenty dollars a thousand&mdash;the newspaper
+clipping had said so. He was puzzled by countless short stories, written
+lightly and cleverly he confessed, but without vitality or reality. Life was so
+strange and wonderful, filled with an immensity of problems, of dreams, and of
+heroic toils, and yet these stories dealt only with the commonplaces of life.
+He felt the stress and strain of life, its fevers and sweats and wild
+insurgences&mdash;surely this was the stuff to write about! He wanted to
+glorify the leaders of forlorn hopes, the mad lovers, the giants that fought
+under stress and strain, amid terror and tragedy, making life crackle with the
+strength of their endeavor. And yet the magazine short stories seemed intent on
+glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sordid dollar-chasers, and the commonplace
+little love affairs of commonplace little men and women. Was it because the
+editors of the magazines were commonplace? he demanded. Or were they afraid of
+life, these writers and editors and readers?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his chief trouble was that he did not know any editors or writers. And not
+merely did he not know any writers, but he did not know anybody who had ever
+attempted to write. There was nobody to tell him, to hint to him, to give him
+the least word of advice. He began to doubt that editors were real men. They
+seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it was, a machine. He poured his soul
+into stories, articles, and poems, and intrusted them to the machine. He folded
+them just so, put the proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the
+manuscript, sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into
+the mail-box. It travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of
+time the postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope, on the
+outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed. There was no human editor at
+the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the
+manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like
+the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of
+machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate.
+It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate
+or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the
+other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible machinelikeness of the
+process. These slips were printed in stereotyped forms and he had received
+hundreds of them&mdash;as many as a dozen or more on each of his earlier
+manuscripts. If he had received one line, one personal line, along with one
+rejection of all his rejections, he would have been cheered. But not one editor
+had given that proof of existence. And he could conclude only that there were
+no warm human men at the other end, only mere cogs, well oiled and running
+beautifully in the machine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and he would have been
+content to continue feeding the machine for years; but he was bleeding to
+death, and not years but weeks would determine the fight. Each week his board
+bill brought him nearer destruction, while the postage on forty manuscripts
+bled him almost as severely. He no longer bought books, and he economized in
+petty ways and sought to delay the inevitable end; though he did not know how
+to economize, and brought the end nearer by a week when he gave his sister
+Marian five dollars for a dress.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He struggled in the dark, without advice, without encouragement, and in the
+teeth of discouragement. Even Gertrude was beginning to look askance. At first
+she had tolerated with sisterly fondness what she conceived to be his
+foolishness; but now, out of sisterly solicitude, she grew anxious. To her it
+seemed that his foolishness was becoming a madness. Martin knew this and
+suffered more keenly from it than from the open and nagging contempt of Bernard
+Higginbotham. Martin had faith in himself, but he was alone in this faith. Not
+even Ruth had faith. She had wanted him to devote himself to study, and, though
+she had not openly disapproved of his writing, she had never approved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had never offered to show her his work. A fastidious delicacy had prevented
+him. Besides, she had been studying heavily at the university, and he felt
+averse to robbing her of her time. But when she had taken her degree, she asked
+him herself to let her see something of what he had been doing. Martin was
+elated and diffident. Here was a judge. She was a bachelor of arts. She had
+studied literature under skilled instructors. Perhaps the editors were capable
+judges, too. But she would be different from them. She would not hand him a
+stereotyped rejection slip, nor would she inform him that lack of preference
+for his work did not necessarily imply lack of merit in his work. She would
+talk, a warm human being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important of all,
+she would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden. In his work she would discern
+what his heart and soul were like, and she would come to understand something,
+a little something, of the stuff of his dreams and the strength of his power.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of his short stories,
+hesitated a moment, then added his &ldquo;Sea Lyrics.&rdquo; They mounted their
+wheels on a late June afternoon and rode for the hills. It was the second time
+he had been out with her alone, and as they rode along through the balmy
+warmth, just chilled by she sea-breeze to refreshing coolness, he was
+profoundly impressed by the fact that it was a very beautiful and well-ordered
+world and that it was good to be alive and to love. They left their wheels by
+the roadside and climbed to the brown top of an open knoll where the sunburnt
+grass breathed a harvest breath of dry sweetness and content.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Its work is done,&rdquo; Martin said, as they seated themselves, she
+upon his coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth. He sniffed the
+sweetness of the tawny grass, which entered his brain and set his thoughts
+whirling on from the particular to the universal. &ldquo;It has achieved its
+reason for existence,&rdquo; he went on, patting the dry grass affectionately.
+&ldquo;It quickened with ambition under the dreary downpour of last winter,
+fought the violent early spring, flowered, and lured the insects and the bees,
+scattered its seeds, squared itself with its duty and the world,
+and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical
+eyes?&rdquo; she interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because I&rsquo;ve been studying evolution, I guess. It&rsquo;s only
+recently that I got my eyesight, if the truth were told.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical, that
+you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub the down off
+their beautiful wings.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before. I
+just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was just
+beautiful without rhyme or reason. I did not know anything about beauty. But
+now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know. This grass is more beautiful
+to me now that I know why it is grass, and all the hidden chemistry of sun and
+rain and earth that makes it become grass. Why, there is romance in the
+life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure, too. The very thought of it
+stirs me. When I think of the play of force and matter, and all the tremendous
+struggle of it, I feel as if I could write an epic on the grass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How well you talk,&rdquo; she said absently, and he noted that she was
+looking at him in a searching way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood flushing red
+on his neck and brow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope I am learning to talk,&rdquo; he stammered. &ldquo;There seems to
+be so much in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can&rsquo;t find ways
+to say what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all
+life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me
+to be the spokesman. I feel&mdash;oh, I can&rsquo;t describe it&mdash;I feel
+the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child. It is a
+great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken,
+that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the
+selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a lordly task. See, I bury my face in the
+grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a
+thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a breath of the universe I have breathed.
+I know song and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I
+see visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I
+would like to tell them to you, to the world. But how can I? My tongue is tied.
+I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me
+of the scent of the grass. But I have not succeeded. I have no more than hinted
+in awkward speech. My words seem gibberish to me. And yet I am stifled with
+desire to tell. Oh!&mdash;&rdquo; he threw up his hands with a despairing
+gesture&mdash;&ldquo;it is impossible! It is not understandable! It is
+incommunicable!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you do talk well,&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;Just think how you
+have improved in the short time I have known you. Mr. Butler is a noted public
+speaker. He is always asked by the State Committee to go out on stump during
+campaign. Yet you talked just as well as he the other night at dinner. Only he
+was more controlled. You get too excited; but you will get over that with
+practice. Why, you would make a good public speaker. You can go far&mdash;if
+you want to. You are masterly. You can lead men, I am sure, and there is no
+reason why you should not succeed at anything you set your hand to, just as you
+have succeeded with grammar. You would make a good lawyer. You should shine in
+politics. There is nothing to prevent you from making as great a success as Mr.
+Butler has made. And minus the dyspepsia,&rdquo; she added with a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always to the need
+of thorough grounding in education and to the advantages of Latin as part of
+the foundation for any career. She drew her ideal of the successful man, and it
+was largely in her father&rsquo;s image, with a few unmistakable lines and
+touches of color from the image of Mr. Butler. He listened eagerly, with
+receptive ears, lying on his back and looking up and joying in each movement of
+her lips as she talked. But his brain was not receptive. There was nothing
+alluring in the pictures she drew, and he was aware of a dull pain of
+disappointment and of a sharper ache of love for her. In all she said there was
+no mention of his writing, and the manuscripts he had brought to read lay
+neglected on the ground.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height above the
+horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had forgotten,&rdquo; she said quickly. &ldquo;And I am so anxious to
+hear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his very best.
+He called it &ldquo;The Wine of Life,&rdquo; and the wine of it, that had
+stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his brain now as he read it.
+There was a certain magic in the original conception, and he had adorned it
+with more magic of phrase and touch. All the old fire and passion with which he
+had written it were reborn in him, and he was swayed and swept away so that he
+was blind and deaf to the faults of it. But it was not so with Ruth. Her
+trained ear detected the weaknesses and exaggerations, the overemphasis of the
+tyro, and she was instantly aware each time the sentence-rhythm tripped and
+faltered. She scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, except when it became too
+pompous, at which moments she was disagreeably impressed with its
+amateurishness. That was her final judgment on the story as a
+whole&mdash;amateurish, though she did not tell him so. Instead, when he had
+done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he was disappointed. Her criticism was just. He acknowledged that, but he
+had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with her for the purpose of
+schoolroom correction. The details did not matter. They could take care of
+themselves. He could mend them, he could learn to mend them. Out of life he had
+captured something big and attempted to imprison it in the story. It was the
+big thing out of life he had read to her, not sentence-structure and
+semicolons. He wanted her to feel with him this big thing that was his, that he
+had seen with his own eyes, grappled with his own brain, and placed there on
+the page with his own hands in printed words. Well, he had failed, was his
+secret decision. Perhaps the editors were right. He had felt the big thing, but
+he had failed to transmute it. He concealed his disappointment, and joined so
+easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize that deep down in him
+was running a strong undercurrent of disagreement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This next thing I&rsquo;ve called &lsquo;The Pot&rsquo;,&rdquo; he said,
+unfolding the manuscript. &ldquo;It has been refused by four or five magazines
+now, but still I think it is good. In fact, I don&rsquo;t know what to think of
+it, except that I&rsquo;ve caught something there. Maybe it won&rsquo;t affect
+you as it does me. It&rsquo;s a short thing&mdash;only two thousand
+words.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How dreadful!&rdquo; she cried, when he had finished. &ldquo;It is
+horrible, unutterably horrible!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched hands, with
+secret satisfaction. He had succeeded. He had communicated the stuff of fancy
+and feeling from out of his brain. It had struck home. No matter whether she
+liked it or not, it had gripped her and mastered her, made her sit there and
+listen and forget details.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is life,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and life is not always beautiful. And
+yet, perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful there. It
+seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because it is
+there&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why couldn&rsquo;t the poor woman&mdash;&rdquo; she broke in
+disconnectedly. Then she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out:
+&ldquo;Oh! It is degrading! It is not nice! It is nasty!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. <i>Nasty</i>! He
+had never dreamed it. He had not meant it. The whole sketch stood before him in
+letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he sought vainly for
+nastiness. Then his heart began to beat again. He was not guilty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you select a nice subject?&rdquo; she was saying.
+&ldquo;We know there are nasty things in the world, but that is no
+reason&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following her. He was
+smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal face, so innocent, so
+penetratingly innocent, that its purity seemed always to enter into him,
+driving out of him all dross and bathing him in some ethereal effulgence that
+was as cool and soft and velvety as starshine. <i>We know there are nasty
+things in the world</i>! He cuddled to him the notion of her knowing, and
+chuckled over it as a love joke. The next moment, in a flashing vision of
+multitudinous detail, he sighted the whole sea of life&rsquo;s nastiness that
+he had known and voyaged over and through, and he forgave her for not
+understanding the story. It was through no fault of hers that she could not
+understand. He thanked God that she had been born and sheltered to such
+innocence. But he knew life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its
+greatness in spite of the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to
+have his say on it to the world. Saints in heaven&mdash;how could they be
+anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime&mdash;ah,
+that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see
+moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first
+glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of
+weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising
+strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The tone of it all is low. And there is so much that is high. Take
+&lsquo;In Memoriam.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was impelled to suggest &ldquo;Locksley Hall,&rdquo; and would have done so,
+had not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her, the female of
+his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment, creeping and crawling up the vast
+ladder of life for a thousand thousand centuries, had emerged on the topmost
+rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and with power to
+make him know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to desire to taste
+divinity&mdash;him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some amazing fashion
+from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless mistakes and abortions of
+unending creation. There was the romance, and the wonder, and the glory. There
+was the stuff to write, if he could only find speech. Saints in
+heaven!&mdash;They were only saints and could not help themselves. But he was a
+man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have strength,&rdquo; he could hear her saying, &ldquo;but it is
+untutored strength.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Like a bull in a china shop,&rdquo; he suggested, and won a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you must develop discrimination. You must consult taste, and
+fineness, and tone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I dare too much,&rdquo; he muttered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another story.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you&rsquo;ll make of this,&rdquo; he said
+apologetically. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a funny thing. I&rsquo;m afraid I got beyond
+my depth in it, but my intentions were good. Don&rsquo;t bother about the
+little features of it. Just see if you catch the feel of the big thing in it.
+It is big, and it is true, though the chance is large that I have failed to
+make it intelligible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read, and as he read he watched her. At last he had reached her, he thought.
+She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon him, scarcely breathing,
+caught up and out of herself, he thought, by the witchery of the thing he had
+created. He had entitled the story &ldquo;Adventure,&rdquo; and it was the
+apotheosis of adventure&mdash;not of the adventure of the storybooks, but of
+real adventure, the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward,
+faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and
+nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death at the end of
+thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous delirium of rotting fever,
+through blood and sweat and stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty
+and ignoble contacts to royal culminations and lordly achievements.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story, and it was
+this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and listened. Her eyes were wide,
+color was in her pale cheeks, and before he finished it seemed to him that she
+was almost panting. Truly, she was warmed; but she was warmed, not by the
+story, but by him. She did not think much of the story; it was Martin&rsquo;s
+intensity of power, the old excess of strength that seemed to pour from his
+body and on and over her. The paradox of it was that it was the story itself
+that was freighted with his power, that was the channel, for the time being,
+through which his strength poured out to her. She was aware only of the
+strength, and not of the medium, and when she seemed most carried away by what
+he had written, in reality she had been carried away by something quite foreign
+to it&mdash;by a thought, terrible and perilous, that had formed itself
+unsummoned in her brain. She had caught herself wondering what marriage was
+like, and the becoming conscious of the waywardness and ardor of the thought
+had terrified her. It was unmaidenly. It was not like her. She had never been
+tormented by womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy,
+dense even to the full significance of that delicate master&rsquo;s delicate
+allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens and
+knights. She had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering imperatively
+at all her doors. Mentally she was in a panic to shoot the bolts and drop the
+bars into place, while wanton instincts urged her to throw wide her portals and
+bid the deliciously strange visitor to enter in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict. He had no doubt of what it
+would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is beautiful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is beautiful,&rdquo; she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere beauty in
+it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its handmaiden. He
+sprawled silently on the ground, watching the grisly form of a great doubt
+rising before him. He had failed. He was inarticulate. He had seen one of the
+greatest things in the world, and he had not expressed it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you think of the&mdash;&rdquo; He hesitated, abashed at his
+first attempt to use a strange word. &ldquo;Of the <i>motif</i>?&rdquo; he
+asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was confused,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;That is my only criticism
+in the large way. I followed the story, but there seemed so much else. It is
+too wordy. You clog the action by introducing so much extraneous
+material.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was the major <i>motif</i>,&rdquo; he hurriedly explained,
+&ldquo;the big underrunning <i>motif</i>, the cosmic and universal thing. I
+tried to make it keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial
+after all. I was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly. I did not
+succeed in suggesting what I was driving at. But I&rsquo;ll learn in
+time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not follow him. She was a bachelor of arts, but he had gone beyond her
+limitations. This she did not comprehend, attributing her incomprehension to
+his incoherence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were too voluble,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But it was beautiful, in
+places.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he would read
+her the &ldquo;Sea Lyrics.&rdquo; He lay in dull despair, while she watched him
+searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and wayward thoughts of marriage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You want to be famous?&rdquo; she asked abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, a little bit,&rdquo; he confessed. &ldquo;That is part of the
+adventure. It is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that
+counts. And after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means to something
+else. I want to be famous very much, for that matter, and for that
+reason.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For your sake,&rdquo; he wanted to add, and might have added had she
+proved enthusiastic over what he had read to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that would at
+least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was which he had hinted
+at. There was no career for him in literature. Of that she was convinced. He
+had proved it to-day, with his amateurish and sophomoric productions. He could
+talk well, but he was incapable of expressing himself in a literary way. She
+compared Tennyson, and Browning, and her favorite prose masters with him, and
+to his hopeless discredit. Yet she did not tell him her whole mind. Her strange
+interest in him led her to temporize. His desire to write was, after all, a
+little weakness which he would grow out of in time. Then he would devote
+himself to the more serious affairs of life. And he would succeed, too. She
+knew that. He was so strong that he could not fail&mdash;if only he would drop
+writing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He flushed with pleasure. She was interested, that much was sure. And at least
+she had not given him a rejection slip. She had called certain portions of his
+work beautiful, and that was the first encouragement he had ever received from
+any one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I will,&rdquo; he said passionately. &ldquo;And I promise you, Miss
+Morse, that I will make good. I have come far, I know that; and I have far to
+go, and I will cover it if I have to do it on my hands and knees.&rdquo; He
+held up a bunch of manuscript. &ldquo;Here are the &lsquo;Sea Lyrics.&rsquo;
+When you get home, I&rsquo;ll turn them over to you to read at your leisure.
+And you must be sure to tell me just what you think of them. What I need, you
+know, above all things, is criticism. And do, please, be frank with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I will be perfectly frank,&rdquo; she promised, with an uneasy
+conviction that she had not been frank with him and with a doubt if she could
+be quite frank with him the next time.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap15"></a>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The first battle, fought and finished,&rdquo; Martin said to the
+looking-glass ten days later. &ldquo;But there will be a second battle, and a
+third battle, and battles to the end of time, unless&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had not finished the sentence, but looked about the mean little room and let
+his eyes dwell sadly upon a heap of returned manuscripts, still in their long
+envelopes, which lay in a corner on the floor. He had no stamps with which to
+continue them on their travels, and for a week they had been piling up. More of
+them would come in on the morrow, and on the next day, and the next, till they
+were all in. And he would be unable to start them out again. He was a
+month&rsquo;s rent behind on the typewriter, which he could not pay, having
+barely enough for the week&rsquo;s board which was due and for the employment
+office fees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He sat down and regarded the table thoughtfully. There were ink stains upon it,
+and he suddenly discovered that he was fond of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dear old table,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve spent some happy hours
+with you, and you&rsquo;ve been a pretty good friend when all is said and done.
+You never turned me down, never passed me out a reward-of-unmerit rejection
+slip, never complained about working overtime.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He dropped his arms upon the table and buried his face in them. His throat was
+aching, and he wanted to cry. It reminded him of his first fight, when he was
+six years old, when he punched away with the tears running down his cheeks
+while the other boy, two years his elder, had beaten and pounded him into
+exhaustion. He saw the ring of boys, howling like barbarians as he went down at
+last, writhing in the throes of nausea, the blood streaming from his nose and
+the tears from his bruised eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor little shaver,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;And you&rsquo;re just as
+badly licked now. You&rsquo;re beaten to a pulp. You&rsquo;re down and
+out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the vision of that first fight still lingered under his eyelids, and as he
+watched he saw it dissolve and reshape into the series of fights which had
+followed. Six months later Cheese-Face (that was the boy) had whipped him
+again. But he had blacked Cheese-Face&rsquo;s eye that time. That was going
+some. He saw them all, fight after fight, himself always whipped and
+Cheese-Face exulting over him. But he had never run away. He felt strengthened
+by the memory of that. He had always stayed and taken his medicine. Cheese-Face
+had been a little fiend at fighting, and had never once shown mercy to him. But
+he had stayed! He had stayed with it!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next, he saw a narrow alley, between ramshackle frame buildings. The end of the
+alley was blocked by a one-story brick building, out of which issued the
+rhythmic thunder of the presses, running off the first edition of the
+<i>Enquirer</i>. He was eleven, and Cheese-Face was thirteen, and they both
+carried the <i>Enquirer</i>. That was why they were there, waiting for their
+papers. And, of course, Cheese-Face had picked on him again, and there was
+another fight that was indeterminate, because at quarter to four the door of
+the press-room was thrown open and the gang of boys crowded in to fold their
+papers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll lick you to-morrow,&rdquo; he heard Cheese-Face promise; and
+he heard his own voice, piping and trembling with unshed tears, agreeing to be
+there on the morrow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he had come there the next day, hurrying from school to be there first, and
+beating Cheese-Face by two minutes. The other boys said he was all right, and
+gave him advice, pointing out his faults as a scrapper and promising him
+victory if he carried out their instructions. The same boys gave Cheese-Face
+advice, too. How they had enjoyed the fight! He paused in his recollections
+long enough to envy them the spectacle he and Cheese-Face had put up. Then the
+fight was on, and it went on, without rounds, for thirty minutes, until the
+press-room door was opened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He watched the youthful apparition of himself, day after day, hurrying from
+school to the <i>Enquirer</i> alley. He could not walk very fast. He was stiff
+and lame from the incessant fighting. His forearms were black and blue from
+wrist to elbow, what of the countless blows he had warded off, and here and
+there the tortured flesh was beginning to fester. His head and arms and
+shoulders ached, the small of his back ached,&mdash;he ached all over, and his
+brain was heavy and dazed. He did not play at school. Nor did he study. Even to
+sit still all day at his desk, as he did, was a torment. It seemed centuries
+since he had begun the round of daily fights, and time stretched away into a
+nightmare and infinite future of daily fights. Why couldn&rsquo;t Cheese-Face
+be licked? he often thought; that would put him, Martin, out of his misery. It
+never entered his head to cease fighting, to allow Cheese-Face to whip him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so he dragged himself to the <i>Enquirer</i> alley, sick in body and soul,
+but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal enemy, Cheese-Face, who
+was just as sick as he, and just a bit willing to quit if it were not for the
+gang of newsboys that looked on and made pride painful and necessary. One
+afternoon, after twenty minutes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other
+according to set rules that did not permit kicking, striking below the belt,
+nor hitting when one was down, Cheese-Face, panting for breath and reeling,
+offered to call it quits. And Martin, head on arms, thrilled at the picture he
+caught of himself, at that moment in the afternoon of long ago, when he reeled
+and panted and choked with the blood that ran into his mouth and down his
+throat from his cut lips; when he tottered toward Cheese-Face, spitting out a
+mouthful of blood so that he could speak, crying out that he would never quit,
+though Cheese-Face could give in if he wanted to. And Cheese-Face did not give
+in, and the fight went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed the afternoon fight.
+When he put up his arms, each day, to begin, they pained exquisitely, and the
+first few blows, struck and received, racked his soul; after that things grew
+numb, and he fought on blindly, seeing as in a dream, dancing and wavering, the
+large features and burning, animal-like eyes of Cheese-Face. He concentrated
+upon that face; all else about him was a whirling void. There was nothing else
+in the world but that face, and he would never know rest, blessed rest, until
+he had beaten that face into a pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until the
+bleeding knuckles that somehow belonged to that face had beaten him into a
+pulp. And then, one way or the other, he would have rest. But to
+quit,&mdash;for him, Martin, to quit,&mdash;that was impossible!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came the day when he dragged himself into the <i>Enquirer</i> alley, and there
+was no Cheese-Face. Nor did Cheese-Face come. The boys congratulated him, and
+told him that he had licked Cheese-Face. But Martin was not satisfied. He had
+not licked Cheese-Face, nor had Cheese-Face licked him. The problem had not
+been solved. It was not until afterward that they learned that
+Cheese-Face&rsquo;s father had died suddenly that very day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin skipped on through the years to the night in the nigger heaven at the
+Auditorium. He was seventeen and just back from sea. A row started. Somebody
+was bullying somebody, and Martin interfered, to be confronted by
+Cheese-Face&rsquo;s blazing eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll fix you after de show,&rdquo; his ancient enemy hissed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin nodded. The nigger-heaven bouncer was making his way toward the
+disturbance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll meet you outside, after the last act,&rdquo; Martin
+whispered, the while his face showed undivided interest in the buck-and-wing
+dancing on the stage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bouncer glared and went away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Got a gang?&rdquo; he asked Cheese-Face, at the end of the act.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I got to get one,&rdquo; Martin announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Between the acts he mustered his following&mdash;three fellows he knew from the
+nail works, a railroad fireman, and half a dozen of the Boo Gang, along with as
+many more from the dread Eighteen-and-Market Gang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the theatre let out, the two gangs strung along inconspicuously on
+opposite sides of the street. When they came to a quiet corner, they united and
+held a council of war.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Eighth Street Bridge is the place,&rdquo; said a red-headed fellow
+belonging to Cheese-Face&rsquo;s Gang. &ldquo;You kin fight in the middle,
+under the electric light, an&rsquo; whichever way the bulls come in we kin
+sneak the other way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s agreeable to me,&rdquo; Martin said, after consulting with
+the leaders of his own gang.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Eighth Street Bridge, crossing an arm of San Antonio Estuary, was the
+length of three city blocks. In the middle of the bridge, and at each end, were
+electric lights. No policeman could pass those end-lights unseen. It was the
+safe place for the battle that revived itself under Martin&rsquo;s eyelids. He
+saw the two gangs, aggressive and sullen, rigidly keeping apart from each other
+and backing their respective champions; and he saw himself and Cheese-Face
+stripping. A short distance away lookouts were set, their task being to watch
+the lighted ends of the bridge. A member of the Boo Gang held Martin&rsquo;s
+coat, and shirt, and cap, ready to race with them into safety in case the
+police interfered. Martin watched himself go into the centre, facing
+Cheese-Face, and he heard himself say, as he held up his hand warningly:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They ain&rsquo;t no hand-shakin&rsquo; in this. Understand? They
+ain&rsquo;t nothin&rsquo; but scrap. No throwin&rsquo; up the sponge. This is a
+grudge-fight an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s to a finish. Understand? Somebody&rsquo;s
+goin&rsquo; to get licked.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cheese-Face wanted to demur,&mdash;Martin could see that,&mdash;but
+Cheese-Face&rsquo;s old perilous pride was touched before the two gangs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aw, come on,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;Wot&rsquo;s the good of
+chewin&rsquo; de rag about it? I&rsquo;m wit&rsquo; cheh to de finish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of youth,
+with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to destroy. All
+the painful, thousand years&rsquo; gains of man in his upward climb through
+creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a milestone on the path
+of the great human adventure. Martin and Cheese-Face were two savages, of the
+stone age, of the squatting place and the tree refuge. They sank lower and
+lower into the muddy abyss, back into the dregs of the raw beginnings of life,
+striving blindly and chemically, as atoms strive, as the star-dust of the
+heavens strives, colliding, recoiling, and colliding again and eternally again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;God! We are animals! Brute-beasts!&rdquo; Martin muttered aloud, as he
+watched the progress of the fight. It was to him, with his splendid power of
+vision, like gazing into a kinetoscope. He was both onlooker and participant.
+His long months of culture and refinement shuddered at the sight; then the
+present was blotted out of his consciousness and the ghosts of the past
+possessed him, and he was Martin Eden, just returned from sea and fighting
+Cheese-Face on the Eighth Street Bridge. He suffered and toiled and sweated and
+bled, and exulted when his naked knuckles smashed home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They were twin whirlwinds of hatred, revolving about each other monstrously.
+The time passed, and the two hostile gangs became very quiet. They had never
+witnessed such intensity of ferocity, and they were awed by it. The two
+fighters were greater brutes than they. The first splendid velvet edge of youth
+and condition wore off, and they fought more cautiously and deliberately. There
+had been no advantage gained either way. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s anybody&rsquo;s
+fight,&rdquo; Martin heard some one saying. Then he followed up a feint, right
+and left, was fiercely countered, and felt his cheek laid open to the bone. No
+bare knuckle had done that. He heard mutters of amazement at the ghastly damage
+wrought, and was drenched with his own blood. But he gave no sign. He became
+immensely wary, for he was wise with knowledge of the low cunning and foul
+vileness of his kind. He watched and waited, until he feigned a wild rush,
+which he stopped midway, for he had seen the glint of metal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hold up yer hand!&rdquo; he screamed. &ldquo;Them&rsquo;s brass
+knuckles, an&rsquo; you hit me with &rsquo;em!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both gangs surged forward, growling and snarling. In a second there would be a
+free-for-all fight, and he would be robbed of his vengeance. He was beside
+himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You guys keep out!&rdquo; he screamed hoarsely. &ldquo;Understand? Say,
+d&rsquo;ye understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They shrank away from him. They were brutes, but he was the arch-brute, a thing
+of terror that towered over them and dominated them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is my scrap, an&rsquo; they ain&rsquo;t goin&rsquo; to be no
+buttin&rsquo; in. Gimme them knuckles.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Cheese-Face, sobered and a bit frightened, surrendered the foul weapon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You passed &rsquo;em to him, you red-head sneakin&rsquo; in behind the
+push there,&rdquo; Martin went on, as he tossed the knuckles into the water.
+&ldquo;I seen you, an&rsquo; I was wonderin&rsquo; what you was up to. If you
+try anything like that again, I&rsquo;ll beat cheh to death. Understand?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They fought on, through exhaustion and beyond, to exhaustion immeasurable and
+inconceivable, until the crowd of brutes, its blood-lust sated, terrified by
+what it saw, begged them impartially to cease. And Cheese-Face, ready to drop
+and die, or to stay on his legs and die, a grisly monster out of whose features
+all likeness to Cheese-Face had been beaten, wavered and hesitated; but Martin
+sprang in and smashed him again and again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Next, after a seeming century or so, with Cheese-Face weakening fast, in a
+mix-up of blows there was a loud snap, and Martin&rsquo;s right arm dropped to
+his side. It was a broken bone. Everybody heard it and knew; and Cheese-Face
+knew, rushing like a tiger in the other&rsquo;s extremity and raining blow on
+blow. Martin&rsquo;s gang surged forward to interfere. Dazed by the rapid
+succession of blows, Martin warned them back with vile and earnest curses
+sobbed out and groaned in ultimate desolation and despair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He punched on, with his left hand only, and as he punched, doggedly, only
+half-conscious, as from a remote distance he heard murmurs of fear in the
+gangs, and one who said with shaking voice: &ldquo;This ain&rsquo;t a scrap,
+fellows. It&rsquo;s murder, an&rsquo; we ought to stop it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on wearily and endlessly with
+his one arm, battering away at a bloody something before him that was not a
+face but a horror, an oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that
+persisted before his wavering vision and would not go away. And he punched on
+and on, slower and slower, as the last shreds of vitality oozed from him,
+through centuries and aeons and enormous lapses of time, until, in a dim way,
+he became aware that the nameless thing was sinking, slowly sinking down to the
+rough board-planking of the bridge. And the next moment he was standing over
+it, staggering and swaying on shaky legs, clutching at the air for support, and
+saying in a voice he did not recognize:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;ye want any more? Say, d&rsquo;ye want any more?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still saying it, over and over,&mdash;demanding, entreating,
+threatening, to know if it wanted any more,&mdash;when he felt the fellows of
+his gang laying hands on him, patting him on the back and trying to put his
+coat on him. And then came a sudden rush of blackness and oblivion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The tin alarm-clock on the table ticked on, but Martin Eden, his face buried on
+his arms, did not hear it. He heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely
+had he relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years before on the
+Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the blackness and the blankness
+endured. Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat
+pouring down his face, shouting:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I licked you, Cheese-Face! It took me eleven years, but I licked
+you!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His knees were trembling under him, he felt faint, and he staggered back to the
+bed, sinking down and sitting on the edge of it. He was still in the clutch of
+the past. He looked about the room, perplexed, alarmed, wondering where he was,
+until he caught sight of the pile of manuscripts in the corner. Then the wheels
+of memory slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the
+present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had won from their
+pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith of a
+girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she
+witness but one moment of what he had just lived through&mdash;one moment of
+all the muck of life through which he had waded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He arose to his feet and confronted himself in the looking-glass.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden,&rdquo; he said solemnly.
+&ldquo;And you cleanse your eyes in a great brightness, and thrust your
+shoulders among the stars, doing what all life has done, letting the &lsquo;ape
+and tiger die&rsquo; and wresting highest heritage from all powers that
+be.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked more closely at himself and laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?&rdquo; he queried. &ldquo;Well,
+never mind. You licked Cheese-Face, and you&rsquo;ll lick the editors if it
+takes twice eleven years to do it in. You can&rsquo;t stop here. You&rsquo;ve
+got to go on. It&rsquo;s to a finish, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap16"></a>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The alarm-clock went off, jerking Martin out of sleep with a suddenness that
+would have given headache to one with less splendid constitution. Though he
+slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a cat, and he awoke eagerly, glad that
+the five hours of unconsciousness were gone. He hated the oblivion of sleep.
+There was too much to do, too much of life to live. He grudged every moment of
+life sleep robbed him of, and before the clock had ceased its clattering he was
+head and ears in the washbasin and thrilling to the cold bite of the water.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But he did not follow his regular programme. There was no unfinished story
+waiting his hand, no new story demanding articulation. He had studied late, and
+it was nearly time for breakfast. He tried to read a chapter in Fiske, but his
+brain was restless and he closed the book. To-day witnessed the beginning of
+the new battle, wherein for some time there would be no writing. He was aware
+of a sadness akin to that with which one leaves home and family. He looked at
+the manuscripts in the corner. That was it. He was going away from them, his
+pitiful, dishonored children that were welcome nowhere. He went over and began
+to rummage among them, reading snatches here and there, his favorite portions.
+&ldquo;The Pot&rdquo; he honored with reading aloud, as he did
+&ldquo;Adventure.&rdquo; &ldquo;Joy,&rdquo; his latest-born, completed the day
+before and tossed into the corner for lack of stamps, won his keenest
+approbation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t understand,&rdquo; he murmured. &ldquo;Or maybe it&rsquo;s
+the editors who can&rsquo;t understand. There&rsquo;s nothing wrong with that.
+They publish worse every month. Everything they publish is worse&mdash;nearly
+everything, anyway.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After breakfast he put the type-writer in its case and carried it down into
+Oakland.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I owe a month on it,&rdquo; he told the clerk in the store. &ldquo;But
+you tell the manager I&rsquo;m going to work and that I&rsquo;ll be in in a
+month or so and straighten up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crossed on the ferry to San Francisco and made his way to an employment
+office. &ldquo;Any kind of work, no trade,&rdquo; he told the agent; and was
+interrupted by a new-comer, dressed rather foppishly, as some workingmen dress
+who have instincts for finer things. The agent shook his head despondently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothin&rsquo; doin&rsquo; eh?&rdquo; said the other. &ldquo;Well, I got
+to get somebody to-day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned and stared at Martin, and Martin, staring back, noted the puffed and
+discolored face, handsome and weak, and knew that he had been making a night of
+it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lookin&rsquo; for a job?&rdquo; the other queried. &ldquo;What can you
+do?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hard labor, sailorizing, run a type-writer, no shorthand, can sit on a
+horse, willing to do anything and tackle anything,&rdquo; was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sounds good to me. My name&rsquo;s Dawson, Joe Dawson, an&rsquo;
+I&rsquo;m tryin&rsquo; to scare up a laundryman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too much for me.&rdquo; Martin caught an amusing glimpse of himself
+ironing fluffy white things that women wear. But he had taken a liking to the
+other, and he added: &ldquo;I might do the plain washing. I learned that much
+at sea.&rdquo; Joe Dawson thought visibly for a moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look here, let&rsquo;s get together an&rsquo; frame it up. Willin&rsquo;
+to listen?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is a small laundry, up country, belongs to Shelly Hot
+Springs,&mdash;hotel, you know. Two men do the work, boss and assistant.
+I&rsquo;m the boss. You don&rsquo;t work for me, but you work under me. Think
+you&rsquo;d be willin&rsquo; to learn?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin paused to think. The prospect was alluring. A few months of it, and he
+would have time to himself for study. He could work hard and study hard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Good grub an&rsquo; a room to yourself,&rdquo; Joe said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That settled it. A room to himself where he could burn the midnight oil
+unmolested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But work like hell,&rdquo; the other added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin caressed his swelling shoulder-muscles significantly. &ldquo;That came
+from hard work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then let&rsquo;s get to it.&rdquo; Joe held his hand to his head for a
+moment. &ldquo;Gee, but it&rsquo;s a stem-winder. Can hardly see. I went down
+the line last night&mdash;everything&mdash;everything. Here&rsquo;s the
+frame-up. The wages for two is a hundred and board. I&rsquo;ve ben
+drawin&rsquo; down sixty, the second man forty. But he knew the biz.
+You&rsquo;re green. If I break you in, I&rsquo;ll be doing plenty of your work
+at first. Suppose you begin at thirty, an&rsquo; work up to the forty.
+I&rsquo;ll play fair. Just as soon as you can do your share you get the
+forty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go you,&rdquo; Martin announced, stretching out his hand,
+which the other shook. &ldquo;Any advance?&mdash;for rail-road ticket and
+extras?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I blew it in,&rdquo; was Joe&rsquo;s sad answer, with another reach at
+his aching head. &ldquo;All I got is a return ticket.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;m broke&mdash;when I pay my board.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Jump it,&rdquo; Joe advised.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t. Owe it to my sister.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe whistled a long, perplexed whistle, and racked his brains to little
+purpose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve got the price of the drinks,&rdquo; he said desperately.
+&ldquo;Come on, an&rsquo; mebbe we&rsquo;ll cook up something.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin declined.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Water-wagon?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This time Martin nodded, and Joe lamented, &ldquo;Wish I was.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I somehow just can&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he said in extenuation.
+&ldquo;After I&rsquo;ve ben workin&rsquo; like hell all week I just got to
+booze up. If I didn&rsquo;t, I&rsquo;d cut my throat or burn up the premises.
+But I&rsquo;m glad you&rsquo;re on the wagon. Stay with it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin knew of the enormous gulf between him and this man&mdash;the gulf the
+books had made; but he found no difficulty in crossing back over that gulf. He
+had lived all his life in the working-class world, and the <i>camaraderie</i>
+of labor was second nature with him. He solved the difficulty of transportation
+that was too much for the other&rsquo;s aching head. He would send his trunk up
+to Shelly Hot Springs on Joe&rsquo;s ticket. As for himself, there was his
+wheel. It was seventy miles, and he could ride it on Sunday and be ready for
+work Monday morning. In the meantime he would go home and pack up. There was no
+one to say good-by to. Ruth and her whole family were spending the long summer
+in the Sierras, at Lake Tahoe.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He arrived at Shelly Hot Springs, tired and dusty, on Sunday night. Joe greeted
+him exuberantly. With a wet towel bound about his aching brow, he had been at
+work all day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Part of last week&rsquo;s washin&rsquo; mounted up, me bein&rsquo; away
+to get you,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;Your box arrived all right. It&rsquo;s
+in your room. But it&rsquo;s a hell of a thing to call a trunk. An&rsquo;
+what&rsquo;s in it? Gold bricks?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe sat on the bed while Martin unpacked. The box was a packing-case for
+breakfast food, and Mr. Higginbotham had charged him half a dollar for it. Two
+rope handles, nailed on by Martin, had technically transformed it into a trunk
+eligible for the baggage-car. Joe watched, with bulging eyes, a few shirts and
+several changes of underclothes come out of the box, followed by books, and
+more books.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Books clean to the bottom?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books on a kitchen table which served
+in the room in place of a wash-stand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gee!&rdquo; Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the deduction to
+arise in his brain. At last it came.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, you don&rsquo;t care for the girls&mdash;much?&rdquo; he queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;I used to chase a lot before I tackled
+the books. But since then there&rsquo;s no time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And there won&rsquo;t be any time here. All you can do is work an&rsquo;
+sleep.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin thought of his five hours&rsquo; sleep a night, and smiled. The room was
+situated over the laundry and was in the same building with the engine that
+pumped water, made electricity, and ran the laundry machinery. The engineer,
+who occupied the adjoining room, dropped in to meet the new hand and helped
+Martin rig up an electric bulb, on an extension wire, so that it travelled
+along a stretched cord from over the table to the bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was routed out for a
+quarter-to-seven breakfast. There happened to be a bath-tub for the servants in
+the laundry building, and he electrified Joe by taking a cold bath.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gee, but you&rsquo;re a hummer!&rdquo; Joe announced, as they sat down
+to breakfast in a corner of the hotel kitchen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the assistant gardener, and two
+or three men from the stable. They ate hurriedly and gloomily, with but little
+conversation, and as Martin ate and listened he realized how far he had
+travelled from their status. Their small mental caliber was depressing to him,
+and he was anxious to get away from them. So he bolted his breakfast, a sickly,
+sloppy affair, as rapidly as they, and heaved a sigh of relief when he passed
+out through the kitchen door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, wherein the most modern
+machinery did everything that was possible for machinery to do. Martin, after a
+few instructions, sorted the great heaps of soiled clothes, while Joe started
+the masher and made up fresh supplies of soft-soap, compounded of biting
+chemicals that compelled him to swathe his mouth and nostrils and eyes in
+bath-towels till he resembled a mummy. Finished the sorting, Martin lent a hand
+in wringing the clothes. This was done by dumping them into a spinning
+receptacle that went at a rate of a few thousand revolutions a minute, tearing
+the water from the clothes by centrifugal force. Then Martin began to alternate
+between the dryer and the wringer, between times &ldquo;shaking out&rdquo;
+socks and stockings. By the afternoon, one feeding and one stacking up, they
+were running socks and stockings through the mangle while the irons were
+heating. Then it was hot irons and underclothes till six o&rsquo;clock, at
+which time Joe shook his head dubiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Way behind,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Got to work after supper.&rdquo; And
+after supper they worked until ten o&rsquo;clock, under the blazing electric
+lights, until the last piece of under-clothing was ironed and folded away in
+the distributing room. It was a hot California night, and though the windows
+were thrown wide, the room, with its red-hot ironing-stove, was a furnace.
+Martin and Joe, down to undershirts, bare armed, sweated and panted for air.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Like trimming cargo in the tropics,&rdquo; Martin said, when they went
+upstairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll do,&rdquo; Joe answered. &ldquo;You take hold like a good
+fellow. If you keep up the pace, you&rsquo;ll be on thirty dollars only one
+month. The second month you&rsquo;ll be gettin&rsquo; your forty. But
+don&rsquo;t tell me you never ironed before. I know better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never ironed a rag in my life, honestly, until to-day,&rdquo; Martin
+protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was surprised at his weariness when he got into his room, forgetful of the
+fact that he had been on his feet and working without let up for fourteen
+hours. He set the alarm clock at six, and measured back five hours to one
+o&rsquo;clock. He could read until then. Slipping off his shoes, to ease his
+swollen feet, he sat down at the table with his books. He opened Fiske, where
+he had left off to read. But he found trouble and began to read it through a
+second time. Then he awoke, in pain from his stiffened muscles and chilled by
+the mountain wind that had begun to blow in through the window. He looked at
+the clock. It marked two. He had been asleep four hours. He pulled off his
+clothes and crawled into bed, where he was asleep the moment after his head
+touched the pillow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tuesday was a day of similar unremitting toil. The speed with which Joe worked
+won Martin&rsquo;s admiration. Joe was a dozen of demons for work. He was keyed
+up to concert pitch, and there was never a moment in the long day when he was
+not fighting for moments. He concentrated himself upon his work and upon how to
+save time, pointing out to Martin where he did in five motions what could be
+done in three, or in three motions what could be done in two.
+&ldquo;Elimination of waste motion,&rdquo; Martin phrased it as he watched and
+patterned after. He was a good workman himself, quick and deft, and it had
+always been a point of pride with him that no man should do any of his work for
+him or outwork him. As a result, he concentrated with a similar singleness of
+purpose, greedily snapping up the hints and suggestions thrown out by his
+working mate. He &ldquo;rubbed out&rdquo; collars and cuffs, rubbing the starch
+out from between the double thicknesses of linen so that there would be no
+blisters when it came to the ironing, and doing it at a pace that elicited
+Joe&rsquo;s praise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was never an interval when something was not at hand to be done. Joe
+waited for nothing, waited on nothing, and went on the jump from task to task.
+They starched two hundred white shirts, with a single gathering movement
+seizing a shirt so that the wristbands, neckband, yoke, and bosom protruded
+beyond the circling right hand. At the same moment the left hand held up the
+body of the shirt so that it would not enter the starch, and at the same moment
+the right hand dipped into the starch&mdash;starch so hot that, in order to
+wring it out, their hands had to thrust, and thrust continually, into a bucket
+of cold water. And that night they worked till half-past ten, dipping
+&ldquo;fancy starch&rdquo;&mdash;all the frilled and airy, delicate wear of
+ladies.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Me for the tropics and no clothes,&rdquo; Martin laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And me out of a job,&rdquo; Joe answered seriously. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+know nothin&rsquo; but laundrying.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you know it well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I ought to. Began in the Contra Costa in Oakland when I was eleven,
+shakin&rsquo; out for the mangle. That was eighteen years ago, an&rsquo;
+I&rsquo;ve never done a tap of anything else. But this job is the fiercest I
+ever had. Ought to be one more man on it at least. We work to-morrow night.
+Always run the mangle Wednesday nights&mdash;collars an&rsquo; cuffs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin set his alarm, drew up to the table, and opened Fiske. He did not finish
+the first paragraph. The lines blurred and ran together and his head nodded. He
+walked up and down, batting his head savagely with his fists, but he could not
+conquer the numbness of sleep. He propped the book before him, and propped his
+eyelids with his fingers, and fell asleep with his eyes wide open. Then he
+surrendered, and, scarcely conscious of what he did, got off his clothes and
+into bed. He slept seven hours of heavy, animal-like sleep, and awoke by the
+alarm, feeling that he had not had enough.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Doin&rsquo; much readin&rsquo;?&rdquo; Joe asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind. We got to run the mangle to-night, but Thursday we&rsquo;ll
+knock off at six. That&rsquo;ll give you a chance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin washed woollens that day, by hand, in a large barrel, with strong
+soft-soap, by means of a hub from a wagon wheel, mounted on a plunger-pole that
+was attached to a spring-pole overhead.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My invention,&rdquo; Joe said proudly. &ldquo;Beats a washboard
+an&rsquo; your knuckles, and, besides, it saves at least fifteen minutes in the
+week, an&rsquo; fifteen minutes ain&rsquo;t to be sneezed at in this
+shebang.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Running the collars and cuffs through the mangle was also Joe&rsquo;s idea.
+That night, while they toiled on under the electric lights, he explained it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Something no laundry ever does, except this one. An&rsquo; I got to do
+it if I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to get done Saturday afternoon at three
+o&rsquo;clock. But I know how, an&rsquo; that&rsquo;s the difference. Got to
+have right heat, right pressure, and run &rsquo;em through three times. Look at
+that!&rdquo; He held a cuff aloft. &ldquo;Couldn&rsquo;t do it better by hand
+or on a tiler.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thursday, Joe was in a rage. A bundle of extra &ldquo;fancy starch&rdquo; had
+come in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to quit,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;I won&rsquo;t
+stand for it. I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to quit it cold. What&rsquo;s the good of
+me workin&rsquo; like a slave all week, a-savin&rsquo; minutes, an&rsquo; them
+a-comin&rsquo; an&rsquo; ringin&rsquo; in fancy-starch extras on me? This is a
+free country, an&rsquo; I&rsquo;m to tell that fat Dutchman what I think of
+him. An&rsquo; I won&rsquo;t tell &rsquo;m in French. Plain United States is
+good enough for me. Him a-ringin&rsquo; in fancy starch extras!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We got to work to-night,&rdquo; he said the next moment, reversing his
+judgment and surrendering to fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Martin did no reading that night. He had seen no daily paper all week, and,
+strangely to him, felt no desire to see one. He was not interested in the news.
+He was too tired and jaded to be interested in anything, though he planned to
+leave Saturday afternoon, if they finished at three, and ride on his wheel to
+Oakland. It was seventy miles, and the same distance back on Sunday afternoon
+would leave him anything but rested for the second week&rsquo;s work. It would
+have been easier to go on the train, but the round trip was two dollars and a
+half, and he was intent on saving money.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap17"></a>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Martin learned to do many things. In the course of the first week, in one
+afternoon, he and Joe accounted for the two hundred white shirts. Joe ran the
+tiler, a machine wherein a hot iron was hooked on a steel string which
+furnished the pressure. By this means he ironed the yoke, wristbands, and
+neckband, setting the latter at right angles to the shirt, and put the glossy
+finish on the bosom. As fast as he finished them, he flung the shirts on a rack
+between him and Martin, who caught them up and &ldquo;backed&rdquo; them. This
+task consisted of ironing all the unstarched portions of the shirts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was exhausting work, carried on, hour after hour, at top speed. Out on the
+broad verandas of the hotel, men and women, in cool white, sipped iced drinks
+and kept their circulation down. But in the laundry the air was sizzling. The
+huge stove roared red hot and white hot, while the irons, moving over the damp
+cloth, sent up clouds of steam. The heat of these irons was different from that
+used by housewives. An iron that stood the ordinary test of a wet finger was
+too cold for Joe and Martin, and such test was useless. They went wholly by
+holding the irons close to their cheeks, gauging the heat by some secret mental
+process that Martin admired but could not understand. When the fresh irons
+proved too hot, they hooked them on iron rods and dipped them into cold water.
+This again required a precise and subtle judgment. A fraction of a second too
+long in the water and the fine and silken edge of the proper heat was lost, and
+Martin found time to marvel at the accuracy he developed&mdash;an automatic
+accuracy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and unerring.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But there was little time in which to marvel. All Martin&rsquo;s consciousness
+was concentrated in the work. Ceaselessly active, head and hand, an intelligent
+machine, all that constituted him a man was devoted to furnishing that
+intelligence. There was no room in his brain for the universe and its mighty
+problems. All the broad and spacious corridors of his mind were closed and
+hermetically sealed. The echoing chamber of his soul was a narrow room, a
+conning tower, whence were directed his arm and shoulder muscles, his ten
+nimble fingers, and the swift-moving iron along its steaming path in broad,
+sweeping strokes, just so many strokes and no more, just so far with each
+stroke and not a fraction of an inch farther, rushing along interminable
+sleeves, sides, backs, and tails, and tossing the finished shirts, without
+rumpling, upon the receiving frame. And even as his hurrying soul tossed, it
+was reaching for another shirt. This went on, hour after hour, while outside
+all the world swooned under the overhead California sun. But there was no
+swooning in that superheated room. The cool guests on the verandas needed clean
+linen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The sweat poured from Martin. He drank enormous quantities of water, but so
+great was the heat of the day and of his exertions, that the water sluiced
+through the interstices of his flesh and out at all his pores. Always, at sea,
+except at rare intervals, the work he performed had given him ample opportunity
+to commune with himself. The master of the ship had been lord of Martin&rsquo;s
+time; but here the manager of the hotel was lord of Martin&rsquo;s thoughts as
+well. He had no thoughts save for the nerve-racking, body-destroying toil.
+Outside of that it was impossible to think. He did not know that he loved Ruth.
+She did not even exist, for his driven soul had no time to remember her. It was
+only when he crawled to bed at night, or to breakfast in the morning, that she
+asserted herself to him in fleeting memories.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is hell, ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; Joe remarked once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation. The statement had been obvious
+and unnecessary. They did not talk while they worked. Conversation threw them
+out of their stride, as it did this time, compelling Martin to miss a stroke of
+his iron and to make two extra motions before he caught his stride again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On Friday morning the washer ran. Twice a week they had to put through hotel
+linen,&mdash;the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table-cloths, and napkins. This
+finished, they buckled down to &ldquo;fancy starch.&rdquo; It was slow work,
+fastidious and delicate, and Martin did not learn it so readily. Besides, he
+could not take chances. Mistakes were disastrous.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;See that,&rdquo; Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could
+have crumpled from view in one hand. &ldquo;Scorch that an&rsquo; it&rsquo;s
+twenty dollars out of your wages.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his muscular tension, though
+nervous tension rose higher than ever, and he listened sympathetically to the
+other&rsquo;s blasphemies as he toiled and suffered over the beautiful things
+that women wear when they do not have to do their own laundrying. &ldquo;Fancy
+starch&rdquo; was Martin&rsquo;s nightmare, and it was Joe&rsquo;s, too. It was
+&ldquo;fancy starch&rdquo; that robbed them of their hard-won minutes. They
+toiled at it all day. At seven in the evening they broke off to run the hotel
+linen through the mangle. At ten o&rsquo;clock, while the hotel guests slept,
+the two laundrymen sweated on at &ldquo;fancy starch&rdquo; till midnight, till
+one, till two. At half-past two they knocked off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Saturday morning it was &ldquo;fancy starch,&rdquo; and odds and ends, and at
+three in the afternoon the week&rsquo;s work was done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t a-goin&rsquo; to ride them seventy miles into Oakland on
+top of this?&rdquo; Joe demanded, as they sat on the stairs and took a
+triumphant smoke.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Got to,&rdquo; was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you goin&rsquo; for?&mdash;a girl?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket. I want to renew some
+books at the library.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you send &rsquo;em down an&rsquo; up by express?
+That&rsquo;ll cost only a quarter each way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin considered it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; take a rest to-morrow,&rdquo; the other urged. &ldquo;You need
+it. I know I do. I&rsquo;m plumb tuckered out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked it. Indomitable, never resting, fighting for seconds and minutes all
+week, circumventing delays and crushing down obstacles, a fount of resistless
+energy, a high-driven human motor, a demon for work, now that he had
+accomplished the week&rsquo;s task he was in a state of collapse. He was worn
+and haggard, and his handsome face drooped in lean exhaustion. He pulled his
+cigarette spiritlessly, and his voice was peculiarly dead and monotonous. All
+the snap and fire had gone out of him. His triumph seemed a sorry one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; next week we got to do it all over again,&rdquo; he said
+sadly. &ldquo;An&rsquo; what&rsquo;s the good of it all, hey? Sometimes I wish
+I was a hobo. They don&rsquo;t work, an&rsquo; they get their livin&rsquo;.
+Gee! I wish I had a glass of beer; but I can&rsquo;t get up the gumption to go
+down to the village an&rsquo; get it. You&rsquo;ll stay over, an&rsquo; send
+your books down by express, or else you&rsquo;re a damn fool.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what can I do here all day Sunday?&rdquo; Martin asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Rest. You don&rsquo;t know how tired you are. Why, I&rsquo;m that tired
+Sunday I can&rsquo;t even read the papers. I was sick once&mdash;typhoid. In
+the hospital two months an&rsquo; a half. Didn&rsquo;t do a tap of work all
+that time. It was beautiful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was beautiful,&rdquo; he repeated dreamily, a minute later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head laundryman had
+disappeared. Most likely he had gone for a glass of beer Martin decided, but
+the half-mile walk down to the village to find out seemed a long journey to
+him. He lay on his bed with his shoes off, trying to make up his mind. He did
+not reach out for a book. He was too tired to feel sleepy, and he lay, scarcely
+thinking, in a semi-stupor of weariness, until it was time for supper. Joe did
+not appear for that function, and when Martin heard the gardener remark that
+most likely he was ripping the slats off the bar, Martin understood. He went to
+bed immediately afterward, and in the morning decided that he was greatly
+rested. Joe being still absent, Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay down in
+a shady nook under the trees. The morning passed, he knew not how. He did not
+sleep, nobody disturbed him, and he did not finish the paper. He came back to
+it in the afternoon, after dinner, and fell asleep over it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard at work, sorting clothes,
+while Joe, a towel bound tightly around his head, with groans and blasphemies,
+was running the washer and mixing soft-soap.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I simply can&rsquo;t help it,&rdquo; he explained. &ldquo;I got to drink
+when Saturday night comes around.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another week passed, a great battle that continued under the electric lights
+each night and that culminated on Saturday afternoon at three o&rsquo;clock,
+when Joe tasted his moment of wilted triumph and then drifted down to the
+village to forget. Martin&rsquo;s Sunday was the same as before. He slept in
+the shade of the trees, toiled aimlessly through the newspaper, and spent long
+hours lying on his back, doing nothing, thinking nothing. He was too dazed to
+think, though he was aware that he did not like himself. He was self-repelled,
+as though he had undergone some degradation or was intrinsically foul. All that
+was god-like in him was blotted out. The spur of ambition was blunted; he had
+no vitality with which to feel the prod of it. He was dead. His soul seemed
+dead. He was a beast, a work-beast. He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting
+down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky whisper as of
+old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling to disclosure. Life was
+intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad in his mouth. A black screen
+was drawn across his mirror of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened
+sick-room where entered no ray of light. He envied Joe, down in the village,
+rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots,
+exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously
+drunk and forgetful of Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life. He was
+oppressed by a sense of failure. There was reason for the editors refusing his
+stuff. He could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself and the dreams he
+had dreamed. Ruth returned his &ldquo;Sea Lyrics&rdquo; by mail. He read her
+letter apathetically. She did her best to say how much she liked them and that
+they were beautiful. But she could not lie, and she could not disguise the
+truth from herself. She knew they were failures, and he read her disapproval in
+every perfunctory and unenthusiastic line of her letter. And she was right. He
+was firmly convinced of it as he read the poems over. Beauty and wonder had
+departed from him, and as he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to
+what he had had in mind when he wrote them. His audacities of phrase struck him
+as grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities, and everything
+was absurd, unreal, and impossible. He would have burned the &ldquo;Sea
+Lyrics&rdquo; on the spot, had his will been strong enough to set them aflame.
+There was the engine-room, but the exertion of carrying them to the furnace was
+not worth while. All his exertion was used in washing other persons&rsquo;
+clothes. He did not have any left for private affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together and answer
+Ruth&rsquo;s letter. But Saturday afternoon, after work was finished and he had
+taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered him. &ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;ll
+go down and see how Joe&rsquo;s getting on,&rdquo; was the way he put it to
+himself; and in the same moment he knew that he lied. But he did not have the
+energy to consider the lie. If he had had the energy, he would have refused to
+consider the lie, because he wanted to forget. He started for the village
+slowly and casually, increasing his pace in spite of himself as he neared the
+saloon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought you was on the water-wagon,&rdquo; was Joe&rsquo;s greeting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey, filling his own
+glass brimming before he passed the bottle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t take all night about it,&rdquo; he said roughly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin refused to wait for him,
+tossing the glass off in a gulp and refilling it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, I can wait for you,&rdquo; he said grimly; &ldquo;but hurry
+up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe hurried, and they drank together.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The work did it, eh?&rdquo; Joe queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin refused to discuss the matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s fair hell, I know,&rdquo; the other went on, &ldquo;but I
+kind of hate to see you come off the wagon, Mart. Well, here&rsquo;s
+how!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and awing the
+barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery blue eyes and hair
+parted in the middle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s something scandalous the way they work us poor devils,&rdquo;
+Joe was remarking. &ldquo;If I didn&rsquo;t bowl up, I&rsquo;d break loose
+an&rsquo; burn down the shebang. My bowlin&rsquo; up is all that saves
+&rsquo;em, I can tell you that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin made no answer. A few more drinks, and in his brain he felt the
+maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl. Ah, it was living, the first breath
+of life he had breathed in three weeks. His dreams came back to him. Fancy came
+out of the darkened room and lured him on, a thing of flaming brightness. His
+mirror of vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery.
+Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand in hand, and all power was his. He
+tried to tell it to Joe, but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes
+whereby he would escape the slavery of laundry-work and become himself the
+owner of a great steam laundry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I tell yeh, Mart, they won&rsquo;t be no kids workin&rsquo; in my
+laundry&mdash;not on yer life. An&rsquo; they won&rsquo;t be no workin&rsquo; a
+livin&rsquo; soul after six P.M. You hear me talk! They&rsquo;ll be machinery
+enough an&rsquo; hands enough to do it all in decent workin&rsquo; hours,
+an&rsquo; Mart, s&rsquo;help me, I&rsquo;ll make yeh superintendent of the
+shebang&mdash;the whole of it, all of it. Now here&rsquo;s the scheme. I get on
+the water-wagon an&rsquo; save my money for two years&mdash;save an&rsquo;
+then&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper, until that
+worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers who, coming in,
+accepted Martin&rsquo;s invitation. Martin dispensed royal largess, inviting
+everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and the gardener&rsquo;s assistant from
+the hotel, the barkeeper, and the furtive hobo who slid in like a shadow and
+like a shadow hovered at the end of the bar.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap18"></a>CHAPTER XVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to the washer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I say,&rdquo; he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t talk to me,&rdquo; Martin snarled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry, Joe,&rdquo; he said at noon, when they knocked off for
+dinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tears came into the other&rsquo;s eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right, old man,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;We&rsquo;re in
+hell, an&rsquo; we can&rsquo;t help ourselves. An&rsquo;, you know, I kind of
+like you a whole lot. That&rsquo;s what made it&mdash;hurt. I cottoned to you
+from the first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s quit,&rdquo; Joe suggested. &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s chuck it,
+an&rsquo; go hoboin&rsquo;. I ain&rsquo;t never tried it, but it must be dead
+easy. An&rsquo; nothin&rsquo; to do. Just think of it, nothin&rsquo; to do. I
+was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an&rsquo; it was beautiful. I wish
+I&rsquo;d get sick again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The week dragged on. The hotel was full, and extra &ldquo;fancy starch&rdquo;
+poured in upon them. They performed prodigies of valor. They fought late each
+night under the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even got in a half
+hour&rsquo;s work before breakfast. Martin no longer took his cold baths. Every
+moment was drive, drive, drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd of moments,
+herding them carefully, never losing one, counting them over like a miser
+counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish machine, aided ably
+by that other machine that thought of itself as once having been one Martin
+Eden, a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think. The house of
+thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its shadowy caretaker.
+He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were both shadows, and this was the
+unending limbo of toil. Or was it a dream? Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling
+heat, as he swung the heavy irons back and forth over the white garments, it
+came to him that it was a dream. In a short while, or maybe after a thousand
+years or so, he would awake, in his little room with the ink-stained table, and
+take up his writing where he had left off the day before. Or maybe that was a
+dream, too, and the awakening would be the changing of the watches, when he
+would drop down out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck,
+under the tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind blowing
+through his flesh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o&rsquo;clock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Guess I&rsquo;ll go down an&rsquo; get a glass of beer,&rdquo; Joe said,
+in the queer, monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the kit bag and oiled his wheel,
+putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the bearings. Joe was halfway down
+to the saloon when Martin passed by, bending low over the handle-bars, his legs
+driving the ninety-six gear with rhythmic strength, his face set for seventy
+miles of road and grade and dust. He slept in Oakland that night, and on Sunday
+covered the seventy miles back. And on Monday morning, weary, he began the new
+week&rsquo;s work, but he had kept sober.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled as a
+machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a glimmering bit of
+soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to scorch off the hundred and forty
+miles. But this was not rest. It was super-machinelike, and it helped to crush
+out the glimmering bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life.
+At the end of the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, he
+drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life and found life until
+Monday morning.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty miles,
+obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the numbness of still
+greater exertion. At the end of three months he went down a third time to the
+village with Joe. He forgot, and lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear
+illumination, the beast he was making of himself&mdash;not by the drink, but by
+the work. The drink was an effect, not a cause. It followed inevitably upon the
+work, as the night follows upon the day. Not by becoming a toil-beast could he
+win to the heights, was the message the whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded
+approbation. The whiskey was wise. It told secrets on itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and while they drank
+his very good health, he clung to the bar and scribbled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A telegram, Joe,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Read it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what he read seemed to sober
+him. He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his eyes and down
+his cheeks.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ain&rsquo;t goin&rsquo; back on me, Mart?&rdquo; he queried
+hopelessly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the message to the
+telegraph office.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hold on,&rdquo; Joe muttered thickly. &ldquo;Lemme think.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin&rsquo;s arm around
+him and supporting him, while he thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Make that two laundrymen,&rdquo; he said abruptly. &ldquo;Here, lemme
+fix it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What are you quitting for?&rdquo; Martin demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Same reason as you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I&rsquo;m going to sea. You can&rsquo;t do that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nope,&rdquo; was the answer, &ldquo;but I can hobo all right, all
+right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By God, I think you&rsquo;re right! Better a hobo than a beast of toil.
+Why, man, you&rsquo;ll live. And that&rsquo;s more than you ever did
+before.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was in hospital, once,&rdquo; Joe corrected. &ldquo;It was beautiful.
+Typhoid&mdash;did I tell you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+While Martin changed the telegram to &ldquo;two laundrymen,&rdquo; Joe went
+on:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never wanted to drink when I was in hospital. Funny, ain&rsquo;t it?
+But when I&rsquo;ve ben workin&rsquo; like a slave all week, I just got to bowl
+up. Ever noticed that cooks drink like hell?&mdash;an&rsquo; bakers, too?
+It&rsquo;s the work. They&rsquo;ve sure got to. Here, lemme pay half of that
+telegram.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll shake you for it,&rdquo; Martin offered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on, everybody drink,&rdquo; Joe called, as they rattled the dice
+and rolled them out on the damp bar.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation. He did not mind his aching head,
+nor did he take interest in his work. Whole herds of moments stole away and
+were lost while their careless shepherd gazed out of the window at the sunshine
+and the trees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just look at it!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;An&rsquo; it&rsquo;s all mine!
+It&rsquo;s free. I can lie down under them trees an&rsquo; sleep for a
+thousan&rsquo; years if I want to. Aw, come on, Mart, let&rsquo;s chuck it.
+What&rsquo;s the good of waitin&rsquo; another moment. That&rsquo;s the land of
+nothin&rsquo; to do out there, an&rsquo; I got a ticket for it&mdash;an&rsquo;
+it ain&rsquo;t no return ticket, b&rsquo;gosh!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes for the washer, Joe
+spied the hotel manager&rsquo;s shirt. He knew its mark, and with a sudden
+glorious consciousness of freedom he threw it on the floor and stamped on it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!&rdquo; he shouted.
+&ldquo;In it, an&rsquo; right there where I&rsquo;ve got you! Take that!
+an&rsquo; that! an&rsquo; that! damn you! Hold me back, somebody! Hold me
+back!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin laughed and held him to his work. On Tuesday night the new laundrymen
+arrived, and the rest of the week was spent breaking them into the routine. Joe
+sat around and explained his system, but he did no more work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not a tap,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;Not a tap. They can fire me if
+they want to, but if they do, I&rsquo;ll quit. No more work in mine, thank you
+kindly. Me for the freight cars an&rsquo; the shade under the trees. Go to it,
+you slaves! That&rsquo;s right. Slave an&rsquo; sweat! Slave an&rsquo; sweat!
+An&rsquo; when you&rsquo;re dead, you&rsquo;ll rot the same as me, an&rsquo;
+what&rsquo;s it matter how you live?&mdash;eh? Tell me that&mdash;what&rsquo;s
+it matter in the long run?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On Saturday they drew their pay and came to the parting of the ways.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They ain&rsquo;t no use in me askin&rsquo; you to change your mind
+an&rsquo; hit the road with me?&rdquo; Joe asked hopelessly:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head. He was standing by his wheel, ready to start. They shook
+hands, and Joe held on to his for a moment, as he said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to see you again, Mart, before you an&rsquo; me
+die. That&rsquo;s straight dope. I feel it in my bones. Good-by, Mart,
+an&rsquo; be good. I like you like hell, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stood, a forlorn figure, in the middle of the road, watching until Martin
+turned a bend and was gone from sight.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a good Indian, that boy,&rdquo; he muttered. &ldquo;A good
+Indian.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he plodded down the road himself, to the water tank, where half a dozen
+empties lay on a side-track waiting for the up freight.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap19"></a>CHAPTER XIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Ruth and her family were home again, and Martin, returned to Oakland, saw much
+of her. Having gained her degree, she was doing no more studying; and he,
+having worked all vitality out of his mind and body, was doing no writing. This
+gave them time for each other that they had never had before, and their
+intimacy ripened fast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first, Martin had done nothing but rest. He had slept a great deal, and
+spent long hours musing and thinking and doing nothing. He was like one
+recovering from some terrible bout of hardship. The first signs of reawakening
+came when he discovered more than languid interest in the daily paper. Then he
+began to read again&mdash;light novels, and poetry; and after several days more
+he was head over heels in his long-neglected Fiske. His splendid body and
+health made new vitality, and he possessed all the resiliency and rebound of
+youth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth showed her disappointment plainly when he announced that he was going to
+sea for another voyage as soon as he was well rested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why do you want to do that?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Money,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have to lay in a supply
+for my next attack on the editors. Money is the sinews of war, in my
+case&mdash;money and patience.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if all you wanted was money, why didn&rsquo;t you stay in the
+laundry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because the laundry was making a beast of me. Too much work of that sort
+drives to drink.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stared at him with horror in her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean&mdash;?&rdquo; she quavered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It would have been easy for him to get out of it; but his natural impulse was
+for frankness, and he remembered his old resolve to be frank, no matter what
+happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;Just that. Several times.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shivered and drew away from him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No man that I have ever known did that&mdash;ever did that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then they never worked in the laundry at Shelly Hot Springs,&rdquo; he
+laughed bitterly. &ldquo;Toil is a good thing. It is necessary for human
+health, so all the preachers say, and Heaven knows I&rsquo;ve never been afraid
+of it. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and the laundry
+up there is one of them. And that&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;m going to sea one more
+voyage. It will be my last, I think, for when I come back, I shall break into
+the magazines. I am certain of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was silent, unsympathetic, and he watched her moodily, realizing how
+impossible it was for her to understand what he had been through.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some day I shall write it up&mdash;&lsquo;The Degradation of Toil&rsquo;
+or the &lsquo;Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,&rsquo; or something
+like that for a title.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Never, since the first meeting, had they seemed so far apart as that day. His
+confession, told in frankness, with the spirit of revolt behind, had repelled
+her. But she was more shocked by the repulsion itself than by the cause of it.
+It pointed out to her how near she had drawn to him, and once accepted, it
+paved the way for greater intimacy. Pity, too, was aroused, and innocent,
+idealistic thoughts of reform. She would save this raw young man who had come
+so far. She would save him from the curse of his early environment, and she
+would save him from himself in spite of himself. And all this affected her as a
+very noble state of consciousness; nor did she dream that behind it and
+underlying it were the jealousy and desire of love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They rode on their wheels much in the delightful fall weather, and out in the
+hills they read poetry aloud, now one and now the other, noble, uplifting
+poetry that turned one&rsquo;s thoughts to higher things. Renunciation,
+sacrifice, patience, industry, and high endeavor were the principles she thus
+indirectly preached&mdash;such abstractions being objectified in her mind by
+her father, and Mr. Butler, and by Andrew Carnegie, who, from a poor immigrant
+boy had arisen to be the book-giver of the world. All of which was appreciated
+and enjoyed by Martin. He followed her mental processes more clearly now, and
+her soul was no longer the sealed wonder it had been. He was on terms of
+intellectual equality with her. But the points of disagreement did not affect
+his love. His love was more ardent than ever, for he loved her for what she
+was, and even her physical frailty was an added charm in his eyes. He read of
+sickly Elizabeth Barrett, who for years had not placed her feet upon the
+ground, until that day of flame when she eloped with Browning and stood
+upright, upon the earth, under the open sky; and what Browning had done for
+her, Martin decided he could do for Ruth. But first, she must love him. The
+rest would be easy. He would give her strength and health. And he caught
+glimpses of their life, in the years to come, wherein, against a background of
+work and comfort and general well-being, he saw himself and Ruth reading and
+discussing poetry, she propped amid a multitude of cushions on the ground while
+she read aloud to him. This was the key to the life they would live. And always
+he saw that particular picture. Sometimes it was she who leaned against him
+while he read, one arm about her, her head upon his shoulder. Sometimes they
+pored together over the printed pages of beauty. Then, too, she loved nature,
+and with generous imagination he changed the scene of their
+reading&mdash;sometimes they read in closed-in valleys with precipitous walls,
+or in high mountain meadows, and, again, down by the gray sand-dunes with a
+wreath of billows at their feet, or afar on some volcanic tropic isle where
+waterfalls descended and became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that
+swayed and shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind. But always, in the
+foreground, lords of beauty and eternally reading and sharing, lay he and Ruth,
+and always in the background that was beyond the background of nature, dim and
+hazy, were work and success and money earned that made them free of the world
+and all its treasures.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should recommend my little girl to be careful,&rdquo; her mother
+warned her one day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know what you mean. But it is impossible. He is not&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth was blushing, but it was the blush of maidenhood called upon for the first
+time to discuss the sacred things of life with a mother held equally sacred.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your kind.&rdquo; Her mother finished the sentence for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did not want to say it, but he is not. He is rough, brutal,
+strong&mdash;too strong. He has not&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She hesitated and could not go on. It was a new experience, talking over such
+matters with her mother. And again her mother completed her thought for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He has not lived a clean life, is what you wanted to say.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again Ruth nodded, and again a blush mantled her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is just that,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It has not been his fault, but
+he has played much with&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;With pitch?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, with pitch. And he frightens me. Sometimes I am positively in
+terror of him, when he talks in that free and easy way of the things he has
+done&mdash;as if they did not matter. They do matter, don&rsquo;t they?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They sat with their arms twined around each other, and in the pause her mother
+patted her hand and waited for her to go on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I am interested in him dreadfully,&rdquo; she continued. &ldquo;In a
+way he is my protégé. Then, too, he is my first boy friend&mdash;but not
+exactly friend; rather protégé and friend combined. Sometimes, too, when he
+frightens me, it seems that he is a bulldog I have taken for a plaything, like
+some of the &lsquo;frat&rsquo; girls, and he is tugging hard, and showing his
+teeth, and threatening to break loose.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again her mother waited.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He interests me, I suppose, like the bulldog. And there is much good in
+him, too; but there is much in him that I would not like in&mdash;in the other
+way. You see, I have been thinking. He swears, he smokes, he drinks, he has
+fought with his fists (he has told me so, and he likes it; he says so). He is
+all that a man should not be&mdash;a man I would want for my&mdash;&rdquo; her
+voice sank very low&mdash;&ldquo;husband. Then he is too strong. My prince must
+be tall, and slender, and dark&mdash;a graceful, bewitching prince. No, there
+is no danger of my falling in love with Martin Eden. It would be the worst fate
+that could befall me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it is not that that I spoke about,&rdquo; her mother equivocated.
+&ldquo;Have you thought about him? He is so ineligible in every way, you know,
+and suppose he should come to love you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But he does&mdash;already,&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was to be expected,&rdquo; Mrs. Morse said gently. &ldquo;How could
+it be otherwise with any one who knew you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Olney hates me!&rdquo; she exclaimed passionately. &ldquo;And I hate
+Olney. I feel always like a cat when he is around. I feel that I must be nasty
+to him, and even when I don&rsquo;t happen to feel that way, why, he&rsquo;s
+nasty to me, anyway. But I am happy with Martin Eden. No one ever loved me
+before&mdash;no man, I mean, in that way. And it is sweet to be
+loved&mdash;that way. You know what I mean, mother dear. It is sweet to feel
+that you are really and truly a woman.&rdquo; She buried her face in her
+mother&rsquo;s lap, sobbing. &ldquo;You think I am dreadful, I know, but I am
+honest, and I tell you just how I feel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Morse was strangely sad and happy. Her child-daughter, who was a bachelor
+of arts, was gone; but in her place was a woman-daughter. The experiment had
+succeeded. The strange void in Ruth&rsquo;s nature had been filled, and filled
+without danger or penalty. This rough sailor-fellow had been the instrument,
+and, though Ruth did not love him, he had made her conscious of her womanhood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His hand trembles,&rdquo; Ruth was confessing, her face, for
+shame&rsquo;s sake, still buried. &ldquo;It is most amusing and ridiculous, but
+I feel sorry for him, too. And when his hands are too trembly, and his eyes too
+shiny, why, I lecture him about his life and the wrong way he is going about it
+to mend it. But he worships me, I know. His eyes and his hands do not lie. And
+it makes me feel grown-up, the thought of it, the very thought of it; and I
+feel that I am possessed of something that is by rights my own&mdash;that makes
+me like the other girls&mdash;and&mdash;and young women. And, then, too, I knew
+that I was not like them before, and I knew that it worried you. You thought
+you did not let me know that dear worry of yours, but I did, and I wanted
+to&mdash;&lsquo;to make good,&rsquo; as Martin Eden says.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a holy hour for mother and daughter, and their eyes were wet as they
+talked on in the twilight, Ruth all white innocence and frankness, her mother
+sympathetic, receptive, yet calmly explaining and guiding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He is four years younger than you,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He has no
+place in the world. He has neither position nor salary. He is impractical.
+Loving you, he should, in the name of common sense, be doing something that
+would give him the right to marry, instead of paltering around with those
+stories of his and with childish dreams. Martin Eden, I am afraid, will never
+grow up. He does not take to responsibility and a man&rsquo;s work in the world
+like your father did, or like all our friends, Mr. Butler for one. Martin Eden,
+I am afraid, will never be a money-earner. And this world is so ordered that
+money is necessary to happiness&mdash;oh, no, not these swollen fortunes, but
+enough of money to permit of common comfort and decency. He&mdash;he has never
+spoken?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He has not breathed a word. He has not attempted to; but if he did, I
+would not let him, because, you see, I do not love him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad of that. I should not care to see my daughter, my one
+daughter, who is so clean and pure, love a man like him. There are noble men in
+the world who are clean and true and manly. Wait for them. You will find one
+some day, and you will love him and be loved by him, and you will be happy with
+him as your father and I have been happy with each other. And there is one
+thing you must always carry in mind&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, mother.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Morse&rsquo;s voice was low and sweet as she said, &ldquo;And that is the
+children.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;have thought about them,&rdquo; Ruth confessed, remembering the
+wanton thoughts that had vexed her in the past, her face again red with maiden
+shame that she should be telling such things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it is that, the children, that makes Mr. Eden impossible,&rdquo;
+Mrs. Morse went on incisively. &ldquo;Their heritage must be clean, and he is,
+I am afraid, not clean. Your father has told me of sailors&rsquo; lives,
+and&mdash;and you understand.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth pressed her mother&rsquo;s hand in assent, feeling that she really did
+understand, though her conception was of something vague, remote, and terrible
+that was beyond the scope of imagination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know I do nothing without telling you,&rdquo; she began.
+&ldquo;&mdash;Only, sometimes you must ask me, like this time. I wanted to tell
+you, but I did not know how. It is false modesty, I know it is that, but you
+can make it easy for me. Sometimes, like this time, you must ask me, you must
+give me a chance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, mother, you are a woman, too!&rdquo; she cried exultantly, as they
+stood up, catching her mother&rsquo;s hands and standing erect, facing her in
+the twilight, conscious of a strangely sweet equality between them. &ldquo;I
+should never have thought of you in that way if we had not had this talk. I had
+to learn that I was a woman to know that you were one, too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We are women together,&rdquo; her mother said, drawing her to her and
+kissing her. &ldquo;We are women together,&rdquo; she repeated, as they went
+out of the room, their arms around each other&rsquo;s waists, their hearts
+swelling with a new sense of companionship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Our little girl has become a woman,&rdquo; Mrs. Morse said proudly to
+her husband an hour later.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That means,&rdquo; he said, after a long look at his wife, &ldquo;that
+means she is in love.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, but that she is loved,&rdquo; was the smiling rejoinder. &ldquo;The
+experiment has succeeded. She is awakened at last.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then we&rsquo;ll have to get rid of him.&rdquo; Mr. Morse spoke briskly,
+in matter-of-fact, businesslike tones.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his wife shook her head. &ldquo;It will not be necessary. Ruth says he is
+going to sea in a few days. When he comes back, she will not be here. We will
+send her to Aunt Clara&rsquo;s. And, besides, a year in the East, with the
+change in climate, people, ideas, and everything, is just the thing she
+needs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap20"></a>CHAPTER XX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more. Stories and poems were
+springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he made notes of them
+against the future time when he would give them expression. But he did not
+write. This was his little vacation; he had resolved to devote it to rest and
+love, and in both matters he prospered. He was soon spilling over with
+vitality, and each day he saw Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experienced
+the old shock of his strength and health.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Be careful,&rdquo; her mother warned her once again. &ldquo;I am afraid
+you are seeing too much of Martin Eden.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Ruth laughed from security. She was sure of herself, and in a few days he
+would be off to sea. Then, by the time he returned, she would be away on her
+visit East. There was a magic, however, in the strength and health of Martin.
+He, too, had been told of her contemplated Eastern trip, and he felt the need
+for haste. Yet he did not know how to make love to a girl like Ruth. Then, too,
+he was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of experience with girls
+and women who had been absolutely different from her. They had known about love
+and life and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things. Her
+prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech,
+and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness. Also he was
+handicapped in another way. He had himself never been in love before. He had
+liked women in that turgid past of his, and been fascinated by some of them,
+but he had not known what it was to love them. He had whistled in a masterful,
+careless way, and they had come to him. They had been diversions, incidents,
+part of the game men play, but a small part at most. And now, and for the first
+time, he was a suppliant, tender and timid and doubting. He did not know the
+way of love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his loved one&rsquo;s
+clear innocence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling on through
+the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of conduct which was to
+the effect that when one played a strange game, he should let the other fellow
+play first. This had stood him in good stead a thousand times and trained him
+as an observer as well. He knew how to watch the thing that was strange, and to
+wait for a weakness, for a place of entrance, to divulge itself. It was like
+sparring for an opening in fist-fighting. And when such an opening came, he
+knew by long experience to play for it and to play hard.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but not daring.
+He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of himself. Had he but known
+it, he was following the right course with her. Love came into the world before
+articulate speech, and in its own early youth it had learned ways and means
+that it had never forgotten. It was in this old, primitive way that Martin
+wooed Ruth. He did not know he was doing it at first, though later he divined
+it. The touch of his hand on hers was vastly more potent than any word he could
+utter, the impact of his strength on her imagination was more alluring than the
+printed poems and spoken passions of a thousand generations of lovers. Whatever
+his tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but the
+touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to her instinct. Her
+judgment was as young as she, but her instincts were as old as the race and
+older. They had been young when love was young, and they were wiser than
+convention and opinion and all the new-born things. So her judgment did not
+act. There was no call upon it, and she did not realize the strength of the
+appeal Martin made from moment to moment to her love-nature. That he loved her,
+on the other hand, was as clear as day, and she consciously delighted in
+beholding his love-manifestations&mdash;the glowing eyes with their tender
+lights, the trembling hands, and the never failing swarthy flush that flooded
+darkly under his sunburn. She even went farther, in a timid way inciting him,
+but doing it so delicately that he never suspected, and doing it
+half-consciously, so that she scarcely suspected herself. She thrilled with
+these proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and she took an Eve-like
+delight in tormenting him and playing upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing unwittingly and
+awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by contact. The touch of his hand was
+pleasant to her, and something deliciously more than pleasant. Martin did not
+know it, but he did know that it was not distasteful to her. Not that they
+touched hands often, save at meeting and parting; but that in handling the
+bicycles, in strapping on the books of verse they carried into the hills, and
+in conning the pages of books side by side, there were opportunities for hand
+to stray against hand. And there were opportunities, too, for her hair to brush
+his cheek, and for shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over the
+beauty of the books. She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which arose from
+nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he desired greatly, when
+they tired of reading, to rest his head in her lap and dream with closed eyes
+about the future that was to be theirs. On Sunday picnics at Shellmound Park
+and Schuetzen Park, in the past, he had rested his head on many laps, and,
+usually, he had slept soundly and selfishly while the girls shaded his face
+from the sun and looked down and loved him and wondered at his lordly
+carelessness of their love. To rest his head in a girl&rsquo;s lap had been the
+easiest thing in the world until now, and now he found Ruth&rsquo;s lap
+inaccessible and impossible. Yet it was right here, in his reticence, that the
+strength of his wooing lay. It was because of this reticence that he never
+alarmed her. Herself fastidious and timid, she never awakened to the perilous
+trend of their intercourse. Subtly and unaware she grew toward him and closer
+to him, while he, sensing the growing closeness, longed to dare but was afraid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened living room
+with a blinding headache.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing can do it any good,&rdquo; she had answered his inquiries.
+&ldquo;And besides, I don&rsquo;t take headache powders. Doctor Hall
+won&rsquo;t permit me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can cure it, I think, and without drugs,&rdquo; was Martin&rsquo;s
+answer. &ldquo;I am not sure, of course, but I&rsquo;d like to try. It&rsquo;s
+simply massage. I learned the trick first from the Japanese. They are a race of
+masseurs, you know. Then I learned it all over again with variations from the
+Hawaiians. They call it <i>lomi-lomi</i>. It can accomplish most of the things
+drugs accomplish and a few things that drugs can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is so good,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, &ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t
+you tired?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would be. Then she
+lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing balm of his strength: Life
+poured from the ends of his fingers, driving the pain before it, or so it
+seemed to her, until with the easement of pain, she fell asleep and he stole
+away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I slept until dinner,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You cured me completely,
+Mr. Eden, and I don&rsquo;t know how to thank you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied to her, and
+there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone conversation, the
+memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth Barrett. What had been done could be
+done again, and he, Martin Eden, could do it and would do it for Ruth Morse. He
+went back to his room and to the volume of Spencer&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Sociology&rdquo; lying open on the bed. But he could not read. Love
+tormented him and overrode his will, so that, despite all determination, he
+found himself at the little ink-stained table. The sonnet he composed that
+night was the first of a love-cycle of fifty sonnets which was completed within
+two months. He had the &ldquo;Love-sonnets from the Portuguese&rdquo; in mind
+as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for great work, at a
+climacteric of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the &ldquo;Love-cycle,&rdquo;
+to reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got more closely
+in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature of their policy and
+content. The hours he spent with Ruth were maddening alike in promise and in
+inconclusiveness. It was a week after he cured her headache that a moonlight
+sail on Lake Merritt was proposed by Norman and seconded by Arthur and Olney.
+Martin was the only one capable of handling a boat, and he was pressed into
+service. Ruth sat near him in the stern, while the three young fellows lounged
+amidships, deep in a wordy wrangle over &ldquo;frat&rdquo; affairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault of the sky
+and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a sudden feeling of
+loneliness. She glanced at him. A puff of wind was heeling the boat over till
+the deck was awash, and he, one hand on tiller and the other on main-sheet, was
+luffing slightly, at the same time peering ahead to make out the near-lying
+north shore. He was unaware of her gaze, and she watched him intently,
+speculating fancifully about the strange warp of soul that led him, a young man
+with signal powers, to fritter away his time on the writing of stories and
+poems foredoomed to mediocrity and failure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen in the starlight, and
+over the firm-poised head, and the old desire to lay her hands upon his neck
+came back to her. The strength she abhorred attracted her. Her feeling of
+loneliness became more pronounced, and she felt tired. Her position on the
+heeling boat irked her, and she remembered the headache he had cured and the
+soothing rest that resided in him. He was sitting beside her, quite beside her,
+and the boat seemed to tilt her toward him. Then arose in her the impulse to
+lean against him, to rest herself against his strength&mdash;a vague,
+half-formed impulse, which, even as she considered it, mastered her and made
+her lean toward him. Or was it the heeling of the boat? She did not know. She
+never knew. She knew only that she was leaning against him and that the
+easement and soothing rest were very good. Perhaps it had been the boat&rsquo;s
+fault, but she made no effort to retrieve it. She leaned lightly against his
+shoulder, but she leaned, and she continued to lean when he shifted his
+position to make it more comfortable for her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a madness, but she refused to consider the madness. She was no longer
+herself but a woman, with a woman&rsquo;s clinging need; and though she leaned
+ever so lightly, the need seemed satisfied. She was no longer tired. Martin did
+not speak. Had he, the spell would have been broken. But his reticence of love
+prolonged it. He was dazed and dizzy. He could not understand what was
+happening. It was too wonderful to be anything but a delirium. He conquered a
+mad desire to let go sheet and tiller and to clasp her in his arms. His
+intuition told him it was the wrong thing to do, and he was glad that sheet and
+tiller kept his hands occupied and fended off temptation. But he luffed the
+boat less delicately, spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as to
+prolong the tack to the north shore. The shore would compel him to go about,
+and the contact would be broken. He sailed with skill, stopping way on the boat
+without exciting the notice of the wranglers, and mentally forgiving his
+hardest voyages in that they had made this marvellous night possible, giving
+him mastery over sea and boat and wind so that he could sail with her beside
+him, her dear weight against him on his shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail, illuminating the boat
+with pearly radiance, Ruth moved away from him. And, even as she moved, she
+felt him move away. The impulse to avoid detection was mutual. The episode was
+tacitly and secretly intimate. She sat apart from him with burning cheeks,
+while the full force of it came home to her. She had been guilty of something
+she would not have her brothers see, nor Olney see. Why had she done it? She
+had never done anything like it in her life, and yet she had been
+moonlight-sailing with young men before. She had never desired to do anything
+like it. She was overcome with shame and with the mystery of her own burgeoning
+womanhood. She stole a glance at Martin, who was busy putting the boat about on
+the other tack, and she could have hated him for having made her do an immodest
+and shameful thing. And he, of all men! Perhaps her mother was right, and she
+was seeing too much of him. It would never happen again, she resolved, and she
+would see less of him in the future. She entertained a wild idea of explaining
+to him the first time they were alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning
+casually the attack of faintness that had overpowered her just before the moon
+came up. Then she remembered how they had drawn mutually away before the
+revealing moon, and she knew he would know it for a lie.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the days that swiftly followed she was no longer herself but a strange,
+puzzling creature, wilful over judgment and scornful of self-analysis, refusing
+to peer into the future or to think about herself and whither she was drifting.
+She was in a fever of tingling mystery, alternately frightened and charmed, and
+in constant bewilderment. She had one idea firmly fixed, however, which insured
+her security. She would not let Martin speak his love. As long as she did this,
+all would be well. In a few days he would be off to sea. And even if he did
+speak, all would be well. It could not be otherwise, for she did not love him.
+Of course, it would be a painful half hour for him, and an embarrassing half
+hour for her, because it would be her first proposal. She thrilled deliciously
+at the thought. She was really a woman, with a man ripe to ask for her in
+marriage. It was a lure to all that was fundamental in her sex. The fabric of
+her life, of all that constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous. The thought
+fluttered in her mind like a flame-attracted moth. She went so far as to
+imagine Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his mouth; and she
+rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness and exhorting him to true and
+noble manhood. And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes. She would make a
+point of that. But no, she must not let him speak at all. She could stop him,
+and she had told her mother that she would. All flushed and burning, she
+regretfully dismissed the conjured situation. Her first proposal would have to
+be deferred to a more propitious time and a more eligible suitor.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap21"></a>CHAPTER XXI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the hush of the
+changing season, a California Indian summer day, with hazy sun and wandering
+wisps of breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air. Filmy purple mists,
+that were not vapors but fabrics woven of color, hid in the recesses of the
+hills. San Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her heights. The intervening
+bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing craft lay motionless or
+drifted with the lazy tide. Far Tamalpais, barely seen in the silver haze,
+bulked hugely by the Golden Gate, the latter a pale gold pathway under the
+westering sun. Beyond, the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line
+tumbled cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first
+blustering breath of winter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The erasure of summer was at hand. Yet summer lingered, fading and fainting
+among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze
+from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm content of having
+lived and lived well. And among the hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and
+Ruth sat side by side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading aloud
+from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved Browning as it is given to few
+men to be loved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the reading languished. The spell of passing beauty all about them was too
+strong. The golden year was dying as it had lived, a beautiful and unrepentant
+voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content freighted heavily the air. It
+entered into them, dreamy and languorous, weakening the fibres of resolution,
+suffusing the face of morality, or of judgment, with haze and purple mist.
+Martin felt tender and melting, and from time to time warm glows passed over
+him. His head was very near to hers, and when wandering phantoms of breeze
+stirred her hair so that it touched his face, the printed pages swam before his
+eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe you know a word of what you are reading,&rdquo;
+she said once when he had lost his place.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of becoming awkward,
+when a retort came to his lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t believe you know either. What was the last sonnet
+about?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; she laughed frankly. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve
+already forgotten. Don&rsquo;t let us read any more. The day is too
+beautiful.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It will be our last in the hills for some time,&rdquo; he announced
+gravely. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a storm gathering out there on the
+sea-rim.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and they sat idly and silently,
+gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed and did not see. Ruth
+glanced sidewise at his neck. She did not lean toward him. She was drawn by
+some force outside of herself and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny.
+It was only an inch to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her
+part. Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly touches a flower, and
+just as lightly was the counter-pressure. She felt his shoulder press hers, and
+a tremor run through him. Then was the time for her to draw back. But she had
+become an automaton. Her actions had passed beyond the control of her
+will&mdash;she never thought of control or will in the delicious madness that
+was upon her. His arm began to steal behind her and around her. She waited its
+slow progress in a torment of delight. She waited, she knew not for what,
+panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and a fever of expectancy in
+all her blood. The girdling arm lifted higher and drew her toward him, drew her
+slowly and caressingly. She could wait no longer. With a tired sigh, and with
+an impulsive movement all her own, unpremeditated, spasmodic, she rested her
+head upon his breast. His head bent over swiftly, and, as his lips approached,
+hers flew to meet them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This must be love, she thought, in the one rational moment that was vouchsafed
+her. If it was not love, it was too shameful. It could be nothing else than
+love. She loved the man whose arms were around her and whose lips were pressed
+to hers. She pressed more tightly to him, with a snuggling movement of her
+body. And a moment later, tearing herself half out of his embrace, suddenly and
+exultantly she reached up and placed both hands upon Martin Eden&rsquo;s
+sunburnt neck. So exquisite was the pang of love and desire fulfilled that she
+uttered a low moan, relaxed her hands, and lay half-swooning in his arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken for a long time. Twice he
+bent and kissed her, and each time her lips met his shyly and her body made its
+happy, nestling movement. She clung to him, unable to release herself, and he
+sat, half supporting her in his arms, as he gazed with unseeing eyes at the
+blur of the great city across the bay. For once there were no visions in his
+brain. Only colors and lights and glows pulsed there, warm as the day and warm
+as his love. He bent over her. She was speaking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When did you love me?&rdquo; she whispered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid eye on you. I
+was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has passed since then I
+have only grown the madder. I am maddest, now, dear. I am almost a lunatic, my
+head is so turned with joy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad I am a woman, Martin&mdash;dear,&rdquo; she said, after a long
+sigh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then asked:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you? When did you first know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I knew it all the time, almost, from the first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I have been as blind as a bat!&rdquo; he cried, a ring of vexation
+in his voice. &ldquo;I never dreamed it until just how, when I&mdash;when I
+kissed you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t mean that.&rdquo; She drew herself partly away and looked
+at him. &ldquo;I meant I knew you loved almost from the first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It came to me suddenly.&rdquo; She was speaking very slowly, her eyes
+warm and fluttery and melting, a soft flush on her cheeks that did not go away.
+&ldquo;I never knew until just now when&mdash;you put your arms around me. And
+I never expected to marry you, Martin, not until just now. How did you make me
+love you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; he laughed, &ldquo;unless just by loving you,
+for I loved you hard enough to melt the heart of a stone, much less the heart
+of the living, breathing woman you are.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This is so different from what I thought love would be,&rdquo; she
+announced irrelevantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you think it would be like?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t think it would be like this.&rdquo; She was looking into
+his eyes at the moment, but her own dropped as she continued, &ldquo;You see, I
+didn&rsquo;t know what this was like.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He offered to draw her toward him again, but it was no more than a tentative
+muscular movement of the girdling arm, for he feared that he might be greedy.
+Then he felt her body yielding, and once again she was close in his arms and
+lips were pressed on lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What will my people say?&rdquo; she queried, with sudden apprehension,
+in one of the pauses.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know. We can find out very easily any time we are so
+minded.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if mamma objects? I am sure I am afraid to tell her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me tell her,&rdquo; he volunteered valiantly. &ldquo;I think your
+mother does not like me, but I can win her around. A fellow who can win you can
+win anything. And if we don&rsquo;t&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, we&rsquo;ll have each other. But there&rsquo;s no danger not
+winning your mother to our marriage. She loves you too well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should not like to break her heart,&rdquo; Ruth said pensively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He felt like assuring her that mothers&rsquo; hearts were not so easily broken,
+but instead he said, &ldquo;And love is the greatest thing in the world.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me. I am frightened now,
+when I think of you and of what you have been. You must be very, very good to
+me. Remember, after all, that I am only a child. I never loved before.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nor I. We are both children together. And we are fortunate above most,
+for we have found our first love in each other.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that is impossible!&rdquo; she cried, withdrawing herself from his
+arms with a swift, passionate movement. &ldquo;Impossible for you. You have
+been a sailor, and sailors, I have heard, are&mdash;are&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her voice faltered and died away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Are addicted to having a wife in every port?&rdquo; he suggested.
+&ldquo;Is that what you mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she answered in a low voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that is not love.&rdquo; He spoke authoritatively. &ldquo;I have
+been in many ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw you
+that first night. Do you know, when I said good night and went away, I was
+almost arrested.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Arrested?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too&mdash;with love
+for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for you,
+and we have strayed away from the point.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I said that I never loved anybody but you,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;You
+are my first, my very first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And yet you have been a sailor,&rdquo; she objected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that doesn&rsquo;t prevent me from loving you the first.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And there have been women&mdash;other women&mdash;oh!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to Martin Eden&rsquo;s supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of tears
+that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive away. And all the
+while there was running through his head Kipling&rsquo;s line: &ldquo;<i>And
+the Colonel&rsquo;s lady and Judy O&rsquo;Grady are sisters under their
+skins</i>.&rdquo; It was true, he decided; though the novels he had read had
+led him to believe otherwise. His idea, for which the novels were responsible,
+had been that only formal proposals obtained in the upper classes. It was all
+right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each other
+by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights to make love
+in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable. Yet the novels were wrong. Here was
+a proof of it. The same pressures and caresses, unaccompanied by speech, that
+were efficacious with the girls of the working-class, were equally efficacious
+with the girls above the working-class. They were all of the same flesh, after
+all, sisters under their skins; and he might have known as much himself had he
+remembered his Spencer. As he held Ruth in his arms and soothed her, he took
+great consolation in the thought that the Colonel&rsquo;s lady and Judy
+O&rsquo;Grady were pretty much alike under their skins. It brought Ruth closer
+to him, made her possible. Her dear flesh was as anybody&rsquo;s flesh, as his
+flesh. There was no bar to their marriage. Class difference was the only
+difference, and class was extrinsic. It could be shaken off. A slave, he had
+read, had risen to the Roman purple. That being so, then he could rise to Ruth.
+Under her purity, and saintliness, and culture, and ethereal beauty of soul,
+she was, in things fundamentally human, just like Lizzie Connolly and all
+Lizzie Connollys. All that was possible of them was possible of her. She could
+love, and hate, maybe have hysterics; and she could certainly be jealous, as
+she was jealous now, uttering her last sobs in his arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Besides, I am older than you,&rdquo; she remarked suddenly, opening her
+eyes and looking up at him, &ldquo;three years older.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hush, you are only a child, and I am forty years older than you, in
+experience,&rdquo; was his answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In truth, they were children together, so far as love was concerned, and they
+were as naive and immature in the expression of their love as a pair of
+children, and this despite the fact that she was crammed with a university
+education and that his head was full of scientific philosophy and the hard
+facts of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They sat on through the passing glory of the day, talking as lovers are prone
+to talk, marvelling at the wonder of love and at destiny that had flung them so
+strangely together, and dogmatically believing that they loved to a degree
+never attained by lovers before. And they returned insistently, again and
+again, to a rehearsal of their first impressions of each other and to hopeless
+attempts to analyze just precisely what they felt for each other and how much
+there was of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cloud-masses on the western horizon received the descending sun, and the
+circle of the sky turned to rose, while the zenith glowed with the same warm
+color. The rosy light was all about them, flooding over them, as she sang,
+&ldquo;Good-by, Sweet Day.&rdquo; She sang softly, leaning in the cradle of his
+arm, her hands in his, their hearts in each other&rsquo;s hands.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap22"></a>CHAPTER XXII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Morse did not require a mother&rsquo;s intuition to read the advertisement
+in Ruth&rsquo;s face when she returned home. The flush that would not leave the
+cheeks told the simple story, and more eloquently did the eyes, large and
+bright, reflecting an unmistakable inward glory.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What has happened?&rdquo; Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till
+Ruth had gone to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know?&rdquo; Ruth queried, with trembling lips.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For reply, her mother&rsquo;s arm went around her, and a hand was softly
+caressing her hair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He did not speak,&rdquo; she blurted out. &ldquo;I did not intend that
+it should happen, and I would never have let him speak&mdash;only he
+didn&rsquo;t speak.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if he did not speak, then nothing could have happened, could
+it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it did, just the same.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling about?&rdquo; Mrs.
+Morse was bewildered. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think I know what happened, after
+all. What did happen?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth looked at her mother in surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I thought you knew. Why, we&rsquo;re engaged, Martin and I.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, he didn&rsquo;t speak,&rdquo; Ruth explained. &ldquo;He just loved
+me, that was all. I was as surprised as you are. He didn&rsquo;t say a word. He
+just put his arm around me. And&mdash;and I was not myself. And he kissed me,
+and I kissed him. I couldn&rsquo;t help it. I just had to. And then I knew I
+loved him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of her mother&rsquo;s kiss,
+but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a dreadful accident, I know,&rdquo; Ruth recommenced with a
+sinking voice. &ldquo;And I don&rsquo;t know how you will ever forgive me. But
+I couldn&rsquo;t help it. I did not dream that I loved him until that moment.
+And you must tell father for me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Would it not be better not to tell your father? Let me see Martin Eden,
+and talk with him, and explain. He will understand and release you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No! no!&rdquo; Ruth cried, starting up. &ldquo;I do not want to be
+released. I love him, and love is very sweet. I am going to marry him&mdash;of
+course, if you will let me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father and I&mdash;oh, no,
+no; no man picked out for you, or anything like that. Our plans go no farther
+than your marrying some man in your own station in life, a good and honorable
+gentleman, whom you will select yourself, when you love him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I love Martin already,&rdquo; was the plaintive protest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We would not influence your choice in any way; but you are our daughter,
+and we could not bear to see you make a marriage such as this. He has nothing
+but roughness and coarseness to offer you in exchange for all that is refined
+and delicate in you. He is no match for you in any way. He could not support
+you. We have no foolish ideas about wealth, but comfort is another matter, and
+our daughter should at least marry a man who can give her that&mdash;and not a
+penniless adventurer, a sailor, a cowboy, a smuggler, and Heaven knows what
+else, who, in addition to everything, is hare-brained and irresponsible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth was silent. Every word she recognized as true.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses
+and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish. A man thinking of
+marriage should be preparing for marriage. But not he. As I have said, and I
+know you agree with me, he is irresponsible. And why should he not be? It is
+the way of sailors. He has never learned to be economical or temperate. The
+spendthrift years have marked him. It is not his fault, of course, but that
+does not alter his nature. And have you thought of the years of licentiousness
+he inevitably has lived? Have you thought of that, daughter? You know what
+marriage means.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I have thought.&rdquo; Ruth waited a long time for the thought to frame
+itself. &ldquo;And it is terrible. It sickens me to think of it. I told you it
+was a dreadful accident, my loving him; but I can&rsquo;t help myself. Could
+you help loving father? Then it is the same with me. There is something in me,
+in him&mdash;I never knew it was there until to-day&mdash;but it is there, and
+it makes me love him. I never thought to love him, but, you see, I do,&rdquo;
+she concluded, a certain faint triumph in her voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion agreeing to wait an
+indeterminate time without doing anything.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The same conclusion was reached, a little later that night, between Mrs. Morse
+and her husband, after she had made due confession of the miscarriage of her
+plans.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It could hardly have come otherwise,&rdquo; was Mr. Morse&rsquo;s
+judgment. &ldquo;This sailor-fellow has been the only man she was in touch
+with. Sooner or later she was going to awaken anyway; and she did awaken, and
+lo! here was this sailor-fellow, the only accessible man at the moment, and of
+course she promptly loved him, or thought she did, which amounts to the same
+thing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Morse took it upon herself to work slowly and indirectly upon Ruth, rather
+than to combat her. There would be plenty of time for this, for Martin was not
+in position to marry.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let her see all she wants of him,&rdquo; was Mr. Morse&rsquo;s advice.
+&ldquo;The more she knows him, the less she&rsquo;ll love him, I wager. And
+give her plenty of contrast. Make a point of having young people at the house.
+Young women and young men, all sorts of young men, clever men, men who have
+done something or who are doing things, men of her own class, gentlemen. She
+can gauge him by them. They will show him up for what he is. And after all, he
+is a mere boy of twenty-one. Ruth is no more than a child. It is calf love with
+the pair of them, and they will grow out of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So the matter rested. Within the family it was accepted that Ruth and Martin
+were engaged, but no announcement was made. The family did not think it would
+ever be necessary. Also, it was tacitly understood that it was to be a long
+engagement. They did not ask Martin to go to work, nor to cease writing. They
+did not intend to encourage him to mend himself. And he aided and abetted them
+in their unfriendly designs, for going to work was farthest from his thoughts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder if you&rsquo;ll like what I have done!&rdquo; he said to Ruth
+several days later. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve decided that boarding with my sister is
+too expensive, and I am going to board myself. I&rsquo;ve rented a little room
+out in North Oakland, retired neighborhood and all the rest, you know, and
+I&rsquo;ve bought an oil-burner on which to cook.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth was overjoyed. The oil-burner especially pleased her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was the way Mr. Butler began his start,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin frowned inwardly at the citation of that worthy gentleman, and went on:
+&ldquo;I put stamps on all my manuscripts and started them off to the editors
+again. Then to-day I moved in, and to-morrow I start to work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A position!&rdquo; she cried, betraying the gladness of her surprise in
+all her body, nestling closer to him, pressing his hand, smiling. &ldquo;And
+you never told me! What is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I meant that I was going to work at my writing.&rdquo; Her face fell,
+and he went on hastily. &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t misjudge me. I am not going in this
+time with any iridescent ideas. It is to be a cold, prosaic, matter-of-fact
+business proposition. It is better than going to sea again, and I shall earn
+more money than any position in Oakland can bring an unskilled man.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, this vacation I have taken has given me perspective. I
+haven&rsquo;t been working the life out of my body, and I haven&rsquo;t been
+writing, at least not for publication. All I&rsquo;ve done has been to love you
+and to think. I&rsquo;ve read some, too, but it has been part of my thinking,
+and I have read principally magazines. I have generalized about myself, and the
+world, my place in it, and my chance to win to a place that will be fit for
+you. Also, I&rsquo;ve been reading Spencer&rsquo;s &lsquo;Philosophy of
+Style,&rsquo; and found out a lot of what was the matter with me&mdash;or my
+writing, rather; and for that matter with most of the writing that is published
+every month in the magazines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the upshot of it all&mdash;of my thinking and reading and
+loving&mdash;is that I am going to move to Grub Street. I shall leave
+masterpieces alone and do hack-work&mdash;jokes, paragraphs, feature articles,
+humorous verse, and society verse&mdash;all the rot for which there seems so
+much demand. Then there are the newspaper syndicates, and the newspaper
+short-story syndicates, and the syndicates for the Sunday supplements. I can go
+ahead and hammer out the stuff they want, and earn the equivalent of a good
+salary by it. There are free-lances, you know, who earn as much as four or five
+hundred a month. I don&rsquo;t care to become as they; but I&rsquo;ll earn a
+good living, and have plenty of time to myself, which I wouldn&rsquo;t have in
+any position.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then, I&rsquo;ll have my spare time for study and for real work. In
+between the grind I&rsquo;ll try my hand at masterpieces, and I&rsquo;ll study
+and prepare myself for the writing of masterpieces. Why, I am amazed at the
+distance I have come already. When I first tried to write, I had nothing to
+write about except a few paltry experiences which I neither understood nor
+appreciated. But I had no thoughts. I really didn&rsquo;t. I didn&rsquo;t even
+have the words with which to think. My experiences were so many meaningless
+pictures. But as I began to add to my knowledge, and to my vocabulary, I saw
+something more in my experiences than mere pictures. I retained the pictures
+and I found their interpretation. That was when I began to do good work, when I
+wrote &lsquo;Adventure,&rsquo; &lsquo;Joy,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Pot,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;The Wine of Life,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Jostling Street,&rsquo; the
+&lsquo;Love-cycle,&rsquo; and the &lsquo;Sea Lyrics.&rsquo; I shall write more
+like them, and better; but I shall do it in my spare time. My feet are on the
+solid earth, now. Hack-work and income first, masterpieces afterward. Just to
+show you, I wrote half a dozen jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and
+just as I was going to bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at a
+triolet&mdash;a humorous one; and inside an hour I had written four. They ought
+to be worth a dollar apiece. Four dollars right there for a few afterthoughts
+on the way to bed.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course it&rsquo;s all valueless, just so much dull and sordid
+plodding; but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at sixty dollars
+a month, adding up endless columns of meaningless figures until one dies. And
+furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in touch with things literary and gives me
+time to try bigger things.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what good are these bigger things, these masterpieces?&rdquo; Ruth
+demanded. &ldquo;You can&rsquo;t sell them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes, I can,&rdquo; he began; but she interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All those you named, and which you say yourself are good&mdash;you have
+not sold any of them. We can&rsquo;t get married on masterpieces that
+won&rsquo;t sell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then we&rsquo;ll get married on triolets that will sell,&rdquo; he
+asserted stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive
+sweetheart toward him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Listen to this,&rdquo; he went on in attempted gayety. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+not art, but it&rsquo;s a dollar.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;He came in<br />
+    When I was out,<br />
+To borrow some tin<br />
+Was why he came in,<br />
+    And he went without;<br />
+So I was in<br />
+    And he was out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at variance with the
+dejection that came into his face as he finished. He had drawn no smile from
+Ruth. She was looking at him in an earnest and troubled way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It may be a dollar,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but it is a jester&rsquo;s
+dollar, the fee of a clown. Don&rsquo;t you see, Martin, the whole thing is
+lowering. I want the man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than
+a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You want him to be like&mdash;say Mr. Butler?&rdquo; he suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know you don&rsquo;t like Mr. Butler,&rdquo; she began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Butler&rsquo;s all right,&rdquo; he interrupted. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s
+only his indigestion I find fault with. But to save me I can&rsquo;t see any
+difference between writing jokes or comic verse and running a type-writer,
+taking dictation, or keeping sets of books. It is all a means to an end. Your
+theory is for me to begin with keeping books in order to become a successful
+lawyer or man of business. Mine is to begin with hack-work and develop into an
+able author.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is a difference,&rdquo; she insisted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can&rsquo;t sell.
+You have tried, you know that,&mdash;but the editors won&rsquo;t buy it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Give me time, dear,&rdquo; he pleaded. &ldquo;The hack-work is only
+makeshift, and I don&rsquo;t take it seriously. Give me two years. I shall
+succeed in that time, and the editors will be glad to buy my good work. I know
+what I am saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; I know what
+literature is, now; I know the average rot that is poured out by a lot of
+little men; and I know that at the end of two years I shall be on the highroad
+to success. As for business, I shall never succeed at it. I am not in sympathy
+with it. It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and mercenary, and tricky. Anyway I
+am not adapted for it. I&rsquo;d never get beyond a clerkship, and how could
+you and I be happy on the paltry earnings of a clerk? I want the best of
+everything in the world for you, and the only time when I won&rsquo;t want it
+will be when there is something better. And I&rsquo;m going to get it, going to
+get all of it. The income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap. A
+&lsquo;best-seller&rsquo; will earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred
+thousand dollars&mdash;sometimes more and sometimes less; but, as a rule,
+pretty close to those figures.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had hoped and planned otherwise. I had thought, and I still think,
+that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand&mdash;you already know
+type-writing&mdash;and go into father&rsquo;s office. You have a good mind, and
+I am confident you would succeed as a lawyer.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap23"></a>CHAPTER XXIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter her nor
+diminish her in Martin&rsquo;s eyes. In the breathing spell of the vacation he
+had taken, he had spent many hours in self-analysis, and thereby learned much
+of himself. He had discovered that he loved beauty more than fame, and that
+what desire he had for fame was largely for Ruth&rsquo;s sake. It was for this
+reason that his desire for fame was strong. He wanted to be great in the
+world&rsquo;s eyes; &ldquo;to make good,&rdquo; as he expressed it, in order
+that the woman he loved should be proud of him and deem him worthy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of serving her was to
+him sufficient wage. And more than beauty he loved Ruth. He considered love the
+finest thing in the world. It was love that had worked the revolution in him,
+changing him from an uncouth sailor to a student and an artist; therefore, to
+him, the finest and greatest of the three, greater than learning and artistry,
+was love. Already he had discovered that his brain went beyond Ruth&rsquo;s,
+just as it went beyond the brains of her brothers, or the brain of her father.
+In spite of every advantage of university training, and in the face of her
+bachelorship of arts, his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or
+so of self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of the world
+and art and life that she could never hope to possess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor her love for
+him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was too loyal a lover for him to
+besmirch love with criticism. What did love have to do with Ruth&rsquo;s
+divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or equal
+suffrage? They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason; it was
+superrational. He could not belittle love. He worshipped it. Love lay on the
+mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was a sublimated condition
+of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it came rarely. Thanks to the
+school of scientific philosophers he favored, he knew the biological
+significance of love; but by a refined process of the same scientific reasoning
+he reached the conclusion that the human organism achieved its highest purpose
+in love, that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as the highest
+guerdon of life. Thus, he considered the lover blessed over all creatures, and
+it was a delight to him to think of &ldquo;God&rsquo;s own mad lover,&rdquo;
+rising above the things of earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and
+applause, rising above life itself and &ldquo;dying on a kiss.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he reasoned out
+later. In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation except when he went to
+see Ruth, and living like a Spartan. He paid two dollars and a half a month
+rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a
+virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood
+of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals
+in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and
+saloon for fifteen cents. From detesting her and her foul tongue at first,
+Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made. There were
+but four rooms in the little house&mdash;three, when Martin&rsquo;s was
+subtracted. One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous
+with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous departed babes,
+was kept strictly for company. The blinds were always down, and her barefooted
+tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred precinct save on state occasions.
+She cooked, and all ate, in the kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched,
+and ironed clothes on all days of the week except Sunday; for her income came
+largely from taking in washing from her more prosperous neighbors. Remained the
+bedroom, small as the one occupied by Martin, into which she and her seven
+little ones crowded and slept. It was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it
+was accomplished, and from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly
+every detail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the soft
+chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of birds. Another source of
+income to Maria were her cows, two of them, which she milked night and morning
+and which gained a surreptitious livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that
+grew on either side the public side walks, attended always by one or more of
+her ragged boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping their
+eyes out for the poundmen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept house.
+Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch, was the kitchen
+table that served as desk, library, and type-writing stand. The bed, against
+the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space of the room. The table
+was flanked on one side by a gaudy bureau, manufactured for profit and not for
+service, the thin veneer of which was shed day by day. This bureau stood in the
+corner, and in the opposite corner, on the table&rsquo;s other flank, was the
+kitchen&mdash;the oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and
+cooking utensils, a shelf on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of water on
+the floor. Martin had to carry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no
+tap in his room. On days when there was much steam to his cooking, the harvest
+of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous. Over the bed, hoisted by a
+tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle. At first he had tried to keep it in the
+basement; but the tribe of Silva, loosening the bearings and puncturing the
+tires, had driven him out. Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a
+howling southeaster drenched the wheel a night-long. Then he had retreated with
+it to his room and slung it aloft.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had accumulated and for
+which there was no room on the table or under the table. Hand in hand with
+reading, he had developed the habit of making notes, and so copiously did he
+make them that there would have been no existence for him in the confined
+quarters had he not rigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the
+notes were hung. Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was a
+difficult task. He could not open the door without first closing the closet
+door, and <i>vice versa</i>. It was impossible for him anywhere to traverse the
+room in a straight line. To go from the door to the head of the bed was a
+zigzag course that he was never quite able to accomplish in the dark without
+collisions. Having settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to
+steer sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen. Next, he sheered to the left,
+to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too generous, brought him
+against the corner of the table. With a sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated
+the sheer and bore off to the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which
+was the bed, the other the table. When the one chair in the room was at its
+usual place before the table, the canal was unnavigable. When the chair was not
+in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when
+cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming skilful
+enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying. Also, so small was
+the little corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to
+reach anything he needed. In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting down;
+standing up, he was too often in his own way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything, he possessed
+knowledge of the various foods that were at the same time nutritious and cheap.
+Pea-soup was a common article in his diet, as well as potatoes and beans, the
+latter large and brown and cooked in Mexican style. Rice, cooked as American
+housewives never cook it and can never learn to cook it, appeared on
+Martin&rsquo;s table at least once a day. Dried fruits were less expensive than
+fresh, and he had usually a pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, for they
+took the place of butter on his bread. Occasionally he graced his table with a
+piece of round-steak, or with a soup-bone. Coffee, without cream or milk, he
+had twice a day, in the evening substituting tea; but both coffee and tea were
+excellently cooked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was need for him to be economical. His vacation had consumed nearly all
+he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his market that weeks must
+elapse before he could hope for the first returns from his hack-work. Except at
+such times as he saw Ruth, or dropped in to see his sister Gertude, he lived a
+recluse, in each day accomplishing at least three days&rsquo; labor of ordinary
+men. He slept a scant five hours, and only one with a constitution of iron
+could have held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, to nineteen
+consecutive hours of toil. He never lost a moment. On the looking-glass were
+lists of definitions and pronunciations; when shaving, or dressing, or combing
+his hair, he conned these lists over. Similar lists were on the wall over the
+oil-stove, and they were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in
+washing the dishes. New lists continually displaced the old ones. Every strange
+or partly familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately jotted down,
+and later, when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were typed and pinned
+to the wall or looking-glass. He even carried them in his pockets, and reviewed
+them at odd moments on the street, or while waiting in butcher shop or grocery
+to be served.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who had arrived, he
+noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by which they
+had been achieved&mdash;the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, the
+points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these he made lists for
+study. He did not ape. He sought principles. He drew up lists of effective and
+fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, he was
+able to induce the general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast
+about for new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and
+appraise them properly. In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases,
+the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like
+flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid
+desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle that lay behind and
+beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it
+for himself. He was not content with the fair face of beauty. He dissected
+beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells
+alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and
+learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty
+itself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not work
+blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting to chance
+and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be right and fine.
+He had no patience with chance effects. He wanted to know why and how. His was
+deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the thing
+itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in sight and the means of
+realizing that end in his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed
+to failure. On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and
+phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all
+tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable
+connotations. Before such he bowed down and marvelled, knowing that they were
+beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And no matter how much he dissected
+beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty
+possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he
+did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated. He knew full well,
+from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimate knowledge of anything, and
+that the mystery of beauty was no less than that of life&mdash;nay,
+more&mdash;that the fibres of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he
+himself was but a bit of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine
+and star-dust and wonder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his essay
+entitled &ldquo;Star-dust,&rdquo; in which he had his fling, not at the
+principles of criticism, but at the principal critics. It was brilliant, deep,
+philosophical, and deliciously touched with laughter. Also it was promptly
+rejected by the magazines as often as it was submitted. But having cleared his
+mind of it, he went serenely on his way. It was a habit he developed, of
+incubating and maturing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing into
+the type-writer with it. That it did not see print was a matter of small moment
+with him. The writing of it was the culminating act of a long mental process,
+the drawing together of scattered threads of thought and the final generalizing
+upon all the data with which his mind was burdened. To write such an article
+was the conscious effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh
+material and problems. It was in a way akin to that common habit of men and
+women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who periodically and volubly
+break their long-suffering silence and &ldquo;have their say&rdquo; till the
+last word is said.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap24"></a>CHAPTER XXIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The weeks passed. Martin ran out of money, and publishers&rsquo; checks were
+far away as ever. All his important manuscripts had come back and been started
+out again, and his hack-work fared no better. His little kitchen was no longer
+graced with a variety of foods. Caught in the pinch with a part sack of rice
+and a few pounds of dried apricots, rice and apricots was his menu three times
+a day for five days hand-running. Then he startled to realize on his credit.
+The Portuguese grocer, to whom he had hitherto paid cash, called a halt when
+Martin&rsquo;s bill reached the magnificent total of three dollars and
+eighty-five cents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For you see,&rdquo; said the grocer, &ldquo;you no catcha da work, I
+losa da mon&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Martin could reply nothing. There was no way of explaining. It was not true
+business principle to allow credit to a strong-bodied young fellow of the
+working-class who was too lazy to work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You catcha da job, I let you have mora da grub,&rdquo; the grocer
+assured Martin. &ldquo;No job, no grub. Thata da business.&rdquo; And then, to
+show that it was purely business foresight and not prejudice, &ldquo;Hava da
+drink on da house&mdash;good friends justa da same.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Martin drank, in his easy way, to show that he was good friends with the
+house, and then went supperless to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The fruit store, where Martin had bought his vegetables, was run by an American
+whose business principles were so weak that he let Martin run a bill of five
+dollars before stopping his credit. The baker stopped at two dollars, and the
+butcher at four dollars. Martin added his debts and found that he was possessed
+of a total credit in all the world of fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents.
+He was up with his type-writer rent, but he estimated that he could get two
+months&rsquo; credit on that, which would be eight dollars. When that occurred,
+he would have exhausted all possible credit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last purchase from the fruit store had been a sack of potatoes, and for a
+week he had potatoes, and nothing but potatoes, three times a day. An
+occasional dinner at Ruth&rsquo;s helped to keep strength in his body, though
+he found it tantalizing enough to refuse further helping when his appetite was
+raging at sight of so much food spread before it. Now and again, though
+afflicted with secret shame, he dropped in at his sister&rsquo;s at meal-time
+and ate as much as he dared&mdash;more than he dared at the Morse table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Day by day he worked on, and day by day the postman delivered to him rejected
+manuscripts. He had no money for stamps, so the manuscripts accumulated in a
+heap under the table. Came a day when for forty hours he had not tasted food.
+He could not hope for a meal at Ruth&rsquo;s, for she was away to San Rafael on
+a two weeks&rsquo; visit; and for very shame&rsquo;s sake he could not go to
+his sister&rsquo;s. To cap misfortune, the postman, in his afternoon round,
+brought him five returned manuscripts. Then it was that Martin wore his
+overcoat down into Oakland, and came back without it, but with five dollars
+tinkling in his pocket. He paid a dollar each on account to the four tradesmen,
+and in his kitchen fried steak and onions, made coffee, and stewed a large pot
+of prunes. And having dined, he sat down at his table-desk and completed before
+midnight an essay which he entitled &ldquo;The Dignity of Usury.&rdquo; Having
+typed it out, he flung it under the table, for there had been nothing left from
+the five dollars with which to buy stamps.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, reducing the amount
+available for food by putting stamps on all his manuscripts and sending them
+out. He was disappointed with his hack-work. Nobody cared to buy. He compared
+it with what he found in the newspapers, weeklies, and cheap magazines, and
+decided that his was better, far better, than the average; yet it would not
+sell. Then he discovered that most of the newspapers printed a great deal of
+what was called &ldquo;plate&rdquo; stuff, and he got the address of the
+association that furnished it. His own work that he sent in was returned, along
+with a stereotyped slip informing him that the staff supplied all the copy that
+was needed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of incident and
+anecdote. Here was a chance. His paragraphs were returned, and though he tried
+repeatedly he never succeeded in placing one. Later on, when it no longer
+mattered, he learned that the associate editors and sub-editors augmented their
+salaries by supplying those paragraphs themselves. The comic weeklies returned
+his jokes and humorous verse, and the light society verse he wrote for the
+large magazines found no abiding-place. Then there was the newspaper storiette.
+He knew that he could write better ones than were published. Managing to obtain
+the addresses of two newspaper syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes.
+When he had written twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased. And yet,
+from day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and weeklies, scores and
+scores of storiettes, not one of which would compare with his. In his
+despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever, that he was
+hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-deluded pretender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever. He folded the stamps in
+with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and from three weeks to a
+month afterward the postman came up the steps and handed him the manuscript.
+Surely there were no live, warm editors at the other end. It was all wheels and
+cogs and oil-cups&mdash;a clever mechanism operated by automatons. He reached
+stages of despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at all. He had never
+received a sign of the existence of one, and from absence of judgment in
+rejecting all he wrote it seemed plausible that editors were myths,
+manufactured and maintained by office boys, typesetters, and pressmen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and they were not
+all happy. He was afflicted always with a gnawing restlessness, more
+tantalizing than in the old days before he possessed her love; for now that he
+did possess her love, the possession of her was far away as ever. He had asked
+for two years; time was flying, and he was achieving nothing. Again, he was
+always conscious of the fact that she did not approve what he was doing. She
+did not say so directly. Yet indirectly she let him understand it as clearly
+and definitely as she could have spoken it. It was not resentment with her, but
+disapproval; though less sweet-natured women might have resented where she was
+no more than disappointed. Her disappointment lay in that this man she had
+taken to mould, refused to be moulded. To a certain extent she had found his
+clay plastic, then it had developed stubbornness, declining to be shaped in the
+image of her father or of Mr. Butler.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse yet, misunderstood.
+This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could live in any number of
+pigeonholes of human existence, she thought wilful and most obstinate because
+she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole, which was the only one she
+knew. She could not follow the flights of his mind, and when his brain got
+beyond her, she deemed him erratic. Nobody else&rsquo;s brain ever got beyond
+her. She could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and Olney;
+wherefore, when she could not follow Martin, she believed the fault lay with
+him. It was the old tragedy of insularity trying to serve as mentor to the
+universal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You worship at the shrine of the established,&rdquo; he told her once,
+in a discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater. &ldquo;I grant that as
+authorities to quote they are most excellent&mdash;the two foremost literary
+critics in the United States. Every school teacher in the land looks up to
+Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism. Yet I read his stuff, and it
+seems to me the perfection of the felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he
+is no more than a ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess. And Praps is no
+better. His &lsquo;Hemlock Mosses,&rsquo; for instance is beautifully written.
+Not a comma is out of place; and the tone&mdash;ah!&mdash;is lofty, so lofty.
+He is the best-paid critic in the United States. Though, Heaven forbid!
+he&rsquo;s not a critic at all. They do criticism better in England.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it so
+beautifully and morally and contentedly. Their reviews remind me of a British
+Sunday. They are the popular mouthpieces. They back up your professors of
+English, and your professors of English back them up. And there isn&rsquo;t an
+original idea in any of their skulls. They know only the established,&mdash;in
+fact, they are the established. They are weak minded, and the established
+impresses itself upon them as easily as the name of the brewery is impressed on
+a beer bottle. And their function is to catch all the young fellows attending
+the university, to drive out of their minds any glimmering originality that may
+chance to be there, and to put upon them the stamp of the established.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think I am nearer the truth,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;when I stand
+by the established, than you are, raging around like an iconoclastic South Sea
+Islander.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was the missionary who did the image breaking,&rdquo; he laughed.
+&ldquo;And unfortunately, all the missionaries are off among the heathen, so
+there are none left at home to break those old images, Mr. Vanderwater and Mr.
+Praps.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the college professors, as well,&rdquo; she added.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head emphatically. &ldquo;No; the science professors should live.
+They&rsquo;re really great. But it would be a good deed to break the heads of
+nine-tenths of the English professors&mdash;little, microscopic-minded
+parrots!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Which was rather severe on the professors, but which to Ruth was blasphemy. She
+could not help but measure the professors, neat, scholarly, in fitting clothes,
+speaking in well-modulated voices, breathing of culture and refinement, with
+this almost indescribable young fellow whom somehow she loved, whose clothes
+never would fit him, whose heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew excited
+when he talked, substituting abuse for calm statement and passionate utterance
+for cool self-possession. They at least earned good salaries and
+were&mdash;yes, she compelled herself to face it&mdash;were gentlemen; while he
+could not earn a penny, and he was not as they.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She did not weigh Martin&rsquo;s words nor judge his argument by them. Her
+conclusion that his argument was wrong was reached&mdash;unconsciously, it is
+true&mdash;by a comparison of externals. They, the professors, were right in
+their literary judgments because they were successes. Martin&rsquo;s literary
+judgments were wrong because he could not sell his wares. To use his own
+phrase, they made good, and he did not make good. And besides, it did not seem
+reasonable that he should be right&mdash;he who had stood, so short a time
+before, in that same living room, blushing and awkward, acknowledging his
+introduction, looking fearfully about him at the bric-a-brac his swinging
+shoulders threatened to break, asking how long since Swinburne died, and
+boastfully announcing that he had read &ldquo;Excelsior&rdquo; and the
+&ldquo;Psalm of Life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she worshipped the established.
+Martin followed the processes of her thoughts, but forbore to go farther. He
+did not love her for what she thought of Praps and Vanderwater and English
+professors, and he was coming to realize, with increasing conviction, that he
+possessed brain-areas and stretches of knowledge which she could never
+comprehend nor know existed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera not only
+unreasonable but wilfully perverse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How did you like it?&rdquo; she asked him one night, on the way home
+from the opera.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a night when he had taken her at the expense of a month&rsquo;s rigid
+economizing on food. After vainly waiting for him to speak about it, herself
+still tremulous and stirred by what she had just seen and heard, she had asked
+the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I liked the overture,&rdquo; was his answer. &ldquo;It was
+splendid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but the opera itself?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was splendid too; that is, the orchestra was, though I&rsquo;d have
+enjoyed it more if those jumping-jacks had kept quiet or gone off the
+stage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth was aghast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t mean Tetralani or Barillo?&rdquo; she queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All of them&mdash;the whole kit and crew.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But they are great artists,&rdquo; she protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics and
+unrealities.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But don&rsquo;t you like Barillo&rsquo;s voice?&rdquo; Ruth asked.
+&ldquo;He is next to Caruso, they say.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even better. Her voice is
+exquisite&mdash;or at least I think so.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, but&mdash;&rdquo; Ruth stammered. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what
+you mean, then. You admire their voices, yet say they spoiled the music.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Precisely that. I&rsquo;d give anything to hear them in concert, and
+I&rsquo;d give even a bit more not to hear them when the orchestra is playing.
+I&rsquo;m afraid I am a hopeless realist. Great singers are not great actors.
+To hear Barillo sing a love passage with the voice of an angel, and to hear
+Tetralani reply like another angel, and to hear it all accompanied by a perfect
+orgy of glowing and colorful music&mdash;is ravishing, most ravishing. I do not
+admit it. I assert it. But the whole effect is spoiled when I look at
+them&mdash;at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking feet and weighing a
+hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a scant five feet four,
+greasy-featured, with the chest of a squat, undersized blacksmith, and at the
+pair of them, attitudinizing, clasping their breasts, flinging their arms in
+the air like demented creatures in an asylum; and when I am expected to accept
+all this as the faithful illusion of a love-scene between a slender and
+beautiful princess and a handsome, romantic, young prince&mdash;why, I
+can&rsquo;t accept it, that&rsquo;s all. It&rsquo;s rot; it&rsquo;s absurd;
+it&rsquo;s unreal. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s the matter with it. It&rsquo;s not
+real. Don&rsquo;t tell me that anybody in this world ever made love that way.
+Why, if I&rsquo;d made love to you in such fashion, you&rsquo;d have boxed my
+ears.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you misunderstand,&rdquo; Ruth protested. &ldquo;Every form of art
+has its limitations.&rdquo; (She was busy recalling a lecture she had heard at
+the university on the conventions of the arts.) &ldquo;In painting there are
+only two dimensions to the canvas, yet you accept the illusion of three
+dimensions which the art of a painter enables him to throw into the canvas. In
+writing, again, the author must be omnipotent. You accept as perfectly
+legitimate the author&rsquo;s account of the secret thoughts of the heroine,
+and yet all the time you know that the heroine was alone when thinking these
+thoughts, and that neither the author nor any one else was capable of hearing
+them. And so with the stage, with sculpture, with opera, with every art form.
+Certain irreconcilable things must be accepted.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, I understood that,&rdquo; Martin answered. &ldquo;All the arts have
+their conventions.&rdquo; (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word. It was as
+if he had studied at the university himself, instead of being ill-equipped from
+browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.) &ldquo;But even the
+conventions must be real. Trees, painted on flat cardboard and stuck up on each
+side of the stage, we accept as a forest. It is a real enough convention. But,
+on the other hand, we would not accept a sea scene as a forest. We can&rsquo;t
+do it. It violates our senses. Nor would you, or, rather, should you, accept
+the ravings and writhings and agonized contortions of those two lunatics
+to-night as a convincing portrayal of love.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you don&rsquo;t hold yourself superior to all the judges of
+music?&rdquo; she protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an individual. I
+have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the
+elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The
+world&rsquo;s judges of music may all be right. But I am I, and I won&rsquo;t
+subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don&rsquo;t
+like a thing, I don&rsquo;t like it, that&rsquo;s all; and there is no reason
+under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my
+fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can&rsquo;t follow
+the fashions in the things I like or dislike.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But music, you know, is a matter of training,&rdquo; Ruth argued;
+&ldquo;and opera is even more a matter of training. May it not be&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That I am not trained in opera?&rdquo; he dashed in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The very thing,&rdquo; he agreed. &ldquo;And I consider I am fortunate
+in not having been caught when I was young. If I had, I could have wept
+sentimental tears to-night, and the clownish antics of that precious pair would
+have but enhanced the beauty of their voices and the beauty of the accompanying
+orchestra. You are right. It&rsquo;s mostly a matter of training. And I am too
+old, now. I must have the real or nothing. An illusion that won&rsquo;t
+convince is a palpable lie, and that&rsquo;s what grand opera is to me when
+little Barillo throws a fit, clutches mighty Tetralani in his arms (also in a
+fit), and tells her how passionately he adores her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again Ruth measured his thoughts by comparison of externals and in accordance
+with her belief in the established. Who was he that he should be right and all
+the cultured world wrong? His words and thoughts made no impression upon her.
+She was too firmly intrenched in the established to have any sympathy with
+revolutionary ideas. She had always been used to music, and she had enjoyed
+opera ever since she was a child, and all her world had enjoyed it, too. Then
+by what right did Martin Eden emerge, as he had so recently emerged, from his
+rag-time and working-class songs, and pass judgment on the world&rsquo;s music?
+She was vexed with him, and as she walked beside him she had a vague feeling of
+outrage. At the best, in her most charitable frame of mind, she considered the
+statement of his views to be a caprice, an erratic and uncalled-for prank. But
+when he took her in his arms at the door and kissed her good night in tender
+lover-fashion, she forgot everything in the outrush of her own love to him. And
+later, on a sleepless pillow, she puzzled, as she had often puzzled of late, as
+to how it was that she loved so strange a man, and loved him despite the
+disapproval of her people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And next day Martin Eden cast hack-work aside, and at white heat hammered out
+an essay to which he gave the title, &ldquo;The Philosophy of Illusion.&rdquo;
+A stamp started it on its travels, but it was destined to receive many stamps
+and to be started on many travels in the months that followed.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap25"></a>CHAPTER XXV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Maria Silva was poor, and all the ways of poverty were clear to her. Poverty,
+to Ruth, was a word signifying a not-nice condition of existence. That was her
+total knowledge on the subject. She knew Martin was poor, and his condition she
+associated in her mind with the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and
+of other men who had become successes. Also, while aware that poverty was
+anything but delectable, she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that
+poverty was salutary, that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men
+who were not degraded and hopeless drudges. So that her knowledge that Martin
+was so poor that he had pawned his watch and overcoat did not disturb her. She
+even considered it the hopeful side of the situation, believing that sooner or
+later it would arouse him and compel him to abandon his writing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth never read hunger in Martin&rsquo;s face, which had grown lean and had
+enlarged the slight hollows in the cheeks. In fact, she marked the change in
+his face with satisfaction. It seemed to refine him, to remove from him much of
+the dross of flesh and the too animal-like vigor that lured her while she
+detested it. Sometimes, when with her, she noted an unusual brightness in his
+eyes, and she admired it, for it made him appear more the poet and the
+scholar&mdash;the things he would have liked to be and which she would have
+liked him to be. But Maria Silva read a different tale in the hollow cheeks and
+the burning eyes, and she noted the changes in them from day to day, by them
+following the ebb and flow of his fortunes. She saw him leave the house with
+his overcoat and return without it, though the day was chill and raw, and
+promptly she saw his cheeks fill out slightly and the fire of hunger leave his
+eyes. In the same way she had seen his wheel and watch go, and after each event
+she had seen his vigor bloom again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Likewise she watched his toils, and knew the measure of the midnight oil he
+burned. Work! She knew that he outdid her, though his work was of a different
+order. And she was surprised to behold that the less food he had, the harder he
+worked. On occasion, in a casual sort of way, when she thought hunger pinched
+hardest, she would send him in a loaf of new baking, awkwardly covering the act
+with banter to the effect that it was better than he could bake. And again, she
+would send one of her toddlers in to him with a great pitcher of hot soup,
+debating inwardly the while whether she was justified in taking it from the
+mouths of her own flesh and blood. Nor was Martin ungrateful, knowing as he did
+the lives of the poor, and that if ever in the world there was charity, this
+was it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+On a day when she had filled her brood with what was left in the house, Maria
+invested her last fifteen cents in a gallon of cheap wine. Martin, coming into
+her kitchen to fetch water, was invited to sit down and drink. He drank her
+very-good health, and in return she drank his. Then she drank to prosperity in
+his undertakings, and he drank to the hope that James Grant would show up and
+pay her for his washing. James Grant was a journeymen carpenter who did not
+always pay his bills and who owed Maria three dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both Maria and Martin drank the sour new wine on empty stomachs, and it went
+swiftly to their heads. Utterly differentiated creatures that they were, they
+were lonely in their misery, and though the misery was tacitly ignored, it was
+the bond that drew them together. Maria was amazed to learn that he had been in
+the Azores, where she had lived until she was eleven. She was doubly amazed
+that he had been in the Hawaiian Islands, whither she had migrated from the
+Azores with her people. But her amazement passed all bounds when he told her he
+had been on Maui, the particular island whereon she had attained womanhood and
+married. Kahului, where she had first met her husband,&mdash;he, Martin, had
+been there twice! Yes, she remembered the sugar steamers, and he had been on
+them&mdash;well, well, it was a small world. And Wailuku! That place, too! Did
+he know the head-luna of the plantation? Yes, and had had a couple of drinks
+with him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so they reminiscenced and drowned their hunger in the raw, sour wine. To
+Martin the future did not seem so dim. Success trembled just before him. He was
+on the verge of clasping it. Then he studied the deep-lined face of the
+toil-worn woman before him, remembered her soups and loaves of new baking, and
+felt spring up in him the warmest gratitude and philanthropy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maria,&rdquo; he exclaimed suddenly. &ldquo;What would you like to
+have?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at him, bepuzzled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What would you like to have now, right now, if you could get it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Shoe alla da roun&rsquo; for da childs&mdash;seven pairs da shoe.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shall have them,&rdquo; he announced, while she nodded her head
+gravely. &ldquo;But I mean a big wish, something big that you want.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her eyes sparkled good-naturedly. He was choosing to make fun with her, Maria,
+with whom few made fun these days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Think hard,&rdquo; he cautioned, just as she was opening her mouth to
+speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Alla right,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;I thinka da hard. I lika da
+house, dis house&mdash;all mine, no paya da rent, seven dollar da month.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shall have it,&rdquo; he granted, &ldquo;and in a short time. Now
+wish the great wish. Make believe I am God, and I say to you anything you want
+you can have. Then you wish that thing, and I listen.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maria considered solemnly for a space.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You no &rsquo;fraid?&rdquo; she asked warningly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no,&rdquo; he laughed, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not afraid. Go ahead.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Most verra big,&rdquo; she warned again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right. Fire away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, den&mdash;&rdquo; She drew a big breath like a child, as she
+voiced to the uttermost all she cared to demand of life. &ldquo;I lika da have
+one milka ranch&mdash;good milka ranch. Plenty cow, plenty land, plenty grass.
+I lika da have near San Le-an; my sister liva dere. I sella da milk in Oakland.
+I maka da plentee mon. Joe an&rsquo; Nick no runna da cow. Dey go-a to school.
+Bimeby maka da good engineer, worka da railroad. Yes, I lika da milka
+ranch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She paused and regarded Martin with twinkling eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shall have it,&rdquo; he answered promptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded her head and touched her lips courteously to the wine-glass and to
+the giver of the gift she knew would never be given. His heart was right, and
+in her own heart she appreciated his intention as much as if the gift had gone
+with it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, Maria,&rdquo; he went on; &ldquo;Nick and Joe won&rsquo;t have to
+peddle milk, and all the kids can go to school and wear shoes the whole year
+round. It will be a first-class milk ranch&mdash;everything complete. There
+will be a house to live in and a stable for the horses, and cow-barns, of
+course. There will be chickens, pigs, vegetables, fruit trees, and everything
+like that; and there will be enough cows to pay for a hired man or two. Then
+you won&rsquo;t have anything to do but take care of the children. For that
+matter, if you find a good man, you can marry and take it easy while he runs
+the ranch.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And from such largess, dispensed from his future, Martin turned and took his
+one good suit of clothes to the pawnshop. His plight was desperate for him to
+do this, for it cut him off from Ruth. He had no second-best suit that was
+presentable, and though he could go to the butcher and the baker, and even on
+occasion to his sister&rsquo;s, it was beyond all daring to dream of entering
+the Morse home so disreputably apparelled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He toiled on, miserable and well-nigh hopeless. It began to appear to him that
+the second battle was lost and that he would have to go to work. In doing this
+he would satisfy everybody&mdash;the grocer, his sister, Ruth, and even Maria,
+to whom he owed a month&rsquo;s room rent. He was two months behind with his
+type-writer, and the agency was clamoring for payment or for the return of the
+machine. In desperation, all but ready to surrender, to make a truce with fate
+until he could get a fresh start, he took the civil service examinations for
+the Railway Mail. To his surprise, he passed first. The job was assured, though
+when the call would come to enter upon his duties nobody knew.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was at this time, at the lowest ebb, that the smooth-running editorial
+machine broke down. A cog must have slipped or an oil-cup run dry, for the
+postman brought him one morning a short, thin envelope. Martin glanced at the
+upper left-hand corner and read the name and address of the <i>Transcontinental
+Monthly</i>. His heart gave a great leap, and he suddenly felt faint, the
+sinking feeling accompanied by a strange trembling of the knees. He staggered
+into his room and sat down on the bed, the envelope still unopened, and in that
+moment came understanding to him how people suddenly fall dead upon receipt of
+extraordinarily good news.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Of course this was good news. There was no manuscript in that thin envelope,
+therefore it was an acceptance. He knew the story in the hands of the
+<i>Transcontinental</i>. It was &ldquo;The Ring of Bells,&rdquo; one of his
+horror stories, and it was an even five thousand words. And, since first-class
+magazines always paid on acceptance, there was a check inside. Two cents a
+word&mdash;twenty dollars a thousand; the check must be a hundred dollars. One
+hundred dollars! As he tore the envelope open, every item of all his debts
+surged in his brain&mdash;$3.85 to the grocer; butcher $4.00 flat; baker,
+$2.00; fruit store, $5.00; total, $14.85. Then there was room rent, $2.50;
+another month in advance, $2.50; two months&rsquo; type-writer, $8.00; a month
+in advance, $4.00; total, $31.85. And finally to be added, his pledges, plus
+interest, with the pawnbroker&mdash;watch, $5.50; overcoat, $5.50; wheel,
+$7.75; suit of clothes, $5.50 (60 % interest, but what did it
+matter?)&mdash;grand total, $56.10. He saw, as if visible in the air before
+him, in illuminated figures, the whole sum, and the subtraction that followed
+and that gave a remainder of $43.90. When he had squared every debt, redeemed
+every pledge, he would still have jingling in his pockets a princely $43.90.
+And on top of that he would have a month&rsquo;s rent paid in advance on the
+type-writer and on the room.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+By this time he had drawn the single sheet of type-written letter out and
+spread it open. There was no check. He peered into the envelope, held it to the
+light, but could not trust his eyes, and in trembling haste tore the envelope
+apart. There was no check. He read the letter, skimming it line by line,
+dashing through the editor&rsquo;s praise of his story to the meat of the
+letter, the statement why the check had not been sent. He found no such
+statement, but he did find that which made him suddenly wilt. The letter slid
+from his hand. His eyes went lack-lustre, and he lay back on the pillow,
+pulling the blanket about him and up to his chin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Five dollars for &ldquo;The Ring of Bells&rdquo;&mdash;five dollars for five
+thousand words! Instead of two cents a word, ten words for a cent! And the
+editor had praised it, too. And he would receive the check when the story was
+published. Then it was all poppycock, two cents a word for minimum rate and
+payment upon acceptance. It was a lie, and it had led him astray. He would
+never have attempted to write had he known that. He would have gone to
+work&mdash;to work for Ruth. He went back to the day he first attempted to
+write, and was appalled at the enormous waste of time&mdash;and all for ten
+words for a cent. And the other high rewards of writers, that he had read
+about, must be lies, too. His second-hand ideas of authorship were wrong, for
+here was the proof of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The <i>Transcontinental</i> sold for twenty-five cents, and its dignified and
+artistic cover proclaimed it as among the first-class magazines. It was a
+staid, respectable magazine, and it had been published continuously since long
+before he was born. Why, on the outside cover were printed every month the
+words of one of the world&rsquo;s great writers, words proclaiming the inspired
+mission of the <i>Transcontinental</i> by a star of literature whose first
+coruscations had appeared inside those self-same covers. And the high and
+lofty, heaven-inspired <i>Transcontinental</i> paid five dollars for five
+thousand words! The great writer had recently died in a foreign land&mdash;in
+dire poverty, Martin remembered, which was not to be wondered at, considering
+the magnificent pay authors receive.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, he had taken the bait, the newspaper lies about writers and their pay,
+and he had wasted two years over it. But he would disgorge the bait now. Not
+another line would he ever write. He would do what Ruth wanted him to do, what
+everybody wanted him to do&mdash;get a job. The thought of going to work
+reminded him of Joe&mdash;Joe, tramping through the land of nothing-to-do.
+Martin heaved a great sigh of envy. The reaction of nineteen hours a day for
+many days was strong upon him. But then, Joe was not in love, had none of the
+responsibilities of love, and he could afford to loaf through the land of
+nothing-to-do. He, Martin, had something to work for, and go to work he would.
+He would start out early next morning to hunt a job. And he would let Ruth
+know, too, that he had mended his ways and was willing to go into her
+father&rsquo;s office.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent, the market price
+for art. The disappointment of it, the lie of it, the infamy of it, were
+uppermost in his thoughts; and under his closed eyelids, in fiery figures,
+burned the &ldquo;$3.85&rdquo; he owed the grocer. He shivered, and was aware
+of an aching in his bones. The small of his back ached especially. His head
+ached, the top of it ached, the back of it ached, the brains inside of it ached
+and seemed to be swelling, while the ache over his brows was intolerable. And
+beneath the brows, planted under his lids, was the merciless
+&ldquo;$3.85.&rdquo; He opened his eyes to escape it, but the white light of
+the room seemed to sear the balls and forced him to close his eyes, when the
+&ldquo;$3.85&rdquo; confronted him again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent&mdash;that
+particular thought took up its residence in his brain, and he could no more
+escape it than he could the &ldquo;$3.85&rdquo; under his eyelids. A change
+seemed to come over the latter, and he watched curiously, till
+&ldquo;$2.00&rdquo; burned in its stead. Ah, he thought, that was the baker.
+The next sum that appeared was &ldquo;$2.50.&rdquo; It puzzled him, and he
+pondered it as if life and death hung on the solution. He owed somebody two
+dollars and a half, that was certain, but who was it? To find it was the task
+set him by an imperious and malignant universe, and he wandered through the
+endless corridors of his mind, opening all manner of lumber rooms and chambers
+stored with odds and ends of memories and knowledge as he vainly sought the
+answer. After several centuries it came to him, easily, without effort, that it
+was Maria. With a great relief he turned his soul to the screen of torment
+under his lids. He had solved the problem; now he could rest. But no, the
+&ldquo;$2.50&rdquo; faded away, and in its place burned &ldquo;$8.00.&rdquo;
+Who was that? He must go the dreary round of his mind again and find out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How long he was gone on this quest he did not know, but after what seemed an
+enormous lapse of time, he was called back to himself by a knock at the door,
+and by Maria&rsquo;s asking if he was sick. He replied in a muffled voice he
+did not recognize, saying that he was merely taking a nap. He was surprised
+when he noted the darkness of night in the room. He had received the letter at
+two in the afternoon, and he realized that he was sick.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then the &ldquo;$8.00&rdquo; began to smoulder under his lids again, and he
+returned himself to servitude. But he grew cunning. There was no need for him
+to wander through his mind. He had been a fool. He pulled a lever and made his
+mind revolve about him, a monstrous wheel of fortune, a merry-go-round of
+memory, a revolving sphere of wisdom. Faster and faster it revolved, until its
+vortex sucked him in and he was flung whirling through black chaos.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Quite naturally he found himself at a mangle, feeding starched cuffs. But as he
+fed he noticed figures printed in the cuffs. It was a new way of marking linen,
+he thought, until, looking closer, he saw &ldquo;$3.85&rdquo; on one of the
+cuffs. Then it came to him that it was the grocer&rsquo;s bill, and that these
+were his bills flying around on the drum of the mangle. A crafty idea came to
+him. He would throw the bills on the floor and so escape paying them. No sooner
+thought than done, and he crumpled the cuffs spitefully as he flung them upon
+an unusually dirty floor. Ever the heap grew, and though each bill was
+duplicated a thousand times, he found only one for two dollars and a half,
+which was what he owed Maria. That meant that Maria would not press for
+payment, and he resolved generously that it would be the only one he would pay;
+so he began searching through the cast-out heap for hers. He sought it
+desperately, for ages, and was still searching when the manager of the hotel
+entered, the fat Dutchman. His face blazed with wrath, and he shouted in
+stentorian tones that echoed down the universe, &ldquo;I shall deduct the cost
+of those cuffs from your wages!&rdquo; The pile of cuffs grew into a mountain,
+and Martin knew that he was doomed to toil for a thousand years to pay for
+them. Well, there was nothing left to do but kill the manager and burn down the
+laundry. But the big Dutchman frustrated him, seizing him by the nape of the
+neck and dancing him up and down. He danced him over the ironing tables, the
+stove, and the mangles, and out into the wash-room and over the wringer and
+washer. Martin was danced until his teeth rattled and his head ached, and he
+marvelled that the Dutchman was so strong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And then he found himself before the mangle, this time receiving the cuffs an
+editor of a magazine was feeding from the other side. Each cuff was a check,
+and Martin went over them anxiously, in a fever of expectation, but they were
+all blanks. He stood there and received the blanks for a million years or so,
+never letting one go by for fear it might be filled out. At last he found it.
+With trembling fingers he held it to the light. It was for five dollars.
+&ldquo;Ha! Ha!&rdquo; laughed the editor across the mangle. &ldquo;Well, then,
+I shall kill you,&rdquo; Martin said. He went out into the wash-room to get the
+axe, and found Joe starching manuscripts. He tried to make him desist, then
+swung the axe for him. But the weapon remained poised in mid-air, for Martin
+found himself back in the ironing room in the midst of a snow-storm. No, it was
+not snow that was falling, but checks of large denomination, the smallest not
+less than a thousand dollars. He began to collect them and sort them out, in
+packages of a hundred, tying each package securely with twine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked up from his task and saw Joe standing before him juggling flat-irons,
+starched shirts, and manuscripts. Now and again he reached out and added a
+bundle of checks to the flying miscellany that soared through the roof and out
+of sight in a tremendous circle. Martin struck at him, but he seized the axe
+and added it to the flying circle. Then he plucked Martin and added him. Martin
+went up through the roof, clutching at manuscripts, so that by the time he came
+down he had a large armful. But no sooner down than up again, and a second and
+a third time and countless times he flew around the circle. From far off he
+could hear a childish treble singing: &ldquo;Waltz me around again, Willie,
+around, around, around.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He recovered the axe in the midst of the Milky Way of checks, starched shirts,
+and manuscripts, and prepared, when he came down, to kill Joe. But he did not
+come down. Instead, at two in the morning, Maria, having heard his groans
+through the thin partition, came into his room, to put hot flat-irons against
+his body and damp cloths upon his aching eyes.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap26"></a>CHAPTER XXVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Martin Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the morning. It was late
+afternoon before he came out of his delirium and gazed with aching eyes about
+the room. Mary, one of the tribe of Silva, eight years old, keeping watch,
+raised a screech at sight of his returning consciousness. Maria hurried into
+the room from the kitchen. She put her work-calloused hand upon his hot
+forehead and felt his pulse.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You lika da eat?&rdquo; she asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head. Eating was farthest from his desire, and he wondered that he
+should ever have been hungry in his life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sick, Maria,&rdquo; he said weakly. &ldquo;What is it? Do you
+know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Grip,&rdquo; she answered. &ldquo;Two or three days you alla da right.
+Better you no eat now. Bimeby plenty can eat, to-morrow can eat maybe.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was not used to sickness, and when Maria and her little girl left him,
+he essayed to get up and dress. By a supreme exertion of will, with rearing
+brain and eyes that ached so that he could not keep them open, he managed to
+get out of bed, only to be left stranded by his senses upon the table. Half an
+hour later he managed to regain the bed, where he was content to lie with
+closed eyes and analyze his various pains and weaknesses. Maria came in several
+times to change the cold cloths on his forehead. Otherwise she left him in
+peace, too wise to vex him with chatter. This moved him to gratitude, and he
+murmured to himself, &ldquo;Maria, you getta da milka ranch, all righta, all
+right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then he remembered his long-buried past of yesterday.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed a life-time since he had received that letter from the
+<i>Transcontinental</i>, a life-time since it was all over and done with and a
+new page turned. He had shot his bolt, and shot it hard, and now he was down on
+his back. If he hadn&rsquo;t starved himself, he wouldn&rsquo;t have been
+caught by La Grippe. He had been run down, and he had not had the strength to
+throw off the germ of disease which had invaded his system. This was what
+resulted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own
+life?&rdquo; he demanded aloud. &ldquo;This is no place for me. No more
+literature in mine. Me for the counting-house and ledger, the monthly salary,
+and the little home with Ruth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Two days later, having eaten an egg and two slices of toast and drunk a cup of
+tea, he asked for his mail, but found his eyes still hurt too much to permit
+him to read.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You read for me, Maria,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Never mind the big, long
+letters. Throw them under the table. Read me the small letters.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No can,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;Teresa, she go to school, she
+can.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Teresa Silva, aged nine, opened his letters and read them to him. He
+listened absently to a long dun from the type-writer people, his mind busy with
+ways and means of finding a job. Suddenly he was shocked back to himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;We offer you forty dollars for all serial rights in your
+story,&rsquo;&rdquo; Teresa slowly spelled out, &ldquo;&lsquo;provided you
+allow us to make the alterations suggested.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What magazine is that?&rdquo; Martin shouted. &ldquo;Here, give it to
+me!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He could see to read, now, and he was unaware of the pain of the action. It was
+the <i>White Mouse</i> that was offering him forty dollars, and the story was
+&ldquo;The Whirlpool,&rdquo; another of his early horror stories. He read the
+letter through again and again. The editor told him plainly that he had not
+handled the idea properly, but that it was the idea they were buying because it
+was original. If they could cut the story down one-third, they would take it
+and send him forty dollars on receipt of his answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He called for pen and ink, and told the editor he could cut the story down
+three-thirds if he wanted to, and to send the forty dollars right along.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The letter despatched to the letter-box by Teresa, Martin lay back and thought.
+It wasn&rsquo;t a lie, after all. The <i>White Mouse</i> paid on acceptance.
+There were three thousand words in &ldquo;The Whirlpool.&rdquo; Cut down a
+third, there would be two thousand. At forty dollars that would be two cents a
+word. Pay on acceptance and two cents a word&mdash;the newspapers had told the
+truth. And he had thought the <i>White Mouse</i> a third-rater! It was evident
+that he did not know the magazines. He had deemed the <i>Transcontinental</i> a
+first-rater, and it paid a cent for ten words. He had classed the <i>White
+Mouse</i> as of no account, and it paid twenty times as much as the<i>
+Transcontinental</i> and also had paid on acceptance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, there was one thing certain: when he got well, he would not go out
+looking for a job. There were more stories in his head as good as &ldquo;The
+Whirlpool,&rdquo; and at forty dollars apiece he could earn far more than in
+any job or position. Just when he thought the battle lost, it was won. He had
+proved for his career. The way was clear. Beginning with the <i>White Mouse</i>
+he would add magazine after magazine to his growing list of patrons. Hack-work
+could be put aside. For that matter, it had been wasted time, for it had not
+brought him a dollar. He would devote himself to work, good work, and he would
+pour out the best that was in him. He wished Ruth was there to share in his
+joy, and when he went over the letters left lying on his bed, he found one from
+her. It was sweetly reproachful, wondering what had kept him away for so
+dreadful a length of time. He reread the letter adoringly, dwelling over her
+handwriting, loving each stroke of her pen, and in the end kissing her
+signature.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And when he answered, he told her recklessly that he had not been to see her
+because his best clothes were in pawn. He told her that he had been sick, but
+was once more nearly well, and that inside ten days or two weeks (as soon as a
+letter could travel to New York City and return) he would redeem his clothes
+and be with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Ruth did not care to wait ten days or two weeks. Besides, her lover was
+sick. The next afternoon, accompanied by Arthur, she arrived in the Morse
+carriage, to the unqualified delight of the Silva tribe and of all the urchins
+on the street, and to the consternation of Maria. She boxed the ears of the
+Silvas who crowded about the visitors on the tiny front porch, and in more than
+usual atrocious English tried to apologize for her appearance. Sleeves rolled
+up from soap-flecked arms and a wet gunny-sack around her waist told of the
+task at which she had been caught. So flustered was she by two such grand young
+people asking for her lodger, that she forgot to invite them to sit down in the
+little parlor. To enter Martin&rsquo;s room, they passed through the kitchen,
+warm and moist and steamy from the big washing in progress. Maria, in her
+excitement, jammed the bedroom and bedroom-closet doors together, and for five
+minutes, through the partly open door, clouds of steam, smelling of soap-suds
+and dirt, poured into the sick chamber.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth succeeded in veering right and left and right again, and in running the
+narrow passage between table and bed to Martin&rsquo;s side; but Arthur veered
+too wide and fetched up with clatter and bang of pots and pans in the corner
+where Martin did his cooking. Arthur did not linger long. Ruth occupied the
+only chair, and having done his duty, he went outside and stood by the gate,
+the centre of seven marvelling Silvas, who watched him as they would have
+watched a curiosity in a side-show. All about the carriage were gathered the
+children from a dozen blocks, waiting and eager for some tragic and terrible
+dénouement. Carriages were seen on their street only for weddings and funerals.
+Here was neither marriage nor death: therefore, it was something transcending
+experience and well worth waiting for.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin had been wild to see Ruth. His was essentially a love-nature, and he
+possessed more than the average man&rsquo;s need for sympathy. He was starving
+for sympathy, which, with him, meant intelligent understanding; and he had yet
+to learn that Ruth&rsquo;s sympathy was largely sentimental and tactful, and
+that it proceeded from gentleness of nature rather than from understanding of
+the objects of her sympathy. So it was while Martin held her hand and gladly
+talked, that her love for him prompted her to press his hand in return, and
+that her eyes were moist and luminous at sight of his helplessness and of the
+marks suffering had stamped upon his face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But while he told her of his two acceptances, of his despair when he received
+the one from the <i>Transcontinental</i>, and of the corresponding delight with
+which he received the one from the <i>White Mouse</i>, she did not follow him.
+She heard the words he uttered and understood their literal import, but she was
+not with him in his despair and his delight. She could not get out of herself.
+She was not interested in selling stories to magazines. What was important to
+her was matrimony. She was not aware of it, however, any more than she was
+aware that her desire that Martin take a position was the instinctive and
+preparative impulse of motherhood. She would have blushed had she been told as
+much in plain, set terms, and next, she might have grown indignant and asserted
+that her sole interest lay in the man she loved and her desire for him to make
+the best of himself. So, while Martin poured out his heart to her, elated with
+the first success his chosen work in the world had received, she paid heed to
+his bare words only, gazing now and again about the room, shocked by what she
+saw.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the first time Ruth gazed upon the sordid face of poverty. Starving lovers
+had always seemed romantic to her,&mdash;but she had had no idea how starving
+lovers lived. She had never dreamed it could be like this. Ever her gaze
+shifted from the room to him and back again. The steamy smell of dirty clothes,
+which had entered with her from the kitchen, was sickening. Martin must be
+soaked with it, Ruth concluded, if that awful woman washed frequently. Such was
+the contagiousness of degradation. When she looked at Martin, she seemed to see
+the smirch left upon him by his surroundings. She had never seen him unshaven,
+and the three days&rsquo; growth of beard on his face was repulsive to her. Not
+alone did it give him the same dark and murky aspect of the Silva house, inside
+and out, but it seemed to emphasize that animal-like strength of his which she
+detested. And here he was, being confirmed in his madness by the two
+acceptances he took such pride in telling her about. A little longer and he
+would have surrendered and gone to work. Now he would continue on in this
+horrible house, writing and starving for a few more months.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is that smell?&rdquo; she asked suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Some of Maria&rsquo;s washing smells, I imagine,&rdquo; was the answer.
+&ldquo;I am growing quite accustomed to them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no; not that. It is something else. A stale, sickish smell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin sampled the air before replying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke,&rdquo; he
+announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it. It is terrible. Why do you smoke so much,
+Martin?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know, except that I smoke more than usual when I am
+lonely. And then, too, it&rsquo;s such a long-standing habit. I learned when I
+was only a youngster.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not a nice habit, you know,&rdquo; she reproved. &ldquo;It smells
+to heaven.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s the fault of the tobacco. I can afford only the cheapest.
+But wait until I get that forty-dollar check. I&rsquo;ll use a brand that is
+not offensive even to the angels. But that wasn&rsquo;t so bad, was it, two
+acceptances in three days? That forty-five dollars will pay about all my
+debts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For two years&rsquo; work?&rdquo; she queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, for less than a week&rsquo;s work. Please pass me that book over on
+the far corner of the table, the account book with the gray cover.&rdquo; He
+opened it and began turning over the pages rapidly. &ldquo;Yes, I was right.
+Four days for &lsquo;The Ring of Bells,&rsquo; two days for &lsquo;The
+Whirlpool.&rsquo; That&rsquo;s forty-five dollars for a week&rsquo;s work, one
+hundred and eighty dollars a month. That beats any salary I can command. And,
+besides, I&rsquo;m just beginning. A thousand dollars a month is not too much
+to buy for you all I want you to have. A salary of five hundred a month would
+be too small. That forty-five dollars is just a starter. Wait till I get my
+stride. Then watch my smoke.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth misunderstood his slang, and reverted to cigarettes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You smoke more than enough as it is, and the brand of tobacco will make
+no difference. It is the smoking itself that is not nice, no matter what the
+brand may be. You are a chimney, a living volcano, a perambulating smoke-stack,
+and you are a perfect disgrace, Martin dear, you know you are.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he looked at her delicate
+face and into her pure, limpid eyes, as of old he was struck with his own
+unworthiness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you wouldn&rsquo;t smoke any more,&rdquo; she whispered.
+&ldquo;Please, for&mdash;my sake.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, I won&rsquo;t,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll do anything
+you ask, dear love, anything; you know that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A great temptation assailed her. In an insistent way she had caught glimpses of
+the large, easy-going side of his nature, and she felt sure, if she asked him
+to cease attempting to write, that he would grant her wish. In the swift
+instant that elapsed, the words trembled on her lips. But she did not utter
+them. She was not quite brave enough; she did not quite dare. Instead, she
+leaned toward him to meet him, and in his arms murmured:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own. I am
+sure smoking hurts you; and besides, it is not good to be a slave to anything,
+to a drug least of all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall always be your slave,&rdquo; he smiled.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She looked at him mischievously, though deep down she was already regretting
+that she had not preferred her largest request.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I live but to obey, your majesty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not omit to shave every
+day. Look how you have scratched my cheek.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter. But she had made one point, and
+she could not expect to make more than one at a time. She felt a woman&rsquo;s
+pride in that she had made him stop smoking. Another time she would persuade
+him to take a position, for had he not said he would do anything she asked?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She left his side to explore the room, examining the clothes-lines of notes
+overhead, learning the mystery of the tackle used for suspending his wheel
+under the ceiling, and being saddened by the heap of manuscripts under the
+table which represented to her just so much wasted time. The oil-stove won her
+admiration, but on investigating the food shelves she found them empty.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, you haven&rsquo;t anything to eat, you poor dear,&rdquo; she said
+with tender compassion. &ldquo;You must be starving.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I store my food in Maria&rsquo;s safe and in her pantry,&rdquo; he lied.
+&ldquo;It keeps better there. No danger of my starving. Look at that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had come back to his side, and she saw him double his arm at the elbow, the
+biceps crawling under his shirt-sleeve and swelling into a knot of muscle,
+heavy and hard. The sight repelled her. Sentimentally, she disliked it. But her
+pulse, her blood, every fibre of her, loved it and yearned for it, and, in the
+old, inexplicable way, she leaned toward him, not away from him. And in the
+moment that followed, when he crushed her in his arms, the brain of her,
+concerned with the superficial aspects of life, was in revolt; while the heart
+of her, the woman of her, concerned with life itself, exulted triumphantly. It
+was in moments like this that she felt to the uttermost the greatness of her
+love for Martin, for it was almost a swoon of delight to her to feel his strong
+arms about her, holding her tightly, hurting her with the grip of their fervor.
+At such moments she found justification for her treason to her standards, for
+her violation of her own high ideals, and, most of all, for her tacit
+disobedience to her mother and father. They did not want her to marry this man.
+It shocked them that she should love him. It shocked her, too, sometimes, when
+she was apart from him, a cool and reasoning creature. With him, she loved
+him&mdash;in truth, at times a vexed and worried love; but love it was, a love
+that was stronger than she.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;This La Grippe is nothing,&rdquo; he was saying. &ldquo;It hurts a bit,
+and gives one a nasty headache, but it doesn&rsquo;t compare with break-bone
+fever.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Have you had that, too?&rdquo; she queried absently, intent on the
+heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his words startled
+her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of the Hawaiian
+Islands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why did you go there?&rdquo; she demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because I didn&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;I never dreamed
+of lepers. When I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed
+inland for some place of hiding. For three days I lived off guavas,
+<i>ohia</i>-apples, and bananas, all of which grew wild in the jungle. On the
+fourth day I found the trail&mdash;a mere foot-trail. It led inland, and it led
+up. It was the way I wanted to go, and it showed signs of recent travel. At one
+place it ran along the crest of a ridge that was no more than a knife-edge. The
+trail wasn&rsquo;t three feet wide on the crest, and on either side the ridge
+fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep. One man, with plenty of
+ammunition, could have held it against a hundred thousand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was the only way in to the hiding-place. Three hours after I found
+the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket in the midst of
+lava peaks. The whole place was terraced for taro-patches, fruit trees grew
+there, and there were eight or ten grass huts. But as soon as I saw the
+inhabitants I knew what I&rsquo;d struck. One sight of them was enough.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you do?&rdquo; Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening, like any
+Desdemona, appalled and fascinated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nothing for me to do. Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty far
+gone, but he ruled like a king. He had discovered the little valley and founded
+the settlement&mdash;all of which was against the law. But he had guns, plenty
+of ammunition, and those Kanakas, trained to the shooting of wild cattle and
+wild pig, were dead shots. No, there wasn&rsquo;t any running away for Martin
+Eden. He stayed&mdash;for three months.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But how did you escape?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d have been there yet, if it hadn&rsquo;t been for a girl there,
+a half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian. She was a beauty, poor
+thing, and well educated. Her mother, in Honolulu, was worth a million or so.
+Well, this girl got me away at last. Her mother financed the settlement, you
+see, so the girl wasn&rsquo;t afraid of being punished for letting me go. But
+she made me swear, first, never to reveal the hiding-place; and I never have.
+This is the first time I have even mentioned it. The girl had just the first
+signs of leprosy. The fingers of her right hand were slightly twisted, and
+there was a small spot on her arm. That was all. I guess she is dead,
+now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But weren&rsquo;t you frightened? And weren&rsquo;t you glad to get away
+without catching that dreadful disease?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he confessed, &ldquo;I was a bit shivery at first; but I
+got used to it. I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though. That made me
+forget to be afraid. She was such a beauty, in spirit as well as in appearance,
+and she was only slightly touched; yet she was doomed to lie there, living the
+life of a primitive savage and rotting slowly away. Leprosy is far more
+terrible than you can imagine it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor thing,&rdquo; Ruth murmured softly. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a wonder she
+let you get away.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you mean?&rdquo; Martin asked unwittingly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because she must have loved you,&rdquo; Ruth said, still softly.
+&ldquo;Candidly, now, didn&rsquo;t she?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin&rsquo;s sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and by the
+indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness had made his face
+even pale; and across this pallor flowed the slow wave of a blush. He was
+opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut him off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never mind, don&rsquo;t answer; it&rsquo;s not necessary,&rdquo; she
+laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter, and that the
+light in her eyes was cold. On the spur of the moment it reminded him of a gale
+he had once experienced in the North Pacific. And for the moment the apparition
+of the gale rose before his eyes&mdash;a gale at night, with a clear sky and
+under a full moon, the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight. Next, he saw
+the girl in the leper refuge and remembered it was for love of him that she had
+let him go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She was noble,&rdquo; he said simply. &ldquo;She gave me life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob in her throat,
+and noticed that she turned her face away to gaze out of the window. When she
+turned it back to him, it was composed, and there was no hint of the gale in
+her eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m such a silly,&rdquo; she said plaintively. &ldquo;But I
+can&rsquo;t help it. I do so love you, Martin, I do, I do. I shall grow more
+catholic in time, but at present I can&rsquo;t help being jealous of those
+ghosts of the past, and you know your past is full of ghosts.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It must be,&rdquo; she silenced his protest. &ldquo;It could not be
+otherwise. And there&rsquo;s poor Arthur motioning me to come. He&rsquo;s tired
+waiting. And now good-by, dear.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that
+helps men to stop the use of tobacco,&rdquo; she called back from the door,
+&ldquo;and I am going to send you some.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door closed, but opened again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do, I do,&rdquo; she whispered to him; and this time she was really
+gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note the texture of
+Ruth&rsquo;s garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown that produced an
+effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the carriage. The crowd of
+disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared from view, then
+transferred their stare to Maria, who had abruptly become the most important
+person on the street. But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria&rsquo;s
+reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been for her lodger. After
+that Maria dropped back into her old obscurity and Martin began to notice the
+respectful manner in which he was regarded by the small fry of the
+neighborhood. As for Maria, Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per
+cent, and had the Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he
+would have allowed Martin an additional
+three-dollars-and-eighty-five-cents&rsquo; worth of credit.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap27"></a>CHAPTER XXVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The sun of Martin&rsquo;s good fortune rose. The day after Ruth&rsquo;s visit,
+he received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in payment
+for three of his triolets. Two days later a newspaper published in Chicago
+accepted his &ldquo;Treasure Hunters,&rdquo; promising to pay ten dollars for
+it on publication. The price was small, but it was the first article he had
+written, his very first attempt to express his thought on the printed page. To
+cap everything, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, was accepted
+before the end of the week by a juvenile monthly calling itself <i>Youth and
+Age</i>. It was true the serial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered
+to pay him sixteen dollars on publication, which was something like
+seventy-five cents a thousand words; but it was equally true that it was the
+second thing he had attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware
+of its clumsy worthlessness.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of
+mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great
+strength&mdash;the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes
+butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a war-club. So
+it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for songs. He knew them
+for what they were, and it had not taken him long to acquire this knowledge.
+What he pinned his faith to was his later work. He had striven to be something
+more than a mere writer of magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself
+with the tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength.
+His conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of
+strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was realism,
+though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of
+imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human
+aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all its
+spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One
+treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man
+as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both the
+god and the clod schools erred, in Martin&rsquo;s estimation, and erred through
+too great singleness of sight and purpose. There was a compromise that
+approximated the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it
+challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story,
+&ldquo;Adventure,&rdquo; which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin believed had
+achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, &ldquo;God
+and Clod,&rdquo; that he had expressed his views on the whole general subject.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But &ldquo;Adventure,&rdquo; and all that he deemed his best work, still went
+begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in his eyes
+except for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of which he had
+sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work. To him they were frankly
+imaginative and fantastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real,
+wherein lay their power. This investiture of the grotesque and impossible with
+reality, he looked upon as a trick&mdash;a skilful trick at best. Great
+literature could not reside in such a field. Their artistry was high, but he
+denied the worthwhileness of artistry when divorced from humanness. The trick
+had been to fling over the face of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this
+he had done in the half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written
+before he emerged upon the high peaks of &ldquo;Adventure,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Joy,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Pot,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Wine of Life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a precarious
+existence against the arrival of the <i>White Mouse</i> check. He cashed the
+first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a dollar on account
+and dividing the remaining two dollars between the baker and the fruit store.
+Martin was not yet rich enough to afford meat, and he was on slim allowance
+when the <i>White Mouse</i> check arrived. He was divided on the cashing of it.
+He had never been in a bank in his life, much less been in one on business, and
+he had a naive and childlike desire to walk into one of the big banks down in
+Oakland and fling down his indorsed check for forty dollars. On the other hand,
+practical common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer and thereby
+make an impression that would later result in an increase of credit.
+Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying his bill with
+him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of jingling coin. Also, he
+paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his suit and his bicycle, paid one
+month&rsquo;s rent on the type-writer, and paid Maria the overdue month for his
+room and a month in advance. This left him in his pocket, for emergencies, a
+balance of nearly three dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. Immediately on recovering his
+clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he could not refrain from
+jingling the little handful of silver in his pocket. He had been so long
+without money that, like a rescued starving man who cannot let the unconsumed
+food out of his sight, Martin could not keep his hand off the silver. He was
+not mean, nor avaricious, but the money meant more than so many dollars and
+cents. It stood for success, and the eagles stamped upon the coins were to him
+so many winged victories.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world. It certainly appeared
+more beautiful to him. For weeks it had been a very dull and sombre world; but
+now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars jingling in his pocket, and in
+his mind the consciousness of success, the sun shone bright and warm, and even
+a rain-squall that soaked unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry happening to
+him. When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew
+were starving the world over; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of the
+thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain. He forgot about them,
+and, being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the world. Without
+deliberately thinking about it, <i>motifs</i> for love-lyrics began to agitate
+his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, he got off the electric car,
+without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He found a number of persons in the Morse home. Ruth&rsquo;s two girl-cousins
+were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of
+entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young people.
+The campaign had begun during Martin&rsquo;s enforced absence, and was already
+in full swing. She was making a point of having at the house men who were doing
+things. Thus, in addition to the cousins Dorothy and Florence, Martin
+encountered two university professors, one of Latin, the other of English; a
+young army officer just back from the Philippines, one-time school-mate of
+Ruth&rsquo;s; a young fellow named Melville, private secretary to Joseph
+Perkins, head of the San Francisco Trust Company; and finally of the men, a
+live bank cashier, Charles Hapgood, a youngish man of thirty-five, graduate of
+Stanford University, member of the Nile Club and the Unity Club, and a
+conservative speaker for the Republican Party during campaigns&mdash;in short,
+a rising young man in every way. Among the women was one who painted portraits,
+another who was a professional musician, and still another who possessed the
+degree of Doctor of Sociology and who was locally famous for her social
+settlement work in the slums of San Francisco. But the women did not count for
+much in Mrs. Morse&rsquo;s plan. At the best, they were necessary accessories.
+The men who did things must be drawn to the house somehow.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t get excited when you talk,&rdquo; Ruth admonished Martin,
+before the ordeal of introduction began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his own
+awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to their old trick of
+threatening destruction to furniture and ornaments. Also, he was rendered
+self-conscious by the company. He had never before been in contact with such
+exalted beings nor with so many of them. Melville, the bank cashier, fascinated
+him, and he resolved to investigate him at the first opportunity. For
+underneath Martin&rsquo;s awe lurked his assertive ego, and he felt the urge to
+measure himself with these men and women and to find out what they had learned
+from the books and life which he had not learned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth&rsquo;s eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on, and she
+was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got acquainted with her
+cousins. He certainly did not grow excited, while being seated removed from him
+the worry of his shoulders. Ruth knew them for clever girls, superficially
+brilliant, and she could scarcely understand their praise of Martin later that
+night at going to bed. But he, on the other hand, a wit in his own class, a gay
+quizzer and laughter-maker at dances and Sunday picnics, had found the making
+of fun and the breaking of good-natured lances simple enough in this
+environment. And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him on the
+shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he could afford to
+laugh and make laughter and remain unabashed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Later, Ruth&rsquo;s anxiety found justification. Martin and Professor Caldwell
+had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though Martin no longer wove the
+air with his hands, to Ruth&rsquo;s critical eye he permitted his own eyes to
+flash and glitter too frequently, talked too rapidly and warmly, grew too
+intense, and allowed his aroused blood to redden his cheeks too much. He lacked
+decorum and control, and was in decided contrast to the young professor of
+English with whom he talked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin was not concerned with appearances! He had been swift to note the
+other&rsquo;s trained mind and to appreciate his command of knowledge.
+Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize Martin&rsquo;s concept of the
+average English professor. Martin wanted him to talk shop, and, though he
+seemed averse at first, succeeded in making him do it. For Martin did not see
+why a man should not talk shop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s absurd and unfair,&rdquo; he had told Ruth weeks before,
+&ldquo;this objection to talking shop. For what reason under the sun do men and
+women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is in them? And
+the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the thing by which
+they make their living, the thing they&rsquo;ve specialized on and sat up days
+and nights over, and even dreamed about. Imagine Mr. Butler living up to social
+etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul Verlaine or the German drama or the
+novels of D&rsquo;Annunzio. We&rsquo;d be bored to death. I, for one, if I must
+listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear him talk about his law. It&rsquo;s the
+best that is in him, and life is so short that I want the best of every man and
+woman I meet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But,&rdquo; Ruth had objected, &ldquo;there are the topics of general
+interest to all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There, you mistake,&rdquo; he had rushed on. &ldquo;All persons in
+society, all cliques in society&mdash;or, rather, nearly all persons and
+cliques&mdash;ape their betters. Now, who are the best betters? The idlers, the
+wealthy idlers. They do not know, as a rule, the things known by the persons
+who are doing something in the world. To listen to conversation about such
+things would mean to be bored, wherefore the idlers decree that such things are
+shop and must not be talked about. Likewise they decree the things that are not
+shop and which may be talked about, and those things are the latest operas,
+latest novels, cards, billiards, cocktails, automobiles, horse shows, trout
+fishing, tuna-fishing, big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and so forth&mdash;and
+mark you, these are the things the idlers know. In all truth, they constitute
+the shop-talk of the idlers. And the funniest part of it is that many of the
+clever people, and all the would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to
+impose upon them. As for me, I want the best a man&rsquo;s got in him, call it
+shop vulgarity or anything you please.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on the established had seemed
+to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness, challenging
+him to speak his mind. As Ruth paused beside them she heard Martin saying:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You surely don&rsquo;t pronounce such heresies in the University of
+California?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. &ldquo;The honest taxpayer and the
+politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our appropriations and therefore we
+kowtow to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to the party press, or
+to the press of both parties.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s clear; but how about you?&rdquo; Martin urged.
+&ldquo;You must be a fish out of the water.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Sometimes I am fairly
+sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris, in Grub Street, in a
+hermit&rsquo;s cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian crowd, drinking
+claret,&mdash;dago-red they call it in San Francisco,&mdash;dining in cheap
+restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing vociferously radical views
+upon all creation. Really, I am frequently almost sure that I was cut out to be
+a radical. But then, there are so many questions on which I am not sure. I grow
+timid when I am face to face with my human frailty, which ever prevents me from
+grasping all the factors in any problem&mdash;human, vital problems, you
+know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had come the
+&ldquo;Song of the Trade Wind&rdquo;:-
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;I am strongest at noon,<br />
+But under the moon<br />
+    I stiffen the bunt of the sail.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other reminded
+him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and cool, and strong. He
+was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal there was a certain
+bafflement about him. Martin had the feeling that he never spoke his full mind,
+just as he had often had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest
+but always held reserves of strength that were never used. Martin&rsquo;s trick
+of visioning was active as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of
+remembered fact and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for
+his inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin&rsquo;s mind
+immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily
+expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic, and his
+visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living present. Just as
+Ruth&rsquo;s face, in a momentary jealousy had called before his eyes a
+forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor Caldwell made him see again the
+Northeast Trade herding the white billows across the purple sea, so, from
+moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new
+memory-visions rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were thrown
+upon the screen of his consciousness. These visions came out of the actions and
+sensations of the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday and
+last week&mdash;a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping,
+forever thronged his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell&rsquo;s easy flow of
+speech&mdash;the conversation of a clever, cultured man&mdash;that Martin kept
+seeing himself down all his past. He saw himself when he had been quite the
+hoodlum, wearing a &ldquo;stiff-rim&rdquo; Stetson hat and a square-cut,
+double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and possessing
+the ideal of being as tough as the police permitted. He did not disguise it to
+himself, nor attempt to palliate it. At one time in his life he had been just a
+common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the police and terrorized
+honest, working-class householders. But his ideals had changed. He glanced
+about him at the well-bred, well-dressed men and women, and breathed into his
+lungs the atmosphere of culture and refinement, and at the same moment the
+ghost of his early youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and
+toughness, stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he saw
+merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual university professor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place. He had fitted
+in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and everywhere by virtue
+of holding his own at work and at play and by his willingness and ability to
+fight for his rights and command respect. But he had never taken root. He had
+fitted in sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He
+had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of
+something from beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he
+found books and art and love. And here he was, in the midst of all this, the
+only one of all the comrades he had adventured with who could have made
+themselves eligible for the inside of the Morse home.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following Professor
+Caldwell closely. And as he followed, comprehendingly and critically, he noted
+the unbroken field of the other&rsquo;s knowledge. As for himself, from moment
+to moment the conversation showed him gaps and open stretches, whole subjects
+with which he was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that
+he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a matter only of
+time, when he would fill in the outline. Then watch out, he
+thought&mdash;&rsquo;ware shoal, everybody! He felt like sitting at the feet of
+the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began to
+discern a weakness in the other&rsquo;s judgments&mdash;a weakness so stray and
+elusive that he might not have caught it had it not been ever present. And when
+he did catch it, he leapt to equality at once.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your
+judgments,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You lack biology. It has no place in your
+scheme of things.&mdash;Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the
+ground up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic
+right on up to the widest aesthetic and sociological generalizations.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses under Professor Caldwell and
+looked up to him as the living repository of all knowledge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I scarcely follow you,&rdquo; he said dubiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll try to explain,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I remember
+reading in Egyptian history something to the effect that understanding could
+not be had of Egyptian art without first studying the land question.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Quite right,&rdquo; the professor nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it seems to me,&rdquo; Martin continued, &ldquo;that knowledge of
+the land question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had
+without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of life. How can
+we understand laws and institutions, religions and customs, without
+understanding, not merely the nature of the creatures that made them, but the
+nature of the stuff out of which the creatures are made? Is literature less
+human than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt? Is there one thing in the
+known universe that is not subject to the law of evolution?&mdash;Oh, I know
+there is an elaborate evolution of the various arts laid down, but it seems to
+me to be too mechanical. The human himself is left out. The evolution of the
+tool, of the harp, of music and song and dance, are all beautifully elaborated;
+but how about the evolution of the human himself, the development of the basic
+and intrinsic parts that were in him before he made his first tool or gibbered
+his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and which I call
+biology. It is biology in its largest aspects.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know I express myself incoherently, but I&rsquo;ve tried to hammer out
+the idea. It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed and ready to
+deliver it. You spoke yourself of the human frailty that prevented one from
+taking all the factors into consideration. And you, in turn,&mdash;or so it
+seems to me,&mdash;leave out the biological factor, the very stuff out of which
+has been spun the fabric of all the arts, the warp and the woof of all human
+actions and achievements.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To Ruth&rsquo;s amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that the
+professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance for
+Martin&rsquo;s youth. Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute, silent and
+fingering his watch chain.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you know,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve had that same
+criticism passed on me once before&mdash;by a very great man, a scientist and
+evolutionist, Joseph Le Conte. But he is dead, and I thought to remain
+undetected; and now you come along and expose me. Seriously, though&mdash;and
+this is confession&mdash;I think there is something in your contention&mdash;a
+great deal, in fact. I am too classical, not enough up-to-date in the
+interpretative branches of science, and I can only plead the disadvantages of
+my education and a temperamental slothfulness that prevents me from doing the
+work. I wonder if you&rsquo;ll believe that I&rsquo;ve never been inside a
+physics or chemistry laboratory? It is true, nevertheless. Le Conte was right,
+and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to an extent&mdash;how much I do not
+know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him aside,
+whispering:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You shouldn&rsquo;t have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way. There
+may be others who want to talk with him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My mistake,&rdquo; Martin admitted contritely. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;d got
+him stirred up, and he was so interesting that I did not think. Do you know, he
+is the brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked with. And
+I&rsquo;ll tell you something else. I once thought that everybody who went to
+universities, or who sat in the high places in society, was just as brilliant
+and intelligent as he.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s an exception,&rdquo; she answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now?&mdash;Oh, say,
+bring me up against that cashier-fellow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have wished better
+behavior on her lover&rsquo;s part. Not once did his eyes flash nor his cheeks
+flush, while the calmness and poise with which he talked surprised her. But in
+Martin&rsquo;s estimation the whole tribe of bank cashiers fell a few hundred
+per cent, and for the rest of the evening he labored under the impression that
+bank cashiers and talkers of platitudes were synonymous phrases. The army
+officer he found good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome young fellow,
+content to occupy the place in life into which birth and luck had flung him. On
+learning that he had completed two years in the university, Martin was puzzled
+to know where he had stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked him better than
+the platitudinous bank cashier.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I really don&rsquo;t object to platitudes,&rdquo; he told Ruth later;
+&ldquo;but what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent,
+superior certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it.
+Why, I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time he
+took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the Democrats. Do you
+know, he skins his words as a professional poker-player skins the cards that
+are dealt out to him. Some day I&rsquo;ll show you what I mean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sorry you don&rsquo;t like him,&rdquo; was her reply.
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a favorite of Mr. Butler&rsquo;s. Mr. Butler says he is safe
+and honest&mdash;calls him the Rock, Peter, and says that upon him any banking
+institution can well be built.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t doubt it&mdash;from the little I saw of him and the less I
+heard from him; but I don&rsquo;t think so much of banks as I did. You
+don&rsquo;t mind my speaking my mind this way, dear?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no; it is most interesting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; Martin went on heartily, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m no more than a
+barbarian getting my first impressions of civilization. Such impressions must
+be entertainingly novel to the civilized person.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you think of my cousins?&rdquo; Ruth queried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I liked them better than the other women. There&rsquo;s plenty of fun in
+them along with paucity of pretence.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you did like the other women?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-parrot.
+I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like Tomlinson, there would
+be found in her not one original thought. As for the portrait-painter, she was
+a positive bore. She&rsquo;d make a good wife for the cashier. And the musician
+woman! I don&rsquo;t care how nimble her fingers are, how perfect her
+technique, how wonderful her expression&mdash;the fact is, she knows nothing
+about music.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She plays beautifully,&rdquo; Ruth protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, she&rsquo;s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but
+the intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her what music meant
+to her&mdash;you know I&rsquo;m always curious to know that particular thing;
+and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it, that it
+was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life to her.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were making them talk shop,&rdquo; Ruth charged him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings
+if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used to think that up here,
+where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed&mdash;&rdquo; He paused for a
+moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and square-cut,
+enter the door and swagger across the room. &ldquo;As I was saying, up here I
+thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant. But now, from what little
+I&rsquo;ve seen of them, they strike me as a pack of ninnies, most of them, and
+ninety percent of the remainder as bores. Now there&rsquo;s Professor
+Caldwell&mdash;he&rsquo;s different. He&rsquo;s a man, every inch of him and
+every atom of his gray matter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth&rsquo;s face brightened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Tell me about him,&rdquo; she urged. &ldquo;Not what is large and
+brilliant&mdash;I know those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am
+most curious to know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Perhaps I&rsquo;ll get myself in a pickle.&rdquo; Martin debated
+humorously for a moment. &ldquo;Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in
+him nothing less than the best.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two
+years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine things you
+think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest specimen of intellectual
+man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, no, no!&rdquo; he hastened to cry. &ldquo;Nothing paltry nor vulgar.
+What I mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of
+things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to himself that
+he never saw it. Perhaps that&rsquo;s not the clearest way to express it.
+Here&rsquo;s another way. A man who has found the path to the hidden temple but
+has not followed it; who has, perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and
+striven afterward to convince himself that it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet
+another way. A man who could have done things but who placed no value on the
+doing, and who, all the time, in his innermost heart, is regretting that he has
+not done them; who has secretly laughed at the rewards for doing, and yet,
+still more secretly, has yearned for the rewards and for the joy of
+doing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t read him that way,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And for that
+matter, I don&rsquo;t see just what you mean.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is only a vague feeling on my part,&rdquo; Martin temporized.
+&ldquo;I have no reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is
+wrong. You certainly should know him better than I.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the evening at Ruth&rsquo;s Martin brought away with him strange
+confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his goal, in the
+persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was encouraged with
+his success. The climb had been easier than he expected. He was superior to the
+climb, and (he did not, with false modesty, hide it from himself) he was
+superior to the beings among whom he had climbed&mdash;with the exception, of
+course, of Professor Caldwell. About life and the books he knew more than they,
+and he wondered into what nooks and crannies they had cast aside their
+educations. He did not know that he was himself possessed of unusual brain
+vigor; nor did he know that the persons who were given to probing the depths
+and to thinking ultimate thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of
+the world&rsquo;s Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely
+eagles sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its swarming
+freight of gregarious life.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap28"></a>CHAPTER XXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+But success had lost Martin&rsquo;s address, and her messengers no longer came
+to his door. For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays, he toiled on
+&ldquo;The Shame of the Sun,&rdquo; a long essay of some thirty thousand words.
+It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck school&mdash;an
+attack from the citadel of positive science upon the wonder-dreamers, but an
+attack nevertheless that retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort
+compatible with ascertained fact. It was a little later that he followed up the
+attack with two short essays, &ldquo;The Wonder-Dreamers&rdquo; and &ldquo;The
+Yardstick of the Ego.&rdquo; And on essays, long and short, he began to pay the
+travelling expenses from magazine to magazine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the twenty-five days spent on &ldquo;The Shame of the Sun,&rdquo; he
+sold hack-work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents. A joke had brought
+in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-grade comic weekly, had
+fetched a dollar. Then two humorous poems had earned two dollars and three
+dollars respectively. As a result, having exhausted his credit with the
+tradesmen (though he had increased his credit with the grocer to five dollars),
+his wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker. The type-writer
+people were again clamoring for money, insistently pointing out that according
+to the agreement rent was to be paid strictly in advance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack-work. Perhaps
+there was a living in it, after all. Stored away under his table were the
+twenty storiettes which had been rejected by the newspaper short-story
+syndicate. He read them over in order to find out how not to write newspaper
+storiettes, and so doing, reasoned out the perfect formula. He found that the
+newspaper storiette should never be tragic, should never end unhappily, and
+should never contain beauty of language, subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy
+of sentiment. Sentiment it must contain, plenty of it, pure and noble, of the
+sort that in his own early youth had brought his applause from &ldquo;nigger
+heaven&rdquo;&mdash;the &ldquo;For-God-my-country-and-the-Czar&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest&rdquo; brand of sentiment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted &ldquo;The Duchess&rdquo; for
+tone, and proceeded to mix according to formula. The formula consists of three
+parts: (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart; (2) by some deed or event they
+are reunited; (3) marriage bells. The third part was an unvarying quantity, but
+the first and second parts could be varied an infinite number of times. Thus,
+the pair of lovers could be jarred apart by misunderstood motives, by accident
+of fate, by jealous rivals, by irate parents, by crafty guardians, by scheming
+relatives, and so forth and so forth; they could be reunited by a brave deed of
+the man lover, by a similar deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one
+lover or the other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming relative,
+or jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same, by discovery of some
+unguessed secret, by lover storming girl&rsquo;s heart, by lover making long
+and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly. It was very fetching to make
+the girl propose in the course of being reunited, and Martin discovered, bit by
+bit, other decidedly piquant and fetching ruses. But marriage bells at the end
+was the one thing he could take no liberties with; though the heavens rolled up
+as a scroll and the stars fell, the wedding bells must go on ringing just the
+same. In quantity, the formula prescribed twelve hundred words minimum dose,
+fifteen hundred words maximum dose.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin worked out
+half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when constructing
+storiettes. These forms were like the cunning tables used by mathematicians,
+which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and left, which entrances consist
+of scores of lines and dozens of columns, and from which may be drawn, without
+reasoning or thinking, thousands of different conclusions, all unchallengably
+precise and true. Thus, in the course of half an hour with his forms, Martin
+could frame up a dozen or so storiettes, which he put aside and filled in at
+his convenience. He found that he could fill one in, after a day of serious
+work, in the hour before going to bed. As he later confessed to Ruth, he could
+almost do it in his sleep. The real work was in constructing the frames, and
+that was merely mechanical.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for once he knew
+the editorial mind when he said positively to himself that the first two he
+sent off would bring checks. And checks they brought, for four dollars each, at
+the end of twelve days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries concerning the
+magazines. Though the <i>Transcontinental</i> had published &ldquo;The Ring of
+Bells,&rdquo; no check was forthcoming. Martin needed it, and he wrote for it.
+An evasive answer and a request for more of his work was all he received. He
+had gone hungry two days waiting for the reply, and it was then that he put his
+wheel back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice a week, to the
+<i>Transcontinental</i> for his five dollars, though it was only
+semi-occasionally that he elicited a reply. He did not know that the
+<i>Transcontinental</i> had been staggering along precariously for years, that
+it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing, with a crazy
+circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and partly on patriotic
+appealing, and with advertisements that were scarcely more than charitable
+donations. Nor did he know that the <i>Transcontinental</i> was the sole
+livelihood of the editor and the business manager, and that they could wring
+their livelihood out of it only by moving to escape paying rent and by never
+paying any bill they could evade. Nor could he have guessed that the particular
+five dollars that belonged to him had been appropriated by the business manager
+for the painting of his house in Alameda, which painting he performed himself,
+on week-day afternoons, because he could not afford to pay union wages and
+because the first scab he had employed had had a ladder jerked out from under
+him and been sent to the hospital with a broken collar-bone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The ten dollars for which Martin had sold &ldquo;Treasure Hunters&rdquo; to the
+Chicago newspaper did not come to hand. The article had been published, as he
+had ascertained at the file in the Central Reading-room, but no word could he
+get from the editor. His letters were ignored. To satisfy himself that they had
+been received, he registered several of them. It was nothing less than robbery,
+he concluded&mdash;a cold-blooded steal; while he starved, he was pilfered of
+his merchandise, of his goods, the sale of which was the sole way of getting
+bread to eat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Youth and Age</i> was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his
+twenty-one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business. With it went all
+hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To cap the situation, &ldquo;The Pot,&rdquo; which he looked upon as one of the
+best things he had written, was lost to him. In despair, casting about
+frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to <i>The Billow</i>, a society
+weekly in San Francisco. His chief reason for submitting it to that publication
+was that, having only to travel across the bay from Oakland, a quick decision
+could be reached. Two weeks later he was overjoyed to see, in the latest number
+on the news-stand, his story printed in full, illustrated, and in the place of
+honor. He went home with leaping pulse, wondering how much they would pay him
+for one of the best things he had done. Also, the celerity with which it had
+been accepted and published was a pleasant thought to him. That the editor had
+not informed him of the acceptance made the surprise more complete. After
+waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation conquered
+diffidence, and he wrote to the editor of <i>The Billow</i>, suggesting that
+possibly through some negligence of the business manager his little account had
+been overlooked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even if it isn&rsquo;t more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself, it
+will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a dozen like it,
+and possibly as good.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least elicited Martin&rsquo;s
+admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We thank you,&rdquo; it ran, &ldquo;for your excellent contribution. All
+of us in the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was given the
+place of honor and immediate publication. We earnestly hope that you liked the
+illustrations.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring under the
+misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts. This is not our
+custom, and of course yours was unsolicited. We assumed, naturally, when we
+received your story, that you understood the situation. We can only deeply
+regret this unfortunate misunderstanding, and assure you of our unfailing
+regard. Again, thanking you for your kind contribution, and hoping to receive
+more from you in the near future, we remain, etc.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was also a postscript to the effect that though <i>The Billow</i> carried
+no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a complimentary
+subscription for the ensuing year.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet of all his
+manuscripts: &ldquo;Submitted at your usual rate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at <i>my</i> usual rate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection, under the
+sway of which he rewrote and polished &ldquo;The Jostling Street,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;The Wine of Life,&rdquo; &ldquo;Joy,&rdquo; the &ldquo;Sea
+Lyrics,&rdquo; and others of his earlier work. As of old, nineteen hours of
+labor a day was all too little to suit him. He wrote prodigiously, and he read
+prodigiously, forgetting in his toil the pangs caused by giving up his tobacco.
+Ruth&rsquo;s promised cure for the habit, flamboyantly labelled, he stowed away
+in the most inaccessible corner of his bureau. Especially during his stretches
+of famine he suffered from lack of the weed; but no matter how often he
+mastered the craving, it remained with him as strong as ever. He regarded it as
+the biggest thing he had ever achieved. Ruth&rsquo;s point of view was that he
+was doing no more than was right. She brought him the anti-tobacco remedy,
+purchased out of her glove money, and in a few days forgot all about it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them, were
+successful. By means of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid most of his
+bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel. The storiettes at least
+kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for ambitious work; while the one
+thing that upheld him was the forty dollars he had received from <i>The White
+Mouse</i>. He anchored his faith to that, and was confident that the really
+first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer at least an equal rate, if
+not a better one. But the thing was, how to get into the first-class magazines.
+His best stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and yet, each
+month, he read reams of dull, prosy, inartistic stuff between all their various
+covers. If only one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend from his high
+seat of pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if my work is unusual,
+no matter if it is unfit, for prudential reasons, for their pages, surely there
+must be some sparks in it, somewhere, a few, to warm them to some sort of
+appreciation. And thereupon he would get out one or another of his manuscripts,
+such as &ldquo;Adventure,&rdquo; and read it over and over in a vain attempt to
+vindicate the editorial silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an end.
+For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the part of the
+newspaper storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to him through the mail
+ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes. They were accompanied by a brief
+letter to the effect that the syndicate was overstocked, and that some months
+would elapse before it would be in the market again for manuscripts. Martin had
+even been extravagant on the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last
+the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for them and accepting
+every one he sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had
+lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank. So it was that he
+entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he continued selling his earlier
+efforts to publications that would not pay and submitting his later work to
+magazines that would not buy. Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker
+down in Oakland. A few jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the New
+York weeklies, made existence barely possible for him. It was at this time that
+he wrote letters of inquiry to the several great monthly and quarterly reviews,
+and learned in reply that they rarely considered unsolicited articles, and that
+most of their contents were written upon order by well-known specialists who
+were authorities in their various fields.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap29"></a>CHAPTER XXIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers and editors were away on
+vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a decision in three weeks
+now retained his manuscript for three months or more. The consolation he drew
+from it was that a saving in postage was effected by the deadlock. Only the
+robber-publications seemed to remain actively in business, and to them Martin
+disposed of all his early efforts, such as &ldquo;Pearl-diving,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;The Sea as a Career,&rdquo; &ldquo;Turtle-catching,&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;The Northeast Trades.&rdquo; For these manuscripts he never received a
+penny. It is true, after six months&rsquo; correspondence, he effected a
+compromise, whereby he received a safety razor for
+&ldquo;Turtle-catching,&rdquo; and that <i>The Acropolis</i>, having agreed to
+give him five dollars cash and five yearly subscriptions: for &ldquo;The
+Northeast Trades,&rdquo; fulfilled the second part of the agreement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a Boston
+editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste and a
+penny-dreadful purse. &ldquo;The Peri and the Pearl,&rdquo; a clever skit of a
+poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain, won the
+heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in the interest of a
+great railroad. When the editor wrote, offering him payment in transportation,
+Martin wrote back to inquire if the transportation was transferable. It was
+not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the return of the
+poem. Back it came, with the editor&rsquo;s regrets, and Martin sent it to San
+Francisco again, this time to <i>The Hornet</i>, a pretentious monthly that had
+been fanned into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant
+journalist who founded it. But <i>The Hornet&rsquo;s</i> light had begun to dim
+long before Martin was born. The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the
+poem, but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it. Several of his
+letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew a reply. It was
+written by a new editor, who coolly informed Martin that he declined to be held
+responsible for the old editor&rsquo;s mistakes, and that he did not think much
+of &ldquo;The Peri and the Pearl&rdquo; anyway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But <i>The Globe</i>, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel treatment
+of all. He had refrained from offering his &ldquo;Sea Lyrics&rdquo; for
+publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having been rejected by a
+dozen magazines, they had come to rest in <i>The Globe</i> office. There were
+thirty poems in the collection, and he was to receive a dollar apiece for them.
+The first month four were published, and he promptly received a check for four
+dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the
+slaughter. In some cases the titles had been altered: &ldquo;Finis,&rdquo; for
+instance, being changed to &ldquo;The Finish,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Song of the
+Outer Reef&rdquo; to &ldquo;The Song of the Coral Reef.&rdquo; In one case, an
+absolutely different title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place
+of his own, &ldquo;Medusa Lights,&rdquo; the editor had printed, &ldquo;The
+Backward Track.&rdquo; But the slaughter in the body of the poems was
+terrifying. Martin groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair.
+Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled about in the
+most incomprehensible manner. Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were
+substituted for his. He could not believe that a sane editor could be guilty of
+such maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have
+been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote immediately,
+begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to return them to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his letters
+were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till the thirty poems were
+published, and month by month he received a check for those which had appeared
+in the current number.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the <i>White Mouse</i>
+forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to
+hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural weeklies
+and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he found he could
+easily starve. At his lowest ebb, when his black suit was in pawn, he made a
+ten-strike&mdash;or so it seemed to him&mdash;in a prize contest arranged by
+the County Committee of the Republican Party. There were three branches of the
+contest, and he entered them all, laughing at himself bitterly the while in
+that he was driven to such straits to live. His poem won the first prize of ten
+dollars, his campaign song the second prize of five dollars, his essay on the
+principles of the Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars.
+Which was very gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had gone
+wrong in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a state senator
+were members of it, the money was not forthcoming. While this affair was
+hanging fire, he proved that he understood the principles of the Democratic
+Party by winning the first prize for his essay in a similar contest. And,
+moreover, he received the money, twenty-five dollars. But the forty dollars won
+in the first contest he never received.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long walk from
+north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too much time, he kept his
+black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle. The latter gave him exercise, saved
+him hours of time for work, and enabled him to see Ruth just the same. A pair
+of knee duck trousers and an old sweater made him a presentable wheel costume,
+so that he could go with Ruth on afternoon rides. Besides, he no longer had
+opportunity to see much of her in her own home, where Mrs. Morse was thoroughly
+prosecuting her campaign of entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and
+to whom he had looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no
+longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times,
+disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of such
+people was maddening. He was not unduly egotistic. He measured the narrowness
+of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he read. At
+Ruth&rsquo;s home he never met a large mind, with the exception of Professor
+Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the rest, they were
+numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. It was their ignorance
+that astounded him. What was the matter with them? What had they done with
+their educations? They had had access to the same books he had. How did it
+happen that they had drawn nothing from them?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers, existed. He had
+his proofs from the books, the books that had educated him beyond the Morse
+standard. And he knew that higher intellects than those of the Morse circle
+were to be found in the world. He read English society novels, wherein he
+caught glimpses of men and women talking politics and philosophy. And he read
+of salons in great cities, even in the United States, where art and intellect
+congregated. Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived that all well-groomed
+persons above the working class were persons with power of intellect and vigor
+of beauty. Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been
+deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same
+things.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth with him.
+Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would shine anywhere. As it
+was clear to him that he had been handicapped by his early environment, so now
+he perceived that she was similarly handicapped. She had not had a chance to
+expand. The books on her father&rsquo;s shelves, the paintings on the walls,
+the music on the piano&mdash;all was just so much meretricious display. To real
+literature, real painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead.
+And bigger than such things was life, of which they were densely, hopelessly
+ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of
+conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative
+science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the
+ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same
+metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the
+cave-man, and older&mdash;the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to
+fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from
+Adam&rsquo;s rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the
+universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous
+British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win
+immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of
+history.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that the
+difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank cashiers he
+had met and the members of the working class he had known was on a par with the
+difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they
+lived. Certainly, in all of them was lacking the something more which he found
+in himself and in the books. The Morses had shown him the best their social
+position could produce, and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a
+slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the
+Morses&rsquo;; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he
+moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what
+a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You hate and fear the socialists,&rdquo; he remarked to Mr. Morse, one
+evening at dinner; &ldquo;but why? You know neither them nor their
+doctrines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse, who had been
+invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood. The cashier was Martin&rsquo;s
+black beast, and his temper was a trifle short where the talker of platitudes
+was concerned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he had said, &ldquo;Charley Hapgood is what they call a
+rising young man&mdash;somebody told me as much. And it is true. He&rsquo;ll
+make the Governor&rsquo;s Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the
+United States Senate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What makes you think so?&rdquo; Mrs. Morse had inquired.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid
+and unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but regard
+him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the platitudes of
+the average voter that&mdash;oh, well, you know you flatter any man by dressing
+up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to him.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood,&rdquo; Ruth had chimed
+in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Heaven forbid!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The look of horror on Martin&rsquo;s face stirred Mrs. Morse to belligerence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You surely don&rsquo;t mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?&rdquo;
+she demanded icily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No more than the average Republican,&rdquo; was the retort, &ldquo;or
+average Democrat, either. They are all stupid when they are not crafty, and
+very few of them are crafty. The only wise Republicans are the millionnaires
+and their conscious henchmen. They know which side their bread is buttered on,
+and they know why.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am a Republican,&rdquo; Mr. Morse put in lightly. &ldquo;Pray, how do
+you classify me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, you are an unconscious henchman.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Henchman?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no working-class nor
+criminal practice. You don&rsquo;t depend upon wife-beaters and pickpockets for
+your income. You get your livelihood from the masters of society, and whoever
+feeds a man is that man&rsquo;s master. Yes, you are a henchman. You are
+interested in advancing the interests of the aggregations of capital you
+serve.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Morse&rsquo;s face was a trifle red.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confess, sir,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that you talk like a scoundrelly
+socialist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then it was that Martin made his remark:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You know neither them nor
+their doctrines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism,&rdquo; Mr. Morse replied,
+while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed happily
+at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege lord&rsquo;s antagonism.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality,
+and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist,&rdquo;
+Martin said with a smile. &ldquo;Because I question Jefferson and the
+unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a socialist.
+Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I who am its avowed
+enemy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you please to be facetious,&rdquo; was all the other could say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in equality,
+and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the corporations, from day to
+day, are busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me a socialist
+because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live up to. The
+Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight the battle against
+equality with the very word itself the slogan on their lips. In the name of
+equality they destroy equality. That was why I called them stupid. As for
+myself, I am an individualist. I believe the race is to the swift, the battle
+to the strong. Such is the lesson I have learned from biology, or at least
+think I have learned. As I said, I am an individualist, and individualism is
+the hereditary and eternal foe of socialism.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you frequent socialist meetings,&rdquo; Mr. Morse challenged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you to
+learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings. They are good
+fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books. Any one of them knows
+far more about sociology and all the other ologies than the average captain of
+industry. Yes, I have been to half a dozen of their meetings, but that
+doesn&rsquo;t make me a socialist any more than hearing Charley Hapgood orate
+made me a Republican.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t help it,&rdquo; Mr. Morse said feebly, &ldquo;but I still
+believe you incline that way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn&rsquo;t know what I was talking
+about. He hasn&rsquo;t understood a word of it. What did he do with his
+education, anyway?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with economic
+morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him a grisly monster.
+Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more offending to him than
+platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him, which was a
+curious hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the
+imitative.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His sister
+Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young mechanic, of German
+extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade, had set up for himself in
+a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having got the agency for a low-grade make of
+wheel, he was prosperous. Marian had called on Martin in his room a short time
+before to announce her engagement, during which visit she had playfully
+inspected Martin&rsquo;s palm and told his fortune. On her next visit she
+brought Hermann von Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and
+congratulated both of them in language so easy and graceful as to affect
+disagreeably the peasant-mind of his sister&rsquo;s lover. This bad impression
+was further heightened by Martin&rsquo;s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas
+of verse with which he had commemorated Marian&rsquo;s previous visit. It was a
+bit of society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named &ldquo;The
+Palmist.&rdquo; He was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no
+enjoyment in his sister&rsquo;s face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously
+upon her betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that
+worthy&rsquo;s asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen disapproval.
+The incident passed over, they made an early departure, and Martin forgot all
+about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any woman, even of the
+working class, should not have been flattered and delighted by having poetry
+written about her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone. Nor did she
+waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for what he had
+done.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, Marian,&rdquo; he chided, &ldquo;you talk as though you were
+ashamed of your relatives, or of your brother at any rate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I am, too,&rdquo; she blurted out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes. The
+mood, whatever it was, was genuine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry
+about my own sister?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He ain&rsquo;t jealous,&rdquo; she sobbed. &ldquo;He says it was
+indecent, ob&mdash;obscene.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to resurrect
+and read a carbon copy of &ldquo;The Palmist.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t see it,&rdquo; he said finally, proffering the manuscript
+to her. &ldquo;Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as
+obscene&mdash;that was the word, wasn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He says so, and he ought to know,&rdquo; was the answer, with a wave
+aside of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing. &ldquo;And he says
+you&rsquo;ve got to tear it up. He says he won&rsquo;t have no wife of his with
+such things written about her which anybody can read. He says it&rsquo;s a
+disgrace, an&rsquo; he won&rsquo;t stand for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense,&rdquo; Martin
+began; then abruptly changed his mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to convince
+her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd and
+preposterous, he resolved to surrender.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen
+pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original
+type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York magazine.
+Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself nor they nor the
+world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever were published.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can I?&rdquo; she pleaded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn pieces
+of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her jacket&mdash;ocular
+evidence of the success of her mission. She reminded him of Lizzie Connolly,
+though there was less of fire and gorgeous flaunting life in her than in that
+other girl of the working class whom he had seen twice. But they were on a par,
+the pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he smiled with inward amusement at
+the caprice of his fancy which suggested the appearance of either of them in
+Mrs. Morse&rsquo;s drawing-room. The amusement faded, and he was aware of a
+great loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were milestones
+of the road he had travelled. And he had left them behind. He glanced
+affectionately about him at his few books. They were all the comrades left to
+him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello, what&rsquo;s that?&rdquo; he demanded in startled surprise.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Marian repeated her question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t I go to work?&rdquo; He broke into a laugh that was only
+half-hearted. &ldquo;That Hermann of yours has been talking to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t lie,&rdquo; he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed
+his charge.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business; that when
+I write poetry about the girl he&rsquo;s keeping company with it&rsquo;s his
+business, but that outside of that he&rsquo;s got no say so. Understand?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ll succeed as a writer, eh?&rdquo; he
+went on. &ldquo;You think I&rsquo;m no good?&mdash;that I&rsquo;ve fallen down
+and am a disgrace to the family?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think it would be much better if you got a job,&rdquo; she said
+firmly, and he saw she was sincere. &ldquo;Hermann says&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Damn Hermann!&rdquo; he broke out good-naturedly. &ldquo;What I want to
+know is when you&rsquo;re going to get married. Also, you find out from your
+Hermann if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke out into
+laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her betrothed, all the
+members of his own class and the members of Ruth&rsquo;s class, directing their
+narrow little lives by narrow little formulas&mdash;herd-creatures, flocking
+together and patterning their lives by one another&rsquo;s opinions, failing of
+being individuals and of really living life because of the childlike formulas
+by which they were enslaved. He summoned them before him in apparitional
+procession: Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von
+Schmidt cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he
+judged them and dismissed them&mdash;judged them by the standards of intellect
+and morality he had learned from the books. Vainly he asked: Where are the
+great souls, the great men and women? He found them not among the careless,
+gross, and stupid intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow
+room. He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her swine.
+When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself alone, a late-comer
+entered, unexpected and unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the stiff-rim,
+the square-cut, double-breasted coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the
+youthful hoodlum who had once been he.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were like all the rest, young fellow,&rdquo; Martin sneered.
+&ldquo;Your morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did
+not think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready
+made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock of your gang
+because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and ruled the gang, not
+because you liked to,&mdash;you know you really despised it,&mdash;but because
+the other fellows patted you on the shoulder. You licked Cheese-Face because
+you wouldn&rsquo;t give in, and you wouldn&rsquo;t give in partly because you
+were an abysmal brute and for the rest because you believed what every one
+about you believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivorous ferocity
+displayed in injuring and marring fellow-creatures&rsquo; anatomies. Why, you
+whelp, you even won other fellows&rsquo; girls away from them, not because you
+wanted the girls, but because in the marrow of those about you, those who set
+your moral pace, was the instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well,
+the years have passed, and what do you think about it now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. The stiff-rim and
+the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder garments; the toughness went
+out of the face, the hardness out of the eyes; and, the face, chastened and
+refined, was irradiated from an inner life of communion with beauty and
+knowledge. The apparition was very like his present self, and, as he regarded
+it, he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book over
+which it pored. He glanced at the title and read, &ldquo;The Science of
+Æsthetics.&rdquo; Next, he entered into the apparition, trimmed the
+student-lamp, and himself went on reading &ldquo;The Science of
+Æsthetics.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap30"></a>CHAPTER XXX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that which had seen
+their love declared the year before, Martin read his &ldquo;Love-cycle&rdquo;
+to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before, they had ridden out to their
+favorite knoll in the hills. Now and again she had interrupted his reading with
+exclamations of pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with
+its fellows, he waited her judgment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating to frame in
+words the harshness of her thought.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think they are beautiful, very beautiful,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;but
+you can&rsquo;t sell them, can you? You see what I mean,&rdquo; she said,
+almost pleaded. &ldquo;This writing of yours is not practical. Something is the
+matter&mdash;maybe it is with the market&mdash;that prevents you from earning a
+living by it. And please, dear, don&rsquo;t misunderstand me. I am flattered,
+and made proud, and all that&mdash;I could not be a true woman were it
+otherwise&mdash;that you should write these poems to me. But they do not make
+our marriage possible. Don&rsquo;t you see, Martin? Don&rsquo;t think me
+mercenary. It is love, the thought of our future, with which I am burdened. A
+whole year has gone by since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding
+day is no nearer. Don&rsquo;t think me immodest in thus talking about our
+wedding, for really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don&rsquo;t
+you try to get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing? Why
+not become a reporter?&mdash;for a while, at least?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It would spoil my style,&rdquo; was his answer, in a low, monotonous
+voice. &ldquo;You have no idea how I&rsquo;ve worked for style.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But those storiettes,&rdquo; she argued. &ldquo;You called them
+hack-work. You wrote many of them. Didn&rsquo;t they spoil your style?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out, jaded, at
+the end of a long day of application to style. But a reporter&rsquo;s work is
+all hack from morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life. And it is
+a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with neither past nor future, and
+certainly without thought of any style but reportorial style, and that
+certainly is not literature. To become a reporter now, just as my style is
+taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide. As it is,
+every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a violation of myself, of
+my self-respect, of my respect for beauty. I tell you it was sickening. I was
+guilty of sin. And I was secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my
+clothes did go into pawn. But the joy of writing the &lsquo;Love-cycle&rsquo;!
+The creative joy in its noblest form! That was compensation for
+everything.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the creative joy.
+She used the phrase&mdash;it was on her lips he had first heard it. She had
+read about it, studied about it, in the university in the course of earning her
+Bachelorship of Arts; but she was not original, not creative, and all
+manifestations of culture on her part were but harpings of the harpings of
+others.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;May not the editor have been right in his revision of your &lsquo;Sea
+Lyrics&rsquo;?&rdquo; she questioned. &ldquo;Remember, an editor must have
+proved qualifications or else he would not be an editor.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s in line with the persistence of the established,&rdquo; he
+rejoined, his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of him.
+&ldquo;What is, is not only right, but is the best possible. The existence of
+anything is sufficient vindication of its fitness to exist&mdash;to exist, mark
+you, as the average person unconsciously believes, not merely in present
+conditions, but in all conditions. It is their ignorance, of course, that makes
+them believe such rot&mdash;their ignorance, which is nothing more nor less
+than the henidical mental process described by Weininger. They think they
+think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the lives of the few
+who really think.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking over
+Ruth&rsquo;s head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m sure I don&rsquo;t know who this Weininger is,&rdquo; she
+retorted. &ldquo;And you are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you.
+What I was speaking of was the qualification of editors&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I&rsquo;ll tell you,&rdquo; he interrupted. &ldquo;The chief
+qualification of ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. They have
+failed as writers. Don&rsquo;t think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and
+the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the joy of
+writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed. And right there is the
+cursed paradox of it. Every portal to success in literature is guarded by those
+watch-dogs, the failures in literature. The editors, sub-editors, associate
+editors, most of them, and the manuscript-readers for the magazines and
+book-publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to write
+and who have failed. And yet they, of all creatures under the sun the most
+unfit, are the very creatures who decide what shall and what shall not find its
+way into print&mdash;they, who have proved themselves not original, who have
+demonstrated that they lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon originality
+and genius. And after them come the reviewers, just so many more failures.
+Don&rsquo;t tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and attempted to write
+poetry or fiction; for they have, and they have failed. Why, the average review
+is more nauseating than cod-liver oil. But you know my opinion on the reviewers
+and the alleged critics. There are great critics, but they are as rare as
+comets. If I fail as a writer, I shall have proved for the career of
+editorship. There&rsquo;s bread and butter and jam, at any rate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth&rsquo;s mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover&rsquo;s views was
+buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you have
+shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the great writers ever
+arrived?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They arrived by achieving the impossible,&rdquo; he answered.
+&ldquo;They did such blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that
+opposed them. They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one
+wager against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle&rsquo;s
+battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down. And that is what I must do; I
+must achieve the impossible.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But if you fail? You must consider me as well, Martin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If I fail?&rdquo; He regarded her for a moment as though the thought she
+had uttered was unthinkable. Then intelligence illumined his eyes. &ldquo;If I
+fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an editor&rsquo;s wife.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She frowned at his facetiousness&mdash;a pretty, adorable frown that made him
+put his arm around her and kiss it away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There, that&rsquo;s enough,&rdquo; she urged, by an effort of will
+withdrawing herself from the fascination of his strength. &ldquo;I have talked
+with father and mother. I never before asserted myself so against them. I
+demanded to be heard. I was very undutiful. They are against you, you know; but
+I assured them over and over of my abiding love for you, and at last father
+agreed that if you wanted to, you could begin right away in his office. And
+then, of his own accord, he said he would pay you enough at the start so that
+we could get married and have a little cottage somewhere. Which I think was
+very fine of him&mdash;don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically reaching for
+the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to roll a cigarette,
+muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frankly, though, and don&rsquo;t let it hurt you&mdash;I tell you, to
+show you precisely how you stand with him&mdash;he doesn&rsquo;t like your
+radical views, and he thinks you are lazy. Of course I know you are not. I know
+you work hard.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin&rsquo;s mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, then,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;how about my views? Do you think they
+are so radical?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He held her eyes and waited the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I think them, well, very disconcerting,&rdquo; she replied.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the grayness of
+life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had made for him to go to
+work. And she, having gone as far as she dared, was willing to wait the answer
+till she should bring the question up again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She had not long to wait. Martin had a question of his own to propound to her.
+He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith in him, and within the week
+each was answered. Martin precipitated it by reading to her his &ldquo;The
+Shame of the Sun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you become a reporter?&rdquo; she asked when he had
+finished. &ldquo;You love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed. You
+could rise in journalism and make a name for yourself. There are a number of
+great special correspondents. Their salaries are large, and their field is the
+world. They are sent everywhere, to the heart of Africa, like Stanley, or to
+interview the Pope, or to explore unknown Thibet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you don&rsquo;t like my essay?&rdquo; he rejoined. &ldquo;You
+believe that I have some show in journalism but none in literature?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no; I do like it. It reads well. But I am afraid it&rsquo;s over the
+heads of your readers. At least it is over mine. It sounds beautiful, but I
+don&rsquo;t understand it. Your scientific slang is beyond me. You are an
+extremist, you know, dear, and what may be intelligible to you may not be
+intelligible to the rest of us.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I imagine it&rsquo;s the philosophic slang that bothers you,&rdquo; was
+all he could say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had expressed,
+and her verdict stunned him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No matter how poorly it is done,&rdquo; he persisted, &ldquo;don&rsquo;t
+you see anything in it?&mdash;in the thought of it, I mean?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, it is so different from anything I have read. I read Maeterlinck and
+understand him&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His mysticism, you understand that?&rdquo; Martin flashed out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon him, I
+don&rsquo;t understand. Of course, if originality counts&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by speech. He
+became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that she had been speaking for
+some time.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After all, your writing has been a toy to you,&rdquo; she was saying.
+&ldquo;Surely you have played with it long enough. It is time to take up life
+seriously&mdash;<i>our</i> life, Martin. Hitherto you have lived solely your
+own.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You want me to go to work?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes. Father has offered&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I understand all that,&rdquo; he broke in; &ldquo;but what I want to
+know is whether or not you have lost faith in me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In your writing, dear,&rdquo; she admitted in a half-whisper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve read lots of my stuff,&rdquo; he went on brutally.
+&ldquo;What do you think of it? Is it utterly hopeless? How does it compare
+with other men&rsquo;s work?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But they sell theirs, and you&mdash;don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That doesn&rsquo;t answer my question. Do you think that literature is
+not at all my vocation?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I will answer.&rdquo; She steeled herself to do it. &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t think you were made to write. Forgive me, dear. You compel me to
+say it; and you know I know more about literature than you do.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts,&rdquo; he said meditatively; &ldquo;and
+you ought to know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there is more to be said,&rdquo; he continued, after a pause painful
+to both. &ldquo;I know what I have in me. No one knows that so well as I. I
+know I shall succeed. I will not be kept down. I am afire with what I have to
+say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not ask you to have faith in that,
+though. I do not ask you to have faith in me, nor in my writing. What I do ask
+of you is to love me and have faith in love.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A year ago I begged for two years. One of those years is yet to run. And
+I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that year is run I shall
+have succeeded. You remember what you told me long ago, that I must serve my
+apprenticeship to writing. Well, I have served it. I have crammed it and
+telescoped it. With you at the end awaiting me, I have never shirked. Do you
+know, I have forgotten what it is to fall peacefully asleep. A few million
+years ago I knew what it was to sleep my fill and to awake naturally from very
+glut of sleep. I am awakened always now by an alarm clock. If I fall asleep
+early or late, I set the alarm accordingly; and this, and the putting out of
+the lamp, are my last conscious actions.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading for a
+lighter one. And when I doze over that, I beat my head with my knuckles in
+order to drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a man who was afraid to sleep.
+Kipling wrote the story. This man arranged a spur so that when unconsciousness
+came, his naked body pressed against the iron teeth. Well, I&rsquo;ve done the
+same. I look at the time, and I resolve that not until midnight, or not until
+one o&rsquo;clock, or two o&rsquo;clock, or three o&rsquo;clock, shall the spur
+be removed. And so it rowels me awake until the appointed time. That spur has
+been my bed-mate for months. I have grown so desperate that five and a half
+hours of sleep is an extravagance. I sleep four hours now. I am starved for
+sleep. There are times when I am light-headed from want of sleep, times when
+death, with its rest and sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am
+haunted by Longfellow&rsquo;s lines:
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The sea is still and deep;<br />
+All things within its bosom sleep;<br />
+A single step and all is o&rsquo;er,<br />
+A plunge, a bubble, and no more.&rsquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from nervousness, from an
+overwrought mind. But the point is: Why have I done this? For you. To shorten
+my apprenticeship. To compel Success to hasten. And my apprenticeship is now
+served. I know my equipment. I swear that I learn more each month than the
+average college man learns in a year. I know it, I tell you. But were my need
+for you to understand not so desperate I should not tell you. It is not
+boasting. I measure the results by the books. Your brothers, to-day, are
+ignorant barbarians compared with me and the knowledge I have wrung from the
+books in the hours they were sleeping. Long ago I wanted to be famous. I care
+very little for fame now. What I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for
+food, or clothing, or recognition. I have a dream of laying my head on your
+breast and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere another
+year is gone.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his will opposed
+hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward him. The strength that
+had always poured out from him to her was now flowering in his impassioned
+voice, his flashing eyes, and the vigor of life and intellect surging in him.
+And in that moment, and for the moment, she was aware of a rift that showed in
+her certitude&mdash;a rift through which she caught sight of the real Martin
+Eden, splendid and invincible; and as animal-trainers have their moments of
+doubt, so she, for the instant, seemed to doubt her power to tame this wild
+spirit of a man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And another thing,&rdquo; he swept on. &ldquo;You love me. But why do
+you love me? The thing in me that compels me to write is the very thing that
+draws your love. You love me because I am somehow different from the men you
+have known and might have loved. I was not made for the desk and
+counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling. Make me do
+such things, make me like those other men, doing the work they do, breathing
+the air they breathe, developing the point of view they have developed, and you
+have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed the thing you love. My
+desire to write is the most vital thing in me. Had I been a mere clod, neither
+would I have desired to write, nor would you have desired me for a
+husband.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you forget,&rdquo; she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind
+glimpsing a parallel. &ldquo;There have been eccentric inventors, starving
+their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion. Doubtless
+their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them, not because of but
+in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;But there have been inventors who
+were not eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical
+things; and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded. Certainly I do not seek
+any impossibilities&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have called it &lsquo;achieving the impossible,&rsquo;&rdquo; she
+interpolated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I spoke figuratively. I seek to do what men have done before me&mdash;to
+write and to live by my writing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her silence spurred him on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?&rdquo;
+he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his&mdash;the pitying
+mother-hand for the hurt child. And to her, just then, he was the hurt child,
+the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the antagonism of her
+father and mother.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you love me?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I do! I do!&rdquo; she cried.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me.&rdquo;
+Triumph sounded in his voice. &ldquo;For I have faith in your love, not fear of
+their enmity. All things may go astray in this world, but not love. Love cannot
+go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles by the way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap31"></a>CHAPTER XXXI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway&mdash;as it
+proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance. Waiting on the corner for a
+car, she had seen him first, and noted the eager, hungry lines of his face and
+the desperate, worried look of his eyes. In truth, he was desperate and
+worried. He had just come from a fruitless interview with the pawnbroker, from
+whom he had tried to wring an additional loan on his wheel. The muddy fall
+weather having come on, Martin had pledged his wheel some time since and
+retained his black suit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s the black suit,&rdquo; the pawnbroker, who knew his every
+asset, had answered. &ldquo;You needn&rsquo;t tell me you&rsquo;ve gone and
+pledged it with that Jew, Lipka. Because if you have&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no; I&rsquo;ve got it. But I want to wear it on a matter of
+business.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; the mollified usurer had replied. &ldquo;And I want it
+on a matter of business before I can let you have any more money. You
+don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;m in it for my health?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it&rsquo;s a forty-dollar wheel, in good condition,&rdquo; Martin
+had argued. &ldquo;And you&rsquo;ve only let me have seven dollars on it. No,
+not even seven. Six and a quarter; you took the interest in advance.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you want some more, bring the suit,&rdquo; had been the reply that
+sent Martin out of the stuffy little den, so desperate at heart as to reflect
+it in his face and touch his sister to pity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car came along and stopped to
+take on a crowd of afternoon shoppers. Mrs. Higginbotham divined from the grip
+on her arm as he helped her on, that he was not going to follow her. She turned
+on the step and looked down upon him. His haggard face smote her to the heart
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t you comin&rsquo;?&rdquo; she asked
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment she had descended to his side.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m walking&mdash;exercise, you know,&rdquo; he explained.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then I&rsquo;ll go along for a few blocks,&rdquo; she announced.
+&ldquo;Mebbe it&rsquo;ll do me good. I ain&rsquo;t ben feelin&rsquo; any too
+spry these last few days.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her general slovenly
+appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the drooping shoulders, the tired face
+with the sagging lines, and in the heavy fall of her feet, without
+elasticity&mdash;a very caricature of the walk that belongs to a free and happy
+body.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;d better stop here,&rdquo; he said, though she had already
+come to a halt at the first corner, &ldquo;and take the next car.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My goodness!&mdash;if I ain&rsquo;t all tired a&rsquo;ready!&rdquo; she
+panted. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;m just as able to walk as you in them soles.
+They&rsquo;re that thin they&rsquo;ll bu&rsquo;st long before you git out to
+North Oakland.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a better pair at home,&rdquo; was the answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come out to dinner to-morrow,&rdquo; she invited irrelevantly.
+&ldquo;Mr. Higginbotham won&rsquo;t be there. He&rsquo;s goin&rsquo; to San
+Leandro on business.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back the wolfish, hungry look
+that leapt into his eyes at the suggestion of dinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You haven&rsquo;t a penny, Mart, and that&rsquo;s why you&rsquo;re
+walkin&rsquo;. Exercise!&rdquo; She tried to sniff contemptuously, but
+succeeded in producing only a sniffle. &ldquo;Here, lemme see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar piece into his hand.
+&ldquo;I guess I forgot your last birthday, Mart,&rdquo; she mumbled lamely.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin&rsquo;s hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold. In the same
+instant he knew he ought not to accept, and found himself struggling in the
+throes of indecision. That bit of gold meant food, life, and light in his body
+and brain, power to go on writing, and&mdash;who was to say?&mdash;maybe to
+write something that would bring in many pieces of gold. Clear on his vision
+burned the manuscripts of two essays he had just completed. He saw them under
+the table on top of the heap of returned manuscripts for which he had no
+stamps, and he saw their titles, just as he had typed them&mdash;&ldquo;The
+High Priests of Mystery,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Cradle of Beauty.&rdquo; He had
+never submitted them anywhere. They were as good as anything he had done in
+that line. If only he had stamps for them! Then the certitude of his ultimate
+success rose up in him, an able ally of hunger, and with a quick movement he
+slipped the coin into his pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over,&rdquo; he
+gulped out, his throat painfully contracted and in his eyes a swift hint of
+moisture.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mark my words!&rdquo; he cried with abrupt positiveness. &ldquo;Before
+the year is out I&rsquo;ll put an even hundred of those little yellow-boys into
+your hand. I don&rsquo;t ask you to believe me. All you have to do is wait and
+see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nor did she believe. Her incredulity made her uncomfortable, and failing of
+other expedient, she said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know you&rsquo;re hungry, Mart. It&rsquo;s sticking out all over you.
+Come in to meals any time. I&rsquo;ll send one of the children to tell you when
+Mr. Higginbotham ain&rsquo;t to be there. An&rsquo; Mart&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she was about to say, so
+visible was her thought process to him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think it&rsquo;s about time you got a job?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ll win out?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nobody has faith in me, Gertrude, except myself.&rdquo; His voice was
+passionately rebellious. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve done good work already, plenty of
+it, and sooner or later it will sell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How do you know it is good?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because&mdash;&rdquo; He faltered as the whole vast field of literature
+and the history of literature stirred in his brain and pointed the futility of
+his attempting to convey to her the reasons for his faith. &ldquo;Well, because
+it&rsquo;s better than ninety-nine per cent of what is published in the
+magazines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish&rsquo;t you&rsquo;d listen to reason,&rdquo; she answered feebly,
+but with unwavering belief in the correctness of her diagnosis of what was
+ailing him. &ldquo;I wish&rsquo;t you&rsquo;d listen to reason,&rdquo; she
+repeated, &ldquo;an&rsquo; come to dinner to-morrow.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After Martin had helped her on the car, he hurried to the post-office and
+invested three of the five dollars in stamps; and when, later in the day, on
+the way to the Morse home, he stopped in at the post-office to weigh a large
+number of long, bulky envelopes, he affixed to them all the stamps save three
+of the two-cent denomination.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It proved a momentous night for Martin, for after dinner he met Russ
+Brissenden. How he chanced to come there, whose friend he was or what
+acquaintance brought him, Martin did not know. Nor had he the curiosity to
+inquire about him of Ruth. In short, Brissenden struck Martin as anaemic and
+feather-brained, and was promptly dismissed from his mind. An hour later he
+decided that Brissenden was a boor as well, what of the way he prowled about
+from one room to another, staring at the pictures or poking his nose into books
+and magazines he picked up from the table or drew from the shelves. Though a
+stranger in the house he finally isolated himself in the midst of the company,
+huddling into a capacious Morris chair and reading steadily from a thin volume
+he had drawn from his pocket. As he read, he abstractedly ran his fingers, with
+a caressing movement, through his hair. Martin noticed him no more that
+evening, except once when he observed him chaffing with great apparent success
+with several of the young women.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It chanced that when Martin was leaving, he overtook Brissenden already half
+down the walk to the street.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hello, is that you?&rdquo; Martin said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung alongside. Martin made no
+further attempt at conversation, and for several blocks unbroken silence lay
+upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pompous old ass!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The suddenness and the virulence of the exclamation startled Martin. He felt
+amused, and at the same time was aware of a growing dislike for the other.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you go to such a place for?&rdquo; was abruptly flung at him
+after another block of silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why do you?&rdquo; Martin countered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bless me, I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; came back. &ldquo;At least this is
+my first indiscretion. There are twenty-four hours in each day, and I must
+spend them somehow. Come and have a drink.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; Martin answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of his acceptance. At home
+was several hours&rsquo; hack-work waiting for him before he went to bed, and
+after he went to bed there was a volume of Weismann waiting for him, to say
+nothing of Herbert Spencer&rsquo;s Autobiography, which was as replete for him
+with romance as any thrilling novel. Why should he waste any time with this man
+he did not like? was his thought. And yet, it was not so much the man nor the
+drink as was it what was associated with the drink&mdash;the bright lights, the
+mirrors and dazzling array of glasses, the warm and glowing faces and the
+resonant hum of the voices of men. That was it, it was the voices of men,
+optimistic men, men who breathed success and spent their money for drinks like
+men. He was lonely, that was what was the matter with him; that was why he had
+snapped at the invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook. Not
+since with Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception of the wine he
+took with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a drink at a public bar. Mental
+exhaustion did not produce a craving for liquor such as physical exhaustion
+did, and he had felt no need for it. But just now he felt desire for the drink,
+or, rather, for the atmosphere wherein drinks were dispensed and disposed of.
+Such a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden and he lounged in capacious
+leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They talked. They talked about many things, and now Brissenden and now Martin
+took turn in ordering Scotch and soda. Martin, who was extremely strong-headed,
+marvelled at the other&rsquo;s capacity for liquor, and ever and anon broke off
+to marvel at the other&rsquo;s conversation. He was not long in assuming that
+Brissenden knew everything, and in deciding that here was the second
+intellectual man he had met. But he noted that Brissenden had what Professor
+Caldwell lacked&mdash;namely, fire, the flashing insight and perception, the
+flaming uncontrol of genius. Living language flowed from him. His thin lips,
+like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again,
+pursing caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin lips
+shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of haunting
+beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness of life; and yet again
+the thin lips were like a bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic
+strife, phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry
+spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said something
+more&mdash;the poet&rsquo;s word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without
+words which could express, and which none the less found expression in the
+subtle and all but ungraspable connotations of common words. He, by some wonder
+of vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language
+for narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing known words
+with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin&rsquo;s consciousness
+messages that were incommunicable to ordinary souls.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin forgot his first impression of dislike. Here was the best the books had
+to offer coming true. Here was an intelligence, a living man for him to look up
+to. &ldquo;I am down in the dirt at your feet,&rdquo; Martin repeated to
+himself again and again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve studied biology,&rdquo; he said aloud, in significant
+allusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To his surprise Brissenden shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you are stating truths that are substantiated only by
+biology,&rdquo; Martin insisted, and was rewarded by a blank stare. &ldquo;Your
+conclusions are in line with the books which you must have read.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am glad to hear it,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;That my smattering
+of knowledge should enable me to short-cut my way to truth is most reassuring.
+As for myself, I never bother to find out if I am right or not. It is all
+valueless anyway. Man can never know the ultimate verities.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are a disciple of Spencer!&rdquo; Martin cried triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t read him since adolescence, and all I read then was his
+&lsquo;Education.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly,&rdquo; Martin broke out
+half an hour later. He had been closely analyzing Brissenden&rsquo;s mental
+equipment. &ldquo;You are a sheer dogmatist, and that&rsquo;s what makes it so
+marvellous. You state dogmatically the latest facts which science has been able
+to establish only by <i>&agrave; posteriori</i> reasoning. You jump at correct
+conclusions. You certainly short-cut with a vengeance. You feel your way with
+the speed of light, by some hyperrational process, to truth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that was what used to bother Father Joseph, and Brother
+Dutton,&rdquo; Brissenden replied. &ldquo;Oh, no,&rdquo; he added; &ldquo;I am
+not anything. It was a lucky trick of fate that sent me to a Catholic college
+for my education. Where did you pick up what you know?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And while Martin told him, he was busy studying Brissenden, ranging from a
+long, lean, aristocratic face and drooping shoulders to the overcoat on a
+neighboring chair, its pockets sagged and bulged by the freightage of many
+books. Brissenden&rsquo;s face and long, slender hands were browned by the
+sun&mdash;excessively browned, Martin thought. This sunburn bothered Martin. It
+was patent that Brissenden was no outdoor man. Then how had he been ravaged by
+the sun? Something morbid and significant attached to that sunburn, was
+Martin&rsquo;s thought as he returned to a study of the face, narrow, with high
+cheek-bones and cavernous hollows, and graced with as delicate and fine an
+aquiline nose as Martin had ever seen. There was nothing remarkable about the
+size of the eyes. They were neither large nor small, while their color was a
+nondescript brown; but in them smouldered a fire, or, rather, lurked an
+expression dual and strangely contradictory. Defiant, indomitable, even harsh
+to excess, they at the same time aroused pity. Martin found himself pitying him
+he knew not why, though he was soon to learn.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I&rsquo;m a lunger,&rdquo; Brissenden announced, offhand, a little
+later, having already stated that he came from Arizona. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been
+down there a couple of years living on the climate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Aren&rsquo;t you afraid to venture it up in this climate?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Afraid?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There was no special emphasis of his repetition of Martin&rsquo;s word. But
+Martin saw in that ascetic face the advertisement that there was nothing of
+which it was afraid. The eyes had narrowed till they were eagle-like, and
+Martin almost caught his breath as he noted the eagle beak with its dilated
+nostrils, defiant, assertive, aggressive. Magnificent, was what he commented to
+himself, his blood thrilling at the sight. Aloud, he quoted:-
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;Under the bludgeoning of Chance<br />
+    My head is bloody but unbowed.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You like Henley,&rdquo; Brissenden said, his expression changing swiftly
+to large graciousness and tenderness. &ldquo;Of course, I couldn&rsquo;t have
+expected anything else of you. Ah, Henley! A brave soul. He stands out among
+contemporary rhymesters&mdash;magazine rhymesters&mdash;as a gladiator stands
+out in the midst of a band of eunuchs.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t like the magazines,&rdquo; Martin softly impeached.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you?&rdquo; was snarled back at him so savagely as to startle him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines,&rdquo;
+Martin faltered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s better,&rdquo; was the mollified rejoinder. &ldquo;You try
+to write, but you don&rsquo;t succeed. I respect and admire your failure. I
+know what you write. I can see it with half an eye, and there&rsquo;s one
+ingredient in it that shuts it out of the magazines. It&rsquo;s guts, and
+magazines have no use for that particular commodity. What they want is
+wish-wash and slush, and God knows they get it, but not from you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not above hack-work,&rdquo; Martin contended.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the contrary&mdash;&rdquo; Brissenden paused and ran an insolent eye
+over Martin&rsquo;s objective poverty, passing from the well-worn tie and the
+saw-edged collar to the shiny sleeves of the coat and on to the slight fray of
+one cuff, winding up and dwelling upon Martin&rsquo;s sunken cheeks. &ldquo;On
+the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far above you that you can never hope
+to rise to it. Why, man, I could insult you by asking you to have something to
+eat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and Brissenden
+laughed triumphantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A full man is not insulted by such an invitation,&rdquo; he concluded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are a devil,&rdquo; Martin cried irritably.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Anyway, I didn&rsquo;t ask you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You didn&rsquo;t dare.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know about that. I invite you now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if with the intention of
+departing to the restaurant forthwith.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin&rsquo;s fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was drumming in his
+temples.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Bosco! He eats &rsquo;em alive! Eats &rsquo;em alive!&rdquo; Brissenden
+exclaimed, imitating the <i>spieler</i> of a locally famous snake-eater.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I could certainly eat you alive,&rdquo; Martin said, in turn running
+insolent eyes over the other&rsquo;s disease-ravaged frame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Only I&rsquo;m not worthy of it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; Martin considered, &ldquo;because the incident
+is not worthy.&rdquo; He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome. &ldquo;I
+confess you made a fool of me, Brissenden. That I am hungry and you are aware
+of it are only ordinary phenomena, and there&rsquo;s no disgrace. You see, I
+laugh at the conventional little moralities of the herd; then you drift by, say
+a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the slave of the same little
+moralities.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You were insulted,&rdquo; Brissenden affirmed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I certainly was, a moment ago. The prejudice of early youth, you know. I
+learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have since learned. They are
+the skeletons in my particular closet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;ve got the door shut on them now?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I certainly have.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then let&rsquo;s go and get something to eat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go you,&rdquo; Martin answered, attempting to pay for the
+current Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and seeing
+the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change back on the table.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly weight of
+Brissenden&rsquo;s hand upon his shoulder.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap32"></a>CHAPTER XXXII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin&rsquo;s second
+visitor. But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated Brissenden in
+her parlor&rsquo;s grandeur of respectability.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hope you don&rsquo;t mind my coming?&rdquo; Brissenden began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no, not at all,&rdquo; Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him
+to the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed. &ldquo;But how did you know
+where I lived?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Called up the Morses. Miss Morse answered the &rsquo;phone. And here I
+am.&rdquo; He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the table.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s a book, by a poet. Read it and keep it.&rdquo; And then,
+in reply to Martin&rsquo;s protest: &ldquo;What have I to do with books? I had
+another hemorrhage this morning. Got any whiskey? No, of course not. Wait a
+minute.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was off and away. Martin watched his long figure go down the outside steps,
+and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang the shoulders, which had
+once been broad, drawn in now over the collapsed ruin of the chest. Martin got
+two tumblers, and fell to reading the book of verse, Henry Vaughn
+Marlow&rsquo;s latest collection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No Scotch,&rdquo; Brissenden announced on his return. &ldquo;The beggar
+sells nothing but American whiskey. But here&rsquo;s a quart of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we&rsquo;ll make a
+toddy,&rdquo; Martin offered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?&rdquo; he went on,
+holding up the volume in question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Possibly fifty dollars,&rdquo; came the answer. &ldquo;Though he&rsquo;s
+lucky if he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk
+bringing it out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then one can&rsquo;t make a living out of poetry?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin&rsquo;s tone and face alike showed his dejection.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes. There&rsquo;s
+Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick. They do very nicely. But
+poetry&mdash;do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his living?&mdash;teaching in
+a boys&rsquo; cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania, and of all private little
+hells such a billet is the limit. I wouldn&rsquo;t trade places with him if he
+had fifty years of life before him. And yet his work stands out from the ruck
+of the contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots. And the reviews
+he gets! Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too much is written by the men who can&rsquo;t write about the men who
+do write,&rdquo; Martin concurred. &ldquo;Why, I was appalled at the quantities
+of rubbish written about Stevenson and his work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ghouls and harpies!&rdquo; Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth.
+&ldquo;Yes, I know the spawn&mdash;complacently pecking at him for his Father
+Damien letter, analyzing him, weighing him&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos,&rdquo;
+Martin broke in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s it, a good phrase,&mdash;mouthing and besliming the
+True, and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and saying,
+&lsquo;Good dog, Fido.&rsquo; Faugh! &lsquo;The little chattering daws of
+men,&rsquo; Richard Realf called them the night he died.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pecking at star-dust,&rdquo; Martin took up the strain warmly; &ldquo;at
+the meteoric flight of the master-men. I once wrote a squib on them&mdash;the
+critics, or the reviewers, rather.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let&rsquo;s see it,&rdquo; Brissenden begged eagerly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of &ldquo;Star-dust,&rdquo; and during the
+reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to sip his
+toddy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Strikes me you&rsquo;re a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world
+of cowled gnomes who cannot see,&rdquo; was his comment at the end of it.
+&ldquo;Of course it was snapped up by the first magazine?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book. &ldquo;It has been refused by
+twenty-seven of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit of
+coughing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, you needn&rsquo;t tell me you haven&rsquo;t tackled poetry,&rdquo;
+he gasped. &ldquo;Let me see some of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t read it now,&rdquo; Martin pleaded. &ldquo;I want to talk
+with you. I&rsquo;ll make up a bundle and you can take it home.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden departed with the &ldquo;Love-cycle,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Peri and
+the Pearl,&rdquo; returning next day to greet Martin with:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin learned that
+Brissenden also was one. He was swept off his feet by the other&rsquo;s work,
+and astounded that no attempt had been made to publish it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A plague on all their houses!&rdquo; was Brissenden&rsquo;s answer to
+Martin&rsquo;s volunteering to market his work for him. &ldquo;Love Beauty for
+its own sake,&rdquo; was his counsel, &ldquo;and leave the magazines alone.
+Back to your ships and your sea&mdash;that&rsquo;s my advice to you, Martin
+Eden. What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men? You are cutting
+your throat every day you waste in them trying to prostitute beauty to the
+needs of magazinedom. What was it you quoted me the other day?&mdash;Oh, yes,
+&lsquo;Man, the latest of the ephemera.&rsquo; Well, what do you, the latest of
+the ephemera, want with fame? If you got it, it would be poison to you. You are
+too simple, too elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper on such
+pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines. Beauty is the only
+master to serve. Serve her and damn the multitude! Success! What in
+hell&rsquo;s success if it isn&rsquo;t right there in your Stevenson sonnet,
+which outranks Henley&rsquo;s &lsquo;Apparition,&rsquo; in that
+&lsquo;Love-cycle,&rsquo; in those sea-poems?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in the
+doing of it. You can&rsquo;t tell me. I know it. You know it. Beauty hurts you.
+It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a knife of flame.
+Why should you palter with magazines? Let beauty be your end. Why should you
+mint beauty into gold? Anyway, you can&rsquo;t; so there&rsquo;s no use in my
+getting excited over it. You can read the magazines for a thousand years and
+you won&rsquo;t find the value of one line of Keats. Leave fame and coin alone,
+sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to your sea.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not for fame, but for love,&rdquo; Martin laughed. &ldquo;Love seems to
+have no place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of Love.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly. &ldquo;You are so young,
+Martin boy, so young. You will flutter high, but your wings are of the finest
+gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments. Do not scorch them. But of course you
+have scorched them already. It required some glorified petticoat to account for
+that &lsquo;Love-cycle,&rsquo; and that&rsquo;s the shame of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It glorifies love as well as the petticoat,&rdquo; Martin laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The philosophy of madness,&rdquo; was the retort. &ldquo;So have I
+assured myself when wandering in hasheesh dreams. But beware. These bourgeois
+cities will kill you. Look at that den of traitors where I met you. Dry rot is
+no name for it. One can&rsquo;t keep his sanity in such an atmosphere.
+It&rsquo;s degrading. There&rsquo;s not one of them who is not degrading, man
+and woman, all of them animated stomachs guided by the high intellectual and
+artistic impulses of clams&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin. Then, with a flash of divination, he
+saw the situation. The expression on his face turned to wondering horror.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And you wrote that tremendous &lsquo;Love-cycle&rsquo; to her&mdash;that
+pale, shrivelled, female thing!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next instant Martin&rsquo;s right hand had shot to a throttling clutch on
+his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth rattled. But Martin, looking
+into his eyes, saw no fear there,&mdash;naught but a curious and mocking devil.
+Martin remembered himself, and flung Brissenden, by the neck, sidelong upon the
+bed, at the same moment releasing his hold.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to chuckle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the
+flame,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days,&rdquo; Martin apologized.
+&ldquo;Hope I didn&rsquo;t hurt you. Here, let me mix a fresh toddy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ah, you young Greek!&rdquo; Brissenden went on. &ldquo;I wonder if you
+take just pride in that body of yours. You are devilish strong. You are a young
+panther, a lion cub. Well, well, it is you who must pay for that
+strength.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do you mean?&rdquo; Martin asked curiously, passing him a glass.
+&ldquo;Here, down this and be good.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because&mdash;&rdquo; Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled
+appreciation of it. &ldquo;Because of the women. They will worry you until you
+die, as they have already worried you, or else I was born yesterday. Now
+there&rsquo;s no use in your choking me; I&rsquo;m going to have my say. This
+is undoubtedly your calf love; but for Beauty&rsquo;s sake show better taste
+next time. What under heaven do you want with a daughter of the bourgeoisie?
+Leave them alone. Pick out some great, wanton flame of a woman, who laughs at
+life and jeers at death and loves one while she may. There are such women, and
+they will love you just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois
+sheltered life.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pusillanimous?&rdquo; Martin protested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have been
+prattled into them, and afraid to live life. They will love you, Martin, but
+they will love their little moralities more. What you want is the magnificent
+abandon of life, the great free souls, the blazing butterflies and not the
+little gray moths. Oh, you will grow tired of them, too, of all the female
+things, if you are unlucky enough to live. But you won&rsquo;t live. You
+won&rsquo;t go back to your ships and sea; therefore, you&rsquo;ll hang around
+these pest-holes of cities until your bones are rotten, and then you&rsquo;ll
+die.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can lecture me, but you can&rsquo;t make me talk back,&rdquo; Martin
+said. &ldquo;After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the
+wisdom of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but they liked
+each other, and on Martin&rsquo;s part it was no less than a profound liking.
+Day after day they were together, if for no more than the hour Brissenden spent
+in Martin&rsquo;s stuffy room. Brissenden never arrived without his quart of
+whiskey, and when they dined together down-town, he drank Scotch and soda
+throughout the meal. He invariably paid the way for both, and it was through
+him that Martin learned the refinements of food, drank his first champagne, and
+made acquaintance with Rhenish wines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Brissenden was always an enigma. With the face of an ascetic, he was, in
+all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary. He was unafraid to die,
+bitter and cynical of all the ways of living; and yet, dying, he loved life, to
+the last atom of it. He was possessed by a madness to live, to thrill,
+&ldquo;to squirm my little space in the cosmic dust whence I came,&rdquo; as he
+phrased it once himself. He had tampered with drugs and done many strange
+things in quest of new thrills, new sensations. As he told Martin, he had once
+gone three days without water, had done so voluntarily, in order to experience
+the exquisite delight of such a thirst assuaged. Who or what he was, Martin
+never learned. He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave
+and whose present was a bitter fever of living.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap33"></a>CHAPTER XXXIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Martin was steadily losing his battle. Economize as he would, the earnings from
+hack-work did not balance expenses. Thanksgiving found him with his black suit
+in pawn and unable to accept the Morses&rsquo; invitation to dinner. Ruth was
+not made happy by his reason for not coming, and the corresponding effect on
+him was one of desperation. He told her that he would come, after all; that he
+would go over to San Francisco, to the <i>Transcontinental</i> office, collect
+the five dollars due him, and with it redeem his suit of clothes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria. He would have borrowed it, by
+preference, from Brissenden, but that erratic individual had disappeared. Two
+weeks had passed since Martin had seen him, and he vainly cudgelled his brains
+for some cause of offence. The ten cents carried Martin across the ferry to San
+Francisco, and as he walked up Market Street he speculated upon his predicament
+in case he failed to collect the money. There would then be no way for him to
+return to Oakland, and he knew no one in San Francisco from whom to borrow
+another ten cents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door to the <i>Transcontinental</i> office was ajar, and Martin, in the act
+of opening it, was brought to a sudden pause by a loud voice from within, which
+exclaimed:- &ldquo;But that is not the question, Mr. Ford.&rdquo; (Ford, Martin
+knew, from his correspondence, to be the editor&rsquo;s name.) &ldquo;The
+question is, are you prepared to pay?&mdash;cash, and cash down, I mean? I am
+not interested in the prospects of the <i>Transcontinental</i> and what you
+expect to make it next year. What I want is to be paid for what I do. And I
+tell you, right now, the Christmas <i>Transcontinental</i> don&rsquo;t go to
+press till I have the money in my hand. Good day. When you get the money, come
+and see me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The door jerked open, and the man flung past Martin, with an angry countenance
+and went down the corridor, muttering curses and clenching his fists. Martin
+decided not to enter immediately, and lingered in the hallways for a quarter of
+an hour. Then he shoved the door open and walked in. It was a new experience,
+the first time he had been inside an editorial office. Cards evidently were not
+necessary in that office, for the boy carried word to an inner room that there
+was a man who wanted to see Mr. Ford. Returning, the boy beckoned him from
+halfway across the room and led him to the private office, the editorial
+sanctum. Martin&rsquo;s first impression was of the disorder and cluttered
+confusion of the room. Next he noticed a bewhiskered, youthful-looking man,
+sitting at a roll-top desk, who regarded him curiously. Martin marvelled at the
+calm repose of his face. It was evident that the squabble with the printer had
+not affected his equanimity.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I am Martin Eden,&rdquo; Martin began the conversation.
+(&ldquo;And I want my five dollars,&rdquo; was what he would have liked to
+say.)
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But this was his first editor, and under the circumstances he did not desire to
+scare him too abruptly. To his surprise, Mr. Ford leaped into the air with a
+&ldquo;You don&rsquo;t say so!&rdquo; and the next moment, with both hands, was
+shaking Martin&rsquo;s hand effusively.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Can&rsquo;t say how glad I am to see you, Mr. Eden. Often wondered what
+you were like.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Here he held Martin off at arm&rsquo;s length and ran his beaming eyes over
+Martin&rsquo;s second-best suit, which was also his worst suit, and which was
+ragged and past repair, though the trousers showed the careful crease he had
+put in with Maria&rsquo;s flat-irons.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I confess, though, I conceived you to be a much older man than you are.
+Your story, you know, showed such breadth, and vigor, such maturity and depth
+of thought. A masterpiece, that story&mdash;I knew it when I had read the first
+half-dozen lines. Let me tell you how I first read it. But no; first let me
+introduce you to the staff.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Still talking, Mr. Ford led him into the general office, where he introduced
+him to the associate editor, Mr. White, a slender, frail little man whose hand
+seemed strangely cold, as if he were suffering from a chill, and whose whiskers
+were sparse and silky.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And Mr. Ends, Mr. Eden. Mr. Ends is our business manager, you
+know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin found himself shaking hands with a cranky-eyed, bald-headed man, whose
+face looked youthful enough from what little could be seen of it, for most of
+it was covered by a snow-white beard, carefully trimmed&mdash;by his wife, who
+did it on Sundays, at which times she also shaved the back of his neck.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The three men surrounded Martin, all talking admiringly and at once, until it
+seemed to him that they were talking against time for a wager.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We often wondered why you didn&rsquo;t call,&rdquo; Mr. White was
+saying.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t have the carfare, and I live across the Bay,&rdquo;
+Martin answered bluntly, with the idea of showing them his imperative need for
+the money.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Surely, he thought to himself, my glad rags in themselves are eloquent
+advertisement of my need. Time and again, whenever opportunity offered, he
+hinted about the purpose of his business. But his admirers&rsquo; ears were
+deaf. They sang his praises, told him what they had thought of his story at
+first sight, what they subsequently thought, what their wives and families
+thought; but not one hint did they breathe of intention to pay him for it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did I tell you how I first read your story?&rdquo; Mr. Ford said.
+&ldquo;Of course I didn&rsquo;t. I was coming west from New York, and when the
+train stopped at Ogden, the train-boy on the new run brought aboard the current
+number of the <i>Transcontinental</i>.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+My God! Martin thought; you can travel in a Pullman while I starve for the
+paltry five dollars you owe me. A wave of anger rushed over him. The wrong done
+him by the <i>Transcontinental</i> loomed colossal, for strong upon him were
+all the dreary months of vain yearning, of hunger and privation, and his
+present hunger awoke and gnawed at him, reminding him that he had eaten nothing
+since the day before, and little enough then. For the moment he saw red. These
+creatures were not even robbers. They were sneak-thieves. By lies and broken
+promises they had tricked him out of his story. Well, he would show them. And a
+great resolve surged into his will to the effect that he would not leave the
+office until he got his money. He remembered, if he did not get it, that there
+was no way for him to go back to Oakland. He controlled himself with an effort,
+but not before the wolfish expression of his face had awed and perturbed them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They became more voluble than ever. Mr. Ford started anew to tell how he had
+first read &ldquo;The Ring of Bells,&rdquo; and Mr. Ends at the same time was
+striving to repeat his niece&rsquo;s appreciation of &ldquo;The Ring of
+Bells,&rdquo; said niece being a school-teacher in Alameda.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll tell you what I came for,&rdquo; Martin said finally.
+&ldquo;To be paid for that story all of you like so well. Five dollars, I
+believe, is what you promised me would be paid on publication.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Ford, with an expression on his mobile features of mediate and happy
+acquiescence, started to reach for his pocket, then turned suddenly to Mr.
+Ends, and said that he had left his money home. That Mr. Ends resented this,
+was patent; and Martin saw the twitch of his arm as if to protect his trousers
+pocket. Martin knew that the money was there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am sorry,&rdquo; said Mr. Ends, &ldquo;but I paid the printer not an
+hour ago, and he took my ready change. It was careless of me to be so short;
+but the bill was not yet due, and the printer&rsquo;s request, as a favor, to
+make an immediate advance, was quite unexpected.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Both men looked expectantly at Mr. White, but that gentleman laughed and
+shrugged his shoulders. His conscience was clean at any rate. He had come into
+the <i>Transcontinental</i> to learn magazine-literature, instead of which he
+had principally learned finance. The <i>Transcontinental</i> owed him four
+months&rsquo; salary, and he knew that the printer must be appeased before the
+associate editor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s rather absurd, Mr. Eden, to have caught us in this
+shape,&rdquo; Mr. Ford preambled airily. &ldquo;All carelessness, I assure you.
+But I&rsquo;ll tell you what we&rsquo;ll do. We&rsquo;ll mail you a check the
+first thing in the morning. You have Mr. Eden&rsquo;s address, haven&rsquo;t
+you, Mr. Ends?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, Mr. Ends had the address, and the check would be mailed the first thing in
+the morning. Martin&rsquo;s knowledge of banks and checks was hazy, but he
+could see no reason why they should not give him the check on this day just as
+well as on the next.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then it is understood, Mr. Eden, that we&rsquo;ll mail you the check
+to-morrow?&rdquo; Mr. Ford said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I need the money to-day,&rdquo; Martin answered stolidly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The unfortunate circumstances&mdash;if you had chanced here any other
+day,&rdquo; Mr. Ford began suavely, only to be interrupted by Mr. Ends, whose
+cranky eyes justified themselves in his shortness of temper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Mr. Ford has already explained the situation,&rdquo; he said with
+asperity. &ldquo;And so have I. The check will be mailed&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I also have explained,&rdquo; Martin broke in, &ldquo;and I have
+explained that I want the money to-day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had felt his pulse quicken a trifle at the business manager&rsquo;s
+brusqueness, and upon him he kept an alert eye, for it was in that
+gentleman&rsquo;s trousers pocket that he divined the
+<i>Transcontinental&rsquo;s</i> ready cash was reposing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is too bad&mdash;&rdquo; Mr. Ford began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But at that moment, with an impatient movement, Mr. Ends turned as if about to
+leave the room. At the same instant Martin sprang for him, clutching him by the
+throat with one hand in such fashion that Mr. Ends&rsquo; snow-white beard,
+still maintaining its immaculate trimness, pointed ceilingward at an angle of
+forty-five degrees. To the horror of Mr. White and Mr. Ford, they saw their
+business manager shaken like an Astrakhan rug.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dig up, you venerable discourager of rising young talent!&rdquo; Martin
+exhorted. &ldquo;Dig up, or I&rsquo;ll shake it out of you, even if it&rsquo;s
+all in nickels.&rdquo; Then, to the two affrighted onlookers: &ldquo;Keep away!
+If you interfere, somebody&rsquo;s liable to get hurt.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Ends was choking, and it was not until the grip on his throat was eased
+that he was able to signify his acquiescence in the digging-up programme. All
+together, after repeated digs, its trousers pocket yielded four dollars and
+fifteen cents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Inside out with it,&rdquo; Martin commanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+An additional ten cents fell out. Martin counted the result of his raid a
+second time to make sure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You next!&rdquo; he shouted at Mr. Ford. &ldquo;I want seventy-five
+cents more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Ford did not wait, but ransacked his pockets, with the result of sixty
+cents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure that is all?&rdquo; Martin demanded menacingly, possessing himself
+of it. &ldquo;What have you got in your vest pockets?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In token of his good faith, Mr. Ford turned two of his pockets inside out. A
+strip of cardboard fell to the floor from one of them. He recovered it and was
+in the act of returning it, when Martin cried:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s that?&mdash;A ferry ticket? Here, give it to me. It&rsquo;s
+worth ten cents. I&rsquo;ll credit you with it. I&rsquo;ve now got four dollars
+and ninety-five cents, including the ticket. Five cents is still due me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked fiercely at Mr. White, and found that fragile creature in the act of
+handing him a nickel.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Thank you,&rdquo; Martin said, addressing them collectively. &ldquo;I
+wish you a good day.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Robber!&rdquo; Mr. Ends snarled after him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sneak-thief!&rdquo; Martin retorted, slamming the door as he passed out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was elated&mdash;so elated that when he recollected that <i>The
+Hornet</i> owed him fifteen dollars for &ldquo;The Peri and the Pearl,&rdquo;
+he decided forthwith to go and collect it. But <i>The Hornet</i> was run by a
+set of clean-shaven, strapping young men, frank buccaneers who robbed
+everything and everybody, not excepting one another. After some breakage of the
+office furniture, the editor (an ex-college athlete), ably assisted by the
+business manager, an advertising agent, and the porter, succeeded in removing
+Martin from the office and in accelerating, by initial impulse, his descent of
+the first flight of stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come again, Mr. Eden; glad to see you any time,&rdquo; they laughed down
+at him from the landing above.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin grinned as he picked himself up.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Phew!&rdquo; he murmured back. &ldquo;The <i>Transcontinental</i> crowd
+were nanny-goats, but you fellows are a lot of prize-fighters.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+More laughter greeted this.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I must say, Mr. Eden,&rdquo; the editor of <i>The Hornet</i> called
+down, &ldquo;that for a poet you can go some yourself. Where did you learn that
+right cross&mdash;if I may ask?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Where you learned that half-Nelson,&rdquo; Martin answered.
+&ldquo;Anyway, you&rsquo;re going to have a black eye.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I hope your neck doesn&rsquo;t stiffen up,&rdquo; the editor wished
+solicitously: &ldquo;What do you say we all go out and have a drink on
+it&mdash;not the neck, of course, but the little rough-house?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll go you if I lose,&rdquo; Martin accepted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably agreeing that the battle was to
+the strong, and that the fifteen dollars for &ldquo;The Peri and the
+Pearl&rdquo; belonged by right to <i>The Hornet&rsquo;s</i> editorial staff.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap34"></a>CHAPTER XXXIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Arthur remained at the gate while Ruth climbed Maria&rsquo;s front steps. She
+heard the rapid click of the type-writer, and when Martin let her in, found him
+on the last page of a manuscript. She had come to make certain whether or not
+he would be at their table for Thanksgiving dinner; but before she could broach
+the subject Martin plunged into the one with which he was full.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, let me read you this,&rdquo; he cried, separating the carbon
+copies and running the pages of manuscript into shape. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s my
+latest, and different from anything I&rsquo;ve done. It is so altogether
+different that I am almost afraid of it, and yet I&rsquo;ve a sneaking idea it
+is good. You be judge. It&rsquo;s an Hawaiian story. I&rsquo;ve called it
+&lsquo;Wiki-wiki.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His face was bright with the creative glow, though she shivered in the cold
+room and had been struck by the coldness of his hands at greeting. She listened
+closely while he read, and though he from time to time had seen only
+disapprobation in her face, at the close he asked:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Frankly, what do you think of it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know,&rdquo; she, answered. &ldquo;Will
+it&mdash;do you think it will sell?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid not,&rdquo; was the confession. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s too
+strong for the magazines. But it&rsquo;s true, on my word it&rsquo;s
+true.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But why do you persist in writing such things when you know they
+won&rsquo;t sell?&rdquo; she went on inexorably. &ldquo;The reason for your
+writing is to make a living, isn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s right; but the miserable story got away with me. I
+couldn&rsquo;t help writing it. It demanded to be written.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But that character, that Wiki-Wiki, why do you make him talk so roughly?
+Surely it will offend your readers, and surely that is why the editors are
+justified in refusing your work.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it is not good taste.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is life,&rdquo; he replied bluntly. &ldquo;It is real. It is true.
+And I must write life as I see it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they sat silent. It was because
+he loved her that he did not quite understand her, and she could not understand
+him because he was so large that he bulked beyond her horizon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ve collected from the <i>Transcontinental</i>,&rdquo; he
+said in an effort to shift the conversation to a more comfortable subject. The
+picture of the bewhiskered trio, as he had last seen them, mulcted of four
+dollars and ninety cents and a ferry ticket, made him chuckle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you&rsquo;ll come!&rdquo; she cried joyously. &ldquo;That was what
+I came to find out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come?&rdquo; he muttered absently. &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, to dinner to-morrow. You know you said you&rsquo;d recover your
+suit if you got that money.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I forgot all about it,&rdquo; he said humbly. &ldquo;You see, this
+morning the poundman got Maria&rsquo;s two cows and the baby calf,
+and&mdash;well, it happened that Maria didn&rsquo;t have any money, and so I
+had to recover her cows for her. That&rsquo;s where the <i>Transcontinental</i>
+fiver went&mdash;&lsquo;The Ring of Bells&rsquo; went into the poundman&rsquo;s
+pocket.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then you won&rsquo;t come?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked down at his clothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her blue eyes, but she said
+nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Next Thanksgiving you&rsquo;ll have dinner with me in
+Delmonico&rsquo;s,&rdquo; he said cheerily; &ldquo;or in London, or Paris, or
+anywhere you wish. I know it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw in the paper a few days ago,&rdquo; she announced abruptly,
+&ldquo;that there had been several local appointments to the Railway Mail. You
+passed first, didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was compelled to admit that the call had come for him, but that he had
+declined it. &ldquo;I was so sure&mdash;I am so sure&mdash;of myself,&rdquo; he
+concluded. &ldquo;A year from now I&rsquo;ll be earning more than a dozen men
+in the Railway Mail. You wait and see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; was all she said, when he finished. She stood up, pulling at
+her gloves. &ldquo;I must go, Martin. Arthur is waiting for me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He took her in his arms and kissed her, but she proved a passive sweetheart.
+There was no tenseness in her body, her arms did not go around him, and her
+lips met his without their wonted pressure.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was angry with him, he concluded, as he returned from the gate. But why? It
+was unfortunate that the poundman had gobbled Maria&rsquo;s cows. But it was
+only a stroke of fate. Nobody could be blamed for it. Nor did it enter his head
+that he could have done aught otherwise than what he had done. Well, yes, he
+was to blame a little, was his next thought, for having refused the call to the
+Railway Mail. And she had not liked &ldquo;Wiki-Wiki.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned at the head of the steps to meet the letter-carrier on his afternoon
+round. The ever recurrent fever of expectancy assailed Martin as he took the
+bundle of long envelopes. One was not long. It was short and thin, and outside
+was printed the address of <i>The New York Outview</i>. He paused in the act of
+tearing the envelope open. It could not be an acceptance. He had no manuscripts
+with that publication. Perhaps&mdash;his heart almost stood still at
+the&mdash;wild thought&mdash;perhaps they were ordering an article from him;
+but the next instant he dismissed the surmise as hopelessly impossible.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a short, formal letter, signed by the office editor, merely informing
+him that an anonymous letter which they had received was enclosed, and that he
+could rest assured the <i>Outview&rsquo;s</i> staff never under any
+circumstances gave consideration to anonymous correspondence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The enclosed letter Martin found to be crudely printed by hand. It was a
+hotchpotch of illiterate abuse of Martin, and of assertion that the
+&ldquo;so-called Martin Eden&rdquo; who was selling stories to magazines was no
+writer at all, and that in reality he was stealing stories from old magazines,
+typing them, and sending them out as his own. The envelope was postmarked
+&ldquo;San Leandro.&rdquo; Martin did not require a second thought to discover
+the author. Higginbotham&rsquo;s grammar, Higginbotham&rsquo;s colloquialisms,
+Higginbotham&rsquo;s mental quirks and processes, were apparent throughout.
+Martin saw in every line, not the fine Italian hand, but the coarse
+grocer&rsquo;s fist, of his brother-in-law.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But why? he vainly questioned. What injury had he done Bernard Higginbotham?
+The thing was so unreasonable, so wanton. There was no explaining it. In the
+course of the week a dozen similar letters were forwarded to Martin by the
+editors of various Eastern magazines. The editors were behaving handsomely,
+Martin concluded. He was wholly unknown to them, yet some of them had even been
+sympathetic. It was evident that they detested anonymity. He saw that the
+malicious attempt to hurt him had failed. In fact, if anything came of it, it
+was bound to be good, for at least his name had been called to the attention of
+a number of editors. Sometime, perhaps, reading a submitted manuscript of his,
+they might remember him as the fellow about whom they had received an anonymous
+letter. And who was to say that such a remembrance might not sway the balance
+of their judgment just a trifle in his favor?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was about this time that Martin took a great slump in Maria&rsquo;s
+estimation. He found her in the kitchen one morning groaning with pain, tears
+of weakness running down her cheeks, vainly endeavoring to put through a large
+ironing. He promptly diagnosed her affliction as La Grippe, dosed her with hot
+whiskey (the remnants in the bottles for which Brissenden was responsible), and
+ordered her to bed. But Maria was refractory. The ironing had to be done, she
+protested, and delivered that night, or else there would be no food on the
+morrow for the seven small and hungry Silvas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To her astonishment (and it was something that she never ceased from relating
+to her dying day), she saw Martin Eden seize an iron from the stove and throw a
+fancy shirt-waist on the ironing-board. It was Kate Flanagan&rsquo;s best
+Sunday waist, than whom there was no more exacting and fastidiously dressed
+woman in Maria&rsquo;s world. Also, Miss Flanagan had sent special instruction
+that said waist must be delivered by that night. As every one knew, she was
+keeping company with John Collins, the blacksmith, and, as Maria knew privily,
+Miss Flanagan and Mr. Collins were going next day to Golden Gate Park. Vain was
+Maria&rsquo;s attempt to rescue the garment. Martin guided her tottering
+footsteps to a chair, from where she watched him with bulging eyes. In a
+quarter of the time it would have taken her she saw the shirt-waist safely
+ironed, and ironed as well as she could have done it, as Martin made her grant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I could work faster,&rdquo; he explained, &ldquo;if your irons were only
+hotter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To her, the irons he swung were much hotter than she ever dared to use.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Your sprinkling is all wrong,&rdquo; he complained next. &ldquo;Here,
+let me teach you how to sprinkle. Pressure is what&rsquo;s wanted. Sprinkle
+under pressure if you want to iron fast.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He procured a packing-case from the woodpile in the cellar, fitted a cover to
+it, and raided the scrap-iron the Silva tribe was collecting for the junkman.
+With fresh-sprinkled garments in the box, covered with the board and pressed by
+the iron, the device was complete and in operation.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now you watch me, Maria,&rdquo; he said, stripping off to his undershirt
+and gripping an iron that was what he called &ldquo;really hot.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; when he feenish da iron&rsquo; he washa da wools,&rdquo; as
+she described it afterward. &ldquo;He say, &lsquo;Maria, you are da greata
+fool. I showa you how to washa da wools,&rsquo; an&rsquo; he shows me, too. Ten
+minutes he maka da machine&mdash;one barrel, one wheel-hub, two poles, justa
+like dat.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin had learned the contrivance from Joe at the Shelly Hot Springs. The old
+wheel-hub, fixed on the end of the upright pole, constituted the plunger.
+Making this, in turn, fast to the spring-pole attached to the kitchen rafters,
+so that the hub played upon the woollens in the barrel, he was able, with one
+hand, thoroughly to pound them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No more Maria washa da wools,&rdquo; her story always ended. &ldquo;I
+maka da kids worka da pole an&rsquo; da hub an&rsquo; da barrel. Him da smarta
+man, Mister Eden.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Nevertheless, by his masterly operation and improvement of her kitchen-laundry
+he fell an immense distance in her regard. The glamour of romance with which
+her imagination had invested him faded away in the cold light of fact that he
+was an ex-laundryman. All his books, and his grand friends who visited him in
+carriages or with countless bottles of whiskey, went for naught. He was, after
+all, a mere workingman, a member of her own class and caste. He was more human
+and approachable, but, he was no longer mystery.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin&rsquo;s alienation from his family continued. Following upon Mr.
+Higginbotham&rsquo;s unprovoked attack, Mr. Hermann von Schmidt showed his
+hand. The fortunate sale of several storiettes, some humorous verse, and a few
+jokes gave Martin a temporary splurge of prosperity. Not only did he partially
+pay up his bills, but he had sufficient balance left to redeem his black suit
+and wheel. The latter, by virtue of a twisted crank-hanger, required repairing,
+and, as a matter of friendliness with his future brother-in-law, he sent it to
+Von Schmidt&rsquo;s shop.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The afternoon of the same day Martin was pleased by the wheel being delivered
+by a small boy. Von Schmidt was also inclined to be friendly, was
+Martin&rsquo;s conclusion from this unusual favor. Repaired wheels usually had
+to be called for. But when he examined the wheel, he discovered no repairs had
+been made. A little later in the day he telephoned his sister&rsquo;s
+betrothed, and learned that that person didn&rsquo;t want anything to do with
+him in &ldquo;any shape, manner, or form.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hermann von Schmidt,&rdquo; Martin answered cheerfully,
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a good mind to come over and punch that Dutch nose of
+yours.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You come to my shop,&rdquo; came the reply, &ldquo;an&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll
+send for the police. An&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll put you through, too. Oh, I know you,
+but you can&rsquo;t make no rough-house with me. I don&rsquo;t want
+nothin&rsquo; to do with the likes of you. You&rsquo;re a loafer, that&rsquo;s
+what, an&rsquo; I ain&rsquo;t asleep. You ain&rsquo;t goin&rsquo; to do no
+spongin&rsquo; off me just because I&rsquo;m marryin&rsquo; your sister. Why
+don&rsquo;t you go to work an&rsquo; earn an honest livin&rsquo;, eh? Answer me
+that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin&rsquo;s philosophy asserted itself, dissipating his anger, and he hung
+up the receiver with a long whistle of incredulous amusement. But after the
+amusement came the reaction, and he was oppressed by his loneliness. Nobody
+understood him, nobody seemed to have any use for him, except Brissenden, and
+Brissenden had disappeared, God alone knew where.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Twilight was falling as Martin left the fruit store and turned homeward, his
+marketing on his arm. At the corner an electric car had stopped, and at sight
+of a lean, familiar figure alighting, his heart leapt with joy. It was
+Brissenden, and in the fleeting glimpse, ere the car started up, Martin noted
+the overcoat pockets, one bulging with books, the other bulging with a quart
+bottle of whiskey.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap35"></a>CHAPTER XXXV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden gave no explanation of his long absence, nor did Martin pry into it.
+He was content to see his friend&rsquo;s cadaverous face opposite him through
+the steam rising from a tumbler of toddy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I, too, have not been idle,&rdquo; Brissenden proclaimed, after hearing
+Martin&rsquo;s account of the work he had accomplished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and passed it to Martin, who
+looked at the title and glanced up curiously.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s it,&rdquo; Brissenden laughed. &ldquo;Pretty good
+title, eh? &lsquo;Ephemera&rsquo;&mdash;it is the one word. And you&rsquo;re
+responsible for it, what of your <i>man</i>, who is always the erected, the
+vitalized inorganic, the latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature
+strutting his little space on the thermometer. It got into my head and I had to
+write it to get rid of it. Tell me what you think of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin&rsquo;s face, flushed at first, paled as he read on. It was perfect art.
+Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be called where the last
+conceivable atom of substance had found expression in so perfect construction
+as to make Martin&rsquo;s head swim with delight, to put passionate tears into
+his eyes, and to send chills creeping up and down his back. It was a long poem
+of six or seven hundred lines, and it was a fantastic, amazing, unearthly
+thing. It was terrific, impossible; and yet there it was, scrawled in black ink
+across the sheets of paper. It dealt with man and his soul-gropings in their
+ultimate terms, plumbing the abysses of space for the testimony of remotest
+suns and rainbow spectrums. It was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the
+skull of a dying man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the
+wild flutter of fading heart-beats. The poem swung in majestic rhythm to the
+cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry hosts, to the
+impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebulae in the darkened void; and
+through it all, unceasing and faint, like a silver shuttle, ran the frail,
+piping voice of man, a querulous chirp amid the screaming of planets and the
+crash of systems.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is nothing like it in literature,&rdquo; Martin said, when at last
+he was able to speak. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s wonderful!&mdash;wonderful! It has gone
+to my head. I am drunken with it. That great, infinitesimal question&mdash;I
+can&rsquo;t shake it out of my thoughts. That questing, eternal, ever
+recurring, thin little wailing voice of man is still ringing in my ears. It is
+like the dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring
+of lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I now I&rsquo;m making a
+fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me. You are&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know
+what you are&mdash;you are wonderful, that&rsquo;s all. But how do you do it?
+How do you do it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I shall never write again. I am a dauber in clay. You have shown me the
+work of the real artificer-artisan. Genius! This is something more than genius.
+It transcends genius. It is truth gone mad. It is true, man, every line of it.
+I wonder if you realize that, you dogmatist. Science cannot give you the lie.
+It is the truth of the sneer, stamped out from the black iron of the Cosmos and
+interwoven with mighty rhythms of sound into a fabric of splendor and beauty.
+And now I won&rsquo;t say another word. I am overwhelmed, crushed. Yes, I will,
+too. Let me market it for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden grinned. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s not a magazine in Christendom that
+would dare to publish it&mdash;you know that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know nothing of the sort. I know there&rsquo;s not a magazine in
+Christendom that wouldn&rsquo;t jump at it. They don&rsquo;t get things like
+that every day. That&rsquo;s no mere poem of the year. It&rsquo;s the poem of
+the century.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to take you up on the proposition.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t get cynical,&rdquo; Martin exhorted. &ldquo;The magazine
+editors are not wholly fatuous. I know that. And I&rsquo;ll close with you on
+the bet. I&rsquo;ll wager anything you want that &lsquo;Ephemera&rsquo; is
+accepted either on the first or second offering.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s just one thing that prevents me from taking you.&rdquo;
+Brissenden waited a moment. &ldquo;The thing is big&mdash;the biggest
+I&rsquo;ve ever done. I know that. It&rsquo;s my swan song. I am almighty proud
+of it. I worship it. It&rsquo;s better than whiskey. It is what I dreamed
+of&mdash;the great and perfect thing&mdash;when I was a simple young man, with
+sweet illusions and clean ideals. And I&rsquo;ve got it, now, in my last grasp,
+and I&rsquo;ll not have it pawed over and soiled by a lot of swine. No, I
+won&rsquo;t take the bet. It&rsquo;s mine. I made it, and I&rsquo;ve shared it
+with you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But think of the rest of the world,&rdquo; Martin protested. &ldquo;The
+function of beauty is joy-making.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s my beauty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be selfish.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not selfish.&rdquo; Brissenden grinned soberly in the way he
+had when pleased by the thing his thin lips were about to shape.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m as unselfish as a famished hog.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In vain Martin strove to shake him from his decision. Martin told him that his
+hatred of the magazines was rabid, fanatical, and that his conduct was a
+thousand times more despicable than that of the youth who burned the temple of
+Diana at Ephesus. Under the storm of denunciation Brissenden complacently
+sipped his toddy and affirmed that everything the other said was quite true,
+with the exception of the magazine editors. His hatred of them knew no bounds,
+and he excelled Martin in denunciation when he turned upon them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I wish you&rsquo;d type it for me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;You know how a
+thousand times better than any stenographer. And now I want to give you some
+advice.&rdquo; He drew a bulky manuscript from his outside coat pocket.
+&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s your &lsquo;Shame of the Sun.&rsquo; I&rsquo;ve read it not
+once, but twice and three times&mdash;the highest compliment I can pay you.
+After what you&rsquo;ve said about &lsquo;Ephemera&rsquo; I must be silent. But
+this I will say: when &lsquo;The Shame of the Sun&rsquo; is published, it will
+make a hit. It will start a controversy that will be worth thousands to you
+just in advertising.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin laughed. &ldquo;I suppose your next advice will be to submit it to the
+magazines.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By all means no&mdash;that is, if you want to see it in print. Offer it
+to the first-class houses. Some publisher&rsquo;s reader may be mad enough or
+drunk enough to report favorably on it. You&rsquo;ve read the books. The meat
+of them has been transmuted in the alembic of Martin Eden&rsquo;s mind and
+poured into &lsquo;The Shame of the Sun,&rsquo; and one day Martin Eden will be
+famous, and not the least of his fame will rest upon that work. So you must get
+a publisher for it&mdash;the sooner the better.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden went home late that night; and just as he mounted the first step of
+the car, he swung suddenly back on Martin and thrust into his hand a small,
+tightly crumpled wad of paper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here, take this,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I was out to the races to-day,
+and I had the right dope.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bell clanged and the car pulled out, leaving Martin wondering as to the
+nature of the crinkly, greasy wad he clutched in his hand. Back in his room he
+unrolled it and found a hundred-dollar bill.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not scruple to use it. He knew his friend had always plenty of money,
+and he knew also, with profound certitude, that his success would enable him to
+repay it. In the morning he paid every bill, gave Maria three months&rsquo;
+advance on the room, and redeemed every pledge at the pawnshop. Next he bought
+Marian&rsquo;s wedding present, and simpler presents, suitable to Christmas,
+for Ruth and Gertrude. And finally, on the balance remaining to him, he herded
+the whole Silva tribe down into Oakland. He was a winter late in redeeming his
+promise, but redeemed it was, for the last, least Silva got a pair of shoes, as
+well as Maria herself. Also, there were horns, and dolls, and toys of various
+sorts, and parcels and bundles of candies and nuts that filled the arms of all
+the Silvas to overflowing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was with this extraordinary procession trooping at his and Maria&rsquo;s
+heels into a confectioner&rsquo;s in quest of the biggest candy-cane ever made,
+that he encountered Ruth and her mother. Mrs. Morse was shocked. Even Ruth was
+hurt, for she had some regard for appearances, and her lover, cheek by jowl
+with Maria, at the head of that army of Portuguese ragamuffins, was not a
+pretty sight. But it was not that which hurt so much as what she took to be his
+lack of pride and self-respect. Further, and keenest of all, she read into the
+incident the impossibility of his living down his working-class origin. There
+was stigma enough in the fact of it, but shamelessly to flaunt it in the face
+of the world&mdash;her world&mdash;was going too far. Though her engagement to
+Martin had been kept secret, their long intimacy had not been unproductive of
+gossip; and in the shop, glancing covertly at her lover and his following, had
+been several of her acquaintances. She lacked the easy largeness of Martin and
+could not rise superior to her environment. She had been hurt to the quick, and
+her sensitive nature was quivering with the shame of it. So it was, when Martin
+arrived later in the day, that he kept her present in his breast-pocket,
+deferring the giving of it to a more propitious occasion. Ruth in
+tears&mdash;passionate, angry tears&mdash;was a revelation to him. The
+spectacle of her suffering convinced him that he had been a brute, yet in the
+soul of him he could not see how nor why. It never entered his head to be
+ashamed of those he knew, and to take the Silvas out to a Christmas treat could
+in no way, so it seemed to him, show lack of consideration for Ruth. On the
+other hand, he did see Ruth&rsquo;s point of view, after she had explained it;
+and he looked upon it as a feminine weakness, such as afflicted all women and
+the best of women.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap36"></a>CHAPTER XXXVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on,&mdash;I&rsquo;ll show you the real dirt,&rdquo; Brissenden said
+to him, one evening in January.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+They had dined together in San Francisco, and were at the Ferry Building,
+returning to Oakland, when the whim came to him to show Martin the &ldquo;real
+dirt.&rdquo; He turned and fled across the water-front, a meagre shadow in a
+flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to keep up with him. At a wholesale
+liquor store he bought two gallon-demijohns of old port, and with one in each
+hand boarded a Mission Street car, Martin at his heels burdened with several
+quart-bottles of whiskey.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he wondered as to what
+constituted the real dirt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maybe nobody will be there,&rdquo; Brissenden said, when they dismounted
+and plunged off to the right into the heart of the working-class ghetto, south
+of Market Street. &ldquo;In which case you&rsquo;ll miss what you&rsquo;ve been
+looking for so long.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what the deuce is that?&rdquo; Martin asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonentities I found you
+consorting with in that trader&rsquo;s den. You read the books and you found
+yourself all alone. Well, I&rsquo;m going to show you to-night some other men
+who&rsquo;ve read the books, so that you won&rsquo;t be lonely any more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not that I bother my head about their everlasting discussions,&rdquo; he
+said at the end of a block. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not interested in book philosophy.
+But you&rsquo;ll find these fellows intelligences and not bourgeois swine. But
+watch out, they&rsquo;ll talk an arm off of you on any subject under the
+sun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hope Norton&rsquo;s there,&rdquo; he panted a little later, resisting
+Martin&rsquo;s effort to relieve him of the two demijohns.
+&ldquo;Norton&rsquo;s an idealist&mdash;a Harvard man. Prodigious memory.
+Idealism led him to philosophic anarchy, and his family threw him off.
+Father&rsquo;s a railroad president and many times millionnaire, but the
+son&rsquo;s starving in &rsquo;Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet for
+twenty-five a month.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not at all south of Market;
+so he had no idea of where he was being led.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Go ahead,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;tell me about them beforehand. What do
+they do for a living? How do they happen to be here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Hope Hamilton&rsquo;s there.&rdquo; Brissenden paused and rested his
+hands. &ldquo;Strawn-Hamilton&rsquo;s his name&mdash;hyphenated, you
+know&mdash;comes of old Southern stock. He&rsquo;s a tramp&mdash;laziest man I
+ever knew, though he&rsquo;s clerking, or trying to, in a socialist
+co&ouml;perative store for six dollars a week. But he&rsquo;s a confirmed hobo.
+Tramped into town. I&rsquo;ve seen him sit all day on a bench and never a bite
+pass his lips, and in the evening, when I invited him to
+dinner&mdash;restaurant two blocks away&mdash;have him say, &lsquo;Too much
+trouble, old man. Buy me a package of cigarettes instead.&rsquo; He was a
+Spencerian like you till Kreis turned him to materialistic monism. I&rsquo;ll
+start him on monism if I can. Norton&rsquo;s another monist&mdash;only he
+affirms naught but spirit. He can give Kreis and Hamilton all they want,
+too.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is Kreis?&rdquo; Martin asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;His rooms we&rsquo;re going to. One time professor&mdash;fired from
+university&mdash;usual story. A mind like a steel trap. Makes his living any
+old way. I know he&rsquo;s been a street fakir when he was down. Unscrupulous.
+Rob a corpse of a shroud&mdash;anything. Difference between him and the
+bourgeoisie is that he robs without illusion. He&rsquo;ll talk Nietzsche, or
+Schopenhauer, or Kant, or anything, but the only thing in this world, not
+excepting Mary, that he really cares for, is his monism. Haeckel is his little
+tin god. The only way to insult him is to take a slap at Haeckel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s the hang-out.&rdquo; Brissenden rested his demijohn at the
+upstairs entrance, preliminary to the climb. It was the usual two-story corner
+building, with a saloon and grocery underneath. &ldquo;The gang lives
+here&mdash;got the whole upstairs to themselves. But Kreis is the only one who
+has two rooms. Come on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden threaded the utter blackness
+like a familiar ghost. He stopped to speak to Martin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s one fellow&mdash;Stevens&mdash;a theosophist. Makes a
+pretty tangle when he gets going. Just now he&rsquo;s dish-washer in a
+restaurant. Likes a good cigar. I&rsquo;ve seen him eat in a ten-cent
+hash-house and pay fifty cents for the cigar he smoked afterward. I&rsquo;ve
+got a couple in my pocket for him, if he shows up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And there&rsquo;s another fellow&mdash;Parry&mdash;an Australian, a
+statistician and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay
+for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at
+what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight
+champion of the United States in &rsquo;68, and you&rsquo;ll get the correct
+answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-machine. And there&rsquo;s Andy, a
+stone-mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; and another fellow,
+Harry, a baker, red hot socialist and strong union man. By the way, you
+remember Cooks&rsquo; and Waiters&rsquo; strike&mdash;Hamilton was the chap who
+organized that union and precipitated the strike&mdash;planned it all out in
+advance, right here in Kreis&rsquo;s rooms. Did it just for the fun of it, but
+was too lazy to stay by the union. Yet he could have risen high if he wanted
+to. There&rsquo;s no end to the possibilities in that man&mdash;if he
+weren&rsquo;t so insuperably lazy.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread of light marked the
+threshold of a door. A knock and an answer opened it, and Martin found himself
+shaking hands with Kreis, a handsome brunette man, with dazzling white teeth, a
+drooping black mustache, and large, flashing black eyes. Mary, a matronly young
+blonde, was washing dishes in the little back room that served for kitchen and
+dining room. The front room served as bedchamber and living room. Overhead was
+the week&rsquo;s washing, hanging in festoons so low that Martin did not see at
+first the two men talking in a corner. They hailed Brissenden and his demijohns
+with acclamation, and, on being introduced, Martin learned they were Andy and
+Parry. He joined them and listened attentively to the description of a
+prize-fight Parry had seen the night before; while Brissenden, in his glory,
+plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and the serving of wine and
+whiskey-and-sodas. At his command, &ldquo;Bring in the clan,&rdquo; Andy
+departed to go the round of the rooms for the lodgers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;re lucky that most of them are here,&rdquo; Brissenden
+whispered to Martin. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s Norton and Hamilton; come on and meet
+them. Stevens isn&rsquo;t around, I hear. I&rsquo;m going to get them started
+on monism if I can. Wait till they get a few jolts in them and they&rsquo;ll
+warm up.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At first the conversation was desultory. Nevertheless Martin could not fail to
+appreciate the keen play of their minds. They were men with opinions, though
+the opinions often clashed, and, though they were witty and clever, they were
+not superficial. He swiftly saw, no matter upon what they talked, that each man
+applied the correlation of knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified
+conception of society and the Cosmos. Nobody manufactured their opinions for
+them; they were all rebels of one variety or another, and their lips were
+strangers to platitudes. Never had Martin, at the Morses&rsquo;, heard so
+amazing a range of topics discussed. There seemed no limit save time to the
+things they were alive to. The talk wandered from Mrs. Humphry Ward&rsquo;s new
+book to Shaw&rsquo;s latest play, through the future of the drama to
+reminiscences of Mansfield. They appreciated or sneered at the morning
+editorials, jumped from labor conditions in New Zealand to Henry James and
+Brander Matthews, passed on to the German designs in the Far East and the
+economic aspect of the Yellow Peril, wrangled over the German elections and
+Bebel&rsquo;s last speech, and settled down to local politics, the latest plans
+and scandals in the union labor party administration, and the wires that were
+pulled to bring about the Coast Seamen&rsquo;s strike. Martin was struck by the
+inside knowledge they possessed. They knew what was never printed in the
+newspapers&mdash;the wires and strings and the hidden hands that made the
+puppets dance. To Martin&rsquo;s surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the
+conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encountered in the few
+women he had met. They talked together on Swinburne and Rossetti, after which
+she led him beyond his depth into the by-paths of French literature. His
+revenge came when she defended Maeterlinck and he brought into action the
+carefully-thought-out thesis of &ldquo;The Shame of the Sun.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with tobacco smoke,
+when Brissenden waved the red flag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s fresh meat for your axe, Kreis,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;a
+rose-white youth with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer. Make a
+Haeckelite of him&mdash;if you can.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic thing, while
+Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet, girlish smile, as much
+as to say that he would be amply protected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered, until he
+and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle. Martin listened and fain
+would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible that this should be, much less in
+the labor ghetto south of Market. The books were alive in these men. They
+talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he
+had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the
+philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like
+Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in
+these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again
+other men joined in, and all followed the discussion with cigarettes going out
+in their hands and with alert, intent faces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now received at the
+hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical plausibility of it, that made an
+appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at
+Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as
+metaphysicians. <i>Phenomenon</i> and <i>noumenon</i> were bandied back and
+forth. They charged him with attempting to explain consciousness by itself. He
+charged them with word-jugglery, with reasoning from words to theory instead of
+from facts to theory. At this they were aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of
+their mode of reasoning to start with facts and to give names to the facts.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded him that all
+good little German philosophies when they died went to Oxford. A little later
+Norton reminded them of Hamilton&rsquo;s Law of Parsimony, the application of
+which they immediately claimed for every reasoning process of theirs. And
+Martin hugged his knees and exulted in it all. But Norton was no Spencerian,
+and he, too, strove for Martin&rsquo;s philosophic soul, talking as much at him
+as to his two opponents.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know Berkeley has never been answered,&rdquo; he said, looking
+directly at Martin. &ldquo;Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was not very
+near. Even the stanchest of Spencer&rsquo;s followers will not go farther. I
+was reading an essay of Saleeby&rsquo;s the other day, and the best Saleeby
+could say was that Herbert Spencer <i>nearly</i> succeeded in answering
+Berkeley.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know what Hume said?&rdquo; Hamilton asked. Norton nodded, but
+Hamilton gave it for the benefit of the rest. &ldquo;He said that
+Berkeley&rsquo;s arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;In his, Hume&rsquo;s, mind,&rdquo; was the reply. &ldquo;And
+Hume&rsquo;s mind was the same as yours, with this difference: he was wise
+enough to admit there was no answering Berkeley.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head, while Kreis
+and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages, seeking out tender
+places to prod and poke. As the evening grew late, Norton, smarting under the
+repeated charges of being a metaphysician, clutching his chair to keep from
+jumping to his feet, his gray eyes snapping and his girlish face grown harsh
+and sure, made a grand attack upon their position.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but, pray,
+how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists
+with your positive science which you are always lugging about into places it
+has no right to be. Long before the school of materialistic monism arose, the
+ground was removed so that there could be no foundation. Locke was the man,
+John Locke. Two hundred years ago&mdash;more than that, even in his
+&lsquo;Essay concerning the Human Understanding,&rsquo; he proved the
+non-existence of innate ideas. The best of it is that that is precisely what
+you claim. To-night, again and again, you have asserted the non-existence of
+innate ideas.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And what does that mean? It means that you can never know ultimate
+reality. Your brains are empty when you are born. Appearances, or phenomena,
+are all the content your minds can receive from your five senses. Then noumena,
+which are not in your minds when you are born, have no way of getting
+in&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I deny&mdash;&rdquo; Kreis started to interrupt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You wait till I&rsquo;m done,&rdquo; Norton shouted. &ldquo;You can know
+only that much of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one
+way or another on our senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of
+the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is to efface you by
+your own argument. I can&rsquo;t do it any other way, for you are both
+congenitally unable to understand a philosophic abstraction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive
+science? You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances. You are aware only
+of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in your
+consciousness. Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish
+enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with noumena. Yet, by the very
+definition of positive science, science is concerned only with appearances. As
+somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot transcend phenomena.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet,
+perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science proves
+the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence of
+matter.&mdash;You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to make
+myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive scientists, if you
+please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it alone.
+Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and Brissenden and
+Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and Kreis and Hamilton waiting
+to pounce on him like a pair of hounds as soon as he finished.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You have given me a glimpse of fairyland,&rdquo; Martin said on the
+ferry-boat. &ldquo;It makes life worth while to meet people like that. My mind
+is all worked up. I never appreciated idealism before. Yet I can&rsquo;t accept
+it. I know that I shall always be a realist. I am so made, I guess. But
+I&rsquo;d like to have made a reply to Kreis and Hamilton, and I think
+I&rsquo;d have had a word or two for Norton. I didn&rsquo;t see that Spencer
+was damaged any. I&rsquo;m as excited as a child on its first visit to the
+circus. I see I must read up some more. I&rsquo;m going to get hold of Saleeby.
+I still think Spencer is unassailable, and next time I&rsquo;m going to take a
+hand myself.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his chin buried
+in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body wrapped in the long
+overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the propellers.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap37"></a>CHAPTER XXXVII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to
+Brissenden&rsquo;s advice and command. &ldquo;The Shame of the Sun&rdquo; he
+wrapped and mailed to <i>The Acropolis</i>. He believed he could find magazine
+publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would commend
+him to the book-publishing houses. &ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; he likewise wrapped
+and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden&rsquo;s prejudice against the
+magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided that the great
+poem should see print. He did not intend, however, to publish it without the
+other&rsquo;s permission. His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high
+magazines, and, thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden for consent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a number of weeks
+before and which ever since had been worrying him with its insistent clamor to
+be created. Apparently it was to be a rattling sea story, a tale of
+twentieth-century adventure and romance, handling real characters, in a real
+world, under real conditions. But beneath the swing and go of the story was to
+be something else&mdash;something that the superficial reader would never
+discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way the
+interest and enjoyment for such a reader. It was this, and not the mere story,
+that impelled Martin to write it. For that matter, it was always the great,
+universal motif that suggested plots to him. After having found such a motif,
+he cast about for the particular persons and particular location in time and
+space wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing. &ldquo;Overdue&rdquo;
+was the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not be
+more than sixty thousand words&mdash;a bagatelle for him with his splendid
+vigor of production. On this first day he took hold of it with conscious
+delight in the mastery of his tools. He no longer worried for fear that the
+sharp, cutting edges should slip and mar his work. The long months of intense
+application and study had brought their reward. He could now devote himself
+with sure hand to the larger phases of the thing he shaped; and as he worked,
+hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the sure and cosmic grasp with which
+he held life and the affairs of life. &ldquo;Overdue&rdquo; would tell a story
+that would be true of its particular characters and its particular events; but
+it would tell, too, he was confident, great vital things that would be true of
+all time, and all sea, and all life&mdash;thanks to Herbert Spencer, he
+thought, leaning back for a moment from the table. Ay, thanks to Herbert
+Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had placed in
+his hands.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing. &ldquo;It will go! It
+will go!&rdquo; was the refrain that kept sounding in his ears. Of course it
+would go. At last he was turning out the thing at which the magazines would
+jump. The whole story worked out before him in lightning flashes. He broke off
+from it long enough to write a paragraph in his note-book. This would be the
+last paragraph in &ldquo;Overdue&rdquo;; but so thoroughly was the whole book
+already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he had arrived
+at the end, the end itself. He compared the tale, as yet unwritten, with the
+tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to be immeasurably superior.
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only one man who could touch it,&rdquo; he murmured aloud,
+&ldquo;and that&rsquo;s Conrad. And it ought to make even him sit up and shake
+hands with me, and say, &lsquo;Well done, Martin, my boy.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was to have
+dinner at the Morses&rsquo;. Thanks to Brissenden, his black suit was out of
+pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties. Down town he stopped off
+long enough to run into the library and search for Saleeby&rsquo;s books. He
+drew out &ldquo;The Cycle of Life,&rdquo; and on the car turned to the essay
+Norton had mentioned on Spencer. As Martin read, he grew angry. His face
+flushed, his jaw set, and unconsciously his hand clenched, unclenched, and
+clenched again as if he were taking fresh grips upon some hateful thing out of
+which he was squeezing the life. When he left the car, he strode along the
+sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse bell with such
+viciousness that it roused him to consciousness of his condition, so that he
+entered in good nature, smiling with amusement at himself. No sooner, however,
+was he inside than a great depression descended upon him. He fell from the
+height where he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
+&ldquo;Bourgeois,&rdquo; &ldquo;trader&rsquo;s
+den&rdquo;&mdash;Brissenden&rsquo;s epithets repeated themselves in his mind.
+But what of that? he demanded angrily. He was marrying Ruth, not her family.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more spiritual and
+ethereal and at the same time more healthy. There was color in her cheeks, and
+her eyes drew him again and again&mdash;the eyes in which he had first read
+immortality. He had forgotten immortality of late, and the trend of his
+scientific reading had been away from it; but here, in Ruth&rsquo;s eyes, he
+read an argument without words that transcended all worded arguments. He saw
+that in her eyes before which all discussion fled away, for he saw love there.
+And in his own eyes was love; and love was unanswerable. Such was his
+passionate doctrine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left him
+supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life. Nevertheless, at table, the
+inevitable reaction and exhaustion consequent upon the hard day seized hold of
+him. He was aware that his eyes were tired and that he was irritable. He
+remembered it was at this table, at which he now sneered and was so often
+bored, that he had first eaten with civilized beings in what he had imagined
+was an atmosphere of high culture and refinement. He caught a glimpse of that
+pathetic figure of him, so long ago, a self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat
+at every pore in an agony of apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae
+of eating-implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap to
+live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to be frankly
+himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did not possess.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a passenger,
+with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will strive to locate the life
+preservers. Well, that much had come out of it&mdash;love and Ruth. All the
+rest had failed to stand the test of the books. But Ruth and love had stood the
+test; for them he found a biological sanction. Love was the most exalted
+expression of life. Nature had been busy designing him, as she had been busy
+with all normal men, for the purpose of loving. She had spent ten thousand
+centuries&mdash;ay, a hundred thousand and a million centuries&mdash;upon the
+task, and he was the best she could do. She had made love the strongest thing
+in him, increased its power a myriad per cent with her gift of imagination, and
+sent him forth into the ephemera to thrill and melt and mate. His hand sought
+Ruth&rsquo;s hand beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was given
+and received. She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes were radiant and
+melting. So were his in the thrill that pervaded him; nor did he realize how
+much that was radiant and melting in her eyes had been aroused by what she had
+seen in his.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse&rsquo;s right, sat
+Judge Blount, a local superior court judge. Martin had met him a number of
+times and had failed to like him. He and Ruth&rsquo;s father were discussing
+labor union politics, the local situation, and socialism, and Mr. Morse was
+endeavoring to twit Martin on the latter topic. At last Judge Blount looked
+across the table with benignant and fatherly pity. Martin smiled to himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll grow out of it, young man,&rdquo; he said soothingly.
+&ldquo;Time is the best cure for such youthful distempers.&rdquo; He turned to
+Mr. Morse. &ldquo;I do not believe discussion is good in such cases. It makes
+the patient obstinate.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is true,&rdquo; the other assented gravely. &ldquo;But it is well
+to warn the patient occasionally of his condition.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort. The day had been too long,
+the day&rsquo;s effort too intense, and he was deep in the throes of the
+reaction.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;but
+if you care a whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that you
+are poor diagnosticians. In fact, you are both suffering from the disease you
+think you find in me. As for me, I am immune. The socialist philosophy that
+riots half-baked in your veins has passed me by.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Clever, clever,&rdquo; murmured the judge. &ldquo;An excellent ruse in
+controversy, to reverse positions.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Out of your mouth.&rdquo; Martin&rsquo;s eyes were sparkling, but he
+kept control of himself. &ldquo;You see, Judge, I&rsquo;ve heard your campaign
+speeches. By some henidical process&mdash;henidical, by the way is a favorite
+word of mine which nobody understands&mdash;by some henidical process you
+persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival
+of the strong, and at the same time you indorse with might and main all sorts
+of measures to shear the strength from the strong.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My young man&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Remember, I&rsquo;ve heard your campaign speeches,&rdquo; Martin warned.
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s on record, your position on interstate commerce regulation,
+on regulation of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the conservation of the
+forests, on a thousand and one restrictive measures that are nothing else than
+socialistic.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
+various outrageous exercises of power?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s not the point. I mean to tell you that you are a poor
+diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the microbe of
+socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are suffering from the
+emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As for me, I am an inveterate
+opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate opponent of your own mongrel
+democracy that is nothing else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb
+of words that will not stand the test of the dictionary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am a reactionary&mdash;so complete a reactionary that my position is
+incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social organization and
+whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil. You make believe that you
+believe in the survival of the strong and the rule of the strong. I believe.
+That is the difference. When I was a trifle younger,&mdash;a few months
+younger,&mdash;I believed the same thing. You see, the ideas of you and yours
+had impressed me. But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they
+grunt and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have swung
+back to aristocracy, if you please. I am the only individualist in this room. I
+look to the state for nothing. I look only to the strong man, the man on
+horseback, to save the state from its own rotten futility.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Nietzsche was right. I won&rsquo;t take the time to tell you who
+Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong&mdash;to the
+strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade
+and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond
+beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the &lsquo;yes-sayers.&rsquo; And they will
+eat you up, you socialists&mdash;who are afraid of socialism and who think
+yourselves individualists. Your slave-morality of the meek and lowly will never
+save you.&mdash;Oh, it&rsquo;s all Greek, I know, and I won&rsquo;t bother you
+any more with it. But remember one thing. There aren&rsquo;t half a dozen
+individualists in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to Ruth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m wrought up to-day,&rdquo; he said in an undertone. &ldquo;All
+I want to do is to love, not talk.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That is the way to tell
+them.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll make a good Republican out of you yet,&rdquo; said Judge
+Blount.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The man on horseback will arrive before that time,&rdquo; Martin
+retorted with good humor, and returned to Ruth.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the laziness and the
+disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective son-in-law of
+his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose nature he had no
+understanding. So he turned the conversation to Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount
+ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears had pricked at the first mention of
+the philosopher&rsquo;s name, listened to the judge enunciate a grave and
+complacent diatribe against Spencer. From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at
+Martin, as much as to say, &ldquo;There, my boy, you see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Chattering daws,&rdquo; Martin muttered under his breath, and went on
+talking with Ruth and Arthur.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But the long day and the &ldquo;real dirt&rdquo; of the night before were
+telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what had made him
+angry when he read it on the car.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What is the matter?&rdquo; Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he
+was making to contain himself.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its
+prophet,&rdquo; Judge Blount was saying at that moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin turned upon him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A cheap judgment,&rdquo; he remarked quietly. &ldquo;I heard it first in
+the City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better.
+I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it nauseates me.
+You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear that great and noble man&rsquo;s
+name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a cesspool. You are
+disgusting.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was like a thunderbolt. Judge Blount glared at him with apoplectic
+countenance, and silence reigned. Mr. Morse was secretly pleased. He could see
+that his daughter was shocked. It was what he wanted to do&mdash;to bring out
+the innate ruffianism of this man he did not like.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth&rsquo;s hand sought Martin&rsquo;s beseechingly under the table, but his
+blood was up. He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and fraud of those
+who sat in the high places. A Superior Court Judge! It was only several years
+before that he had looked up from the mire at such glorious entities and deemed
+them gods.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing himself to
+Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter understood was for the
+benefit of the ladies. Even this added to his anger. Was there no honesty in
+the world?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You can&rsquo;t discuss Spencer with me,&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;You do
+not know any more about Spencer than do his own countrymen. But it is no fault
+of yours, I grant. It is just a phase of the contemptible ignorance of the
+times. I ran across a sample of it on my way here this evening. I was reading
+an essay by Saleeby on Spencer. You should read it. It is accessible to all
+men. You can buy it in any book-store or draw it from the public library. You
+would feel ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance of that noble man
+compared with what Saleeby has collected on the subject. It is a record of
+shame that would shame your shame.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;The philosopher of the half-educated,&rsquo; he was called by an
+academic Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere he breathed.
+I don&rsquo;t think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but there have been
+critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who have read no more than you of
+Spencer, who publicly challenged his followers to adduce one single idea from
+all his writings&mdash;from Herbert Spencer&rsquo;s writings, the man who has
+impressed the stamp of his genius over the whole field of scientific research
+and modern thought; the father of psychology; the man who revolutionized
+pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French peasant is taught the three
+R&rsquo;s according to principles laid down by him. And the little gnats of men
+sting his memory when they get their very bread and butter from the technical
+application of his ideas. What little of worth resides in their brains is
+largely due to him. It is certain that had he never lived, most of what is
+correct in their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford&mdash;a man who sits in
+an even higher place than you, Judge Blount&mdash;has said that Spencer will be
+dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker. Yappers and
+blatherskites, the whole brood of them! &lsquo;&ldquo;First Principles&rdquo;
+is not wholly destitute of a certain literary power,&rsquo; said one of them.
+And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather than an
+original thinker. Yappers and blatherskites! Yappers and blatherskites!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence. Everybody in Ruth&rsquo;s family
+looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement, and they were
+horrified at Martin&rsquo;s outbreak. The remainder of the dinner passed like a
+funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining their talk to each other, and the
+rest of the conversation being extremely desultory. Then afterward, when Ruth
+and Martin were alone, there was a scene.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are unbearable,&rdquo; she wept.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, &ldquo;The beasts! The
+beasts!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;By telling the truth about him?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care whether it was true or not,&rdquo; she insisted.
+&ldquo;There are certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult
+anybody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?&rdquo;
+Martin demanded. &ldquo;Surely to assault truth is a more serious misdemeanor
+than to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge&rsquo;s. He did worse than
+that. He blackened the name of a great, noble man who is dead. Oh, the beasts!
+The beasts!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him. Never had she
+seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and unreasonable to her
+comprehension. And yet, through her very terror ran the fibres of fascination
+that had drawn and that still drew her to him&mdash;that had compelled her to
+lean towards him, and, in that mad, culminating moment, lay her hands upon his
+neck. She was hurt and outraged by what had taken place, and yet she lay in his
+arms and quivered while he went on muttering, &ldquo;The beasts! The
+beasts!&rdquo; And she still lay there when he said: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll not
+bother your table again, dear. They do not like me, and it is wrong of me to
+thrust my objectionable presence upon them. Besides, they are just as
+objectionable to me. Faugh! They are sickening. And to think of it, I dreamed
+in my innocence that the persons who sat in the high places, who lived in fine
+houses and had educations and bank accounts, were worth while!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap38"></a>CHAPTER XXXVIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Come on, let&rsquo;s go down to the local.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before&mdash;the
+second hemorrhage in three days. The perennial whiskey glass was in his hands,
+and he drained it with shaking fingers.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What do I want with socialism?&rdquo; Martin demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches,&rdquo; the sick man urged.
+&ldquo;Get up and spout. Tell them why you don&rsquo;t want socialism. Tell
+them what you think about them and their ghetto ethics. Slam Nietzsche into
+them and get walloped for your pains. Make a scrap of it. It will do them good.
+Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too. You see, I&rsquo;d like
+to see you a socialist before I&rsquo;m gone. It will give you a sanction for
+your existence. It is the one thing that will save you in the time of
+disappointment that is coming to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist,&rdquo;
+Martin pondered. &ldquo;You detest the crowd so. Surely there is nothing in the
+canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul.&rdquo; He pointed an accusing
+finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling. &ldquo;Socialism
+doesn&rsquo;t seem to save you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m very sick,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;With you it is
+different. You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to
+life somehow. As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I&rsquo;ll tell you.
+It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and
+irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on
+horseback. The slaves won&rsquo;t stand for it. They are too many, and
+willy-nilly they&rsquo;ll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets
+astride. You can&rsquo;t get away from them, and you&rsquo;ll have to swallow
+the whole slave-morality. It&rsquo;s not a nice mess, I&rsquo;ll allow. But
+it&rsquo;s been a-brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway,
+with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history
+repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don&rsquo;t like the crowd, but
+what&rsquo;s a poor chap to do? We can&rsquo;t have the man on horseback, and
+anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule. But come on, anyway.
+I&rsquo;m loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I&rsquo;ll
+get drunk. And you know the doctor says&mdash;damn the doctor! I&rsquo;ll fool
+him yet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland
+socialists, chiefly members of the working class. The speaker, a clever Jew,
+won Martin&rsquo;s admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism.
+The man&rsquo;s stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him
+the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long
+struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who
+had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time. To Martin this
+withered wisp of a creature was a symbol. He was the figure that stood forth
+representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who
+perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life. They were
+the unfit. In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike
+proclivities for co&ouml;peration, Nature rejected them for the exceptional
+man. Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she
+selected only the best. It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred
+race-horses and cucumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised
+a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this
+particular method. Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the
+socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd
+were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with
+which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell.
+He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and
+addressing the chairman. He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order
+the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking. In such
+meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when
+Martin&rsquo;s five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon
+their doctrines but half completed. He had caught their interest, and the
+audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin&rsquo;s time. They
+appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened
+intently, following every word. He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no
+words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly
+alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question. He quoted Spencer and
+Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And so,&rdquo; he concluded, in a swift résumé, &ldquo;no
+state composed of the slave-types can endure. The old law of development still
+holds. In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the
+progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the
+weak are crushed and tend to perish. The result is that the strong and the
+progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the
+strength of each generation increases. That is development. But you
+slaves&mdash;it is too bad to be slaves, I grant&mdash;but you slaves dream of
+a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and
+inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants
+to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have
+progeny&mdash;the weak as well as the strong. What will be the result? No
+longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase. On the
+contrary, it will diminish. There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy. Your
+society of slaves&mdash;of, by, and for, slaves&mdash;must inevitably weaken
+and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics. No state
+of slaves can stand&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How about the United States?&rdquo; a man yelled from the audience.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And how about it?&rdquo; Martin retorted. &ldquo;The thirteen colonies
+threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called. The slaves were their
+own masters. There were no more masters of the sword. But you couldn&rsquo;t
+get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of
+masters&mdash;not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery
+traders and money-lenders. And they enslaved you over again&mdash;but not
+frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms,
+but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies.
+They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave
+legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your
+slave boys and girls. Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this
+trader-oligarchy of the United States. Ten millions of you slaves are not
+properly sheltered nor properly fed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But to return. I have shown that no society of slaves can endure,
+because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development. No
+sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in. It is easy
+for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law
+of development that will maintain your strength? Formulate it. Is it already
+formulated? Then state it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices. A score of men were on their
+feet clamoring for recognition from the chair. And one by one, encouraged by
+vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures,
+they replied to the attack. It was a wild night&mdash;but it was wild
+intellectually, a battle of ideas. Some strayed from the point, but most of the
+speakers replied directly to Martin. They shook him with lines of thought that
+were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into
+new applications of the old laws. They were too earnest to be always polite,
+and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day
+dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation. He
+was not a bright cub reporter. He was merely facile and glib. He was too dense
+to follow the discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was
+vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also, he had a
+great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of
+nations and newspapers. Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that
+excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something&mdash;even a
+great deal&mdash;out of nothing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like
+<i>revolution</i> gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct
+an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole
+speech from the one word <i>revolution</i>. He did it that night, and he did it
+well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth
+and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary
+individualism into the most lurid, red-shirt socialist utterance. The cub
+reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the
+local color&mdash;wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenic and degenerate types
+of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all
+projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of
+angry men.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap39"></a>CHAPTER XXXIX.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning&rsquo;s paper. It
+was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that;
+and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the
+Oakland socialists. He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had
+constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in
+the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious,&rdquo; he said that
+afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped
+limply into the one chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But what do you care?&rdquo; Brissenden asked. &ldquo;Surely you
+don&rsquo;t desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the
+newspapers?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin thought for a while, then said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I really don&rsquo;t care for their approval, not a whit. On the
+other hand, it&rsquo;s very likely to make my relations with Ruth&rsquo;s
+family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a socialist, and
+this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not that I care for his
+opinion&mdash;but what&rsquo;s the odds? I want to read you what I&rsquo;ve
+been doing to-day. It&rsquo;s &lsquo;Overdue,&rsquo; of course, and I&rsquo;m
+just about halfway through.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man
+in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil-burner and the
+kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sit down,&rdquo; Brissenden said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his
+business.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I&rsquo;ve come to interview
+you,&rdquo; he began.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A brother socialist?&rdquo; the reporter asked, with a quick glance at
+Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And he wrote that report,&rdquo; Martin said softly. &ldquo;Why, he is
+only a boy!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you poke him?&rdquo; Brissenden asked. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d
+give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him
+and at him. But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the
+socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview
+with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?&rdquo; he
+said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it
+will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower. Then we can
+have the interview afterward.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;A photographer,&rdquo; Brissenden said meditatively. &ldquo;Poke him,
+Martin! Poke him!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I guess I&rsquo;m getting old,&rdquo; was the answer. &ldquo;I know I
+ought, but I really haven&rsquo;t the heart. It doesn&rsquo;t seem to
+matter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;For his mother&rsquo;s sake,&rdquo; Brissenden urged.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s worth considering,&rdquo; Martin replied; &ldquo;but it
+doesn&rsquo;t seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You
+see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it
+matter?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s right&mdash;that&rsquo;s the way to take it,&rdquo; the cub
+announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But it wasn&rsquo;t true, not a word of what he wrote,&rdquo; Martin
+went on, confining his attention to Brissenden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was just in a general way a description, you understand,&rdquo; the
+cub ventured, &ldquo;and besides, it&rsquo;s good advertising. That&rsquo;s
+what counts. It was a favor to you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s good advertising, Martin, old boy,&rdquo; Brissenden repeated
+solemnly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it was a favor to me&mdash;think of that!&rdquo; was Martin&rsquo;s
+contribution.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Let me see&mdash;where were you born, Mr. Eden?&rdquo; the cub asked,
+assuming an air of expectant attention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t take notes,&rdquo; said Brissenden. &ldquo;He remembers
+it all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That is sufficient for me.&rdquo; The cub was trying not to look
+worried. &ldquo;No decent reporter needs to bother with notes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That was sufficient&mdash;for last night.&rdquo; But Brissenden was not
+a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. &ldquo;Martin, if
+you don&rsquo;t poke him, I&rsquo;ll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor
+the next moment.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How will a spanking do?&rdquo; Martin asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face
+downward across his knees.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now don&rsquo;t bite,&rdquo; Martin warned, &ldquo;or else I&rsquo;ll
+have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty
+face.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady
+rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite.
+Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the
+whiskey bottle, pleading, &ldquo;Here, just let me swat him once.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sorry my hand played out,&rdquo; Martin said, when at last he desisted.
+&ldquo;It is quite numb.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have you arrested for this,&rdquo; he snarled, tears of
+boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll make you
+sweat for this. You&rsquo;ll see.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The pretty thing,&rdquo; Martin remarked. &ldquo;He doesn&rsquo;t
+realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not
+square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one&rsquo;s fellow-creatures the
+way he has done, and he doesn&rsquo;t know it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He has to come to us to be told,&rdquo; Brissenden filled in a pause.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly
+refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this
+way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a
+first-class scoundrel.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But there is yet time,&rdquo; quoth Brissenden. &ldquo;Who knows but
+what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn&rsquo;t you let
+me swat him just once? I&rsquo;d like to have had a hand in it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big
+brutes,&rdquo; sobbed the erring soul.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak.&rdquo; Martin shook his head
+lugubriously. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I&rsquo;ve numbed my hand in vain. The
+young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful
+newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that
+Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the next morning&rsquo;s paper Martin learned a great deal more about
+himself that was new to him. &ldquo;We are the sworn enemies of society,&rdquo;
+he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. &ldquo;No, we are not
+anarchists but socialists.&rdquo; When the reporter pointed out to him that
+there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his
+shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally
+asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described.
+Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his
+blood-shot eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park,
+and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of
+the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary
+speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its
+oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death&rsquo;s-head tramp who kept him
+company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary
+confinement in some fortress dungeon.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cub had been industrious. He had scurried around and nosed out
+Martin&rsquo;s family history, and procured a photograph of
+Higginbotham&rsquo;s Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out
+in front. That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman
+who had no patience with his brother-in-law&rsquo;s socialistic views, and no
+patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing
+as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn&rsquo;t take a job when it was offered to
+him and who would go to jail yet. Hermann von Schmidt, Marian&rsquo;s husband,
+had likewise been interviewed. He had called Martin the black sheep of the
+family and repudiated him. &ldquo;He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a
+stop to that good and quick,&rdquo; Von Schmidt had said to the reporter.
+&ldquo;He knows better than to come bumming around here. A man who won&rsquo;t
+work is no good, take that from me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This time Martin was genuinely angry. Brissenden looked upon the affair as a
+good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy
+task to explain to Ruth. As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed
+with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the
+engagement. How much he would make of it he was soon to realize. The afternoon
+mail brought a letter from Ruth. Martin opened it with a premonition of
+disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from
+the postman. As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the
+tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days. He was not aware that the
+pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to
+roll a cigarette.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was not a passionate letter. There were no touches of anger in it. But all
+the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of
+hurt and disappointment. She had expected better of him. She had thought he had
+got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently
+worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently. And now her father
+and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken.
+That they were justified in this she could not but admit. Their relation could
+never be a happy one. It had been unfortunate from the first. But one regret
+she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin. &ldquo;If
+only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of
+yourself,&rdquo; she wrote. &ldquo;But it was not to be. Your past life had
+been too wild and irregular. I can understand that you are not to be blamed.
+You could act only according to your nature and your early training. So I do
+not blame you, Martin. Please remember that. It was simply a mistake. As father
+and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both
+be happy because it was discovered not too late.&rdquo; . . &ldquo;There is no
+use trying to see me,&rdquo; she said toward the last. &ldquo;It would be an
+unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother. I feel, as it is,
+that I have caused her great pain and worry. I shall have to do much living to
+atone for it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and
+replied. He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting,
+pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had
+put in his mouth. Toward the end of the letter he was God&rsquo;s own lover
+pleading passionately for love. &ldquo;Please answer,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing. Do you love me?
+That is all&mdash;the answer to that one question.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But no answer came the next day, nor the next. &ldquo;Overdue&rdquo; lay
+untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under
+the table grew larger. For the first time Martin&rsquo;s glorious sleep was
+interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. Three
+times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who
+answered the bell. Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out,
+and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For Martin&rsquo;s troubles were many. The aftermath of the cub
+reporter&rsquo;s deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated. The
+Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an
+American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused
+further dealings with him&mdash;carrying his patriotism to such a degree that
+he cancelled Martin&rsquo;s account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it.
+The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation
+against Martin ran high. No one would have anything to do with a socialist
+traitor. Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal. The
+children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which
+once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him
+&ldquo;hobo&rdquo; and &ldquo;bum.&rdquo; The Silva tribe, however, stanchly
+defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black
+eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to
+Maria&rsquo;s perplexities and troubles.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he
+knew could not be otherwise&mdash;that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with
+him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had
+forbidden him the house.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you go away, Martin?&rdquo; Gertrude had begged.
+&ldquo;Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down. Afterwards, when this
+all blows over, you can come back.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations. How could he explain? He was
+appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his
+people. He could never cross it and explain to them his position,&mdash;the
+Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism. There were not words enough in
+the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct
+intelligible to them. Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was
+to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their
+whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought,
+while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The
+slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich
+before which they fell down and worshipped.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that
+within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t come near Bernard now,&rdquo; she admonished him.
+&ldquo;After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get
+the job of drivin&rsquo; delivery-wagon for him. Any time you want me, just
+send for me an&rsquo; I&rsquo;ll come. Don&rsquo;t forget.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him
+at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait. As he watched her go, the
+Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter. The slave-class in the abstract
+was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home
+to his own family. And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong,
+that slave was his sister Gertrude. He grinned savagely at the paradox. A fine
+Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the
+first sentiment or emotion that strayed along&mdash;ay, to be shaken by the
+slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was.
+The true noble men were above pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been
+generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than
+the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap40"></a>CHAPTER XL.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Overdue&rdquo; still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every
+manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one manuscript he
+kept going, and that was Brissenden&rsquo;s &ldquo;Ephemera.&rdquo; His bicycle
+and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more
+worrying about the rent. But such things no longer bothered him. He was seeking
+a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth on the
+street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was
+true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you interfere with my sister, I&rsquo;ll call an officer,&rdquo;
+Norman threatened. &ldquo;She does not wish to speak with you, and your
+insistence is insult.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If you persist, you&rsquo;ll have to call that officer, and then
+you&rsquo;ll get your name in the papers,&rdquo; Martin answered grimly.
+&ldquo;And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to. I&rsquo;m
+going to talk with Ruth.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want to have it from your own lips,&rdquo; he said to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The question I asked in my letter,&rdquo; he prompted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She shook her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is all this of your own free will?&rdquo; he demanded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is.&rdquo; She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation.
+&ldquo;It is of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to
+meet my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can tell
+you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not
+stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A blush drove the pallor from her face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;After what has passed?&rdquo; she said faintly. &ldquo;Martin, you do
+not know what you are saying. I am not common.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, she doesn&rsquo;t want to have anything to do with you,&rdquo;
+Norman blurted out, starting on with her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket
+for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps
+and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found himself sitting on
+the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist. He
+noticed &ldquo;Overdue&rdquo; lying on the table and drew up his chair and
+reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward
+completeness. Here was something undone. It had been deferred against the
+completion of something else. Now that something else had been finished, and he
+would apply himself to this task until it was finished. What he would do next
+he did not know. All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had
+been attained. A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in
+workman-like fashion. He was not curious about the future. He would soon enough
+find out what it held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter.
+Nothing seemed to matter.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For five days he toiled on at &ldquo;Overdue,&rdquo; going nowhere, seeing
+nobody, and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman
+brought him a thin letter from the editor of <i>The Parthenon</i>. A glance
+told him that &ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; was accepted. &ldquo;We have submitted the
+poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce,&rdquo; the editor went on to say, &ldquo;and he
+has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of
+our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for
+the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly extend our
+pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by return mail his
+photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly
+telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars,
+Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too, there was
+Brissenden&rsquo;s consent to be gained. Well, he had been right, after all.
+Here was one magazine editor who knew real poetry when he saw it. And the price
+was splendid, even though it was for the poem of a century. As for Cartwright
+Bruce, Martin knew that he was the one critic for whose opinions Brissenden had
+any respect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the houses and
+cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that he was not more elated
+over his friend&rsquo;s success and over his own signal victory. The one critic
+in the United States had pronounced favorably on the poem, while his own
+contention that good stuff could find its way into the magazines had proved
+correct. But enthusiasm had lost its spring in him, and he found that he was
+more anxious to see Brissenden than he was to carry the good news. The
+acceptance of <i>The Parthenon</i> had recalled to him that during his five
+days&rsquo; devotion to &ldquo;Overdue&rdquo; he had not heard from Brissenden
+nor even thought about him. For the first time Martin realized the daze he had
+been in, and he felt shame for having forgotten his friend. But even the shame
+did not burn very sharply. He was numb to emotions of any sort save the
+artistic ones concerned in the writing of &ldquo;Overdue.&rdquo; So far as
+other affairs were concerned, he had been in a trance. For that matter, he was
+still in a trance. All this life through which the electric car whirred seemed
+remote and unreal, and he would have experienced little interest and less shock
+if the great stone steeple of the church he passed had suddenly crumbled to
+mortar-dust upon his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden&rsquo;s room, and hurried down again.
+The room was empty. All luggage was gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?&rdquo; he asked the clerk, who
+looked at him curiously for a moment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Haven&rsquo;t you heard?&rdquo; he asked.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead in bed. Suicide. Shot
+himself through the head.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Is he buried yet?&rdquo; Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one
+else&rsquo;s voice, from a long way off, asking the question.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. Lawyers engaged by his
+people saw to the arrangements.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;They were quick about it, I must say,&rdquo; Martin commented.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I don&rsquo;t know. It happened five days ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Five days ago?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, five days ago.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; Martin said as he turned and went out.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram to <i>The
+Parthenon</i>, advising them to proceed with the publication of the poem. He
+had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare home, so he sent
+the message collect.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once in his room, he resumed his writing. The days and nights came and went,
+and he sat at his table and wrote on. He went nowhere, save to the pawnbroker,
+took no exercise, and ate methodically when he was hungry and had something to
+cook, and just as methodically went without when he had nothing to cook.
+Composed as the story was, in advance, chapter by chapter, he nevertheless saw
+and developed an opening that increased the power of it, though it necessitated
+twenty thousand additional words. It was not that there was any vital need that
+the thing should be well done, but that his artistic canons compelled him to do
+it well. He worked on in the daze, strangely detached from the world around
+him, feeling like a familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former
+life. He remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the spirit of a man
+who was dead and who did not have sense enough to know it; and he paused for
+the moment to wonder if he were really dead and unaware of it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Came the day when &ldquo;Overdue&rdquo; was finished. The agent of the
+type-writer firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while Martin,
+on the one chair, typed the last pages of the final chapter.
+&ldquo;Finis,&rdquo; he wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it was
+indeed finis. He watched the type-writer carried out the door with a feeling of
+relief, then went over and lay down on the bed. He was faint from hunger. Food
+had not passed his lips in thirty-six hours, but he did not think about it. He
+lay on his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or
+stupor slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness. Half in delirium, he
+began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden had been fond
+of quoting to him. Maria, listening anxiously outside his door, was perturbed
+by his monotonous utterance. The words in themselves were not significant to
+her, but the fact that he was saying them was. &ldquo;I have done,&rdquo; was
+the burden of the poem.
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;I have done&mdash;<br />
+Put by the lute.<br />
+Song and singing soon are over<br />
+As the airy shades that hover<br />
+In among the purple clover.<br />
+I have done&mdash;<br />
+Put by the lute.<br />
+Once I sang as early thrushes<br />
+Sing among the dewy bushes;<br />
+Now I&rsquo;m mute.<br />
+I am like a weary linnet,<br />
+For my throat has no song in it;<br />
+I have had my singing minute.<br />
+I have done.<br />
+Put by the lute.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove, where she filled
+a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion&rsquo;s share of chopped meat
+and vegetables which her ladle scraped from the bottom of the pot. Martin
+roused himself and sat up and began to eat, between spoonfuls reassuring Maria
+that he had not been talking in his sleep and that he did not have any fever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the edge of the
+bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw nothing until the torn
+wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the morning&rsquo;s mail and which lay
+unopened, shot a gleam of light into his darkened brain. It is <i>The
+Parthenon</i>, he thought, the August <i>Parthenon</i>, and it must contain
+&ldquo;Ephemera.&rdquo; If only Brissenden were here to see!
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.
+&ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and
+Beardsley-like margin decorations. On one side of the head-piece was
+Brissenden&rsquo;s photograph, on the other side was the photograph of Sir John
+Value, the British Ambassador. A preliminary editorial note quoted Sir John
+Value as saying that there were no poets in America, and the publication of
+&ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; was <i>The Parthenon&rsquo;s</i>. &ldquo;There, take
+that, Sir John Value!&rdquo; Cartwright Bruce was described as the greatest
+critic in America, and he was quoted as saying that &ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; was
+the greatest poem ever written in America. And finally, the editor&rsquo;s
+foreword ended with: &ldquo;We have not yet made up our minds entirely as to
+the merits of &ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo;; perhaps we shall never be able to do so.
+But we have read it often, wondering at the words and their arrangement,
+wondering where Mr. Brissenden got them, and how he could fasten them
+together.&rdquo; Then followed the poem.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man,&rdquo; Martin murmured,
+letting the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted
+apathetically that he was not nauseated very much. He wished he could get
+angry, but did not have energy enough to try. He was too numb. His blood was
+too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal flow of indignation. After all,
+what did it matter? It was on a par with all the rest that Brissenden had
+condemned in bourgeois society.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor Briss,&rdquo; Martin communed; &ldquo;he would never have forgiven
+me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which had once
+contained type-writer paper. Going through its contents, he drew forth eleven
+poems which his friend had written. These he tore lengthwise and crosswise and
+dropped into the waste basket. He did it languidly, and, when he had finished,
+sat on the edge of the bed staring blankly before him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his sightless
+vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white. It was curious. But as he
+watched it grow in definiteness he saw that it was a coral reef smoking in the
+white Pacific surges. Next, in the line of breakers he made out a small canoe,
+an outrigger canoe. In the stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet
+hip-cloth dipping a flashing paddle. He recognized him. He was Moti, the
+youngest son of Tati, the chief, and this was Tahiti, and beyond that smoking
+reef lay the sweet land of Papara and the chief&rsquo;s grass house by the
+river&rsquo;s mouth. It was the end of the day, and Moti was coming home from
+the fishing. He was waiting for the rush of a big breaker whereon to jump the
+reef. Then he saw himself, sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in
+the past, dipping a paddle that waited Moti&rsquo;s word to dig in like mad
+when the turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them. Next, he was no
+longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out, they were
+both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the steep face of the flying
+turquoise. Under the bow the water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was
+filled with driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long-echoing roar,
+and the canoe floated on the placid water of the lagoon. Moti laughed and shook
+the salt water from his eyes, and together they paddled in to the pounded-coral
+beach where Tati&rsquo;s grass walls through the cocoanut-palms showed golden
+in the setting sun.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of his squalid
+room. He strove in vain to see Tahiti again. He knew there was singing among
+the trees and that the maidens were dancing in the moonlight, but he could not
+see them. He could see only the littered writing-table, the empty space where
+the type-writer had stood, and the unwashed window-pane. He closed his eyes
+with a groan, and slept.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap41"></a>CHAPTER XLI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the postman on
+his morning round. Martin felt tired and passive, and went through his letters
+aimlessly. One thin envelope, from a robber magazine, contained a check for
+twenty-two dollars. He had been dunning for it for a year and a half. He noted
+its amount apathetically. The old-time thrill at receiving a publisher&rsquo;s
+check was gone. Unlike his earlier checks, this one was not pregnant with
+promise of great things to come. To him it was a check for twenty-two dollars,
+that was all, and it would buy him something to eat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in payment for
+some humorous verse which had been accepted months before. It was for ten
+dollars. An idea came to him, which he calmly considered. He did not know what
+he was going to do, and he felt in no hurry to do anything. In the meantime he
+must live. Also he owed numerous debts. Would it not be a paying investment to
+put stamps on the huge pile of manuscripts under the table and start them on
+their travels again? One or two of them might be accepted. That would help him
+to live. He decided on the investment, and, after he had cashed the checks at
+the bank down in Oakland, he bought ten dollars&rsquo; worth of postage stamps.
+The thought of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room was
+repulsive to him. For the first time he refused to consider his debts. He knew
+that in his room he could manufacture a substantial breakfast at a cost of from
+fifteen to twenty cents. But, instead, he went into the Forum Café and
+ordered a breakfast that cost two dollars. He tipped the waiter a quarter, and
+spent fifty cents for a package of Egyptian cigarettes. It was the first time
+he had smoked since Ruth had asked him to stop. But he could see now no reason
+why he should not, and besides, he wanted to smoke. And what did the money
+matter? For five cents he could have bought a package of Durham and brown
+papers and rolled forty cigarettes&mdash;but what of it? Money had no meaning
+to him now except what it would immediately buy. He was chartless and
+rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved the least
+living, and it was living that hurt.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every night. Though
+now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the Japanese restaurants where
+meals were served for ten cents, his wasted body filled out, as did the hollows
+in his cheeks. He no longer abused himself with short sleep, overwork, and
+overstudy. He wrote nothing, and the books were closed. He walked much, out in
+the hills, and loafed long hours in the quiet parks. He had no friends nor
+acquaintances, nor did he make any. He had no inclination. He was waiting for
+some impulse, from he knew not where, to put his stopped life into motion
+again. In the meantime his life remained run down, planless, and empty and
+idle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the &ldquo;real dirt.&rdquo;
+But at the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance, he recoiled
+and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto. He was frightened at the
+thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and he fled furtively, for fear that
+some one of the &ldquo;real dirt&rdquo; might chance along and recognize him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how
+&ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; was being maltreated. It had made a hit. But what a hit!
+Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether or not it was
+really poetry. The local papers had taken it up, and daily there appeared
+columns of learned criticisms, facetious editorials, and serious letters from
+subscribers. Helen Della Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and
+rolling of tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the United States) denied
+Brissenden a seat beside her on Pegasus and wrote voluminous letters to the
+public, proving that he was no poet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>The Parthenon</i> came out in its next number patting itself on the back for
+the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and exploiting
+Brissenden&rsquo;s death with ruthless commercialism. A newspaper with a sworn
+circulation of half a million published an original and spontaneous poem by
+Helen Della Delmar, in which she gibed and sneered at Brissenden. Also, she was
+guilty of a second poem, in which she parodied him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead. He had hated the
+crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of him had been thrown
+to the crowd. Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on. Every nincompoop in the
+land rushed into free print, floating their wizened little egos into the public
+eye on the surge of Brissenden&rsquo;s greatness. Quoth one paper: &ldquo;We
+have received a letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just like it, only
+better, some time ago.&rdquo; Another paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving
+Helen Della Delmar for her parody, said: &ldquo;But unquestionably Miss Delmar
+wrote it in a moment of badinage and not quite with the respect that one great
+poet should show to another and perhaps to the greatest. However, whether Miss
+Delmar be jealous or not of the man who invented &lsquo;Ephemera,&rsquo; it is
+certain that she, like thousands of others, is fascinated by his work, and that
+the day may come when she will try to write lines like his.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ministers began to preach sermons against &ldquo;Ephemera,&rdquo; and one, who
+too stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy. The great
+poem contributed to the gayety of the world. The comic verse-writers and the
+cartoonists took hold of it with screaming laughter, and in the personal
+columns of society weeklies jokes were perpetrated on it to the effect that
+Charley Frensham told Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of
+&ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; would drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines
+would send him to the bottom of the river.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger. The effect produced
+upon him was one of great sadness. In the crash of his whole world, with love
+on the pinnacle, the crash of magazinedom and the dear public was a small crash
+indeed. Brissenden had been wholly right in his judgment of the magazines, and
+he, Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find it out for
+himself. The magazines were all Brissenden had said they were and more. Well,
+he was done, he solaced himself. He had hitched his wagon to a star and been
+landed in a pestiferous marsh. The visions of Tahiti&mdash;clean, sweet
+Tahiti&mdash;were coming to him more frequently. And there were the low
+Paumotus, and the high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading
+schooners or frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at
+Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to Nukahiva and
+the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a pig in honor of his
+coming, and where Tamari&rsquo;s flower-garlanded daughters would seize his
+hands and with song and laughter garland him with flowers. The South Seas were
+calling, and he knew that sooner or later he would answer the call.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long traverse he
+had made through the realm of knowledge. When <i>The Parthenon</i> check of
+three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to him, he turned it over to the
+local lawyer who had attended to Brissenden&rsquo;s affairs for his family.
+Martin took a receipt for the check, and at the same time gave a note for the
+hundred dollars Brissenden had let him have.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese restaurants.
+At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight, the tide turned. But it had
+turned too late. Without a thrill he opened a thick envelope from <i>The
+Millennium</i>, scanned the face of a check that represented three hundred
+dollars, and noted that it was the payment on acceptance for
+&ldquo;Adventure.&rdquo; Every debt he owed in the world, including the
+pawnshop, with its usurious interest, amounted to less than a hundred dollars.
+And when he had paid everything, and lifted the hundred-dollar note with
+Brissenden&rsquo;s lawyer, he still had over a hundred dollars in pocket. He
+ordered a suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals in the best
+cafés in town. He still slept in his little room at Maria&rsquo;s, but
+the sight of his new clothes caused the neighborhood children to cease from
+calling him &ldquo;hobo&rdquo; and &ldquo;tramp&rdquo; from the roofs of
+woodsheds and over back fences.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wiki-Wiki,&rdquo; his Hawaiian short story, was bought by
+<i>Warren&rsquo;s Monthly</i> for two hundred and fifty dollars. <i>The
+Northern Review</i> took his essay, &ldquo;The Cradle of Beauty,&rdquo; and
+<i>Mackintosh&rsquo;s Magazine</i> took &ldquo;The Palmist&rdquo;&mdash;the
+poem he had written to Marian. The editors and readers were back from their
+summer vacations, and manuscripts were being handled quickly. But Martin could
+not puzzle out what strange whim animated them to this general acceptance of
+the things they had persistently rejected for two years. Nothing of his had
+been published. He was not known anywhere outside of Oakland, and in Oakland,
+with the few who thought they knew him, he was notorious as a red-shirt and a
+socialist. So there was no explaining this sudden acceptability of his wares.
+It was sheer jugglery of fate.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After it had been refused by a number of magazines, he had taken
+Brissenden&rsquo;s rejected advice and started &ldquo;The Shame of the
+Sun&rdquo; on the round of publishers. After several refusals, Singletree,
+Darnley &amp; Co. accepted it, promising fall publication. When Martin asked
+for an advance on royalties, they wrote that such was not their custom, that
+books of that nature rarely paid for themselves, and that they doubted if his
+book would sell a thousand copies. Martin figured what the book would earn him
+on such a sale. Retailed at a dollar, on a royalty of fifteen per cent, it
+would bring him one hundred and fifty dollars. He decided that if he had it to
+do over again he would confine himself to fiction. &ldquo;Adventure,&rdquo;
+one-fourth as long, had brought him twice as much from <i>The Millennium</i>.
+That newspaper paragraph he had read so long ago had been true, after all. The
+first-class magazines did not pay on acceptance, and they paid well. Not two
+cents a word, but four cents a word, had <i>The Millennium</i> paid him. And,
+furthermore, they bought good stuff, too, for were they not buying his? This
+last thought he accompanied with a grin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He wrote to Singletree, Darnley &amp; Co., offering to sell out his rights in
+&ldquo;The Shame of the Sun&rdquo; for a hundred dollars, but they did not care
+to take the risk. In the meantime he was not in need of money, for several of
+his later stories had been accepted and paid for. He actually opened a bank
+account, where, without a debt in the world, he had several hundred dollars to
+his credit. &ldquo;Overdue,&rdquo; after having been declined by a number of
+magazines, came to rest at the Meredith-Lowell Company. Martin remembered the
+five dollars Gertrude had given him, and his resolve to return it to her a
+hundred times over; so he wrote for an advance on royalties of five hundred
+dollars. To his surprise a check for that amount, accompanied by a contract,
+came by return mail. He cashed the check into five-dollar gold pieces and
+telephoned Gertrude that he wanted to see her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She arrived at the house panting and short of breath from the haste she had
+made. Apprehensive of trouble, she had stuffed the few dollars she possessed
+into her hand-satchel; and so sure was she that disaster had overtaken her
+brother, that she stumbled forward, sobbing, into his arms, at the same time
+thrusting the satchel mutely at him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d have come myself,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;But I didn&rsquo;t
+want a row with Mr. Higginbotham, and that is what would have surely
+happened.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;ll be all right after a time,&rdquo; she assured him, while she
+wondered what the trouble was that Martin was in. &ldquo;But you&rsquo;d best
+get a job first an&rsquo; steady down. Bernard does like to see a man at honest
+work. That stuff in the newspapers broke &rsquo;m all up. I never saw &rsquo;m
+so mad before.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not going to get a job,&rdquo; Martin said with a smile.
+&ldquo;And you can tell him so from me. I don&rsquo;t need a job, and
+there&rsquo;s the proof of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He emptied the hundred gold pieces into her lap in a glinting, tinkling stream.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You remember that fiver you gave me the time I didn&rsquo;t have
+carfare? Well, there it is, with ninety-nine brothers of different ages but all
+of the same size.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she was now in a panic of
+fear. Her fear was such that it was certitude. She was not suspicious. She was
+convinced. She looked at Martin in horror, and her heavy limbs shrank under the
+golden stream as though it were burning her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s yours,&rdquo; he laughed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She burst into tears, and began to moan, &ldquo;My poor boy, my poor
+boy!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was puzzled for a moment. Then he divined the cause of her agitation and
+handed her the Meredith-Lowell letter which had accompanied the check. She
+stumbled through it, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes, and when she had
+finished, said:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; does it mean that you come by the money honestly?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;More honestly than if I&rsquo;d won it in a lottery. I earned it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly faith came back to her, and she reread the letter carefully. It took him
+long to explain to her the nature of the transaction which had put the money
+into his possession, and longer still to get her to understand that the money
+was really hers and that he did not need it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll put it in the bank for you,&rdquo; she said finally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll do nothing of the sort. It&rsquo;s yours, to do with as you
+please, and if you won&rsquo;t take it, I&rsquo;ll give it to Maria.
+She&rsquo;ll know what to do with it. I&rsquo;d suggest, though, that you hire
+a servant and take a good long rest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to tell Bernard all about it,&rdquo; she
+announced, when she was leaving.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin winced, then grinned.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, do,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And then, maybe, he&rsquo;ll invite me
+to dinner again.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, he will&mdash;I&rsquo;m sure he will!&rdquo; she exclaimed
+fervently, as she drew him to her and kissed and hugged him.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap42"></a>CHAPTER XLII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+One day Martin became aware that he was lonely. He was healthy and strong, and
+had nothing to do. The cessation from writing and studying, the death of
+Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big hole in his life; and
+his life refused to be pinned down to good living in cafés and the
+smoking of Egyptian cigarettes. It was true the South Seas were calling to him,
+but he had a feeling that the game was not yet played out in the United States.
+Two books were soon to be published, and he had more books that might find
+publication. Money could be made out of them, and he would wait and take a
+sackful of it into the South Seas. He knew a valley and a bay in the Marquesas
+that he could buy for a thousand Chili dollars. The valley ran from the
+horseshoe, land-locked bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks and
+contained perhaps ten thousand acres. It was filled with tropical fruits, wild
+chickens, and wild pigs, with an occasional herd of wild cattle, while high up
+among the peaks were herds of wild goats harried by packs of wild dogs. The
+whole place was wild. Not a human lived in it. And he could buy it and the bay
+for a thousand Chili dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with water deep enough to
+accommodate the largest vessel afloat, and so safe that the South Pacific
+Directory recommended it as the best careening place for ships for hundreds of
+miles around. He would buy a schooner&mdash;one of those yacht-like, coppered
+crafts that sailed like witches&mdash;and go trading copra and pearling among
+the islands. He would make the valley and the bay his headquarters. He would
+build a patriarchal grass house like Tati&rsquo;s, and have it and the valley
+and the schooner filled with dark-skinned servitors. He would entertain there
+the factor of Taiohae, captains of wandering traders, and all the best of the
+South Pacific riffraff. He would keep open house and entertain like a prince.
+And he would forget the books he had opened and the world that had proved an
+illusion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money. Already
+it was beginning to flow in. If one of the books made a strike, it might enable
+him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts. Also he could collect the stories
+and the poems into books, and make sure of the valley and the bay and the
+schooner. He would never write again. Upon that he was resolved. But in the
+meantime, awaiting the publication of the books, he must do something more than
+live dazed and stupid in the sort of uncaring trance into which he had fallen.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers&rsquo; Picnic took place
+that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he went. He had been to
+the working-class picnics too often in his earlier life not to know what they
+were like, and as he entered the park he experienced a recrudescence of all the
+old sensations. After all, they were his kind, these working people. He had
+been born among them, he had lived among them, and though he had strayed for a
+time, it was well to come back among them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;If it ain&rsquo;t Mart!&rdquo; he heard some one say, and the next
+moment a hearty hand was on his shoulder. &ldquo;Where you ben all the time?
+Off to sea? Come on an&rsquo; have a drink.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the old crowd in which he found himself&mdash;the old crowd, with here
+and there a gap, and here and there a new face. The fellows were not
+bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics for the
+dancing, and the fighting, and the fun. Martin drank with them, and began to
+feel really human once more. He was a fool to have ever left them, he thought;
+and he was very certain that his sum of happiness would have been greater had
+he remained with them and let alone the books and the people who sat in the
+high places. Yet the beer seemed not so good as of yore. It didn&rsquo;t taste
+as it used to taste. Brissenden had spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded,
+and wondered if, after all, the books had spoiled him for companionship with
+these friends of his youth. He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he
+went on to the dancing pavilion. Jimmy, the plumber, he met there, in the
+company of a tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for Martin.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Gee, it&rsquo;s like old times,&rdquo; Jimmy explained to the gang that
+gave him the laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled away in a waltz.
+&ldquo;An&rsquo; I don&rsquo;t give a rap. I&rsquo;m too damned glad to see
+&rsquo;m back. Watch &rsquo;m waltz, eh? It&rsquo;s like silk. Who&rsquo;d
+blame any girl?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three of them, with half a
+dozen friends, watched the revolving couples and laughed and joked with one
+another. Everybody was glad to see Martin back. No book of his been published;
+he carried no fictitious value in their eyes. They liked him for himself. He
+felt like a prince returned from excile, and his lonely heart burgeoned in the
+geniality in which it bathed. He made a mad day of it, and was at his best.
+Also, he had money in his pockets, and, as in the old days when he returned
+from sea with a pay-day, he made the money fly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go by in the arms of a young
+workingman; and, later, when he made the round of the pavilion, he came upon
+her sitting by a refreshment table. Surprise and greetings over, he led her
+away into the grounds, where they could talk without shouting down the music.
+From the instant he spoke to her, she was his. He knew it. She showed it in the
+proud humility of her eyes, in every caressing movement of her proudly carried
+body, and in the way she hung upon his speech. She was not the young girl as he
+had known her. She was a woman, now, and Martin noted that her wild, defiant
+beauty had improved, losing none of its wildness, while the defiance and the
+fire seemed more in control. &ldquo;A beauty, a perfect beauty,&rdquo; he
+murmured admiringly under his breath. And he knew she was his, that all he had
+to do was to say &ldquo;Come,&rdquo; and she would go with him over the world
+wherever he led.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Even as the thought flashed through his brain he received a heavy blow on the
+side of his head that nearly knocked him down. It was a man&rsquo;s fist,
+directed by a man so angry and in such haste that the fist had missed the jaw
+for which it was aimed. Martin turned as he staggered, and saw the fist coming
+at him in a wild swing. Quite as a matter of course he ducked, and the fist
+flew harmlessly past, pivoting the man who had driven it. Martin hooked with
+his left, landing on the pivoting man with the weight of his body behind the
+blow. The man went to the ground sidewise, leaped to his feet, and made a mad
+rush. Martin saw his passion-distorted face and wondered what could be the
+cause of the fellow&rsquo;s anger. But while he wondered, he shot in a straight
+left, the weight of his body behind the blow. The man went over backward and
+fell in a crumpled heap. Jimmy and others of the gang were running toward them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was thrilling all over. This was the old days with a vengeance, with
+their dancing, and their fighting, and their fun. While he kept a wary eye on
+his antagonist, he glanced at Lizzie. Usually the girls screamed when the
+fellows got to scrapping, but she had not screamed. She was looking on with
+bated breath, leaning slightly forward, so keen was her interest, one hand
+pressed to her breast, her cheek flushed, and in her eyes a great and amazed
+admiration.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The man had gained his feet and was struggling to escape the restraining arms
+that were laid on him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She was waitin&rsquo; for me to come back!&rdquo; he was proclaiming to
+all and sundry. &ldquo;She was waitin&rsquo; for me to come back, an&rsquo;
+then that fresh guy comes buttin&rsquo; in. Let go o&rsquo; me, I tell yeh.
+I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to fix &rsquo;m.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What&rsquo;s eatin&rsquo; yer?&rdquo; Jimmy was demanding, as he helped
+hold the young fellow back. &ldquo;That guy&rsquo;s Mart Eden. He&rsquo;s nifty
+with his mits, lemme tell you that, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;ll eat you alive if you
+monkey with &rsquo;m.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He can&rsquo;t steal her on me that way,&rdquo; the other interjected.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He licked the Flyin&rsquo; Dutchman, an&rsquo; you know
+<i>him</i>,&rdquo; Jimmy went on expostulating. &ldquo;An&rsquo; he did it in
+five rounds. You couldn&rsquo;t last a minute against him. See?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+This information seemed to have a mollifying effect, and the irate young man
+favored Martin with a measuring stare.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He don&rsquo;t look it,&rdquo; he sneered; but the sneer was without
+passion.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s what the Flyin&rsquo; Dutchman thought,&rdquo; Jimmy
+assured him. &ldquo;Come on, now, let&rsquo;s get outa this. There&rsquo;s lots
+of other girls. Come on.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The young fellow allowed himself to be led away toward the pavilion, and the
+gang followed after him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who is he?&rdquo; Martin asked Lizzie. &ldquo;And what&rsquo;s it all
+about, anyway?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Already the zest of combat, which of old had been so keen and lasting, had died
+down, and he discovered that he was self-analytical, too much so to live,
+single heart and single hand, so primitive an existence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Lizzie tossed her head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, he&rsquo;s nobody,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He&rsquo;s just ben
+keepin&rsquo; company with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I had to, you see,&rdquo; she explained after a pause. &ldquo;I was
+gettin&rsquo; pretty lonesome. But I never forgot.&rdquo; Her voice sank lower,
+and she looked straight before her. &ldquo;I&rsquo;d throw &rsquo;m down for
+you any time.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin looking at her averted face, knowing that all he had to do was to reach
+out his hand and pluck her, fell to pondering whether, after all, there was any
+real worth in refined, grammatical English, and, so, forgot to reply to her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You put it all over him,&rdquo; she said tentatively, with a laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He&rsquo;s a husky young fellow, though,&rdquo; he admitted generously.
+&ldquo;If they hadn&rsquo;t taken him away, he might have given me my hands
+full.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Who was that lady friend I seen you with that night?&rdquo; she asked
+abruptly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, just a lady friend,&rdquo; was his answer.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was a long time ago,&rdquo; she murmured contemplatively. &ldquo;It
+seems like a thousand years.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin went no further into the matter. He led the conversation off into
+other channels. They had lunch in the restaurant, where he ordered wine and
+expensive delicacies and afterward he danced with her and with no one but her,
+till she was tired. He was a good dancer, and she whirled around and around
+with him in a heaven of delight, her head against his shoulder, wishing that it
+could last forever. Later in the afternoon they strayed off among the trees,
+where, in the good old fashion, she sat down while he sprawled on his back, his
+head in her lap. He lay and dozed, while she fondled his hair, looked down on
+his closed eyes, and loved him without reserve. Looking up suddenly, he read
+the tender advertisement in her face. Her eyes fluttered down, then they opened
+and looked into his with soft defiance.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve kept straight all these years,&rdquo; she said, her voice so
+low that it was almost a whisper.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In his heart Martin knew that it was the miraculous truth. And at his heart
+pleaded a great temptation. It was in his power to make her happy. Denied
+happiness himself, why should he deny happiness to her? He could marry her and
+take her down with him to dwell in the grass-walled castle in the Marquesas.
+The desire to do it was strong, but stronger still was the imperative command
+of his nature not to do it. In spite of himself he was still faithful to Love.
+The old days of license and easy living were gone. He could not bring them
+back, nor could he go back to them. He was changed&mdash;how changed he had not
+realized until now.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not a marrying man, Lizzie,&rdquo; he said lightly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hand caressing his hair paused perceptibly, then went on with the same
+gentle stroke. He noticed her face harden, but it was with the hardness of
+resolution, for still the soft color was in her cheeks and she was all glowing
+and melting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did not mean that&mdash;&rdquo; she began, then faltered. &ldquo;Or
+anyway I don&rsquo;t care.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care,&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m proud to be
+your friend. I&rsquo;d do anything for you. I&rsquo;m made that way, I
+guess.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin sat up. He took her hand in his. He did it deliberately, with warmth but
+without passion; and such warmth chilled her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let&rsquo;s talk about it,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are a great and noble woman,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And it is I who
+should be proud to know you. And I am, I am. You are a ray of light to me in a
+very dark world, and I&rsquo;ve got to be straight with you, just as straight
+as you have been.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I don&rsquo;t care whether you&rsquo;re straight with me or not. You
+could do anything with me. You could throw me in the dirt an&rsquo; walk on me.
+An&rsquo; you&rsquo;re the only man in the world that can,&rdquo; she added
+with a defiant flash. &ldquo;I ain&rsquo;t taken care of myself ever since I
+was a kid for nothin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And it&rsquo;s just because of that that I&rsquo;m not going to,&rdquo;
+he said gently. &ldquo;You are so big and generous that you challenge me to
+equal generousness. I&rsquo;m not marrying, and I&rsquo;m not&mdash;well,
+loving without marrying, though I&rsquo;ve done my share of that in the past.
+I&rsquo;m sorry I came here to-day and met you. But it can&rsquo;t be helped
+now, and I never expected it would turn out this way.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But look here, Lizzie. I can&rsquo;t begin to tell you how much I like
+you. I do more than like you. I admire and respect you. You are magnificent,
+and you are magnificently good. But what&rsquo;s the use of words? Yet
+there&rsquo;s something I&rsquo;d like to do. You&rsquo;ve had a hard life; let
+me make it easy for you.&rdquo; (A joyous light welled into her eyes, then
+faded out again.) &ldquo;I&rsquo;m pretty sure of getting hold of some money
+soon&mdash;lots of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley and the bay, the
+grass-walled castle and the trim, white schooner. After all, what did it
+matter? He could go away, as he had done so often, before the mast, on any ship
+bound anywhere.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to turn it over to you. There must be something you
+want&mdash;to go to school or business college. You might like to study and be
+a stenographer. I could fix it for you. Or maybe your father and mother are
+living&mdash;I could set them up in a grocery store or something. Anything you
+want, just name it, and I can fix it for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, dry-eyed and
+motionless, but with an ache in the throat which Martin divined so strongly
+that it made his own throat ache. He regretted that he had spoken. It seemed so
+tawdry what he had offered her&mdash;mere money&mdash;compared with what she
+offered him. He offered her an extraneous thing with which he could part
+without a pang, while she offered him herself, along with disgrace and shame,
+and sin, and all her hopes of heaven.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t let&rsquo;s talk about it,&rdquo; she said with a catch in
+her voice that she changed to a cough. She stood up. &ldquo;Come on,
+let&rsquo;s go home. I&rsquo;m all tired out.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly all departed. But as Martin
+and Lizzie emerged from the trees they found the gang waiting for them. Martin
+knew immediately the meaning of it. Trouble was brewing. The gang was his
+body-guard. They passed out through the gates of the park with, straggling in
+the rear, a second gang, the friends that Lizzie&rsquo;s young man had
+collected to avenge the loss of his lady. Several constables and special police
+officers, anticipating trouble, trailed along to prevent it, and herded the two
+gangs separately aboard the train for San Francisco. Martin told Jimmy that he
+would get off at Sixteenth Street Station and catch the electric car into
+Oakland. Lizzie was very quiet and without interest in what was impending. The
+train pulled in to Sixteenth Street Station, and the waiting electric car could
+be seen, the conductor of which was impatiently clanging the gong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There she is,&rdquo; Jimmy counselled. &ldquo;Make a run for it,
+an&rsquo; we&rsquo;ll hold &rsquo;em back. Now you go! Hit her up!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The hostile gang was temporarily disconcerted by the manoeuvre, then it dashed
+from the train in pursuit. The staid and sober Oakland folk who sat upon the
+car scarcely noted the young fellow and the girl who ran for it and found a
+seat in front on the outside. They did not connect the couple with Jimmy, who
+sprang on the steps, crying to the motorman:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Slam on the juice, old man, and beat it outa here!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The next moment Jimmy whirled about, and the passengers saw him land his fist
+on the face of a running man who was trying to board the car. But fists were
+landing on faces the whole length of the car. Thus, Jimmy and his gang, strung
+out on the long, lower steps, met the attacking gang. The car started with a
+great clanging of its gong, and, as Jimmy&rsquo;s gang drove off the last
+assailants, they, too, jumped off to finish the job. The car dashed on, leaving
+the flurry of combat far behind, and its dumfounded passengers never dreamed
+that the quiet young man and the pretty working-girl sitting in the corner on
+the outside seat had been the cause of the row.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the old fighting thrills.
+But they quickly died away, and he was oppressed by a great sadness. He felt
+very old&mdash;centuries older than those careless, care-free young companions
+of his others days. He had travelled far, too far to go back. Their mode of
+life, which had once been his, was now distasteful to him. He was disappointed
+in it all. He had developed into an alien. As the steam beer had tasted raw, so
+their companionship seemed raw to him. He was too far removed. Too many
+thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.
+He had travelled in the vast realm of intellect until he could no longer return
+home. On the other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for
+companionship remained unsatisfied. He had found no new home. As the gang could
+not understand him, as his own family could not understand him, as the
+bourgeoisie could not understand him, so this girl beside him, whom he honored
+high, could not understand him nor the honor he paid her. His sadness was not
+untouched with bitterness as he thought it over.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Make it up with him,&rdquo; he advised Lizzie, at parting, as they stood
+in front of the workingman&rsquo;s shack in which she lived, near Sixth and
+Market. He referred to the young fellow whose place he had usurped that day.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I can&rsquo;t&mdash;now,&rdquo; she said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, go on,&rdquo; he said jovially. &ldquo;All you have to do is whistle
+and he&rsquo;ll come running.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t mean that,&rdquo; she said simply.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And he knew what she had meant.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She leaned toward him as he was about to say good night. But she leaned not
+imperatively, not seductively, but wistfully and humbly. He was touched to the
+heart. His large tolerance rose up in him. He put his arms around her, and
+kissed her, and knew that upon his own lips rested as true a kiss as man ever
+received.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My God!&rdquo; she sobbed. &ldquo;I could die for you. I could die for
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps. He felt a quick
+moisture in his eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Martin Eden,&rdquo; he communed. &ldquo;You&rsquo;re not a brute, and
+you&rsquo;re a damn poor Nietzscheman. You&rsquo;d marry her if you could and
+fill her quivering heart full with happiness. But you can&rsquo;t, you
+can&rsquo;t. And it&rsquo;s a damn shame.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;&lsquo;A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers,&rsquo;&rdquo; he
+muttered, remembering his Henly. &ldquo;&lsquo;Life is, I think, a blunder and
+a shame.&rsquo; It is&mdash;a blunder and a shame.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap43"></a>CHAPTER XLIII.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The Shame of the Sun&rdquo; was published in October. As Martin cut the
+cords of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary copies from the
+publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy sadness fell upon him. He thought
+of the wild delight that would have been his had this happened a few short
+months before, and he contrasted that delight that should have been with his
+present uncaring coldness. His book, his first book, and his pulse had not gone
+up a fraction of a beat, and he was only sad. It meant little to him now. The
+most it meant was that it might bring some money, and little enough did he care
+for money.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I did it,&rdquo; he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment.
+&ldquo;I wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your
+vegetable soup went into the making of it. Keep it. It&rsquo;s yours. Just to
+remember me by, you know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was not bragging, not showing off. His sole motive was to make her happy, to
+make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in him. She put the book in
+the front room on top of the family Bible. A sacred thing was this book her
+lodger had made, a fetich of friendship. It softened the blow of his having
+been a laundryman, and though she could not understand a line of it, she knew
+that every line of it was great. She was a simple, practical, hard-working
+woman, but she possessed faith in large endowment.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Just as emotionlessly as he had received &ldquo;The Shame of the Sun&rdquo; did
+he read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping bureau. The
+book was making a hit, that was evident. It meant more gold in the money sack.
+He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all his promises, and still have enough left to
+build his grass-walled castle.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Singletree, Darnley &amp; Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of fifteen
+hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second edition of twice the
+size through the presses; and ere this was delivered a third edition of five
+thousand had been ordered. A London firm made arrangements by cable for an
+English edition, and hot-footed upon this came the news of French, German, and
+Scandinavian translations in progress. The attack upon the Maeterlinck school
+could not have been made at a more opportune moment. A fierce controversy was
+precipitated. Saleeby and Haeckel indorsed and defended &ldquo;The Shame of the
+Sun,&rdquo; for once finding themselves on the same side of a question. Crookes
+and Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge attempted to
+formulate a compromise that would jibe with his particular cosmic theories.
+Maeterlinck&rsquo;s followers rallied around the standard of mysticism.
+Chesterton set the whole world laughing with a series of alleged non-partisan
+essays on the subject, and the whole affair, controversy and controversialists,
+was well-nigh swept into the pit by a thundering broadside from George Bernard
+Shaw. Needless to say the arena was crowded with hosts of lesser lights, and
+the dust and sweat and din became terrific.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is a most marvellous happening,&rdquo; Singletree, Darnley &amp; Co.
+wrote Martin, &ldquo;a critical philosophic essay selling like a novel. You
+could not have chosen your subject better, and all contributory factors have
+been unwarrantedly propitious. We need scarcely to assure you that we are
+making hay while the sun shines. Over forty thousand copies have already been
+sold in the United States and Canada, and a new edition of twenty thousand is
+on the presses. We are overworked, trying to supply the demand. Nevertheless we
+have helped to create that demand. We have already spent five thousand dollars
+in advertising. The book is bound to be a record-breaker.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book which we
+have taken the liberty of forwarding to you. You will please note that we have
+increased your royalties to twenty per cent, which is about as high as a
+conservative publishing house dares go. If our offer is agreeable to you,
+please fill in the proper blank space with the title of your book. We make no
+stipulations concerning its nature. Any book on any subject. If you have one
+already written, so much the better. Now is the time to strike. The iron could
+not be hotter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an advance
+on royalties of five thousand dollars. You see, we have faith in you, and we
+are going in on this thing big. We should like, also, to discuss with you the
+drawing up of a contract for a term of years, say ten, during which we shall
+have the exclusive right of publishing in book-form all that you produce. But
+more of this anon.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental arithmetic, finding
+the product of fifteen cents times sixty thousand to be nine thousand dollars.
+He signed the new contract, inserting &ldquo;The Smoke of Joy&rdquo; in the
+blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers along with the twenty
+storiettes he had written in the days before he discovered the formula for the
+newspaper storiette. And promptly as the United States mail could deliver and
+return, came Singletree, Darnley &amp; Co.&rsquo;s check for five thousand
+dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about two
+o&rsquo;clock,&rdquo; Martin said, the morning the check arrived. &ldquo;Or,
+better, meet me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o&rsquo;clock. I&rsquo;ll be
+looking out for you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+At the appointed time she was there; but <i>shoes</i> was the only clew to the
+mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered a distinct
+shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by a shoe-store and dived
+into a real estate office. What happened thereupon resided forever after in her
+memory as a dream. Fine gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked
+with Martin and one another; a type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to
+an imposing document; her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his
+signature; and when all was over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her
+landlord spoke to her, saying, &ldquo;Well, Maria, you won&rsquo;t have to pay
+me no seven dollars and a half this month.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Maria was too stunned for speech.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Or next month, or the next, or the next,&rdquo; her landlord said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor. And it was not until she had
+returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her own kind, and had the
+Portuguese grocer investigate, that she really knew that she was the owner of
+the little house in which she had lived and for which she had paid rent so
+long.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you trade with me no more?&rdquo; the Portuguese grocer
+asked Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the car;
+and Martin explained that he wasn&rsquo;t doing his own cooking any more, and
+then went in and had a drink of wine on the house. He noted it was the best
+wine the grocer had in stock.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Maria,&rdquo; Martin announced that night, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to
+leave you. And you&rsquo;re going to leave here yourself soon. Then you can
+rent the house and be a landlord yourself. You&rsquo;ve a brother in San
+Leandro or Haywards, and he&rsquo;s in the milk business. I want you to send
+all your washing back unwashed&mdash;understand?&mdash;unwashed, and to go out
+to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see that brother
+of yours. Tell him to come to see me. I&rsquo;ll be stopping at the Metropole
+down in Oakland. He&rsquo;ll know a good milk-ranch when he sees one.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a dairy, with
+two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account that steadily increased
+despite the fact that her whole brood wore shoes and went to school. Few
+persons ever meet the fairy princes they dream about; but Maria, who worked
+hard and whose head was hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained
+hers in the guise of an ex-laundryman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the meantime the world had begun to ask: &ldquo;Who is this Martin
+Eden?&rdquo; He had declined to give any biographical data to his publishers,
+but the newspapers were not to be denied. Oakland was his own town, and the
+reporters nosed out scores of individuals who could supply information. All
+that he was and was not, all that he had done and most of what he had not done,
+was spread out for the delectation of the public, accompanied by snapshots and
+photographs&mdash;the latter procured from the local photographer who had once
+taken Martin&rsquo;s picture and who promptly copyrighted it and put it on the
+market. At first, so great was his disgust with the magazines and all bourgeois
+society, Martin fought against publicity; but in the end, because it was easier
+than not to, he surrendered. He found that he could not refuse himself to the
+special writers who travelled long distances to see him. Then again, each day
+was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was occupied with writing and
+studying, those hours had to be occupied somehow; so he yielded to what was to
+him a whim, permitted interviews, gave his opinions on literature and
+philosophy, and even accepted invitations of the bourgeoisie. He had settled
+down into a strange and comfortable state of mind. He no longer cared. He
+forgave everybody, even the cub reporter who had painted him red and to whom he
+now granted a full page with specially posed photographs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she regretted the greatness
+that had come to him. It widened the space between them. Perhaps it was with
+the hope of narrowing it that she yielded to his persuasions to go to night
+school and business college and to have herself gowned by a wonderful
+dressmaker who charged outrageous prices. She improved visibly from day to day,
+until Martin wondered if he was doing right, for he knew that all her
+compliance and endeavor was for his sake. She was trying to make herself of
+worth in his eyes&mdash;of the sort of worth he seemed to value. Yet he gave
+her no hope, treating her in brotherly fashion and rarely seeing her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Overdue&rdquo; was rushed upon the market by the Meredith-Lowell Company
+in the height of his popularity, and being fiction, in point of sales it made
+even a bigger strike than &ldquo;The Shame of the Sun.&rdquo; Week after week
+his was the credit of the unprecedented performance of having two books at the
+head of the list of best-sellers. Not only did the story take with the
+fiction-readers, but those who read &ldquo;The Shame of the Sun&rdquo; with
+avidity were likewise attracted to the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of mastery
+with which he had handled it. First he had attacked the literature of
+mysticism, and had done it exceeding well; and, next, he had successfully
+supplied the very literature he had exposited, thus proving himself to be that
+rare genius, a critic and a creator in one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like, through
+the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested by the stir he
+was making. One thing was puzzling him, a little thing that would have puzzled
+the world had it known. But the world would have puzzled over his bepuzzlement
+rather than over the little thing that to him loomed gigantic. Judge Blount
+invited him to dinner. That was the little thing, or the beginning of the
+little thing, that was soon to become the big thing. He had insulted Judge
+Blount, treated him abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street,
+invited him to dinner. Martin bethought himself of the numerous occasions on
+which he had met Judge Blount at the Morses&rsquo; and when Judge Blount had
+not invited him to dinner. Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he asked
+himself. He had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What made the
+difference? The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared inside the
+covers of books? But it was work performed. It was not something he had done
+since. It was achievement accomplished at the very time Judge Blount was
+sharing this general view and sneering at his Spencer and his intellect.
+Therefore it was not for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that
+Judge Blount invited him to dinner.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at his
+complacence. And at the dinner, where, with their womankind, were half a dozen
+of those that sat in high places, and where Martin found himself quite the
+lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded by Judge Hanwell, urged privately that
+Martin should permit his name to be put up for the Styx&mdash;the ultra-select
+club to which belonged, not the mere men of wealth, but the men of attainment.
+And Martin declined, and was more puzzled than ever.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts. He was overwhelmed by
+requests from editors. It had been discovered that he was a stylist, with meat
+under his style. <i>The Northern Review</i>, after publishing &ldquo;The Cradle
+of Beauty,&rdquo; had written him for half a dozen similar essays, which would
+have been supplied out of the heap, had not <i>Burton&rsquo;s Magazine</i>, in
+a speculative mood, offered him five hundred dollars each for five essays. He
+wrote back that he would supply the demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay.
+He remembered that all these manuscripts had been refused by the very magazines
+that were now clamoring for them. And their refusals had been cold-blooded,
+automatic, stereotyped. They had made him sweat, and now he intended to make
+them sweat. <i>Burton&rsquo;s Magazine</i> paid his price for five essays, and
+the remaining four, at the same rate, were snapped up by <i>Mackintosh&rsquo;s
+Monthly, The Northern Review</i> being too poor to stand the pace. Thus went
+out to the world &ldquo;The High Priests of Mystery,&rdquo; &ldquo;The
+Wonder-Dreamers,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Yardstick of the Ego,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Philosophy of Illusion,&rdquo; &ldquo;God and Clod,&rdquo; &ldquo;Art
+and Biology,&rdquo; &ldquo;Critics and Test-tubes,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Star-dust,&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Dignity of Usury,&rdquo;&mdash;to raise
+storms and rumblings and mutterings that were many a day in dying down.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, which he did, but it
+was always for work performed. He refused resolutely to pledge himself to any
+new thing. The thought of again setting pen to paper maddened him. He had seen
+Brissenden torn to pieces by the crowd, and despite the fact that him the crowd
+acclaimed, he could not get over the shock nor gather any respect for the
+crowd. His very popularity seemed a disgrace and a treason to Brissenden. It
+made him wince, but he made up his mind to go on and fill the money-bag.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He received letters from editors like the following: &ldquo;About a year ago we
+were unfortunate enough to refuse your collection of love-poems. We were
+greatly impressed by them at the time, but certain arrangements already entered
+into prevented our taking them. If you still have them, and if you will be kind
+enough to forward them, we shall be glad to publish the entire collection on
+your own terms. We are also prepared to make a most advantageous offer for
+bringing them out in book-form.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it instead. He read it
+over before mailing, and was particularly impressed by its sophomoric
+amateurishness and general worthlessness. But he sent it; and it was published,
+to the everlasting regret of the editor. The public was indignant and
+incredulous. It was too far a cry from Martin Eden&rsquo;s high standard to
+that serious bosh. It was asserted that he had never written it, that the
+magazine had faked it very clumsily, or that Martin Eden was emulating the
+elder Dumas and at the height of success was hiring his writing done for him.
+But when he explained that the tragedy was an early effort of his literary
+childhood, and that the magazine had refused to be happy unless it got it, a
+great laugh went up at the magazine&rsquo;s expense and a change in the
+editorship followed. The tragedy was never brought out in book-form, though
+Martin pocketed the advance royalties that had been paid.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+<i>Coleman&rsquo;s Weekly</i> sent Martin a lengthy telegram, costing nearly
+three hundred dollars, offering him a thousand dollars an article for twenty
+articles. He was to travel over the United States, with all expenses paid, and
+select whatever topics interested him. The body of the telegram was devoted to
+hypothetical topics in order to show him the freedom of range that was to be
+his. The only restriction placed upon him was that he must confine himself to
+the United States. Martin sent his inability to accept and his regrets by wire
+&ldquo;collect.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Wiki-Wiki,&rdquo; published in <i>Warren&rsquo;s Monthly</i>, was an
+instantaneous success. It was brought out forward in a wide-margined,
+beautifully decorated volume that struck the holiday trade and sold like
+wildfire. The critics were unanimous in the belief that it would take its place
+with those two classics by two great writers, &ldquo;The Bottle Imp&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;The Magic Skin.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The public, however, received the &ldquo;Smoke of Joy&rdquo; collection rather
+dubiously and coldly. The audacity and unconventionality of the storiettes was
+a shock to bourgeois morality and prejudice; but when Paris went mad over the
+immediate translation that was made, the American and English reading public
+followed suit and bought so many copies that Martin compelled the conservative
+house of Singletree, Darnley &amp; Co. to pay a flat royalty of twenty-five per
+cent for a third book, and thirty per cent flat for a fourth. These two volumes
+comprised all the short stories he had written and which had received, or were
+receiving, serial publication. &ldquo;The Ring of Bells&rdquo; and his horror
+stories constituted one collection; the other collection was composed of
+&ldquo;Adventure,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Pot,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Wine of Life,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;The Whirlpool,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Jostling Street,&rdquo; and four other
+stories. The Lowell-Meredith Company captured the collection of all his essays,
+and the Maxmillian Company got his &ldquo;Sea Lyrics&rdquo; and the
+&ldquo;Love-cycle,&rdquo; the latter receiving serial publication in the
+<i>Ladies&rsquo; Home Companion</i> after the payment of an extortionate price.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of the last manuscript. The
+grass-walled castle and the white, coppered schooner were very near to him.
+Well, at any rate he had discovered Brissenden&rsquo;s contention that nothing
+of merit found its way into the magazines. His own success demonstrated that
+Brissenden had been wrong.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had been right, after all.
+&ldquo;The Shame of the Sun&rdquo; had been the cause of his success more than
+the stuff he had written. That stuff had been merely incidental. It had been
+rejected right and left by the magazines. The publication of &ldquo;The Shame
+of the Sun&rdquo; had started a controversy and precipitated the landslide in
+his favor. Had there been no &ldquo;Shame of the Sun&rdquo; there would have
+been no landslide, and had there been no miracle in the go of &ldquo;The Shame
+of the Sun&rdquo; there would have been no landslide. Singletree, Darnley &amp;
+Co. attested that miracle. They had brought out a first edition of fifteen
+hundred copies and been dubious of selling it. They were experienced publishers
+and no one had been more astounded than they at the success which had followed.
+To them it had been in truth a miracle. They never got over it, and every
+letter they wrote him reflected their reverent awe of that first mysterious
+happening. They did not attempt to explain it. There was no explaining it. It
+had happened. In the face of all experience to the contrary, it had happened.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of his
+popularity. It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and poured its gold
+into his money-sack, and from what little he knew of the bourgeoisie it was not
+clear to him how it could possibly appreciate or comprehend what he had
+written. His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the hundreds of
+thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books. He was the fad of the
+hour, the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while the gods nodded. The
+hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same brute
+non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on Brissenden&rsquo;s
+&ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; and torn it to pieces&mdash;a wolf-rabble that fawned on
+him instead of fanging him. Fawn or fang, it was all a matter of chance. One
+thing he knew with absolute certitude: &ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo; was infinitely
+greater than anything he had done. It was infinitely greater than anything he
+had in him. It was a poem of centuries. Then the tribute the mob paid him was a
+sorry tribute indeed, for that same mob had wallowed &ldquo;Ephemera&rdquo;
+into the mire. He sighed heavily and with satisfaction. He was glad the last
+manuscript was sold and that he would soon be done with it all.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap44"></a>CHAPTER XLIV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metropole. Whether he had
+happened there just casually, intent on other affairs, or whether he had come
+there for the direct purpose of inviting him to dinner, Martin never could
+quite make up his mind, though he inclined toward the second hypothesis. At any
+rate, invited to dinner he was by Mr. Morse&mdash;Ruth&rsquo;s father, who had
+forbidden him the house and broken off the engagement.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin was not angry. He was not even on his dignity. He tolerated Mr. Morse,
+wondering the while how it felt to eat such humble pie. He did not decline the
+invitation. Instead, he put it off with vagueness and indefiniteness and
+inquired after the family, particularly after Mrs. Morse and Ruth. He spoke her
+name without hesitancy, naturally, though secretly surprised that he had had no
+inward quiver, no old, familiar increase of pulse and warm surge of blood.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he accepted. Persons got
+themselves introduced to him in order to invite him to dinner. And he went on
+puzzling over the little thing that was becoming a great thing. Bernard
+Higginbotham invited him to dinner. He puzzled the harder. He remembered the
+days of his desperate starvation when no one invited him to dinner. That was
+the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost
+weight from sheer famine. That was the paradox of it. When he wanted dinners,
+no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners
+and was losing his appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left. But
+why? There was no justice in it, no merit on his part. He was no different. All
+the work he had done was even at that time work performed. Mr. and Mrs. Morse
+had condemned him for an idler and a shirk and through Ruth had urged that he
+take a clerk&rsquo;s position in an office. Furthermore, they had been aware of
+his work performed. Manuscript after manuscript of his had been turned over to
+them by Ruth. They had read them. It was the very same work that had put his
+name in all the papers, and, it was his name being in all the papers that led
+them to invite him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+One thing was certain: the Morses had not cared to have him for himself or for
+his work. Therefore they could not want him now for himself or for his work,
+but for the fame that was his, because he was somebody amongst men,
+and&mdash;why not?&mdash;because he had a hundred thousand dollars or so. That
+was the way bourgeois society valued a man, and who was he to expect it
+otherwise? But he was proud. He disdained such valuation. He desired to be
+valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all, was an expression of
+himself. That was the way Lizzie valued him. The work, with her, did not even
+count. She valued him, himself. That was the way Jimmy, the plumber, and all
+the old gang valued him. That had been proved often enough in the days when he
+ran with them; it had been proved that Sunday at Shell Mound Park. His work
+could go hang. What they liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart
+Eden, one of the bunch and a pretty good guy.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Then there was Ruth. She had liked him for himself, that was indisputable. And
+yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the bourgeois standard of
+valuation more. She had opposed his writing, and principally, it seemed to him,
+because it did not earn money. That had been her criticism of his
+&ldquo;Love-cycle.&rdquo; She, too, had urged him to get a job. It was true,
+she refined it to &ldquo;position,&rdquo; but it meant the same thing, and in
+his own mind the old nomenclature stuck. He had read her all that he
+wrote&mdash;poems, stories, essays&mdash;&ldquo;Wiki-Wiki,&rdquo; &ldquo;The
+Shame of the Sun,&rdquo; everything. And she had always and consistently urged
+him to get a job, to go to work&mdash;good God!&mdash;as if he hadn&rsquo;t
+been working, robbing sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly,
+slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession.
+<i>Work performed</i>. The phrase haunted his brain. He sat opposite Bernard
+Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over Higginbotham&rsquo;s Cash Store, and
+it was all he could do to restrain himself from shouting out:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It was work performed! And now you feed me, when then you let me starve,
+forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn&rsquo;t get a job. And
+the work was already done, all done. And now, when I speak, you check the
+thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay respectful attention
+to whatever I choose to say. I tell you your party is rotten and filled with
+grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you hum and haw and admit there is
+a great deal in what I say. And why? Because I&rsquo;m famous; because
+I&rsquo;ve a lot of money. Not because I&rsquo;m Martin Eden, a pretty good
+fellow and not particularly a fool. I could tell you the moon is made of green
+cheese and you would subscribe to the notion, at least you would not repudiate
+it, because I&rsquo;ve got dollars, mountains of them. And it was all done long
+ago; it was work performed, I tell you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under
+your feet.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But Martin did not shout out. The thought gnawed in his brain, an unceasing
+torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant. As he grew silent,
+Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking. He was a success
+himself, and proud of it. He was self-made. No one had helped him. He owed no
+man. He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and bringing up a large family.
+And there was Higginbotham&rsquo;s Cash Store, that monument of his own
+industry and ability. He loved Higginbotham&rsquo;s Cash Store as some men
+loved their wives. He opened up his heart to Martin, showed with what keenness
+and with what enormous planning he had made the store. And he had plans for it,
+ambitious plans. The neighborhood was growing up fast. The store was really too
+small. If he had more room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving
+and money-saving improvements. And he would do it yet. He was straining every
+effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and put up another
+two-story frame building. The upstairs he could rent, and the whole
+ground-floor of both buildings would be Higginbotham&rsquo;s Cash Store. His
+eyes glistened when he spoke of the new sign that would stretch clear across
+both buildings.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin forgot to listen. The refrain of &ldquo;Work performed,&rdquo; in his
+own brain, was drowning the other&rsquo;s clatter. The refrain maddened him,
+and he tried to escape from it.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How much did you say it would cost?&rdquo; he asked suddenly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the business
+opportunities of the neighborhood. He hadn&rsquo;t said how much it would cost.
+But he knew. He had figured it out a score of times.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At the way lumber is now,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;four thousand could do
+it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Including the sign?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I didn&rsquo;t count on that. It&rsquo;d just have to come, onc&rsquo;t
+the buildin&rsquo; was there.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And the ground?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Three thousand more.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leaned forward, licking his lips, nervously spreading and closing his
+fingers, while he watched Martin write a check. When it was passed over to him,
+he glanced at the amount-seven thousand dollars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&mdash;I can&rsquo;t afford to pay more than six per cent,&rdquo; he
+said huskily.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin wanted to laugh, but, instead, demanded:-
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How much would that be?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Lemme see. Six per cent&mdash;six times seven&mdash;four hundred
+an&rsquo; twenty.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Higginbotham nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then, if you&rsquo;ve no objection, we&rsquo;ll arrange it this
+way.&rdquo; Martin glanced at Gertrude. &ldquo;You can have the principal to
+keep for yourself, if you&rsquo;ll use the thirty-five dollars a month for
+cooking and washing and scrubbing. The seven thousand is yours if you&rsquo;ll
+guarantee that Gertrude does no more drudgery. Is it a go?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mr. Higginbotham swallowed hard. That his wife should do no more housework was
+an affront to his thrifty soul. The magnificent present was the coating of a
+pill, a bitter pill. That his wife should not work! It gagged him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right, then,&rdquo; Martin said. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll pay the
+thirty-five a month, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He reached across the table for the check. But Bernard Higginbotham got his
+hand on it first, crying:
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I accept! I accept!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When Martin got on the electric car, he was very sick and tired. He looked up
+at the assertive sign.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The swine,&rdquo; he groaned. &ldquo;The swine, the swine.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When <i>Mackintosh&rsquo;s Magazine</i> published &ldquo;The Palmist,&rdquo;
+featuring it with decorations by Berthier and with two pictures by Wenn,
+Hermann von Schmidt forgot that he had called the verses obscene. He announced
+that his wife had inspired the poem, saw to it that the news reached the ears
+of a reporter, and submitted to an interview by a staff writer who was
+accompanied by a staff photographer and a staff artist. The result was a full
+page in a Sunday supplement, filled with photographs and idealized drawings of
+Marian, with many intimate details of Martin Eden and his family, and with the
+full text of &ldquo;The Palmist&rdquo; in large type, and republished by
+special permission of <i>Mackintosh&rsquo;s Magazine</i>. It caused quite a
+stir in the neighborhood, and good housewives were proud to have the
+acquaintances of the great writer&rsquo;s sister, while those who had not made
+haste to cultivate it. Hermann von Schmidt chuckled in his little repair shop
+and decided to order a new lathe. &ldquo;Better than advertising,&rdquo; he
+told Marian, &ldquo;and it costs nothing.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;d better have him to dinner,&rdquo; she suggested.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And to dinner Martin came, making himself agreeable with the fat wholesale
+butcher and his fatter wife&mdash;important folk, they, likely to be of use to
+a rising young man like Hermann von Schmidt. No less a bait, however, had been
+required to draw them to his house than his great brother-in-law. Another man
+at table who had swallowed the same bait was the superintendent of the Pacific
+Coast agencies for the Asa Bicycle Company. Him Von Schmidt desired to please
+and propitiate because from him could be obtained the Oakland agency for the
+bicycle. So Hermann von Schmidt found it a goodly asset to have Martin for a
+brother-in-law, but in his heart of hearts he couldn&rsquo;t understand where
+it all came in. In the silent watches of the night, while his wife slept, he
+had floundered through Martin&rsquo;s books and poems, and decided that the
+world was a fool to buy them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situation only too well, as he
+leaned back and gloated at Von Schmidt&rsquo;s head, in fancy punching it
+well-nigh off of him, sending blow after blow home just right&mdash;the
+chuckle-headed Dutchman! One thing he did like about him, however. Poor as he
+was, and determined to rise as he was, he nevertheless hired one servant to
+take the heavy work off of Marian&rsquo;s hands. Martin talked with the
+superintendent of the Asa agencies, and after dinner he drew him aside with
+Hermann, whom he backed financially for the best bicycle store with fittings in
+Oakland. He went further, and in a private talk with Hermann told him to keep
+his eyes open for an automobile agency and garage, for there was no reason that
+he should not be able to run both establishments successfully.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, Marian, at parting, told
+Martin how much she loved him and always had loved him. It was true, there was
+a perceptible halt midway in her assertion, which she glossed over with more
+tears and kisses and incoherent stammerings, and which Martin inferred to be
+her appeal for forgiveness for the time she had lacked faith in him and
+insisted on his getting a job.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;He can&rsquo;t never keep his money, that&rsquo;s sure,&rdquo; Hermann
+von Schmidt confided to his wife. &ldquo;He got mad when I spoke of interest,
+an&rsquo; he said damn the principal and if I mentioned it again, he&rsquo;d
+punch my Dutch head off. That&rsquo;s what he said&mdash;my Dutch head. But
+he&rsquo;s all right, even if he ain&rsquo;t no business man. He&rsquo;s given
+me my chance, an&rsquo; he&rsquo;s all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the more they poured, the more
+he puzzled. He sat, the guest of honor, at an Arden Club banquet, with men of
+note whom he had heard about and read about all his life; and they told him
+how, when they had read &ldquo;The Ring of Bells&rdquo; in the
+<i>Transcontinental</i>, and &ldquo;The Peri and the Pearl&rdquo; in <i>The
+Hornet</i>, they had immediately picked him for a winner. My God! and I was
+hungry and in rags, he thought to himself. Why didn&rsquo;t you give me a
+dinner then? Then was the time. It was work performed. If you are feeding me
+now for work performed, why did you not feed me then when I needed it? Not one
+word in &ldquo;The Ring of Bells,&rdquo; nor in &ldquo;The Peri and the
+Pearl&rdquo; has been changed. No; you&rsquo;re not feeding me now for work
+performed. You are feeding me because everybody else is feeding me and because
+it is an honor to feed me. You are feeding me now because you are herd animals;
+because you are part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic thought in
+the mob-mind just now is to feed me. And where does Martin Eden and the work
+Martin Eden performed come in in all this? he asked himself plaintively, then
+arose to respond cleverly and wittily to a clever and witty toast.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+So it went. Wherever he happened to be&mdash;at the Press Club, at the Redwood
+Club, at pink teas and literary gatherings&mdash;always were remembered
+&ldquo;The Ring of Bells&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Peri and the Pearl&rdquo; when
+they were first published. And always was Martin&rsquo;s maddening and
+unuttered demand: Why didn&rsquo;t you feed me then? It was work performed.
+&ldquo;The Ring of Bells&rdquo; and &ldquo;The Peri and the Pearl&rdquo; are
+not changed one iota. They were just as artistic, just as worth while, then as
+now. But you are not feeding me for their sake, nor for the sake of anything
+else I have written. You&rsquo;re feeding me because it is the style of feeding
+just now, because the whole mob is crazy with the idea of feeding Martin Eden.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch in among the company a
+young hoodlum in square-cut coat and under a stiff-rim Stetson hat. It happened
+to him at the Gallina Society in Oakland one afternoon. As he rose from his
+chair and stepped forward across the platform, he saw stalk through the wide
+door at the rear of the great room the young hoodlum with the square-cut coat
+and stiff-rim hat. Five hundred fashionably gowned women turned their heads, so
+intent and steadfast was Martin&rsquo;s gaze, to see what he was seeing. But
+they saw only the empty centre aisle. He saw the young tough lurching down that
+aisle and wondered if he would remove the stiff-rim which never yet had he seen
+him without. Straight down the aisle he came, and up the platform. Martin could
+have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when he thought of all that lay
+before him. Across the platform he swaggered, right up to Martin, and into the
+foreground of Martin&rsquo;s consciousness disappeared. The five hundred women
+applauded softly with gloved hands, seeking to encourage the bashful great man
+who was their guest. And Martin shook the vision from his brain, smiled, and
+began to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The Superintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Martin on the street and
+remembered him, recalling seances in his office when Martin was expelled from
+school for fighting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I read your &lsquo;Ring of Bells&rsquo; in one of the magazines quite a
+time ago,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It was as good as Poe. Splendid, I said at the
+time, splendid!&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed me on the street and did
+not know me, Martin almost said aloud. Each time I was hungry and heading for
+the pawnbroker. Yet it was work performed. You did not know me then. Why do you
+know me now?
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I was remarking to my wife only the other day,&rdquo; the other was
+saying, &ldquo;wouldn&rsquo;t it be a good idea to have you out to dinner some
+time? And she quite agreed with me. Yes, she quite agreed with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Dinner?&rdquo; Martin said so sharply that it was almost a snarl.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why, yes, yes, dinner, you know&mdash;just pot luck with us, with your
+old superintendent, you rascal,&rdquo; he uttered nervously, poking Martin in
+an attempt at jocular fellowship.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin went down the street in a daze. He stopped at the corner and looked
+about him vacantly.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, I&rsquo;ll be damned!&rdquo; he murmured at last. &ldquo;The old
+fellow was afraid of me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap45"></a>CHAPTER XLV.</h2>
+
+<p>
+Kreis came to Martin one day&mdash;Kreis, of the &ldquo;real dirt&rdquo;; and
+Martin turned to him with relief, to receive the glowing details of a scheme
+sufficiently wild-catty to interest him as a fictionist rather than an
+investor. Kreis paused long enough in the midst of his exposition to tell him
+that in most of his &ldquo;Shame of the Sun&rdquo; he had been a chump.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But I didn&rsquo;t come here to spout philosophy,&rdquo; Kreis went on.
+&ldquo;What I want to know is whether or not you will put a thousand dollars in
+on this deal?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m not chump enough for that, at any rate,&rdquo; Martin
+answered. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;ll tell you what I will do. You gave me the
+greatest night of my life. You gave me what money cannot buy. Now I&rsquo;ve
+got money, and it means nothing to me. I&rsquo;d like to turn over to you a
+thousand dollars of what I don&rsquo;t value for what you gave me that night
+and which was beyond price. You need the money. I&rsquo;ve got more than I
+need. You want it. You came for it. There&rsquo;s no use scheming it out of me.
+Take it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Kreis betrayed no surprise. He folded the check away in his pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;At that rate I&rsquo;d like the contract of providing you with many such
+nights,&rdquo; he said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Too late.&rdquo; Martin shook his head. &ldquo;That night was the one
+night for me. I was in paradise. It&rsquo;s commonplace with you, I know. But
+it wasn&rsquo;t to me. I shall never live at such a pitch again. I&rsquo;m done
+with philosophy. I want never to hear another word of it.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my philosophy,&rdquo;
+Kreis remarked, as he paused in the doorway. &ldquo;And then the market
+broke.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and smiled and nodded. He
+smiled back and lifted his hat. The episode did not affect him. A month before
+it might have disgusted him, or made him curious and set him to speculating
+about her state of consciousness at that moment. But now it was not provocative
+of a second thought. He forgot about it the next moment. He forgot about it as
+he would have forgotten the Central Bank Building or the City Hall after having
+walked past them. Yet his mind was preternaturally active. His thoughts went
+ever around and around in a circle. The centre of that circle was &ldquo;work
+performed&rdquo;; it ate at his brain like a deathless maggot. He awoke to it
+in the morning. It tormented his dreams at night. Every affair of life around
+him that penetrated through his senses immediately related itself to
+&ldquo;work performed.&rdquo; He drove along the path of relentless logic to
+the conclusion that he was nobody, nothing. Mart Eden, the hoodlum, and Mart
+Eden, the sailor, had been real, had been he; but Martin Eden! the famous
+writer, did not exist. Martin Eden, the famous writer, was a vapor that had
+arisen in the mob-mind and by the mob-mind had been thrust into the corporeal
+being of Mart Eden, the hoodlum and sailor. But it couldn&rsquo;t fool him. He
+was not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping and sacrificing dinners to.
+He knew better.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read the magazines about himself, and pored over portraits of himself
+published therein until he was unable to associate his identity with those
+portraits. He was the fellow who had lived and thrilled and loved; who had been
+easy-going and tolerant of the frailties of life; who had served in the
+forecastle, wandered in strange lands, and led his gang in the old fighting
+days. He was the fellow who had been stunned at first by the thousands of books
+in the free library, and who had afterward learned his way among them and
+mastered them; he was the fellow who had burned the midnight oil and bedded
+with a spur and written books himself. But the one thing he was not was that
+colossal appetite that all the mob was bent upon feeding.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+There were things, however, in the magazines that amused him. All the magazines
+were claiming him. <i>Warren&rsquo;s Monthly</i> advertised to its subscribers
+that it was always on the quest after new writers, and that, among others, it
+had introduced Martin Eden to the reading public. <i>The White Mouse</i>
+claimed him; so did <i>The Northern Review</i> and <i>Mackintosh&rsquo;s
+Magazine</i>, until silenced by <i>The Globe</i>, which pointed triumphantly to
+its files where the mangled &ldquo;Sea Lyrics&rdquo; lay buried. <i>Youth and
+Age</i>, which had come to life again after having escaped paying its bills,
+put in a prior claim, which nobody but farmers&rsquo; children ever read. The
+<i>Transcontinental</i> made a dignified and convincing statement of how it
+first discovered Martin Eden, which was warmly disputed by <i>The Hornet</i>,
+with the exhibit of &ldquo;The Peri and the Pearl.&rdquo; The modest claim of
+Singletree, Darnley &amp; Co. was lost in the din. Besides, that publishing
+firm did not own a magazine wherewith to make its claim less modest.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The newspapers calculated Martin&rsquo;s royalties. In some way the magnificent
+offers certain magazines had made him leaked out, and Oakland ministers called
+upon him in a friendly way, while professional begging letters began to clutter
+his mail. But worse than all this were the women. His photographs were
+published broadcast, and special writers exploited his strong, bronzed face,
+his scars, his heavy shoulders, his clear, quiet eyes, and the slight hollows
+in his cheeks like an ascetic&rsquo;s. At this last he remembered his wild
+youth and smiled. Often, among the women he met, he would see now one, now
+another, looking at him, appraising him, selecting him. He laughed to himself.
+He remembered Brissenden&rsquo;s warning and laughed again. The women would
+never destroy him, that much was certain. He had gone past that stage.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, walking with Lizzie toward night school, she caught a glance directed
+toward him by a well-gowned, handsome woman of the bourgeoisie. The glance was
+a trifle too long, a shade too considerative. Lizzie knew it for what it was,
+and her body tensed angrily. Martin noticed, noticed the cause of it, told her
+how used he was becoming to it and that he did not care anyway.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You ought to care,&rdquo; she answered with blazing eyes.
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re sick. That&rsquo;s what&rsquo;s the matter.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Never healthier in my life. I weigh five pounds more than I ever
+did.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It ain&rsquo;t your body. It&rsquo;s your head. Something&rsquo;s wrong
+with your think-machine. Even I can see that, an&rsquo; I ain&rsquo;t
+nobody.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He walked on beside her, reflecting.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;d give anything to see you get over it,&rdquo; she broke out
+impulsively. &ldquo;You ought to care when women look at you that way, a man
+like you. It&rsquo;s not natural. It&rsquo;s all right enough for sissy-boys.
+But you ain&rsquo;t made that way. So help me, I&rsquo;d be willing an&rsquo;
+glad if the right woman came along an&rsquo; made you care.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+When he left Lizzie at night school, he returned to the Metropole.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and sat staring straight
+before him. He did not doze. Nor did he think. His mind was a blank, save for
+the intervals when unsummoned memory pictures took form and color and radiance
+just under his eyelids. He saw these pictures, but he was scarcely conscious of
+them&mdash;no more so than if they had been dreams. Yet he was not asleep.
+Once, he roused himself and glanced at his watch. It was just eight
+o&rsquo;clock. He had nothing to do, and it was too early for bed. Then his
+mind went blank again, and the pictures began to form and vanish under his
+eyelids. There was nothing distinctive about the pictures. They were always
+masses of leaves and shrub-like branches shot through with hot sunshine.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A knock at the door aroused him. He was not asleep, and his mind immediately
+connected the knock with a telegram, or letter, or perhaps one of the servants
+bringing back clean clothes from the laundry. He was thinking about Joe and
+wondering where he was, as he said, &ldquo;Come in.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn toward the door. He heard it
+close softly. There was a long silence. He forgot that there had been a knock
+at the door, and was still staring blankly before him when he heard a
+woman&rsquo;s sob. It was involuntary, spasmodic, checked, and stifled&mdash;he
+noted that as he turned about. The next instant he was on his feet.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Ruth!&rdquo; he said, amazed and bewildered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her face was white and strained. She stood just inside the door, one hand
+against it for support, the other pressed to her side. She extended both hands
+toward him piteously, and started forward to meet him. As he caught her hands
+and led her to the Morris chair he noticed how cold they were. He drew up
+another chair and sat down on the broad arm of it. He was too confused to
+speak. In his own mind his affair with Ruth was closed and sealed. He felt much
+in the same way that he would have felt had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry
+suddenly invaded the Hotel Metropole with a whole week&rsquo;s washing ready
+for him to pitch into. Several times he was about to speak, and each time he
+hesitated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No one knows I am here,&rdquo; Ruth said in a faint voice, with an
+appealing smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What did you say?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She repeated her words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; he said, then wondered what more he could possibly say.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; he said again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He had never been so tongue-tied in his life. Positively he did not have an
+idea in his head. He felt stupid and awkward, but for the life of him he could
+think of nothing to say. It would have been easier had the intrusion been the
+Shelly Hot Springs laundry. He could have rolled up his sleeves and gone to
+work.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And then you came in,&rdquo; he said finally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She nodded, with a slightly arch expression, and loosened the scarf at her
+throat.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I saw you first from across the street when you were with that
+girl.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; he said simply. &ldquo;I took her down to night
+school.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Well, aren&rsquo;t you glad to see me?&rdquo; she said at the end of
+another silence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes.&rdquo; He spoke hastily. &ldquo;But wasn&rsquo;t it rash of
+you to come here?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I slipped in. Nobody knows I am here. I wanted to see you. I came to
+tell you I have been very foolish. I came because I could no longer stay away,
+because my heart compelled me to come, because&mdash;because I wanted to
+come.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She came forward, out of her chair and over to him. She rested her hand on his
+shoulder a moment, breathing quickly, and then slipped into his arms. And in
+his large, easy way, desirous of not inflicting hurt, knowing that to repulse
+this proffer of herself was to inflict the most grievous hurt a woman could
+receive, he folded his arms around her and held her close. But there was no
+warmth in the embrace, no caress in the contact. She had come into his arms,
+and he held her, that was all. She nestled against him, and then, with a change
+of position, her hands crept up and rested upon his neck. But his flesh was not
+fire beneath those hands, and he felt awkward and uncomfortable.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;What makes you tremble so?&rdquo; he asked. &ldquo;Is it a chill? Shall
+I light the grate?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He made a movement to disengage himself, but she clung more closely to him,
+shivering violently.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is merely nervousness,&rdquo; she said with chattering teeth.
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;ll control myself in a minute. There, I am better
+already.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Slowly her shivering died away. He continued to hold her, but he was no longer
+puzzled. He knew now for what she had come.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;My mother wanted me to marry Charley Hapgood,&rdquo; she announced.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Charley Hapgood, that fellow who speaks always in platitudes?&rdquo;
+Martin groaned. Then he added, &ldquo;And now, I suppose, your mother wants you
+to marry me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not put it in the form of a question. He stated it as a certitude, and
+before his eyes began to dance the rows of figures of his royalties.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She will not object, I know that much,&rdquo; Ruth said.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She considers me quite eligible?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Ruth nodded.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And yet I am not a bit more eligible now than I was when she broke our
+engagement,&rdquo; he meditated. &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t changed any. I&rsquo;m
+the same Martin Eden, though for that matter I&rsquo;m a bit worse&mdash;I
+smoke now. Don&rsquo;t you smell my breath?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In reply she pressed her open fingers against his lips, placed them graciously
+and playfully, and in expectancy of the kiss that of old had always been a
+consequence. But there was no caressing answer of Martin&rsquo;s lips. He
+waited until the fingers were removed and then went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am not changed. I haven&rsquo;t got a job. I&rsquo;m not looking for a
+job. Furthermore, I am not going to look for a job. And I still believe that
+Herbert Spencer is a great and noble man and that Judge Blount is an
+unmitigated ass. I had dinner with him the other night, so I ought to
+know.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you didn&rsquo;t accept father&rsquo;s invitation,&rdquo; she
+chided.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;So you know about that? Who sent him? Your mother?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She remained silent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Then she did send him. I thought so. And now I suppose she has sent
+you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No one knows that I am here,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;Do you think
+my mother would permit this?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She&rsquo;d permit you to marry me, that&rsquo;s certain.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She gave a sharp cry. &ldquo;Oh, Martin, don&rsquo;t be cruel. You have not
+kissed me once. You are as unresponsive as a stone. And think what I have dared
+to do.&rdquo; She looked about her with a shiver, though half the look was
+curiosity. &ldquo;Just think of where I am.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;<i>I could die for you! I could die for
+you</i>!&rdquo;&mdash;Lizzie&rsquo;s words were ringing in his ears.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Why didn&rsquo;t you dare it before?&rdquo; he asked harshly.
+&ldquo;When I hadn&rsquo;t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am
+now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That&rsquo;s the question
+I&rsquo;ve been propounding to myself for many a day&mdash;not concerning you
+merely, but concerning everybody. You see I have not changed, though my sudden
+apparent appreciation in value compels me constantly to reassure myself on that
+point. I&rsquo;ve got the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and
+toes. I am the same. I have not developed any new strength nor virtue. My brain
+is the same old brain. I haven&rsquo;t made even one new generalization on
+literature or philosophy. I am personally of the same value that I was when
+nobody wanted me. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they
+don&rsquo;t want me for myself, for myself is the same old self they did not
+want. Then they must want me for something else, for something that is outside
+of me, for something that is not I! Shall I tell you what that something is? It
+is for the recognition I have received. That recognition is not I. It resides
+in the minds of others. Then again for the money I have earned and am earning.
+But that money is not I. It resides in banks and in the pockets of Tom, Dick,
+and Harry. And is it for that, for the recognition and the money, that you now
+want me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You are breaking my heart,&rdquo; she sobbed. &ldquo;You know I love
+you, that I am here because I love you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am afraid you don&rsquo;t see my point,&rdquo; he said gently.
+&ldquo;What I mean is: if you love me, how does it happen that you love me now
+so much more than you did when your love was weak enough to deny me?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Forget and forgive,&rdquo; she cried passionately. &ldquo;I loved you
+all the time, remember that, and I am here, now, in your arms.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying
+to weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She withdrew herself from his arms, sat upright, and looked at him long and
+searchingly. She was about to speak, then faltered and changed her mind.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You see, it appears this way to me,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;When I was
+all that I am now, nobody out of my own class seemed to care for me. When my
+books were all written, no one who had read the manuscripts seemed to care for
+them. In point of fact, because of the stuff I had written they seemed to care
+even less for me. In writing the stuff it seemed that I had committed acts that
+were, to say the least, derogatory. &lsquo;Get a job,&rsquo; everybody
+said.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She made a movement of dissent.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;except in your case you told me to get
+a position. The homely word <i>job</i>, like much that I have written, offends
+you. It is brutal. But I assure you it was no less brutal to me when everybody
+I knew recommended it to me as they would recommend right conduct to an immoral
+creature. But to return. The publication of what I had written, and the public
+notice I received, wrought a change in the fibre of your love. Martin Eden,
+with his work all performed, you would not marry. Your love for him was not
+strong enough to enable you to marry him. But your love is now strong enough,
+and I cannot avoid the conclusion that its strength arises from the publication
+and the public notice. In your case I do not mention royalties, though I am
+certain that they apply to the change wrought in your mother and father. Of
+course, all this is not flattering to me. But worst of all, it makes me
+question love, sacred love. Is love so gross a thing that it must feed upon
+publication and public notice? It would seem so. I have sat and thought upon it
+till my head went around.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Poor, dear head.&rdquo; She reached up a hand and passed the fingers
+soothingly through his hair. &ldquo;Let it go around no more. Let us begin
+anew, now. I loved you all the time. I know that I was weak in yielding to my
+mother&rsquo;s will. I should not have done so. Yet I have heard you speak so
+often with broad charity of the fallibility and frailty of humankind. Extend
+that charity to me. I acted mistakenly. Forgive me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, I do forgive,&rdquo; he said impatiently. &ldquo;It is easy to
+forgive where there is really nothing to forgive. Nothing that you have done
+requires forgiveness. One acts according to one&rsquo;s lights, and more than
+that one cannot do. As well might I ask you to forgive me for my not getting a
+job.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I meant well,&rdquo; she protested. &ldquo;You know that I could not
+have loved you and not meant well.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Yes, yes,&rdquo; he shut off her attempted objection. &ldquo;You would
+have destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my nature,
+and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. It is
+afraid of life. And all your effort was to make me afraid of life. You would
+have formalized me. You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole
+of life, where all life&rsquo;s values are unreal, and false, and
+vulgar.&rdquo; He felt her stir protestingly. &ldquo;Vulgarity&mdash;a hearty
+vulgarity, I&rsquo;ll admit&mdash;is the basis of bourgeois refinement and
+culture. As I say, you wanted to formalize me, to make me over into one of your
+own class, with your class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices.&rdquo;
+He shook his head sadly. &ldquo;And you do not understand, even now, what I am
+saying. My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them mean. What I
+say is so much fantasy to you. Yet to me it is vital reality. At the best you
+are a trifle puzzled and amused that this raw boy, crawling up out of the mire
+of the abyss, should pass judgment upon your class and call it vulgar.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body shivered with
+recurrent nervousness. He waited for a time for her to speak, and then went on.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;And now you want to renew our love. You want us to be married. You want
+me. And yet, listen&mdash;if my books had not been noticed, I&rsquo;d
+nevertheless have been just what I am now. And you would have stayed away. It
+is all those damned books&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t swear,&rdquo; she interrupted.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh laugh.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;That&rsquo;s it,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;at a high moment, when what
+seems your life&rsquo;s happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the
+same old way&mdash;afraid of life and a healthy oath.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her act, and
+yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was consequently resentful.
+They sat in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately and he pondering
+upon his love which had departed. He knew, now, that he had not really loved
+her. It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own
+creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems. The real bourgeois
+Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the
+bourgeois psychology in her mind, he had never loved.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She suddenly began to speak.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I know that much you have said is so. I have been afraid of life. I did
+not love you well enough. I have learned to love better. I love you for what
+you are, for what you were, for the ways even by which you have become. I love
+you for the ways wherein you differ from what you call my class, for your
+beliefs which I do not understand but which I know I can come to understand. I
+shall devote myself to understanding them. And even your smoking and your
+swearing&mdash;they are part of you and I will love you for them, too. I can
+still learn. In the last ten minutes I have learned much. That I have dared to
+come here is a token of what I have already learned. Oh, Martin!&mdash;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She was sobbing and nestling close against him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy, and she
+acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening face.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is too late,&rdquo; he said. He remembered Lizzie&rsquo;s words.
+&ldquo;I am a sick man&mdash;oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem
+to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few
+months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;It is not too late,&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;I will show you. I will
+prove to you that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and
+all that is dearest to me. All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will flout.
+I am no longer afraid of life. I will leave my father and mother, and let my
+name become a by-word with my friends. I will come to you here and now, in free
+love if you will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you. If I have been a
+traitor to love, I will now, for love&rsquo;s sake, be a traitor to all that
+made that earlier treason.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She stood before him, with shining eyes.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am waiting, Martin,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;waiting for you to
+accept me. Look at me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was splendid, he thought, looking at her. She had redeemed herself for all
+that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman, superior to the iron rule
+of bourgeois convention. It was splendid, magnificent, desperate. And yet, what
+was the matter with him? He was not thrilled nor stirred by what she had done.
+It was splendid and magnificent only intellectually. In what should have been a
+moment of fire, he coldly appraised her. His heart was untouched. He was
+unaware of any desire for her. Again he remembered Lizzie&rsquo;s words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am sick, very sick,&rdquo; he said with a despairing gesture.
+&ldquo;How sick I did not know till now. Something has gone out of me. I have
+always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life.
+Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything. If there were
+room, I should want you, now. You see how sick I am.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child, crying, that
+forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate through the tear-dimmed
+films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the presence of Ruth,
+everything, in watching the masses of vegetation, shot through hotly with
+sunshine that took form and blazed against this background of his eyelids. It
+was not restful, that green foliage. The sunlight was too raw and glaring. It
+hurt him to look at it, and yet he looked, he knew not why.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob. Ruth was at the
+door.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How shall I get out?&rdquo; she questioned tearfully. &ldquo;I am
+afraid.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Oh, forgive me,&rdquo; he cried, springing to his feet. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m
+not myself, you know. I forgot you were here.&rdquo; He put his hand to his
+head. &ldquo;You see, I&rsquo;m not just right. I&rsquo;ll take you home. We
+can go out by the servants&rsquo; entrance. No one will see us. Pull down that
+veil and everything will be all right.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the narrow
+stairs.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I am safe now,&rdquo; she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at
+the same time starting to take her hand from his arm.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, no, I&rsquo;ll see you home,&rdquo; he answered.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No, please don&rsquo;t,&rdquo; she objected. &ldquo;It is
+unnecessary.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Again she started to remove her hand. He felt a momentary curiosity. Now that
+she was out of danger she was afraid. She was in almost a panic to be quit of
+him. He could see no reason for it and attributed it to her nervousness. So he
+restrained her withdrawing hand and started to walk on with her. Halfway down
+the block, he saw a man in a long overcoat shrink back into a doorway. He shot
+a glance in as he passed by, and, despite the high turned-up collar, he was
+certain that he recognized Ruth&rsquo;s brother, Norman.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversation. She was stunned. He
+was apathetic. Once, he mentioned that he was going away, back to the South
+Seas, and, once, she asked him to forgive her having come to him. And that was
+all. The parting at her door was conventional. They shook hands, said good
+night, and he lifted his hat. The door swung shut, and he lighted a cigarette
+and turned back for his hotel. When he came to the doorway into which he had
+seen Norman shrink, he stopped and looked in in a speculative humor.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;She lied,&rdquo; he said aloud. &ldquo;She made believe to me that she
+had dared greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought her was
+waiting to take her back.&rdquo; He burst into laughter. &ldquo;Oh, these
+bourgeois! When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with his sister. When I
+have a bank account, he brings her to me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same direction, begged
+him over his shoulder.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?&rdquo; were the
+words.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+But it was the voice that made Martin turn around. The next instant he had Joe
+by the hand.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;D&rsquo;ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?&rdquo; the
+other was saying. &ldquo;I said then we&rsquo;d meet again. I felt it in my
+bones. An&rsquo; here we are.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re looking good,&rdquo; Martin said admiringly, &ldquo;and
+you&rsquo;ve put on weight.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;I sure have.&rdquo; Joe&rsquo;s face was beaming. &ldquo;I never knew
+what it was to live till I hit hoboin&rsquo;. I&rsquo;m thirty pounds heavier
+an&rsquo; feel tiptop all the time. Why, I was worked to skin an&rsquo; bone in
+them old days. Hoboin&rsquo; sure agrees with me.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;But you&rsquo;re looking for a bed just the same,&rdquo; Martin chided,
+&ldquo;and it&rsquo;s a cold night.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Huh? Lookin&rsquo; for a bed?&rdquo; Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket
+and brought it out filled with small change. &ldquo;That beats hard
+graft,&rdquo; he exulted. &ldquo;You just looked good; that&rsquo;s why I
+battered you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin laughed and gave in.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;ve several full-sized drunks right there,&rdquo; he
+insinuated.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe slid the money back into his pocket.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Not in mine,&rdquo; he announced. &ldquo;No gettin&rsquo; oryide for me,
+though there ain&rsquo;t nothin&rsquo; to stop me except I don&rsquo;t want to.
+I&rsquo;ve ben drunk once since I seen you last, an&rsquo; then it was
+unexpected, bein&rsquo; on an empty stomach. When I work like a beast, I drink
+like a beast. When I live like a man, I drink like a man&mdash;a jolt now
+an&rsquo; again when I feel like it, an&rsquo; that&rsquo;s all.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to the hotel. He paused in
+the office to look up steamer sailings. The <i>Mariposa</i> sailed for Tahiti
+in five days.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me,&rdquo; he told
+the clerk. &ldquo;No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the
+weather-side,&mdash;the port-side, remember that, the port-side. You&rsquo;d
+better write it down.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently as a child.
+The occurrences of the evening had made no impression on him. His mind was dead
+to impressions. The glow of warmth with which he met Joe had been most
+fleeting. The succeeding minute he had been bothered by the
+ex-laundryman&rsquo;s presence and by the compulsion of conversation. That in
+five more days he sailed for his loved South Seas meant nothing to him. So he
+closed his eyes and slept normally and comfortably for eight uninterrupted
+hours. He was not restless. He did not change his position, nor did he dream.
+Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each day that he awoke, he awoke with
+regret. Life worried and bored him, and time was a vexation.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<h2><a name="chap46"></a>CHAPTER XLVI.</h2>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Say, Joe,&rdquo; was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next
+morning, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street.
+He&rsquo;s made a pot of money, and he&rsquo;s going back to France. It&rsquo;s
+a dandy, well-appointed, small steam laundry. There&rsquo;s a start for you if
+you want to settle down. Here, take this; buy some clothes with it and be at
+this man&rsquo;s office by ten o&rsquo;clock. He looked up the laundry for me,
+and he&rsquo;ll take you out and show you around. If you like it, and think it
+is worth the price&mdash;twelve thousand&mdash;let me know and it is yours. Now
+run along. I&rsquo;m busy. I&rsquo;ll see you later.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now look here, Mart,&rdquo; the other said slowly, with kindling anger,
+&ldquo;I come here this mornin&rsquo; to see you. Savve? I didn&rsquo;t come
+here to get no laundry. I come here for a talk for old friends&rsquo; sake, and
+you shove a laundry at me. I tell you what you can do. You can take that
+laundry an&rsquo; go to hell.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him around.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now look here, Joe,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;if you act that way,
+I&rsquo;ll punch your head. And for old friends&rsquo; sake I&rsquo;ll punch it
+hard. Savve?&mdash;you will, will you?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and writhing
+out of the advantage of the other&rsquo;s hold. They reeled about the room,
+locked in each other&rsquo;s arms, and came down with a crash across the
+splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath, with arms spread out
+and held and with Martin&rsquo;s knee on his chest. He was panting and gasping
+for breath when Martin released him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Now we&rsquo;ll talk a moment,&rdquo; Martin said. &ldquo;You
+can&rsquo;t get fresh with me. I want that laundry business finished first of
+all. Then you can come back and we&rsquo;ll talk for old sake&rsquo;s sake. I
+told you I was busy. Look at that.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of letters and
+magazines.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;How can I wade through that and talk with you? You go and fix up that
+laundry, and then we&rsquo;ll get together.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;All right,&rdquo; Joe admitted reluctantly. &ldquo;I thought you was
+turnin&rsquo; me down, but I guess I was mistaken. But you can&rsquo;t lick me,
+Mart, in a stand-up fight. I&rsquo;ve got the reach on you.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;We&rsquo;ll put on the gloves sometime and see,&rdquo; Martin said with
+a smile.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going.&rdquo; Joe extended his arm.
+&ldquo;You see that reach? It&rsquo;ll make you go a few.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman. He
+was becoming anti-social. Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with
+people. Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated
+him. They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he
+was casting about for excuses to get rid of them.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in his
+chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-formed thoughts
+occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at wide intervals,
+themselves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. There were a dozen
+requests for autographs&mdash;he knew them at sight; there were professional
+begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging from the man with
+a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who demonstrated that the
+surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking
+financial aid to purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of
+communist colonization. There were letters from women seeking to know him, and
+over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt for pew-rent, sent as
+evidence of her good faith and as proof of her respectability.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters, the former on
+their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their knees for his
+books&mdash;his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept all he possessed in
+pawn for so many dreary months in order to fund them in postage. There were
+unexpected checks for English serial rights and for advance payments on foreign
+translations. His English agent announced the sale of German translation rights
+in three of his books, and informed him that Swedish editions, from which he
+could expect nothing because Sweden was not a party to the Berne Convention,
+were already on the market. Then there was a nominal request for his permission
+for a Russian translation, that country being likewise outside the Berne
+Convention.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He turned to the huge bundle of clippings which had come in from his press
+bureau, and read about himself and his vogue, which had become a furore. All
+his creative output had been flung to the public in one magnificent sweep. That
+seemed to account for it. He had taken the public off its feet, the way Kipling
+had, that time when he lay near to death and all the mob, animated by a
+mob-mind thought, began suddenly to read him. Martin remembered how that same
+world-mob, having read him and acclaimed him and not understood him in the
+least, had, abruptly, a few months later, flung itself upon him and torn him to
+pieces. Martin grinned at the thought. Who was he that he should not be
+similarly treated in a few more months? Well, he would fool the mob. He would
+be away, in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls and
+copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and bonitas, hunting
+wild goats among the cliffs of the valley that lay next to the valley of
+Taiohae.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the moment of that thought the desperateness of his situation dawned upon
+him. He saw, cleared eyed, that he was in the Valley of the Shadow. All the
+life that was in him was fading, fainting, making toward death.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He realized how much he slept, and how much he desired to sleep. Of old, he had
+hated sleep. It had robbed him of precious moments of living. Four hours of
+sleep in the twenty-four had meant being robbed of four hours of life. How he
+had grudged sleep! Now it was life he grudged. Life was not good; its taste in
+his mouth was without tang, and bitter. This was his peril. Life that did not
+yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing. Some remote instinct for
+preservation stirred in him, and he knew he must get away. He glanced about the
+room, and the thought of packing was burdensome. Perhaps it would be better to
+leave that to the last. In the meantime he might be getting an outfit.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He put on his hat and went out, stopping in at a gun-store, where he spent the
+remainder of the morning buying automatic rifles, ammunition, and fishing
+tackle. Fashions changed in trading, and he knew he would have to wait till he
+reached Tahiti before ordering his trade-goods. They could come up from
+Australia, anyway. This solution was a source of pleasure. He had avoided doing
+something, and the doing of anything just now was unpleasant. He went back to
+the hotel gladly, with a feeling of satisfaction in that the comfortable Morris
+chair was waiting for him; and he groaned inwardly, on entering his room, at
+sight of Joe in the Morris chair.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe was delighted with the laundry. Everything was settled, and he would enter
+into possession next day. Martin lay on the bed, with closed eyes, while the
+other talked on. Martin&rsquo;s thoughts were far away&mdash;so far away that
+he was rarely aware that he was thinking. It was only by an effort that he
+occasionally responded. And yet this was Joe, whom he had always liked. But Joe
+was too keen with life. The boisterous impact of it on Martin&rsquo;s jaded
+mind was a hurt. It was an aching probe to his tired sensitiveness. When Joe
+reminded him that sometime in the future they were going to put on the gloves
+together, he could almost have screamed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Remember, Joe, you&rsquo;re to run the laundry according to those old
+rules you used to lay down at Shelly Hot Springs,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;No
+overworking. No working at night. And no children at the mangles. No children
+anywhere. And a fair wage.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe nodded and pulled out a note-book.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;Look at here. I was workin&rsquo; out them rules before breakfast this
+A.M. What d&rsquo;ye think of them?&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He read them aloud, and Martin approved, worrying at the same time as to when
+Joe would take himself off.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was late afternoon when he awoke. Slowly the fact of life came back to him.
+He glanced about the room. Joe had evidently stolen away after he had dozed
+off. That was considerate of Joe, he thought. Then he closed his eyes and slept
+again.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+In the days that followed Joe was too busy organizing and taking hold of the
+laundry to bother him much; and it was not until the day before sailing that
+the newspapers made the announcement that he had taken passage on the
+<i>Mariposa</i>. Once, when the instinct of preservation fluttered, he went to
+a doctor and underwent a searching physical examination. Nothing could be found
+the matter with him. His heart and lungs were pronounced magnificent. Every
+organ, so far as the doctor could know, was normal and was working normally.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;There is nothing the matter with you, Mr. Eden,&rdquo; he said,
+&ldquo;positively nothing the matter with you. You are in the pink of
+condition. Candidly, I envy you your health. It is superb. Look at that chest.
+There, and in your stomach, lies the secret of your remarkable constitution.
+Physically, you are a man in a thousand&mdash;in ten thousand. Barring
+accidents, you should live to be a hundred.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+And Martin knew that Lizzie&rsquo;s diagnosis had been correct. Physically he
+was all right. It was his &ldquo;think-machine&rdquo; that had gone wrong, and
+there was no cure for that except to get away to the South Seas. The trouble
+was that now, on the verge of departure, he had no desire to go. The South Seas
+charmed him no more than did bourgeois civilization. There was no zest in the
+thought of departure, while the act of departure appalled him as a weariness of
+the flesh. He would have felt better if he were already on board and gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The last day was a sore trial. Having read of his sailing in the morning
+papers, Bernard Higginbotham, Gertrude, and all the family came to say good-by,
+as did Hermann von Schmidt and Marian. Then there was business to be
+transacted, bills to be paid, and everlasting reporters to be endured. He said
+good-by to Lizzie Connolly, abruptly, at the entrance to night school, and
+hurried away. At the hotel he found Joe, too busy all day with the laundry to
+have come to him earlier. It was the last straw, but Martin gripped the arms of
+his chair and talked and listened for half an hour.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;You know, Joe,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that you are not tied down to that
+laundry. There are no strings on it. You can sell it any time and blow the
+money. Any time you get sick of it and want to hit the road, just pull out. Do
+what will make you the happiest.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Joe shook his head.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+&ldquo;No more road in mine, thank you kindly. Hoboin&rsquo;s all right,
+exceptin&rsquo; for one thing&mdash;the girls. I can&rsquo;t help it, but
+I&rsquo;m a ladies&rsquo; man. I can&rsquo;t get along without &rsquo;em, and
+you&rsquo;ve got to get along without &rsquo;em when you&rsquo;re
+hoboin&rsquo;. The times I&rsquo;ve passed by houses where dances an&rsquo;
+parties was goin&rsquo; on, an&rsquo; heard the women laugh, an&rsquo; saw
+their white dresses and smiling faces through the windows&mdash;Gee! I tell you
+them moments was plain hell. I like dancin&rsquo; an&rsquo; picnics, an&rsquo;
+walking in the moonlight, an&rsquo; all the rest too well. Me for the laundry,
+and a good front, with big iron dollars clinkin&rsquo; in my jeans. I seen a
+girl already, just yesterday, and, d&rsquo;ye know, I&rsquo;m feelin&rsquo;
+already I&rsquo;d just as soon marry her as not. I&rsquo;ve ben whistlin&rsquo;
+all day at the thought of it. She&rsquo;s a beaut, with the kindest eyes and
+softest voice you ever heard. Me for her, you can stack on that. Say, why
+don&rsquo;t you get married with all this money to burn? You could get the
+finest girl in the land.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Martin shook his head with a smile, but in his secret heart he was wondering
+why any man wanted to marry. It seemed an amazing and incomprehensible thing.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+From the deck of the <i>Mariposa</i>, at the sailing hour, he saw Lizzie
+Connolly hiding in the skirts of the crowd on the wharf. Take her with you,
+came the thought. It is easy to be kind. She will be supremely happy. It was
+almost a temptation one moment, and the succeeding moment it became a terror.
+He was in a panic at the thought of it. His tired soul cried out in protest. He
+turned away from the rail with a groan, muttering, &ldquo;Man, you are too
+sick, you are too sick.&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He fled to his stateroom, where he lurked until the steamer was clear of the
+dock. In the dining saloon, at luncheon, he found himself in the place of
+honor, at the captain&rsquo;s right; and he was not long in discovering that he
+was the great man on board. But no more unsatisfactory great man ever sailed on
+a ship. He spent the afternoon in a deck-chair, with closed eyes, dozing
+brokenly most of the time, and in the evening went early to bed.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+After the second day, recovered from seasickness, the full passenger list was
+in evidence, and the more he saw of the passengers the more he disliked them.
+Yet he knew that he did them injustice. They were good and kindly people, he
+forced himself to acknowledge, and in the moment of acknowledgment he
+qualified&mdash;good and kindly like all the bourgeoisie, with all the
+psychological cramp and intellectual futility of their kind, they bored him
+when they talked with him, their little superficial minds were so filled with
+emptiness; while the boisterous high spirits and the excessive energy of the
+younger people shocked him. They were never quiet, ceaselessly playing
+deck-quoits, tossing rings, promenading, or rushing to the rail with loud cries
+to watch the leaping porpoises and the first schools of flying fish.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He slept much. After breakfast he sought his deck-chair with a magazine he
+never finished. The printed pages tired him. He puzzled that men found so much
+to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair. When the gong awoke him for
+luncheon, he was irritated that he must awaken. There was no satisfaction in
+being awake.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and went forward into the
+forecastle with the sailors. But the breed of sailors seemed to have changed
+since the days he had lived in the forecastle. He could find no kinship with
+these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures. He was in despair. Up above
+nobody had wanted Martin Eden for his own sake, and he could not go back to
+those of his own class who had wanted him in the past. He did not want them. He
+could not stand them any more than he could stand the stupid first-cabin
+passengers and the riotous young people.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a sick
+person. During every conscious moment life blazed in a raw glare around him and
+upon him. It hurt. It hurt intolerably. It was the first time in his life that
+Martin had travelled first class. On ships at sea he had always been in the
+forecastle, the steerage, or in the black depths of the coal-hold, passing
+coal. In those days, climbing up the iron ladders out the pit of stifling heat,
+he had often caught glimpses of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing
+but enjoy themselves, under awnings spread to keep the sun and wind away from
+them, with subservient stewards taking care of their every want and whim, and
+it had seemed to him that the realm in which they moved and had their being was
+nothing else than paradise. Well, here he was, the great man on board, in the
+midmost centre of it, sitting at the captain&rsquo;s right hand, and yet vainly
+harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest of the Paradise he had lost.
+He had found no new one, and now he could not find the old one.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He strove to stir himself and find something to interest him. He ventured the
+petty officers&rsquo; mess, and was glad to get away. He talked with a
+quartermaster off duty, an intelligent man who promptly prodded him with the
+socialist propaganda and forced into his hands a bunch of leaflets and
+pamphlets. He listened to the man expounding the slave-morality, and as he
+listened, he thought languidly of his own Nietzsche philosophy. But what was it
+worth, after all? He remembered one of Nietzsche&rsquo;s mad utterances wherein
+that madman had doubted truth. And who was to say? Perhaps Nietzsche had been
+right. Perhaps there was no truth in anything, no truth in truth&mdash;no such
+thing as truth. But his mind wearied quickly, and he was content to go back to
+his chair and doze.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Miserable as he was on the steamer, a new misery came upon him. What when the
+steamer reached Tahiti? He would have to go ashore. He would have to order his
+trade-goods, to find a passage on a schooner to the Marquesas, to do a thousand
+and one things that were awful to contemplate. Whenever he steeled himself
+deliberately to think, he could see the desperate peril in which he stood. In
+all truth, he was in the Valley of the Shadow, and his danger lay in that he
+was not afraid. If he were only afraid, he would make toward life. Being
+unafraid, he was drifting deeper into the shadow. He found no delight in the
+old familiar things of life. The <i>Mariposa</i> was now in the northeast
+trades, and this wine of wind, surging against him, irritated him. He had his
+chair moved to escape the embrace of this lusty comrade of old days and nights.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The day the <i>Mariposa</i> entered the doldrums, Martin was more miserable
+than ever. He could no longer sleep. He was soaked with sleep, and perforce he
+must now stay awake and endure the white glare of life. He moved about
+restlessly. The air was sticky and humid, and the rain-squalls were
+unrefreshing. He ached with life. He walked around the deck until that hurt too
+much, then sat in his chair until he was compelled to walk again. He forced
+himself at last to finish the magazine, and from the steamer library he culled
+several volumes of poetry. But they could not hold him, and once more he took
+to walking.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him, for when he
+went below, he could not sleep. This surcease from life had failed him. It was
+too much. He turned on the electric light and tried to read. One of the volumes
+was a Swinburne. He lay in bed, glancing through its pages, until suddenly he
+became aware that he was reading with interest. He finished the stanza,
+attempted to read on, then came back to it. He rested the book face downward on
+his breast and fell to thinking. That was it. The very thing. Strange that it
+had never come to him before. That was the meaning of it all; he had been
+drifting that way all the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the
+happy way out. He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him. He glanced at
+the open port-hole. Yes, it was large enough. For the first time in weeks he
+felt happy. At last he had discovered the cure of his ill. He picked up the
+book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-
+</p>
+
+<p class="poem">
+&ldquo;&lsquo;From too much love of living,<br />
+    From hope and fear set free,<br />
+We thank with brief thanksgiving<br />
+    Whatever gods may be<br />
+That no life lives forever;<br />
+That dead men rise up never;<br />
+    That even the weariest river<br />
+    Winds somewhere safe to sea.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He looked again at the open port. Swinburne had furnished the key. Life was
+ill, or, rather, it had become ill&mdash;an unbearable thing. &ldquo;That dead
+men rise up never!&rdquo; That line stirred him with a profound feeling of
+gratitude. It was the one beneficent thing in the universe. When life became an
+aching weariness, death was ready to soothe away to everlasting sleep. But what
+was he waiting for? It was time to go.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He arose and thrust his head out the port-hole, looking down into the milky
+wash. The <i>Mariposa</i> was deeply loaded, and, hanging by his hands, his
+feet would be in the water. He could slip in noiselessly. No one would hear. A
+smother of spray dashed up, wetting his face. It tasted salt on his lips, and
+the taste was good. He wondered if he ought to write a swan-song, but laughed
+the thought away. There was no time. He was too impatient to be gone.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Turning off the light in his room so that it might not betray him, he went out
+the port-hole feet first. His shoulders stuck, and he forced himself back so as
+to try it with one arm down by his side. A roll of the steamer aided him, and
+he was through, hanging by his hands. When his feet touched the sea, he let go.
+He was in a milky froth of water. The side of the <i>Mariposa</i> rushed past
+him like a dark wall, broken here and there by lighted ports. She was certainly
+making time. Almost before he knew it, he was astern, swimming gently on the
+foam-crackling surface.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed aloud. It had taken a piece
+out, and the sting of it reminded him of why he was there. In the work to do he
+had forgotten the purpose of it. The lights of the <i>Mariposa</i> were growing
+dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming confidently, as though it were
+his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swimming, but the moment he
+felt the water rising above his mouth the hands struck out sharply with a
+lifting movement. The will to live, was his thought, and the thought was
+accompanied by a sneer. Well, he had will,&mdash;ay, will strong enough that
+with one last exertion it could destroy itself and cease to be.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+He changed his position to a vertical one. He glanced up at the quiet stars, at
+the same time emptying his lungs of air. With swift, vigorous propulsion of
+hands and feet, he lifted his shoulders and half his chest out of water. This
+was to gain impetus for the descent. Then he let himself go and sank without
+movement, a white statue, into the sea. He breathed in the water deeply,
+deliberately, after the manner of a man taking an anaesthetic. When he
+strangled, quite involuntarily his arms and legs clawed the water and drove him
+up to the surface and into the clear sight of the stars.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly endeavoring not to breathe
+the air into his bursting lungs. Well, he would have to try a new way. He
+filled his lungs with air, filled them full. This supply would take him far
+down. He turned over and went down head first, swimming with all his strength
+and all his will. Deeper and deeper he went. His eyes were open, and he watched
+the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita. As he swam, he hoped
+that they would not strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will.
+But they did not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last
+kindness of life.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+Down, down, he swam till his arms and legs grew tired and hardly moved. He knew
+that he was deep. The pressure on his ear-drums was a pain, and there was a
+buzzing in his head. His endurance was faltering, but he compelled his arms and
+legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped and the air drove from his
+lungs in a great explosive rush. The bubbles rubbed and bounded like tiny
+balloons against his cheeks and eyes as they took their upward flight. Then
+came pain and strangulation. This hurt was not death, was the thought that
+oscillated through his reeling consciousness. Death did not hurt. It was life,
+the pangs of life, this awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life
+could deal him.
+</p>
+
+<p>
+His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and
+feebly. But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and
+churn. He was too deep down. They could never bring him to the surface. He
+seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision. Colors and radiances
+surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him. What was that? It seemed a
+lighthouse; but it was inside his brain&mdash;a flashing, bright white light.
+It flashed swifter and swifter. There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed
+to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And somewhere
+at the bottom he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into
+darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.
+</p>
+
+</div><!--end chapter-->
+
+<div style='display:block;margin-top:4em'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTIN EDEN ***</div>
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diff --git a/old/1056-h/images/cover.jpg b/old/1056-h/images/cover.jpg
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+++ b/old/1056-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/old/old/1056.txt b/old/old/1056.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,14786 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Martin Eden, by Jack London
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Martin Eden
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: November 25, 2004  [eBook #1056]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTIN EDEN***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1913 Macmillan and Company edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+
+MARTIN EDEN
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a young
+fellow who awkwardly removed his cap.  He wore rough clothes that smacked
+of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in
+which he found himself.  He did not know what to do with his cap, and was
+stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it from him.  The
+act was done quietly and naturally, and the awkward young fellow
+appreciated it.  "He understands," was his thought.  "He'll see me
+through all right."
+
+He walked at the other's heels with a swing to his shoulders, and his
+legs spread unwittingly, as if the level floors were tilting up and
+sinking down to the heave and lunge of the sea.  The wide rooms seemed
+too narrow for his rolling gait, and to himself he was in terror lest his
+broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or sweep the bric-a-brac
+from the low mantel.  He recoiled from side to side between the various
+objects and multiplied the hazards that in reality lodged only in his
+mind.  Between a grand piano and a centre-table piled high with books was
+space for a half a dozen to walk abreast, yet he essayed it with
+trepidation.  His heavy arms hung loosely at his sides.  He did not know
+what to do with those arms and hands, and when, to his excited vision,
+one arm seemed liable to brush against the books on the table, he lurched
+away like a frightened horse, barely missing the piano stool.  He watched
+the easy walk of the other in front of him, and for the first time
+realized that his walk was different from that of other men.  He
+experienced a momentary pang of shame that he should walk so uncouthly.
+The sweat burst through the skin of his forehead in tiny beads, and he
+paused and mopped his bronzed face with his handkerchief.
+
+"Hold on, Arthur, my boy," he said, attempting to mask his anxiety with
+facetious utterance.  "This is too much all at once for yours truly.  Give
+me a chance to get my nerve.  You know I didn't want to come, an' I guess
+your fam'ly ain't hankerin' to see me neither."
+
+"That's all right," was the reassuring answer.  "You mustn't be
+frightened at us.  We're just homely people--Hello, there's a letter for
+me."
+
+He stepped back to the table, tore open the envelope, and began to read,
+giving the stranger an opportunity to recover himself.  And the stranger
+understood and appreciated.  His was the gift of sympathy, understanding;
+and beneath his alarmed exterior that sympathetic process went on.  He
+mopped his forehead dry and glanced about him with a controlled face,
+though in the eyes there was an expression such as wild animals betray
+when they fear the trap.  He was surrounded by the unknown, apprehensive
+of what might happen, ignorant of what he should do, aware that he walked
+and bore himself awkwardly, fearful that every attribute and power of him
+was similarly afflicted.  He was keenly sensitive, hopelessly
+self-conscious, and the amused glance that the other stole privily at him
+over the top of the letter burned into him like a dagger-thrust.  He saw
+the glance, but he gave no sign, for among the things he had learned was
+discipline.  Also, that dagger-thrust went to his pride.  He cursed
+himself for having come, and at the same time resolved that, happen what
+would, having come, he would carry it through.  The lines of his face
+hardened, and into his eyes came a fighting light.  He looked about more
+unconcernedly, sharply observant, every detail of the pretty interior
+registering itself on his brain.  His eyes were wide apart; nothing in
+their field of vision escaped; and as they drank in the beauty before
+them the fighting light died out and a warm glow took its place.  He was
+responsive to beauty, and here was cause to respond.
+
+An oil painting caught and held him.  A heavy surf thundered and burst
+over an outjutting rock; lowering storm-clouds covered the sky; and,
+outside the line of surf, a pilot-schooner, close-hauled, heeled over
+till every detail of her deck was visible, was surging along against a
+stormy sunset sky.  There was beauty, and it drew him irresistibly.  He
+forgot his awkward walk and came closer to the painting, very close.  The
+beauty faded out of the canvas.  His face expressed his bepuzzlement.  He
+stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then stepped away.
+Immediately all the beauty flashed back into the canvas.  "A trick
+picture," was his thought, as he dismissed it, though in the midst of the
+multitudinous impressions he was receiving he found time to feel a prod
+of indignation that so much beauty should be sacrificed to make a trick.
+He did not know painting.  He had been brought up on chromos and
+lithographs that were always definite and sharp, near or far.  He had
+seen oil paintings, it was true, in the show windows of shops, but the
+glass of the windows had prevented his eager eyes from approaching too
+near.
+
+He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and saw the books on
+the table.  Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as promptly
+as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food.
+An impulsive stride, with one lurch to right and left of the shoulders,
+brought him to the table, where he began affectionately handling the
+books.  He glanced at the titles and the authors' names, read fragments
+of text, caressing the volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once,
+recognized a book he had read.  For the rest, they were strange books and
+strange authors.  He chanced upon a volume of Swinburne and began reading
+steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face glowing.  Twice he closed
+the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the author.  Swinburne!
+he would remember that name.  That fellow had eyes, and he had certainly
+seen color and flashing light.  But who was Swinburne?  Was he dead a
+hundred years or so, like most of the poets?  Or was he alive still, and
+writing?  He turned to the title-page . . . yes, he had written other
+books; well, he would go to the free library the first thing in the
+morning and try to get hold of some of Swinburne's stuff.  He went back
+to the text and lost himself.  He did not notice that a young woman had
+entered the room.  The first he knew was when he heard Arthur's voice
+saying:-
+
+"Ruth, this is Mr. Eden."
+
+The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he turned he was
+thrilling to the first new impression, which was not of the girl, but of
+her brother's words.  Under that muscled body of his he was a mass of
+quivering sensibilities.  At the slightest impact of the outside world
+upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and
+played like lambent flame.  He was extraordinarily receptive and
+responsive, while his imagination, pitched high, was ever at work
+establishing relations of likeness and difference.  "Mr. Eden," was what
+he had thrilled to--he who had been called "Eden," or "Martin Eden," or
+just "Martin," all his life.  And "_Mister_!"  It was certainly going
+some, was his internal comment.  His mind seemed to turn, on the instant,
+into a vast camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness
+endless pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and
+beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets,
+wherein the thread of association was the fashion in which he had been
+addressed in those various situations.
+
+And then he turned and saw the girl.  The phantasmagoria of his brain
+vanished at sight of her.  She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide,
+spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair.  He did not know how she
+was dressed, except that the dress was as wonderful as she.  He likened
+her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem.  No, she was a spirit, a
+divinity, a goddess; such sublimated beauty was not of the earth.  Or
+perhaps the books were right, and there were many such as she in the
+upper walks of life.  She might well be sung by that chap, Swinburne.
+Perhaps he had had somebody like her in mind when he painted that girl,
+Iseult, in the book there on the table.  All this plethora of sight, and
+feeling, and thought occurred on the instant.  There was no pause of the
+realities wherein he moved.  He saw her hand coming out to his, and she
+looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly, like a man.
+The women he had known did not shake hands that way.  For that matter,
+most of them did not shake hands at all.  A flood of associations,
+visions of various ways he had made the acquaintance of women, rushed
+into his mind and threatened to swamp it.  But he shook them aside and
+looked at her.  Never had he seen such a woman.  The women he had known!
+Immediately, beside her, on either hand, ranged the women he had known.
+For an eternal second he stood in the midst of a portrait gallery,
+wherein she occupied the central place, while about her were limned many
+women, all to be weighed and measured by a fleeting glance, herself the
+unit of weight and measure.  He saw the weak and sickly faces of the
+girls of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the
+south of Market.  There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy
+cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico.  These, in turn, were crowded out
+by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by
+Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with degeneracy; by full-bodied
+South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and brown-skinned.  All these were
+blotted out by a grotesque and terrible nightmare brood--frowsy,
+shuffling creatures from the pavements of Whitechapel, gin-bloated hags
+of the stews, and all the vast hell's following of harpies, vile-mouthed
+and filthy, that under the guise of monstrous female form prey upon
+sailors, the scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit.
+
+"Won't you sit down, Mr. Eden?" the girl was saying.  "I have been
+looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us.  It was brave
+of you--"
+
+He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at all,
+what he had done, and that any fellow would have done it.  She noticed
+that the hand he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in the process
+of healing, and a glance at the other loose-hanging hand showed it to be
+in the same condition.  Also, with quick, critical eye, she noted a scar
+on his cheek, another that peeped out from under the hair of the
+forehead, and a third that ran down and disappeared under the starched
+collar.  She repressed a smile at sight of the red line that marked the
+chafe of the collar against the bronzed neck.  He was evidently unused to
+stiff collars.  Likewise her feminine eye took in the clothes he wore,
+the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the
+shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that advertised
+bulging biceps muscles.
+
+While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at all, he
+was obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair.  He found time to
+admire the ease with which she sat down, then lurched toward a chair
+facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the awkward figure he was
+cutting.  This was a new experience for him.  All his life, up to then,
+he had been unaware of being either graceful or awkward.  Such thoughts
+of self had never entered his mind.  He sat down gingerly on the edge of
+the chair, greatly worried by his hands.  They were in the way wherever
+he put them.  Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his
+exit with longing eyes.  He felt lost, alone there in the room with that
+pale spirit of a woman.  There was no bar-keeper upon whom to call for
+drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a can of beer and by
+means of that social fluid start the amenities of friendship flowing.
+
+"You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden," the girl was saying.  "How
+did it happen?  I am sure it must have been some adventure."
+
+"A Mexican with a knife, miss," he answered, moistening his parched lips
+and clearing his throat.  "It was just a fight.  After I got the knife
+away, he tried to bite off my nose."
+
+Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision of that hot,
+starry night at Salina Cruz, the white strip of beach, the lights of the
+sugar steamers in the harbor, the voices of the drunken sailors in the
+distance, the jostling stevedores, the flaming passion in the Mexican's
+face, the glint of the beast-eyes in the starlight, the sting of the
+steel in his neck, and the rush of blood, the crowd and the cries, the
+two bodies, his and the Mexican's, locked together, rolling over and over
+and tearing up the sand, and from away off somewhere the mellow tinkling
+of a guitar.  Such was the picture, and he thrilled to the memory of it,
+wondering if the man could paint it who had painted the pilot-schooner on
+the wall.  The white beach, the stars, and the lights of the sugar
+steamers would look great, he thought, and midway on the sand the dark
+group of figures that surrounded the fighters.  The knife occupied a
+place in the picture, he decided, and would show well, with a sort of
+gleam, in the light of the stars.  But of all this no hint had crept into
+his speech.  "He tried to bite off my nose," he concluded.
+
+"Oh," the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed the shock in
+her sensitive face.
+
+He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment shone faintly on
+his sunburned cheeks, though to him it burned as hotly as when his cheeks
+had been exposed to the open furnace-door in the fire-room.  Such sordid
+things as stabbing affrays were evidently not fit subjects for
+conversation with a lady.  People in the books, in her walk of life, did
+not talk about such things--perhaps they did not know about them, either.
+
+There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get
+started.  Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek.  Even
+as she asked, he realized that she was making an effort to talk his talk,
+and he resolved to get away from it and talk hers.
+
+"It was just an accident," he said, putting his hand to his cheek.  "One
+night, in a calm, with a heavy sea running, the main-boom-lift carried
+away, an' next the tackle.  The lift was wire, an' it was threshin'
+around like a snake.  The whole watch was tryin' to grab it, an' I rushed
+in an' got swatted."
+
+"Oh," she said, this time with an accent of comprehension, though
+secretly his speech had been so much Greek to her and she was wondering
+what a _lift_ was and what _swatted_ meant.
+
+"This man Swineburne," he began, attempting to put his plan into
+execution and pronouncing the i long.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Swineburne," he repeated, with the same mispronunciation.  "The poet."
+
+"Swinburne," she corrected.
+
+"Yes, that's the chap," he stammered, his cheeks hot again.  "How long
+since he died?"
+
+"Why, I haven't heard that he was dead."  She looked at him curiously.
+"Where did you make his acquaintance?"
+
+"I never clapped eyes on him," was the reply.  "But I read some of his
+poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come in.  How
+do you like his poetry?"
+
+And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject he had
+suggested.  He felt better, and settled back slightly from the edge of
+the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands, as if it might get
+away from him and buck him to the floor.  He had succeeded in making her
+talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he strove to follow her,
+marvelling at all the knowledge that was stowed away in that pretty head
+of hers, and drinking in the pale beauty of her face.  Follow her he did,
+though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by
+critical phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but
+that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling.  Here was
+intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as
+he had never dreamed it could be.  He forgot himself and stared at her
+with hungry eyes.  Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight
+for--ay, and die for.  The books were true.  There were such women in the
+world.  She was one of them.  She lent wings to his imagination, and
+great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed
+vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for
+woman's sake--for a pale woman, a flower of gold.  And through the
+swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the
+real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art.  He listened
+as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the
+fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in
+his eyes.  But she, who knew little of the world of men, being a woman,
+was keenly aware of his burning eyes.  She had never had men look at her
+in such fashion, and it embarrassed her.  She stumbled and halted in her
+utterance.  The thread of argument slipped from her.  He frightened her,
+and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon.  Her
+training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring;
+while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her
+to hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another world,
+to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red
+caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently,
+was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence.  She was clean, and her
+cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to
+learn the paradox of woman.
+
+"As I was saying--what was I saying?"  She broke off abruptly and laughed
+merrily at her predicament.
+
+"You was saying that this man Swinburne failed bein' a great poet
+because--an' that was as far as you got, miss," he prompted, while to
+himself he seemed suddenly hungry, and delicious little thrills crawled
+up and down his spine at the sound of her laughter.  Like silver, he
+thought to himself, like tinkling silver bells; and on the instant, and
+for an instant, he was transported to a far land, where under pink cherry
+blossoms, he smoked a cigarette and listened to the bells of the peaked
+pagoda calling straw-sandalled devotees to worship.
+
+"Yes, thank you," she said.  "Swinburne fails, when all is said, because
+he is, well, indelicate.  There are many of his poems that should never
+be read.  Every line of the really great poets is filled with beautiful
+truth, and calls to all that is high and noble in the human.  Not a line
+of the great poets can be spared without impoverishing the world by that
+much."
+
+"I thought it was great," he said hesitatingly, "the little I read.  I
+had no idea he was such a--a scoundrel.  I guess that crops out in his
+other books."
+
+"There are many lines that could be spared from the book you were
+reading," she said, her voice primly firm and dogmatic.
+
+"I must 'a' missed 'em," he announced.  "What I read was the real goods.
+It was all lighted up an' shining, an' it shun right into me an' lighted
+me up inside, like the sun or a searchlight.  That's the way it landed on
+me, but I guess I ain't up much on poetry, miss."
+
+He broke off lamely.  He was confused, painfully conscious of his
+inarticulateness.  He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he
+had read, but his speech was inadequate.  He could not express what he
+felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship,
+on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging.  Well,
+he decided, it was up to him to get acquainted in this new world.  He had
+never seen anything that he couldn't get the hang of when he wanted to
+and it was about time for him to want to learn to talk the things that
+were inside of him so that she could understand.  _She_ was bulking large
+on his horizon.
+
+"Now Longfellow--" she was saying.
+
+"Yes, I've read 'm," he broke in impulsively, spurred on to exhibit and
+make the most of his little store of book knowledge, desirous of showing
+her that he was not wholly a stupid clod.  "'The Psalm of Life,'
+'Excelsior,' an' . . . I guess that's all."
+
+She nodded her head and smiled, and he felt, somehow, that her smile was
+tolerant, pitifully tolerant.  He was a fool to attempt to make a
+pretence that way.  That Longfellow chap most likely had written
+countless books of poetry.
+
+"Excuse me, miss, for buttin' in that way.  I guess the real facts is
+that I don't know nothin' much about such things.  It ain't in my class.
+But I'm goin' to make it in my class."
+
+It sounded like a threat.  His voice was determined, his eyes were
+flashing, the lines of his face had grown harsh.  And to her it seemed
+that the angle of his jaw had changed; its pitch had become unpleasantly
+aggressive.  At the same time a wave of intense virility seemed to surge
+out from him and impinge upon her.
+
+"I think you could make it in--in your class," she finished with a laugh.
+"You are very strong."
+
+Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, heavy corded, almost
+bull-like, bronzed by the sun, spilling over with rugged health and
+strength.  And though he sat there, blushing and humble, again she felt
+drawn to him.  She was surprised by a wanton thought that rushed into her
+mind.  It seemed to her that if she could lay her two hands upon that
+neck that all its strength and vigor would flow out to her.  She was
+shocked by this thought.  It seemed to reveal to her an undreamed
+depravity in her nature.  Besides, strength to her was a gross and
+brutish thing.  Her ideal of masculine beauty had always been slender
+gracefulness.  Yet the thought still persisted.  It bewildered her that
+she should desire to place her hands on that sunburned neck.  In truth,
+she was far from robust, and the need of her body and mind was for
+strength.  But she did not know it.  She knew only that no man had ever
+affected her before as this one had, who shocked her from moment to
+moment with his awful grammar.
+
+"Yes, I ain't no invalid," he said.  "When it comes down to hard-pan, I
+can digest scrap-iron.  But just now I've got dyspepsia.  Most of what
+you was sayin' I can't digest.  Never trained that way, you see.  I like
+books and poetry, and what time I've had I've read 'em, but I've never
+thought about 'em the way you have.  That's why I can't talk about 'em.
+I'm like a navigator adrift on a strange sea without chart or compass.
+Now I want to get my bearin's.  Mebbe you can put me right.  How did you
+learn all this you've ben talkin'?"
+
+"By going to school, I fancy, and by studying," she answered.
+
+"I went to school when I was a kid," he began to object.
+
+"Yes; but I mean high school, and lectures, and the university."
+
+"You've gone to the university?" he demanded in frank amazement.  He felt
+that she had become remoter from him by at least a million miles.
+
+"I'm going there now.  I'm taking special courses in English."
+
+He did not know what "English" meant, but he made a mental note of that
+item of ignorance and passed on.
+
+"How long would I have to study before I could go to the university?" he
+asked.
+
+She beamed encouragement upon his desire for knowledge, and said: "That
+depends upon how much studying you have already done.  You have never
+attended high school?  Of course not.  But did you finish grammar
+school?"
+
+"I had two years to run, when I left," he answered.  "But I was always
+honorably promoted at school."
+
+The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he had gripped the
+arms of the chair so savagely that every finger-end was stinging.  At the
+same moment he became aware that a woman was entering the room.  He saw
+the girl leave her chair and trip swiftly across the floor to the
+newcomer.  They kissed each other, and, with arms around each other's
+waists, they advanced toward him.  That must be her mother, he thought.
+She was a tall, blond woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful.  Her
+gown was what he might expect in such a house.  His eyes delighted in the
+graceful lines of it.  She and her dress together reminded him of women
+on the stage.  Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and gowns
+entering the London theatres while he stood and watched and the policemen
+shoved him back into the drizzle beyond the awning.  Next his mind leaped
+to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too, from the sidewalk, he had
+seen grand ladies.  Then the city and the harbor of Yokohama, in a
+thousand pictures, began flashing before his eyes.  But he swiftly
+dismissed the kaleidoscope of memory, oppressed by the urgent need of the
+present.  He knew that he must stand up to be introduced, and he
+struggled painfully to his feet, where he stood with trousers bagging at
+the knees, his arms loose-hanging and ludicrous, his face set hard for
+the impending ordeal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.
+Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times
+seemed impossible.  But at last he had made it, and was seated alongside
+of Her.  The array of knives and forks frightened him.  They bristled
+with unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their dazzle
+became a background across which moved a succession of forecastle
+pictures, wherein he and his mates sat eating salt beef with
+sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins by
+means of battered iron spoons.  The stench of bad beef was in his
+nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers and
+groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters.  He
+watched them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs.  Well, he would
+be careful here.  He would make no noise.  He would keep his mind upon it
+all the time.
+
+He glanced around the table.  Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur's
+brother, Norman.  They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his
+heart warmed toward them.  How they loved each other, the members of this
+family!  There flashed into his mind the picture of her mother, of the
+kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them walking toward him with arms
+entwined.  Not in his world were such displays of affection between
+parents and children made.  It was a revelation of the heights of
+existence that were attained in the world above.  It was the finest thing
+yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that world.  He was moved
+deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic
+tenderness.  He had starved for love all his life.  His nature craved
+love.  It was an organic demand of his being.  Yet he had gone without,
+and hardened himself in the process.  He had not known that he needed
+love.  Nor did he know it now.  He merely saw it in operation, and
+thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.
+
+He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there.  It was difficult enough
+getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman.
+Arthur he already knew somewhat.  The father would have been too much for
+him, he felt sure.  It seemed to him that he had never worked so hard in
+his life.  The severest toil was child's play compared with this.  Tiny
+nodules of moisture stood out on his forehead, and his shirt was wet with
+sweat from the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed things at once.  He
+had to eat as he had never eaten before, to handle strange tools, to
+glance surreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish each new thing,
+to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him and
+being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a yearning
+for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, aching restlessness; to
+feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life whereon she trod, and
+to have his mind ever and again straying off in speculation and vague
+plans of how to reach to her.  Also, when his secret glance went across
+to Norman opposite him, or to any one else, to ascertain just what knife
+or fork was to be used in any particular occasion, that person's features
+were seized upon by his mind, which automatically strove to appraise them
+and to divine what they were--all in relation to her.  Then he had to
+talk, to hear what was said to him and what was said back and forth, and
+to answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of
+speech that required a constant curb.  And to add confusion to confusion,
+there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at
+his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums
+demanding instantaneous solution.  He was oppressed throughout the meal
+by the thought of finger-bowls.  Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of
+times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like.  He
+had heard of such things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next
+few minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings who used
+them--ay, and he would use them himself.  And most important of all, far
+down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was the problem of how
+he should comport himself toward these persons.  What should his attitude
+be?  He wrestled continually and anxiously with the problem.  There were
+cowardly suggestions that he should make believe, assume a part; and
+there were still more cowardly suggestions that warned him he would fail
+in such course, that his nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that
+he would make a fool of himself.
+
+It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide upon his
+attitude, that he was very quiet.  He did not know that his quietness was
+giving the lie to Arthur's words of the day before, when that brother of
+hers had announced that he was going to bring a wild man home to dinner
+and for them not to be alarmed, because they would find him an
+interesting wild man.  Martin Eden could not have found it in him, just
+then, to believe that her brother could be guilty of such
+treachery--especially when he had been the means of getting this
+particular brother out of an unpleasant row.  So he sat at table,
+perturbed by his own unfitness and at the same time charmed by all that
+went on about him.  For the first time he realized that eating was
+something more than a utilitarian function.  He was unaware of what he
+ate.  It was merely food.  He was feasting his love of beauty at this
+table where eating was an aesthetic function.  It was an intellectual
+function, too.  His mind was stirred.  He heard words spoken that were
+meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only in books and
+that no man or woman he had known was of large enough mental caliber to
+pronounce.  When he heard such words dropping carelessly from the lips of
+the members of this marvellous family, her family, he thrilled with
+delight.  The romance, and beauty, and high vigor of the books were
+coming true.  He was in that rare and blissful state wherein a man sees
+his dreams stalk out from the crannies of fantasy and become fact.
+
+Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept himself in
+the background, listening, observing, and pleasuring, replying in
+reticent monosyllables, saying, "Yes, miss," and "No, miss," to her, and
+"Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," to her mother.  He curbed the impulse,
+arising out of his sea-training, to say "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to her
+brothers.  He felt that it would be inappropriate and a confession of
+inferiority on his part--which would never do if he was to win to her.
+Also, it was a dictate of his pride.  "By God!" he cried to himself,
+once; "I'm just as good as them, and if they do know lots that I don't, I
+could learn 'm a few myself, all the same!"  And the next moment, when
+she or her mother addressed him as "Mr. Eden," his aggressive pride was
+forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with delight.  He was a civilized
+man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, at dinner, with people
+he had read about in books.  He was in the books himself, adventuring
+through the printed pages of bound volumes.
+
+But while he belied Arthur's description, and appeared a gentle lamb
+rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course of action.
+He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle would never do for
+the high-pitched dominance of his nature.  He talked only when he had to,
+and then his speech was like his walk to the table, filled with jerks and
+halts as he groped in his polyglot vocabulary for words, debating over
+words he knew were fit but which he feared he could not pronounce,
+rejecting other words he knew would not be understood or would be raw and
+harsh.  But all the time he was oppressed by the consciousness that this
+carefulness of diction was making a booby of him, preventing him from
+expressing what he had in him.  Also, his love of freedom chafed against
+the restriction in much the same way his neck chafed against the starched
+fetter of a collar.  Besides, he was confident that he could not keep it
+up.  He was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, and the
+creative spirit was restive and urgent.  He was swiftly mastered by the
+concept or sensation in him that struggled in birth-throes to receive
+expression and form, and then he forgot himself and where he was, and the
+old words--the tools of speech he knew--slipped out.
+
+Once, he declined something from the servant who interrupted and pestered
+at his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically, "Pew!"
+
+On the instant those at the table were keyed up and expectant, the
+servant was smugly pleased, and he was wallowing in mortification.  But
+he recovered himself quickly.
+
+"It's the Kanaka for 'finish,'" he explained, "and it just come out
+naturally.  It's spelt p-a-u."
+
+He caught her curious and speculative eyes fixed on his hands, and, being
+in explanatory mood, he said:-
+
+"I just come down the Coast on one of the Pacific mail steamers.  She was
+behind time, an' around the Puget Sound ports we worked like niggers,
+storing cargo-mixed freight, if you know what that means.  That's how the
+skin got knocked off."
+
+"Oh, it wasn't that," she hastened to explain, in turn.  "Your hands
+seemed too small for your body."
+
+His cheeks were hot.  He took it as an exposure of another of his
+deficiencies.
+
+"Yes," he said depreciatingly.  "They ain't big enough to stand the
+strain.  I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders.  They are too
+strong, an' when I smash a man on the jaw the hands get smashed, too."
+
+He was not happy at what he had said.  He was filled with disgust at
+himself.  He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked about things
+that were not nice.
+
+"It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did--and you a stranger,"
+she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though not of the reason
+for it.
+
+He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warm surge
+of gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-worded tongue.
+
+"It wasn't nothin' at all," he said.  "Any guy 'ud do it for another.
+That bunch of hoodlums was lookin' for trouble, an' Arthur wasn't
+botherin' 'em none.  They butted in on 'm, an' then I butted in on them
+an' poked a few.  That's where some of the skin off my hands went, along
+with some of the teeth of the gang.  I wouldn't 'a' missed it for
+anything.  When I seen--"
+
+He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own depravity and
+utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did.  And while Arthur
+took up the tale, for the twentieth time, of his adventure with the
+drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how Martin Eden had rushed in
+and rescued him, that individual, with frowning brows, meditated upon the
+fool he had made of himself, and wrestled more determinedly with the
+problem of how he should conduct himself toward these people.  He
+certainly had not succeeded so far.  He wasn't of their tribe, and he
+couldn't talk their lingo, was the way he put it to himself.  He couldn't
+fake being their kind.  The masquerade would fail, and besides,
+masquerade was foreign to his nature.  There was no room in him for sham
+or artifice.  Whatever happened, he must be real.  He couldn't talk their
+talk just yet, though in time he would.  Upon that he was resolved.  But
+in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be his own talk, toned down,
+of course, so as to be comprehensible to them and so as not to shook them
+too much.  And furthermore, he wouldn't claim, not even by tacit
+acceptance, to be familiar with anything that was unfamiliar.  In
+pursuance of this decision, when the two brothers, talking university
+shop, had used "trig" several times, Martin Eden demanded:-
+
+"What is _trig_?"
+
+"Trignometry," Norman said; "a higher form of math."
+
+"And what is math?" was the next question, which, somehow, brought the
+laugh on Norman.
+
+"Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer.
+
+Martin Eden nodded.  He had caught a glimpse of the apparently
+illimitable vistas of knowledge.  What he saw took on tangibility.  His
+abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete form.  In the
+alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematics and the whole field of
+knowledge which they betokened were transmuted into so much landscape.
+The vistas he saw were vistas of green foliage and forest glades, all
+softly luminous or shot through with flashing lights.  In the distance,
+detail was veiled and blurred by a purple haze, but behind this purple
+haze, he knew, was the glamour of the unknown, the lure of romance.  It
+was like wine to him.  Here was adventure, something to do with head and
+hand, a world to conquer--and straightway from the back of his
+consciousness rushed the thought, _conquering, to win to her, that lily-
+pale spirit sitting beside him_.
+
+The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur, who, all
+evening, had been trying to draw his wild man out.  Martin Eden
+remembered his decision.  For the first time he became himself,
+consciously and deliberately at first, but soon lost in the joy of
+creating in making life as he knew it appear before his listeners' eyes.
+He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling schooner Halcyon when
+she was captured by a revenue cutter.  He saw with wide eyes, and he
+could tell what he saw.  He brought the pulsing sea before them, and the
+men and the ships upon the sea.  He communicated his power of vision,
+till they saw with his eyes what he had seen.  He selected from the vast
+mass of detail with an artist's touch, drawing pictures of life that
+glowed and burned with light and color, injecting movement so that his
+listeners surged along with him on the flood of rough eloquence,
+enthusiasm, and power.  At times he shocked them with the vividness of
+the narrative and his terms of speech, but beauty always followed fast
+upon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved by humor, by
+interpretations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors' minds.
+
+And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes.  His fire
+warmed her.  She wondered if she had been cold all her days.  She wanted
+to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was like a volcano spouting
+forth strength, robustness, and health.  She felt that she must lean
+toward him, and resisted by an effort.  Then, too, there was the counter
+impulse to shrink away from him.  She was repelled by those lacerated
+hands, grimed by toil so that the very dirt of life was ingrained in the
+flesh itself, by that red chafe of the collar and those bulging muscles.
+His roughness frightened her; each roughness of speech was an insult to
+her ear, each rough phase of his life an insult to her soul.  And ever
+and again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil to
+have such power over her.  All that was most firmly established in her
+mind was rocking.  His romance and adventure were battering at the
+conventions.  Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life was no
+longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy, to be played
+with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived and pleasured in, and
+carelessly to be flung aside.  "Therefore, play!" was the cry that rang
+through her.  "Lean toward him, if so you will, and place your two hands
+upon his neck!"  She wanted to cry out at the recklessness of the
+thought, and in vain she appraised her own cleanness and culture and
+balanced all that she was against what he was not.  She glanced about her
+and saw the others gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would have
+despaired had not she seen horror in her mother's eyes--fascinated
+horror, it was true, but none the less horror.  This man from outer
+darkness was evil.  Her mother saw it, and her mother was right.  She
+would trust her mother's judgment in this as she had always trusted it in
+all things.  The fire of him was no longer warm, and the fear of him was
+no longer poignant.
+
+Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, aggressively, with
+the vague intent of emphasizing the impassableness of the gulf that
+separated them.  Her music was a club that she swung brutally upon his
+head; and though it stunned him and crushed him down, it incited him.  He
+gazed upon her in awe.  In his mind, as in her own, the gulf widened; but
+faster than it widened, towered his ambition to win across it.  But he
+was too complicated a plexus of sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a
+whole evening, especially when there was music.  He was remarkably
+susceptible to music.  It was like strong drink, firing him to audacities
+of feeling,--a drug that laid hold of his imagination and went
+cloud-soaring through the sky.  It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind
+with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings.  He did not
+understand the music she played.  It was different from the dance-hall
+piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard.  But he had caught
+hints of such music from the books, and he accepted her playing largely
+on faith, patiently waiting, at first, for the lifting measures of
+pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because those measures were not
+long continued.  Just as he caught the swing of them and started, his
+imagination attuned in flight, always they vanished away in a chaotic
+scramble of sounds that was meaningless to him, and that dropped his
+imagination, an inert weight, back to earth.
+
+Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all this.
+He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the message that
+her hands pronounced upon the keys.  Then he dismissed the thought as
+unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself more freely to the music.
+The old delightful condition began to be induced.  His feet were no
+longer clay, and his flesh became spirit; before his eyes and behind his
+eyes shone a great glory; and then the scene before him vanished and he
+was away, rocking over the world that was to him a very dear world.  The
+known and the unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged
+his vision.  He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod
+market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen.  The
+scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had known it on
+warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against the southeast
+trades through long tropic days, sinking palm-tufted coral islets in the
+turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tufted coral islets in the
+turquoise sea ahead.  Swift as thought the pictures came and went.  One
+instant he was astride a broncho and flying through the fairy-colored
+Painted Desert country; the next instant he was gazing down through
+shimmering heat into the whited sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an
+oar on a freezing ocean where great ice islands towered and glistened in
+the sun.  He lay on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the
+mellow-sounding surf.  The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue
+fires, in the light of which danced the hula dancers to the barbaric love-
+calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling ukuleles and rumbling tom-
+toms.  It was a sensuous, tropic night.  In the background a volcano
+crater was silhouetted against the stars.  Overhead drifted a pale
+crescent moon, and the Southern Cross burned low in the sky.
+
+He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his consciousness
+was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind that poured against
+those strings and set them vibrating with memories and dreams.  He did
+not merely feel.  Sensation invested itself in form and color and
+radiance, and what his imagination dared, it objectified in some
+sublimated and magic way.  Past, present, and future mingled; and he went
+on oscillating across the broad, warm world, through high adventure and
+noble deeds to Her--ay, and with her, winning her, his arm about her, and
+carrying her on in flight through the empery of his mind.
+
+And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all this
+in his face.  It was a transfigured face, with great shining eyes that
+gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leap and pulse of
+life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit.  She was startled.  The
+raw, stumbling lout was gone.  The ill-fitting clothes, battered hands,
+and sunburned face remained; but these seemed the prison-bars through
+which she saw a great soul looking forth, inarticulate and dumb because
+of those feeble lips that would not give it speech.  Only for a flashing
+moment did she see this, then she saw the lout returned, and she laughed
+at the whim of her fancy.  But the impression of that fleeting glimpse
+lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling retreat and
+go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another of Browning--she
+was studying Browning in one of her English courses.  He seemed such a
+boy, as he stood blushing and stammering his thanks, that a wave of pity,
+maternal in its prompting, welled up in her.  She did not remember the
+lout, nor the imprisoned soul, nor the man who had stared at her in all
+masculineness and delighted and frightened her.  She saw before her only
+a boy, who was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt
+like a nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and who was saying jerkily:-
+
+"The greatest time of my life.  You see, I ain't used to things. . . "  He
+looked about him helplessly.  "To people and houses like this.  It's all
+new to me, and I like it."
+
+"I hope you'll call again," she said, as he was saying good night to her
+brothers.
+
+He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and was
+gone.
+
+"Well, what do you think of him?" Arthur demanded.
+
+"He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone," she answered.  "How old is
+he?"
+
+"Twenty--almost twenty-one.  I asked him this afternoon.  I didn't think
+he was that young."
+
+And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she kissed her
+brothers goodnight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
+pocket.  It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
+tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette.  He drew the
+first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long and
+lingering exhalation.  "By God!" he said aloud, in a voice of awe and
+wonder.  "By God!" he repeated.  And yet again he murmured, "By God!"
+Then his hand went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and
+stuffed into his pocket.  A cold drizzle was falling, but he bared his
+head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern.
+He was only dimly aware that it was raining.  He was in an ecstasy,
+dreaming dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past.
+
+He had met the woman at last--the woman that he had thought little about,
+not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had expected, in a
+remote way, he would sometime meet.  He had sat next to her at table.  He
+had felt her hand in his, he had looked into her eyes and caught a vision
+of a beautiful spirit;--but no more beautiful than the eyes through which
+it shone, nor than the flesh that gave it expression and form.  He did
+not think of her flesh as flesh,--which was new to him; for of the women
+he had known that was the only way he thought.  Her flesh was somehow
+different.  He did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the
+ills and frailties of bodies.  Her body was more than the garb of her
+spirit.  It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
+crystallization of her divine essence.  This feeling of the divine
+startled him.  It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought.  No word,
+no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before.  He had
+never believed in the divine.  He had always been irreligious, scoffing
+good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their immortality of the soul.  There
+was no life beyond, he had contended; it was here and now, then darkness
+everlasting.  But what he had seen in her eyes was soul--immortal soul
+that could never die.  No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him
+the message of immortality.  But she had.  She had whispered it to him
+the first moment she looked at him.  Her face shimmered before his eyes
+as he walked along,--pale and serious, sweet and sensitive, smiling with
+pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and pure as he had
+never dreamed purity could be.  Her purity smote him like a blow.  It
+startled him.  He had known good and bad; but purity, as an attribute of
+existence, had never entered his mind.  And now, in her, he conceived
+purity to be the superlative of goodness and of cleanness, the sum of
+which constituted eternal life.
+
+And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life.  He was not fit
+to carry water for her--he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a
+fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and talk
+with her that night.  It was accidental.  There was no merit in it.  He
+did not deserve such fortune.  His mood was essentially religious.  He
+was humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement and abasement.  In
+such frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form.  He was convicted
+of sin.  But as the meek and lowly at the penitent form catch splendid
+glimpses of their future lordly existence, so did he catch similar
+glimpses of the state he would gain to by possessing her.  But this
+possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from
+possession as he had known it.  Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw
+himself climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her,
+pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her.  It was a
+soul-possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free
+comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought.  He
+did not think it.  For that matter, he did not think at all.  Sensation
+usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with emotions he had
+never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility where feeling
+itself was exalted and spiritualized and carried beyond the summits of
+life.
+
+He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud: "By
+God!  By God!"
+
+A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted his
+sailor roll.
+
+"Where did you get it?" the policeman demanded.
+
+Martin Eden came back to earth.  His was a fluid organism, swiftly
+adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and
+crannies.  With the policeman's hail he was immediately his ordinary
+self, grasping the situation clearly.
+
+"It's a beaut, ain't it?" he laughed back.  "I didn't know I was talkin'
+out loud."
+
+"You'll be singing next," was the policeman's diagnosis.
+
+"No, I won't.  Gimme a match an' I'll catch the next car home."
+
+He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on.  "Now wouldn't
+that rattle you?" he ejaculated under his breath.  "That copper thought I
+was drunk."  He smiled to himself and meditated.  "I guess I was," he
+added; "but I didn't think a woman's face'd do it."
+
+He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley.  It was
+crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and ever and
+again barking out college yells.  He studied them curiously.  They were
+university boys.  They went to the same university that she did, were in
+her class socially, could know her, could see her every day if they
+wanted to.  He wondered that they did not want to, that they had been out
+having a good time instead of being with her that evening, talking with
+her, sitting around her in a worshipful and adoring circle.  His thoughts
+wandered on.  He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a loose-lipped
+mouth.  That fellow was vicious, he decided.  On shipboard he would be a
+sneak, a whiner, a tattler.  He, Martin Eden, was a better man than that
+fellow.  The thought cheered him.  It seemed to draw him nearer to Her.
+He began comparing himself with the students.  He grew conscious of the
+muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident that he was physically
+their master.  But their heads were filled with knowledge that enabled
+them to talk her talk,--the thought depressed him.  But what was a brain
+for? he demanded passionately.  What they had done, he could do.  They
+had been studying about life from the books while he had been busy living
+life.  His brain was just as full of knowledge as theirs, though it was a
+different kind of knowledge.  How many of them could tie a lanyard knot,
+or take a wheel or a lookout?  His life spread out before him in a series
+of pictures of danger and daring, hardship and toil.  He remembered his
+failures and scrapes in the process of learning.  He was that much to the
+good, anyway.  Later on they would have to begin living life and going
+through the mill as he had gone.  Very well.  While they were busy with
+that, he could be learning the other side of life from the books.
+
+As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated Oakland
+from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story building along
+the front of which ran the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAM'S CASH STORE.  Martin
+Eden got off at this corner.  He stared up for a moment at the sign.  It
+carried a message to him beyond its mere wording.  A personality of
+smallness and egotism and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from
+the letters themselves.  Bernard Higginbotham had married his sister, and
+he knew him well.  He let himself in with a latch-key and climbed the
+stairs to the second floor.  Here lived his brother-in-law.  The grocery
+was below.  There was a smell of stale vegetables in the air.  As he
+groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-cart, left there by
+one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and brought up against a door
+with a resounding bang.  "The pincher," was his thought; "too miserly to
+burn two cents' worth of gas and save his boarders' necks."
+
+He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his sister
+and Bernard Higginbotham.  She was patching a pair of his trousers, while
+his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his feet dangling in
+dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the second chair.  He
+glanced across the top of the paper he was reading, showing a pair of
+dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes.  Martin Eden never looked at him
+without experiencing a sense of repulsion.  What his sister had seen in
+the man was beyond him.  The other affected him as so much vermin, and
+always aroused in him an impulse to crush him under his foot.  "Some day
+I'll beat the face off of him," was the way he often consoled himself for
+enduring the man's existence.  The eyes, weasel-like and cruel, were
+looking at him complainingly.
+
+"Well," Martin demanded.  "Out with it."
+
+"I had that door painted only last week," Mr. Higginbotham half whined,
+half bullied; "and you know what union wages are.  You should be more
+careful."
+
+Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of
+it.  He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the
+wall.  It surprised him.  He had always liked it, but it seemed that now
+he was seeing it for the first time.  It was cheap, that was what it was,
+like everything else in this house.  His mind went back to the house he
+had just left, and he saw, first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking
+at him with melting sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving.  He
+forgot where he was and Bernard Higginbotham's existence, till that
+gentleman demanded:-
+
+"Seen a ghost?"
+
+Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent,
+cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same eyes
+when their owner was making a sale in the store below--subservient eyes,
+smug, and oily, and flattering.
+
+"Yes," Martin answered.  "I seen a ghost.  Good night.  Good night,
+Gertrude."
+
+He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the
+slatternly carpet.
+
+"Don't bang the door," Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.
+
+He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and closed
+the door softly behind him.
+
+Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.
+
+"He's ben drinkin'," he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper.  "I told you he
+would."
+
+She nodded her head resignedly.
+
+"His eyes was pretty shiny," she confessed; "and he didn't have no
+collar, though he went away with one.  But mebbe he didn't have more'n a
+couple of glasses."
+
+"He couldn't stand up straight," asserted her husband.  "I watched him.
+He couldn't walk across the floor without stumblin'.  You heard 'm
+yourself almost fall down in the hall."
+
+"I think it was over Alice's cart," she said.  "He couldn't see it in the
+dark."
+
+Mr. Higginbotham's voice and wrath began to rise.  All day he effaced
+himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the
+privilege of being himself.
+
+"I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk."
+
+His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation
+of each word like the die of a machine.  His wife sighed and remained
+silent.  She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and
+always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and her husband.
+
+"He's got it in him, I tell you, from his father," Mr. Higginbotham went
+on accusingly.  "An' he'll croak in the gutter the same way.  You know
+that."
+
+She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching.  They were agreed that Martin
+had come home drunk.  They did not have it in their souls to know beauty,
+or they would have known that those shining eyes and that glowing face
+betokened youth's first vision of love.
+
+"Settin' a fine example to the children," Mr. Higginbotham snorted,
+suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and which he
+resented.  Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him more.  "If he
+does it again, he's got to get out.  Understand!  I won't put up with his
+shinanigan--debotchin' innocent children with his boozing."  Mr.
+Higginbotham liked the word, which was a new one in his vocabulary,
+recently gleaned from a newspaper column.  "That's what it is,
+debotchin'--there ain't no other name for it."
+
+Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on.  Mr.
+Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.
+
+"Has he paid last week's board?" he shot across the top of the newspaper.
+
+She nodded, then added, "He still has some money."
+
+"When is he goin' to sea again?"
+
+"When his pay-day's spent, I guess," she answered.  "He was over to San
+Francisco yesterday looking for a ship.  But he's got money, yet, an'
+he's particular about the kind of ship he signs for."
+
+"It's not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs," Mr. Higginbotham
+snorted.  "Particular!  Him!"
+
+"He said something about a schooner that's gettin' ready to go off to
+some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he'd sail on her
+if his money held out."
+
+"If he only wanted to steady down, I'd give him a job drivin' the wagon,"
+her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his voice.  "Tom's
+quit."
+
+His wife looked alarm and interrogation.
+
+"Quit to-night.  Is goin' to work for Carruthers.  They paid 'm more'n I
+could afford."
+
+"I told you you'd lose 'm," she cried out.  "He was worth more'n you was
+giving him."
+
+"Now look here, old woman," Higginbotham bullied, "for the thousandth
+time I've told you to keep your nose out of the business.  I won't tell
+you again."
+
+"I don't care," she sniffled.  "Tom was a good boy."  Her husband glared
+at her.  This was unqualified defiance.
+
+"If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the wagon,"
+he snorted.
+
+"He pays his board, just the same," was the retort.  "An' he's my
+brother, an' so long as he don't owe you money you've got no right to be
+jumping on him all the time.  I've got some feelings, if I have been
+married to you for seven years."
+
+"Did you tell 'm you'd charge him for gas if he goes on readin' in bed?"
+he demanded.
+
+Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply.  Her revolt faded away, her spirit
+wilting down into her tired flesh.  Her husband was triumphant.  He had
+her.  His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in the sniffles
+she emitted.  He extracted great happiness from squelching her, and she
+squelched easily these days, though it had been different in the first
+years of their married life, before the brood of children and his
+incessant nagging had sapped her energy.
+
+"Well, you tell 'm to-morrow, that's all," he said.  "An' I just want to
+tell you, before I forget it, that you'd better send for Marian to-morrow
+to take care of the children.  With Tom quit, I'll have to be out on the
+wagon, an' you can make up your mind to it to be down below waitin' on
+the counter."
+
+"But to-morrow's wash day," she objected weakly.
+
+"Get up early, then, an' do it first.  I won't start out till ten
+o'clock."
+
+He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his brother-in-
+law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and entered his room, a
+tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-stand, and one chair.  Mr.
+Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a servant when his wife could do the
+work.  Besides, the servant's room enabled them to take in two boarders
+instead of one.  Martin placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair,
+took off his coat, and sat down on the bed.  A screeching of asthmatic
+springs greeted the weight of his body, but he did not notice them.  He
+started to take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster
+wall opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had
+leaked through the roof.  On this befouled background visions began to
+flow and burn.  He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his lips began
+to move and he murmured, "Ruth."
+
+"Ruth."  He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful.  It
+delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition of it.
+"Ruth."  It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with.  Each time he
+murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing the foul wall with
+a golden radiance.  This radiance did not stop at the wall.  It extended
+on into infinity, and through its golden depths his soul went questing
+after hers.  The best that was in him was out in splendid flood.  The
+very thought of her ennobled and purified him, made him better, and made
+him want to be better.  This was new to him.  He had never known women
+who had made him better.  They had always had the counter effect of
+making him beastly.  He did not know that many of them had done their
+best, bad as it was.  Never having been conscious of himself, he did not
+know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and which
+had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth.  Though they had
+often bothered him, he had never bothered about them; and he would never
+have dreamed that there were women who had been better because of him.
+Always in sublime carelessness had he lived, till now, and now it seemed
+to him that they had always reached out and dragged at him with vile
+hands.  This was not just to them, nor to himself.  But he, who for the
+first time was becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to
+judge, and he burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.
+
+He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-glass
+over the wash-stand.  He passed a towel over it and looked again, long
+and carefully.  It was the first time he had ever really seen himself.
+His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that moment they had been filled
+with the ever changing panorama of the world, at which he had been too
+busy gazing, ever to gaze at himself.  He saw the head and face of a
+young fellow of twenty, but, being unused to such appraisement, he did
+not know how to value it.  Above a square-domed forehead he saw a mop of
+brown hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that were a
+delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and fingers tingle
+to pass caresses through it.  But he passed it by as without merit, in
+Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high, square
+forehead,--striving to penetrate it and learn the quality of its content.
+What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his insistent interrogation.
+What was it capable of?  How far would it take him?  Would it take him to
+her?
+
+He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were often
+quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs of the sun-
+washed deep.  He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to her.  He tried to
+imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed in the
+jugglery.  He could successfully put himself inside other men's minds,
+but they had to be men whose ways of life he knew.  He did not know her
+way of life.  She was wonder and mystery, and how could he guess one
+thought of hers?  Well, they were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them
+was neither smallness nor meanness.  The brown sunburn of his face
+surprised him.  He had not dreamed he was so black.  He rolled up his
+shirt-sleeve and compared the white underside if the arm with his face.
+Yes, he was a white man, after all.  But the arms were sunburned, too.  He
+twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and gazed
+underneath where he was least touched by the sun.  It was very white.  He
+laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the thought that it was once
+as white as the underside of his arm; nor did he dream that in the world
+there were few pale spirits of women who could boast fairer or smoother
+skins than he--fairer than where he had escaped the ravages of the sun.
+
+His might have been a cherub's mouth, had not the full, sensuous lips a
+trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth.  At times, so
+tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic.
+They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover.  They could taste the
+sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the sweetness aside and
+command life.  The chin and jaw, strong and just hinting of square
+aggressiveness, helped the lips to command life.  Strength balanced
+sensuousness and had upon it a tonic effect, compelling him to love
+beauty that was healthy and making him vibrate to sensations that were
+wholesome.  And between the lips were teeth that had never known nor
+needed the dentist's care.  They were white and strong and regular, he
+decided, as he looked at them.  But as he looked, he began to be
+troubled.  Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and vaguely
+remembered, was the impression that there were people who washed their
+teeth every day.  They were the people from up above--people in her
+class.  She must wash her teeth every day, too.  What would she think if
+she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all the days of his
+life?  He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form the habit.  He would
+begin at once, to-morrow.  It was not by mere achievement that he could
+hope to win to her.  He must make a personal reform in all things, even
+to tooth-washing and neck-gear, though a starched collar affected him as
+a renunciation of freedom.
+
+He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over the calloused
+palm and gazing at the dirt that was ingrained in the flesh itself and
+which no brush could scrub away.  How different was her palm!  He
+thrilled deliciously at the remembrance.  Like a rose-petal, he thought;
+cool and soft as a snowflake.  He had never thought that a mere woman's
+hand could be so sweetly soft.  He caught himself imagining the wonder of
+a caress from such a hand, and flushed guiltily.  It was too gross a
+thought for her.  In ways it seemed to impugn her high spirituality.  She
+was a pale, slender spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but
+nevertheless the softness of her palm persisted in his thoughts.  He was
+used to the harsh callousness of factory girls and working women.  Well
+he knew why their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was
+soft because she had never used it to work with.  The gulf yawned between
+her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not have to work
+for a living.  He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who did not
+labor.  It towered before him on the wall, a figure in brass, arrogant
+and powerful.  He had worked himself; his first memories seemed connected
+with work, and all his family had worked.  There was Gertrude.  When her
+hands were not hard from the endless housework, they were swollen and red
+like boiled beef, what of the washing.  And there was his sister Marian.
+She had worked in the cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty
+hands were all scarred with the tomato-knives.  Besides, the tips of two
+of her fingers had been left in the cutting machine at the paper-box
+factory the preceding winter.  He remembered the hard palms of his mother
+as she lay in her coffin.  And his father had worked to the last fading
+gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been half an inch thick
+when he died.  But Her hands were soft, and her mother's hands, and her
+brothers'.  This last came to him as a surprise; it was tremendously
+indicative of the highness of their caste, of the enormous distance that
+stretched between her and him.
+
+He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off his
+shoes.  He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman's face and by
+a woman's soft, white hands.  And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on the
+foul plaster-wall appeared a vision.  He stood in front of a gloomy
+tenement house.  It was night-time, in the East End of London, and before
+him stood Margey, a little factory girl of fifteen.  He had seen her home
+after the bean-feast.  She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit
+for swine.  His hand was going out to hers as he said good night.  She
+had put her lips up to be kissed, but he wasn't going to kiss her.
+Somehow he was afraid of her.  And then her hand closed on his and
+pressed feverishly.  He felt her callouses grind and grate on his, and a
+great wave of pity welled over him.  He saw her yearning, hungry eyes,
+and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed from childhood into a
+frightened and ferocious maturity; then he put his arms about her in
+large tolerance and stooped and kissed her on the lips.  Her glad little
+cry rang in his ears, and he felt her clinging to him like a cat.  Poor
+little starveling!  He continued to stare at the vision of what had
+happened in the long ago.  His flesh was crawling as it had crawled that
+night when she clung to him, and his heart was warm with pity.  It was a
+gray scene, greasy gray, and the rain drizzled greasily on the pavement
+stones.  And then a radiant glory shone on the wall, and up through the
+other vision, displacing it, glimmered Her pale face under its crown of
+golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a star.
+
+He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed them.
+Just the same, she told me to call again, he thought.  He took another
+look at himself in the glass, and said aloud, with great solemnity:-
+
+"Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the free library an'
+read up on etiquette.  Understand!"
+
+He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under his body.
+
+"But you've got to quit cussin', Martin, old boy; you've got to quit
+cussin'," he said aloud.
+
+Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and
+audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+He awoke next morning from rosy scenes of dream to a steamy atmosphere
+that smelled of soapsuds and dirty clothes, and that was vibrant with the
+jar and jangle of tormented life.  As he came out of his room he heard
+the slosh of water, a sharp exclamation, and a resounding smack as his
+sister visited her irritation upon one of her numerous progeny.  The
+squall of the child went through him like a knife.  He was aware that the
+whole thing, the very air he breathed, was repulsive and mean.  How
+different, he thought, from the atmosphere of beauty and repose of the
+house wherein Ruth dwelt.  There it was all spiritual.  Here it was all
+material, and meanly material.
+
+"Come here, Alfred," he called to the crying child, at the same time
+thrusting his hand into his trousers pocket, where he carried his money
+loose in the same large way that he lived life in general.  He put a
+quarter in the youngster's hand and held him in his arms a moment,
+soothing his sobs.  "Now run along and get some candy, and don't forget
+to give some to your brothers and sisters.  Be sure and get the kind that
+lasts longest."
+
+His sister lifted a flushed face from the wash-tub and looked at him.
+
+"A nickel'd ha' ben enough," she said.  "It's just like you, no idea of
+the value of money.  The child'll eat himself sick."
+
+"That's all right, sis," he answered jovially.  "My money'll take care of
+itself.  If you weren't so busy, I'd kiss you good morning."
+
+He wanted to be affectionate to this sister, who was good, and who, in
+her way, he knew, loved him.  But, somehow, she grew less herself as the
+years went by, and more and more baffling.  It was the hard work, the
+many children, and the nagging of her husband, he decided, that had
+changed her.  It came to him, in a flash of fancy, that her nature seemed
+taking on the attributes of stale vegetables, smelly soapsuds, and of the
+greasy dimes, nickels, and quarters she took in over the counter of the
+store.
+
+"Go along an' get your breakfast," she said roughly, though secretly
+pleased.  Of all her wandering brood of brothers he had always been her
+favorite.  "I declare I _will_ kiss you," she said, with a sudden stir at
+her heart.
+
+With thumb and forefinger she swept the dripping suds first from one arm
+and then from the other.  He put his arms round her massive waist and
+kissed her wet steamy lips. The tears welled into her eyes--not so much
+from strength of feeling as from the weakness of chronic overwork.  She
+shoved him away from her, but not before he caught a glimpse of her moist
+eyes.
+
+"You'll find breakfast in the oven," she said hurriedly.  "Jim ought to
+be up now.  I had to get up early for the washing.  Now get along with
+you and get out of the house early.  It won't be nice to-day, what of Tom
+quittin' an' nobody but Bernard to drive the wagon."
+
+Martin went into the kitchen with a sinking heart, the image of her red
+face and slatternly form eating its way like acid into his brain.  She
+might love him if she only had some time, he concluded.  But she was
+worked to death.  Bernard Higginbotham was a brute to work her so hard.
+But he could not help but feel, on the other hand, that there had not
+been anything beautiful in that kiss.  It was true, it was an unusual
+kiss.  For years she had kissed him only when he returned from voyages or
+departed on voyages. But this kiss had tasted soapsuds, and the lips, he
+had noticed, were flabby.  There had been no quick, vigorous lip-pressure
+such as should accompany any kiss.  Hers was the kiss of a tired woman
+who had been tired so long that she had forgotten how to kiss.  He
+remembered her as a girl, before her marriage, when she would dance with
+the best, all night, after a hard day's work at the laundry, and think
+nothing of leaving the dance to go to another day's hard work.  And then
+he thought of Ruth and the cool sweetness that must reside in her lips as
+it resided in all about her.  Her kiss would be like her hand-shake or
+the way she looked at one, firm and frank.  In imagination he dared to
+think of her lips on his, and so vividly did he imagine that he went
+dizzy at the thought and seemed to rift through clouds of rose-petals,
+filling his brain with their perfume.
+
+In the kitchen he found Jim, the other boarder, eating mush very
+languidly, with a sick, far-away look in his eyes.  Jim was a plumber's
+apprentice whose weak chin and hedonistic temperament, coupled with a
+certain nervous stupidity, promised to take him nowhere in the race for
+bread and butter.
+
+"Why don't you eat?" he demanded, as Martin dipped dolefully into the
+cold, half-cooked oatmeal mush.  "Was you drunk again last night?"
+
+Martin shook his head.  He was oppressed by the utter squalidness of it
+all.  Ruth Morse seemed farther removed than ever.
+
+"I was," Jim went on with a boastful, nervous giggle.  "I was loaded
+right to the neck.  Oh, she was a daisy.  Billy brought me home."
+
+Martin nodded that he heard,--it was a habit of nature with him to pay
+heed to whoever talked to him,--and poured a cup of lukewarm coffee.
+
+"Goin' to the Lotus Club dance to-night?" Jim demanded.  "They're goin'
+to have beer, an' if that Temescal bunch comes, there'll be a
+rough-house.  I don't care, though.  I'm takin' my lady friend just the
+same.  Cripes, but I've got a taste in my mouth!"
+
+He made a wry face and attempted to wash the taste away with coffee.
+
+"D'ye know Julia?"
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+"She's my lady friend," Jim explained, "and she's a peach.  I'd introduce
+you to her, only you'd win her.  I don't see what the girls see in you,
+honest I don't; but the way you win them away from the fellers is
+sickenin'."
+
+"I never got any away from you," Martin answered uninterestedly.  The
+breakfast had to be got through somehow.
+
+"Yes, you did, too," the other asserted warmly.  "There was Maggie."
+
+"Never had anything to do with her.  Never danced with her except that
+one night."
+
+"Yes, an' that's just what did it," Jim cried out.  "You just danced with
+her an' looked at her, an' it was all off.  Of course you didn't mean
+nothin' by it, but it settled me for keeps.  Wouldn't look at me again.
+Always askin' about you.  She'd have made fast dates enough with you if
+you'd wanted to."
+
+"But I didn't want to."
+
+"Wasn't necessary.  I was left at the pole."  Jim looked at him
+admiringly.  "How d'ye do it, anyway, Mart?"
+
+"By not carin' about 'em," was the answer.
+
+"You mean makin' b'lieve you don't care about them?" Jim queried eagerly.
+
+Martin considered for a moment, then answered, "Perhaps that will do, but
+with me I guess it's different.  I never have cared--much.  If you can
+put it on, it's all right, most likely."
+
+"You should 'a' ben up at Riley's barn last night," Jim announced
+inconsequently.  "A lot of the fellers put on the gloves.  There was a
+peach from West Oakland.  They called 'm 'The Rat.'  Slick as silk.  No
+one could touch 'm.  We was all wishin' you was there.  Where was you
+anyway?"
+
+"Down in Oakland," Martin replied.
+
+"To the show?"
+
+Martin shoved his plate away and got up.
+
+"Comin' to the dance to-night?" the other called after him.
+
+"No, I think not," he answered.
+
+He went downstairs and out into the street, breathing great breaths of
+air.  He had been suffocating in that atmosphere, while the apprentice's
+chatter had driven him frantic.  There had been times when it was all he
+could do to refrain from reaching over and mopping Jim's face in the mush-
+plate.  The more he had chattered, the more remote had Ruth seemed to
+him.  How could he, herding with such cattle, ever become worthy of her?
+He was appalled at the problem confronting him, weighted down by the
+incubus of his working-class station.  Everything reached out to hold him
+down--his sister, his sister's house and family, Jim the apprentice,
+everybody he knew, every tie of life.  Existence did not taste good in
+his mouth.  Up to then he had accepted existence, as he had lived it with
+all about him, as a good thing.  He had never questioned it, except when
+he read books; but then, they were only books, fairy stories of a fairer
+and impossible world.  But now he had seen that world, possible and real,
+with a flower of a woman called Ruth in the midmost centre of it; and
+thenceforth he must know bitter tastes, and longings sharp as pain, and
+hopelessness that tantalized because it fed on hope.
+
+He had debated between the Berkeley Free Library and the Oakland Free
+Library, and decided upon the latter because Ruth lived in Oakland.  Who
+could tell?--a library was a most likely place for her, and he might see
+her there.  He did not know the way of libraries, and he wandered through
+endless rows of fiction, till the delicate-featured French-looking girl
+who seemed in charge, told him that the reference department was
+upstairs.  He did not know enough to ask the man at the desk, and began
+his adventures in the philosophy alcove.  He had heard of book
+philosophy, but had not imagined there had been so much written about it.
+The high, bulging shelves of heavy tomes humbled him and at the same time
+stimulated him.  Here was work for the vigor of his brain.  He found
+books on trigonometry in the mathematics section, and ran the pages, and
+stared at the meaningless formulas and figures.  He could read English,
+but he saw there an alien speech.  Norman and Arthur knew that speech.  He
+had heard them talking it.  And they were her brothers.  He left the
+alcove in despair.  From every side the books seemed to press upon him
+and crush him.
+
+He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge bulked so big.  He
+was frightened.  How could his brain ever master it all?  Later, he
+remembered that there were other men, many men, who had mastered it; and
+he breathed a great oath, passionately, under his breath, swearing that
+his brain could do what theirs had done.
+
+And so he wandered on, alternating between depression and elation as he
+stared at the shelves packed with wisdom.  In one miscellaneous section
+he came upon a "Norrie's Epitome."  He turned the pages reverently.  In a
+way, it spoke a kindred speech.  Both he and it were of the sea.  Then he
+found a "Bowditch" and books by Lecky and Marshall.  There it was; he
+would teach himself navigation.  He would quit drinking, work up, and
+become a captain.  Ruth seemed very near to him in that moment.  As a
+captain, he could marry her (if she would have him).  And if she
+wouldn't, well--he would live a good life among men, because of Her, and
+he would quit drinking anyway.  Then he remembered the underwriters and
+the owners, the two masters a captain must serve, either of which could
+and would break him and whose interests were diametrically opposed.  He
+cast his eyes about the room and closed the lids down on a vision of ten
+thousand books.  No; no more of the sea for him.  There was power in all
+that wealth of books, and if he would do great things, he must do them on
+the land.  Besides, captains were not allowed to take their wives to sea
+with them.
+
+Noon came, and afternoon.  He forgot to eat, and sought on for the books
+on etiquette; for, in addition to career, his mind was vexed by a simple
+and very concrete problem: _When you meet a young lady and she asks you
+to call, how soon can you call_? was the way he worded it to himself.  But
+when he found the right shelf, he sought vainly for the answer.  He was
+appalled at the vast edifice of etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes
+of visiting-card conduct between persons in polite society.  He abandoned
+his search.  He had not found what he wanted, though he had found that it
+would take all of a man's time to be polite, and that he would have to
+live a preliminary life in which to learn how to be polite.
+
+"Did you find what you wanted?" the man at the desk asked him as he was
+leaving.
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered.  "You have a fine library here."
+
+The man nodded.  "We should be glad to see you here often.  Are you a
+sailor?"
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered.  "And I'll come again."
+
+Now, how did he know that? he asked himself as he went down the stairs.
+
+And for the first block along the street he walked very stiff and
+straight and awkwardly, until he forgot himself in his thoughts,
+whereupon his rolling gait gracefully returned to him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin Eden.  He
+was famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands had gripped his
+life with a giant's grasp.  He could not steel himself to call upon her.
+He was afraid that he might call too soon, and so be guilty of an awful
+breach of that awful thing called etiquette.  He spent long hours in the
+Oakland and Berkeley libraries, and made out application blanks for
+membership for himself, his sisters Gertrude and Marian, and Jim, the
+latter's consent being obtained at the expense of several glasses of
+beer.  With four cards permitting him to draw books, he burned the gas
+late in the servant's room, and was charged fifty cents a week for it by
+Mr. Higginbotham.
+
+The many books he read but served to whet his unrest.  Every page of
+every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge.  His hunger fed
+upon what he read, and increased.  Also, he did not know where to begin,
+and continually suffered from lack of preparation.  The commonest
+references, that he could see plainly every reader was expected to know,
+he did not know.  And the same was true of the poetry he read which
+maddened him with delight.  He read more of Swinburne than was contained
+in the volume Ruth had lent him; and "Dolores" he understood thoroughly.
+But surely Ruth did not understand it, he concluded.  How could she,
+living the refined life she did?  Then he chanced upon Kipling's poems,
+and was swept away by the lilt and swing and glamour with which familiar
+things had been invested.  He was amazed at the man's sympathy with life
+and at his incisive psychology.  Psychology was a new word in Martin's
+vocabulary.  He had bought a dictionary, which deed had decreased his
+supply of money and brought nearer the day on which he must sail in
+search of more.  Also, it incensed Mr. Higginbotham, who would have
+preferred the money taking the form of board.
+
+He dared not go near Ruth's neighborhood in the daytime, but night found
+him lurking like a thief around the Morse home, stealing glimpses at the
+windows and loving the very walls that sheltered her.  Several times he
+barely escaped being caught by her brothers, and once he trailed Mr.
+Morse down town and studied his face in the lighted streets, longing all
+the while for some quick danger of death to threaten so that he might
+spring in and save her father.  On another night, his vigil was rewarded
+by a glimpse of Ruth through a second-story window.  He saw only her head
+and shoulders, and her arms raised as she fixed her hair before a mirror.
+It was only for a moment, but it was a long moment to him, during which
+his blood turned to wine and sang through his veins.  Then she pulled
+down the shade.  But it was her room--he had learned that; and thereafter
+he strayed there often, hiding under a dark tree on the opposite side of
+the street and smoking countless cigarettes.  One afternoon he saw her
+mother coming out of a bank, and received another proof of the enormous
+distance that separated Ruth from him.  She was of the class that dealt
+with banks.  He had never been inside a bank in his life, and he had an
+idea that such institutions were frequented only by the very rich and the
+very powerful.
+
+In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution.  Her cleanness and
+purity had reacted upon him, and he felt in his being a crying need to be
+clean.  He must be that if he were ever to be worthy of breathing the
+same air with her.  He washed his teeth, and scrubbed his hands with a
+kitchen scrub-brush till he saw a nail-brush in a drug-store window and
+divined its use.  While purchasing it, the clerk glanced at his nails,
+suggested a nail-file, and so he became possessed of an additional toilet-
+tool.  He ran across a book in the library on the care of the body, and
+promptly developed a penchant for a cold-water bath every morning, much
+to the amazement of Jim, and to the bewilderment of Mr. Higginbotham, who
+was not in sympathy with such high-fangled notions and who seriously
+debated whether or not he should charge Martin extra for the water.
+Another stride was in the direction of creased trousers.  Now that Martin
+was aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the difference between the
+baggy knees of the trousers worn by the working class and the straight
+line from knee to foot of those worn by the men above the working class.
+Also, he learned the reason why, and invaded his sister's kitchen in
+search of irons and ironing-board.  He had misadventures at first,
+hopelessly burning one pair and buying another, which expenditure again
+brought nearer the day on which he must put to sea.
+
+But the reform went deeper than mere outward appearance.  He still
+smoked, but he drank no more.  Up to that time, drinking had seemed to
+him the proper thing for men to do, and he had prided himself on his
+strong head which enabled him to drink most men under the table.  Whenever
+he encountered a chance shipmate, and there were many in San Francisco,
+he treated them and was treated in turn, as of old, but he ordered for
+himself root beer or ginger ale and good-naturedly endured their
+chaffing.  And as they waxed maudlin he studied them, watching the beast
+rise and master them and thanking God that he was no longer as they.  They
+had their limitations to forget, and when they were drunk, their dim,
+stupid spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his heaven of
+intoxicated desire.  With Martin the need for strong drink had vanished.
+He was drunken in new and more profound ways--with Ruth, who had fired
+him with love and with a glimpse of higher and eternal life; with books,
+that had set a myriad maggots of desire gnawing in his brain; and with
+the sense of personal cleanliness he was achieving, that gave him even
+more superb health than what he had enjoyed and that made his whole body
+sing with physical well-being.
+
+One night he went to the theatre, on the blind chance that he might see
+her there, and from the second balcony he did see her.  He saw her come
+down the aisle, with Arthur and a strange young man with a football mop
+of hair and eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him to instant
+apprehension and jealousy.  He saw her take her seat in the orchestra
+circle, and little else than her did he see that night--a pair of slender
+white shoulders and a mass of pale gold hair, dim with distance.  But
+there were others who saw, and now and again, glancing at those about
+him, he noted two young girls who looked back from the row in front, a
+dozen seats along, and who smiled at him with bold eyes.  He had always
+been easy-going.  It was not in his nature to give rebuff.  In the old
+days he would have smiled back, and gone further and encouraged smiling.
+But now it was different.  He did smile back, then looked away, and
+looked no more deliberately.  But several times, forgetting the existence
+of the two girls, his eyes caught their smiles.  He could not re-thumb
+himself in a day, nor could he violate the intrinsic kindliness of his
+nature; so, at such moments, he smiled at the girls in warm human
+friendliness.  It was nothing new to him.  He knew they were reaching out
+their woman's hands to him.  But it was different now.  Far down there in
+the orchestra circle was the one woman in all the world, so different, so
+terrifically different, from these two girls of his class, that he could
+feel for them only pity and sorrow.  He had it in his heart to wish that
+they could possess, in some small measure, her goodness and glory.  And
+not for the world could he hurt them because of their outreaching.  He
+was not flattered by it; he even felt a slight shame at his lowliness
+that permitted it.  He knew, did he belong in Ruth's class, that there
+would be no overtures from these girls; and with each glance of theirs he
+felt the fingers of his own class clutching at him to hold him down.
+
+He left his seat before the curtain went down on the last act, intent on
+seeing Her as she passed out.  There were always numbers of men who stood
+on the sidewalk outside, and he could pull his cap down over his eyes and
+screen himself behind some one's shoulder so that she should not see him.
+He emerged from the theatre with the first of the crowd; but scarcely had
+he taken his position on the edge of the sidewalk when the two girls
+appeared.  They were looking for him, he knew; and for the moment he
+could have cursed that in him which drew women.  Their casual edging
+across the sidewalk to the curb, as they drew near, apprised him of
+discovery.  They slowed down, and were in the thick of the crown as they
+came up with him.  One of them brushed against him and apparently for the
+first time noticed him.  She was a slender, dark girl, with black,
+defiant eyes.  But they smiled at him, and he smiled back.
+
+"Hello," he said.
+
+It was automatic; he had said it so often before under similar
+circumstances of first meetings.  Besides, he could do no less.  There
+was that large tolerance and sympathy in his nature that would permit him
+to do no less.  The black-eyed girl smiled gratification and greeting,
+and showed signs of stopping, while her companion, arm linked in arm,
+giggled and likewise showed signs of halting.  He thought quickly.  It
+would never do for Her to come out and see him talking there with them.
+Quite naturally, as a matter of course, he swung in along-side the dark-
+eyed one and walked with her.  There was no awkwardness on his part, no
+numb tongue.  He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the
+badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the
+preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs.  At the
+corner where the main stream of people flowed onward, he started to edge
+out into the cross street.  But the girl with the black eyes caught his
+arm, following him and dragging her companion after her, as she cried:
+
+"Hold on, Bill!  What's yer rush?  You're not goin' to shake us so sudden
+as all that?"
+
+He halted with a laugh, and turned, facing them.  Across their shoulders
+he could see the moving throng passing under the street lamps.  Where he
+stood it was not so light, and, unseen, he would be able to see Her as
+she passed by.  She would certainly pass by, for that way led home.
+
+"What's her name?" he asked of the giggling girl, nodding at the dark-
+eyed one.
+
+"You ask her," was the convulsed response.
+
+"Well, what is it?" he demanded, turning squarely on the girl in
+question.
+
+"You ain't told me yours, yet," she retorted.
+
+"You never asked it," he smiled.  "Besides, you guessed the first rattle.
+It's Bill, all right, all right."
+
+"Aw, go 'long with you."  She looked him in the eyes, her own sharply
+passionate and inviting.  "What is it, honest?"
+
+Again she looked.  All the centuries of woman since sex began were
+eloquent in her eyes.  And he measured her in a careless way, and knew,
+bold now, that she would begin to retreat, coyly and delicately, as he
+pursued, ever ready to reverse the game should he turn fainthearted.  And,
+too, he was human, and could feel the draw of her, while his ego could
+not but appreciate the flattery of her kindness.  Oh, he knew it all, and
+knew them well, from A to Z.  Good, as goodness might be measured in
+their particular class, hard-working for meagre wages and scorning the
+sale of self for easier ways, nervously desirous for some small pinch of
+happiness in the desert of existence, and facing a future that was a
+gamble between the ugliness of unending toil and the black pit of more
+terrible wretchedness, the way whereto being briefer though better paid.
+
+"Bill," he answered, nodding his head.  "Sure, Pete, Bill an' no other."
+
+"No joshin'?" she queried.
+
+"It ain't Bill at all," the other broke in.
+
+"How do you know?" he demanded.  "You never laid eyes on me before."
+
+"No need to, to know you're lyin'," was the retort.
+
+"Straight, Bill, what is it?" the first girl asked.
+
+"Bill'll do," he confessed.
+
+She reached out to his arm and shook him playfully.  "I knew you was
+lyin', but you look good to me just the same."
+
+He captured the hand that invited, and felt on the palm familiar markings
+and distortions.
+
+"When'd you chuck the cannery?" he asked.
+
+"How'd yeh know?" and, "My, ain't cheh a mind-reader!" the girls
+chorussed.
+
+And while he exchanged the stupidities of stupid minds with them, before
+his inner sight towered the book-shelves of the library, filled with the
+wisdom of the ages.  He smiled bitterly at the incongruity of it, and was
+assailed by doubts.  But between inner vision and outward pleasantry he
+found time to watch the theatre crowd streaming by.  And then he saw Her,
+under the lights, between her brother and the strange young man with
+glasses, and his heart seemed to stand still.  He had waited long for
+this moment.  He had time to note the light, fluffy something that hid
+her queenly head, the tasteful lines of her wrapped figure, the
+gracefulness of her carriage and of the hand that caught up her skirts;
+and then she was gone and he was left staring at the two girls of the
+cannery, at their tawdry attempts at prettiness of dress, their tragic
+efforts to be clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap ribbons, and the
+cheap rings on the fingers.  He felt a tug at his arm, and heard a voice
+saying:-
+
+"Wake up, Bill!  What's the matter with you?"
+
+"What was you sayin'?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, nothin'," the dark girl answered, with a toss of her head.  "I was
+only remarkin'--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Well, I was whisperin' it'd be a good idea if you could dig up a
+gentleman friend--for her" (indicating her companion), "and then, we
+could go off an' have ice-cream soda somewhere, or coffee, or anything."
+
+He was afflicted by a sudden spiritual nausea.  The transition from Ruth
+to this had been too abrupt.  Ranged side by side with the bold, defiant
+eyes of the girl before him, he saw Ruth's clear, luminous eyes, like a
+saint's, gazing at him out of unplumbed depths of purity.  And, somehow,
+he felt within him a stir of power.  He was better than this.  Life meant
+more to him than it meant to these two girls whose thoughts did not go
+beyond ice-cream and a gentleman friend.  He remembered that he had led
+always a secret life in his thoughts.  These thoughts he had tried to
+share, but never had he found a woman capable of understanding--nor a
+man.  He had tried, at times, but had only puzzled his listeners.  And as
+his thoughts had been beyond them, so, he argued now, he must be beyond
+them.  He felt power move in him, and clenched his fists.  If life meant
+more to him, then it was for him to demand more from life, but he could
+not demand it from such companionship as this.  Those bold black eyes had
+nothing to offer.  He knew the thoughts behind them--of ice-cream and of
+something else.  But those saint's eyes alongside--they offered all he
+knew and more than he could guess.  They offered books and painting,
+beauty and repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence.  Behind
+those black eyes he knew every thought process.  It was like clockwork.
+He could watch every wheel go around.  Their bid was low pleasure, narrow
+as the grave, that palled, and the grave was at the end of it.  But the
+bid of the saint's eyes was mystery, and wonder unthinkable, and eternal
+life.  He had caught glimpses of the soul in them, and glimpses of his
+own soul, too.
+
+"There's only one thing wrong with the programme," he said aloud.  "I've
+got a date already."
+
+The girl's eyes blazed her disappointment.
+
+"To sit up with a sick friend, I suppose?" she sneered.
+
+"No, a real, honest date with--" he faltered, "with a girl."
+
+"You're not stringin' me?" she asked earnestly.
+
+He looked her in the eyes and answered: "It's straight, all right.  But
+why can't we meet some other time?  You ain't told me your name yet.  An'
+where d'ye live?"
+
+"Lizzie," she replied, softening toward him, her hand pressing his arm,
+while her body leaned against his.  "Lizzie Connolly.  And I live at
+Fifth an' Market."
+
+He talked on a few minutes before saying good night.  He did not go home
+immediately; and under the tree where he kept his vigils he looked up at
+a window and murmured: "That date was with you, Ruth.  I kept it for
+you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met Ruth
+Morse, and still he dared not call.  Time and again he nerved himself up
+to call, but under the doubts that assailed him his determination died
+away.  He did not know the proper time to call, nor was there any one to
+tell him, and he was afraid of committing himself to an irretrievable
+blunder.  Having shaken himself free from his old companions and old ways
+of life, and having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to
+read, and the long hours he devoted to it would have ruined a dozen pairs
+of ordinary eyes.  But his eyes were strong, and they were backed by a
+body superbly strong.  Furthermore, his mind was fallow.  It had lain
+fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the books was
+concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing.  It had never been jaded by
+study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp teeth
+that would not let go.
+
+It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived centuries, so
+far behind were the old life and outlook.  But he was baffled by lack of
+preparation.  He attempted to read books that required years of
+preliminary specialization.  One day he would read a book of antiquated
+philosophy, and the next day one that was ultra-modern, so that his head
+would be whirling with the conflict and contradiction of ideas.  It was
+the same with the economists.  On the one shelf at the library he found
+Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of
+the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were obsolete.  He was
+bewildered, and yet he wanted to know.  He had become interested, in a
+day, in economics, industry, and politics.  Passing through the City Hall
+Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of which were half a
+dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly carrying on a
+discussion.  He joined the listeners, and heard a new, alien tongue in
+the mouths of the philosophers of the people.  One was a tramp, another
+was a labor agitator, a third was a law-school student, and the remainder
+was composed of wordy workingmen.  For the first time he heard of
+socialism, anarchism, and single tax, and learned that there were warring
+social philosophies.  He heard hundreds of technical words that were new
+to him, belonging to fields of thought that his meagre reading had never
+touched upon.  Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely,
+and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such
+strange expressions.  Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who
+was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who
+baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that _what is is right_,
+and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and the
+father-atom and the mother-atom.
+
+Martin Eden's head was in a state of addlement when he went away after
+several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the definitions
+of a dozen unusual words.  And when he left the library, he carried under
+his arm four volumes: Madam Blavatsky's "Secret Doctrine," "Progress and
+Poverty," "The Quintessence of Socialism," and, "Warfare of Religion and
+Science."  Unfortunately, he began on the "Secret Doctrine."  Every line
+bristled with many-syllabled words he did not understand.  He sat up in
+bed, and the dictionary was in front of him more often than the book.  He
+looked up so many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten
+their meaning and had to look them up again.  He devised the plan of
+writing the definitions in a note-book, and filled page after page with
+them.  And still he could not understand.  He read until three in the
+morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but not one essential thought in
+the text had he grasped.  He looked up, and it seemed that the room was
+lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship upon the sea.  Then he hurled
+the "Secret Doctrine" and many curses across the room, turned off the
+gas, and composed himself to sleep.  Nor did he have much better luck
+with the other three books.  It was not that his brain was weak or
+incapable; it could think these thoughts were it not for lack of training
+in thinking and lack of the thought-tools with which to think.  He
+guessed this, and for a while entertained the idea of reading nothing but
+the dictionary until he had mastered every word in it.
+
+Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, finding his
+greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more understandable.  He
+loved beauty, and there he found beauty.  Poetry, like music, stirred him
+profoundly, and, though he did not know it, he was preparing his mind for
+the heavier work that was to come.  The pages of his mind were blank,
+and, without effort, much he read and liked, stanza by stanza, was
+impressed upon those pages, so that he was soon able to extract great joy
+from chanting aloud or under his breath the music and the beauty of the
+printed words he had read.  Then he stumbled upon Gayley's "Classic
+Myths" and Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," side by side on a library shelf.  It
+was illumination, a great light in the darkness of his ignorance, and he
+read poetry more avidly than ever.
+
+The man at the desk in the library had seen Martin there so often that he
+had become quite cordial, always greeting him with a smile and a nod when
+he entered.  It was because of this that Martin did a daring thing.
+Drawing out some books at the desk, and while the man was stamping the
+cards, Martin blurted out:-
+
+"Say, there's something I'd like to ask you."
+
+The man smiled and paid attention.
+
+"When you meet a young lady an' she asks you to call, how soon can you
+call?"
+
+Martin felt his shirt press and cling to his shoulders, what of the sweat
+of the effort.
+
+"Why I'd say any time," the man answered.
+
+"Yes, but this is different," Martin objected.  "She--I--well, you see,
+it's this way: maybe she won't be there.  She goes to the university."
+
+"Then call again."
+
+"What I said ain't what I meant," Martin confessed falteringly, while he
+made up his mind to throw himself wholly upon the other's mercy.  "I'm
+just a rough sort of a fellow, an' I ain't never seen anything of
+society.  This girl is all that I ain't, an' I ain't anything that she
+is.  You don't think I'm playin' the fool, do you?" he demanded abruptly.
+
+"No, no; not at all, I assure you," the other protested.  "Your request
+is not exactly in the scope of the reference department, but I shall be
+only too pleased to assist you."
+
+Martin looked at him admiringly.
+
+"If I could tear it off that way, I'd be all right," he said.
+
+"I beg pardon?"
+
+"I mean if I could talk easy that way, an' polite, an' all the rest."
+
+"Oh," said the other, with comprehension.
+
+"What is the best time to call?  The afternoon?--not too close to meal-
+time?  Or the evening?  Or Sunday?"
+
+"I'll tell you," the librarian said with a brightening face.  "You call
+her up on the telephone and find out."
+
+"I'll do it," he said, picking up his books and starting away.
+
+He turned back and asked:-
+
+"When you're speakin' to a young lady--say, for instance, Miss Lizzie
+Smith--do you say 'Miss Lizzie'? or 'Miss Smith'?"
+
+"Say 'Miss Smith,'" the librarian stated authoritatively.  "Say 'Miss
+Smith' always--until you come to know her better."
+
+So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.
+
+"Come down any time; I'll be at home all afternoon," was Ruth's reply
+over the telephone to his stammered request as to when he could return
+the borrowed books.
+
+She met him at the door herself, and her woman's eyes took in immediately
+the creased trousers and the certain slight but indefinable change in him
+for the better.  Also, she was struck by his face.  It was almost
+violent, this health of his, and it seemed to rush out of him and at her
+in waves of force.  She felt the urge again of the desire to lean toward
+him for warmth, and marvelled again at the effect his presence produced
+upon her.  And he, in turn, knew again the swimming sensation of bliss
+when he felt the contact of her hand in greeting.  The difference between
+them lay in that she was cool and self-possessed while his face flushed
+to the roots of the hair.  He stumbled with his old awkwardness after
+her, and his shoulders swung and lurched perilously.
+
+Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on easily--more
+easily by far than he had expected.  She made it easy for him; and the
+gracious spirit with which she did it made him love her more madly than
+ever.  They talked first of the borrowed books, of the Swinburne he was
+devoted to, and of the Browning he did not understand; and she led the
+conversation on from subject to subject, while she pondered the problem
+of how she could be of help to him.  She had thought of this often since
+their first meeting.  She wanted to help him.  He made a call upon her
+pity and tenderness that no one had ever made before, and the pity was
+not so much derogatory of him as maternal in her.  Her pity could not be
+of the common sort, when the man who drew it was so much man as to shock
+her with maidenly fears and set her mind and pulse thrilling with strange
+thoughts and feelings.  The old fascination of his neck was there, and
+there was sweetness in the thought of laying her hands upon it.  It
+seemed still a wanton impulse, but she had grown more used to it.  She
+did not dream that in such guise new-born love would epitomize itself.
+Nor did she dream that the feeling he excited in her was love.  She
+thought she was merely interested in him as an unusual type possessing
+various potential excellencies, and she even felt philanthropic about it.
+
+She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different.  He knew
+that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never before desired
+anything in his life.  He had loved poetry for beauty's sake; but since
+he met her the gates to the vast field of love-poetry had been opened
+wide.  She had given him understanding even more than Bulfinch and
+Gayley.  There was a line that a week before he would not have favored
+with a second thought--"God's own mad lover dying on a kiss"; but now it
+was ever insistent in his mind.  He marvelled at the wonder of it and the
+truth; and as he gazed upon her he knew that he could die gladly upon a
+kiss.  He felt himself God's own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood
+could have given him greater pride.  And at last he knew the meaning of
+life and why he had been born.
+
+As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring.  He reviewed
+all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at the door, and
+longed for it again.  His gaze wandered often toward her lips, and he
+yearned for them hungrily.  But there was nothing gross or earthly about
+this yearning.  It gave him exquisite delight to watch every movement and
+play of those lips as they enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were
+not ordinary lips such as all men and women had.  Their substance was not
+mere human clay.  They were lips of pure spirit, and his desire for them
+seemed absolutely different from the desire that had led him to other
+women's lips.  He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical lips upon
+them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor with which one
+would kiss the robe of God.  He was not conscious of this transvaluation
+of values that had taken place in him, and was unaware that the light
+that shone in his eyes when he looked at her was quite the same light
+that shines in all men's eyes when the desire of love is upon them.  He
+did not dream how ardent and masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm
+flame of it was affecting the alchemy of her spirit.  Her penetrative
+virginity exalted and disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts
+to a star-cool chastity, and he would have been startled to learn that
+there was that shining out of his eyes, like warm waves, that flowed
+through her and kindled a kindred warmth.  She was subtly perturbed by
+it, and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted her train
+of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her to grope for
+the remainder of ideas partly uttered.  Speech was always easy with her,
+and these interruptions would have puzzled her had she not decided that
+it was because he was a remarkable type.  She was very sensitive to
+impressions, and it was not strange, after all, that this aura of a
+traveller from another world should so affect her.
+
+The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help him,
+and she turned the conversation in that direction; but it was Martin who
+came to the point first.
+
+"I wonder if I can get some advice from you," he began, and received an
+acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound.  "You remember the
+other time I was here I said I couldn't talk about books an' things
+because I didn't know how?  Well, I've ben doin' a lot of thinkin' ever
+since.  I've ben to the library a whole lot, but most of the books I've
+tackled have ben over my head.  Mebbe I'd better begin at the beginnin'.
+I ain't never had no advantages.  I've worked pretty hard ever since I
+was a kid, an' since I've ben to the library, lookin' with new eyes at
+books--an' lookin' at new books, too--I've just about concluded that I
+ain't ben reading the right kind.  You know the books you find in cattle-
+camps an' fo'c's'ls ain't the same you've got in this house, for
+instance.  Well, that's the sort of readin' matter I've ben accustomed
+to.  And yet--an' I ain't just makin' a brag of it--I've ben different
+from the people I've herded with.  Not that I'm any better than the
+sailors an' cow-punchers I travelled with,--I was cow-punchin' for a
+short time, you know,--but I always liked books, read everything I could
+lay hands on, an'--well, I guess I think differently from most of 'em.
+
+"Now, to come to what I'm drivin' at.  I was never inside a house like
+this.  When I come a week ago, an' saw all this, an' you, an' your
+mother, an' brothers, an' everything--well, I liked it.  I'd heard about
+such things an' read about such things in some of the books, an' when I
+looked around at your house, why, the books come true.  But the thing I'm
+after is I liked it.  I wanted it.  I want it now.  I want to breathe air
+like you get in this house--air that is filled with books, and pictures,
+and beautiful things, where people talk in low voices an' are clean, an'
+their thoughts are clean.  The air I always breathed was mixed up with
+grub an' house-rent an' scrappin' an booze an' that's all they talked
+about, too.  Why, when you was crossin' the room to kiss your mother, I
+thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen.  I've seen a whole
+lot of life, an' somehow I've seen a whole lot more of it than most of
+them that was with me.  I like to see, an' I want to see more, an' I want
+to see it different.
+
+"But I ain't got to the point yet.  Here it is.  I want to make my way to
+the kind of life you have in this house.  There's more in life than
+booze, an' hard work, an' knockin' about.  Now, how am I goin' to get it?
+Where do I take hold an' begin?  I'm willin' to work my passage, you
+know, an' I can make most men sick when it comes to hard work.  Once I
+get started, I'll work night an' day.  Mebbe you think it's funny, me
+askin' you about all this.  I know you're the last person in the world I
+ought to ask, but I don't know anybody else I could ask--unless it's
+Arthur.  Mebbe I ought to ask him.  If I was--"
+
+His voice died away.  His firmly planned intention had come to a halt on
+the verge of the horrible probability that he should have asked Arthur
+and that he had made a fool of himself.  Ruth did not speak immediately.
+She was too absorbed in striving to reconcile the stumbling, uncouth
+speech and its simplicity of thought with what she saw in his face.  She
+had never looked in eyes that expressed greater power.  Here was a man
+who could do anything, was the message she read there, and it accorded
+ill with the weakness of his spoken thought.  And for that matter so
+complex and quick was her own mind that she did not have a just
+appreciation of simplicity.  And yet she had caught an impression of
+power in the very groping of this mind.  It had seemed to her like a
+giant writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down.  Her face
+was all sympathy when she did speak.
+
+"What you need, you realize yourself, and it is education.  You should go
+back and finish grammar school, and then go through to high school and
+university."
+
+"But that takes money," he interrupted.
+
+"Oh!" she cried.  "I had not thought of that.  But then you have
+relatives, somebody who could assist you?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"My father and mother are dead.  I've two sisters, one married, an' the
+other'll get married soon, I suppose.  Then I've a string of
+brothers,--I'm the youngest,--but they never helped nobody.  They've just
+knocked around over the world, lookin' out for number one.  The oldest
+died in India.  Two are in South Africa now, an' another's on a whaling
+voyage, an' one's travellin' with a circus--he does trapeze work.  An' I
+guess I'm just like them.  I've taken care of myself since I was
+eleven--that's when my mother died.  I've got to study by myself, I
+guess, an' what I want to know is where to begin."
+
+"I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar.  Your
+grammar is--"  She had intended saying "awful," but she amended it to "is
+not particularly good."
+
+He flushed and sweated.
+
+"I know I must talk a lot of slang an' words you don't understand.  But
+then they're the only words I know--how to speak.  I've got other words
+in my mind, picked 'em up from books, but I can't pronounce 'em, so I
+don't use 'em."
+
+"It isn't what you say, so much as how you say it.  You don't mind my
+being frank, do you?  I don't want to hurt you."
+
+"No, no," he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness.  "Fire
+away.  I've got to know, an' I'd sooner know from you than anybody else."
+
+"Well, then, you say, 'You was'; it should be, 'You were.'  You say 'I
+seen' for 'I saw.'  You use the double negative--"
+
+"What's the double negative?" he demanded; then added humbly, "You see, I
+don't even understand your explanations."
+
+"I'm afraid I didn't explain that," she smiled.  "A double negative
+is--let me see--well, you say, 'never helped nobody.'  'Never' is a
+negative.  'Nobody' is another negative.  It is a rule that two negatives
+make a positive.  'Never helped nobody' means that, not helping nobody,
+they must have helped somebody."
+
+"That's pretty clear," he said.  "I never thought of it before.  But it
+don't mean they _must_ have helped somebody, does it?  Seems to me that
+'never helped nobody' just naturally fails to say whether or not they
+helped somebody.  I never thought of it before, and I'll never say it
+again."
+
+She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his mind.
+As soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but corrected her
+error.
+
+"You'll find it all in the grammar," she went on.  "There's something
+else I noticed in your speech.  You say 'don't' when you shouldn't.
+'Don't' is a contraction and stands for two words.  Do you know them?"
+
+He thought a moment, then answered, "'Do not.'"
+
+She nodded her head, and said, "And you use 'don't' when you mean 'does
+not.'"
+
+He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.
+
+"Give me an illustration," he asked.
+
+"Well--"  She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she thought,
+while he looked on and decided that her expression was most adorable.
+"'It don't do to be hasty.'  Change 'don't' to 'do not,' and it reads,
+'It do not do to be hasty,' which is perfectly absurd."
+
+He turned it over in his mind and considered.
+
+"Doesn't it jar on your ear?" she suggested.
+
+"Can't say that it does," he replied judicially.
+
+"Why didn't you say, 'Can't say that it do'?" she queried.
+
+"That sounds wrong," he said slowly.  "As for the other I can't make up
+my mind.  I guess my ear ain't had the trainin' yours has."
+
+"There is no such word as 'ain't,'" she said, prettily emphatic.
+
+Martin flushed again.
+
+"And you say 'ben' for 'been,'" she continued; "'come' for 'came'; and
+the way you chop your endings is something dreadful."
+
+"How do you mean?"  He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get down
+on his knees before so marvellous a mind.  "How do I chop?"
+
+"You don't complete the endings.  'A-n-d' spells 'and.'  You pronounce it
+'an'.'  'I-n-g' spells 'ing.'  Sometimes you pronounce it 'ing' and
+sometimes you leave off the 'g.'  And then you slur by dropping initial
+letters and diphthongs.  'T-h-e-m' spells 'them.'  You pronounce it--oh,
+well, it is not necessary to go over all of them.  What you need is the
+grammar.  I'll get one and show you how to begin."
+
+As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had read in
+the etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as to whether he
+was doing the right thing, and fearing that she might take it as a sign
+that he was about to go.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Eden," she called back, as she was leaving the room.
+"What is _booze_?  You used it several times, you know."
+
+"Oh, booze," he laughed.  "It's slang.  It means whiskey an'
+beer--anything that will make you drunk."
+
+"And another thing," she laughed back.  "Don't use 'you' when you are
+impersonal.  'You' is very personal, and your use of it just now was not
+precisely what you meant."
+
+"I don't just see that."
+
+"Why, you said just now, to me, 'whiskey and beer--anything that will
+make you drunk'--make me drunk, don't you see?"
+
+"Well, it would, wouldn't it?"
+
+"Yes, of course," she smiled.  "But it would be nicer not to bring me
+into it.  Substitute 'one' for 'you' and see how much better it sounds."
+
+When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair near his--he
+wondered if he should have helped her with the chair--and sat down beside
+him.  She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads were inclined
+toward each other.  He could hardly follow her outlining of the work he
+must do, so amazed was he by her delightful propinquity.  But when she
+began to lay down the importance of conjugation, he forgot all about her.
+He had never heard of conjugation, and was fascinated by the glimpse he
+was catching into the tie-ribs of language.  He leaned closer to the
+page, and her hair touched his cheek.  He had fainted but once in his
+life, and he thought he was going to faint again.  He could scarcely
+breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his throat and
+suffocating him.  Never had she seemed so accessible as now.  For the
+moment the great gulf that separated them was bridged.  But there was no
+diminution in the loftiness of his feeling for her.  She had not
+descended to him.  It was he who had been caught up into the clouds and
+carried to her.  His reverence for her, in that moment, was of the same
+order as religious awe and fervor.  It seemed to him that he had intruded
+upon the holy of holies, and slowly and carefully he moved his head aside
+from the contact which thrilled him like an electric shock and of which
+she had not been aware.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar,
+reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the books that
+caught his fancy.  Of his own class he saw nothing.  The girls of the
+Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried Jim with
+questions, and some of the fellows who put on the glove at Riley's were
+glad that Martin came no more.  He made another discovery of treasure-
+trove in the library.  As the grammar had shown him the tie-ribs of
+language, so that book showed him the tie-ribs of poetry, and he began to
+learn metre and construction and form, beneath the beauty he loved
+finding the why and wherefore of that beauty.  Another modern book he
+found treated poetry as a representative art, treated it exhaustively,
+with copious illustrations from the best in literature.  Never had he
+read fiction with so keen zest as he studied these books.  And his fresh
+mind, untaxed for twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire,
+gripped hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the student mind.
+
+When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he had
+known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and
+harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with this
+new world and expanded.  His mind made for unity, and he was surprised
+when at first he began to see points of contact between the two worlds.
+And he was ennobled, as well, by the loftiness of thought and beauty he
+found in the books.  This led him to believe more firmly than ever that
+up above him, in society like Ruth and her family, all men and women
+thought these thoughts and lived them.  Down below where he lived was the
+ignoble, and he wanted to purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled
+all his days, and to rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt the upper
+classes.  All his childhood and youth had been troubled by a vague
+unrest; he had never known what he wanted, but he had wanted something
+that he had hunted vainly for until he met Ruth.  And now his unrest had
+become sharp and painful, and he knew at last, clearly and definitely,
+that it was beauty, and intellect, and love that he must have.
+
+During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each time
+was an added inspiration.  She helped him with his English, corrected his
+pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic.  But their intercourse was
+not all devoted to elementary study.  He had seen too much of life, and
+his mind was too matured, to be wholly content with fractions, cube root,
+parsing, and analysis; and there were times when their conversation
+turned on other themes--the last poetry he had read, the latest poet she
+had studied.  And when she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he
+ascended to the topmost heaven of delight.  Never, in all the women he
+had heard speak, had he heard a voice like hers.  The least sound of it
+was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word
+she uttered.  It was the quality of it, the repose, and the musical
+modulation--the soft, rich, indefinable product of culture and a gentle
+soul.  As he listened to her, there rang in the ears of his memory the
+harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and, in lesser degrees of
+harshness, the strident voices of working women and of the girls of his
+own class.  Then the chemistry of vision would begin to work, and they
+would troop in review across his mind, each, by contrast, multiplying
+Ruth's glories.  Then, too, his bliss was heightened by the knowledge
+that her mind was comprehending what she read and was quivering with
+appreciation of the beauty of the written thought.  She read to him much
+from "The Princess," and often he saw her eyes swimming with tears, so
+finely was her aesthetic nature strung.  At such moments her own emotions
+elevated him till he was as a god, and, as he gazed at her and listened,
+he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading its deepest secrets.  And
+then, becoming aware of the heights of exquisite sensibility he attained,
+he decided that this was love and that love was the greatest thing in the
+world.  And in review would pass along the corridors of memory all
+previous thrills and burnings he had known,--the drunkenness of wine, the
+caresses of women, the rough play and give and take of physical
+contests,--and they seemed trivial and mean compared with this sublime
+ardor he now enjoyed.
+
+The situation was obscured to Ruth.  She had never had any experiences of
+the heart.  Her only experiences in such matters were of the books, where
+the facts of ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm of
+unreality; and she little knew that this rough sailor was creeping into
+her heart and storing there pent forces that would some day burst forth
+and surge through her in waves of fire.  She did not know the actual fire
+of love.  Her knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she conceived
+of it as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew or the ripple of quiet
+water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer nights.  Her idea of love
+was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one softly in an
+atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of ethereal calm.  She did
+not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its scorching heat and
+sterile wastes of parched ashes.  She knew neither her own potencies, nor
+the potencies of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of
+illusion.  The conjugal affection of her father and mother constituted
+her ideal of love-affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging,
+without shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence
+with a loved one.
+
+So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange
+individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the effects
+he produced upon her.  It was only natural.  In similar ways she had
+experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild animals in the
+menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or shuddered at the
+bright-ribbed lightning.  There was something cosmic in such things, and
+there was something cosmic in him.  He came to her breathing of large
+airs and great spaces.  The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in
+his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life.  He was
+marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher
+deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon.  He was untamed,
+wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came
+so mildly to her hand.  Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse to
+tame the wild thing.  It was an unconscious impulse, and farthest from
+her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay of him into a
+likeness of her father's image, which image she believed to be the finest
+in the world.  Nor was there any way, out of her inexperience, for her to
+know that the cosmic feel she caught of him was that most cosmic of
+things, love, which with equal power drew men and women together across
+the world, compelled stags to kill each other in the rutting season, and
+drove even the elements irresistibly to unite.
+
+His swift development was a source of surprise and interest.  She
+detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by day, like
+flowers in congenial soil.  She read Browning aloud to him, and was often
+puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave to mooted passages.  It
+was beyond her to realize that, out of his experience of men and women
+and life, his interpretations were far more frequently correct than hers.
+His conceptions seemed naive to her, though she was often fired by his
+daring flights of comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide among the
+stars that she could not follow and could only sit and thrill to the
+impact of unguessed power.  Then she played to him--no longer at him--and
+probed him with music that sank to depths beyond her plumb-line.  His
+nature opened to music as a flower to the sun, and the transition was
+quick from his working-class rag-time and jingles to her classical
+display pieces that she knew nearly by heart.  Yet he betrayed a
+democratic fondness for Wagner, and the "Tannhauser" overture, when she
+had given him the clew to it, claimed him as nothing else she played.  In
+an immediate way it personified his life.  All his past was the Venusburg
+motif, while her he identified somehow with the Pilgrim's Chorus motif;
+and from the exalted state this elevated him to, he swept onward and
+upward into that vast shadow-realm of spirit-groping, where good and evil
+war eternally.
+
+Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind temporary doubts as to
+the correctness of her own definitions and conceptions of music.  But her
+singing he did not question.  It was too wholly her, and he sat always
+amazed at the divine melody of her pure soprano voice.  And he could not
+help but contrast it with the weak pipings and shrill quaverings of
+factory girls, ill-nourished and untrained, and with the raucous
+shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the women of the seaport towns.
+She enjoyed singing and playing to him.  In truth, it was the first time
+she had ever had a human soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him
+was a delight to mould; for she thought she was moulding it, and her
+intentions were good.  Besides, it was pleasant to be with him.  He did
+not repel her.  That first repulsion had been really a fear of her
+undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep.  Though she did not
+know it, she had a feeling in him of proprietary right.  Also, he had a
+tonic effect upon her.  She was studying hard at the university, and it
+seemed to strengthen her to emerge from the dusty books and have the
+fresh sea-breeze of his personality blow upon her.  Strength!  Strength
+was what she needed, and he gave it to her in generous measure.  To come
+into the same room with him, or to meet him at the door, was to take
+heart of life.  And when he had gone, she would return to her books with
+a keener zest and fresh store of energy.
+
+She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was an
+awkward thing to play with souls.  As her interest in Martin increased,
+the remodelling of his life became a passion with her.
+
+"There is Mr. Butler," she said one afternoon, when grammar and
+arithmetic and poetry had been put aside.
+
+"He had comparatively no advantages at first.  His father had been a bank
+cashier, but he lingered for years, dying of consumption in Arizona, so
+that when he was dead, Mr. Butler, Charles Butler he was called, found
+himself alone in the world.  His father had come from Australia, you
+know, and so he had no relatives in California.  He went to work in a
+printing-office,--I have heard him tell of it many times,--and he got
+three dollars a week, at first.  His income to-day is at least thirty
+thousand a year.  How did he do it?  He was honest, and faithful, and
+industrious, and economical.  He denied himself the enjoyments that most
+boys indulge in.  He made it a point to save so much every week, no
+matter what he had to do without in order to save it.  Of course, he was
+soon earning more than three dollars a week, and as his wages increased
+he saved more and more.
+
+"He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to night school.  He had
+his eyes fixed always on the future.  Later on he went to night high
+school.  When he was only seventeen, he was earning excellent wages at
+setting type, but he was ambitious.  He wanted a career, not a
+livelihood, and he was content to make immediate sacrifices for his
+ultimate again.  He decided upon the law, and he entered father's office
+as an office boy--think of that!--and got only four dollars a week.  But
+he had learned how to be economical, and out of that four dollars he went
+on saving money."
+
+She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it.  His face
+was lighted up with interest in the youthful struggles of Mr. Butler; but
+there was a frown upon his face as well.
+
+"I'd say they was pretty hard lines for a young fellow," he remarked.
+"Four dollars a week!  How could he live on it?  You can bet he didn't
+have any frills.  Why, I pay five dollars a week for board now, an'
+there's nothin' excitin' about it, you can lay to that.  He must have
+lived like a dog.  The food he ate--"
+
+"He cooked for himself," she interrupted, "on a little kerosene stove."
+
+"The food he ate must have been worse than what a sailor gets on the
+worst-feedin' deep-water ships, than which there ain't much that can be
+possibly worse."
+
+"But think of him now!" she cried enthusiastically.  "Think of what his
+income affords him.  His early denials are paid for a thousand-fold."
+
+Martin looked at her sharply.
+
+"There's one thing I'll bet you," he said, "and it is that Mr. Butler is
+nothin' gay-hearted now in his fat days.  He fed himself like that for
+years an' years, on a boy's stomach, an' I bet his stomach's none too
+good now for it."
+
+Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.
+
+"I'll bet he's got dyspepsia right now!" Martin challenged.
+
+"Yes, he has," she confessed; "but--"
+
+"An' I bet," Martin dashed on, "that he's solemn an' serious as an old
+owl, an' doesn't care a rap for a good time, for all his thirty thousand
+a year.  An' I'll bet he's not particularly joyful at seein' others have
+a good time.  Ain't I right?"
+
+She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:-
+
+"But he is not that type of man.  By nature he is sober and serious.  He
+always was that."
+
+"You can bet he was," Martin proclaimed.  "Three dollars a week, an' four
+dollars a week, an' a young boy cookin' for himself on an oil-burner an'
+layin' up money, workin' all day an' studyin' all night, just workin' an'
+never playin', never havin' a good time, an' never learnin' how to have a
+good time--of course his thirty thousand came along too late."
+
+His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner sight all the
+thousands of details of the boy's existence and of his narrow spiritual
+development into a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year man.  With the swiftness
+and wide-reaching of multitudinous thought Charles Butler's whole life
+was telescoped upon his vision.
+
+"Do you know," he added, "I feel sorry for Mr. Butler.  He was too young
+to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of thirty
+thousand a year that's clean wasted upon him.  Why, thirty thousand, lump
+sum, wouldn't buy for him right now what ten cents he was layin' up would
+have bought him, when he was a kid, in the way of candy an' peanuts or a
+seat in nigger heaven."
+
+It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth.  Not
+only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but she
+always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or modify
+her own convictions.  Had she been fourteen instead of twenty-four, she
+might have been changed by them; but she was twenty-four, conservative by
+nature and upbringing, and already crystallized into the cranny of life
+where she had been born and formed.  It was true, his bizarre judgments
+troubled her in the moments they were uttered, but she ascribed them to
+his novelty of type and strangeness of living, and they were soon
+forgotten.  Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength of
+their utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that
+accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him.  She would
+never have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her horizon,
+was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with wider and
+deeper concepts.  Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but
+limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.  And so she felt
+that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with
+hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she
+saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers.
+
+"But I have not finished my story," she said.  "He worked, so father
+says, as no other office boy he ever had.  Mr. Butler was always eager to
+work.  He never was late, and he was usually at the office a few minutes
+before his regular time.  And yet he saved his time.  Every spare moment
+was devoted to study.  He studied book-keeping and type-writing, and he
+paid for lessons in shorthand by dictating at night to a court reporter
+who needed practice.  He quickly became a clerk, and he made himself
+invaluable.  Father appreciated him and saw that he was bound to rise.  It
+was on father's suggestion that he went to law college.  He became a
+lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took him in as
+junior partner.  He is a great man.  He refused the United States Senate
+several times, and father says he could become a justice of the Supreme
+Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants to.  Such a life is an
+inspiration to all of us.  It shows us that a man with will may rise
+superior to his environment."
+
+"He is a great man," Martin said sincerely.
+
+But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred upon
+his sense of beauty and life.  He could not find an adequate motive in
+Mr. Butler's life of pinching and privation.  Had he done it for love of
+a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would have understood.  God's
+own mad lover should do anything for the kiss, but not for thirty
+thousand dollars a year.  He was dissatisfied with Mr. Butler's career.
+There was something paltry about it, after all.  Thirty thousand a year
+was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed
+such princely income of all its value.
+
+Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made it
+clear that more remodelling was necessary.  Hers was that common
+insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color,
+creed, and politics are best and right and that other human creatures
+scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they.  It was
+the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew thank God he was
+not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary god-substituting to the
+ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire to shape this man from other
+crannies of life into the likeness of the men who lived in her particular
+cranny of life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a lover's
+desire.  His store of money exhausted, he had shipped before the mast on
+the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon Islands, after eight
+months of failure to find treasure, had witnessed the breaking up of the
+expedition.  The men had been paid off in Australia, and Martin had
+immediately shipped on a deep-water vessel for San Francisco.  Not alone
+had those eight months earned him enough money to stay on land for many
+weeks, but they had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and
+reading.
+
+His was the student's mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
+indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth.  The grammar he had
+taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded brain had
+mastered it.  He noticed the bad grammar used by his shipmates, and made
+a point of mentally correcting and reconstructing their crudities of
+speech.  To his great joy he discovered that his ear was becoming
+sensitive and that he was developing grammatical nerves.  A double
+negative jarred him like a discord, and often, from lack of practice, it
+was from his own lips that the jar came.  His tongue refused to learn new
+tricks in a day.
+
+After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the
+dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary.  He found that
+this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he steadily went over and
+over his lengthening list of pronunciations and definitions, while he
+invariably memorized himself to sleep.  "Never did anything," "if I
+were," and "those things," were phrases, with many variations, that he
+repeated under his breath in order to accustom his tongue to the language
+spoken by Ruth.  "And" and "ing," with the "d" and "g" pronounced
+emphatically, he went over thousands of times; and to his surprise he
+noticed that he was beginning to speak cleaner and more correct English
+than the officers themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin
+who had financed the expedition.
+
+The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into
+possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and Martin had
+washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted access to the
+precious volumes.  For a time, so steeped was he in the plays and in the
+many favorite passages that impressed themselves almost without effort on
+his brain, that all the world seemed to shape itself into forms of
+Elizabethan tragedy or comedy and his very thoughts were in blank verse.
+It trained his ear and gave him a fine appreciation for noble English;
+withal it introduced into his mind much that was archaic and obsolete.
+
+The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he had
+learned of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned much of
+himself.  Along with his humbleness because he knew so little, there
+arose a conviction of power.  He felt a sharp gradation between himself
+and his shipmates, and was wise enough to realize that the difference lay
+in potentiality rather than achievement.  What he could do,--they could
+do; but within him he felt a confused ferment working that told him there
+was more in him than he had done.  He was tortured by the exquisite
+beauty of the world, and wished that Ruth were there to share it with
+him.  He decided that he would describe to her many of the bits of South
+Sea beauty.  The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and
+urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth.  And
+then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea.  He would write.  He
+would be one of the eyes through which the world saw, one of the ears
+through which it heard, one of the hearts through which it felt.  He
+would write--everything--poetry and prose, fiction and description, and
+plays like Shakespeare.  There was career and the way to win to Ruth.  The
+men of literature were the world's giants, and he conceived them to be
+far finer than the Mr. Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and
+could be Supreme Court justices if they wanted to.
+
+Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to
+San Francisco was like a dream.  He was drunken with unguessed power and
+felt that he could do anything.  In the midst of the great and lonely sea
+he gained perspective.  Clearly, and for the first lime, he saw Ruth and
+her world.  It was all visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which
+he could take up in his two hands and turn around and about and examine.
+There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as
+a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it.  To
+write!  The thought was fire in him.  He would begin as soon as he got
+back.  The first thing he would do would be to describe the voyage of the
+treasure-hunters.  He would sell it to some San Francisco newspaper.  He
+would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she would be surprised and
+pleased when she saw his name in print.  While he wrote, he could go on
+studying.  There were twenty-four hours in each day.  He was invincible.
+He knew how to work, and the citadels would go down before him.  He would
+not have to go to sea again--as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a
+vision of a steam yacht.  There were other writers who possessed steam
+yachts.  Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow succeeding at
+first, and for a time he would be content to earn enough money by his
+writing to enable him to go on studying.  And then, after some time,--a
+very indeterminate time,--when he had learned and prepared himself, he
+would write the great things and his name would be on all men's lips.  But
+greater than that, infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have
+proved himself worthy of Ruth.  Fame was all very well, but it was for
+Ruth that his splendid dream arose.  He was not a fame-monger, but merely
+one of God's mad lovers.
+
+Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up his
+old room at Bernard Higginbotham's and set to work.  He did not even let
+Ruth know he was back.  He would go and see her when he finished the
+article on the treasure-hunters.  It was not so difficult to abstain from
+seeing her, because of the violent heat of creative fever that burned in
+him.  Besides, the very article he was writing would bring her nearer to
+him.  He did not know how long an article he should write, but he counted
+the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the San
+Francisco Examiner, and guided himself by that.  Three days, at white
+heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a
+large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked
+up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation
+marks.  He had never thought of such things before; and he promptly set
+to work writing the article over, referring continually to the pages of
+the rhetoric and learning more in a day about composition than the
+average schoolboy in a year.  When he had copied the article a second
+time and rolled it up carefully, he read in a newspaper an item on hints
+to beginners, and discovered the iron law that manuscripts should never
+be rolled and that they should be written on one side of the paper.  He
+had violated the law on both counts.  Also, he learned from the item that
+first-class papers paid a minimum of ten dollars a column.  So, while he
+copied the manuscript a third time, he consoled himself by multiplying
+ten columns by ten dollars.  The product was always the same, one hundred
+dollars, and he decided that that was better than seafaring.  If it
+hadn't been for his blunders, he would have finished the article in three
+days.  One hundred dollars in three days!  It would have taken him three
+months and longer on the sea to earn a similar amount.  A man was a fool
+to go to sea when he could write, he concluded, though the money in
+itself meant nothing to him.  Its value was in the liberty it would get
+him, the presentable garments it would buy him, all of which would bring
+him nearer, swiftly nearer, to the slender, pale girl who had turned his
+life back upon itself and given him inspiration.
+
+He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to the
+editor of the San Francisco Examiner.  He had an idea that anything
+accepted by a paper was published immediately, and as he had sent the
+manuscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on the following
+Sunday.  He conceived that it would be fine to let that event apprise
+Ruth of his return.  Then, Sunday afternoon, he would call and see her.
+In the meantime he was occupied by another idea, which he prided himself
+upon as being a particularly sane, careful, and modest idea.  He would
+write an adventure story for boys and sell it to The Youth's Companion.
+He went to the free reading-room and looked through the files of The
+Youth's Companion.  Serial stories, he found, were usually published in
+that weekly in five instalments of about three thousand words each.  He
+discovered several serials that ran to seven instalments, and decided to
+write one of that length.
+
+He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once--a voyage that was to
+have been for three years and which had terminated in shipwreck at the
+end of six months.  While his imagination was fanciful, even fantastic at
+times, he had a basic love of reality that compelled him to write about
+the things he knew.  He knew whaling, and out of the real materials of
+his knowledge he proceeded to manufacture the fictitious adventures of
+the two boys he intended to use as joint heroes.  It was easy work, he
+decided on Saturday evening.  He had completed on that day the first
+instalment of three thousand words--much to the amusement of Jim, and to
+the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who sneered throughout meal-time
+at the "litery" person they had discovered in the family.
+
+Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in-law's surprise on
+Sunday morning when he opened his Examiner and saw the article on the
+treasure-hunters.  Early that morning he was out himself to the front
+door, nervously racing through the many-sheeted newspaper.  He went
+through it a second time, very carefully, then folded it up and left it
+where he had found it.  He was glad he had not told any one about his
+article.  On second thought he concluded that he had been wrong about the
+speed with which things found their way into newspaper columns.  Besides,
+there had not been any news value in his article, and most likely the
+editor would write to him about it first.
+
+After breakfast he went on with his serial.  The words flowed from his
+pen, though he broke off from the writing frequently to look up
+definitions in the dictionary or to refer to the rhetoric.  He often read
+or re-read a chapter at a time, during such pauses; and he consoled
+himself that while he was not writing the great things he felt to be in
+him, he was learning composition, at any rate, and training himself to
+shape up and express his thoughts.  He toiled on till dark, when he went
+out to the reading-room and explored magazines and weeklies until the
+place closed at ten o'clock.  This was his programme for a week.  Each
+day he did three thousand words, and each evening he puzzled his way
+through the magazines, taking note of the stories, articles, and poems
+that editors saw fit to publish.  One thing was certain: What these
+multitudinous writers did he could do, and only give him time and he
+would do what they could not do.  He was cheered to read in Book News, in
+a paragraph on the payment of magazine writers, not that Rudyard Kipling
+received a dollar per word, but that the minimum rate paid by first-class
+magazines was two cents a word.  The Youth's Companion was certainly
+first class, and at that rate the three thousand words he had written
+that day would bring him sixty dollars--two months' wages on the sea!
+
+On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words long.
+At two cents a word, he calculated, that would bring him four hundred and
+twenty dollars.  Not a bad week's work.  It was more money than he had
+ever possessed at one time.  He did not know how he could spend it all.
+He had tapped a gold mine.  Where this came from he could always get
+more.  He planned to buy some more clothes, to subscribe to many
+magazines, and to buy dozens of reference books that at present he was
+compelled to go to the library to consult.  And still there was a large
+portion of the four hundred and twenty dollars unspent.  This worried him
+until the thought came to him of hiring a servant for Gertrude and of
+buying a bicycle for Marion.
+
+He mailed the bulky manuscript to The Youth's Companion, and on Saturday
+afternoon, after having planned an article on pearl-diving, he went to
+see Ruth.  He had telephoned, and she went herself to greet him at the
+door.  The old familiar blaze of health rushed out from him and struck
+her like a blow.  It seemed to enter into her body and course through her
+veins in a liquid glow, and to set her quivering with its imparted
+strength.  He flushed warmly as he took her hand and looked into her blue
+eyes, but the fresh bronze of eight months of sun hid the flush, though
+it did not protect the neck from the gnawing chafe of the stiff collar.
+She noted the red line of it with amusement which quickly vanished as she
+glanced at his clothes.  They really fitted him,--it was his first made-
+to-order suit,--and he seemed slimmer and better modelled.  In addition,
+his cloth cap had been replaced by a soft hat, which she commanded him to
+put on and then complimented him on his appearance.  She did not remember
+when she had felt so happy.  This change in him was her handiwork, and
+she was proud of it and fired with ambition further to help him.
+
+But the most radical change of all, and the one that pleased her most,
+was the change in his speech.  Not only did he speak more correctly, but
+he spoke more easily, and there were many new words in his vocabulary.
+When he grew excited or enthusiastic, however, he dropped back into the
+old slurring and the dropping of final consonants.  Also, there was an
+awkward hesitancy, at times, as he essayed the new words he had learned.
+On the other hand, along with his ease of expression, he displayed a
+lightness and facetiousness of thought that delighted her.  It was his
+old spirit of humor and badinage that had made him a favorite in his own
+class, but which he had hitherto been unable to use in her presence
+through lack of words and training.  He was just beginning to orientate
+himself and to feel that he was not wholly an intruder.  But he was very
+tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set the pace of sprightliness
+and fancy, keeping up with her but never daring to go beyond her.
+
+He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan to write for a
+livelihood and of going on with his studies.  But he was disappointed at
+her lack of approval.  She did not think much of his plan.
+
+"You see," she said frankly, "writing must be a trade, like anything
+else.  Not that I know anything about it, of course.  I only bring common
+judgment to bear.  You couldn't hope to be a blacksmith without spending
+three years at learning the trade--or is it five years!  Now writers are
+so much better paid than blacksmiths that there must be ever so many more
+men who would like to write, who--try to write."
+
+"But then, may not I be peculiarly constituted to write?" he queried,
+secretly exulting at the language he had used, his swift imagination
+throwing the whole scene and atmosphere upon a vast screen along with a
+thousand other scenes from his life--scenes that were rough and raw,
+gross and bestial.
+
+The whole composite vision was achieved with the speed of light,
+producing no pause in the conversation, nor interrupting his calm train
+of thought.  On the screen of his imagination he saw himself and this
+sweet and beautiful girl, facing each other and conversing in good
+English, in a room of books and paintings and tone and culture, and all
+illuminated by a bright light of steadfast brilliance; while ranged about
+and fading away to the remote edges of the screen were antithetical
+scenes, each scene a picture, and he the onlooker, free to look at will
+upon what he wished.  He saw these other scenes through drifting vapors
+and swirls of sullen fog dissolving before shafts of red and garish
+light.  He saw cowboys at the bar, drinking fierce whiskey, the air
+filled with obscenity and ribald language, and he saw himself with them
+drinking and cursing with the wildest, or sitting at table with them,
+under smoking kerosene lamps, while the chips clicked and clattered and
+the cards were dealt around.  He saw himself, stripped to the waist, with
+naked fists, fighting his great fight with Liverpool Red in the
+forecastle of the Susquehanna; and he saw the bloody deck of the John
+Rogers, that gray morning of attempted mutiny, the mate kicking in death-
+throes on the main-hatch, the revolver in the old man's hand spitting
+fire and smoke, the men with passion-wrenched faces, of brutes screaming
+vile blasphemies and falling about him--and then he returned to the
+central scene, calm and clean in the steadfast light, where Ruth sat and
+talked with him amid books and paintings; and he saw the grand piano upon
+which she would later play to him; and he heard the echoes of his own
+selected and correct words, "But then, may I not be peculiarly
+constituted to write?"
+
+"But no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for
+blacksmithing," she was laughing, "I never heard of one becoming a
+blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship."
+
+"What would you advise?" he asked.  "And don't forget that I feel in me
+this capacity to write--I can't explain it; I just know that it is in
+me."
+
+"You must get a thorough education," was the answer, "whether or not you
+ultimately become a writer.  This education is indispensable for whatever
+career you select, and it must not be slipshod or sketchy.  You should go
+to high school."
+
+"Yes--" he began; but she interrupted with an afterthought:-
+
+"Of course, you could go on with your writing, too."
+
+"I would have to," he said grimly.
+
+"Why?"  She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did not quite like
+the persistence with which he clung to his notion.
+
+"Because, without writing there wouldn't be any high school.  I must live
+and buy books and clothes, you know."
+
+"I'd forgotten that," she laughed.  "Why weren't you born with an
+income?"
+
+"I'd rather have good health and imagination," he answered.  "I can make
+good on the income, but the other things have to be made good for--"  He
+almost said "you," then amended his sentence to, "have to be made good
+for one."
+
+"Don't say 'make good,'" she cried, sweetly petulant.  "It's slang, and
+it's horrid."
+
+He flushed, and stammered, "That's right, and I only wish you'd correct
+me every time."
+
+"I--I'd like to," she said haltingly.  "You have so much in you that is
+good that I want to see you perfect."
+
+He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of being
+moulded by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the image of her
+ideal of man.  And when she pointed out the opportuneness of the time,
+that the entrance examinations to high school began on the following
+Monday, he promptly volunteered that he would take them.
+
+Then she played and sang to him, while he gazed with hungry yearning at
+her, drinking in her loveliness and marvelling that there should not be a
+hundred suitors listening there and longing for her as he listened and
+longed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+He stopped to dinner that evening, and, much to Ruth's satisfaction, made
+a favorable impression on her father.  They talked about the sea as a
+career, a subject which Martin had at his finger-ends, and Mr. Morse
+remarked afterward that he seemed a very clear-headed young man.  In his
+avoidance of slang and his search after right words, Martin was compelled
+to talk slowly, which enabled him to find the best thoughts that were in
+him.  He was more at ease than that first night at dinner, nearly a year
+before, and his shyness and modesty even commended him to Mrs. Morse, who
+was pleased at his manifest improvement.
+
+"He is the first man that ever drew passing notice from Ruth," she told
+her husband.  "She has been so singularly backward where men are
+concerned that I have been worried greatly."
+
+Mr. Morse looked at his wife curiously.
+
+"You mean to use this young sailor to wake her up?" he questioned.
+
+"I mean that she is not to die an old maid if I can help it," was the
+answer.  "If this young Eden can arouse her interest in mankind in
+general, it will be a good thing."
+
+"A very good thing," he commented.  "But suppose,--and we must suppose,
+sometimes, my dear,--suppose he arouses her interest too particularly in
+him?"
+
+"Impossible," Mrs. Morse laughed.  "She is three years older than he,
+and, besides, it is impossible.  Nothing will ever come of it.  Trust
+that to me."
+
+And so Martin's role was arranged for him, while he, led on by Arthur and
+Norman, was meditating an extravagance.  They were going out for a ride
+into the hills Sunday morning on their wheels, which did not interest
+Martin until he learned that Ruth, too, rode a wheel and was going along.
+He did not ride, nor own a wheel, but if Ruth rode, it was up to him to
+begin, was his decision; and when he said good night, he stopped in at a
+cyclery on his way home and spent forty dollars for a wheel.  It was more
+than a month's hard-earned wages, and it reduced his stock of money
+amazingly; but when he added the hundred dollars he was to receive from
+the Examiner to the four hundred and twenty dollars that was the least
+The Youth's Companion could pay him, he felt that he had reduced the
+perplexity the unwonted amount of money had caused him.  Nor did he mind,
+in the course of learning to ride the wheel home, the fact that he ruined
+his suit of clothes.  He caught the tailor by telephone that night from
+Mr. Higginbotham's store and ordered another suit.  Then he carried the
+wheel up the narrow stairway that clung like a fire-escape to the rear
+wall of the building, and when he had moved his bed out from the wall,
+found there was just space enough in the small room for himself and the
+wheel.
+
+Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school
+examination, but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he spent
+the day in the white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and romance that
+burned in him.  The fact that the Examiner of that morning had failed to
+publish his treasure-hunting article did not dash his spirits.  He was at
+too great a height for that, and having been deaf to a twice-repeated
+summons, he went without the heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr.
+Higginbotham invariably graced his table.  To Mr. Higginbotham such a
+dinner was advertisement of his worldly achievement and prosperity, and
+he honored it by delivering platitudinous sermonettes upon American
+institutions and the opportunity said institutions gave to any
+hard-working man to rise--the rise, in his case, which he pointed out
+unfailingly, being from a grocer's clerk to the ownership of
+Higginbotham's Cash Store.
+
+Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished "Pearl-diving" on Monday
+morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high school.  And when,
+days later, he applied for the results of his examinations, he learned
+that he had failed in everything save grammar.
+
+"Your grammar is excellent," Professor Hilton informed him, staring at
+him through heavy spectacles; "but you know nothing, positively nothing,
+in the other branches, and your United States history is abominable--there
+is no other word for it, abominable.  I should advise you--"
+
+Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and
+unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes.  He was professor of physics
+in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre salary, and a
+select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.
+
+"Yes, sir," Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at the desk
+in the library was in Professor Hilton's place just then.
+
+"And I should advise you to go back to the grammar school for at least
+two years.  Good day."
+
+Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though he was surprised at
+Ruth's shocked expression when he told her Professor Hilton's advice.  Her
+disappointment was so evident that he was sorry he had failed, but
+chiefly so for her sake.
+
+"You see I was right," she said.  "You know far more than any of the
+students entering high school, and yet you can't pass the examinations.
+It is because what education you have is fragmentary, sketchy.  You need
+the discipline of study, such as only skilled teachers can give you.  You
+must be thoroughly grounded.  Professor Hilton is right, and if I were
+you, I'd go to night school.  A year and a half of it might enable you to
+catch up that additional six months.  Besides, that would leave you your
+days in which to write, or, if you could not make your living by your
+pen, you would have your days in which to work in some position."
+
+But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school, when am
+I going to see you?--was Martin's first thought, though he refrained from
+uttering it.  Instead, he said:-
+
+"It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school.  But I wouldn't
+mind that if I thought it would pay.  But I don't think it will pay.  I
+can do the work quicker than they can teach me.  It would be a loss of
+time--" he thought of her and his desire to have her--"and I can't afford
+the time.  I haven't the time to spare, in fact."
+
+"There is so much that is necessary."  She looked at him gently, and he
+was a brute to oppose her.  "Physics and chemistry--you can't do them
+without laboratory study; and you'll find algebra and geometry almost
+hopeless without instruction.  You need the skilled teachers, the
+specialists in the art of imparting knowledge."
+
+He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least vainglorious way
+in which to express himself.
+
+"Please don't think I'm bragging," he began.  "I don't intend it that way
+at all.  But I have a feeling that I am what I may call a natural
+student.  I can study by myself.  I take to it kindly, like a duck to
+water.  You see yourself what I did with grammar.  And I've learned much
+of other things--you would never dream how much.  And I'm only getting
+started.  Wait till I get--"  He hesitated and assured himself of the
+pronunciation before he said "momentum.  I'm getting my first real feel
+of things now.  I'm beginning to size up the situation--"
+
+"Please don't say 'size up,'" she interrupted.
+
+"To get a line on things," he hastily amended.
+
+"That doesn't mean anything in correct English," she objected.
+
+He floundered for a fresh start.
+
+"What I'm driving at is that I'm beginning to get the lay of the land."
+
+Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.
+
+"Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room.  Whenever I go into the
+library, I am impressed that way.  The part played by teachers is to
+teach the student the contents of the chart-room in a systematic way.  The
+teachers are guides to the chart-room, that's all.  It's not something
+that they have in their own heads.  They don't make it up, don't create
+it.  It's all in the chart-room and they know their way about in it, and
+it's their business to show the place to strangers who might else get
+lost.  Now I don't get lost easily.  I have the bump of location.  I
+usually know where I'm at--What's wrong now?"
+
+"Don't say 'where I'm at.'"
+
+"That's right," he said gratefully, "where I am.  But where am I at--I
+mean, where am I?  Oh, yes, in the chart-room.  Well, some people--"
+
+"Persons," she corrected.
+
+"Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get along
+without them.  I've spent a lot of time in the chart-room now, and I'm on
+the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to, what
+coasts I want to explore.  And from the way I line it up, I'll explore a
+whole lot more quickly by myself.  The speed of a fleet, you know, is the
+speed of the slowest ship, and the speed of the teachers is affected the
+same way.  They can't go any faster than the ruck of their scholars, and
+I can set a faster pace for myself than they set for a whole schoolroom."
+
+"'He travels the fastest who travels alone,'" she quoted at him.
+
+But I'd travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to blurt
+out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit spaces and
+starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm around her, her
+pale gold hair blowing about his face.  In the same instant he was aware
+of the pitiful inadequacy of speech.  God!  If he could so frame words
+that she could see what he then saw!  And he felt the stir in him, like a
+throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed
+unsummoned on the mirror of his mind.  Ah, that was it!  He caught at the
+hem of the secret.  It was the very thing that the great writers and
+master-poets did.  That was why they were giants.  They knew how to
+express what they thought, and felt, and saw.  Dogs asleep in the sun
+often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that
+made them whine and bark.  He had often wondered what it was.  And that
+was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun.  He saw noble and beautiful
+visions, but he could only whine and bark at Ruth.  But he would cease
+sleeping in the sun.  He would stand up, with open eyes, and he would
+struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes unblinded and tongue untied,
+he could share with her his visioned wealth.  Other men had discovered
+the trick of expression, of making words obedient servitors, and of
+making combinations of words mean more than the sum of their separate
+meanings.  He was stirred profoundly by the passing glimpse at the
+secret, and he was again caught up in the vision of sunlit spaces and
+starry voids--until it came to him that it was very quiet, and he saw
+Ruth regarding him with an amused expression and a smile in her eyes.
+
+"I have had a great visioning," he said, and at the sound of his words in
+his own ears his heart gave a leap.  Where had those words come from?
+They had adequately expressed the pause his vision had put in the
+conversation.  It was a miracle.  Never had he so loftily framed a lofty
+thought.  But never had he attempted to frame lofty thoughts in words.
+That was it.  That explained it.  He had never tried.  But Swinburne had,
+and Tennyson, and Kipling, and all the other poets.  His mind flashed on
+to his "Pearl-diving."  He had never dared the big things, the spirit of
+the beauty that was a fire in him.  That article would be a different
+thing when he was done with it.  He was appalled by the vastness of the
+beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind flashed and
+dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not chant that beauty in
+noble verse as the great poets did.  And there was all the mysterious
+delight and spiritual wonder of his love for Ruth.  Why could he not
+chant that, too, as the poets did?  They had sung of love.  So would he.
+By God!--
+
+And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing.  Carried
+away, he had breathed it aloud.  The blood surged into his face, wave
+upon wave, mastering the bronze of it till the blush of shame flaunted
+itself from collar-rim to the roots of his hair.
+
+"I--I--beg your pardon," he stammered.  "I was thinking."
+
+"It sounded as if you were praying," she said bravely, but she felt
+herself inside to be withering and shrinking.  It was the first time she
+had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she was shocked,
+not merely as a matter of principle and training, but shocked in spirit
+by this rough blast of life in the garden of her sheltered maidenhood.
+
+But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.
+Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything.  He had not had
+a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and succeeding,
+too.  It never entered her head that there could be any other reason for
+her being kindly disposed toward him.  She was tenderly disposed toward
+him, but she did not know it.  She had no way of knowing it.  The placid
+poise of twenty-four years without a single love affair did not fit her
+with a keen perception of her own feelings, and she who had never warmed
+to actual love was unaware that she was warming now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been
+finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by his
+attempts to write poetry.  His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth,
+but they were never completed.  Not in a day could he learn to chant in
+noble verse.  Rhyme and metre and structure were serious enough in
+themselves, but there was, over and beyond them, an intangible and
+evasive something that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could
+not catch and imprison in his own.  It was the elusive spirit of poetry
+itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture.  It seemed
+a glow to him, a warm and trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching,
+though sometimes he was rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving
+them into phrases that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted
+across his vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty.  It was baffling.  He
+ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as
+everybody gibbered.  He read his fragments aloud.  The metre marched
+along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and equally
+faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he felt within
+were lacking.  He could not understand, and time and again, in despair,
+defeated and depressed, he returned to his article.  Prose was certainly
+an easier medium.
+
+Following the "Pearl-diving," he wrote an article on the sea as a career,
+another on turtle-catching, and a third on the northeast trades.  Then he
+tried, as an experiment, a short story, and before he broke his stride he
+had finished six short stories and despatched them to various magazines.
+He wrote prolifically, intensely, from morning till night, and late at
+night, except when he broke off to go to the reading-room, draw books
+from the library, or to call on Ruth.  He was profoundly happy.  Life was
+pitched high.  He was in a fever that never broke.  The joy of creation
+that is supposed to belong to the gods was his.  All the life about
+him--the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the slatternly form of
+his sister, and the jeering face of Mr. Higginbotham--was a dream.  The
+real world was in his mind, and the stories he wrote were so many pieces
+of reality out of his mind.
+
+The days were too short.  There was so much he wanted to study.  He cut
+his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along upon it.
+He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back to five.  He
+could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon any one of his
+pursuits.  It was with regret that he ceased from writing to study, that
+he ceased from study to go to the library, that he tore himself away from
+that chart-room of knowledge or from the magazines in the reading-room
+that were filled with the secrets of writers who succeeded in selling
+their wares.  It was like severing heart strings, when he was with Ruth,
+to stand up and go; and he scorched through the dark streets so as to get
+home to his books at the least possible expense of time.  And hardest of
+all was it to shut up the algebra or physics, put note-book and pencil
+aside, and close his tired eyes in sleep.  He hated the thought of
+ceasing to live, even for so short a time, and his sole consolation was
+that the alarm clock was set five hours ahead.  He would lose only five
+hours anyway, and then the jangling bell would jerk him out of
+unconsciousness and he would have before him another glorious day of
+nineteen hours.
+
+In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was ebbing low, and
+there was no money coming in.  A month after he had mailed it, the
+adventure serial for boys was returned to him by The Youth's Companion.
+The rejection slip was so tactfully worded that he felt kindly toward the
+editor.  But he did not feel so kindly toward the editor of the San
+Francisco Examiner.  After waiting two whole weeks, Martin had written to
+him.  A week later he wrote again.  At the end of the month, he went over
+to San Francisco and personally called upon the editor.  But he did not
+meet that exalted personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of
+tender years and red hair, who guarded the portals.  At the end of the
+fifth week the manuscript came back to him, by mail, without comment.
+There was no rejection slip, no explanation, nothing.  In the same way
+his other articles were tied up with the other leading San Francisco
+papers.  When he recovered them, he sent them to the magazines in the
+East, from which they were returned more promptly, accompanied always by
+the printed rejection slips.
+
+The short stories were returned in similar fashion.  He read them over
+and over, and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out the cause
+of their rejection, until, one day, he read in a newspaper that
+manuscripts should always be typewritten.  That explained it.  Of course
+editors were so busy that they could not afford the time and strain of
+reading handwriting.  Martin rented a typewriter and spent a day
+mastering the machine.  Each day he typed what he composed, and he typed
+his earlier manuscripts as fast as they were returned him.  He was
+surprised when the typed ones began to come back.  His jaw seemed to
+become squarer, his chin more aggressive, and he bundled the manuscripts
+off to new editors.
+
+The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own work.  He
+tried it out on Gertrude.  He read his stories aloud to her.  Her eyes
+glistened, and she looked at him proudly as she said:-
+
+"Ain't it grand, you writin' those sort of things."
+
+"Yes, yes," he demanded impatiently.  "But the story--how did you like
+it?"
+
+"Just grand," was the reply.  "Just grand, an' thrilling, too.  I was all
+worked up."
+
+He could see that her mind was not clear.  The perplexity was strong in
+her good-natured face.  So he waited.
+
+"But, say, Mart," after a long pause, "how did it end?  Did that young
+man who spoke so highfalutin' get her?"
+
+And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made
+artistically obvious, she would say:-
+
+"That's what I wanted to know.  Why didn't you write that way in the
+story?"
+
+One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories, namely,
+that she liked happy endings.
+
+"That story was perfectly grand," she announced, straightening up from
+the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her forehead
+with a red, steamy hand; "but it makes me sad.  I want to cry.  There is
+too many sad things in the world anyway.  It makes me happy to think
+about happy things.  Now if he'd married her, and--You don't mind, Mart?"
+she queried apprehensively.  "I just happen to feel that way, because I'm
+tired, I guess.  But the story was grand just the same, perfectly grand.
+Where are you goin' to sell it?"
+
+"That's a horse of another color," he laughed.
+
+"But if you _did_ sell it, what do you think you'd get for it?"
+
+"Oh, a hundred dollars.  That would be the least, the way prices go."
+
+"My!  I do hope you'll sell it!"
+
+"Easy money, eh?"  Then he added proudly: "I wrote it in two days.  That's
+fifty dollars a day."
+
+He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare.  He would wait
+till some were published, he decided, then she would understand what he
+had been working for.  In the meantime he toiled on.  Never had the
+spirit of adventure lured him more strongly than on this amazing
+exploration of the realm of mind.  He bought the text-books on physics
+and chemistry, and, along with his algebra, worked out problems and
+demonstrations.  He took the laboratory proofs on faith, and his intense
+power of vision enabled him to see the reactions of chemicals more
+understandingly than the average student saw them in the laboratory.
+Martin wandered on through the heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he
+was getting to the nature of things.  He had accepted the world as the
+world, but now he was comprehending the organization of it, the play and
+interplay of force and matter.  Spontaneous explanations of old matters
+were continually arising in his mind.  Levers and purchases fascinated
+him, and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks and tackles at
+sea.  The theory of navigation, which enabled the ships to travel
+unerringly their courses over the pathless ocean, was made clear to him.
+The mysteries of storm, and rain, and tide were revealed, and the reason
+for the existence of trade-winds made him wonder whether he had written
+his article on the northeast trade too soon.  At any rate he knew he
+could write it better now.  One afternoon he went out with Arthur to the
+University of California, and, with bated breath and a feeling of
+religious awe, went through the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and
+listened to a physics professor lecturing to his classes.
+
+But he did not neglect his writing.  A stream of short stories flowed
+from his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of verse--the
+kind he saw printed in the magazines--though he lost his head and wasted
+two weeks on a tragedy in blank verse, the swift rejection of which, by
+half a dozen magazines, dumfounded him.  Then he discovered Henley and
+wrote a series of sea-poems on the model of "Hospital Sketches."  They
+were simple poems, of light and color, and romance and adventure.  "Sea
+Lyrics," he called them, and he judged them to be the best work he had
+yet done.  There were thirty, and he completed them in a month, doing one
+a day after having done his regular day's work on fiction, which day's
+work was the equivalent to a week's work of the average successful
+writer.  The toil meant nothing to him.  It was not toil.  He was finding
+speech, and all the beauty and wonder that had been pent for years behind
+his inarticulate lips was now pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.
+
+He showed the "Sea Lyrics" to no one, not even to the editors.  He had
+become distrustful of editors.  But it was not distrust that prevented
+him from submitting the "Lyrics."  They were so beautiful to him that he
+was impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some glorious, far-off
+time when he would dare to read to her what he had written.  Against that
+time he kept them with him, reading them aloud, going over them until he
+knew them by heart.
+
+He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his sleep, his
+subjective mind rioting through his five hours of surcease and combining
+the thoughts and events of the day into grotesque and impossible marvels.
+In reality, he never rested, and a weaker body or a less firmly poised
+brain would have been prostrated in a general break-down.  His late
+afternoon calls on Ruth were rarer now, for June was approaching, when
+she would take her degree and finish with the university.  Bachelor of
+Arts!--when he thought of her degree, it seemed she fled beyond him
+faster than he could pursue.
+
+One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually
+stayed for dinner and for music afterward.  Those were his red-letter
+days.  The atmosphere of the house, in such contrast with that in which
+he lived, and the mere nearness to her, sent him forth each time with a
+firmer grip on his resolve to climb the heights.  In spite of the beauty
+in him, and the aching desire to create, it was for her that he
+struggled.  He was a lover first and always.  All other things he
+subordinated to love.
+
+Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his
+love-adventure.  The world itself was not so amazing because of the atoms
+and molecules that composed it according to the propulsions of
+irresistible force; what made it amazing was the fact that Ruth lived in
+it.  She was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or dreamed, or
+guessed.
+
+But he was oppressed always by her remoteness.  She was so far from him,
+and he did not know how to approach her.  He had been a success with
+girls and women in his own class; but he had never loved any of them,
+while he did love her, and besides, she was not merely of another class.
+His very love elevated her above all classes.  She was a being apart, so
+far apart that he did not know how to draw near to her as a lover should
+draw near.  It was true, as he acquired knowledge and language, that he
+was drawing nearer, talking her speech, discovering ideas and delights in
+common; but this did not satisfy his lover's yearning.  His lover's
+imagination had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any
+kinship with him in the flesh.  It was his own love that thrust her from
+him and made her seem impossible for him.  Love itself denied him the one
+thing that it desired.
+
+And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was bridged for
+a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it was ever narrower.
+They had been eating cherries--great, luscious, black cherries with a
+juice of the color of dark wine.  And later, as she read aloud to him
+from "The Princess," he chanced to notice the stain of the cherries on
+her lips.  For the moment her divinity was shattered.  She was clay,
+after all, mere clay, subject to the common law of clay as his clay was
+subject, or anybody's clay.  Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries
+dyed them as cherries dyed his.  And if so with her lips, then was it so
+with all of her.  She was woman, all woman, just like any woman.  It came
+upon him abruptly.  It was a revelation that stunned him.  It was as if
+he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen worshipped purity
+polluted.
+
+Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began pounding and
+challenging him to play the lover with this woman who was not a spirit
+from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a cherry could stain.  He
+trembled at the audacity of his thought; but all his soul was singing,
+and reason, in a triumphant paean, assured him he was right.  Something
+of this change in him must have reached her, for she paused from her
+reading, looked up at him, and smiled.  His eyes dropped from her blue
+eyes to her lips, and the sight of the stain maddened him.  His arms all
+but flashed out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless
+life.  She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will fought to
+hold him back.
+
+"You were not following a word," she pouted.
+
+Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he looked
+into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of what he
+felt, he became abashed.  He had indeed in thought dared too far.  Of all
+the women he had known there was no woman who would not have guessed--save
+her.  And she had not guessed.  There was the difference.  She was
+different.  He was appalled by his own grossness, awed by her clear
+innocence, and he gazed again at her across the gulf.  The bridge had
+broken down.
+
+But still the incident had brought him nearer.  The memory of it
+persisted, and in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt upon
+it eagerly.  The gulf was never again so wide.  He had accomplished a
+distance vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts, or a dozen
+bachelorships.  She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of
+purity; but cherries stained her lips.  She was subject to the laws of
+the universe just as inexorably as he was.  She had to eat to live, and
+when she got her feet wet, she caught cold.  But that was not the point.
+If she could feel hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, then could she
+feel love--and love for a man.  Well, he was a man.  And why could he not
+be the man?  "It's up to me to make good," he would murmur fervently.  "I
+will be _the_ man.  I will make myself _the_ man.  I will make good."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry the
+beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain,
+Martin was called to the telephone.
+
+"It's a lady's voice, a fine lady's," Mr. Higginbotham, who had called
+him, jeered.
+
+Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a wave
+of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth's voice.  In his battle with
+the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the sound of her voice
+his love for her smote him like a sudden blow.  And such a
+voice!--delicate and sweet, like a strain of music heard far off and
+faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect tone, crystal-pure.
+No mere woman had a voice like that.  There was something celestial about
+it, and it came from other worlds.  He could scarcely hear what it said,
+so ravished was he, though he controlled his face, for he knew that Mr.
+Higginbotham's ferret eyes were fixed upon him.
+
+It was not much that Ruth wanted to say--merely that Norman had been
+going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a headache,
+and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and that if he had
+no other engagement, would he be good enough to take her?
+
+Would he!  He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice.  It was
+amazing.  He had always seen her in her own house.  And he had never
+dared to ask her to go anywhere with him.  Quite irrelevantly, still at
+the telephone and talking with her, he felt an overpowering desire to die
+for her, and visions of heroic sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his
+whirling brain.  He loved her so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.  In
+that moment of mad happiness that she should go out with him, go to a
+lecture with him--with him, Martin Eden--she soared so far above him that
+there seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her.  It was the
+only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty emotion
+he felt for her.  It was the sublime abnegation of true love that comes
+to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone, in a whirlwind
+of fire and glory; and to die for her, he felt, was to have lived and
+loved well.  And he was only twenty-one, and he had never been in love
+before.
+
+His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from the
+organ which had stirred him.  His eyes were shining like an angel's, and
+his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and
+holy.
+
+"Makin' dates outside, eh?" his brother-in-law sneered.  "You know what
+that means.  You'll be in the police court yet."
+
+But Martin could not come down from the height.  Not even the bestiality
+of the allusion could bring him back to earth.  Anger and hurt were
+beneath him.  He had seen a great vision and was as a god, and he could
+feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot of a man.  He did not
+look at him, and though his eyes passed over him, he did not see him; and
+as in a dream he passed out of the room to dress.  It was not until he
+had reached his own room and was tying his necktie that he became aware
+of a sound that lingered unpleasantly in his ears.  On investigating this
+sound he identified it as the final snort of Bernard Higginbotham, which
+somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.
+
+As Ruth's front door closed behind them and he came down the steps with
+her, he found himself greatly perturbed.  It was not unalloyed bliss,
+taking her to the lecture.  He did not know what he ought to do.  He had
+seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that the women took the
+men's arms.  But then, again, he had seen them when they didn't; and he
+wondered if it was only in the evening that arms were taken, or only
+between husbands and wives and relatives.
+
+Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie.  Minnie had
+always been a stickler.  She had called him down the second time she
+walked out with him, because he had gone along on the inside, and she had
+laid the law down to him that a gentleman always walked on the
+outside--when he was with a lady.  And Minnie had made a practice of
+kicking his heels, whenever they crossed from one side of the street to
+the other, to remind him to get over on the outside.  He wondered where
+she had got that item of etiquette, and whether it had filtered down from
+above and was all right.
+
+It wouldn't do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had
+reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind Ruth and took up his station on
+the outside.  Then the other problem presented itself.  Should he offer
+her his arm?  He had never offered anybody his arm in his life.  The
+girls he had known never took the fellows' arms.  For the first several
+times they walked freely, side by side, and after that it was arms around
+the waists, and heads against the fellows' shoulders where the streets
+were unlighted.  But this was different.  She wasn't that kind of a girl.
+He must do something.
+
+He crooked the arm next to her--crooked it very slightly and with secret
+tentativeness, not invitingly, but just casually, as though he was
+accustomed to walk that way.  And then the wonderful thing happened.  He
+felt her hand upon his arm.  Delicious thrills ran through him at the
+contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed that he had left the solid
+earth and was flying with her through the air.  But he was soon back
+again, perturbed by a new complication.  They were crossing the street.
+This would put him on the inside.  He should be on the outside.  Should
+he therefore drop her arm and change over?  And if he did so, would he
+have to repeat the manoeuvre the next time?  And the next?  There was
+something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about and play the
+fool.  Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and when he found
+himself on the inside, he talked quickly and earnestly, making a show of
+being carried away by what he was saying, so that, in case he was wrong
+in not changing sides, his enthusiasm would seem the cause for his
+carelessness.
+
+As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem.  In
+the blaze of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her giggly
+friend.  Only for an instant he hesitated, then his hand went up and his
+hat came off.  He could not be disloyal to his kind, and it was to more
+than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was lifted.  She nodded and looked at
+him boldly, not with soft and gentle eyes like Ruth's, but with eyes that
+were handsome and hard, and that swept on past him to Ruth and itemized
+her face and dress and station.  And he was aware that Ruth looked, too,
+with quick eyes that were timid and mild as a dove's, but which saw, in a
+look that was a flutter on and past, the working-class girl in her cheap
+finery and under the strange hat that all working-class girls were
+wearing just then.
+
+"What a pretty girl!" Ruth said a moment later.
+
+Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-
+
+"I don't know.  I guess it's all a matter of personal taste, but she
+doesn't strike me as being particularly pretty."
+
+"Why, there isn't one woman in ten thousand with features as regular as
+hers.  They are splendid.  Her face is as clear-cut as a cameo.  And her
+eyes are beautiful."
+
+"Do you think so?" Martin queried absently, for to him there was only one
+beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her hand upon his
+arm.
+
+"Do I think so?  If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr. Eden,
+and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be fairly dazzled
+by her, and so would all men."
+
+"She would have to be taught how to speak," he commented, "or else most
+of the men wouldn't understand her.  I'm sure you couldn't understand a
+quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally."
+
+"Nonsense!  You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your point."
+
+"You forget how I talked when you first met me.  I have learned a new
+language since then.  Before that time I talked as that girl talks.  Now
+I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to
+explain that you do not know that other girl's language.  And do you know
+why she carries herself the way she does?  I think about such things now,
+though I never used to think about them, and I am beginning to
+understand--much."
+
+"But why does she?"
+
+"She has worked long hours for years at machines.  When one's body is
+young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like putty
+according to the nature of the work.  I can tell at a glance the trades
+of many workingmen I meet on the street.  Look at me.  Why am I rolling
+all about the shop?  Because of the years I put in on the sea.  If I'd
+put in the same years cow-punching, with my body young and pliable, I
+wouldn't be rolling now, but I'd be bow-legged.  And so with that girl.
+You noticed that her eyes were what I might call hard.  She has never
+been sheltered.  She has had to take care of herself, and a young girl
+can't take care of herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like--like
+yours, for example."
+
+"I think you are right," Ruth said in a low voice.  "And it is too bad.
+She is such a pretty girl."
+
+He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity.  And then he
+remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his fortune
+that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm to a lecture.
+
+Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass,
+that night when he got back to his room.  He gazed at himself long and
+curiously.  Who are you?  What are you?  Where do you belong?  You belong
+by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.  You belong with the legions of
+toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful.  You belong with
+the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and
+stenches.  There are the stale vegetables now.  Those potatoes are
+rotting.  Smell them, damn you, smell them.  And yet you dare to open the
+books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful
+paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own
+kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys
+and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles beyond you
+and who lives in the stars!  Who are you? and what are you? damn you!  And
+are you going to make good?
+
+He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge of
+the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes.  Then he got out note-book
+and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations, while the hours
+slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of dawn flooded against
+his window.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers that
+held forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was responsible
+for the great discovery.  Once or twice in the month, while riding
+through the park on his way to the library, Martin dismounted from his
+wheel and listened to the arguments, and each time he tore himself away
+reluctantly.  The tone of discussion was much lower than at Mr. Morse's
+table.  The men were not grave and dignified.  They lost their tempers
+easily and called one another names, while oaths and obscene allusions
+were frequent on their lips.  Once or twice he had seen them come to
+blows.  And yet, he knew not why, there seemed something vital about the
+stuff of these men's thoughts.  Their logomachy was far more stimulating
+to his intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse.
+These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and
+fought one another's ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to be
+more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.
+
+Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park, but
+one afternoon a disciple of Spencer's appeared, a seedy tramp with a
+dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the absence of a
+shirt.  Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and
+the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully
+held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, "There is no god but
+the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet."  Martin was puzzled
+as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library
+he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because
+of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned "First Principles,"
+Martin drew out that volume.
+
+So the great discovery began.  Once before he had tried Spencer, and
+choosing the "Principles of Psychology" to begin with, he had failed as
+abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky.  There had been no
+understanding the book, and he had returned it unread.  But this night,
+after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a sonnet, he got into bed
+and opened "First Principles."  Morning found him still reading.  It was
+impossible for him to sleep.  Nor did he write that day.  He lay on the
+bed till his body grew tired, when he tried the hard floor, reading on
+his back, the book held in the air above him, or changing from side to
+side.  He slept that night, and did his writing next morning, and then
+the book tempted him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to
+everything and oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth
+gave to him.  His first consciousness of the immediate world about him
+was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know
+if he thought they were running a restaurant.
+
+Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days.  He wanted to
+know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the
+world.  But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had known, and
+that he never could have known had he continued his sailing and wandering
+forever.  He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing
+detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making superficial
+little generalizations--and all and everything quite unrelated in a
+capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance.  The mechanism of the
+flight of birds he had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but
+it had never entered his head to try to explain the process whereby
+birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been developed.  He had never
+dreamed there was such a process.  That birds should have come to be, was
+unguessed.  They always had been.  They just happened.
+
+And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything.  His ignorant
+and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless.  The medieval
+metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served the
+sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers.  In similar
+manner his attempt to study evolution had been confined to a hopelessly
+technical volume by Romanes.  He had understood nothing, and the only
+idea he had gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a
+lot of little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies.  And
+now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but an accepted process
+of development; that scientists no longer disagreed about it, their only
+differences being over the method of evolution.
+
+And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him, reducing
+everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to
+his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization that it was like
+the model of a ship such as sailors make and put into glass bottles.
+There was no caprice, no chance.  All was law.  It was in obedience to
+law that the bird flew, and it was in obedience to the same law that
+fermenting slime had writhed and squirmed and put out legs and wings and
+become a bird.
+
+Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and here
+he was at a higher pitch than ever.  All the hidden things were laying
+their secrets bare.  He was drunken with comprehension.  At night,
+asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in the
+day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon
+the world he had just discovered.  At table he failed to hear the
+conversation about petty and ignoble things, his eager mind seeking out
+and following cause and effect in everything before him.  In the meat on
+the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its energy back through all
+its transformations to its source a hundred million miles away, or traced
+its energy ahead to the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to
+cut the meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to
+cut the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his
+brain.  He was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the
+"Bughouse," whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister's face,
+nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham's finger, whereby he
+imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in his brother-in-law's head.
+
+What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the correlation of
+knowledge--of all knowledge.  He had been curious to know things, and
+whatever he acquired he had filed away in separate memory compartments in
+his brain.  Thus, on the subject of sailing he had an immense store.  On
+the subject of woman he had a fairly large store.  But these two subjects
+had been unrelated.  Between the two memory compartments there had been
+no connection.  That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any
+connection whatever between a woman with hysterics and a schooner
+carrying a weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as
+ridiculous and impossible.  But Herbert Spencer had shown him not only
+that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for there to be no
+connection.  All things were related to all other things from the
+farthermost star in the wastes of space to the myriads of atoms in the
+grain of sand under one's foot.  This new concept was a perpetual
+amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually in tracing
+the relationship between all things under the sun and on the other side
+of the sun.  He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and was
+unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them
+all--kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes,
+rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions,
+illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and
+tobacco.  Thus, he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it,
+or wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a terrified
+traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal, but
+observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there was to know.
+And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the universe, and
+life, and his own life in the midst of it all.
+
+"You fool!" he cried at his image in the looking-glass.  "You wanted to
+write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write about.
+What did you have in you?--some childish notions, a few half-baked
+sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance,
+a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love
+and as futile as your ignorance.  And you wanted to write!  Why, you're
+just on the edge of beginning to get something in you to write about.  You
+wanted to create beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about
+the nature of beauty?  You wanted to write about life when you knew
+nothing of the essential characteristics of life.  You wanted to write
+about the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese
+puzzle to you and all that you could have written would have been about
+what you did not know of the scheme of existence.  But cheer up, Martin,
+my boy.  You'll write yet.  You know a little, a very little, and you're
+on the right road now to know more.  Some day, if you're lucky, you may
+come pretty close to knowing all that may be known.  Then you will
+write."
+
+He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his joy and
+wonder in it.  But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic over it.  She
+tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it from her own
+studies.  It did not stir her deeply, as it did him, and he would have
+been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it was not new and fresh
+to her as it was to him.  Arthur and Norman, he found, believed in
+evolution and had read Spencer, though it did not seem to have made any
+vital impression upon them, while the young fellow with the glasses and
+the mop of hair, Will Olney, sneered disagreeably at Spencer and repeated
+the epigram, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is
+his prophet."
+
+But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that Olney
+was not in love with Ruth.  Later, he was dumfounded to learn from
+various little happenings not only that Olney did not care for Ruth, but
+that he had a positive dislike for her.  Martin could not understand
+this.  It was a bit of phenomena that he could not correlate with all the
+rest of the phenomena in the universe.  But nevertheless he felt sorry
+for the young fellow because of the great lack in his nature that
+prevented him from a proper appreciation of Ruth's fineness and beauty.
+They rode out into the hills several Sundays on their wheels, and Martin
+had ample opportunity to observe the armed truce that existed between
+Ruth and Olney.  The latter chummed with Norman, throwing Arthur and
+Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.
+
+Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was with
+Ruth, and great, also, because they were putting him more on a par with
+the young men of her class.  In spite of their long years of disciplined
+education, he was finding himself their intellectual equal, and the hours
+spent with them in conversation was so much practice for him in the use
+of the grammar he had studied so hard.  He had abandoned the etiquette
+books, falling back upon observation to show him the right things to do.
+Except when carried away by his enthusiasm, he was always on guard,
+keenly watchful of their actions and learning their little courtesies and
+refinements of conduct.
+
+The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a source of
+surprise to Martin.  "Herbert Spencer," said the man at the desk in the
+library, "oh, yes, a great mind."  But the man did not seem to know
+anything of the content of that great mind.  One evening, at dinner, when
+Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the conversation upon Spencer.  Mr.
+Morse bitterly arraigned the English philosopher's agnosticism, but
+confessed that he had not read "First Principles"; while Mr. Butler
+stated that he had no patience with Spencer, had never read a line of
+him, and had managed to get along quite well without him.  Doubts arose
+in Martin's mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would have
+accepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up.  As it was, he
+found Spencer's explanation of things convincing; and, as he phrased it
+to himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent to a navigator
+throwing the compass and chronometer overboard.  So Martin went on into a
+thorough study of evolution, mastering more and more the subject himself,
+and being convinced by the corroborative testimony of a thousand
+independent writers.  The more he studied, the more vistas he caught of
+fields of knowledge yet unexplored, and the regret that days were only
+twenty-four hours long became a chronic complaint with him.
+
+One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up algebra
+and geometry.  Trigonometry he had not even attempted.  Then he cut
+chemistry from his study-list, retaining only physics.
+
+"I am not a specialist," he said, in defence, to Ruth.  "Nor am I going
+to try to be a specialist.  There are too many special fields for any one
+man, in a whole lifetime, to master a tithe of them.  I must pursue
+general knowledge.  When I need the work of specialists, I shall refer to
+their books."
+
+"But that is not like having the knowledge yourself," she protested.
+
+"But it is unnecessary to have it.  We profit from the work of the
+specialists.  That's what they are for.  When I came in, I noticed the
+chimney-sweeps at work.  They're specialists, and when they get done, you
+will enjoy clean chimneys without knowing anything about the construction
+of chimneys."
+
+"That's far-fetched, I am afraid."
+
+She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in her gaze and
+manner.  But he was convinced of the rightness of his position.
+
+"All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in the world, in
+fact, rely on the specialists.  Herbert Spencer did that.  He generalized
+upon the findings of thousands of investigators.  He would have had to
+live a thousand lives in order to do it all himself.  And so with Darwin.
+He took advantage of all that had been learned by the florists and cattle-
+breeders."
+
+"You're right, Martin," Olney said.  "You know what you're after, and
+Ruth doesn't.  She doesn't know what she is after for herself even."
+
+"--Oh, yes," Olney rushed on, heading off her objection, "I know you call
+it general culture.  But it doesn't matter what you study if you want
+general culture.  You can study French, or you can study German, or cut
+them both out and study Esperanto, you'll get the culture tone just the
+same.  You can study Greek or Latin, too, for the same purpose, though it
+will never be any use to you.  It will be culture, though.  Why, Ruth
+studied Saxon, became clever in it,--that was two years ago,--and all
+that she remembers of it now is 'Whan that sweet Aprile with his schowers
+soote'--isn't that the way it goes?"
+
+"But it's given you the culture tone just the same," he laughed, again
+heading her off.  "I know.  We were in the same classes."
+
+"But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to something," Ruth
+cried out.  Her eyes were flashing, and in her cheeks were two spots of
+color.  "Culture is the end in itself."
+
+"But that is not what Martin wants."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"What do you want, Martin?" Olney demanded, turning squarely upon him.
+
+Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.
+
+"Yes, what do you want?" Ruth asked.  "That will settle it."
+
+"Yes, of course, I want culture," Martin faltered.  "I love beauty, and
+culture will give me a finer and keener appreciation of beauty."
+
+She nodded her head and looked triumph.
+
+"Rot, and you know it," was Olney's comment.  "Martin's after career, not
+culture.  It just happens that culture, in his case, is incidental to
+career.  If he wanted to be a chemist, culture would be unnecessary.
+Martin wants to write, but he's afraid to say so because it will put you
+in the wrong."
+
+"And why does Martin want to write?" he went on.  "Because he isn't
+rolling in wealth.  Why do you fill your head with Saxon and general
+culture?  Because you don't have to make your way in the world.  Your
+father sees to that.  He buys your clothes for you, and all the rest.
+What rotten good is our education, yours and mine and Arthur's and
+Norman's?  We're soaked in general culture, and if our daddies went broke
+to-day, we'd be falling down to-morrow on teachers' examinations.  The
+best job you could get, Ruth, would be a country school or music teacher
+in a girls' boarding-school."
+
+"And pray what would you do?" she asked.
+
+"Not a blessed thing.  I could earn a dollar and a half a day, common
+labor, and I might get in as instructor in Hanley's cramming joint--I say
+might, mind you, and I might be chucked out at the end of the week for
+sheer inability."
+
+Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced that
+Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he accorded
+Ruth.  A new conception of love formed in his mind as he listened.  Reason
+had nothing to do with love.  It mattered not whether the woman he loved
+reasoned correctly or incorrectly.  Love was above reason.  If it just
+happened that she did not fully appreciate his necessity for a career,
+that did not make her a bit less lovable.  She was all lovable, and what
+she thought had nothing to do with her lovableness.
+
+"What's that?" he replied to a question from Olney that broke in upon his
+train of thought.
+
+"I was saying that I hoped you wouldn't be fool enough to tackle Latin."
+
+"But Latin is more than culture," Ruth broke in.  "It is equipment."
+
+"Well, are you going to tackle it?" Olney persisted.
+
+Martin was sore beset.  He could see that Ruth was hanging eagerly upon
+his answer.
+
+"I am afraid I won't have time," he said finally.  "I'd like to, but I
+won't have time."
+
+"You see, Martin's not seeking culture," Olney exulted.  "He's trying to
+get somewhere, to do something."
+
+"Oh, but it's mental training.  It's mind discipline.  It's what makes
+disciplined minds."  Ruth looked expectantly at Martin, as if waiting for
+him to change his judgment.  "You know, the foot-ball players have to
+train before the big game.  And that is what Latin does for the thinker.
+It trains."
+
+"Rot and bosh!  That's what they told us when we were kids.  But there is
+one thing they didn't tell us then.  They let us find it out for
+ourselves afterwards."  Olney paused for effect, then added, "And what
+they didn't tell us was that every gentleman should have studied Latin,
+but that no gentleman should know Latin."
+
+"Now that's unfair," Ruth cried.  "I knew you were turning the
+conversation just in order to get off something."
+
+"It's clever all right," was the retort, "but it's fair, too.  The only
+men who know their Latin are the apothecaries, the lawyers, and the Latin
+professors.  And if Martin wants to be one of them, I miss my guess.  But
+what's all that got to do with Herbert Spencer anyway?  Martin's just
+discovered Spencer, and he's wild over him.  Why?  Because Spencer is
+taking him somewhere.  Spencer couldn't take me anywhere, nor you.  We
+haven't got anywhere to go.  You'll get married some day, and I'll have
+nothing to do but keep track of the lawyers and business agents who will
+take care of the money my father's going to leave me."
+
+Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting shot.
+
+"You leave Martin alone, Ruth.  He knows what's best for himself.  Look
+at what he's done already.  He makes me sick sometimes, sick and ashamed
+of myself.  He knows more now about the world, and life, and man's place,
+and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or I, or you, too, for that
+matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and French, and Saxon, and
+culture."
+
+"But Ruth is my teacher," Martin answered chivalrously.  "She is
+responsible for what little I have learned."
+
+"Rats!"  Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious.  "I
+suppose you'll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her
+recommendation--only you didn't.  And she doesn't know anything more
+about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon's mines.  What's
+that jawbreaker definition about something or other, of Spencer's, that
+you sprang on us the other day--that indefinite, incoherent homogeneity
+thing?  Spring it on her, and see if she understands a word of it.  That
+isn't culture, you see.  Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, Martin, I
+won't have any respect for you."
+
+And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been aware of
+an irk in it as well.  It was about studies and lessons, dealing with the
+rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted with
+the big things that were stirring in him--with the grip upon life that
+was even then crooking his fingers like eagle's talons, with the cosmic
+thrills that made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness of
+mastery of it all.  He likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores
+of a strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering
+and vainly trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren
+in the new land.  And so with him.  He was alive, painfully alive, to the
+great universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and grope
+among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should study Latin.
+
+"What in hell has Latin to do with it?" he demanded before his mirror
+that night.  "I wish dead people would stay dead.  Why should I and the
+beauty in me be ruled by the dead?  Beauty is alive and everlasting.
+Languages come and go.  They are the dust of the dead."
+
+And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very well,
+and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar fashion
+when he was with Ruth.  He was only a schoolboy, with a schoolboy's
+tongue, when he was in her presence.
+
+"Give me time," he said aloud.  "Only give me time."
+
+Time!  Time!  Time! was his unending plaint.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and his love for Ruth,
+that he finally decided not to take up Latin.  His money meant time.
+There was so much that was more important than Latin, so many studies
+that clamored with imperious voices.  And he must write.  He must earn
+money.  He had had no acceptances.  Twoscore of manuscripts were
+travelling the endless round of the magazines.  How did the others do it?
+He spent long hours in the free reading-room, going over what others had
+written, studying their work eagerly and critically, comparing it with
+his own, and wondering, wondering, about the secret trick they had
+discovered which enabled them to sell their work.
+
+He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead.  No
+light, no life, no color, was shot through it.  There was no breath of
+life in it, and yet it sold, at two cents a word, twenty dollars a
+thousand--the newspaper clipping had said so.  He was puzzled by
+countless short stories, written lightly and cleverly he confessed, but
+without vitality or reality.  Life was so strange and wonderful, filled
+with an immensity of problems, of dreams, and of heroic toils, and yet
+these stories dealt only with the commonplaces of life.  He felt the
+stress and strain of life, its fevers and sweats and wild
+insurgences--surely this was the stuff to write about!  He wanted to
+glorify the leaders of forlorn hopes, the mad lovers, the giants that
+fought under stress and strain, amid terror and tragedy, making life
+crackle with the strength of their endeavor.  And yet the magazine short
+stories seemed intent on glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sordid dollar-
+chasers, and the commonplace little love affairs of commonplace little
+men and women.  Was it because the editors of the magazines were
+commonplace? he demanded.  Or were they afraid of life, these writers and
+editors and readers?
+
+But his chief trouble was that he did not know any editors or writers.
+And not merely did he not know any writers, but he did not know anybody
+who had ever attempted to write.  There was nobody to tell him, to hint
+to him, to give him the least word of advice.  He began to doubt that
+editors were real men.  They seemed cogs in a machine.  That was what it
+was, a machine.  He poured his soul into stories, articles, and poems,
+and intrusted them to the machine.  He folded them just so, put the
+proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the manuscript, sealed
+the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into the mail-box.
+It travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of time the
+postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope, on the
+outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed.  There was no human
+editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that
+changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the
+stamps.  It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and,
+with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of
+chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate.  It depended upon which slot one
+dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum.  And so with the
+editorial machine.  One slot brought checks and the other brought
+rejection slips.  So far he had found only the latter slot.
+
+It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible machinelikeness of
+the process.  These slips were printed in stereotyped forms and he had
+received hundreds of them--as many as a dozen or more on each of his
+earlier manuscripts.  If he had received one line, one personal line,
+along with one rejection of all his rejections, he would have been
+cheered.  But not one editor had given that proof of existence.  And he
+could conclude only that there were no warm human men at the other end,
+only mere cogs, well oiled and running beautifully in the machine.
+
+He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and he would have been
+content to continue feeding the machine for years; but he was bleeding to
+death, and not years but weeks would determine the fight.  Each week his
+board bill brought him nearer destruction, while the postage on forty
+manuscripts bled him almost as severely.  He no longer bought books, and
+he economized in petty ways and sought to delay the inevitable end;
+though he did not know how to economize, and brought the end nearer by a
+week when he gave his sister Marian five dollars for a dress.
+
+He struggled in the dark, without advice, without encouragement, and in
+the teeth of discouragement.  Even Gertrude was beginning to look
+askance.  At first she had tolerated with sisterly fondness what she
+conceived to be his foolishness; but now, out of sisterly solicitude, she
+grew anxious.  To her it seemed that his foolishness was becoming a
+madness.  Martin knew this and suffered more keenly from it than from the
+open and nagging contempt of Bernard Higginbotham.  Martin had faith in
+himself, but he was alone in this faith.  Not even Ruth had faith.  She
+had wanted him to devote himself to study, and, though she had not openly
+disapproved of his writing, she had never approved.
+
+He had never offered to show her his work.  A fastidious delicacy had
+prevented him.  Besides, she had been studying heavily at the university,
+and he felt averse to robbing her of her time.  But when she had taken
+her degree, she asked him herself to let her see something of what he had
+been doing.  Martin was elated and diffident.  Here was a judge.  She was
+a bachelor of arts.  She had studied literature under skilled
+instructors.  Perhaps the editors were capable judges, too.  But she
+would be different from them.  She would not hand him a stereotyped
+rejection slip, nor would she inform him that lack of preference for his
+work did not necessarily imply lack of merit in his work.  She would
+talk, a warm human being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important
+of all, she would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden.  In his work
+she would discern what his heart and soul were like, and she would come
+to understand something, a little something, of the stuff of his dreams
+and the strength of his power.
+
+Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of his short stories,
+hesitated a moment, then added his "Sea Lyrics."  They mounted their
+wheels on a late June afternoon and rode for the hills.  It was the
+second time he had been out with her alone, and as they rode along
+through the balmy warmth, just chilled by she sea-breeze to refreshing
+coolness, he was profoundly impressed by the fact that it was a very
+beautiful and well-ordered world and that it was good to be alive and to
+love.  They left their wheels by the roadside and climbed to the brown
+top of an open knoll where the sunburnt grass breathed a harvest breath
+of dry sweetness and content.
+
+"Its work is done," Martin said, as they seated themselves, she upon his
+coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth.  He sniffed the sweetness
+of the tawny grass, which entered his brain and set his thoughts whirling
+on from the particular to the universal.  "It has achieved its reason for
+existence," he went on, patting the dry grass affectionately.  "It
+quickened with ambition under the dreary downpour of last winter, fought
+the violent early spring, flowered, and lured the insects and the bees,
+scattered its seeds, squared itself with its duty and the world, and--"
+
+"Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical eyes?"
+she interrupted.
+
+"Because I've been studying evolution, I guess.  It's only recently that
+I got my eyesight, if the truth were told."
+
+"But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical, that
+you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub the down
+off their beautiful wings."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before.  I
+just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was just
+beautiful without rhyme or reason.  I did not know anything about beauty.
+But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know.  This grass is
+more beautiful to me now that I know why it is grass, and all the hidden
+chemistry of sun and rain and earth that makes it become grass.  Why,
+there is romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure,
+too.  The very thought of it stirs me.  When I think of the play of force
+and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could
+write an epic on the grass.
+
+"How well you talk," she said absently, and he noted that she was looking
+at him in a searching way.
+
+He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood flushing
+red on his neck and brow.
+
+"I hope I am learning to talk," he stammered.  "There seems to be so much
+in me I want to say.  But it is all so big.  I can't find ways to say
+what is really in me.  Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all
+life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring
+for me to be the spokesman.  I feel--oh, I can't describe it--I feel the
+bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child.  It is a
+great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or
+spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself
+back into the selfsame feeling and sensation.  It is a lordly task.  See,
+I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils
+sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies.  It is a breath
+of the universe I have breathed.  I know song and laughter, and success
+and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my
+brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell
+them to you, to the world.  But how can I?  My tongue is tied.  I have
+tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me
+of the scent of the grass.  But I have not succeeded.  I have no more
+than hinted in awkward speech.  My words seem gibberish to me.  And yet I
+am stifled with desire to tell.  Oh!--" he threw up his hands with a
+despairing gesture--"it is impossible!  It is not understandable!  It is
+incommunicable!"
+
+"But you do talk well," she insisted.  "Just think how you have improved
+in the short time I have known you.  Mr. Butler is a noted public
+speaker.  He is always asked by the State Committee to go out on stump
+during campaign.  Yet you talked just as well as he the other night at
+dinner.  Only he was more controlled.  You get too excited; but you will
+get over that with practice.  Why, you would make a good public speaker.
+You can go far--if you want to.  You are masterly.  You can lead men, I
+am sure, and there is no reason why you should not succeed at anything
+you set your hand to, just as you have succeeded with grammar.  You would
+make a good lawyer.  You should shine in politics.  There is nothing to
+prevent you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made.  And
+minus the dyspepsia," she added with a smile.
+
+They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always to
+the need of thorough grounding in education and to the advantages of
+Latin as part of the foundation for any career.  She drew her ideal of
+the successful man, and it was largely in her father's image, with a few
+unmistakable lines and touches of color from the image of Mr. Butler.  He
+listened eagerly, with receptive ears, lying on his back and looking up
+and joying in each movement of her lips as she talked.  But his brain was
+not receptive.  There was nothing alluring in the pictures she drew, and
+he was aware of a dull pain of disappointment and of a sharper ache of
+love for her.  In all she said there was no mention of his writing, and
+the manuscripts he had brought to read lay neglected on the ground.
+
+At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height above the
+horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them up.
+
+"I had forgotten," she said quickly.  "And I am so anxious to hear."
+
+He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his very
+best.  He called it "The Wine of Life," and the wine of it, that had
+stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his brain now as he
+read it.  There was a certain magic in the original conception, and he
+had adorned it with more magic of phrase and touch.  All the old fire and
+passion with which he had written it were reborn in him, and he was
+swayed and swept away so that he was blind and deaf to the faults of it.
+But it was not so with Ruth.  Her trained ear detected the weaknesses and
+exaggerations, the overemphasis of the tyro, and she was instantly aware
+each time the sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered.  She scarcely noted
+the rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous, at which moments
+she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness.  That was her
+final judgment on the story as a whole--amateurish, though she did not
+tell him so.  Instead, when he had done, she pointed out the minor flaws
+and said that she liked the story.
+
+But he was disappointed.  Her criticism was just.  He acknowledged that,
+but he had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with her for the
+purpose of schoolroom correction.  The details did not matter.  They
+could take care of themselves.  He could mend them, he could learn to
+mend them.  Out of life he had captured something big and attempted to
+imprison it in the story.  It was the big thing out of life he had read
+to her, not sentence-structure and semicolons.  He wanted her to feel
+with him this big thing that was his, that he had seen with his own eyes,
+grappled with his own brain, and placed there on the page with his own
+hands in printed words.  Well, he had failed, was his secret decision.
+Perhaps the editors were right.  He had felt the big thing, but he had
+failed to transmute it.  He concealed his disappointment, and joined so
+easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize that deep down
+in him was running a strong undercurrent of disagreement.
+
+"This next thing I've called 'The Pot'," he said, unfolding the
+manuscript.  "It has been refused by four or five magazines now, but
+still I think it is good.  In fact, I don't know what to think of it,
+except that I've caught something there.  Maybe it won't affect you as it
+does me.  It's a short thing--only two thousand words."
+
+"How dreadful!" she cried, when he had finished.  "It is horrible,
+unutterably horrible!"
+
+He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched hands,
+with secret satisfaction.  He had succeeded.  He had communicated the
+stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain.  It had struck home.  No
+matter whether she liked it or not, it had gripped her and mastered her,
+made her sit there and listen and forget details.
+
+"It is life," he said, "and life is not always beautiful.  And yet,
+perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful there.  It
+seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because it is there--"
+
+"But why couldn't the poor woman--" she broke in disconnectedly.  Then
+she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out: "Oh!  It is
+degrading!  It is not nice!  It is nasty!"
+
+For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still.  _Nasty_!  He
+had never dreamed it.  He had not meant it.  The whole sketch stood
+before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he
+sought vainly for nastiness.  Then his heart began to beat again.  He was
+not guilty.
+
+"Why didn't you select a nice subject?" she was saying.  "We know there
+are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason--"
+
+She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following her.  He
+was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal face, so
+innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity seemed always to
+enter into him, driving out of him all dross and bathing him in some
+ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft and velvety as starshine.
+_We know there are nasty things in the world_!  He cuddled to him the
+notion of her knowing, and chuckled over it as a love joke.  The next
+moment, in a flashing vision of multitudinous detail, he sighted the
+whole sea of life's nastiness that he had known and voyaged over and
+through, and he forgave her for not understanding the story.  It was
+through no fault of hers that she could not understand.  He thanked God
+that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence.  But he knew
+life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the
+slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to
+the world.  Saints in heaven--how could they be anything but fair and
+pure?  No praise to them.  But saints in slime--ah, that was the
+everlasting wonder!  That was what made life worth while.  To see moral
+grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first
+glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of
+weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness,
+arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment--
+
+He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.
+
+"The tone of it all is low.  And there is so much that is high.  Take 'In
+Memoriam.'"
+
+He was impelled to suggest "Locksley Hall," and would have done so, had
+not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her, the female
+of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment, creeping and crawling up
+the vast ladder of life for a thousand thousand centuries, had emerged on
+the topmost rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and
+with power to make him know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to
+desire to taste divinity--him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some
+amazing fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless
+mistakes and abortions of unending creation.  There was the romance, and
+the wonder, and the glory.  There was the stuff to write, if he could
+only find speech.  Saints in heaven!--They were only saints and could not
+help themselves.  But he was a man.
+
+"You have strength," he could hear her saying, "but it is untutored
+strength."
+
+"Like a bull in a china shop," he suggested, and won a smile.
+
+"And you must develop discrimination.  You must consult taste, and
+fineness, and tone."
+
+"I dare too much," he muttered.
+
+She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another story.
+
+"I don't know what you'll make of this," he said apologetically.  "It's a
+funny thing.  I'm afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but my intentions
+were good.  Don't bother about the little features of it.  Just see if
+you catch the feel of the big thing in it.  It is big, and it is true,
+though the chance is large that I have failed to make it intelligible."
+
+He read, and as he read he watched her.  At last he had reached her, he
+thought.  She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon him, scarcely
+breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought, by the witchery of
+the thing he had created.  He had entitled the story "Adventure," and it
+was the apotheosis of adventure--not of the adventure of the storybooks,
+but of real adventure, the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and
+awful of reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible patience and
+heartbreaking days and nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight
+glory or dark death at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag
+and monstrous delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and
+stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts
+to royal culminations and lordly achievements.
+
+It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story, and it
+was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and listened.  Her eyes
+were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and before he finished it seemed
+to him that she was almost panting.  Truly, she was warmed; but she was
+warmed, not by the story, but by him.  She did not think much of the
+story; it was Martin's intensity of power, the old excess of strength
+that seemed to pour from his body and on and over her.  The paradox of it
+was that it was the story itself that was freighted with his power, that
+was the channel, for the time being, through which his strength poured
+out to her.  She was aware only of the strength, and not of the medium,
+and when she seemed most carried away by what he had written, in reality
+she had been carried away by something quite foreign to it--by a thought,
+terrible and perilous, that had formed itself unsummoned in her brain.
+She had caught herself wondering what marriage was like, and the becoming
+conscious of the waywardness and ardor of the thought had terrified her.
+It was unmaidenly.  It was not like her.  She had never been tormented by
+womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy, dense
+even to the full significance of that delicate master's delicate
+allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens
+and knights.  She had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering
+imperatively at all her doors.  Mentally she was in a panic to shoot the
+bolts and drop the bars into place, while wanton instincts urged her to
+throw wide her portals and bid the deliciously strange visitor to enter
+in.
+
+Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict.  He had no doubt of what
+it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:
+
+"It is beautiful."
+
+"It is beautiful," she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.
+
+Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere beauty
+in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its
+handmaiden.  He sprawled silently on the ground, watching the grisly form
+of a great doubt rising before him.  He had failed.  He was inarticulate.
+He had seen one of the greatest things in the world, and he had not
+expressed it.
+
+"What did you think of the--"  He hesitated, abashed at his first attempt
+to use a strange word.  "Of the _motif_?" he asked.
+
+"It was confused," she answered.  "That is my only criticism in the large
+way.  I followed the story, but there seemed so much else.  It is too
+wordy.  You clog the action by introducing so much extraneous material."
+
+"That was the major _motif_," he hurriedly explained, "the big
+underrunning _motif_, the cosmic and universal thing.  I tried to make it
+keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial after all.  I
+was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly.  I did not succeed in
+suggesting what I was driving at.  But I'll learn in time."
+
+She did not follow him.  She was a bachelor of arts, but he had gone
+beyond her limitations.  This she did not comprehend, attributing her
+incomprehension to his incoherence.
+
+"You were too voluble," she said.  "But it was beautiful, in places."
+
+He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he would
+read her the "Sea Lyrics."  He lay in dull despair, while she watched him
+searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and wayward thoughts of
+marriage.
+
+"You want to be famous?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"Yes, a little bit," he confessed.  "That is part of the adventure.  It
+is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that counts.  And
+after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means to something else.
+I want to be famous very much, for that matter, and for that reason."
+
+"For your sake," he wanted to add, and might have added had she proved
+enthusiastic over what he had read to her.
+
+But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that would
+at least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was which he had
+hinted at.  There was no career for him in literature.  Of that she was
+convinced.  He had proved it to-day, with his amateurish and sophomoric
+productions.  He could talk well, but he was incapable of expressing
+himself in a literary way.  She compared Tennyson, and Browning, and her
+favorite prose masters with him, and to his hopeless discredit.  Yet she
+did not tell him her whole mind.  Her strange interest in him led her to
+temporize.  His desire to write was, after all, a little weakness which
+he would grow out of in time.  Then he would devote himself to the more
+serious affairs of life.  And he would succeed, too.  She knew that.  He
+was so strong that he could not fail--if only he would drop writing.
+
+"I wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden," she said.
+
+He flushed with pleasure.  She was interested, that much was sure.  And
+at least she had not given him a rejection slip.  She had called certain
+portions of his work beautiful, and that was the first encouragement he
+had ever received from any one.
+
+"I will," he said passionately.  "And I promise you, Miss Morse, that I
+will make good.  I have come far, I know that; and I have far to go, and
+I will cover it if I have to do it on my hands and knees."  He held up a
+bunch of manuscript.  "Here are the 'Sea Lyrics.'  When you get home,
+I'll turn them over to you to read at your leisure.  And you must be sure
+to tell me just what you think of them.  What I need, you know, above all
+things, is criticism.  And do, please, be frank with me."
+
+"I will be perfectly frank," she promised, with an uneasy conviction that
+she had not been frank with him and with a doubt if she could be quite
+frank with him the next time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+"The first battle, fought and finished," Martin said to the looking-glass
+ten days later.  "But there will be a second battle, and a third battle,
+and battles to the end of time, unless--"
+
+He had not finished the sentence, but looked about the mean little room
+and let his eyes dwell sadly upon a heap of returned manuscripts, still
+in their long envelopes, which lay in a corner on the floor.  He had no
+stamps with which to continue them on their travels, and for a week they
+had been piling up.  More of them would come in on the morrow, and on the
+next day, and the next, till they were all in.  And he would be unable to
+start them out again.  He was a month's rent behind on the typewriter,
+which he could not pay, having barely enough for the week's board which
+was due and for the employment office fees.
+
+He sat down and regarded the table thoughtfully.  There were ink stains
+upon it, and he suddenly discovered that he was fond of it.
+
+"Dear old table," he said, "I've spent some happy hours with you, and
+you've been a pretty good friend when all is said and done.  You never
+turned me down, never passed me out a reward-of-unmerit rejection slip,
+never complained about working overtime."
+
+He dropped his arms upon the table and buried his face in them.  His
+throat was aching, and he wanted to cry.  It reminded him of his first
+fight, when he was six years old, when he punched away with the tears
+running down his cheeks while the other boy, two years his elder, had
+beaten and pounded him into exhaustion.  He saw the ring of boys, howling
+like barbarians as he went down at last, writhing in the throes of
+nausea, the blood streaming from his nose and the tears from his bruised
+eyes.
+
+"Poor little shaver," he murmured.  "And you're just as badly licked now.
+You're beaten to a pulp.  You're down and out."
+
+But the vision of that first fight still lingered under his eyelids, and
+as he watched he saw it dissolve and reshape into the series of fights
+which had followed.  Six months later Cheese-Face (that was the boy) had
+whipped him again.  But he had blacked Cheese-Face's eye that time.  That
+was going some.  He saw them all, fight after fight, himself always
+whipped and Cheese-Face exulting over him.  But he had never run away.  He
+felt strengthened by the memory of that.  He had always stayed and taken
+his medicine.  Cheese-Face had been a little fiend at fighting, and had
+never once shown mercy to him.  But he had stayed!  He had stayed with
+it!
+
+Next, he saw a narrow alley, between ramshackle frame buildings.  The end
+of the alley was blocked by a one-story brick building, out of which
+issued the rhythmic thunder of the presses, running off the first edition
+of the Enquirer.  He was eleven, and Cheese-Face was thirteen, and they
+both carried the Enquirer.  That was why they were there, waiting for
+their papers.  And, of course, Cheese-Face had picked on him again, and
+there was another fight that was indeterminate, because at quarter to
+four the door of the press-room was thrown open and the gang of boys
+crowded in to fold their papers.
+
+"I'll lick you to-morrow," he heard Cheese-Face promise; and he heard his
+own voice, piping and trembling with unshed tears, agreeing to be there
+on the morrow.
+
+And he had come there the next day, hurrying from school to be there
+first, and beating Cheese-Face by two minutes.  The other boys said he
+was all right, and gave him advice, pointing out his faults as a scrapper
+and promising him victory if he carried out their instructions.  The same
+boys gave Cheese-Face advice, too.  How they had enjoyed the fight!  He
+paused in his recollections long enough to envy them the spectacle he and
+Cheese-Face had put up.  Then the fight was on, and it went on, without
+rounds, for thirty minutes, until the press-room door was opened.
+
+He watched the youthful apparition of himself, day after day, hurrying
+from school to the Enquirer alley.  He could not walk very fast.  He was
+stiff and lame from the incessant fighting.  His forearms were black and
+blue from wrist to elbow, what of the countless blows he had warded off,
+and here and there the tortured flesh was beginning to fester.  His head
+and arms and shoulders ached, the small of his back ached,--he ached all
+over, and his brain was heavy and dazed.  He did not play at school.  Nor
+did he study.  Even to sit still all day at his desk, as he did, was a
+torment.  It seemed centuries since he had begun the round of daily
+fights, and time stretched away into a nightmare and infinite future of
+daily fights.  Why couldn't Cheese-Face be licked? he often thought; that
+would put him, Martin, out of his misery.  It never entered his head to
+cease fighting, to allow Cheese-Face to whip him.
+
+And so he dragged himself to the Enquirer alley, sick in body and soul,
+but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal enemy, Cheese-
+Face, who was just as sick as he, and just a bit willing to quit if it
+were not for the gang of newsboys that looked on and made pride painful
+and necessary.  One afternoon, after twenty minutes of desperate efforts
+to annihilate each other according to set rules that did not permit
+kicking, striking below the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese-
+Face, panting for breath and reeling, offered to call it quits.  And
+Martin, head on arms, thrilled at the picture he caught of himself, at
+that moment in the afternoon of long ago, when he reeled and panted and
+choked with the blood that ran into his mouth and down his throat from
+his cut lips; when he tottered toward Cheese-Face, spitting out a
+mouthful of blood so that he could speak, crying out that he would never
+quit, though Cheese-Face could give in if he wanted to.  And Cheese-Face
+did not give in, and the fight went on.
+
+The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed the afternoon
+fight.  When he put up his arms, each day, to begin, they pained
+exquisitely, and the first few blows, struck and received, racked his
+soul; after that things grew numb, and he fought on blindly, seeing as in
+a dream, dancing and wavering, the large features and burning, animal-
+like eyes of Cheese-Face.  He concentrated upon that face; all else about
+him was a whirling void.  There was nothing else in the world but that
+face, and he would never know rest, blessed rest, until he had beaten
+that face into a pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until the bleeding
+knuckles that somehow belonged to that face had beaten him into a pulp.
+And then, one way or the other, he would have rest.  But to quit,--for
+him, Martin, to quit,--that was impossible!
+
+Came the day when he dragged himself into the Enquirer alley, and there
+was no Cheese-Face.  Nor did Cheese-Face come.  The boys congratulated
+him, and told him that he had licked Cheese-Face.  But Martin was not
+satisfied.  He had not licked Cheese-Face, nor had Cheese-Face licked
+him.  The problem had not been solved.  It was not until afterward that
+they learned that Cheese-Face's father had died suddenly that very day.
+
+Martin skipped on through the years to the night in the nigger heaven at
+the Auditorium.  He was seventeen and just back from sea.  A row started.
+Somebody was bullying somebody, and Martin interfered, to be confronted
+by Cheese-Face's blazing eyes.
+
+"I'll fix you after de show," his ancient enemy hissed.
+
+Martin nodded.  The nigger-heaven bouncer was making his way toward the
+disturbance.
+
+"I'll meet you outside, after the last act," Martin whispered, the while
+his face showed undivided interest in the buck-and-wing dancing on the
+stage.
+
+The bouncer glared and went away.
+
+"Got a gang?" he asked Cheese-Face, at the end of the act.
+
+"Sure."
+
+"Then I got to get one," Martin announced.
+
+Between the acts he mustered his following--three fellows he knew from
+the nail works, a railroad fireman, and half a dozen of the Boo Gang,
+along with as many more from the dread Eighteen-and-Market Gang.
+
+When the theatre let out, the two gangs strung along inconspicuously on
+opposite sides of the street.  When they came to a quiet corner, they
+united and held a council of war.
+
+"Eighth Street Bridge is the place," said a red-headed fellow belonging
+to Cheese-Face's Gang.  "You kin fight in the middle, under the electric
+light, an' whichever way the bulls come in we kin sneak the other way."
+
+"That's agreeable to me," Martin said, after consulting with the leaders
+of his own gang.
+
+The Eighth Street Bridge, crossing an arm of San Antonio Estuary, was the
+length of three city blocks.  In the middle of the bridge, and at each
+end, were electric lights.  No policeman could pass those end-lights
+unseen.  It was the safe place for the battle that revived itself under
+Martin's eyelids.  He saw the two gangs, aggressive and sullen, rigidly
+keeping apart from each other and backing their respective champions; and
+he saw himself and Cheese-Face stripping.  A short distance away lookouts
+were set, their task being to watch the lighted ends of the bridge.  A
+member of the Boo Gang held Martin's coat, and shirt, and cap, ready to
+race with them into safety in case the police interfered.  Martin watched
+himself go into the centre, facing Cheese-Face, and he heard himself say,
+as he held up his hand warningly:-
+
+"They ain't no hand-shakin' in this.  Understand?  They ain't nothin' but
+scrap.  No throwin' up the sponge.  This is a grudge-fight an' it's to a
+finish.  Understand?  Somebody's goin' to get licked."
+
+Cheese-Face wanted to demur,--Martin could see that,--but Cheese-Face's
+old perilous pride was touched before the two gangs.
+
+"Aw, come on," he replied.  "Wot's the good of chewin' de rag about it?
+I'm wit' cheh to de finish."
+
+Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of
+youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to
+destroy.  All the painful, thousand years' gains of man in his upward
+climb through creation were lost.  Only the electric light remained, a
+milestone on the path of the great human adventure.  Martin and Cheese-
+Face were two savages, of the stone age, of the squatting place and the
+tree refuge.  They sank lower and lower into the muddy abyss, back into
+the dregs of the raw beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemically,
+as atoms strive, as the star-dust of the heavens strives, colliding,
+recoiling, and colliding again and eternally again.
+
+"God!  We are animals!  Brute-beasts!"  Martin muttered aloud, as he
+watched the progress of the fight.  It was to him, with his splendid
+power of vision, like gazing into a kinetoscope.  He was both onlooker
+and participant.  His long months of culture and refinement shuddered at
+the sight; then the present was blotted out of his consciousness and the
+ghosts of the past possessed him, and he was Martin Eden, just returned
+from sea and fighting Cheese-Face on the Eighth Street Bridge.  He
+suffered and toiled and sweated and bled, and exulted when his naked
+knuckles smashed home.
+
+They were twin whirlwinds of hatred, revolving about each other
+monstrously.  The time passed, and the two hostile gangs became very
+quiet.  They had never witnessed such intensity of ferocity, and they
+were awed by it.  The two fighters were greater brutes than they.  The
+first splendid velvet edge of youth and condition wore off, and they
+fought more cautiously and deliberately.  There had been no advantage
+gained either way.  "It's anybody's fight," Martin heard some one saying.
+Then he followed up a feint, right and left, was fiercely countered, and
+felt his cheek laid open to the bone.  No bare knuckle had done that.  He
+heard mutters of amazement at the ghastly damage wrought, and was
+drenched with his own blood.  But he gave no sign.  He became immensely
+wary, for he was wise with knowledge of the low cunning and foul vileness
+of his kind.  He watched and waited, until he feigned a wild rush, which
+he stopped midway, for he had seen the glint of metal.
+
+"Hold up yer hand!" he screamed.  "Them's brass knuckles, an' you hit me
+with 'em!"
+
+Both gangs surged forward, growling and snarling.  In a second there
+would be a free-for-all fight, and he would be robbed of his vengeance.
+He was beside himself.
+
+"You guys keep out!" he screamed hoarsely.  "Understand?  Say, d'ye
+understand?"
+
+They shrank away from him.  They were brutes, but he was the arch-brute,
+a thing of terror that towered over them and dominated them.
+
+"This is my scrap, an' they ain't goin' to be no buttin' in.  Gimme them
+knuckles."
+
+Cheese-Face, sobered and a bit frightened, surrendered the foul weapon.
+
+"You passed 'em to him, you red-head sneakin' in behind the push there,"
+Martin went on, as he tossed the knuckles into the water.  "I seen you,
+an' I was wonderin' what you was up to.  If you try anything like that
+again, I'll beat cheh to death.  Understand?"
+
+They fought on, through exhaustion and beyond, to exhaustion immeasurable
+and inconceivable, until the crowd of brutes, its blood-lust sated,
+terrified by what it saw, begged them impartially to cease.  And Cheese-
+Face, ready to drop and die, or to stay on his legs and die, a grisly
+monster out of whose features all likeness to Cheese-Face had been
+beaten, wavered and hesitated; but Martin sprang in and smashed him again
+and again.
+
+Next, after a seeming century or so, with Cheese-Face weakening fast, in
+a mix-up of blows there was a loud snap, and Martin's right arm dropped
+to his side.  It was a broken bone.  Everybody heard it and knew; and
+Cheese-Face knew, rushing like a tiger in the other's extremity and
+raining blow on blow.  Martin's gang surged forward to interfere.  Dazed
+by the rapid succession of blows, Martin warned them back with vile and
+earnest curses sobbed out and groaned in ultimate desolation and despair.
+
+He punched on, with his left hand only, and as he punched, doggedly, only
+half-conscious, as from a remote distance he heard murmurs of fear in the
+gangs, and one who said with shaking voice: "This ain't a scrap, fellows.
+It's murder, an' we ought to stop it."
+
+But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on wearily and endlessly
+with his one arm, battering away at a bloody something before him that
+was not a face but a horror, an oscillating, hideous, gibbering, nameless
+thing that persisted before his wavering vision and would not go away.
+And he punched on and on, slower and slower, as the last shreds of
+vitality oozed from him, through centuries and aeons and enormous lapses
+of time, until, in a dim way, he became aware that the nameless thing was
+sinking, slowly sinking down to the rough board-planking of the bridge.
+And the next moment he was standing over it, staggering and swaying on
+shaky legs, clutching at the air for support, and saying in a voice he
+did not recognize:-
+
+"D'ye want any more?  Say, d'ye want any more?"
+
+He was still saying it, over and over,--demanding, entreating,
+threatening, to know if it wanted any more,--when he felt the fellows of
+his gang laying hands on him, patting him on the back and trying to put
+his coat on him.  And then came a sudden rush of blackness and oblivion.
+
+The tin alarm-clock on the table ticked on, but Martin Eden, his face
+buried on his arms, did not hear it.  He heard nothing.  He did not
+think.  So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he
+fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge.  For a full minute the
+blackness and the blankness endured.  Then, like one from the dead, he
+sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat pouring down his face, shouting:-
+
+"I licked you, Cheese-Face!  It took me eleven years, but I licked you!"
+
+His knees were trembling under him, he felt faint, and he staggered back
+to the bed, sinking down and sitting on the edge of it.  He was still in
+the clutch of the past.  He looked about the room, perplexed, alarmed,
+wondering where he was, until he caught sight of the pile of manuscripts
+in the corner.  Then the wheels of memory slipped ahead through four
+years of time, and he was aware of the present, of the books he had
+opened and the universe he had won from their pages, of his dreams and
+ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and
+sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she witness but one
+moment of what he had just lived through--one moment of all the muck of
+life through which he had waded.
+
+He arose to his feet and confronted himself in the looking-glass.
+
+"And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden," he said solemnly.  "And you
+cleanse your eyes in a great brightness, and thrust your shoulders among
+the stars, doing what all life has done, letting the 'ape and tiger die'
+and wresting highest heritage from all powers that be."
+
+He looked more closely at himself and laughed.
+
+"A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?" he queried.  "Well, never mind.
+You licked Cheese-Face, and you'll lick the editors if it takes twice
+eleven years to do it in.  You can't stop here.  You've got to go on.
+It's to a finish, you know."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+The alarm-clock went off, jerking Martin out of sleep with a suddenness
+that would have given headache to one with less splendid constitution.
+Though he slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a cat, and he awoke
+eagerly, glad that the five hours of unconsciousness were gone.  He hated
+the oblivion of sleep.  There was too much to do, too much of life to
+live.  He grudged every moment of life sleep robbed him of, and before
+the clock had ceased its clattering he was head and ears in the washbasin
+and thrilling to the cold bite of the water.
+
+But he did not follow his regular programme.  There was no unfinished
+story waiting his hand, no new story demanding articulation.  He had
+studied late, and it was nearly time for breakfast.  He tried to read a
+chapter in Fiske, but his brain was restless and he closed the book.  To-
+day witnessed the beginning of the new battle, wherein for some time
+there would be no writing.  He was aware of a sadness akin to that with
+which one leaves home and family.  He looked at the manuscripts in the
+corner.  That was it.  He was going away from them, his pitiful,
+dishonored children that were welcome nowhere.  He went over and began to
+rummage among them, reading snatches here and there, his favorite
+portions.  "The Pot" he honored with reading aloud, as he did
+"Adventure."  "Joy," his latest-born, completed the day before and tossed
+into the corner for lack of stamps, won his keenest approbation.
+
+"I can't understand," he murmured.  "Or maybe it's the editors who can't
+understand.  There's nothing wrong with that.  They publish worse every
+month.  Everything they publish is worse--nearly everything, anyway."
+
+After breakfast he put the type-writer in its case and carried it down
+into Oakland.
+
+"I owe a month on it," he told the clerk in the store.  "But you tell the
+manager I'm going to work and that I'll be in in a month or so and
+straighten up."
+
+He crossed on the ferry to San Francisco and made his way to an
+employment office.  "Any kind of work, no trade," he told the agent; and
+was interrupted by a new-comer, dressed rather foppishly, as some
+workingmen dress who have instincts for finer things.  The agent shook
+his head despondently.
+
+"Nothin' doin' eh?" said the other.  "Well, I got to get somebody
+to-day."
+
+He turned and stared at Martin, and Martin, staring back, noted the
+puffed and discolored face, handsome and weak, and knew that he had been
+making a night of it.
+
+"Lookin' for a job?" the other queried.  "What can you do?"
+
+"Hard labor, sailorizing, run a type-writer, no shorthand, can sit on a
+horse, willing to do anything and tackle anything," was the answer.
+
+The other nodded.
+
+"Sounds good to me.  My name's Dawson, Joe Dawson, an' I'm tryin' to
+scare up a laundryman."
+
+"Too much for me."  Martin caught an amusing glimpse of himself ironing
+fluffy white things that women wear.  But he had taken a liking to the
+other, and he added: "I might do the plain washing.  I learned that much
+at sea."  Joe Dawson thought visibly for a moment.
+
+"Look here, let's get together an' frame it up.  Willin' to listen?"
+
+Martin nodded.
+
+"This is a small laundry, up country, belongs to Shelly Hot
+Springs,--hotel, you know.  Two men do the work, boss and assistant.  I'm
+the boss.  You don't work for me, but you work under me.  Think you'd be
+willin' to learn?"
+
+Martin paused to think.  The prospect was alluring.  A few months of it,
+and he would have time to himself for study.  He could work hard and
+study hard.
+
+"Good grub an' a room to yourself," Joe said.
+
+That settled it.  A room to himself where he could burn the midnight oil
+unmolested.
+
+"But work like hell," the other added.
+
+Martin caressed his swelling shoulder-muscles significantly.  "That came
+from hard work."
+
+"Then let's get to it."  Joe held his hand to his head for a moment.
+"Gee, but it's a stem-winder.  Can hardly see.  I went down the line last
+night--everything--everything.  Here's the frame-up.  The wages for two
+is a hundred and board.  I've ben drawin' down sixty, the second man
+forty.  But he knew the biz.  You're green.  If I break you in, I'll be
+doing plenty of your work at first.  Suppose you begin at thirty, an'
+work up to the forty.  I'll play fair.  Just as soon as you can do your
+share you get the forty."
+
+"I'll go you," Martin announced, stretching out his hand, which the other
+shook.  "Any advance?--for rail-road ticket and extras?"
+
+"I blew it in," was Joe's sad answer, with another reach at his aching
+head.  "All I got is a return ticket."
+
+"And I'm broke--when I pay my board."
+
+"Jump it," Joe advised.
+
+"Can't.  Owe it to my sister."
+
+Joe whistled a long, perplexed whistle, and racked his brains to little
+purpose.
+
+"I've got the price of the drinks," he said desperately.  "Come on, an'
+mebbe we'll cook up something."
+
+Martin declined.
+
+"Water-wagon?"
+
+This time Martin nodded, and Joe lamented, "Wish I was."
+
+"But I somehow just can't," he said in extenuation.  "After I've ben
+workin' like hell all week I just got to booze up.  If I didn't, I'd cut
+my throat or burn up the premises.  But I'm glad you're on the wagon.
+Stay with it."
+
+Martin knew of the enormous gulf between him and this man--the gulf the
+books had made; but he found no difficulty in crossing back over that
+gulf.  He had lived all his life in the working-class world, and the
+camaraderie of labor was second nature with him.  He solved the
+difficulty of transportation that was too much for the other's aching
+head.  He would send his trunk up to Shelly Hot Springs on Joe's ticket.
+As for himself, there was his wheel.  It was seventy miles, and he could
+ride it on Sunday and be ready for work Monday morning.  In the meantime
+he would go home and pack up.  There was no one to say good-by to.  Ruth
+and her whole family were spending the long summer in the Sierras, at
+Lake Tahoe.
+
+He arrived at Shelly Hot Springs, tired and dusty, on Sunday night.  Joe
+greeted him exuberantly.  With a wet towel bound about his aching brow,
+he had been at work all day.
+
+"Part of last week's washin' mounted up, me bein' away to get you," he
+explained.  "Your box arrived all right.  It's in your room.  But it's a
+hell of a thing to call a trunk.  An' what's in it?  Gold bricks?"
+
+Joe sat on the bed while Martin unpacked.  The box was a packing-case for
+breakfast food, and Mr. Higginbotham had charged him half a dollar for
+it.  Two rope handles, nailed on by Martin, had technically transformed
+it into a trunk eligible for the baggage-car.  Joe watched, with bulging
+eyes, a few shirts and several changes of underclothes come out of the
+box, followed by books, and more books.
+
+"Books clean to the bottom?" he asked.
+
+Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books on a kitchen table which
+served in the room in place of a wash-stand.
+
+"Gee!" Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the deduction to arise in
+his brain.  At last it came.
+
+"Say, you don't care for the girls--much?" he queried.
+
+"No," was the answer.  "I used to chase a lot before I tackled the books.
+But since then there's no time."
+
+"And there won't be any time here.  All you can do is work an' sleep."
+
+Martin thought of his five hours' sleep a night, and smiled.  The room
+was situated over the laundry and was in the same building with the
+engine that pumped water, made electricity, and ran the laundry
+machinery.  The engineer, who occupied the adjoining room, dropped in to
+meet the new hand and helped Martin rig up an electric bulb, on an
+extension wire, so that it travelled along a stretched cord from over the
+table to the bed.
+
+The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was routed out for a
+quarter-to-seven breakfast.  There happened to be a bath-tub for the
+servants in the laundry building, and he electrified Joe by taking a cold
+bath.
+
+"Gee, but you're a hummer!" Joe announced, as they sat down to breakfast
+in a corner of the hotel kitchen.
+
+With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the assistant gardener, and
+two or three men from the stable.  They ate hurriedly and gloomily, with
+but little conversation, and as Martin ate and listened he realized how
+far he had travelled from their status.  Their small mental caliber was
+depressing to him, and he was anxious to get away from them.  So he
+bolted his breakfast, a sickly, sloppy affair, as rapidly as they, and
+heaved a sigh of relief when he passed out through the kitchen door.
+
+It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, wherein the most
+modern machinery did everything that was possible for machinery to do.
+Martin, after a few instructions, sorted the great heaps of soiled
+clothes, while Joe started the masher and made up fresh supplies of soft-
+soap, compounded of biting chemicals that compelled him to swathe his
+mouth and nostrils and eyes in bath-towels till he resembled a mummy.
+Finished the sorting, Martin lent a hand in wringing the clothes.  This
+was done by dumping them into a spinning receptacle that went at a rate
+of a few thousand revolutions a minute, tearing the water from the
+clothes by centrifugal force.  Then Martin began to alternate between the
+dryer and the wringer, between times "shaking out" socks and stockings.
+By the afternoon, one feeding and one, stacking up, they were running
+socks and stockings through the mangle while the irons were heating.  Then
+it was hot irons and underclothes till six o'clock, at which time Joe
+shook his head dubiously.
+
+"Way behind," he said.  "Got to work after supper."  And after supper
+they worked until ten o'clock, under the blazing electric lights, until
+the last piece of under-clothing was ironed and folded away in the
+distributing room.  It was a hot California night, and though the windows
+were thrown wide, the room, with its red-hot ironing-stove, was a
+furnace.  Martin and Joe, down to undershirts, bare armed, sweated and
+panted for air.
+
+"Like trimming cargo in the tropics," Martin said, when they went
+upstairs.
+
+"You'll do," Joe answered.  "You take hold like a good fellow.  If you
+keep up the pace, you'll be on thirty dollars only one month.  The second
+month you'll be gettin' your forty.  But don't tell me you never ironed
+before.  I know better."
+
+"Never ironed a rag in my life, honestly, until to-day," Martin
+protested.
+
+He was surprised at his weariness when he got into his room, forgetful of
+the fact that he had been on his feet and working without let up for
+fourteen hours.  He set the alarm clock at six, and measured back five
+hours to one o'clock.  He could read until then.  Slipping off his shoes,
+to ease his swollen feet, he sat down at the table with his books.  He
+opened Fiske, where he had left off to read.  But he found trouble and began
+to read it through a second time.  Then he awoke, in pain from his
+stiffened muscles and chilled by the mountain wind that had begun to blow
+in through the window.  He looked at the clock.  It marked two.  He had
+been asleep four hours.  He pulled off his clothes and crawled into bed,
+where he was asleep the moment after his head touched the pillow.
+
+Tuesday was a day of similar unremitting toil.  The speed with which Joe
+worked won Martin's admiration.  Joe was a dozen of demons for work.  He
+was keyed up to concert pitch, and there was never a moment in the long
+day when he was not fighting for moments.  He concentrated himself upon
+his work and upon how to save time, pointing out to Martin where he did
+in five motions what could be done in three, or in three motions what
+could be done in two.  "Elimination of waste motion," Martin phrased it
+as he watched and patterned after.  He was a good workman himself, quick
+and deft, and it had always been a point of pride with him that no man
+should do any of his work for him or outwork him.  As a result, he
+concentrated with a similar singleness of purpose, greedily snapping up
+the hints and suggestions thrown out by his working mate.  He "rubbed
+out" collars and cuffs, rubbing the starch out from between the double
+thicknesses of linen so that there would be no blisters when it came to
+the ironing, and doing it at a pace that elicited Joe's praise.
+
+There was never an interval when something was not at hand to be done.
+Joe waited for nothing, waited on nothing, and went on the jump from task
+to task.  They starched two hundred white shirts, with a single gathering
+movement seizing a shirt so that the wristbands, neckband, yoke, and
+bosom protruded beyond the circling right hand.  At the same moment the
+left hand held up the body of the shirt so that it would not enter the
+starch, and at the moment the right hand dipped into the starch--starch
+so hot that, in order to wring it out, their hands had to thrust, and
+thrust continually, into a bucket of cold water.  And that night they
+worked till half-past ten, dipping "fancy starch"--all the frilled and
+airy, delicate wear of ladies.
+
+"Me for the tropics and no clothes," Martin laughed.
+
+"And me out of a job," Joe answered seriously.  "I don't know nothin' but
+laundrying."
+
+"And you know it well."
+
+"I ought to.  Began in the Contra Costa in Oakland when I was eleven,
+shakin' out for the mangle.  That was eighteen years ago, an' I've never
+done a tap of anything else.  But this job is the fiercest I ever had.
+Ought to be one more man on it at least.  We work to-morrow night.  Always
+run the mangle Wednesday nights--collars an' cuffs."
+
+Martin set his alarm, drew up to the table, and opened Fiske.  He did not
+finish the first paragraph.  The lines blurred and ran together and his
+head nodded.  He walked up and down, batting his head savagely with his
+fists, but he could not conquer the numbness of sleep.  He propped the
+book before him, and propped his eyelids with his fingers, and fell
+asleep with his eyes wide open.  Then he surrendered, and, scarcely
+conscious of what he did, got off his clothes and into bed.  He slept
+seven hours of heavy, animal-like sleep, and awoke by the alarm, feeling
+that he had not had enough.
+
+"Doin' much readin'?" Joe asked.
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+"Never mind.  We got to run the mangle to-night, but Thursday we'll knock
+off at six.  That'll give you a chance."
+
+Martin washed woollens that day, by hand, in a large barrel, with strong
+soft-soap, by means of a hub from a wagon wheel, mounted on a plunger-
+pole that was attached to a spring-pole overhead.
+
+"My invention," Joe said proudly.  "Beats a washboard an' your knuckles,
+and, besides, it saves at least fifteen minutes in the week, an' fifteen
+minutes ain't to be sneezed at in this shebang."
+
+Running the collars and cuffs through the mangle was also Joe's idea.
+That night, while they toiled on under the electric lights, he explained
+it.
+
+"Something no laundry ever does, except this one.  An' I got to do it if
+I'm goin' to get done Saturday afternoon at three o'clock.  But I know
+how, an' that's the difference.  Got to have right heat, right pressure,
+and run 'em through three times.  Look at that!"  He held a cuff aloft.
+"Couldn't do it better by hand or on a tiler."
+
+Thursday, Joe was in a rage.  A bundle of extra "fancy starch" had come
+in.
+
+"I'm goin' to quit," he announced.  "I won't stand for it.  I'm goin' to
+quit it cold.  What's the good of me workin' like a slave all week, a-
+savin' minutes, an' them a-comin' an' ringin' in fancy-starch extras on
+me?  This is a free country, an' I'm to tell that fat Dutchman what I
+think of him.  An' I won't tell 'm in French.  Plain United States is
+good enough for me.  Him a-ringin' in fancy starch extras!"
+
+"We got to work to-night," he said the next moment, reversing his
+judgment and surrendering to fate.
+
+And Martin did no reading that night.  He had seen no daily paper all
+week, and, strangely to him, felt no desire to see one.  He was not
+interested in the news.  He was too tired and jaded to be interested in
+anything, though he planned to leave Saturday afternoon, if they finished
+at three, and ride on his wheel to Oakland.  It was seventy miles, and
+the same distance back on Sunday afternoon would leave him anything but
+rested for the second week's work.  It would have been easier to go on
+the train, but the round trip was two dollars and a half, and he was
+intent on saving money.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Martin learned to do many things.  In the course of the first week, in
+one afternoon, he and Joe accounted for the two hundred white shirts.  Joe
+ran the tiler, a machine wherein a hot iron was hooked on a steel string
+which furnished the pressure.  By this means he ironed the yoke,
+wristbands, and neckband, setting the latter at right angles to the
+shirt, and put the glossy finish on the bosom.  As fast as he finished
+them, he flung the shirts on a rack between him and Martin, who caught
+them up and "backed" them.  This task consisted of ironing all the
+unstarched portions of the shirts.
+
+It was exhausting work, carried on, hour after hour, at top speed.  Out
+on the broad verandas of the hotel, men and women, in cool white, sipped
+iced drinks and kept their circulation down.  But in the laundry the air
+was sizzling.  The huge stove roared red hot and white hot, while the
+irons, moving over the damp cloth, sent up clouds of steam.  The heat of
+these irons was different from that used by housewives.  An iron that
+stood the ordinary test of a wet finger was too cold for Joe and Martin,
+and such test was useless.  They went wholly by holding the irons close
+to their cheeks, gauging the heat by some secret mental process that
+Martin admired but could not understand.  When the fresh irons proved too
+hot, they hooked them on iron rods and dipped them into cold water.  This
+again required a precise and subtle judgment.  A fraction of a second too
+long in the water and the fine and silken edge of the proper heat was
+lost, and Martin found time to marvel at the accuracy he developed--an
+automatic accuracy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and
+unerring.
+
+But there was little time in which to marvel.  All Martin's consciousness
+was concentrated in the work.  Ceaselessly active, head and hand, an
+intelligent machine, all that constituted him a man was devoted to
+furnishing that intelligence.  There was no room in his brain for the
+universe and its mighty problems.  All the broad and spacious corridors
+of his mind were closed and hermetically sealed.  The echoing chamber of
+his soul was a narrow room, a conning tower, whence were directed his arm
+and shoulder muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the swift-moving iron
+along its steaming path in broad, sweeping strokes, just so many strokes
+and no more, just so far with each stroke and not a fraction of an inch
+farther, rushing along interminable sleeves, sides, backs, and tails, and
+tossing the finished shirts, without rumpling, upon the receiving frame.
+And even as his hurrying soul tossed, it was reaching for another shirt.
+This went on, hour after hour, while outside all the world swooned under
+the overhead California sun.  But there was no swooning in that
+superheated room.  The cool guests on the verandas needed clean linen.
+
+The sweat poured from Martin.  He drank enormous quantities of water, but
+so great was the heat of the day and of his exertions, that the water
+sluiced through the interstices of his flesh and out at all his pores.
+Always, at sea, except at rare intervals, the work he performed had given
+him ample opportunity to commune with himself.  The master of the ship
+had been lord of Martin's time; but here the manager of the hotel was
+lord of Martin's thoughts as well.  He had no thoughts save for the nerve-
+racking, body-destroying toil.  Outside of that it was impossible to
+think.  He did not know that he loved Ruth.  She did not even exist, for
+his driven soul had no time to remember her.  It was only when he crawled
+to bed at night, or to breakfast in the morning, that she asserted
+herself to him in fleeting memories.
+
+"This is hell, ain't it?" Joe remarked once.
+
+Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation.  The statement had been
+obvious and unnecessary.  They did not talk while they worked.
+Conversation threw them out of their stride, as it did this time,
+compelling Martin to miss a stroke of his iron and to make two extra
+motions before he caught his stride again.
+
+On Friday morning the washer ran.  Twice a week they had to put through
+hotel linen,--the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table-cloths, and
+napkins.  This finished, they buckled down to "fancy starch."  It was
+slow work, fastidious and delicate, and Martin did not learn it so
+readily.  Besides, he could not take chances.  Mistakes were disastrous.
+
+"See that," Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could have
+crumpled from view in one hand.  "Scorch that an' it's twenty dollars out
+of your wages."
+
+So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his muscular tension,
+though nervous tension rose higher than ever, and he listened
+sympathetically to the other's blasphemies as he toiled and suffered over
+the beautiful things that women wear when they do not have to do their
+own laundrying.  "Fancy starch" was Martin's nightmare, and it was Joe's,
+too.  It was "fancy starch" that robbed them of their hard-won minutes.
+They toiled at it all day.  At seven in the evening they broke off to run
+the hotel linen through the mangle.  At ten o'clock, while the hotel
+guests slept, the two laundrymen sweated on at "fancy starch" till
+midnight, till one, till two.  At half-past two they knocked off.
+
+Saturday morning it was "fancy starch," and odds and ends, and at three
+in the afternoon the week's work was done.
+
+"You ain't a-goin' to ride them seventy miles into Oakland on top of
+this?" Joe demanded, as they sat on the stairs and took a triumphant
+smoke.
+
+"Got to," was the answer.
+
+"What are you goin' for?--a girl?"
+
+"No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket.  I want to renew some
+books at the library."
+
+"Why don't you send 'em down an' up by express?  That'll cost only a
+quarter each way."
+
+Martin considered it.
+
+"An' take a rest to-morrow," the other urged.  "You need it.  I know I
+do.  I'm plumb tuckered out."
+
+He looked it.  Indomitable, never resting, fighting for seconds and
+minutes all week, circumventing delays and crushing down obstacles, a
+fount of resistless energy, a high-driven human motor, a demon for work,
+now that he had accomplished the week's task he was in a state of
+collapse.  He was worn and haggard, and his handsome face drooped in lean
+exhaustion.  He pulled his cigarette spiritlessly, and his voice was
+peculiarly dead and monotonous.  All the snap and fire had gone out of
+him.  His triumph seemed a sorry one.
+
+"An' next week we got to do it all over again," he said sadly.  "An'
+what's the good of it all, hey?  Sometimes I wish I was a hobo.  They
+don't work, an' they get their livin'.  Gee!  I wish I had a glass of
+beer; but I can't get up the gumption to go down to the village an' get
+it.  You'll stay over, an' send your books dawn by express, or else
+you're a damn fool."
+
+"But what can I do here all day Sunday?" Martin asked.
+
+"Rest.  You don't know how tired you are.  Why, I'm that tired Sunday I
+can't even read the papers.  I was sick once--typhoid.  In the hospital
+two months an' a half.  Didn't do a tap of work all that time.  It was
+beautiful."
+
+"It was beautiful," he repeated dreamily, a minute later.
+
+Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head laundryman had
+disappeared.  Most likely he had gone for a glass of beer Martin decided,
+but the half-mile walk down to the village to find out seemed a long
+journey to him.  He lay on his bed with his shoes off, trying to make up
+his mind.  He did not reach out for a book.  He was too tired to feel
+sleepy, and he lay, scarcely thinking, in a semi-stupor of weariness,
+until it was time for supper.  Joe did not appear for that function, and
+when Martin heard the gardener remark that most likely he was ripping the
+slats off the bar, Martin understood.  He went to bed immediately
+afterward, and in the morning decided that he was greatly rested.  Joe
+being still absent, Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay down in a
+shady nook under the trees.  The morning passed, he knew not how.  He did
+not sleep, nobody disturbed him, and he did not finish the paper.  He
+came back to it in the afternoon, after dinner, and fell asleep over it.
+
+So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard at work, sorting
+clothes, while Joe, a towel bound tightly around his head, with groans
+and blasphemies, was running the washer and mixing soft-soap.
+
+"I simply can't help it," he explained.  "I got to drink when Saturday
+night comes around."
+
+Another week passed, a great battle that continued under the electric
+lights each night and that culminated on Saturday afternoon at three
+o'clock, when Joe tasted his moment of wilted triumph and then drifted
+down to the village to forget.  Martin's Sunday was the same as before.
+He slept in the shade of the trees, toiled aimlessly through the
+newspaper, and spent long hours lying on his back, doing nothing,
+thinking nothing.  He was too dazed to think, though he was aware that he
+did not like himself.  He was self-repelled, as though he had undergone
+some degradation or was intrinsically foul.  All that was god-like in him
+was blotted out.  The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality
+with which to feel the prod of it.  He was dead.  His soul seemed dead.
+He was a beast, a work-beast.  He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting
+down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky whisper
+as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling to
+disclosure.  Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad
+in his mouth.  A black screen was drawn across his mirror of inner
+vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sick-room where entered no ray of
+light.  He envied Joe, down in the village, rampant, tearing the slats
+off the bar, his brain gnawing with maggots, exulting in maudlin ways
+over maudlin things, fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of
+Monday morning and the week of deadening toil to come.
+
+A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life.  He
+was oppressed by a sense of failure.  There was reason for the editors
+refusing his stuff.  He could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself
+and the dreams he had dreamed.  Ruth returned his "Sea Lyrics" by mail.
+He read her letter apathetically.  She did her best to say how much she
+liked them and that they were beautiful.  But she could not lie, and she
+could not disguise the truth from herself.  She knew they were failures,
+and he read her disapproval in every perfunctory and unenthusiastic line
+of her letter.  And she was right.  He was firmly convinced of it as he
+read the poems over.  Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and as he
+read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had had in mind
+when he wrote them.  His audacities of phrase struck him as grotesque,
+his felicities of expression were monstrosities, and everything was
+absurd, unreal, and impossible.  He would have burned the "Sea Lyrics" on
+the spot, had his will been strong enough to set them aflame.  There was
+the engine-room, but the exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not
+worth while.  All his exertion was used in washing other persons'
+clothes.  He did not have any left for private affairs.
+
+He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together and
+answer Ruth's letter.  But Saturday afternoon, after work was finished
+and he had taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered him.  "I guess
+I'll go down and see how Joe's getting on," was the way he put it to
+himself; and in the same moment he knew that he lied.  But he did not
+have the energy to consider the lie.  If he had had the energy, he would
+have refused to consider the lie, because he wanted to forget.  He
+started for the village slowly and casually, increasing his pace in spite
+of himself as he neared the saloon.
+
+"I thought you was on the water-wagon," was Joe's greeting.
+
+Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey, filling
+his own glass brimming before he passed the bottle.
+
+"Don't take all night about it," he said roughly.
+
+The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin refused to wait for
+him, tossing the glass off in a gulp and refilling it.
+
+"Now, I can wait for you," he said grimly; "but hurry up."
+
+Joe hurried, and they drank together.
+
+"The work did it, eh?" Joe queried.
+
+Martin refused to discuss the matter.
+
+"It's fair hell, I know," the other went on, "but I kind of hate to see
+you come off the wagon, Mart.  Well, here's how!"
+
+Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and awing
+the barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery blue eyes and
+hair parted in the middle.
+
+"It's something scandalous the way they work us poor devils," Joe was
+remarking.  "If I didn't bowl up, I'd break loose an' burn down the
+shebang.  My bowlin' up is all that saves 'em, I can tell you that."
+
+But Martin made no answer.  A few more drinks, and in his brain he felt
+the maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl.  Ah, it was living, the
+first breath of life he had breathed in three weeks.  His dreams came
+back to him.  Fancy came out of the darkened room and lured him on, a
+thing of flaming brightness.  His mirror of vision was silver-clear, a
+flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery.  Wonder and beauty walked with
+him, hand in hand, and all power was his.  He tried to tell it to Joe,
+but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes whereby he would
+escape the slavery of laundry-work and become himself the owner of a
+great steam laundry.
+
+"I tell yeh, Mart, they won't be no kids workin' in my laundry--not on
+yer life.  An' they won't be no workin' a livin' soul after six P.M.  You
+hear me talk!  They'll be machinery enough an' hands enough to do it all
+in decent workin' hours, an' Mart, s'help me, I'll make yeh
+superintendent of the shebang--the whole of it, all of it.  Now here's
+the scheme.  I get on the water-wagon an' save my money for two
+years--save an' then--"
+
+But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper, until
+that worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers who, coming
+in, accepted Martin's invitation.  Martin dispensed royal largess,
+inviting everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and the gardener's
+assistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the furtive hobo who slid in
+like a shadow and like a shadow hovered at the end of the bar.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to the
+washer.
+
+"I say," he began.
+
+"Don't talk to me," Martin snarled.
+
+"I'm sorry, Joe," he said at noon, when they knocked off for dinner.
+
+Tears came into the other's eyes.
+
+"That's all right, old man," he said.  "We're in hell, an' we can't help
+ourselves.  An', you know, I kind of like you a whole lot.  That's what
+made it--hurt.  I cottoned to you from the first."
+
+Martin shook his hand.
+
+"Let's quit," Joe suggested.  "Let's chuck it, an' go hoboin'.  I ain't
+never tried it, but it must be dead easy.  An' nothin' to do.  Just think
+of it, nothin' to do.  I was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an' it
+was beautiful.  I wish I'd get sick again."
+
+The week dragged on.  The hotel was full, and extra "fancy starch" poured
+in upon them.  They performed prodigies of valor.  They fought late each
+night under the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even got in a
+half hour's work before breakfast.  Martin no longer took his cold baths.
+Every moment was drive, drive, drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd
+of moments, herding them carefully, never losing one, counting them over
+like a miser counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish
+machine, aided ably by that other machine that thought of itself as once
+having been one Martin Eden, a man.
+
+But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think.  The house
+of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its shadowy
+caretaker.  He was a shadow.  Joe was right.  They were both shadows, and
+this was the unending limbo of toil.  Or was it a dream?  Sometimes, in
+the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the heavy irons back and forth
+over the white garments, it came to him that it was a dream.  In a short
+while, or maybe after a thousand years or so, he would awake, in his
+little room with the ink-stained table, and take up his writing where he
+had left off the day before.  Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the
+awakening would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down
+out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the
+tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind blowing
+through his flesh.
+
+Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o'clock.
+
+"Guess I'll go down an' get a glass of beer," Joe said, in the queer,
+monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.
+
+Martin seemed suddenly to wake up.  He opened the kit bag and oiled his
+wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the bearings.  Joe was
+halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed by, bending low over the
+handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-six gear with rhythmic strength,
+his face set for seventy miles of road and grade and dust.  He slept in
+Oakland that night, and on Sunday covered the seventy miles back.  And on
+Monday morning, weary, he began the new week's work, but he had kept
+sober.
+
+A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled as a
+machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a glimmering
+bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to scorch off the
+hundred and forty miles.  But this was not rest.  It was
+super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering bit of soul
+that was all that was left him from former life.  At the end of the
+seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, he drifted down
+to the village with Joe and drowned life and found life until Monday
+morning.
+
+Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty miles,
+obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the numbness of still
+greater exertion.  At the end of three months he went down a third time
+to the village with Joe.  He forgot, and lived again, and, living, he
+saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was making of himself--not by
+the drink, but by the work.  The drink was an effect, not a cause.  It
+followed inevitably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day.  Not
+by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, was the message the
+whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded approbation.  The whiskey was
+wise.  It told secrets on itself.
+
+He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and while they
+drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and scribbled.
+
+"A telegram, Joe," he said.  "Read it."
+
+Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer.  But what he read seemed to
+sober him.  He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his
+eyes and down his cheeks.
+
+"You ain't goin' back on me, Mart?" he queried hopelessly.
+
+Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the message
+to the telegraph office.
+
+"Hold on," Joe muttered thickly.  "Lemme think."
+
+He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin's arm around
+him and supporting him, while he thought.
+
+"Make that two laundrymen," he said abruptly.  "Here, lemme fix it."
+
+"What are you quitting for?" Martin demanded.
+
+"Same reason as you."
+
+"But I'm going to sea.  You can't do that."
+
+"Nope," was the answer, "but I can hobo all right, all right."
+
+Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-
+
+"By God, I think you're right!  Better a hobo than a beast of toil.  Why,
+man, you'll live.  And that's more than you ever did before."
+
+"I was in hospital, once," Joe corrected.  "It was beautiful.  Typhoid--did
+I tell you?"
+
+While Martin changed the telegram to "two laundrymen," Joe went on:-
+
+"I never wanted to drink when I was in hospital.  Funny, ain't it?  But
+when I've ben workin' like a slave all week, I just got to bowl up.  Ever
+noticed that cooks drink like hell?--an' bakers, too?  It's the work.
+They've sure got to.  Here, lemme pay half of that telegram."
+
+"I'll shake you for it," Martin offered.
+
+"Come on, everybody drink," Joe called, as they rattled the dice and
+rolled them out on the damp bar.
+
+Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation.  He did not mind his
+aching head, nor did he take interest in his work.  Whole herds of
+moments stole away and were lost while their careless shepherd gazed out
+of the window at the sunshine and the trees.
+
+"Just look at it!" he cried.  "An' it's all mine!  It's free.  I can lie
+down under them trees an' sleep for a thousan' years if I want to.  Aw,
+come on, Mart, let's chuck it.  What's the good of waitin' another
+moment.  That's the land of nothin' to do out there, an' I got a ticket
+for it--an' it ain't no return ticket, b'gosh!"
+
+A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes for the
+washer, Joe spied the hotel manager's shirt.  He knew its mark, and with
+a sudden glorious consciousness of freedom he threw it on the floor and
+stamped on it.
+
+"I wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!" he shouted.  "In it, an'
+right there where I've got you!  Take that! an' that! an' that! damn you!
+Hold me back, somebody!  Hold me back!"
+
+Martin laughed and held him to his work.  On Tuesday night the new
+laundrymen arrived, and the rest of the week was spent breaking them into
+the routine.  Joe sat around and explained his system, but he did no more
+work.
+
+"Not a tap," he announced.  "Not a tap.  They can fire me if they want
+to, but if they do, I'll quit.  No more work in mine, thank you kindly.
+Me for the freight cars an' the shade under the trees.  Go to it, you
+slaves!  That's right.  Slave an' sweat!  Slave an' sweat!  An' when
+you're dead, you'll rot the same as me, an' what's it matter how you
+live?--eh?  Tell me that--what's it matter in the long run?"
+
+On Saturday they drew their pay and came to the parting of the ways.
+
+"They ain't no use in me askin' you to change your mind an' hit the road
+with me?" Joe asked hopelessly:
+
+Martin shook his head.  He was standing by his wheel, ready to start.
+They shook hands, and Joe held on to his for a moment, as he said:-
+
+"I'm goin' to see you again, Mart, before you an' me die.  That's
+straight dope.  I feel it in my bones.  Good-by, Mart, an' be good.  I
+like you like hell, you know."
+
+He stood, a forlorn figure, in the middle of the road, watching until
+Martin turned a bend and was gone from sight.
+
+"He's a good Indian, that boy," he muttered.  "A good Indian."
+
+Then he plodded down the road himself, to the water tank, where half a
+dozen empties lay on a side-track waiting for the up freight.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Ruth and her family were home again, and Martin, returned to Oakland, saw
+much of her.  Having gained her degree, she was doing no more studying;
+and he, having worked all vitality out of his mind and body, was doing no
+writing.  This gave them time for each other that they had never had
+before, and their intimacy ripened fast.
+
+At first, Martin had done nothing but rest.  He had slept a great deal,
+and spent long hours musing and thinking and doing nothing.  He was like
+one recovering from some terrible bout of hardship.  The first signs of
+reawakening came when he discovered more than languid interest in the
+daily paper.  Then he began to read again--light novels, and poetry; and
+after several days more he was head over heels in his long-neglected
+Fiske.  His splendid body and health made new vitality, and he possessed
+all the resiliency and rebound of youth.
+
+Ruth showed her disappointment plainly when he announced that he was
+going to sea for another voyage as soon as he was well rested.
+
+"Why do you want to do that?" she asked.
+
+"Money," was the answer.  "I'll have to lay in a supply for my next
+attack on the editors.  Money is the sinews of war, in my case--money and
+patience."
+
+"But if all you wanted was money, why didn't you stay in the laundry?"
+
+"Because the laundry was making a beast of me.  Too much work of that
+sort drives to drink."
+
+She stared at him with horror in her eyes.
+
+"Do you mean--?" she quavered.
+
+It would have been easy for him to get out of it; but his natural impulse
+was for frankness, and he remembered his old resolve to be frank, no
+matter what happened.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "Just that.  Several times."
+
+She shivered and drew away from him.
+
+"No man that I have ever known did that--ever did that."
+
+"Then they never worked in the laundry at Shelly Hot Springs," he laughed
+bitterly.  "Toil is a good thing.  It is necessary for human health, so
+all the preachers say, and Heaven knows I've never been afraid of it.  But
+there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, and the laundry up
+there is one of them.  And that's why I'm going to sea one more voyage.
+It will be my last, I think, for when I come back, I shall break into the
+magazines.  I am certain of it."
+
+She was silent, unsympathetic, and he watched her moodily, realizing how
+impossible it was for her to understand what he had been through.
+
+"Some day I shall write it up--'The Degradation of Toil' or the
+'Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,' or something like that for a
+title."
+
+Never, since the first meeting, had they seemed so far apart as that day.
+His confession, told in frankness, with the spirit of revolt behind, had
+repelled her.  But she was more shocked by the repulsion itself than by
+the cause of it.  It pointed out to her how near she had drawn to him,
+and once accepted, it paved the way for greater intimacy.  Pity, too, was
+aroused, and innocent, idealistic thoughts of reform.  She would save
+this raw young man who had come so far.  She would save him from the
+curse of his early environment, and she would save him from himself in
+spite of himself.  And all this affected her as a very noble state of
+consciousness; nor did she dream that behind it and underlying it were
+the jealousy and desire of love.
+
+They rode on their wheels much in the delightful fall weather, and out in
+the hills they read poetry aloud, now one and now the other, noble,
+uplifting poetry that turned one's thoughts to higher things.
+Renunciation, sacrifice, patience, industry, and high endeavor were the
+principles she thus indirectly preached--such abstractions being
+objectified in her mind by her father, and Mr. Butler, and by Andrew
+Carnegie, who, from a poor immigrant boy had arisen to be the book-giver
+of the world.  All of which was appreciated and enjoyed by Martin.  He
+followed her mental processes more clearly now, and her soul was no
+longer the sealed wonder it had been.  He was on terms of intellectual
+equality with her.  But the points of disagreement did not affect his
+love.  His love was more ardent than ever, for he loved her for what she
+was, and even her physical frailty was an added charm in his eyes.  He
+read of sickly Elizabeth Barrett, who for years had not placed her feet
+upon the ground, until that day of flame when she eloped with Browning
+and stood upright, upon the earth, under the open sky; and what Browning
+had done for her, Martin decided he could do for Ruth.  But first, she
+must love him.  The rest would be easy.  He would give her strength and
+health.  And he caught glimpses of their life, in the years to come,
+wherein, against a background of work and comfort and general well-being,
+he saw himself and Ruth reading and discussing poetry, she propped amid a
+multitude of cushions on the ground while she read aloud to him.  This
+was the key to the life they would live.  And always he saw that
+particular picture.  Sometimes it was she who leaned against him while he
+read, one arm about her, her head upon his shoulder.  Sometimes they
+pored together over the printed pages of beauty.  Then, too, she loved
+nature, and with generous imagination he changed the scene of their
+reading--sometimes they read in closed-in valleys with precipitous walls,
+or in high mountain meadows, and, again, down by the gray sand-dunes with
+a wreath of billows at their feet, or afar on some volcanic tropic isle
+where waterfalls descended and became mist, reaching the sea in vapor
+veils that swayed and shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind.  But
+always, in the foreground, lords of beauty and eternally reading and
+sharing, lay he and Ruth, and always in the background that was beyond
+the background of nature, dim and hazy, were work and success and money
+earned that made them free of the world and all its treasures.
+
+"I should recommend my little girl to be careful," her mother warned her
+one day.
+
+"I know what you mean.  But it is impossible.  He is not--"
+
+Ruth was blushing, but it was the blush of maidenhood called upon for the
+first time to discuss the sacred things of life with a mother held
+equally sacred.
+
+"Your kind."  Her mother finished the sentence for her.
+
+Ruth nodded.
+
+"I did not want to say it, but he is not.  He is rough, brutal,
+strong--too strong.  He has not--"
+
+She hesitated and could not go on.  It was a new experience, talking over
+such matters with her mother.  And again her mother completed her thought
+for her.
+
+"He has not lived a clean life, is what you wanted to say."
+
+Again Ruth nodded, and again a blush mantled her face.
+
+"It is just that," she said.  "It has not been his fault, but he has
+played much with--"
+
+"With pitch?"
+
+"Yes, with pitch.  And he frightens me.  Sometimes I am positively in
+terror of him, when he talks in that free and easy way of the things he
+has done--as if they did not matter.  They do matter, don't they?"
+
+They sat with their arms twined around each other, and in the pause her
+mother patted her hand and waited for her to go on.
+
+"But I am interested in him dreadfully," she continued.  "In a way he is
+my protege.  Then, too, he is my first boy friend--but not exactly
+friend; rather protege and friend combined.  Sometimes, too, when he
+frightens me, it seems that he is a bulldog I have taken for a plaything,
+like some of the 'frat' girls, and he is tugging hard, and showing his
+teeth, and threatening to break loose."
+
+Again her mother waited.
+
+"He interests me, I suppose, like the bulldog.  And there is much good in
+him, too; but there is much in him that I would not like in--in the other
+way.  You see, I have been thinking.  He swears, he smokes, he drinks, he
+has fought with his fists (he has told me so, and he likes it; he says
+so).  He is all that a man should not be--a man I would want for my--"
+her voice sank very low--"husband.  Then he is too strong.  My prince
+must be tall, and slender, and dark--a graceful, bewitching prince.  No,
+there is no danger of my failing in love with Martin Eden.  It would be
+the worst fate that could befall me."
+
+"But it is not that that I spoke about," her mother equivocated.  "Have
+you thought about him?  He is so ineligible in every way, you know, and
+suppose he should come to love you?"
+
+"But he does--already," she cried.
+
+"It was to be expected," Mrs. Morse said gently.  "How could it be
+otherwise with any one who knew you?"
+
+"Olney hates me!" she exclaimed passionately.  "And I hate Olney.  I feel
+always like a cat when he is around.  I feel that I must be nasty to him,
+and even when I don't happen to feel that way, why, he's nasty to me,
+anyway.  But I am happy with Martin Eden.  No one ever loved me before--no
+man, I mean, in that way.  And it is sweet to be loved--that way.  You
+know what I mean, mother dear.  It is sweet to feel that you are really
+and truly a woman."  She buried her face in her mother's lap, sobbing.
+"You think I am dreadful, I know, but I am honest, and I tell you just
+how I feel."
+
+Mrs. Morse was strangely sad and happy.  Her child-daughter, who was a
+bachelor of arts, was gone; but in her place was a woman-daughter.  The
+experiment had succeeded.  The strange void in Ruth's nature had been
+filled, and filled without danger or penalty.  This rough sailor-fellow
+had been the instrument, and, though Ruth did not love him, he had made
+her conscious of her womanhood.
+
+"His hand trembles," Ruth was confessing, her face, for shame's sake,
+still buried.  "It is most amusing and ridiculous, but I feel sorry for
+him, too.  And when his hands are too trembly, and his eyes too shiny,
+why, I lecture him about his life and the wrong way he is going about it
+to mend it.  But he worships me, I know.  His eyes and his hands do not
+lie.  And it makes me feel grown-up, the thought of it, the very thought
+of it; and I feel that I am possessed of something that is by rights my
+own--that makes me like the other girls--and--and young women.  And,
+then, too, I knew that I was not like them before, and I knew that it
+worried you.  You thought you did not let me know that dear worry of
+yours, but I did, and I wanted to--'to make good,' as Martin Eden says."
+
+It was a holy hour for mother and daughter, and their eyes were wet as
+they talked on in the twilight, Ruth all white innocence and frankness,
+her mother sympathetic, receptive, yet calmly explaining and guiding.
+
+"He is four years younger than you," she said.  "He has no place in the
+world.  He has neither position nor salary.  He is impractical.  Loving
+you, he should, in the name of common sense, be doing something that
+would give him the right to marry, instead of paltering around with those
+stories of his and with childish dreams.  Martin Eden, I am afraid, will
+never grow up.  He does not take to responsibility and a man's work in
+the world like your father did, or like all our friends, Mr. Butler for
+one.  Martin Eden, I am afraid, will never be a money-earner.  And this
+world is so ordered that money is necessary to happiness--oh, no, not
+these swollen fortunes, but enough of money to permit of common comfort
+and decency.  He--he has never spoken?"
+
+"He has not breathed a word.  He has not attempted to; but if he did, I
+would not let him, because, you see, I do not love him."
+
+"I am glad of that.  I should not care to see my daughter, my one
+daughter, who is so clean and pure, love a man like him.  There are noble
+men in the world who are clean and true and manly.  Wait for them.  You
+will find one some day, and you will love him and be loved by him, and
+you will be happy with him as your father and I have been happy with each
+other.  And there is one thing you must always carry in mind--"
+
+"Yes, mother."
+
+Mrs. Morse's voice was low and sweet as she said, "And that is the
+children."
+
+"I--have thought about them," Ruth confessed, remembering the wanton
+thoughts that had vexed her in the past, her face again red with maiden
+shame that she should be telling such things.
+
+"And it is that, the children, that makes Mr. Eden impossible," Mrs.
+Morse went on incisively.  "Their heritage must be clean, and he is, I am
+afraid, not clean.  Your father has told me of sailors' lives, and--and
+you understand."
+
+Ruth pressed her mother's hand in assent, feeling that she really did
+understand, though her conception was of something vague, remote, and
+terrible that was beyond the scope of imagination.
+
+"You know I do nothing without telling you," she began.  "--Only,
+sometimes you must ask me, like this time.  I wanted to tell you, but I
+did not know how.  It is false modesty, I know it is that, but you can
+make it easy for me.  Sometimes, like this time, you must ask me, you
+must give me a chance."
+
+"Why, mother, you are a woman, too!" she cried exultantly, as they stood
+up, catching her mother's hands and standing erect, facing her in the
+twilight, conscious of a strangely sweet equality between them.  "I
+should never have thought of you in that way if we had not had this talk.
+I had to learn that I was a woman to know that you were one, too."
+
+"We are women together," her mother said, drawing her to her and kissing
+her.  "We are women together," she repeated, as they went out of the
+room, their arms around each other's waists, their hearts swelling with a
+new sense of companionship.
+
+"Our little girl has become a woman," Mrs. Morse said proudly to her
+husband an hour later.
+
+"That means," he said, after a long look at his wife, "that means she is
+in love."
+
+"No, but that she is loved," was the smiling rejoinder.  "The experiment
+has succeeded.  She is awakened at last."
+
+"Then we'll have to get rid of him."  Mr. Morse spoke briskly, in matter-
+of-fact, businesslike tones.
+
+But his wife shook her head.  "It will not be necessary.  Ruth says he is
+going to sea in a few days.  When he comes back, she will not be here.  We
+will send her to Aunt Clara's.  And, besides, a year in the East, with
+the change in climate, people, ideas, and everything, is just the thing
+she needs."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more.  Stories and poems
+were springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he made notes
+of them against the future time when he would give them expression.  But
+he did not write.  This was his little vacation; he had resolved to
+devote it to rest and love, and in both matters he prospered.  He was
+soon spilling over with vitality, and each day he saw Ruth, at the moment
+of meeting, she experienced the old shock of his strength and health.
+
+"Be careful," her mother warned her once again.  "I am afraid you are
+seeing too much of Martin Eden."
+
+But Ruth laughed from security.  She was sure of herself, and in a few
+days he would be off to sea.  Then, by the time he returned, she would be
+away on her visit East.  There was a magic, however, in the strength and
+health of Martin.  He, too, had been told of her contemplated Eastern
+trip, and he felt the need for haste.  Yet he did not know how to make
+love to a girl like Ruth.  Then, too, he was handicapped by the
+possession of a great fund of experience with girls and women who had
+been absolutely different from her.  They had known about love and life
+and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things.  Her prodigious
+innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and
+convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness.  Also he
+was handicapped in another way.  He had himself never been in love
+before.  He had liked women in that turgid past of his, and been
+fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it was to love
+them.  He had whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to
+him.  They had been diversions, incidents, part of the game men play, but
+a small part at most.  And now, and for the first time, he was a
+suppliant, tender and timid and doubting.  He did not know the way of
+love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his loved one's clear
+innocence.
+
+In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling on
+through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of conduct
+which was to the effect that when one played a strange game, he should
+let the other fellow play first.  This had stood him in good stead a
+thousand times and trained him as an observer as well.  He knew how to
+watch the thing that was strange, and to wait for a weakness, for a place
+of entrance, to divulge itself.  It was like sparring for an opening in
+fist-fighting.  And when such an opening came, he knew by long experience
+to play for it and to play hard.
+
+So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but not
+daring.  He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of himself.
+Had he but known it, he was following the right course with her.  Love
+came into the world before articulate speech, and in its own early youth
+it had learned ways and means that it had never forgotten.  It was in
+this old, primitive way that Martin wooed Ruth.  He did not know he was
+doing it at first, though later he divined it.  The touch of his hand on
+hers was vastly more potent than any word he could utter, the impact of
+his strength on her imagination was more alluring than the printed poems
+and spoken passions of a thousand generations of lovers.  Whatever his
+tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but
+the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to her
+instinct.  Her judgment was as young as she, but her instincts were as
+old as the race and older.  They had been young when love was young, and
+they were wiser than convention and opinion and all the new-born things.
+So her judgment did not act.  There was no call upon it, and she did not
+realize the strength of the appeal Martin made from moment to moment to
+her love-nature.  That he loved her, on the other hand, was as clear as
+day, and she consciously delighted in beholding his
+love-manifestations--the glowing eyes with their tender lights, the
+trembling hands, and the never failing swarthy flush that flooded darkly
+under his sunburn.  She even went farther, in a timid way inciting him,
+but doing it so delicately that he never suspected, and doing it half-
+consciously, so that she scarcely suspected herself.  She thrilled with
+these proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and she took an
+Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon him.
+
+Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing unwittingly
+and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by contact.  The touch of
+his hand was pleasant to her, and something deliciously more than
+pleasant.  Martin did not know it, but he did know that it was not
+distasteful to her.  Not that they touched hands often, save at meeting
+and parting; but that in handling the bicycles, in strapping on the books
+of verse they carried into the hills, and in conning the pages of books
+side by side, there were opportunities for hand to stray against hand.
+And there were opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his cheek, and
+for shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over the beauty
+of the books.  She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which arose from
+nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he desired greatly,
+when they tired of reading, to rest his head in her lap and dream with
+closed eyes about the future that was to be theirs.  On Sunday picnics at
+Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park, in the past, he had rested his head
+on many laps, and, usually, he had slept soundly and selfishly while the
+girls shaded his face from the sun and looked down and loved him and
+wondered at his lordly carelessness of their love.  To rest his head in a
+girl's lap had been the easiest thing in the world until now, and now he
+found Ruth's lap inaccessible and impossible.  Yet it was right here, in
+his reticence, that the strength of his wooing lay.  It was because of
+this reticence that he never alarmed her.  Herself fastidious and timid,
+she never awakened to the perilous trend of their intercourse.  Subtly
+and unaware she grew toward him and closer to him, while he, sensing the
+growing closeness, longed to dare but was afraid.
+
+Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened living
+room with a blinding headache.
+
+"Nothing can do it any good," she had answered his inquiries.  "And
+besides, I don't take headache powders.  Doctor Hall won't permit me."
+
+"I can cure it, I think, and without drugs," was Martin's answer.  "I am
+not sure, of course, but I'd like to try.  It's simply massage.  I
+learned the trick first from the Japanese.  They are a race of masseurs,
+you know.  Then I learned it all over again with variations from the
+Hawaiians.  They call it _lomi-lomi_.  It can accomplish most of the
+things drugs accomplish and a few things that drugs can't."
+
+Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.
+
+"That is so good," she said.
+
+She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, "Aren't you
+tired?"
+
+The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would be.  Then
+she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing balm of his
+strength: Life poured from the ends of his fingers, driving the pain
+before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the easement of pain, she
+fell asleep and he stole away.
+
+She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.
+
+"I slept until dinner," she said.  "You cured me completely, Mr. Eden,
+and I don't know how to thank you."
+
+He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied to
+her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone
+conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth Barrett.
+What had been done could be done again, and he, Martin Eden, could do it
+and would do it for Ruth Morse.  He went back to his room and to the
+volume of Spencer's "Sociology" lying open on the bed.  But he could not
+read.  Love tormented him and overrode his will, so that, despite all
+determination, he found himself at the little ink-stained table.  The
+sonnet he composed that night was the first of a love-cycle of fifty
+sonnets which was completed within two months.  He had the "Love-sonnets
+from the Portuguese" in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best
+conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of
+his own sweet love-madness.
+
+The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the "Love-cycle," to
+reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got more
+closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature of their
+policy and content.  The hours he spent with Ruth were maddening alike in
+promise and in inconclusiveness.  It was a week after he cured her
+headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt was proposed by Norman and
+seconded by Arthur and Olney.  Martin was the only one capable of
+handling a boat, and he was pressed into service.  Ruth sat near him in
+the stern, while the three young fellows lounged amidships, deep in a
+wordy wrangle over "frat" affairs.
+
+The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault of the
+sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a sudden feeling of
+loneliness.  She glanced at him.  A puff of wind was heeling the boat
+over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand on tiller and the other on
+main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the same time peering ahead to make
+out the near-lying north shore.  He was unaware of her gaze, and she
+watched him intently, speculating fancifully about the strange warp of
+soul that led him, a young man with signal powers, to fritter away his
+time on the writing of stories and poems foredoomed to mediocrity and
+failure.
+
+Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen in the starlight,
+and over the firm-poised head, and the old desire to lay her hands upon
+his neck came back to her.  The strength she abhorred attracted her.  Her
+feeling of loneliness became more pronounced, and she felt tired.  Her
+position on the heeling boat irked her, and she remembered the headache
+he had cured and the soothing rest that resided in him.  He was sitting
+beside her, quite beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward him.
+Then arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest herself
+against his strength--a vague, half-formed impulse, which, even as she
+considered it, mastered her and made her lean toward him.  Or was it the
+heeling of the boat?  She did not know.  She never knew.  She knew only
+that she was leaning against him and that the easement and soothing rest
+were very good.  Perhaps it had been the boat's fault, but she made no
+effort to retrieve it.  She leaned lightly against his shoulder, but she
+leaned, and she continued to lean when he shifted his position to make it
+more comfortable for her.
+
+It was a madness, but she refused to consider the madness.  She was no
+longer herself but a woman, with a woman's clinging need; and though she
+leaned ever so lightly, the need seemed satisfied.  She was no longer
+tired.  Martin did not speak.  Had he, the spell would have been broken.
+But his reticence of love prolonged it.  He was dazed and dizzy.  He
+could not understand what was happening.  It was too wonderful to be
+anything but a delirium.  He conquered a mad desire to let go sheet and
+tiller and to clasp her in his arms.  His intuition told him it was the
+wrong thing to do, and he was glad that sheet and tiller kept his hands
+occupied and fended off temptation.  But he luffed the boat less
+delicately, spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as to prolong
+the tack to the north shore.  The shore would compel him to go about, and
+the contact would be broken.  He sailed with skill, stopping way on the
+boat without exciting the notice of the wranglers, and mentally forgiving
+his hardest voyages in that they had made this marvellous night possible,
+giving him mastery over sea and boat and wind so that he could sail with
+her beside him, her dear weight against him on his shoulder.
+
+When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail, illuminating
+the boat with pearly radiance, Ruth moved away from him.  And, even as
+she moved, she felt him move away.  The impulse to avoid detection was
+mutual.  The episode was tacitly and secretly intimate.  She sat apart
+from him with burning cheeks, while the full force of it came home to
+her.  She had been guilty of something she would not have her brothers
+see, nor Olney see.  Why had she done it?  She had never done anything
+like it in her life, and yet she had been moonlight-sailing with young
+men before.  She had never desired to do anything like it.  She was
+overcome with shame and with the mystery of her own burgeoning womanhood.
+She stole a glance at Martin, who was busy putting the boat about on the
+other tack, and she could have hated him for having made her do an
+immodest and shameful thing.  And he, of all men!  Perhaps her mother was
+right, and she was seeing too much of him.  It would never happen again,
+she resolved, and she would see less of him in the future.  She
+entertained a wild idea of explaining to him the first time they were
+alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning casually the attack of
+faintness that had overpowered her just before the moon came up.  Then
+she remembered how they had drawn mutually away before the revealing
+moon, and she knew he would know it for a lie.
+
+In the days that swiftly followed she was no longer herself but a
+strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment and scornful of self-
+analysis, refusing to peer into the future or to think about herself and
+whither she was drifting.  She was in a fever of tingling mystery,
+alternately frightened and charmed, and in constant bewilderment.  She
+had one idea firmly fixed, however, which insured her security.  She
+would not let Martin speak his love.  As long as she did this, all would
+be well.  In a few days he would be off to sea.  And even if he did
+speak, all would be well.  It could not be otherwise, for she did not
+love him.  Of course, it would be a painful half hour for him, and an
+embarrassing half hour for her, because it would be her first proposal.
+She thrilled deliciously at the thought.  She was really a woman, with a
+man ripe to ask for her in marriage.  It was a lure to all that was
+fundamental in her sex.  The fabric of her life, of all that constituted
+her, quivered and grew tremulous.  The thought fluttered in her mind like
+a flame-attracted moth.  She went so far as to imagine Martin proposing,
+herself putting the words into his mouth; and she rehearsed her refusal,
+tempering it with kindness and exhorting him to true and noble manhood.
+And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes.  She would make a point
+of that.  But no, she must not let him speak at all.  She could stop him,
+and she had told her mother that she would.  All flushed and burning, she
+regretfully dismissed the conjured situation.  Her first proposal would
+have to be deferred to a more propitious time and a more eligible suitor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the hush of
+the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with hazy sun and
+wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air.  Filmy
+purple mists, that were not vapors but fabrics woven of color, hid in the
+recesses of the hills.  San Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her
+heights.  The intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon
+sailing craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide.  Far
+Tamalpais, barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by the Golden
+Gate, the latter a pale gold pathway under the westering sun.  Beyond,
+the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line tumbled
+cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first blustering
+breath of winter.
+
+The erasure of summer was at hand.  Yet summer lingered, fading and
+fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a
+shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm
+content of having lived and lived well.  And among the hills, on their
+favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side by side, their heads bent over
+the same pages, he reading aloud from the love-sonnets of the woman who
+had loved Browning as it is given to few men to be loved.
+
+But the reading languished.  The spell of passing beauty all about them
+was too strong.  The golden year was dying as it had lived, a beautiful
+and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content freighted
+heavily the air.  It entered into them, dreamy and languorous, weakening
+the fibres of resolution, suffusing the face of morality, or of judgment,
+with haze and purple mist.  Martin felt tender and melting, and from time
+to time warm glows passed over him.  His head was very near to hers, and
+when wandering phantoms of breeze stirred her hair so that it touched his
+face, the printed pages swam before his eyes.
+
+"I don't believe you know a word of what you are reading," she said once
+when he had lost his place.
+
+He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of becoming
+awkward, when a retort came to his lips.
+
+"I don't believe you know either.  What was the last sonnet about?"
+
+"I don't know," she laughed frankly.  "I've already forgotten.  Don't let
+us read any more.  The day is too beautiful."
+
+"It will be our last in the hills for some time," he announced gravely.
+"There's a storm gathering out there on the sea-rim."
+
+The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and they sat idly and
+silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed and did
+not see.  Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck.  She did not lean toward
+him.  She was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger than
+gravitation, strong as destiny.  It was only an inch to lean, and it was
+accomplished without volition on her part.  Her shoulder touched his as
+lightly as a butterfly touches a flower, and just as lightly was the
+counter-pressure.  She felt his shoulder press hers, and a tremor run
+through him.  Then was the time for her to draw back.  But she had become
+an automaton.  Her actions had passed beyond the control of her will--she
+never thought of control or will in the delicious madness that was upon
+her.  His arm began to steal behind her and around her.  She waited its
+slow progress in a torment of delight.  She waited, she knew not for
+what, panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and a fever of
+expectancy in all her blood.  The girdling arm lifted higher and drew her
+toward him, drew her slowly and caressingly.  She could wait no longer.
+With a tired sigh, and with an impulsive movement all her own,
+unpremeditated, spasmodic, she rested her head upon his breast.  His head
+bent over swiftly, and, as his lips approached, hers flew to meet them.
+
+This must be love, she thought, in the one rational moment that was
+vouchsafed her.  If it was not love, it was too shameful.  It could be
+nothing else than love.  She loved the man whose arms were around her and
+whose lips were pressed to hers.  She pressed more, tightly to him, with
+a snuggling movement of her body.  And a moment later, tearing herself
+half out of his embrace, suddenly and exultantly she reached up and
+placed both hands upon Martin Eden's sunburnt neck.  So exquisite was the
+pang of love and desire fulfilled that she uttered a low moan, relaxed
+her hands, and lay half-swooning in his arms.
+
+Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken for a long time.
+Twice he bent and kissed her, and each time her lips met his shyly and
+her body made its happy, nestling movement.  She clung to him, unable to
+release herself, and he sat, half supporting her in his arms, as he gazed
+with unseeing eyes at the blur of the great city across the bay.  For
+once there were no visions in his brain.  Only colors and lights and
+glows pulsed there, warm as the day and warm as his love.  He bent over
+her.  She was speaking.
+
+"When did you love me?" she whispered.
+
+"From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid eye on you.  I
+was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has passed since
+then I have only grown the madder.  I am maddest, now, dear.  I am almost
+a lunatic, my head is so turned with joy."
+
+"I am glad I am a woman, Martin--dear," she said, after a long sigh.
+
+He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then asked:-
+
+"And you?  When did you first know?"
+
+"Oh, I knew it all the time, almost, from the first."
+
+"And I have been as blind as a bat!" he cried, a ring of vexation in his
+voice.  "I never dreamed it until just how, when I--when I kissed you."
+
+"I didn't mean that."  She drew herself partly away and looked at him.  "I
+meant I knew you loved almost from the first."
+
+"And you?" he demanded.
+
+"It came to me suddenly."  She was speaking very slowly, her eyes warm
+and fluttery and melting, a soft flush on her cheeks that did not go
+away.  "I never knew until just now when--you put your arms around me.
+And I never expected to marry you, Martin, not until just now.  How did
+you make me love you?"
+
+"I don't know," he laughed, "unless just by loving you, for I loved you
+hard enough to melt the heart of a stone, much less the heart of the
+living, breathing woman you are."
+
+"This is so different from what I thought love would be," she announced
+irrelevantly.
+
+"What did you think it would be like?"
+
+"I didn't think it would be like this."  She was looking into his eyes at
+the moment, but her own dropped as she continued, "You see, I didn't know
+what this was like."
+
+He offered to draw her toward him again, but it was no more than a
+tentative muscular movement of the girdling arm, for he feared that he
+might be greedy.  Then he felt her body yielding, and once again she was
+close in his arms and lips were pressed on lips.
+
+"What will my people say?" she queried, with sudden apprehension, in one
+of the pauses.
+
+"I don't know.  We can find out very easily any time we are so minded."
+
+"But if mamma objects?  I am sure I am afraid to tell her."
+
+"Let me tell her," he volunteered valiantly.  "I think your mother does
+not like me, but I can win her around.  A fellow who can win you can win
+anything.  And if we don't--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Why, we'll have each other.  But there's no danger not winning your
+mother to our marriage.  She loves you too well."
+
+"I should not like to break her heart," Ruth said pensively.
+
+He felt like assuring her that mothers' hearts were not so easily broken,
+but instead he said, "And love is the greatest thing in the world."
+
+"Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me.  I am frightened now,
+when I think of you and of what you have been.  You must be very, very
+good to me.  Remember, after all, that I am only a child.  I never loved
+before."
+
+"Nor I.  We are both children together.  And we are fortunate above most,
+for we have found our first love in each other."
+
+"But that is impossible!" she cried, withdrawing herself from his arms
+with a swift, passionate movement.  "Impossible for you.  You have been a
+sailor, and sailors, I have heard, are--are--"
+
+Her voice faltered and died away.
+
+"Are addicted to having a wife in every port?" he suggested.  "Is that
+what you mean?"
+
+"Yes," she answered in a low voice.
+
+"But that is not love."  He spoke authoritatively.  "I have been in many
+ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw you that
+first night.  Do you know, when I said good night and went away, I was
+almost arrested."
+
+"Arrested?"
+
+"Yes.  The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too--with love for
+you."
+
+"But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for you,
+and we have strayed away from the point."
+
+"I said that I never loved anybody but you," he replied.  "You are my
+first, my very first."
+
+"And yet you have been a sailor," she objected.
+
+"But that doesn't prevent me from loving you the first."
+
+"And there have been women--other women--oh!"
+
+And to Martin Eden's supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of tears
+that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive away.  And all
+the while there was running through his head Kipling's line: "_And the
+Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins_."  It was
+true, he decided; though the novels he had read had led him to believe
+otherwise.  His idea, for which the novels were responsible, had been
+that only formal proposals obtained in the upper classes.  It was all
+right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each
+other by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights
+to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable.  Yet the novels
+were wrong.  Here was a proof of it.  The same pressures and caresses,
+unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious with the girls of the
+working-class, were equally efficacious with the girls above the working-
+class.  They were all of the same flesh, after all, sisters under their
+skins; and he might have known as much himself had he remembered his
+Spencer.  As he held Ruth in his arms and soothed her, he took great
+consolation in the thought that the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady were
+pretty much alike under their skins.  It brought Ruth closer to him, made
+her possible.  Her dear flesh was as anybody's flesh, as his flesh.  There
+was no bar to their marriage.  Class difference was the only difference,
+and class was extrinsic.  It could be shaken off.  A slave, he had read,
+had risen to the Roman purple.  That being so, then he could rise to
+Ruth.  Under her purity, and saintliness, and culture, and ethereal
+beauty of soul, she was, in things fundamentally human, just like Lizzie
+Connolly and all Lizzie Connollys.  All that was possible of them was
+possible of her.  She could love, and hate, maybe have hysterics; and she
+could certainly be jealous, as she was jealous now, uttering her last
+sobs in his arms.
+
+"Besides, I am older than you," she remarked suddenly, opening her eyes
+and looking up at him, "three years older."
+
+"Hush, you are only a child, and I am forty years older than you, in
+experience," was his answer.
+
+In truth, they were children together, so far as love was concerned, and
+they were as naive and immature in the expression of their love as a pair
+of children, and this despite the fact that she was crammed with a
+university education and that his head was full of scientific philosophy
+and the hard facts of life.
+
+They sat on through the passing glory of the day, talking as lovers are
+prone to talk, marvelling at the wonder of love and at destiny that had
+flung them so strangely together, and dogmatically believing that they
+loved to a degree never attained by lovers before.  And they returned
+insistently, again and again, to a rehearsal of their first impressions
+of each other and to hopeless attempts to analyze just precisely what
+they felt for each other and how much there was of it.
+
+The cloud-masses on the western horizon received the descending sun, and
+the circle of the sky turned to rose, while the zenith glowed with the
+same warm color.  The rosy light was all about them, flooding over them,
+as she sang, "Good-by, Sweet Day."  She sang softly, leaning in the
+cradle of his arm, her hands in his, their hearts in each other's hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Mrs. Morse did not require a mother's intuition to read the advertisement
+in Ruth's face when she returned home.  The flush that would not leave
+the cheeks told the simple story, and more eloquently did the eyes, large
+and bright, reflecting an unmistakable inward glory.
+
+"What has happened?" Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till Ruth
+had gone to bed.
+
+"You know?" Ruth queried, with trembling lips.
+
+For reply, her mother's arm went around her, and a hand was softly
+caressing her hair.
+
+"He did not speak," she blurted out.  "I did not intend that it should
+happen, and I would never have let him speak--only he didn't speak."
+
+"But if he did not speak, then nothing could have happened, could it?"
+
+"But it did, just the same."
+
+"In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling about?" Mrs. Morse
+was bewildered.  "I don't think I know what happened, after all.  What
+did happen?"
+
+Ruth looked at her mother in surprise.
+
+"I thought you knew.  Why, we're engaged, Martin and I."
+
+Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation.
+
+"No, he didn't speak," Ruth explained.  "He just loved me, that was all.
+I was as surprised as you are.  He didn't say a word.  He just put his
+arm around me.  And--and I was not myself.  And he kissed me, and I
+kissed him.  I couldn't help it.  I just had to.  And then I knew I loved
+him."
+
+She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of her mother's kiss,
+but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent.
+
+"It is a dreadful accident, I know," Ruth recommenced with a sinking
+voice.  "And I don't know how you will ever forgive me.  But I couldn't
+help it.  I did not dream that I loved him until that moment.  And you
+must tell father for me."
+
+"Would it not be better not to tell your father?  Let me see Martin Eden,
+and talk with him, and explain.  He will understand and release you."
+
+"No! no!" Ruth cried, starting up.  "I do not want to be released.  I
+love him, and love is very sweet.  I am going to marry him--of course, if
+you will let me."
+
+"We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father and I--oh, no, no;
+no man picked out for you, or anything like that.  Our plans go no
+farther than your marrying some man in your own station in life, a good
+and honorable gentleman, whom you will select yourself, when you love
+him."
+
+"But I love Martin already," was the plaintive protest.
+
+"We would not influence your choice in any way; but you are our daughter,
+and we could not bear to see you make a marriage such as this.  He has
+nothing but roughness and coarseness to offer you in exchange for all
+that is refined and delicate in you.  He is no match for you in any way.
+He could not support you.  We have no foolish ideas about wealth, but
+comfort is another matter, and our daughter should at least marry a man
+who can give her that--and not a penniless adventurer, a sailor, a
+cowboy, a smuggler, and Heaven knows what else, who, in addition to
+everything, is hare-brained and irresponsible."
+
+Ruth was silent.  Every word she recognized as true.
+
+"He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses
+and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.  A man
+thinking of marriage should be preparing for marriage.  But not he.  As I
+have said, and I know you agree with me, he is irresponsible.  And why
+should he not be?  It is the way of sailors.  He has never learned to be
+economical or temperate.  The spendthrift years have marked him.  It is
+not his fault, of course, but that does not alter his nature.  And have
+you thought of the years of licentiousness he inevitably has lived?  Have
+you thought of that, daughter?  You know what marriage means."
+
+Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother.
+
+"I have thought."  Ruth waited a long time for the thought to frame
+itself.  "And it is terrible.  It sickens me to think of it.  I told you
+it was a dreadful accident, my loving him; but I can't help myself.  Could
+you help loving father?  Then it is the same with me.  There is something
+in me, in him--I never knew it was there until to-day--but it is there,
+and it makes me love him.  I never thought to love him, but, you see, I
+do," she concluded, a certain faint triumph in her voice.
+
+They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion agreeing to wait
+an indeterminate time without doing anything.
+
+The same conclusion was reached, a little later that night, between Mrs.
+Morse and her husband, after she had made due confession of the
+miscarriage of her plans.
+
+"It could hardly have come otherwise," was Mr. Morse's judgment.  "This
+sailor-fellow has been the only man she was in touch with.  Sooner or
+later she was going to awaken anyway; and she did awaken, and lo! here
+was this sailor-fellow, the only accessible man at the moment, and of
+course she promptly loved him, or thought she did, which amounts to the
+same thing."
+
+Mrs. Morse took it upon herself to work slowly and indirectly upon Ruth,
+rather than to combat her.  There would be plenty of time for this, for
+Martin was not in position to marry.
+
+"Let her see all she wants of him," was Mr. Morse's advice.  "The more
+she knows him, the less she'll love him, I wager.  And give her plenty of
+contrast.  Make a point of having young people at the house.  Young women
+and young men, all sorts of young men, clever men, men who have done
+something or who are doing things, men of her own class, gentlemen.  She
+can gauge him by them.  They will show him up for what he is.  And after
+all, he is a mere boy of twenty-one.  Ruth is no more than a child.  It
+is calf love with the pair of them, and they will grow out of it."
+
+So the matter rested.  Within the family it was accepted that Ruth and
+Martin were engaged, but no announcement was made.  The family did not
+think it would ever be necessary.  Also, it was tacitly understood that
+it was to be a long engagement.  They did not ask Martin to go to work,
+nor to cease writing.  They did not intend to encourage him to mend
+himself.  And he aided and abetted them in their unfriendly designs, for
+going to work was farthest from his thoughts.
+
+"I wonder if you'll like what I have done!" he said to Ruth several days
+later.  "I've decided that boarding with my sister is too expensive, and
+I am going to board myself.  I've rented a little room out in North
+Oakland, retired neighborhood and all the rest, you know, and I've bought
+an oil-burner on which to cook."
+
+Ruth was overjoyed.  The oil-burner especially pleased her.
+
+"That was the way Mr. Butler began his start," she said.
+
+Martin frowned inwardly at the citation of that worthy gentleman, and
+went on: "I put stamps on all my manuscripts and started them off to the
+editors again.  Then to-day I moved in, and to-morrow I start to work."
+
+"A position!" she cried, betraying the gladness of her surprise in all
+her body, nestling closer to him, pressing his hand, smiling.  "And you
+never told me!  What is it?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I meant that I was going to work at my writing."  Her face fell, and he
+went on hastily.  "Don't misjudge me.  I am not going in this time with
+any iridescent ideas.  It is to be a cold, prosaic, matter-of-fact
+business proposition.  It is better than going to sea again, and I shall
+earn more money than any position in Oakland can bring an unskilled man."
+
+"You see, this vacation I have taken has given me perspective.  I haven't
+been working the life out of my body, and I haven't been writing, at
+least not for publication.  All I've done has been to love you and to
+think.  I've read some, too, but it has been part of my thinking, and I
+have read principally magazines.  I have generalized about myself, and
+the world, my place in it, and my chance to win to a place that will be
+fit for you.  Also, I've been reading Spencer's 'Philosophy of Style,'
+and found out a lot of what was the matter with me--or my writing,
+rather; and for that matter with most of the writing that is published
+every month in the magazines."
+
+"But the upshot of it all--of my thinking and reading and loving--is that
+I am going to move to Grub Street.  I shall leave masterpieces alone and
+do hack-work--jokes, paragraphs, feature articles, humorous verse, and
+society verse--all the rot for which there seems so much demand.  Then
+there are the newspaper syndicates, and the newspaper short-story
+syndicates, and the syndicates for the Sunday supplements.  I can go
+ahead and hammer out the stuff they want, and earn the equivalent of a
+good salary by it.  There are free-lances, you know, who earn as much as
+four or five hundred a month.  I don't care to become as they; but I'll
+earn a good living, and have plenty of time to myself, which I wouldn't
+have in any position."
+
+"Then, I'll have my spare time for study and for real work.  In between
+the grind I'll try my hand at masterpieces, and I'll study and prepare
+myself for the writing of masterpieces.  Why, I am amazed at the distance
+I have come already.  When I first tried to write, I had nothing to write
+about except a few paltry experiences which I neither understood nor
+appreciated.  But I had no thoughts.  I really didn't.  I didn't even
+have the words with which to think.  My experiences were so many
+meaningless pictures.  But as I began to add to my knowledge, and to my
+vocabulary, I saw something more in my experiences than mere pictures.  I
+retained the pictures and I found their interpretation.  That was when I
+began to do good work, when I wrote 'Adventure,'  'Joy,' 'The Pot,' 'The
+Wine of Life,' 'The Jostling Street,' the 'Love-cycle,' and the 'Sea
+Lyrics.'  I shall write more like them, and better; but I shall do it in
+my spare time.  My feet are on the solid earth, now.  Hack-work and
+income first, masterpieces afterward.  Just to show you, I wrote half a
+dozen jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and just as I was going to
+bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at a triolet--a humorous one;
+and inside an hour I had written four.  They ought to be worth a dollar
+apiece.  Four dollars right there for a few afterthoughts on the way to
+bed."
+
+"Of course it's all valueless, just so much dull and sordid plodding; but
+it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at sixty dollars a
+month, adding up endless columns of meaningless figures until one dies.
+And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in touch with things literary and
+gives me time to try bigger things."
+
+"But what good are these bigger-things, these masterpieces?" Ruth
+demanded.  "You can't sell them."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can," he began; but she interrupted.
+
+"All those you named, and which you say yourself are good--you have not
+sold any of them.  We can't get married on masterpieces that won't sell."
+
+"Then we'll get married on triolets that will sell," he asserted stoutly,
+putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive sweetheart
+toward him.
+
+"Listen to this," he went on in attempted gayety.  "It's not art, but
+it's a dollar.
+
+   "He came in
+   When I was out,
+   To borrow some tin
+   Was why he came in,
+   And he went without;
+   So I was in
+   And he was out."
+
+The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at variance with
+the dejection that came into his face as he finished.  He had drawn no
+smile from Ruth.  She was looking at him in an earnest and troubled way.
+
+"It may be a dollar," she said, "but it is a jester's dollar, the fee of
+a clown.  Don't you see, Martin, the whole thing is lowering.  I want the
+man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than a perpetrator
+of jokes and doggerel."
+
+"You want him to be like--say Mr. Butler?" he suggested.
+
+"I know you don't like Mr. Butler," she began.
+
+"Mr. Butler's all right," he interrupted.  "It's only his indigestion I
+find fault with.  But to save me I can't see any difference between
+writing jokes or comic verse and running a type-writer, taking dictation,
+or keeping sets of books.  It is all a means to an end.  Your theory is
+for me to begin with keeping books in order to become a successful lawyer
+or man of business.  Mine is to begin with hack-work and develop into an
+able author."
+
+"There is a difference," she insisted.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can't sell.  You
+have tried, you know that,--but the editors won't buy it."
+
+"Give me time, dear," he pleaded.  "The hack-work is only makeshift, and
+I don't take it seriously.  Give me two years.  I shall succeed in that
+time, and the editors will be glad to buy my good work.  I know what I am
+saying; I have faith in myself.  I know what I have in me; I know what
+literature is, now; I know the average rot that is poured out by a lot of
+little men; and I know that at the end of two years I shall be on the
+highroad to success.  As for business, I shall never succeed at it.  I am
+not in sympathy with it.  It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and
+mercenary, and tricky.  Anyway I am not adapted for it.  I'd never get
+beyond a clerkship, and how could you and I be happy on the paltry
+earnings of a clerk?  I want the best of everything in the world for you,
+and the only time when I won't want it will be when there is something
+better.  And I'm going to get it, going to get all of it.  The income of
+a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap.  A 'best-seller' will
+earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars--sometimes
+more and sometimes less; but, as a rule, pretty close to those figures."
+
+She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.
+
+"Well?" he asked.
+
+"I had hoped and planned otherwise.  I had thought, and I still think,
+that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand--you already know
+type-writing--and go into father's office.  You have a good mind, and I
+am confident you would succeed as a lawyer."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter her
+nor diminish her in Martin's eyes.  In the breathing spell of the
+vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self-analysis, and
+thereby learned much of himself.  He had discovered that he loved beauty
+more than fame, and that what desire he had for fame was largely for
+Ruth's sake.  It was for this reason that his desire for fame was strong.
+He wanted to be great in the world's eyes; "to make good," as he
+expressed it, in order that the woman he loved should be proud of him and
+deem him worthy.
+
+As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of serving her
+was to him sufficient wage.  And more than beauty he loved Ruth.  He
+considered love the finest thing in the world.  It was love that had
+worked the revolution in him, changing him from an uncouth sailor to a
+student and an artist; therefore, to him, the finest and greatest of the
+three, greater than learning and artistry, was love.  Already he had
+discovered that his brain went beyond Ruth's, just as it went beyond the
+brains of her brothers, or the brain of her father.  In spite of every
+advantage of university training, and in the face of her bachelorship of
+arts, his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or so of
+self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of the world
+and art and life that she could never hope to possess.
+
+All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor her
+love for him.  Love was too fine and noble, and he was too loyal a lover
+for him to besmirch love with criticism.  What did love have to do with
+Ruth's divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or
+equal suffrage?  They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason;
+it was superrational.  He could not belittle love.  He worshipped it.
+Love lay on the mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason.  It was a
+sublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it
+came rarely.  Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he favored,
+he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined process of
+the same scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that the human
+organism achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must not be
+questioned, but must be accepted as the highest guerdon of life.  Thus,
+he considered the lover blessed over all creatures, and it was a delight
+to him to think of "God's own mad lover," rising above the things of
+earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and applause, rising
+above life itself and "dying on a kiss."
+
+Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he reasoned
+out later.  In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation except when
+he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan.  He paid two dollars and
+a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese
+landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher
+tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her
+sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour
+wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen
+cents.  From detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to
+admire her as he observed the brave fight she made.  There were but four
+rooms in the little house--three, when Martin's was subtracted.  One of
+these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous with a funeral
+card and a death-picture of one of her numerous departed babes, was kept
+strictly for company.  The blinds were always down, and her barefooted
+tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred precinct save on state
+occasions.  She cooked, and all ate, in the kitchen, where she likewise
+washed, starched, and ironed clothes on all days of the week except
+Sunday; for her income came largely from taking in washing from her more
+prosperous neighbors.  Remained the bedroom, small as the one occupied by
+Martin, into which she and her seven little ones crowded and slept.  It
+was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished, and from
+her side of the thin partition he heard nightly every detail of the going
+to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the soft chattering, and the sleepy,
+twittering noises as of birds.  Another source of income to Maria were
+her cows, two of them, which she milked night and morning and which
+gained a surreptitious livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that
+grew on either side the public side walks, attended always by one or more
+of her ragged boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in
+keeping their eyes out for the poundmen.
+
+In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept
+house.  Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch, was
+the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-writing stand.
+The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space of
+the room.  The table was flanked on one side by a gaudy bureau,
+manufactured for profit and not for service, the thin veneer of which was
+shed day by day.  This bureau stood in the corner, and in the opposite
+corner, on the table's other flank, was the kitchen--the oil-stove on a
+dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and cooking utensils, a shelf
+on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of water on the floor.  Martin
+had to carry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no tap in his
+room.  On days when there was much steam to his cooking, the harvest of
+veneer from the bureau was unusually generous.  Over the bed, hoisted by
+a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle.  At first he had tried to keep
+it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva, loosening the bearings and
+puncturing the tires, had driven him out.  Next he attempted the tiny
+front porch, until a howling southeaster drenched the wheel a night-long.
+Then he had retreated with it to his room and slung it aloft.
+
+A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had accumulated and
+for which there was no room on the table or under the table.  Hand in
+hand with reading, he had developed the habit of making notes, and so
+copiously did he make them that there would have been no existence for
+him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several clothes-lines
+across the room on which the notes were hung.  Even so, he was crowded
+until navigating the room was a difficult task.  He could not open the
+door without first closing the closet door, and vice versa.  It was
+impossible for him anywhere to traverse the room in a straight line.  To
+go from the door to the head of the bed was a zigzag course that he was
+never quite able to accomplish in the dark without collisions.  Having
+settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to steer sharply
+to the right to avoid the kitchen.  Next, he sheered to the left, to
+escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too generous, brought him
+against the corner of the table.  With a sudden twitch and lurch, he
+terminated the sheer and bore off to the right along a sort of canal, one
+bank of which was the bed, the other the table.  When the one chair in
+the room was at its usual place before the table, the canal was
+unnavigable.  When the chair was not in use, it reposed on top of the
+bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book
+while the water boiled, and even becoming skilful enough to manage a
+paragraph or two while steak was frying.  Also, so small was the little
+corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reach
+anything he needed.  In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting down;
+standing up, he was too often in his own way.
+
+In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything, he
+possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the same time
+nutritious and cheap.  Pea-soup was a common article in his diet, as well
+as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown and cooked in Mexican
+style.  Rice, cooked as American housewives never cook it and can never
+learn to cook it, appeared on Martin's table at least once a day.  Dried
+fruits were less expensive than fresh, and he had usually a pot of them,
+cooked and ready at hand, for they took the place of butter on his bread.
+Occasionally he graced his table with a piece of round-steak, or with a
+soup-bone.  Coffee, without cream or milk, he had twice a day, in the
+evening substituting tea; but both coffee and tea were excellently
+cooked.
+
+There was need for him to be economical.  His vacation had consumed
+nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his
+market that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the first returns
+from his hack-work.  Except at such times as he saw Ruth, or dropped in
+to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in each day accomplishing
+at least three days' labor of ordinary men.  He slept a scant five hours,
+and only one with a constitution of iron could have held himself down, as
+Martin did, day after day, to nineteen consecutive hours of toil.  He
+never lost a moment.  On the looking-glass were lists of definitions and
+pronunciations; when shaving, or dressing, or combing his hair, he conned
+these lists over.  Similar lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and
+they were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in washing
+the dishes.  New lists continually displaced the old ones.  Every strange
+or partly familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately jotted
+down, and later, when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were
+typed and pinned to the wall or looking-glass.  He even carried them in
+his pockets, and reviewed them at odd moments on the street, or while
+waiting in butcher shop or grocery to be served.
+
+He went farther in the matter.  Reading the works of men who had arrived,
+he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by
+which they had been achieved--the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of
+style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these
+he made lists for study.  He did not ape.  He sought principles.  He drew
+up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such,
+culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general principle of
+mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of
+his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly.  In similar
+manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living
+language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that
+glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of
+common speech.  He sought always for the principle that lay behind and
+beneath.  He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could
+do it for himself.  He was not content with the fair face of beauty.  He
+dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking
+smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having
+dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to
+create beauty itself.
+
+He was so made that he could work only with understanding.  He could not
+work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting
+to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be
+right and fine.  He had no patience with chance effects.  He wanted to
+know why and how.  His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he
+began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain,
+with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his
+conscious possession.  Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.  On
+the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases
+that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all
+tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable
+connotations.  Before such he bowed down and marvelled, knowing that they
+were beyond the deliberate creation of any man.  And no matter how much
+he dissected beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and
+make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of
+beauty to which he did not penetrate and to which no man had ever
+penetrated.  He knew full well, from his Spencer, that man can never
+attain ultimate knowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty was
+no less than that of life--nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life
+were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same
+nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and wonder.
+
+In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his essay
+entitled "Star-dust," in which he had his fling, not at the principles of
+criticism, but at the principal critics.  It was brilliant, deep,
+philosophical, and deliciously touched with laughter.  Also it was
+promptly rejected by the magazines as often as it was submitted.  But
+having cleared his mind of it, he went serenely on his way.  It was a
+habit he developed, of incubating and maturing his thought upon a
+subject, and of then rushing into the type-writer with it.  That it did
+not see print was a matter of small moment with him.  The writing of it
+was the culminating act of a long mental process, the drawing together of
+scattered threads of thought and the final generalizing upon all the data
+with which his mind was burdened.  To write such an article was the
+conscious effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh
+material and problems.  It was in a way akin to that common habit of men
+and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who periodically and
+volubly break their long-suffering silence and "have their say" till the
+last word is said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+The weeks passed.  Martin ran out of money, and publishers' checks were
+far away as ever.  All his important manuscripts had come back and been
+started out again, and his hack-work fared no better.  His little kitchen
+was no longer graced with a variety of foods.  Caught in the pinch with a
+part sack of rice and a few pounds of dried apricots, rice and apricots
+was his menu three times a day for five days hand-running.  Then he
+startled to realize on his credit.  The Portuguese grocer, to whom he had
+hitherto paid cash, called a halt when Martin's bill reached the
+magnificent total of three dollars and eighty-five cents.
+
+"For you see," said the grocer, "you no catcha da work, I losa da mon'."
+
+And Martin could reply nothing.  There was no way of explaining.  It was
+not true business principle to allow credit to a strong-bodied young
+fellow of the working-class who was too lazy to work.
+
+"You catcha da job, I let you have mora da grub," the grocer assured
+Martin.  "No job, no grub.  Thata da business."  And then, to show that
+it was purely business foresight and not prejudice, "Hava da drink on da
+house--good friends justa da same."
+
+So Martin drank, in his easy way, to show that he was good friends with
+the house, and then went supperless to bed.
+
+The fruit store, where Martin had bought his vegetables, was run by an
+American whose business principles were so weak that he let Martin run a
+bill of five dollars before stopping his credit.  The baker stopped at
+two dollars, and the butcher at four dollars.  Martin added his debts and
+found that he was possessed of a total credit in all the world of
+fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents.  He was up with his type-writer
+rent, but he estimated that he could get two months' credit on that,
+which would be eight dollars.  When that occurred, he would have
+exhausted all possible credit.
+
+The last purchase from the fruit store had been a sack of potatoes, and
+for a week he had potatoes, and nothing but potatoes, three times a day.
+An occasional dinner at Ruth's helped to keep strength in his body,
+though he found it tantalizing enough to refuse further helping when his
+appetite was raging at sight of so much food spread before it.  Now and
+again, though afflicted with secret shame, he dropped in at his sister's
+at meal-time and ate as much as he dared--more than he dared at the Morse
+table.
+
+Day by day he worked on, and day by day the postman delivered to him
+rejected manuscripts.  He had no money for stamps, so the manuscripts
+accumulated in a heap under the table.  Came a day when for forty hours
+he had not tasted food.  He could not hope for a meal at Ruth's, for she
+was away to San Rafael on a two weeks' visit; and for very shame's sake
+he could not go to his sister's.  To cap misfortune, the postman, in his
+afternoon round, brought him five returned manuscripts.  Then it was that
+Martin wore his overcoat down into Oakland, and came back without it, but
+with five dollars tinkling in his pocket.  He paid a dollar each on
+account to the four tradesmen, and in his kitchen fried steak and onions,
+made coffee, and stewed a large pot of prunes.  And having dined, he sat
+down at his table-desk and completed before midnight an essay which he
+entitled "The Dignity of Usury."  Having typed it out, he flung it under
+the table, for there had been nothing left from the five dollars with
+which to buy stamps.
+
+Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, reducing the
+amount available for food by putting stamps on all his manuscripts and
+sending them out.  He was disappointed with his hack-work.  Nobody cared
+to buy.  He compared it with what he found in the newspapers, weeklies,
+and cheap magazines, and decided that his was better, far better, than
+the average; yet it would not sell.  Then he discovered that most of the
+newspapers printed a great deal of what was called "plate" stuff, and he
+got the address of the association that furnished it.  His own work that
+he sent in was returned, along with a stereotyped slip informing him that
+the staff supplied all the copy that was needed.
+
+In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of
+incident and anecdote.  Here was a chance.  His paragraphs were returned,
+and though he tried repeatedly he never succeeded in placing one.  Later
+on, when it no longer mattered, he learned that the associate editors and
+sub-editors augmented their salaries by supplying those paragraphs
+themselves.  The comic weeklies returned his jokes and humorous verse,
+and the light society verse he wrote for the large magazines found no
+abiding-place.  Then there was the newspaper storiette.  He knew that he
+could write better ones than were published.  Managing to obtain the
+addresses of two newspaper syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes.
+When he had written twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased.
+And yet, from day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and weeklies,
+scores and scores of storiettes, not one of which would compare with his.
+In his despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever, that
+he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-deluded
+pretender.
+
+The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever.  He folded the stamps
+in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and from three
+weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps and handed him
+the manuscript.  Surely there were no live, warm editors at the other
+end.  It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups--a clever mechanism
+operated by automatons.  He reached stages of despair wherein he doubted
+if editors existed at all.  He had never received a sign of the existence
+of one, and from absence of judgment in rejecting all he wrote it seemed
+plausible that editors were myths, manufactured and maintained by office
+boys, typesetters, and pressmen.
+
+The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and they
+were not all happy.  He was afflicted always with a gnawing restlessness,
+more tantalizing than in the old days before he possessed her love; for
+now that he did possess her love, the possession of her was far away as
+ever.  He had asked for two years; time was flying, and he was achieving
+nothing.  Again, he was always conscious of the fact that she did not
+approve what he was doing.  She did not say so directly.  Yet indirectly
+she let him understand it as clearly and definitely as she could have
+spoken it.  It was not resentment with her, but disapproval; though less
+sweet-natured women might have resented where she was no more than
+disappointed.  Her disappointment lay in that this man she had taken to
+mould, refused to be moulded.  To a certain extent she had found his clay
+plastic, then it had developed stubbornness, declining to be shaped in
+the image of her father or of Mr. Butler.
+
+What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse yet,
+misunderstood.  This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could live in
+any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought wilful and most
+obstinate because she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole,
+which was the only one she knew.  She could not follow the flights of his
+mind, and when his brain got beyond her, she deemed him erratic.  Nobody
+else's brain ever got beyond her.  She could always follow her father and
+mother, her brothers and Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow
+Martin, she believed the fault lay with him.  It was the old tragedy of
+insularity trying to serve as mentor to the universal.
+
+"You worship at the shrine of the established," he told her once, in a
+discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater.  "I grant that as
+authorities to quote they are most excellent--the two foremost literary
+critics in the United States.  Every school teacher in the land looks up
+to Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism.  Yet I read his stuff,
+and it seems to me the perfection of the felicitous expression of the
+inane.  Why, he is no more than a ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett
+Burgess.  And Praps is no better.  His 'Hemlock Mosses,' for instance is
+beautifully written.  Not a comma is out of place; and the tone--ah!--is
+lofty, so lofty.  He is the best-paid critic in the United States.
+Though, Heaven forbid! he's not a critic at all.  They do criticism
+better in England.
+
+"But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it so
+beautifully and morally and contentedly.  Their reviews remind me of a
+British Sunday.  They are the popular mouthpieces.  They back up your
+professors of English, and your professors of English back them up.  And
+there isn't an original idea in any of their skulls.  They know only the
+established,--in fact, they are the established.  They are weak minded,
+and the established impresses itself upon them as easily as the name of
+the brewery is impressed on a beer bottle.  And their function is to
+catch all the young fellows attending the university, to drive out of
+their minds any glimmering originality that may chance to be there, and
+to put upon them the stamp of the established."
+
+"I think I am nearer the truth," she replied, "when I stand by the
+established, than you are, raging around like an iconoclastic South Sea
+Islander."
+
+"It was the missionary who did the image breaking," he laughed.  "And
+unfortunately, all the missionaries are off among the heathen, so there
+are none left at home to break those old images, Mr. Vanderwater and Mr.
+Praps."
+
+"And the college professors, as well," she added.
+
+He shook his head emphatically.  "No; the science professors should live.
+They're really great.  But it would be a good deed to break the heads of
+nine-tenths of the English professors--little, microscopic-minded
+parrots!"
+
+Which was rather severe on the professors, but which to Ruth was
+blasphemy.  She could not help but measure the professors, neat,
+scholarly, in fitting clothes, speaking in well-modulated voices,
+breathing of culture and refinement, with this almost indescribable young
+fellow whom somehow she loved, whose clothes never would fit him, whose
+heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew excited when he talked,
+substituting abuse for calm statement and passionate utterance for cool
+self-possession.  They at least earned good salaries and were--yes, she
+compelled herself to face it--were gentlemen; while he could not earn a
+penny, and he was not as they.
+
+She did not weigh Martin's words nor judge his argument by them.  Her
+conclusion that his argument was wrong was reached--unconsciously, it is
+true--by a comparison of externals.  They, the professors, were right in
+their literary judgments because they were successes.  Martin's literary
+judgments were wrong because he could not sell his wares.  To use his own
+phrase, they made good, and he did not make good.  And besides, it did
+not seem reasonable that he should be right--he who had stood, so short a
+time before, in that same living room, blushing and awkward,
+acknowledging his introduction, looking fearfully about him at the bric-a-
+brac his swinging shoulders threatened to break, asking how long since
+Swinburne died, and boastfully announcing that he had read "Excelsior"
+and the "Psalm of Life."
+
+Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she worshipped the
+established.  Martin followed the processes of her thoughts, but forbore
+to go farther.  He did not love her for what she thought of Praps and
+Vanderwater and English professors, and he was coming to realize, with
+increasing conviction, that he possessed brain-areas and stretches of
+knowledge which she could never comprehend nor know existed.
+
+In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera not
+only unreasonable but wilfully perverse.
+
+"How did you like it?" she asked him one night, on the way home from the
+opera.
+
+It was a night when he had taken her at the expense of a month's rigid
+economizing on food.  After vainly waiting for him to speak about it,
+herself still tremulous and stirred by what she had just seen and heard,
+she had asked the question.
+
+"I liked the overture," was his answer.  "It was splendid."
+
+"Yes, but the opera itself?"
+
+"That was splendid too; that is, the orchestra was, though I'd have
+enjoyed it more if those jumping-jacks had kept quiet or gone off the
+stage."
+
+Ruth was aghast.
+
+"You don't mean Tetralani or Barillo?" she queried.
+
+"All of them--the whole kit and crew."
+
+"But they are great artists," she protested.
+
+"They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics and
+unrealities."
+
+"But don't you like Barillo's voice?" Ruth asked.  "He is next to Caruso,
+they say."
+
+"Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even better.  Her voice is
+exquisite--or at least I think so."
+
+"But, but--" Ruth stammered.  "I don't know what you mean, then.  You
+admire their voices, yet say they spoiled the music."
+
+"Precisely that.  I'd give anything to hear them in concert, and I'd give
+even a bit more not to hear them when the orchestra is playing.  I'm
+afraid I am a hopeless realist.  Great singers are not great actors.  To
+hear Barillo sing a love passage with the voice of an angel, and to hear
+Tetralani reply like another angel, and to hear it all accompanied by a
+perfect orgy of glowing and colorful music--is ravishing, most ravishing.
+I do not admit it.  I assert it.  But the whole effect is spoiled when I
+look at them--at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking feet and
+weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a scant five feet
+four, greasy-featured, with the chest of a squat, undersized blacksmith,
+and at the pair of them, attitudinizing, clasping their breasts, flinging
+their arms in the air like demented creatures in an asylum; and when I am
+expected to accept all this as the faithful illusion of a love-scene
+between a slender and beautiful princess and a handsome, romantic, young
+prince--why, I can't accept it, that's all.  It's rot; it's absurd; it's
+unreal.  That's what's the matter with it.  It's not real.  Don't tell me
+that anybody in this world ever made love that way.  Why, if I'd made
+love to you in such fashion, you'd have boxed my ears."
+
+"But you misunderstand," Ruth protested.  "Every form of art has its
+limitations."  (She was busy recalling a lecture she had heard at the
+university on the conventions of the arts.)  "In painting there are only
+two dimensions to the canvas, yet you accept the illusion of three
+dimensions which the art of a painter enables him to throw into the
+canvas.  In writing, again, the author must be omnipotent.  You accept as
+perfectly legitimate the author's account of the secret thoughts of the
+heroine, and yet all the time you know that the heroine was alone when
+thinking these thoughts, and that neither the author nor any one else was
+capable of hearing them.  And so with the stage, with sculpture, with
+opera, with every art form.  Certain irreconcilable things must be
+accepted."
+
+"Yes, I understood that," Martin answered.  "All the arts have their
+conventions."  (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word.  It was as if
+he had studied at the university himself, instead of being ill-equipped
+from browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.)  "But even
+the conventions must be real.  Trees, painted on flat cardboard and stuck
+up on each side of the stage, we accept as a forest.  It is a real enough
+convention.  But, on the other hand, we would not accept a sea scene as a
+forest.  We can't do it.  It violates our senses.  Nor would you, or,
+rather, should you, accept the ravings and writhings and agonized
+contortions of those two lunatics to-night as a convincing portrayal of
+love."
+
+"But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?" she
+protested.
+
+"No, no, not for a moment.  I merely maintain my right as an individual.
+I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the
+elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me.  The
+world's judges of music may all be right.  But I am I, and I won't
+subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind.  If I don't
+like a thing, I don't like it, that's all; and there is no reason under
+the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my
+fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it.  I can't follow
+the fashions in the things I like or dislike."
+
+"But music, you know, is a matter of training," Ruth argued; "and opera
+is even more a matter of training.  May it not be--"
+
+"That I am not trained in opera?" he dashed in.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"The very thing," he agreed.  "And I consider I am fortunate in not
+having been caught when I was young.  If I had, I could have wept
+sentimental tears to-night, and the clownish antics of that precious pair
+would have but enhanced the beauty of their voices and the beauty of the
+accompanying orchestra.  You are right.  It's mostly a matter of
+training.  And I am too old, now.  I must have the real or nothing.  An
+illusion that won't convince is a palpable lie, and that's what grand
+opera is to me when little Barillo throws a fit, clutches mighty
+Tetralani in his arms (also in a fit), and tells her how passionately he
+adores her."
+
+Again Ruth measured his thoughts by comparison of externals and in
+accordance with her belief in the established.  Who was he that he should
+be right and all the cultured world wrong?  His words and thoughts made
+no impression upon her.  She was too firmly intrenched in the established
+to have any sympathy with revolutionary ideas.  She had always been used
+to music, and she had enjoyed opera ever since she was a child, and all
+her world had enjoyed it, too.  Then by what right did Martin Eden
+emerge, as he had so recently emerged, from his rag-time and
+working-class songs, and pass judgment on the world's music?  She was
+vexed with him, and as she walked beside him she had a vague feeling of
+outrage.  At the best, in her most charitable frame of mind, she
+considered the statement of his views to be a caprice, an erratic and
+uncalled-for prank.  But when he took her in his arms at the door and
+kissed her good night in tender lover-fashion, she forgot everything in
+the outrush of her own love to him.  And later, on a sleepless pillow,
+she puzzled, as she had often puzzled of late, as to how it was that she
+loved so strange a man, and loved him despite the disapproval of her
+people.
+
+And next day Martin Eden cast hack-work aside, and at white heat hammered
+out an essay to which he gave the title, "The Philosophy of Illusion."  A
+stamp started it on its travels, but it was destined to receive many
+stamps and to be started on many travels in the months that followed.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+Maria Silva was poor, and all the ways of poverty were clear to her.
+Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signifying a not-nice condition of
+existence.  That was her total knowledge on the subject.  She knew Martin
+was poor, and his condition she associated in her mind with the boyhood
+of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of other men who had become
+successes.  Also, while aware that poverty was anything but delectable,
+she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary,
+that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men who were not
+degraded and hopeless drudges.  So that her knowledge that Martin was so
+poor that he had pawned his watch and overcoat did not disturb her.  She
+even considered it the hopeful side of the situation, believing that
+sooner or later it would arouse him and compel him to abandon his
+writing.
+
+Ruth never read hunger in Martin's face, which had grown lean and had
+enlarged the slight hollows in the cheeks.  In fact, she marked the
+change in his face with satisfaction.  It seemed to refine him, to remove
+from him much of the dross of flesh and the too animal-like vigor that
+lured her while she detested it.  Sometimes, when with her, she noted an
+unusual brightness in his eyes, and she admired it, for it made him
+appear more the poet and the scholar--the things he would have liked to
+be and which she would have liked him to be.  But Maria Silva read a
+different tale in the hollow cheeks and the burning eyes, and she noted
+the changes in them from day to day, by them following the ebb and flow
+of his fortunes.  She saw him leave the house with his overcoat and
+return without it, though the day was chill and raw, and promptly she saw
+his cheeks fill out slightly and the fire of hunger leave his eyes.  In
+the same way she had seen his wheel and watch go, and after each event
+she had seen his vigor bloom again.
+
+Likewise she watched his toils, and knew the measure of the midnight oil
+he burned.  Work!  She knew that he outdid her, though his work was of a
+different order.  And she was surprised to behold that the less food he
+had, the harder he worked.  On occasion, in a casual sort of way, when
+she thought hunger pinched hardest, she would send him in a loaf of new
+baking, awkwardly covering the act with banter to the effect that it was
+better than he could bake.  And again, she would send one of her toddlers
+in to him with a great pitcher of hot soup, debating inwardly the while
+whether she was justified in taking it from the mouths of her own flesh
+and blood.  Nor was Martin ungrateful, knowing as he did the lives of the
+poor, and that if ever in the world there was charity, this was it.
+
+On a day when she had filled her brood with what was left in the house,
+Maria invested her last fifteen cents in a gallon of cheap wine.  Martin,
+coming into her kitchen to fetch water, was invited to sit down and
+drink.  He drank her very-good health, and in return she drank his.  Then
+she drank to prosperity in his undertakings, and he drank to the hope
+that James Grant would show up and pay her for his washing.  James Grant
+was a journeymen carpenter who did not always pay his bills and who owed
+Maria three dollars.
+
+Both Maria and Martin drank the sour new wine on empty stomachs, and it
+went swiftly to their heads.  Utterly differentiated creatures that they
+were, they were lonely in their misery, and though the misery was tacitly
+ignored, it was the bond that drew them together.  Maria was amazed to
+learn that he had been in the Azores, where she had lived until she was
+eleven.  She was doubly amazed that he had been in the Hawaiian Islands,
+whither she had migrated from the Azores with her people.  But her
+amazement passed all bounds when he told her he had been on Maui, the
+particular island whereon she had attained womanhood and married.
+Kahului, where she had first met her husband,--he, Martin, had been there
+twice!  Yes, she remembered the sugar steamers, and he had been on
+them--well, well, it was a small world.  And Wailuku!  That place, too!
+Did he know the head-luna of the plantation?  Yes, and had had a couple
+of drinks with him.
+
+And so they reminiscenced and drowned their hunger in the raw, sour wine.
+To Martin the future did not seem so dim.  Success trembled just before
+him.  He was on the verge of clasping it.  Then he studied the deep-lined
+face of the toil-worn woman before him, remembered her soups and loaves
+of new baking, and felt spring up in him the warmest gratitude and
+philanthropy.
+
+"Maria," he exclaimed suddenly.  "What would you like to have?"
+
+She looked at him, bepuzzled.
+
+"What would you like to have now, right now, if you could get it?"
+
+"Shoe alla da roun' for da childs--seven pairs da shoe."
+
+"You shall have them," he announced, while she nodded her head gravely.
+"But I mean a big wish, something big that you want."
+
+Her eyes sparkled good-naturedly.  He was choosing to make fun with her,
+Maria, with whom few made fun these days.
+
+"Think hard," he cautioned, just as she was opening her mouth to speak.
+
+"Alla right," she answered.  "I thinka da hard.  I lika da house, dis
+house--all mine, no paya da rent, seven dollar da month."
+
+"You shall have it," he granted, "and in a short time.  Now wish the
+great wish.  Make believe I am God, and I say to you anything you want
+you can have.  Then you wish that thing, and I listen."
+
+Maria considered solemnly for a space.
+
+"You no 'fraid?" she asked warningly.
+
+"No, no," he laughed, "I'm not afraid.  Go ahead."
+
+"Most verra big," she warned again.
+
+"All right.  Fire away."
+
+"Well, den--"  She drew a big breath like a child, as she voiced to the
+uttermost all she cared to demand of life.  "I lika da have one milka
+ranch--good milka ranch.  Plenty cow, plenty land, plenty grass.  I lika
+da have near San Le-an; my sister liva dere.  I sella da milk in Oakland.
+I maka da plentee mon.  Joe an' Nick no runna da cow.  Dey go-a to
+school.  Bimeby maka da good engineer, worka da railroad.  Yes, I lika da
+milka ranch."
+
+She paused and regarded Martin with twinkling eyes.
+
+"You shall have it," he answered promptly.
+
+She nodded her head and touched her lips courteously to the wine-glass
+and to the giver of the gift she knew would never be given.  His heart
+was right, and in her own heart she appreciated his intention as much as
+if the gift had gone with it.
+
+"No, Maria," he went on; "Nick and Joe won't have to peddle milk, and all
+the kids can go to school and wear shoes the whole year round.  It will
+be a first-class milk ranch--everything complete.  There will be a house
+to live in and a stable for the horses, and cow-barns, of course.  There
+will be chickens, pigs, vegetables, fruit trees, and everything like
+that; and there will be enough cows to pay for a hired man or two.  Then
+you won't have anything to do but take care of the children.  For that
+matter, if you find a good man, you can marry and take it easy while he
+runs the ranch."
+
+And from such largess, dispensed from his future, Martin turned and took
+his one good suit of clothes to the pawnshop.  His plight was desperate
+for him to do this, for it cut him off from Ruth.  He had no second-best
+suit that was presentable, and though he could go to the butcher and the
+baker, and even on occasion to his sister's, it was beyond all daring to
+dream of entering the Morse home so disreputably apparelled.
+
+He toiled on, miserable and well-nigh hopeless.  It began to appear to
+him that the second battle was lost and that he would have to go to work.
+In doing this he would satisfy everybody--the grocer, his sister, Ruth,
+and even Maria, to whom he owed a month's room rent.  He was two months
+behind with his type-writer, and the agency was clamoring for payment or
+for the return of the machine.  In desperation, all but ready to
+surrender, to make a truce with fate until he could get a fresh start, he
+took the civil service examinations for the Railway Mail.  To his
+surprise, he passed first.  The job was assured, though when the call
+would come to enter upon his duties nobody knew.
+
+It was at this time, at the lowest ebb, that the smooth-running editorial
+machine broke down.  A cog must have slipped or an oil-cup run dry, for
+the postman brought him one morning a short, thin envelope.  Martin
+glanced at the upper left-hand corner and read the name and address of
+the Transcontinental Monthly.  His heart gave a great leap, and he
+suddenly felt faint, the sinking feeling accompanied by a strange
+trembling of the knees.  He staggered into his room and sat down on the
+bed, the envelope still unopened, and in that moment came understanding
+to him how people suddenly fall dead upon receipt of extraordinarily good
+news.
+
+Of course this was good news.  There was no manuscript in that thin
+envelope, therefore it was an acceptance.  He knew the story in the hands
+of the Transcontinental.  It was "The Ring of Bells," one of his horror
+stories, and it was an even five thousand words.  And, since first-class
+magazines always paid on acceptance, there was a check inside.  Two cents
+a word--twenty dollars a thousand; the check must be a hundred dollars.
+One hundred dollars!  As he tore the envelope open, every item of all his
+debts surged in his brain--$3.85 to the grocer; butcher $4.00 flat;
+baker, $2.00; fruit store, $5.00; total, $14.85.  Then there was room
+rent, $2.50; another month in advance, $2.50; two months' type-writer,
+$8.00; a month in advance, $4.00; total, $31.85.  And finally to be
+added, his pledges, plus interest, with the pawnbroker--watch, $5.50;
+overcoat, $5.50; wheel, $7.75; suit of clothes, $5.50 (60 % interest, but
+what did it matter?)--grand total, $56.10.  He saw, as if visible in the
+air before him, in illuminated figures, the whole sum, and the
+subtraction that followed and that gave a remainder of $43.90.  When he
+had squared every debt, redeemed every pledge, he would still have
+jingling in his pockets a princely $43.90.  And on top of that he would
+have a month's rent paid in advance on the type-writer and on the room.
+
+By this time he had drawn the single sheet of type-written letter out and
+spread it open.  There was no check.  He peered into the envelope, held
+it to the light, but could not trust his eyes, and in trembling haste
+tore the envelope apart.  There was no check.  He read the letter,
+skimming it line by line, dashing through the editor's praise of his
+story to the meat of the letter, the statement why the check had not been
+sent.  He found no such statement, but he did find that which made him
+suddenly wilt.  The letter slid from his hand.  His eyes went
+lack-lustre, and he lay back on the pillow, pulling the blanket about him
+and up to his chin.
+
+Five dollars for "The Ring of Bells"--five dollars for five thousand
+words!  Instead of two cents a word, ten words for a cent!  And the
+editor had praised it, too.  And he would receive the check when the
+story was published.  Then it was all poppycock, two cents a word for
+minimum rate and payment upon acceptance.  It was a lie, and it had led
+him astray.  He would never have attempted to write had he known that.  He
+would have gone to work--to work for Ruth.  He went back to the day he
+first attempted to write, and was appalled at the enormous waste of
+time--and all for ten words for a cent.  And the other high rewards of
+writers, that he had read about, must be lies, too.  His second-hand
+ideas of authorship were wrong, for here was the proof of it.
+
+The Transcontinental sold for twenty-five cents, and its dignified and
+artistic cover proclaimed it as among the first-class magazines.  It was
+a staid, respectable magazine, and it had been published continuously
+since long before he was born.  Why, on the outside cover were printed
+every month the words of one of the world's great writers, words
+proclaiming the inspired mission of the Transcontinental by a star of
+literature whose first coruscations had appeared inside those self-same
+covers.  And the high and lofty, heaven-inspired Transcontinental paid
+five dollars for five thousand words!  The great writer had recently died
+in a foreign land--in dire poverty, Martin remembered, which was not to
+be wondered at, considering the magnificent pay authors receive.
+
+Well, he had taken the bait, the newspaper lies about writers and their
+pay, and he had wasted two years over it.  But he would disgorge the bait
+now.  Not another line would he ever write.  He would do what Ruth wanted
+him to do, what everybody wanted him to do--get a job.  The thought of
+going to work reminded him of Joe--Joe, tramping through the land of
+nothing-to-do.  Martin heaved a great sigh of envy.  The reaction of
+nineteen hours a day for many days was strong upon him.  But then, Joe
+was not in love, had none of the responsibilities of love, and he could
+afford to loaf through the land of nothing-to-do.  He, Martin, had
+something to work for, and go to work he would.  He would start out early
+next morning to hunt a job.  And he would let Ruth know, too, that he had
+mended his ways and was willing to go into her father's office.
+
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent, the market
+price for art.  The disappointment of it, the lie of it, the infamy of
+it, were uppermost in his thoughts; and under his closed eyelids, in
+fiery figures, burned the "$3.85" he owed the grocer.  He shivered, and
+was aware of an aching in his bones.  The small of his back ached
+especially.  His head ached, the top of it ached, the back of it ached,
+the brains inside of it ached and seemed to be swelling, while the ache
+over his brows was intolerable.  And beneath the brows, planted under his
+lids, was the merciless "$3.85."  He opened his eyes to escape it, but
+the white light of the room seemed to sear the balls and forced him to
+close his eyes, when the "$3.85" confronted him again.
+
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent--that
+particular thought took up its residence in his brain, and he could no
+more escape it than he could the "$3.85" under his eyelids.  A change
+seemed to come over the latter, and he watched curiously, till "$2.00"
+burned in its stead.  Ah, he thought, that was the baker.  The next sum
+that appeared was "$2.50."  It puzzled him, and he pondered it as if life
+and death hung on the solution.  He owed somebody two dollars and a half,
+that was certain, but who was it?  To find it was the task set him by an
+imperious and malignant universe, and he wandered through the endless
+corridors of his mind, opening all manner of lumber rooms and chambers
+stored with odds and ends of memories and knowledge as he vainly sought
+the answer.  After several centuries it came to him, easily, without
+effort, that it was Maria.  With a great relief he turned his soul to the
+screen of torment under his lids.  He had solved the problem; now he
+could rest.  But no, the "$2.50" faded away, and in its place burned
+"$8.00."  Who was that?  He must go the dreary round of his mind again
+and find out.
+
+How long he was gone on this quest he did not know, but after what seemed
+an enormous lapse of time, he was called back to himself by a knock at
+the door, and by Maria's asking if he was sick.  He replied in a muffled
+voice he did not recognize, saying that he was merely taking a nap.  He
+was surprised when he noted the darkness of night in the room.  He had
+received the letter at two in the afternoon, and he realized that he was
+sick.
+
+Then the "$8.00" began to smoulder under his lids again, and he returned
+himself to servitude.  But he grew cunning.  There was no need for him to
+wander through his mind.  He had been a fool.  He pulled a lever and made
+his mind revolve about him, a monstrous wheel of fortune, a
+merry-go-round of memory, a revolving sphere of wisdom.  Faster and
+faster it revolved, until its vortex sucked him in and he was flung
+whirling through black chaos.
+
+Quite naturally he found himself at a mangle, feeding starched cuffs.  But
+as he fed he noticed figures printed in the cuffs.  It was a new way of
+marking linen, he thought, until, looking closer, he saw "$3.85" on one
+of the cuffs.  Then it came to him that it was the grocer's bill, and
+that these were his bills flying around on the drum of the mangle.  A
+crafty idea came to him.  He would throw the bills on the floor and so
+escape paying them.  No sooner thought than done, and he crumpled the
+cuffs spitefully as he flung them upon an unusually dirty floor.  Ever
+the heap grew, and though each bill was duplicated a thousand times, he
+found only one for two dollars and a half, which was what he owed Maria.
+That meant that Maria would not press for payment, and he resolved
+generously that it would be the only one he would pay; so he began
+searching through the cast-out heap for hers.  He sought it desperately,
+for ages, and was still searching when the manager of the hotel entered,
+the fat Dutchman.  His face blazed with wrath, and he shouted in
+stentorian tones that echoed down the universe, "I shall deduct the cost
+of those cuffs from your wages!"  The pile of cuffs grew into a mountain,
+and Martin knew that he was doomed to toil for a thousand years to pay
+for them.  Well, there was nothing left to do but kill the manager and
+burn down the laundry.  But the big Dutchman frustrated him, seizing him
+by the nape of the neck and dancing him up and down.  He danced him over
+the ironing tables, the stove, and the mangles, and out into the wash-
+room and over the wringer and washer.  Martin was danced until his teeth
+rattled and his head ached, and he marvelled that the Dutchman was so
+strong.
+
+And then he found himself before the mangle, this time receiving the
+cuffs an editor of a magazine was feeding from the other side.  Each cuff
+was a check, and Martin went over them anxiously, in a fever of
+expectation, but they were all blanks.  He stood there and received the
+blanks for a million years or so, never letting one go by for fear it
+might be filled out.  At last he found it.  With trembling fingers he
+held it to the light.  It was for five dollars.  "Ha! Ha!" laughed the
+editor across the mangle.  "Well, then, I shall kill you," Martin said.
+He went out into the wash-room to get the axe, and found Joe starching
+manuscripts.  He tried to make him desist, then swung the axe for him.
+But the weapon remained poised in mid-air, for Martin found himself back
+in the ironing room in the midst of a snow-storm.  No, it was not snow
+that was falling, but checks of large denomination, the smallest not less
+than a thousand dollars.  He began to collect them and sort them out, in
+packages of a hundred, tying each package securely with twine.
+
+He looked up from his task and saw Joe standing before him juggling flat-
+irons, starched shirts, and manuscripts.  Now and again he reached out
+and added a bundle of checks to the flying miscellany that soared through
+the roof and out of sight in a tremendous circle.  Martin struck at him,
+but he seized the axe and added it to the flying circle.  Then he plucked
+Martin and added him.  Martin went up through the roof, clutching at
+manuscripts, so that by the time he came down he had a large armful.  But
+no sooner down than up again, and a second and a third time and countless
+times he flew around the circle.  From far off he could hear a childish
+treble singing: "Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around."
+
+He recovered the axe in the midst of the Milky Way of checks, starched
+shirts, and manuscripts, and prepared, when he came down, to kill Joe.
+But he did not come down.  Instead, at two in the morning, Maria, having
+heard his groans through the thin partition, came into his room, to put
+hot flat-irons against his body and damp cloths upon his aching eyes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Martin Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the morning.  It was late
+afternoon before he came out of his delirium and gazed with aching eyes
+about the room.  Mary, one of the tribe of Silva, eight years old,
+keeping watch, raised a screech at sight of his returning consciousness.
+Maria hurried into the room from the kitchen.  She put her work-calloused
+hand upon his hot forehead and felt his pulse.
+
+"You lika da eat?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head.  Eating was farthest from his desire, and he wondered
+that he should ever have been hungry in his life.
+
+"I'm sick, Maria," he said weakly.  "What is it?  Do you know?"
+
+"Grip," she answered.  "Two or three days you alla da right.  Better you
+no eat now.  Bimeby plenty can eat, to-morrow can eat maybe."
+
+Martin was not used to sickness, and when Maria and her little girl left
+him, he essayed to get up and dress.  By a supreme exertion of will, with
+rearing brain and eyes that ached so that he could not keep them open, he
+managed to get out of bed, only to be left stranded by his senses upon
+the table.  Half an hour later he managed to regain the bed, where he was
+content to lie with closed eyes and analyze his various pains and
+weaknesses.  Maria came in several times to change the cold cloths on his
+forehead.  Otherwise she left him in peace, too wise to vex him with
+chatter.  This moved him to gratitude, and he murmured to himself,
+"Maria, you getta da milka ranch, all righta, all right."
+
+Then he remembered his long-buried past of yesterday.
+
+It seemed a life-time since he had received that letter from the
+Transcontinental, a life-time since it was all over and done with and a
+new page turned.  He had shot his bolt, and shot it hard, and now he was
+down on his back.  If he hadn't starved himself, he wouldn't have been
+caught by La Grippe.  He had been run down, and he had not had the
+strength to throw off the germ of disease which had invaded his system.
+This was what resulted.
+
+"What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own
+life?" he demanded aloud.  "This is no place for me.  No more literature
+in mine.  Me for the counting-house and ledger, the monthly salary, and
+the little home with Ruth."
+
+Two days later, having eaten an egg and two slices of toast and drunk a
+cup of tea, he asked for his mail, but found his eyes still hurt too much
+to permit him to read.
+
+"You read for me, Maria," he said.  "Never mind the big, long letters.
+Throw them under the table.  Read me the small letters."
+
+"No can," was the answer.  "Teresa, she go to school, she can."
+
+So Teresa Silva, aged nine, opened his letters and read them to him.  He
+listened absently to a long dun from the type-writer people, his mind
+busy with ways and means of finding a job.  Suddenly he was shocked back
+to himself.
+
+"'We offer you forty dollars for all serial rights in your story,'"
+Teresa slowly spelled out, "'provided you allow us to make the
+alterations suggested.'"
+
+"What magazine is that?" Martin shouted.  "Here, give it to me!"
+
+He could see to read, now, and he was unaware of the pain of the action.
+It was the White Mouse that was offering him forty dollars, and the story
+was "The Whirlpool," another of his early horror stories.  He read the
+letter through again and again.  The editor told him plainly that he had
+not handled the idea properly, but that it was the idea they were buying
+because it was original.  If they could cut the story down one-third,
+they would take it and send him forty dollars on receipt of his answer.
+
+He called for pen and ink, and told the editor he could cut the story
+down three-thirds if he wanted to, and to send the forty dollars right
+along.
+
+The letter despatched to the letter-box by Teresa, Martin lay back and
+thought.  It wasn't a lie, after all.  The White Mouse paid on
+acceptance.  There were three thousand words in "The Whirlpool."  Cut
+down a third, there would be two thousand.  At forty dollars that would
+be two cents a word.  Pay on acceptance and two cents a word--the
+newspapers had told the truth.  And he had thought the White Mouse a
+third-rater!  It was evident that he did not know the magazines.  He had
+deemed the Transcontinental a first-rater, and it paid a cent for ten
+words.  He had classed the White Mouse as of no account, and it paid
+twenty times as much as the Transcontinental and also had paid on
+acceptance.
+
+Well, there was one thing certain: when he got well, he would not go out
+looking for a job.  There were more stories in his head as good as "The
+Whirlpool," and at forty dollars apiece he could earn far more than in
+any job or position.  Just when he thought the battle lost, it was won.
+He had proved for his career.  The way was clear.  Beginning with the
+White Mouse he would add magazine after magazine to his growing list of
+patrons.  Hack-work could be put aside.  For that matter, it had been
+wasted time, for it had not brought him a dollar.  He would devote
+himself to work, good work, and he would pour out the best that was in
+him.  He wished Ruth was there to share in his joy, and when he went over
+the letters left lying on his bed, he found one from her.  It was sweetly
+reproachful, wondering what had kept him away for so dreadful a length of
+time.  He reread the letter adoringly, dwelling over her handwriting,
+loving each stroke of her pen, and in the end kissing her signature.
+
+And when he answered, he told her recklessly that he had not been to see
+her because his best clothes were in pawn.  He told her that he had been
+sick, but was once more nearly well, and that inside ten days or two
+weeks (as soon as a letter could travel to New York City and return) he
+would redeem his clothes and be with her.
+
+But Ruth did not care to wait ten days or two weeks.  Besides, her lover
+was sick.  The next afternoon, accompanied by Arthur, she arrived in the
+Morse carriage, to the unqualified delight of the Silva tribe and of all
+the urchins on the street, and to the consternation of Maria.  She boxed
+the ears of the Silvas who crowded about the visitors on the tiny front
+porch, and in more than usual atrocious English tried to apologize for
+her appearance.  Sleeves rolled up from soap-flecked arms and a wet gunny-
+sack around her waist told of the task at which she had been caught.  So
+flustered was she by two such grand young people asking for her lodger,
+that she forgot to invite them to sit down in the little parlor.  To
+enter Martin's room, they passed through the kitchen, warm and moist and
+steamy from the big washing in progress.  Maria, in her excitement,
+jammed the bedroom and bedroom-closet doors together, and for five
+minutes, through the partly open door, clouds of steam, smelling of soap-
+suds and dirt, poured into the sick chamber.
+
+Ruth succeeded in veering right and left and right again, and in running
+the narrow passage between table and bed to Martin's side; but Arthur
+veered too wide and fetched up with clatter and bang of pots and pans in
+the corner where Martin did his cooking.  Arthur did not linger long.
+Ruth occupied the only chair, and having done his duty, he went outside
+and stood by the gate, the centre of seven marvelling Silvas, who watched
+him as they would have watched a curiosity in a side-show.  All about the
+carriage were gathered the children from a dozen blocks, waiting and
+eager for some tragic and terrible denouement.  Carriages were seen on
+their street only for weddings and funerals.  Here was neither marriage
+nor death: therefore, it was something transcending experience and well
+worth waiting for.
+
+Martin had been wild to see Ruth.  His was essentially a love-nature, and
+he possessed more than the average man's need for sympathy.  He was
+starving for sympathy, which, with him, meant intelligent understanding;
+and he had yet to learn that Ruth's sympathy was largely sentimental and
+tactful, and that it proceeded from gentleness of nature rather than from
+understanding of the objects of her sympathy.  So it was while Martin
+held her hand and gladly talked, that her love for him prompted her to
+press his hand in return, and that her eyes were moist and luminous at
+sight of his helplessness and of the marks suffering had stamped upon his
+face.
+
+But while he told her of his two acceptances, of his despair when he
+received the one from the Transcontinental, and of the corresponding
+delight with which he received the one from the White Mouse, she did not
+follow him.  She heard the words he uttered and understood their literal
+import, but she was not with him in his despair and his delight.  She
+could not get out of herself.  She was not interested in selling stories
+to magazines.  What was important to her was matrimony.  She was not
+aware of it, however, any more than she was aware that her desire that
+Martin take a position was the instinctive and preparative impulse of
+motherhood.  She would have blushed had she been told as much in plain,
+set terms, and next, she might have grown indignant and asserted that her
+sole interest lay in the man she loved and her desire for him to make the
+best of himself.  So, while Martin poured out his heart to her, elated
+with the first success his chosen work in the world had received, she
+paid heed to his bare words only, gazing now and again about the room,
+shocked by what she saw.
+
+For the first time Ruth gazed upon the sordid face of poverty.  Starving
+lovers had always seemed romantic to her,--but she had had no idea how
+starving lovers lived.  She had never dreamed it could be like this.  Ever
+her gaze shifted from the room to him and back again.  The steamy smell
+of dirty clothes, which had entered with her from the kitchen, was
+sickening.  Martin must be soaked with it, Ruth concluded, if that awful
+woman washed frequently.  Such was the contagiousness of degradation.
+When she looked at Martin, she seemed to see the smirch left upon him by
+his surroundings.  She had never seen him unshaven, and the three days'
+growth of beard on his face was repulsive to her.  Not alone did it give
+him the same dark and murky aspect of the Silva house, inside and out,
+but it seemed to emphasize that animal-like strength of his which she
+detested.  And here he was, being confirmed in his madness by the two
+acceptances he took such pride in telling her about.  A little longer and
+he would have surrendered and gone to work.  Now he would continue on in
+this horrible house, writing and starving for a few more months.
+
+"What is that smell?" she asked suddenly.
+
+"Some of Maria's washing smells, I imagine," was the answer.  "I am
+growing quite accustomed to them."
+
+"No, no; not that.  It is something else.  A stale, sickish smell."
+
+Martin sampled the air before replying.
+
+"I can't smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke," he announced.
+
+"That's it.  It is terrible.  Why do you smoke so much, Martin?"
+
+"I don't know, except that I smoke more than usual when I am lonely.  And
+then, too, it's such a long-standing habit.  I learned when I was only a
+youngster."
+
+"It is not a nice habit, you know," she reproved.  "It smells to heaven."
+
+"That's the fault of the tobacco.  I can afford only the cheapest.  But
+wait until I get that forty-dollar check.  I'll use a brand that is not
+offensive even to the angels.  But that wasn't so bad, was it, two
+acceptances in three days?  That forty-five dollars will pay about all my
+debts."
+
+"For two years' work?" she queried.
+
+"No, for less than a week's work.  Please pass me that book over on the
+far corner of the table, the account book with the gray cover."  He
+opened it and began turning over the pages rapidly.  "Yes, I was right.
+Four days for 'The Ring of Bells,' two days for 'The Whirlpool.'  That's
+forty-five dollars for a week's work, one hundred and eighty dollars a
+month.  That beats any salary I can command.  And, besides, I'm just
+beginning.  A thousand dollars a month is not too much to buy for you all
+I want you to have.  A salary of five hundred a month would be too small.
+That forty-five dollars is just a starter.  Wait till I get my stride.
+Then watch my smoke."
+
+Ruth misunderstood his slang, and reverted to cigarettes.
+
+"You smoke more than enough as it is, and the brand of tobacco will make
+no difference.  It is the smoking itself that is not nice, no matter what
+the brand may be.  You are a chimney, a living volcano, a perambulating
+smoke-stack, and you are a perfect disgrace, Martin dear, you know you
+are."
+
+She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he looked at her
+delicate face and into her pure, limpid eyes, as of old he was struck
+with his own unworthiness.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't smoke any more," she whispered.  "Please, for--my
+sake."
+
+"All right, I won't," he cried.  "I'll do anything you ask, dear love,
+anything; you know that."
+
+A great temptation assailed her.  In an insistent way she had caught
+glimpses of the large, easy-going side of his nature, and she felt sure,
+if she asked him to cease attempting to write, that he would grant her
+wish.  In the swift instant that elapsed, the words trembled on her lips.
+But she did not utter them.  She was not quite brave enough; she did not
+quite dare.  Instead, she leaned toward him to meet him, and in his arms
+murmured:-
+
+"You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own.  I am
+sure smoking hurts you; and besides, it is not good to be a slave to
+anything, to a drug least of all."
+
+"I shall always be your slave," he smiled.
+
+"In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands."
+
+She looked at him mischievously, though deep down she was already
+regretting that she had not preferred her largest request.
+
+"I live but to obey, your majesty."
+
+"Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not omit to shave every
+day.  Look how you have scratched my cheek."
+
+And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter.  But she had made one
+point, and she could not expect to make more than one at a time.  She
+felt a woman's pride in that she had made him stop smoking.  Another time
+she would persuade him to take a position, for had he not said he would
+do anything she asked?
+
+She left his side to explore the room, examining the clothes-lines of
+notes overhead, learning the mystery of the tackle used for suspending
+his wheel under the ceiling, and being saddened by the heap of
+manuscripts under the table which represented to her just so much wasted
+time.  The oil-stove won her admiration, but on investigating the food
+shelves she found them empty.
+
+"Why, you haven't anything to eat, you poor dear," she said with tender
+compassion.  "You must be starving."
+
+"I store my food in Maria's safe and in her pantry," he lied.  "It keeps
+better there.  No danger of my starving.  Look at that."
+
+She had come back to his side, and she saw him double his arm at the
+elbow, the biceps crawling under his shirt-sleeve and swelling into a
+knot of muscle, heavy and hard.  The sight repelled her.  Sentimentally,
+she disliked it.  But her pulse, her blood, every fibre of her, loved it
+and yearned for it, and, in the old, inexplicable way, she leaned toward
+him, not away from him.  And in the moment that followed, when he crushed
+her in his arms, the brain of her, concerned with the superficial aspects
+of life, was in revolt; while the heart of her, the woman of her,
+concerned with life itself, exulted triumphantly.  It was in moments like
+this that she felt to the uttermost the greatness of her love for Martin,
+for it was almost a swoon of delight to her to feel his strong arms about
+her, holding her tightly, hurting her with the grip of their fervor.  At
+such moments she found justification for her treason to her standards,
+for her violation of her own high ideals, and, most of all, for her tacit
+disobedience to her mother and father.  They did not want her to marry
+this man.  It shocked them that she should love him.  It shocked her,
+too, sometimes, when she was apart from him, a cool and reasoning
+creature.  With him, she loved him--in truth, at times a vexed and
+worried love; but love it was, a love that was stronger than she.
+
+"This La Grippe is nothing," he was saying.  "It hurts a bit, and gives
+one a nasty headache, but it doesn't compare with break-bone fever."
+
+"Have you had that, too?" she queried absently, intent on the heaven-sent
+justification she was finding in his arms.
+
+And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his words
+startled her.
+
+He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of the
+Hawaiian Islands.
+
+"But why did you go there?" she demanded.
+
+Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal.
+
+"Because I didn't know," he answered.  "I never dreamed of lepers.  When
+I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed inland for some
+place of hiding.  For three days I lived off guavas, ohia-apples, and
+bananas, all of which grew wild in the jungle.  On the fourth day I found
+the trail--a mere foot-trail.  It led inland, and it led up.  It was the
+way I wanted to go, and it showed signs of recent travel.  At one place
+it ran along the crest of a ridge that was no more than a knife-edge.  The
+trail wasn't three feet wide on the crest, and on either side the ridge
+fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep.  One man, with plenty of
+ammunition, could have held it against a hundred thousand.
+
+"It was the only way in to the hiding-place.  Three hours after I found
+the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket in the midst
+of lava peaks.  The whole place was terraced for taro-patches, fruit
+trees grew there, and there were eight or ten grass huts.  But as soon as
+I saw the inhabitants I knew what I'd struck.  One sight of them was
+enough."
+
+"What did you do?" Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening, like any
+Desdemona, appalled and fascinated.
+
+"Nothing for me to do.  Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty far
+gone, but he ruled like a king.  He had discovered the little valley and
+founded the settlement--all of which was against the law.  But he had
+guns, plenty of ammunition, and those Kanakas, trained to the shooting of
+wild cattle and wild pig, were dead shots.  No, there wasn't any running
+away for Martin Eden.  He stayed--for three months."
+
+"But how did you escape?"
+
+"I'd have been there yet, if it hadn't been for a girl there, a
+half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian.  She was a beauty,
+poor thing, and well educated.  Her mother, in Honolulu, was worth a
+million or so.  Well, this girl got me away at last.  Her mother financed
+the settlement, you see, so the girl wasn't afraid of being punished for
+letting me go.  But she made me swear, first, never to reveal the hiding-
+place; and I never have.  This is the first time I have even mentioned
+it.  The girl had just the first signs of leprosy.  The fingers of her
+right hand were slightly twisted, and there was a small spot on her arm.
+That was all.  I guess she is dead, now."
+
+"But weren't you frightened?  And weren't you glad to get away without
+catching that dreadful disease?"
+
+"Well," he confessed, "I was a bit shivery at first; but I got used to
+it.  I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though.  That made me
+forget to be afraid.  She was such a beauty, in spirit as well as in
+appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was doomed to lie
+there, living the life of a primitive savage and rotting slowly away.
+Leprosy is far more terrible than you can imagine it."
+
+"Poor thing," Ruth murmured softly.  "It's a wonder she let you get
+away."
+
+"How do you mean?" Martin asked unwittingly.
+
+"Because she must have loved you," Ruth said, still softly.  "Candidly,
+now, didn't she?"
+
+Martin's sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and by the
+indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness had made his
+face even pale; and across this pallor flowed the slow wave of a blush.
+He was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut him off.
+
+"Never mind, don't answer; it's not necessary," she laughed.
+
+But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter, and
+that the light in her eyes was cold.  On the spur of the moment it
+reminded him of a gale he had once experienced in the North Pacific.  And
+for the moment the apparition of the gale rose before his eyes--a gale at
+night, with a clear sky and under a full moon, the huge seas glinting
+coldly in the moonlight.  Next, he saw the girl in the leper refuge and
+remembered it was for love of him that she had let him go.
+
+"She was noble," he said simply.  "She gave me life."
+
+That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob in her
+throat, and noticed that she turned her face away to gaze out of the
+window.  When she turned it back to him, it was composed, and there was
+no hint of the gale in her eyes.
+
+"I'm such a silly," she said plaintively.  "But I can't help it.  I do so
+love you, Martin, I do, I do.  I shall grow more catholic in time, but at
+present I can't help being jealous of those ghosts of the past, and you
+know your past is full of ghosts."
+
+"It must be," she silenced his protest.  "It could not be otherwise.  And
+there's poor Arthur motioning me to come.  He's tired waiting.  And now
+good-by, dear."
+
+"There's some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that helps men
+to stop the use of tobacco," she called back from the door, "and I am
+going to send you some."
+
+The door closed, but opened again.
+
+"I do, I do," she whispered to him; and this time she was really gone.
+
+Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note the
+texture of Ruth's garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown that
+produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the carriage.  The
+crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared from
+view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who had abruptly become the
+most important person on the street.  But it was one of her progeny who
+blasted Maria's reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been
+for her lodger.  After that Maria dropped back into her old obscurity and
+Martin began to notice the respectful manner in which he was regarded by
+the small fry of the neighborhood.  As for Maria, Martin rose in her
+estimation a full hundred per cent, and had the Portuguese grocer
+witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would have allowed Martin an
+additional three-dollars-and-eighty-five-cents' worth of credit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+The sun of Martin's good fortune rose.  The day after Ruth's visit, he
+received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in
+payment for three of his triolets.  Two days later a newspaper published
+in Chicago accepted his "Treasure Hunters," promising to pay ten dollars
+for it on publication.  The price was small, but it was the first article
+he had written, his very first attempt to express his thought on the
+printed page.  To cap everything, the adventure serial for boys, his
+second attempt, was accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile
+monthly calling itself Youth and Age.  It was true the serial was twenty-
+one thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on
+publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand
+words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had
+attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its clumsy
+worthlessness.
+
+But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of
+mediocrity.  What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great
+strength--the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes
+butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a
+war-club.  So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for
+songs.  He knew them for what they were, and it had not taken him long to
+acquire this knowledge.  What he pinned his faith to was his later work.
+He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of magazine
+fiction.  He had sought to equip himself with the tools of artistry.  On
+the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength.  His conscious aim had
+been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of strength.  Nor had he
+departed from his love of reality.  His work was realism, though he had
+endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination.  What
+he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration
+and faith.  What he wanted was life as it was, with all its
+spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.
+
+He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction.
+One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other
+treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine
+possibilities.  Both the god and the clod schools erred, in Martin's
+estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight and purpose.
+There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered
+not the school of god, while it challenged the brute-savageness of the
+school of clod.  It was his story, "Adventure," which had dragged with
+Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction;
+and it was in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his views
+on the whole general subject.
+
+But "Adventure," and all that he deemed his best work, still went begging
+among the editors.  His early work counted for nothing in his eyes except
+for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of which he had
+sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work.  To him they were
+frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with all the glamour
+of the real, wherein lay their power.  This investiture of the grotesque
+and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a trick--a skilful trick
+at best.  Great literature could not reside in such a field.  Their
+artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness of artistry when
+divorced from humanness.  The trick had been to fling over the face of
+his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in the half-dozen
+or so stories of the horror brand he had written before he emerged upon
+the high peaks of "Adventure," "Joy," "The Pot," and "The Wine of Life."
+
+The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a
+precarious existence against the arrival of the White Mouse check.  He
+cashed the first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a
+dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars between the
+baker and the fruit store.  Martin was not yet rich enough to afford
+meat, and he was on slim allowance when the White Mouse check arrived.  He
+was divided on the cashing of it.  He had never been in a bank in his
+life, much less been in one on business, and he had a naive and childlike
+desire to walk into one of the big banks down in Oakland and fling down
+his indorsed check for forty dollars.  On the other hand, practical
+common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer and thereby
+make an impression that would later result in an increase of credit.
+Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying his bill
+with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of jingling coin.
+Also, he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his suit and his
+bicycle, paid one month's rent on the type-writer, and paid Maria the
+overdue month for his room and a month in advance.  This left him in his
+pocket, for emergencies, a balance of nearly three dollars.
+
+In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune.  Immediately on recovering
+his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he could not refrain
+from jingling the little handful of silver in his pocket.  He had been so
+long without money that, like a rescued starving man who cannot let the
+unconsumed food out of his sight, Martin could not keep his hand off the
+silver.  He was not mean, nor avaricious, but the money meant more than
+so many dollars and cents.  It stood for success, and the eagles stamped
+upon the coins were to him so many winged victories.
+
+It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world.  It certainly
+appeared more beautiful to him.  For weeks it had been a very dull and
+sombre world; but now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars jingling
+in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success, the sun
+shone bright and warm, and even a rain-squall that soaked unprepared
+pedestrians seemed a merry happening to him.  When he starved, his
+thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were starving the
+world over; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands
+starving was no longer pregnant in his brain.  He forgot about them, and,
+being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the world.  Without
+deliberately thinking about it, motifs for love-lyrics began to agitate
+his brain.  Swept away by the creative impulse, he got off the electric
+car, without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.
+
+He found a number of persons in the Morse home.  Ruth's two girl-cousins
+were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of
+entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young
+people.  The campaign had begun during Martin's enforced absence, and was
+already in full swing.  She was making a point of having at the house men
+who were doing things.  Thus, in addition to the cousins Dorothy and
+Florence, Martin encountered two university professors, one of Latin, the
+other of English; a young army officer just back from the Philippines,
+one-time school-mate of Ruth's; a young fellow named Melville, private
+secretary to Joseph Perkins, head of the San Francisco Trust Company; and
+finally of the men, a live bank cashier, Charles Hapgood, a youngish man
+of thirty-five, graduate of Stanford University, member of the Nile Club
+and the Unity Club, and a conservative speaker for the Republican Party
+during campaigns--in short, a rising young man in every way.  Among the
+women was one who painted portraits, another who was a professional
+musician, and still another who possessed the degree of Doctor of
+Sociology and who was locally famous for her social settlement work in
+the slums of San Francisco.  But the women did not count for much in Mrs.
+Morse's plan.  At the best, they were necessary accessories.  The men who
+did things must be drawn to the house somehow.
+
+"Don't get excited when you talk," Ruth admonished Martin, before the
+ordeal of introduction began.
+
+He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his own
+awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to their old
+trick of threatening destruction to furniture and ornaments.  Also, he
+was rendered self-conscious by the company.  He had never before been in
+contact with such exalted beings nor with so many of them.  Melville, the
+bank cashier, fascinated him, and he resolved to investigate him at the
+first opportunity.  For underneath Martin's awe lurked his assertive ego,
+and he felt the urge to measure himself with these men and women and to
+find out what they had learned from the books and life which he had not
+learned.
+
+Ruth's eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on, and she
+was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got acquainted with
+her cousins.  He certainly did not grow excited, while being seated
+removed from him the worry of his shoulders.  Ruth knew them for clever
+girls, superficially brilliant, and she could scarcely understand their
+praise of Martin later that night at going to bed.  But he, on the other
+hand, a wit in his own class, a gay quizzer and laughter-maker at dances
+and Sunday picnics, had found the making of fun and the breaking of good-
+natured lances simple enough in this environment.  And on this evening
+success stood at his back, patting him on the shoulder and telling him
+that he was making good, so that he could afford to laugh and make
+laughter and remain unabashed.
+
+Later, Ruth's anxiety found justification.  Martin and Professor Caldwell
+had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though Martin no longer
+wove the air with his hands, to Ruth's critical eye he permitted his own
+eyes to flash and glitter too frequently, talked too rapidly and warmly,
+grew too intense, and allowed his aroused blood to redden his cheeks too
+much.  He lacked decorum and control, and was in decided contrast to the
+young professor of English with whom he talked.
+
+But Martin was not concerned with appearances!  He had been swift to note
+the other's trained mind and to appreciate his command of knowledge.
+Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize Martin's concept of the
+average English professor.  Martin wanted him to talk shop, and, though
+he seemed averse at first, succeeded in making him do it.  For Martin did
+not see why a man should not talk shop.
+
+"It's absurd and unfair," he had told Ruth weeks before, "this objection
+to talking shop.  For what reason under the sun do men and women come
+together if not for the exchange of the best that is in them?  And the
+best that is in them is what they are interested in, the thing by which
+they make their living, the thing they've specialized on and sat up days
+and nights over, and even dreamed about.  Imagine Mr. Butler living up to
+social etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul Verlaine or the German
+drama or the novels of D'Annunzio.  We'd be bored to death.  I, for one,
+if I must listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear him talk about his law.
+It's the best that is in him, and life is so short that I want the best
+of every man and woman I meet."
+
+"But," Ruth had objected, "there are the topics of general interest to
+all."
+
+"There, you mistake," he had rushed on.  "All persons in society, all
+cliques in society--or, rather, nearly all persons and cliques--ape their
+betters.  Now, who are the best betters?  The idlers, the wealthy idlers.
+They do not know, as a rule, the things known by the persons who are
+doing something in the world.  To listen to conversation about such
+things would mean to be bored, wherefore the idlers decree that such
+things are shop and must not be talked about.  Likewise they decree the
+things that are not shop and which may be talked about, and those things
+are the latest operas, latest novels, cards, billiards, cocktails,
+automobiles, horse shows, trout fishing, tuna-fishing, big-game shooting,
+yacht sailing, and so forth--and mark you, these are the things the
+idlers know.  In all truth, they constitute the shop-talk of the idlers.
+And the funniest part of it is that many of the clever people, and all
+the would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to impose upon them.  As
+for me, I want the best a man's got in him, call it shop vulgarity or
+anything you please."
+
+And Ruth had not understood.  This attack of his on the established had
+seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.
+
+So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness,
+challenging him to speak his mind.  As Ruth paused beside them she heard
+Martin saying:-
+
+"You surely don't pronounce such heresies in the University of
+California?"
+
+Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders.  "The honest taxpayer and the
+politician, you know.  Sacramento gives us our appropriations and
+therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to
+the party press, or to the press of both parties."
+
+"Yes, that's clear; but how about you?" Martin urged.  "You must be a
+fish out of the water."
+
+"Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond.  Sometimes I am fairly
+sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris, in Grub
+Street, in a hermit's cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian crowd,
+drinking claret,--dago-red they call it in San Francisco,--dining in
+cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing vociferously
+radical views upon all creation.  Really, I am frequently almost sure
+that I was cut out to be a radical.  But then, there are so many
+questions on which I am not sure.  I grow timid when I am face to face
+with my human frailty, which ever prevents me from grasping all the
+factors in any problem--human, vital problems, you know."
+
+And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had come
+the "Song of the Trade Wind":-
+
+   "I am strongest at noon,
+   But under the moon
+   I stiffen the bunt of the sail."
+
+He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other
+reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and cool,
+and strong.  He was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal there
+was a certain bafflement about him.  Martin had the feeling that he never
+spoke his full mind, just as he had often had the feeling that the trades
+never blew their strongest but always held reserves of strength that were
+never used.  Martin's trick of visioning was active as ever.  His brain
+was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its
+contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection.  Whatever
+occurred in the instant present, Martin's mind immediately presented
+associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily expressed themselves
+to him in vision.  It was sheerly automatic, and his visioning was an
+unfailing accompaniment to the living present.  Just as Ruth's face, in a
+momentary jealousy had called before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale,
+and as Professor Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding
+the white billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not
+disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new memory-visions
+rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the
+screen of his consciousness.  These visions came out of the actions and
+sensations of the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday
+and last week--a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping,
+forever thronged his mind.
+
+So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell's easy flow of speech--the
+conversation of a clever, cultured man--that Martin kept seeing himself
+down all his past.  He saw himself when he had been quite the hoodlum,
+wearing a "stiff-rim" Stetson hat and a square-cut, double-breasted coat,
+with a certain swagger to the shoulders and possessing the ideal of being
+as tough as the police permitted.  He did not disguise it to himself, nor
+attempt to palliate it.  At one time in his life he had been just a
+common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the police and
+terrorized honest, working-class householders.  But his ideals had
+changed.  He glanced about him at the well-bred, well-dressed men and
+women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere of culture and
+refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his early youth, in stiff-
+rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness, stalked across the room.
+This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he saw merge into himself, sitting
+and talking with an actual university professor.
+
+For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place.  He had
+fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and
+everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by his
+willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command respect.  But
+he had never taken root.  He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy his
+fellows but not to satisfy himself.  He had been perturbed always by a
+feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from beyond,
+and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found books and art
+and love.  And here he was, in the midst of all this, the only one of all
+the comrades he had adventured with who could have made themselves
+eligible for the inside of the Morse home.
+
+But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following
+Professor Caldwell closely.  And as he followed, comprehendingly and
+critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other's knowledge.  As for
+himself, from moment to moment the conversation showed him gaps and open
+stretches, whole subjects with which he was unfamiliar.  Nevertheless,
+thanks to his Spencer, he saw that he possessed the outlines of the field
+of knowledge.  It was a matter only of time, when he would fill in the
+outline.  Then watch out, he thought--'ware shoal, everybody!  He felt
+like sitting at the feet of the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but,
+as he listened, he began to discern a weakness in the other's judgments--a
+weakness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught it had it not
+been ever present.  And when he did catch it, he leapt to equality at
+once.
+
+Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.
+
+"I'll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your
+judgments," he said.  "You lack biology.  It has no place in your scheme
+of things.--Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the ground
+up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic
+right on up to the widest aesthetic and sociological generalizations."
+
+Ruth was appalled.  She had sat two lecture courses under Professor
+Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all knowledge.
+
+"I scarcely follow you," he said dubiously.
+
+Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.
+
+"Then I'll try to explain," he said.  "I remember reading in Egyptian
+history something to the effect that understanding could not be had of
+Egyptian art without first studying the land question."
+
+"Quite right," the professor nodded.
+
+"And it seems to me," Martin continued, "that knowledge of the land
+question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had
+without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of life.  How
+can we understand laws and institutions, religions and customs, without
+understanding, not merely the nature of the creatures that made them, but
+the nature of the stuff out of which the creatures are made?  Is
+literature less human than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt?  Is
+there one thing in the known universe that is not subject to the law of
+evolution?--Oh, I know there is an elaborate evolution of the various
+arts laid down, but it seems to me to be too mechanical.  The human
+himself is left out.  The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music
+and song and dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the
+evolution of the human himself, the development of the basic and
+intrinsic parts that were in him before he made his first tool or
+gibbered his first chant?  It is that which you do not consider, and
+which I call biology.  It is biology in its largest aspects.
+
+"I know I express myself incoherently, but I've tried to hammer out the
+idea.  It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed and ready
+to deliver it.  You spoke yourself of the human frailty that prevented
+one from taking all the factors into consideration.  And you, in turn,--or
+so it seems to me,--leave out the biological factor, the very stuff out
+of which has been spun the fabric of all the arts, the warp and the woof
+of all human actions and achievements."
+
+To Ruth's amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that the
+professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance for
+Martin's youth.  Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute, silent and
+fingering his watch chain.
+
+"Do you know," he said at last, "I've had that same criticism passed on
+me once before--by a very great man, a scientist and evolutionist, Joseph
+Le Conte.  But he is dead, and I thought to remain undetected; and now
+you come along and expose me.  Seriously, though--and this is
+confession--I think there is something in your contention--a great deal,
+in fact.  I am too classical, not enough up-to-date in the interpretative
+branches of science, and I can only plead the disadvantages of my
+education and a temperamental slothfulness that prevents me from doing
+the work.  I wonder if you'll believe that I've never been inside a
+physics or chemistry laboratory?  It is true, nevertheless.  Le Conte was
+right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to an extent--how much I do not
+know."
+
+Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him aside,
+whispering:-
+
+"You shouldn't have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way.  There may
+be others who want to talk with him."
+
+"My mistake," Martin admitted contritely.  "But I'd got him stirred up,
+and he was so interesting that I did not think.  Do you know, he is the
+brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked with.  And I'll
+tell you something else.  I once thought that everybody who went to
+universities, or who sat in the high places in society, was just as
+brilliant and intelligent as he."
+
+"He's an exception," she answered.
+
+"I should say so.  Whom do you want me to talk to now?--Oh, say, bring me
+up against that cashier-fellow."
+
+Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have wished
+better behavior on her lover's part.  Not once did his eyes flash nor his
+cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which he talked surprised
+her.  But in Martin's estimation the whole tribe of bank cashiers fell a
+few hundred per cent, and for the rest of the evening he labored under
+the impression that bank cashiers and talkers of platitudes were
+synonymous phrases.  The army officer he found good-natured and simple, a
+healthy, wholesome young fellow, content to occupy the place in life into
+which birth and luck had flung him.  On learning that he had completed
+two years in the university, Martin was puzzled to know where he had
+stored it away.  Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the
+platitudinous bank cashier.
+
+"I really don't object to platitudes," he told Ruth later; "but what
+worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior
+certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it.  Why,
+I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time he
+took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the Democrats.
+Do you know, he skins his words as a professional poker-player skins the
+cards that are dealt out to him.  Some day I'll show you what I mean."
+
+"I'm sorry you don't like him," was her reply.  "He's a favorite of Mr.
+Butler's.  Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest--calls him the Rock,
+Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can well be built."
+
+"I don't doubt it--from the little I saw of him and the less I heard from
+him; but I don't think so much of banks as I did.  You don't mind my
+speaking my mind this way, dear?"
+
+"No, no; it is most interesting."
+
+"Yes," Martin went on heartily, "I'm no more than a barbarian getting my
+first impressions of civilization.  Such impressions must be
+entertainingly novel to the civilized person."
+
+"What did you think of my cousins?" Ruth queried.
+
+"I liked them better than the other women.  There's plenty of fun in them
+along with paucity of pretence."
+
+"Then you did like the other women?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-parrot.
+I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like Tomlinson, there
+would be found in her not one original thought.  As for the
+portrait-painter, she was a positive bore.  She'd make a good wife for
+the cashier.  And the musician woman!  I don't care how nimble her
+fingers are, how perfect her technique, how wonderful her expression--the
+fact is, she knows nothing about music."
+
+"She plays beautifully," Ruth protested.
+
+"Yes, she's undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but the
+intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her.  I asked her what music
+meant to her--you know I'm always curious to know that particular thing;
+and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it,
+that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life to
+her."
+
+"You were making them talk shop," Ruth charged him.
+
+"I confess it.  And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings
+if they had discoursed on other subjects.  Why, I used to think that up
+here, where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed--"  He paused for
+a moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and
+square-cut, enter the door and swagger across the room.  "As I was
+saying, up here I thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant.
+But now, from what little I've seen of them, they strike me as a pack of
+ninnies, most of them, and ninety percent of the remainder as bores.  Now
+there's Professor Caldwell--he's different.  He's a man, every inch of
+him and every atom of his gray matter."
+
+Ruth's face brightened.
+
+"Tell me about him," she urged.  "Not what is large and brilliant--I know
+those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse.  I am most curious to
+know."
+
+"Perhaps I'll get myself in a pickle."  Martin debated humorously for a
+moment.  "Suppose you tell me first.  Or maybe you find in him nothing
+less than the best."
+
+"I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two
+years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression."
+
+"Bad impression, you mean?  Well, here goes.  He is all the fine things
+you think about him, I guess.  At least, he is the finest specimen of
+intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame."
+
+"Oh, no, no!" he hastened to cry.  "Nothing paltry nor vulgar.  What I
+mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of things,
+and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to himself that he
+never saw it.  Perhaps that's not the clearest way to express it.  Here's
+another way.  A man who has found the path to the hidden temple but has
+not followed it; who has, perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and
+striven afterward to convince himself that it was only a mirage of
+foliage.  Yet another way.  A man who could have done things but who
+placed no value on the doing, and who, all the time, in his innermost
+heart, is regretting that he has not done them; who has secretly laughed
+at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned for
+the rewards and for the joy of doing."
+
+"I don't read him that way," she said.  "And for that matter, I don't see
+just what you mean."
+
+"It is only a vague feeling on my part," Martin temporized.  "I have no
+reason for it.  It is only a feeling, and most likely it is wrong.  You
+certainly should know him better than I."
+
+From the evening at Ruth's Martin brought away with him strange
+confusions and conflicting feelings.  He was disappointed in his goal, in
+the persons he had climbed to be with.  On the other hand, he was
+encouraged with his success.  The climb had been easier than he expected.
+He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false modesty, hide
+it from himself) he was superior to the beings among whom he had
+climbed--with the exception, of course, of Professor Caldwell.  About
+life and the books he knew more than they, and he wondered into what
+nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations.  He did not know
+that he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did he know
+that the persons who were given to probing the depths and to thinking
+ultimate thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of the
+world's Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely eagles
+sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its swarming
+freight of gregarious life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+But success had lost Martin's address, and her messengers no longer came
+to his door.  For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays, he
+toiled on "The Shame of the Sun," a long essay of some thirty thousand
+words.  It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck
+school--an attack from the citadel of positive science upon the wonder-
+dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of beauty and
+wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact.  It was a little
+later that he followed up the attack with two short essays, "The Wonder-
+Dreamers" and "The Yardstick of the Ego."  And on essays, long and short,
+he began to pay the travelling expenses from magazine to magazine.
+
+During the twenty-five days spent on "The Shame of the Sun," he sold hack-
+work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents.  A joke had brought in
+fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-grade comic weekly, had
+fetched a dollar.  Then two humorous poems had earned two dollars and
+three dollars respectively.  As a result, having exhausted his credit
+with the tradesmen (though he had increased his credit with the grocer to
+five dollars), his wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker.
+The type-writer people were again clamoring for money, insistently
+pointing out that according to the agreement rent was to be paid strictly
+in advance.
+
+Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack-work.
+Perhaps there was a living in it, after all.  Stored away under his table
+were the twenty storiettes which had been rejected by the newspaper short-
+story syndicate.  He read them over in order to find out how not to write
+newspaper storiettes, and so doing, reasoned out the perfect formula.  He
+found that the newspaper storiette should never be tragic, should never
+end unhappily, and should never contain beauty of language, subtlety of
+thought, nor real delicacy of sentiment.  Sentiment it must contain,
+plenty of it, pure and noble, of the sort that in his own early youth had
+brought his applause from "nigger heaven"--the "For-God-my-country-and-
+the-Czar" and "I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest" brand of sentiment.
+
+Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted "The Duchess" for tone,
+and proceeded to mix according to formula.  The formula consists of three
+parts: (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart; (2) by some deed or event
+they are reunited; (3) marriage bells.  The third part was an unvarying
+quantity, but the first and second parts could be varied an infinite
+number of times.  Thus, the pair of lovers could be jarred apart by
+misunderstood motives, by accident of fate, by jealous rivals, by irate
+parents, by crafty guardians, by scheming relatives, and so forth and so
+forth; they could be reunited by a brave deed of the man lover, by a
+similar deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one lover or the
+other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming relative, or
+jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same, by discovery of some
+unguessed secret, by lover storming girl's heart, by lover making long
+and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly.  It was very fetching to
+make the girl propose in the course of being reunited, and Martin
+discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly piquant and fetching ruses.  But
+marriage bells at the end was the one thing he could take no liberties
+with; though the heavens rolled up as a scroll and the stars fell, the
+wedding bells must go on ringing just the same.  In quantity, the formula
+prescribed twelve hundred words minimum dose, fifteen hundred words
+maximum dose.
+
+Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin worked
+out half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when constructing
+storiettes.  These forms were like the cunning tables used by
+mathematicians, which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and left,
+which entrances consist of scores of lines and dozens of columns, and
+from which may be drawn, without reasoning or thinking, thousands of
+different conclusions, all unchallengably precise and true.  Thus, in the
+course of half an hour with his forms, Martin could frame up a dozen or
+so storiettes, which he put aside and filled in at his convenience.  He
+found that he could fill one in, after a day of serious work, in the hour
+before going to bed.  As he later confessed to Ruth, he could almost do
+it in his sleep.  The real work was in constructing the frames, and that
+was merely mechanical.
+
+He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for once he
+knew the editorial mind when he said positively to himself that the first
+two he sent off would bring checks.  And checks they brought, for four
+dollars each, at the end of twelve days.
+
+In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries concerning
+the magazines.  Though the Transcontinental had published "The Ring of
+Bells," no check was forthcoming.  Martin needed it, and he wrote for it.
+An evasive answer and a request for more of his work was all he received.
+He had gone hungry two days waiting for the reply, and it was then that
+he put his wheel back in pawn.  He wrote regularly, twice a week, to the
+Transcontinental for his five dollars, though it was only
+semi-occasionally that he elicited a reply.  He did not know that the
+Transcontinental had been staggering along precariously for years, that
+it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing, with a crazy
+circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and partly on patriotic
+appealing, and with advertisements that were scarcely more than
+charitable donations.  Nor did he know that the Transcontinental was the
+sole livelihood of the editor and the business manager, and that they
+could wring their livelihood out of it only by moving to escape paying
+rent and by never paying any bill they could evade.  Nor could he have
+guessed that the particular five dollars that belonged to him had been
+appropriated by the business manager for the painting of his house in
+Alameda, which painting he performed himself, on week-day afternoons,
+because he could not afford to pay union wages and because the first scab
+he had employed had had a ladder jerked out from under him and been sent
+to the hospital with a broken collar-bone.
+
+The ten dollars for which Martin had sold "Treasure Hunters" to the
+Chicago newspaper did not come to hand.  The article had been published,
+as he had ascertained at the file in the Central Reading-room, but no
+word could he get from the editor.  His letters were ignored.  To satisfy
+himself that they had been received, he registered several of them.  It
+was nothing less than robbery, he concluded--a cold-blooded steal; while
+he starved, he was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale of
+which was the sole way of getting bread to eat.
+
+Youth and Age was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his twenty-
+one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business.  With it went all
+hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.
+
+To cap the situation, "The Pot," which he looked upon as one of the best
+things he had written, was lost to him.  In despair, casting about
+frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to The Billow, a society
+weekly in San Francisco.  His chief reason for submitting it to that
+publication was that, having only to travel across the bay from Oakland,
+a quick decision could be reached.  Two weeks later he was overjoyed to
+see, in the latest number on the news-stand, his story printed in full,
+illustrated, and in the place of honor.  He went home with leaping pulse,
+wondering how much they would pay him for one of the best things he had
+done.  Also, the celerity with which it had been accepted and published
+was a pleasant thought to him.  That the editor had not informed him of
+the acceptance made the surprise more complete.  After waiting a week,
+two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation conquered diffidence, and
+he wrote to the editor of The Billow, suggesting that possibly through
+some negligence of the business manager his little account had been
+overlooked.
+
+Even if it isn't more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself, it
+will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a dozen
+like it, and possibly as good.
+
+Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least elicited Martin's
+admiration.
+
+"We thank you," it ran, "for your excellent contribution.  All of us in
+the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was given the place
+of honor and immediate publication.  We earnestly hope that you liked the
+illustrations.
+
+"On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring under the
+misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts.  This is not our
+custom, and of course yours was unsolicited.  We assumed, naturally, when
+we received your story, that you understood the situation.  We can only
+deeply regret this unfortunate misunderstanding, and assure you of our
+unfailing regard.  Again, thanking you for your kind contribution, and
+hoping to receive more from you in the near future, we remain, etc."
+
+There was also a postscript to the effect that though The Billow carried
+no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a complimentary
+subscription for the ensuing year.
+
+After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet of all
+his manuscripts: "Submitted at your usual rate."
+
+Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at _my_ usual rate.
+
+He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection, under
+the sway of which he rewrote and polished "The Jostling Street," "The
+Wine of Life," "Joy," the "Sea Lyrics," and others of his earlier work.
+As of old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all too little to suit him.
+He wrote prodigiously, and he read prodigiously, forgetting in his toil
+the pangs caused by giving up his tobacco.  Ruth's promised cure for the
+habit, flamboyantly labelled, he stowed away in the most inaccessible
+corner of his bureau.  Especially during his stretches of famine he
+suffered from lack of the weed; but no matter how often he mastered the
+craving, it remained with him as strong as ever.  He regarded it as the
+biggest thing he had ever achieved.  Ruth's point of view was that he was
+doing no more than was right.  She brought him the anti-tobacco remedy,
+purchased out of her glove money, and in a few days forgot all about it.
+
+His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them, were
+successful.  By means of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid most of
+his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel.  The storiettes
+at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for ambitious work;
+while the one thing that upheld him was the forty dollars he had received
+from The White Mouse.  He anchored his faith to that, and was confident
+that the really first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer at
+least an equal rate, if not a better one.  But the thing was, how to get
+into the first-class magazines.  His best stories, essays, and poems went
+begging among them, and yet, each month, he read reams of dull, prosy,
+inartistic stuff between all their various covers.  If only one editor,
+he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat of pride to write
+me one cheering line!  No matter if my work is unusual, no matter if it
+is unfit, for prudential reasons, for their pages, surely there must be
+some sparks in it, somewhere, a few, to warm them to some sort of
+appreciation.  And thereupon he would get out one or another of his
+manuscripts, such as "Adventure," and read it over and over in a vain
+attempt to vindicate the editorial silence.
+
+As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an
+end.  For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the
+part of the newspaper storiette syndicate.  Then, one day, came back to
+him through the mail ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes.  They
+were accompanied by a brief letter to the effect that the syndicate was
+overstocked, and that some months would elapse before it would be in the
+market again for manuscripts.  Martin had even been extravagant on the
+strength of those ten storiettes.  Toward the last the syndicate had
+been paying him five dollars each for them and accepting every one he
+sent.  So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had lived
+accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank.  So it was that he
+entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he continued selling his
+earlier efforts to publications that would not pay and submitting his
+later work to magazines that would not buy.  Also, he resumed his trips
+to the pawn-broker down in Oakland.  A few jokes and snatches of humorous
+verse, sold to the New York weeklies, made existence barely possible for
+him.  It was at this time that he wrote letters of inquiry to the several
+great monthly and quarterly reviews, and learned in reply that they
+rarely considered unsolicited articles, and that most of their contents
+were written upon order by well-known specialists who were authorities in
+their various fields.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+It was a hard summer for Martin.  Manuscript readers and editors were
+away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a decision in
+three weeks now retained his manuscript for three months or more.  The
+consolation he drew from it was that a saving in postage was effected by
+the deadlock.  Only the robber-publications seemed to remain actively in
+business, and to them Martin disposed of all his early efforts, such as
+"Pearl-diving," "The Sea as a Career," "Turtle-catching," and "The
+Northeast Trades."  For these manuscripts he never received a penny.  It
+is true, after six months' correspondence, he effected a compromise,
+whereby he received a safety razor for "Turtle-catching," and that The
+Acropolis, having agreed to give him five dollars cash and five yearly
+subscriptions: for "The Northeast Trades," fulfilled the second part of
+the agreement.
+
+For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a Boston
+editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste and a penny-
+dreadful purse.  "The Peri and the Pearl," a clever skit of a poem of two
+hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain, won the heart of
+the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in the interest of a
+great railroad.  When the editor wrote, offering him payment in
+transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the transportation was
+transferable.  It was not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he
+asked for the return of the poem.  Back it came, with the editor's
+regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to The
+Hornet, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation
+of the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist who founded it.  But
+The Hornet's light had begun to dim long before Martin was born.  The
+editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the poem, but, when it was
+published, seemed to forget about it.  Several of his letters being
+ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew a reply.  It was written
+by a new editor, who coolly informed Martin that he declined to be held
+responsible for the old editor's mistakes, and that he did not think much
+of "The Peri and the Pearl" anyway.
+
+But The Globe, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel treatment
+of all.  He had refrained from offering his "Sea Lyrics" for publication,
+until driven to it by starvation.  After having been rejected by a dozen
+magazines, they had come to rest in The Globe office.  There were thirty
+poems in the collection, and he was to receive a dollar apiece for them.
+The first month four were published, and he promptly received a cheek for
+four dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at
+the slaughter.  In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for
+instance, being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef"
+to "The Song of the Coral Reef."  In one case, an absolutely different
+title, a misappropriate title, was substituted.  In place of his own,
+"Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track."  But the
+slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying.  Martin groaned and
+sweated and thrust his hands through his hair.  Phrases, lines, and
+stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled about in the most
+incomprehensible manner.  Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were
+substituted for his.  He could not believe that a sane editor could be
+guilty of such maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his
+poems must have been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer.
+Martin wrote immediately, begging the editor to cease publishing the
+lyrics and to return them to him.
+
+He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
+letters were ignored.  Month by month the slaughter went on till the
+thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a check for
+those which had appeared in the current number.
+
+Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the White Mouse forty-
+dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to hack-
+work.  He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural
+weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he found
+he could easily starve.  At his lowest ebb, when his black suit was in
+pawn, he made a ten-strike--or so it seemed to him--in a prize contest
+arranged by the County Committee of the Republican Party.  There were
+three branches of the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at
+himself bitterly the while in that he was driven to such straits to live.
+His poem won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second
+prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the Republican
+Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars.  Which was very gratifying
+to him until he tried to collect.  Something had gone wrong in the County
+Committee, and, though a rich banker and a state senator were members of
+it, the money was not forthcoming.  While this affair was hanging fire,
+he proved that he understood the principles of the Democratic Party by
+winning the first prize for his essay in a similar contest.  And,
+moreover, he received the money, twenty-five dollars.  But the forty
+dollars won in the first contest he never received.
+
+Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long walk
+from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too much time, he
+kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle.  The latter gave him
+exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and enabled him to see Ruth
+just the same.  A pair of knee duck trousers and an old sweater made him
+a presentable wheel costume, so that he could go with Ruth on afternoon
+rides.  Besides, he no longer had opportunity to see much of her in her
+own home, where Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her campaign of
+entertainment.  The exalted beings he met there, and to whom he had
+looked up but a short time before, now bored him.  They were no longer
+exalted.  He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times,
+disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of
+such people was maddening.  He was not unduly egotistic.  He measured the
+narrowness of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he
+read.  At Ruth's home he never met a large mind, with the exception of
+Professor Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only once.  As for the
+rest, they were numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant.
+It was their ignorance that astounded him.  What was the matter with
+them?  What had they done with their educations?  They had had access to
+the same books he had.  How did it happen that they had drawn nothing
+from them?
+
+He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers, existed.  He
+had his proofs from the books, the books that had educated him beyond the
+Morse standard.  And he knew that higher intellects than those of the
+Morse circle were to be found in the world.  He read English society
+novels, wherein he caught glimpses of men and women talking politics and
+philosophy.  And he read of salons in great cities, even in the United
+States, where art and intellect congregated.  Foolishly, in the past, he
+had conceived that all well-groomed persons above the working class were
+persons with power of intellect and vigor of beauty.  Culture and collars
+had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that
+college educations and mastery were the same things.
+
+Well, he would fight his way on and up higher.  And he would take Ruth
+with him.  Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would shine
+anywhere.  As it was clear to him that he had been handicapped by his
+early environment, so now he perceived that she was similarly
+handicapped.  She had not had a chance to expand.  The books on her
+father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the piano--all
+was just so much meretricious display.  To real literature, real
+painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead.  And bigger
+than such things was life, of which they were densely, hopelessly
+ignorant.  In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of
+conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind
+interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while
+their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
+struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
+youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older--the same that moved the
+first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty
+Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib; that moved Descartes to
+build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his
+own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce
+evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave
+his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.
+
+So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that
+the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank
+cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known was
+on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore,
+neighborhoods in which they lived.  Certainly, in all of them was lacking
+the something more which he found in himself and in the books.  The
+Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce, and he
+was not impressed by it.  A pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender,
+he knew himself the superior of those he met at the Morses'; and, when
+his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a
+lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince
+would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.
+
+"You hate and fear the socialists," he remarked to Mr. Morse, one evening
+at dinner; "but why?  You know neither them nor their doctrines."
+
+The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse, who had
+been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood.  The cashier was
+Martin's black beast, and his temper was a trifle short where the talker
+of platitudes was concerned.
+
+"Yes," he had said, "Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising young
+man--somebody told me as much.  And it is true.  He'll make the
+Governor's Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the United States
+Senate."
+
+"What makes you think so?" Mrs. Morse had inquired.
+
+"I've heard him make a campaign speech.  It was so cleverly stupid and
+unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but
+regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the
+platitudes of the average voter that--oh, well, you know you flatter any
+man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to him."
+
+"I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood," Ruth had chimed in.
+
+"Heaven forbid!"
+
+The look of horror on Martin's face stirred Mrs. Morse to belligerence.
+
+"You surely don't mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?" she demanded
+icily.
+
+"No more than the average Republican," was the retort, "or average
+Democrat, either.  They are all stupid when they are not crafty, and very
+few of them are crafty.  The only wise Republicans are the millionnaires
+and their conscious henchmen.  They know which side their bread is
+buttered on, and they know why."
+
+"I am a Republican," Mr. Morse put in lightly.  "Pray, how do you
+classify me?"
+
+"Oh, you are an unconscious henchman."
+
+"Henchman?"
+
+"Why, yes.  You do corporation work.  You have no working-class nor
+criminal practice.  You don't depend upon wife-beaters and pickpockets
+for your income.  You get your livelihood from the masters of society,
+and whoever feeds a man is that man's master.  Yes, you are a henchman.
+You are interested in advancing the interests of the aggregations of
+capital you serve."
+
+Mr. Morse's face was a trifle red.
+
+"I confess, sir," he said, "that you talk like a scoundrelly socialist."
+
+Then it was that Martin made his remark:
+
+"You hate and fear the socialists; but why?  You know neither them nor
+their doctrines."
+
+"Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism," Mr. Morse replied, while
+Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed happily
+at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege lord's antagonism.
+
+"Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality,
+and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist,"
+Martin said with a smile.  "Because I question Jefferson and the
+unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a
+socialist.  Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I
+who am its avowed enemy."
+
+"Now you please to be facetious," was all the other could say.
+
+"Not at all.  I speak in all seriousness.  You still believe in equality,
+and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the corporations, from
+day to day, are busily engaged in burying equality.  And you call me a
+socialist because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live up
+to.  The Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight the
+battle against equality with the very word itself the slogan on their
+lips.  In the name of equality they destroy equality.  That was why I
+called them stupid.  As for myself, I am an individualist.  I believe the
+race is to the swift, the battle to the strong.  Such is the lesson I
+have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned.  As I said,
+I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary and eternal
+foe of socialism."
+
+"But you frequent socialist meetings," Mr. Morse challenged.
+
+"Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps.  How else are you to
+learn about the enemy?  Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings.  They
+are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books.  Any
+one of them knows far more about sociology and all the other ologies than
+the average captain of industry.  Yes, I have been to half a dozen of
+their meetings, but that doesn't make me a socialist any more than
+hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me a Republican."
+
+"I can't help it," Mr. Morse said feebly, "but I still believe you
+incline that way."
+
+Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn't know what I was talking
+about.  He hasn't understood a word of it.  What did he do with his
+education, anyway?
+
+Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with economic
+morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him a grisly
+monster.  Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more offending
+to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him,
+which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the
+sentimental, and the imitative.
+
+A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home.  His
+sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young
+mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade,
+had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop.  Also, having got the
+agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous.  Marian had
+called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce her
+engagement, during which visit she had playfully inspected Martin's palm
+and told his fortune.  On her next visit she brought Hermann von Schmidt
+along with her.  Martin did the honors and congratulated both of them in
+language so easy and graceful as to affect disagreeably the peasant-mind
+of his sister's lover.  This bad impression was further heightened by
+Martin's reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse with which he had
+commemorated Marian's previous visit.  It was a bit of society verse,
+airy and delicate, which he had named "The Palmist."  He was surprised,
+when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his sister's face.
+Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her betrothed, and Martin,
+following her gaze, saw spread on that worthy's asymmetrical features
+nothing but black and sullen disapproval.  The incident passed over, they
+made an early departure, and Martin forgot all about it, though for the
+moment he had been puzzled that any woman, even of the working class,
+should not have been flattered and delighted by having poetry written
+about her.
+
+Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone.  Nor
+did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for
+what he had done.
+
+"Why, Marian," he chided, "you talk as though you were ashamed of your
+relatives, or of your brother at any rate."
+
+"And I am, too," she blurted out.
+
+Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes.
+The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.
+
+"But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry
+about my own sister?"
+
+"He ain't jealous," she sobbed.  "He says it was indecent, ob--obscene."
+
+Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to
+resurrect and read a carbon copy of "The Palmist."
+
+"I can't see it," he said finally, proffering the manuscript to her.
+"Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene--that was
+the word, wasn't it?"
+
+"He says so, and he ought to know," was the answer, with a wave aside of
+the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing.  "And he says you've
+got to tear it up.  He says he won't have no wife of his with such things
+written about her which anybody can read.  He says it's a disgrace, an'
+he won't stand for it."
+
+"Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense," Martin began;
+then abruptly changed his mind.
+
+He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to
+convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd
+and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.
+
+"All right," he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen
+pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.
+
+He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original type-
+written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York magazine.
+Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself nor they nor
+the world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever were published.
+
+Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.
+
+"Can I?" she pleaded.
+
+He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn
+pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her jacket--ocular
+evidence of the success of her mission.  She reminded him of Lizzie
+Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous flaunting life in
+her than in that other girl of the working class whom he had seen twice.
+But they were on a par, the pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he
+smiled with inward amusement at the caprice of his fancy which suggested
+the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse's drawing-room.  The
+amusement faded, and he was aware of a great loneliness.  This sister of
+his and the Morse drawing-room were milestones of the road he had
+travelled.  And he had left them behind.  He glanced affectionately about
+him at his few books.  They were all the comrades left to him.
+
+"Hello, what's that?" he demanded in startled surprise.
+
+Marian repeated her question.
+
+"Why don't I go to work?"  He broke into a laugh that was only
+half-hearted.  "That Hermann of yours has been talking to you."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Don't lie," he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his charge.
+
+"Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business; that when
+I write poetry about the girl he's keeping company with it's his
+business, but that outside of that he's got no say so.  Understand?
+
+"So you don't think I'll succeed as a writer, eh?" he went on.  "You
+think I'm no good?--that I've fallen down and am a disgrace to the
+family?"
+
+"I think it would be much better if you got a job," she said firmly, and
+he saw she was sincere.  "Hermann says--"
+
+"Damn Hermann!" he broke out good-naturedly.  "What I want to know is
+when you're going to get married.  Also, you find out from your Hermann
+if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from me."
+
+He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke
+out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her betrothed,
+all the members of his own class and the members of Ruth's class,
+directing their narrow little lives by narrow little
+formulas--herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives by
+one another's opinions, failing of being individuals and of really living
+life because of the childlike formulas by which they were enslaved.  He
+summoned them before him in apparitional procession: Bernard Higginbotham
+arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt cheek by jowl with
+Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he judged them and dismissed
+them--judged them by the standards of intellect and morality he had
+learned from the books.  Vainly he asked: Where are the great souls, the
+great men and women?  He found them not among the careless, gross, and
+stupid intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow room.
+He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her swine.
+When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself alone, a
+late-comer entered, unexpected and unsummoned.  Martin watched him and
+saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted coat and the
+swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had once been he.
+
+"You were like all the rest, young fellow," Martin sneered.  "Your
+morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs.  You did not
+think and act for yourself.  Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready
+made; your acts were shaped by popular approval.  You were cock of your
+gang because others acclaimed you the real thing.  You fought and ruled
+the gang, not because you liked to,--you know you really despised it,--but
+because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder.  You licked Cheese-
+Face because you wouldn't give in, and you wouldn't give in partly
+because you were an abysmal brute and for the rest because you believed
+what every one about you believed, that the measure of manhood was the
+carnivorous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow-creatures'
+anatomies.  Why, you whelp, you even won other fellows' girls away from
+them, not because you wanted the girls, but because in the marrow of
+those about you, those who set your moral pace, was the instinct of the
+wild stallion and the bull-seal.  Well, the years have passed, and what
+do you think about it now?"
+
+As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis.  The stiff-
+rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder garments; the
+toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of the eyes; and, the
+face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from an inner life of
+communion with beauty and knowledge.  The apparition was very like his
+present self, and, as he regarded it, he noted the student-lamp by which
+it was illuminated, and the book over which it pored.  He glanced at the
+title and read, "The Science of AEsthetics."  Next, he entered into the
+apparition, trimmed the student-lamp, and himself went on reading "The
+Science of AEsthetics."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that which had
+seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his "Love-cycle" to
+Ruth.  It was in the afternoon, and, as before, they had ridden out to
+their favorite knoll in the hills.  Now and again she had interrupted his
+reading with exclamations of pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet
+of manuscript with its fellows, he waited her judgment.
+
+She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating to
+frame in words the harshness of her thought.
+
+"I think they are beautiful, very beautiful," she said; "but you can't
+sell them, can you?  You see what I mean," she said, almost pleaded.
+"This writing of yours is not practical.  Something is the matter--maybe
+it is with the market--that prevents you from earning a living by it.  And
+please, dear, don't misunderstand me.  I am flattered, and made proud,
+and all that--I could not be a true woman were it otherwise--that you
+should write these poems to me.  But they do not make our marriage
+possible.  Don't you see, Martin?  Don't think me mercenary.  It is love,
+the thought of our future, with which I am burdened.  A whole year has
+gone by since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no
+nearer.  Don't think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
+really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake.  Why don't you try to
+get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing?  Why not
+become a reporter?--for a while, at least?"
+
+"It would spoil my style," was his answer, in a low, monotonous voice.
+"You have no idea how I've worked for style."
+
+"But those storiettes," she argued.  "You called them hack-work.  You
+wrote many of them.  Didn't they spoil your style?"
+
+"No, the cases are different.  The storiettes were ground out, jaded, at
+the end of a long day of application to style.  But a reporter's work is
+all hack from morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life.  And
+it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with neither past nor
+future, and certainly without thought of any style but reportorial style,
+and that certainly is not literature.  To become a reporter now, just as
+my style is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary
+suicide.  As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a
+violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty.  I
+tell you it was sickening.  I was guilty of sin.  And I was secretly glad
+when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go into pawn.  But the
+joy of writing the 'Love-cycle'!  The creative joy in its noblest form!
+That was compensation for everything."
+
+Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the creative
+joy.  She used the phrase--it was on her lips he had first heard it.  She
+had read about it, studied about it, in the university in the course of
+earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but she was not original, not creative,
+and all manifestations of culture on her part were but harpings of the
+harpings of others.
+
+"May not the editor have been right in his revision of your 'Sea
+Lyrics'?" she questioned.  "Remember, an editor must have proved
+qualifications or else he would not be an editor."
+
+"That's in line with the persistence of the established," he rejoined,
+his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of him.  "What is, is
+not only right, but is the best possible.  The existence of anything is
+sufficient vindication of its fitness to exist--to exist, mark you, as
+the average person unconsciously believes, not merely in present
+conditions, but in all conditions.  It is their ignorance, of course,
+that makes them believe such rot--their ignorance, which is nothing more
+nor less than the henidical mental process described by Weininger.  They
+think they think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the
+lives of the few who really think."
+
+He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking over
+Ruth's head.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know who this Weininger is," she retorted.  "And you
+are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you.  What I was speaking
+of was the qualification of editors--"
+
+"And I'll tell you," he interrupted.  "The chief qualification of ninety-
+nine per cent of all editors is failure.  They have failed as writers.
+Don't think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and the slavery to their
+circulation and to the business manager to the joy of writing.  They have
+tried to write, and they have failed.  And right there is the cursed
+paradox of it.  Every portal to success in literature is guarded by those
+watch-dogs, the failures in literature.  The editors, sub-editors,
+associate editors, most of them, and the manuscript-readers for the
+magazines and book-publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men
+who wanted to write and who have failed.  And yet they, of all creatures
+under the sun the most unfit, are the very creatures who decide what
+shall and what shall not find its way into print--they, who have proved
+themselves not original, who have demonstrated that they lack the divine
+fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius.  And after them come
+the reviewers, just so many more failures.  Don't tell me that they have
+not dreamed the dream and attempted to write poetry or fiction; for they
+have, and they have failed.  Why, the average review is more nauseating
+than cod-liver oil.  But you know my opinion on the reviewers and the
+alleged critics.  There are great critics, but they are as rare as
+comets.  If I fail as a writer, I shall have proved for the career of
+editorship.  There's bread and butter and jam, at any rate."
+
+Ruth's mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover's views was
+buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.
+
+"But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you have
+shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the great writers
+ever arrived?"
+
+"They arrived by achieving the impossible," he answered.  "They did such
+blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed them.  They
+arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one wager against
+them.  They arrived because they were Carlyle's battle-scarred giants who
+will not be kept down.  And that is what I must do; I must achieve the
+impossible."
+
+"But if you fail?  You must consider me as well, Martin."
+
+"If I fail?"  He regarded her for a moment as though the thought she had
+uttered was unthinkable.  Then intelligence illumined his eyes.  "If I
+fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an editor's wife."
+
+She frowned at his facetiousness--a pretty, adorable frown that made him
+put his arm around her and kiss it away.
+
+"There, that's enough," she urged, by an effort of will withdrawing
+herself from the fascination of his strength.  "I have talked with father
+and mother.  I never before asserted myself so against them.  I demanded
+to be heard.  I was very undutiful.  They are against you, you know; but
+I assured them over and over of my abiding love for you, and at last
+father agreed that if you wanted to, you could begin right away in his
+office.  And then, of his own accord, he said he would pay you enough at
+the start so that we could get married and have a little cottage
+somewhere.  Which I think was very fine of him--don't you?"
+
+Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically reaching
+for the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to roll a
+cigarette, muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went on.
+
+"Frankly, though, and don't let it hurt you--I tell you, to show you
+precisely how you stand with him--he doesn't like your radical views, and
+he thinks you are lazy.  Of course I know you are not.  I know you work
+hard."
+
+How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin's mind.
+
+"Well, then," he said, "how about my views?  Do you think they are so
+radical?"
+
+He held her eyes and waited the answer.
+
+"I think them, well, very disconcerting," she replied.
+
+The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the
+grayness of life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had made
+for him to go to work.  And she, having gone as far as she dared, was
+willing to wait the answer till she should bring the question up again.
+
+She had not long to wait.  Martin had a question of his own to propound
+to her.  He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith in him, and
+within the week each was answered.  Martin precipitated it by reading to
+her his "The Shame of the Sun."
+
+"Why don't you become a reporter?" she asked when he had finished.  "You
+love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed.  You could rise in
+journalism and make a name for yourself.  There are a number of great
+special correspondents.  Their salaries are large, and their field is the
+world.  They are sent everywhere, to the heart of Africa, like Stanley,
+or to interview the Pope, or to explore unknown Thibet."
+
+"Then you don't like my essay?" he rejoined.  "You believe that I have
+some show in journalism but none in literature?"
+
+"No, no; I do like it.  It reads well.  But I am afraid it's over the
+heads of your readers.  At least it is over mine.  It sounds beautiful,
+but I don't understand it.  Your scientific slang is beyond me.  You are
+an extremist, you know, dear, and what may be intelligible to you may not
+be intelligible to the rest of us."
+
+"I imagine it's the philosophic slang that bothers you," was all he could
+say.
+
+He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had
+expressed, and her verdict stunned him.
+
+"No matter how poorly it is done," he persisted, "don't you see anything
+in it?--in the thought of it, I mean?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, it is so different from anything I have read.  I read Maeterlinck
+and understand him--"
+
+"His mysticism, you understand that?" Martin flashed out.
+
+"Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon him, I
+don't understand.  Of course, if originality counts--"
+
+He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by speech.
+He became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that she had been
+speaking for some time.
+
+"After all, your writing has been a toy to you," she was saying.  "Surely
+you have played with it long enough.  It is time to take up life
+seriously--_our_ life, Martin.  Hitherto you have lived solely your own."
+
+"You want me to go to work?" he asked.
+
+"Yes.  Father has offered--"
+
+"I understand all that," he broke in; "but what I want to know is whether
+or not you have lost faith in me?"
+
+She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.
+
+"In your writing, dear," she admitted in a half-whisper.
+
+"You've read lots of my stuff," he went on brutally.  "What do you think
+of it?  Is it utterly hopeless?  How does it compare with other men's
+work?"
+
+"But they sell theirs, and you--don't."
+
+"That doesn't answer my question.  Do you think that literature is not at
+all my vocation?"
+
+"Then I will answer."  She steeled herself to do it.  "I don't think you
+were made to write.  Forgive me, dear.  You compel me to say it; and you
+know I know more about literature than you do."
+
+"Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts," he said meditatively; "and you ought
+to know."
+
+"But there is more to be said," he continued, after a pause painful to
+both.  "I know what I have in me.  No one knows that so well as I.  I
+know I shall succeed.  I will not be kept down.  I am afire with what I
+have to say in verse, and fiction, and essay.  I do not ask you to have
+faith in that, though.  I do not ask you to have faith in me, nor in my
+writing.  What I do ask of you is to love me and have faith in love."
+
+"A year ago I believed for two years.  One of those years is yet to run.
+And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that year is run
+I shall have succeeded.  You remember what you told me long ago, that I
+must serve my apprenticeship to writing.  Well, I have served it.  I have
+crammed it and telescoped it.  With you at the end awaiting me, I have
+never shirked.  Do you know, I have forgotten what it is to fall
+peacefully asleep.  A few million years ago I knew what it was to sleep
+my fill and to awake naturally from very glut of sleep.  I am awakened
+always now by an alarm clock.  If I fall asleep early or late, I set the
+alarm accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my last
+conscious actions."
+
+"When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading for a
+lighter one.  And when I doze over that, I beat my head with my knuckles
+in order to drive sleep away.  Somewhere I read of a man who was afraid
+to sleep.  Kipling wrote the story.  This man arranged a spur so that
+when unconsciousness came, his naked body pressed against the iron teeth.
+Well, I've done the same.  I look at the time, and I resolve that not
+until midnight, or not until one o'clock, or two o'clock, or three
+o'clock, shall the spur be removed.  And so it rowels me awake until the
+appointed time.  That spur has been my bed-mate for months.  I have grown
+so desperate that five and a half hours of sleep is an extravagance.  I
+sleep four hours now.  I am starved for sleep.  There are times when I am
+light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with its rest and
+sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted by Longfellow's
+lines:
+
+   "'The sea is still and deep;
+   All things within its bosom sleep;
+   A single step and all is o'er,
+   A plunge, a bubble, and no more.'
+
+"Of course, this is sheer nonsense.  It comes from nervousness, from an
+overwrought mind.  But the point is: Why have I done this?  For you.  To
+shorten my apprenticeship.  To compel Success to hasten.  And my
+apprenticeship is now served.  I know my equipment.  I swear that I learn
+more each month than the average college man learns in a year.  I know
+it, I tell you.  But were my need for you to understand not so desperate
+I should not tell you.  It is not boasting.  I measure the results by the
+books.  Your brothers, to-day, are ignorant barbarians compared with me
+and the knowledge I have wrung from the books in the hours they were
+sleeping.  Long ago I wanted to be famous.  I care very little for fame
+now.  What I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or
+clothing, or recognition.  I have a dream of laying my head on your
+breast and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere
+another year is gone."
+
+His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his will
+opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward him.  The
+strength that had always poured out from him to her was now flowering in
+his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the vigor of life and
+intellect surging in him.  And in that moment, and for the moment, she
+was aware of a rift that showed in her certitude--a rift through which
+she caught sight of the real Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and as
+animal-trainers have their moments of doubt, so she, for the instant,
+seemed to doubt her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.
+
+"And another thing," he swept on.  "You love me.  But why do you love me?
+The thing in me that compels me to write is the very thing that draws
+your love.  You love me because I am somehow different from the men you
+have known and might have loved.  I was not made for the desk and
+counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling.  Make
+me do such things, make me like those other men, doing the work they do,
+breathing the air they breathe, developing the point of view they have
+developed, and you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed
+the thing you love.  My desire to write is the most vital thing in me.
+Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to write, nor would
+you have desired me for a husband."
+
+"But you forget," she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind
+glimpsing a parallel.  "There have been eccentric inventors, starving
+their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.
+Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them,
+not because of but in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion."
+
+"True," was the reply.  "But there have been inventors who were not
+eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical things;
+and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded.  Certainly I do not seek
+any impossibilities--"
+
+"You have called it 'achieving the impossible,'" she interpolated.
+
+"I spoke figuratively.  I seek to do what men have done before me--to
+write and to live by my writing."
+
+Her silence spurred him on.
+
+"To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?" he
+demanded.
+
+He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his--the pitying mother-
+hand for the hurt child.  And to her, just then, he was the hurt child,
+the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.
+
+Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the antagonism of
+her father and mother.
+
+"But you love me?" he asked.
+
+"I do!  I do!" she cried.
+
+"And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me."  Triumph
+sounded in his voice.  "For I have faith in your love, not fear of their
+enmity.  All things may go astray in this world, but not love.  Love
+cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles by the
+way."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway--as it
+proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance.  Waiting on the
+corner for a car, she had seen him first, and noted the eager, hungry
+lines of his face and the desperate, worried look of his eyes.  In truth,
+he was desperate and worried.  He had just come from a fruitless
+interview with the pawnbroker, from whom he had tried to wring an
+additional loan on his wheel.  The muddy fall weather having come on,
+Martin had pledged his wheel some time since and retained his black suit.
+
+"There's the black suit," the pawnbroker, who knew his every asset, had
+answered.  "You needn't tell me you've gone and pledged it with that Jew,
+Lipka.  Because if you have--"
+
+The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-
+
+"No, no; I've got it.  But I want to wear it on a matter of business."
+
+"All right," the mollified usurer had replied.  "And I want it on a
+matter of business before I can let you have any more money.  You don't
+think I'm in it for my health?"
+
+"But it's a forty-dollar wheel, in good condition," Martin had argued.
+"And you've only let me have seven dollars on it.  No, not even seven.
+Six and a quarter; you took the interest in advance."
+
+"If you want some more, bring the suit," had been the reply that sent
+Martin out of the stuffy little den, so desperate at heart as to reflect
+it in his face and touch his sister to pity.
+
+Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car came along and
+stopped to take on a crowd of afternoon shoppers.  Mrs. Higginbotham
+divined from the grip on her arm as he helped her on, that he was not
+going to follow her.  She turned on the step and looked down upon him.
+His haggard face smote her to the heart again.
+
+"Ain't you comin'?" she asked
+
+The next moment she had descended to his side.
+
+"I'm walking--exercise, you know," he explained.
+
+"Then I'll go along for a few blocks," she announced.  "Mebbe it'll do me
+good.  I ain't ben feelin' any too spry these last few days."
+
+Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her general slovenly
+appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the drooping shoulders, the tired
+face with the sagging lines, and in the heavy fall of her feet, without
+elasticity--a very caricature of the walk that belongs to a free and
+happy body.
+
+"You'd better stop here," he said, though she had already come to a halt
+at the first corner, "and take the next car."
+
+"My goodness!--if I ain't all tired a'ready!" she panted.  "But I'm just
+as able to walk as you in them soles.  They're that thin they'll bu'st
+long before you git out to North Oakland."
+
+"I've a better pair at home," was the answer.
+
+"Come out to dinner to-morrow," she invited irrelevantly.  "Mr.
+Higginbotham won't be there.  He's goin' to San Leandro on business."
+
+Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back the wolfish, hungry
+look that leapt into his eyes at the suggestion of dinner.
+
+"You haven't a penny, Mart, and that's why you're walkin'.  Exercise!"
+She tried to sniff contemptuously, but succeeded in producing only a
+sniffle.  "Here, lemme see."
+
+And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar piece into his
+hand.  "I guess I forgot your last birthday, Mart," she mumbled lamely.
+
+Martin's hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold.  In the same
+instant he knew he ought not to accept, and found himself struggling in
+the throes of indecision.  That bit of gold meant food, life, and light
+in his body and brain, power to go on writing, and--who was to say?--maybe
+to write something that would bring in many pieces of gold.  Clear on his
+vision burned the manuscripts of two essays he had just completed.  He
+saw them under the table on top of the heap of returned manuscripts for
+which he had no stamps, and he saw their titles, just as he had typed
+them--"The High Priests of Mystery," and "The Cradle of Beauty."  He had
+never submitted them anywhere.  They were as good as anything he had done
+in that line.  If only he had stamps for them!  Then the certitude of his
+ultimate success rose up in him, an able ally of hunger, and with a quick
+movement he slipped the coin into his pocket.
+
+"I'll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over," he gulped out, his
+throat painfully contracted and in his eyes a swift hint of moisture.
+
+"Mark my words!" he cried with abrupt positiveness.  "Before the year is
+out I'll put an even hundred of those little yellow-boys into your hand.
+I don't ask you to believe me.  All you have to do is wait and see."
+
+Nor did she believe.  Her incredulity made her uncomfortable, and failing
+of other expedient, she said:-
+
+"I know you're hungry, Mart.  It's sticking out all over you.  Come in to
+meals any time.  I'll send one of the children to tell you when Mr.
+Higginbotham ain't to be there.  An' Mart--"
+
+He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she was about to say,
+so visible was her thought process to him.
+
+"Don't you think it's about time you got a job?"
+
+"You don't think I'll win out?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Nobody has faith in me, Gertrude, except myself."  His voice was
+passionately rebellious.  "I've done good work already, plenty of it, and
+sooner or later it will sell."
+
+"How do you know it is good?"
+
+"Because--"  He faltered as the whole vast field of literature and the
+history of literature stirred in his brain and pointed the futility of
+his attempting to convey to her the reasons for his faith.  "Well,
+because it's better than ninety-nine per cent of what is published in the
+magazines."
+
+"I wish't you'd listen to reason," she answered feebly, but with
+unwavering belief in the correctness of her diagnosis of what was ailing
+him.  "I wish't you'd listen to reason," she repeated, "an' come to
+dinner to-morrow."
+
+After Martin had helped her on the car, he hurried to the post-office and
+invested three of the five dollars in stamps; and when, later in the day,
+on the way to the Morse home, he stopped in at the post-office to weigh a
+large number of long, bulky envelopes, he affixed to them all the stamps
+save three of the two-cent denomination.
+
+It proved a momentous night for Martin, for after dinner he met Russ
+Brissenden.  How he chanced to come there, whose friend he was or what
+acquaintance brought him, Martin did not know.  Nor had he the curiosity
+to inquire about him of Ruth.  In short, Brissenden struck Martin as
+anaemic and feather-brained, and was promptly dismissed from his mind.  An
+hour later he decided that Brissenden was a boor as well, what of the way
+he prowled about from one room to another, staring at the pictures or
+poking his nose into books and magazines he picked up from the table or
+drew from the shelves.  Though a stranger in the house he finally
+isolated himself in the midst of the company, huddling into a capacious
+Morris chair and reading steadily from a thin volume he had drawn from
+his pocket.  As he read, he abstractedly ran his fingers, with a
+caressing movement, through his hair.  Martin noticed him no more that
+evening, except once when he observed him chaffing with great apparent
+success with several of the young women.
+
+It chanced that when Martin was leaving, he overtook Brissenden already
+half down the walk to the street.
+
+"Hello, is that you?" Martin said.
+
+The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung alongside.  Martin
+made no further attempt at conversation, and for several blocks unbroken
+silence lay upon them.
+
+"Pompous old ass!"
+
+The suddenness and the virulence of the exclamation startled Martin.  He
+felt amused, and at the same time was aware of a growing dislike for the
+other.
+
+"What do you go to such a place for?" was abruptly flung at him after
+another block of silence.
+
+"Why do you?" Martin countered.
+
+"Bless me, I don't know," came back.  "At least this is my first
+indiscretion.  There are twenty-four hours in each day, and I must spend
+them somehow.  Come and have a drink."
+
+"All right," Martin answered.
+
+The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of his acceptance.  At
+home was several hours' hack-work waiting for him before he went to bed,
+and after he went to bed there was a volume of Weismann waiting for him,
+to say nothing of Herbert Spencer's Autobiography, which was as replete
+for him with romance as any thrilling novel.  Why should he waste any
+time with this man he did not like? was his thought.  And yet, it was not
+so much the man nor the drink as was it what was associated with the
+drink--the bright lights, the mirrors and dazzling array of glasses, the
+warm and glowing faces and the resonant hum of the voices of men.  That
+was it, it was the voices of men, optimistic men, men who breathed
+success and spent their money for drinks like men.  He was lonely, that
+was what was the matter with him; that was why he had snapped at the
+invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook.  Not since with
+Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception of the wine he took
+with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a drink at a public bar.
+Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving for liquor such as physical
+exhaustion did, and he had felt no need for it.  But just now he felt
+desire for the drink, or, rather, for the atmosphere wherein drinks were
+dispensed and disposed of.  Such a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden
+and he lounged in capacious leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.
+
+They talked.  They talked about many things, and now Brissenden and now
+Martin took turn in ordering Scotch and soda.  Martin, who was extremely
+strong-headed, marvelled at the other's capacity for liquor, and ever and
+anon broke off to marvel at the other's conversation.  He was not long in
+assuming that Brissenden knew everything, and in deciding that here was
+the second intellectual man he had met.  But he noted that Brissenden had
+what Professor Caldwell lacked--namely, fire, the flashing insight and
+perception, the flaming uncontrol of genius.  Living language flowed from
+him.  His thin lips, like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that
+cut and stung; or again, pursing caressingly about the inchoate sound
+they articulated, the thin lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow
+phrases of glow and glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery
+and inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a
+bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases
+that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that
+epitomized the final word of science and yet said something more--the
+poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without words which
+could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and
+all but ungraspable connotations of common words.  He, by some wonder of
+vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no
+language for narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech,
+investing known words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin's
+consciousness messages that were incommunicable to ordinary souls.
+
+Martin forgot his first impression of dislike.  Here was the best the
+books had to offer coming true.  Here was an intelligence, a living man
+for him to look up to.  "I am down in the dirt at your feet," Martin
+repeated to himself again and again.
+
+"You've studied biology," he said aloud, in significant allusion.
+
+To his surprise Brissenden shook his head.
+
+"But you are stating truths that are substantiated only by biology,"
+Martin insisted, and was rewarded by a blank stare.  "Your conclusions
+are in line with the books which you must have read."
+
+"I am glad to hear it," was the answer.  "That my smattering of knowledge
+should enable me to short-cut my way to truth is most reassuring.  As for
+myself, I never bother to find out if I am right or not.  It is all
+valueless anyway.  Man can never know the ultimate verities."
+
+"You are a disciple of Spencer!" Martin cried triumphantly.
+
+"I haven't read him since adolescence, and all I read then was his
+'Education.'"
+
+"I wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly," Martin broke out half an
+hour later.  He had been closely analyzing Brissenden's mental equipment.
+"You are a sheer dogmatist, and that's what makes it so marvellous.  You
+state dogmatically the latest facts which science has been able to
+establish only by a posteriori reasoning.  You jump at correct
+conclusions.  You certainly short-cut with a vengeance.  You feel your
+way with the speed of light, by some hyperrational process, to truth."
+
+"Yes, that was what used to bother Father Joseph, and Brother Dutton,"
+Brissenden replied.  "Oh, no," he added; "I am not anything.  It was a
+lucky trick of fate that sent me to a Catholic college for my education.
+Where did you pick up what you know?"
+
+And while Martin told him, he was busy studying Brissenden, ranging from
+a long, lean, aristocratic face and drooping shoulders to the overcoat on
+a neighboring chair, its pockets sagged and bulged by the freightage of
+many books.  Brissenden's face and long, slender hands were browned by
+the sun--excessively browned, Martin thought.  This sunburn bothered
+Martin.  It was patent that Brissenden was no outdoor man.  Then how had
+he been ravaged by the sun?  Something morbid and significant attached to
+that sunburn, was Martin's thought as he returned to a study of the face,
+narrow, with high cheek-bones and cavernous hollows, and graced with as
+delicate and fine an aquiline nose as Martin had ever seen.  There was
+nothing remarkable about the size of the eyes.  They were neither large
+nor small, while their color was a nondescript brown; but in them
+smouldered a fire, or, rather, lurked an expression dual and strangely
+contradictory.  Defiant, indomitable, even harsh to excess, they at the
+same time aroused pity.  Martin found himself pitying him he knew not
+why, though he was soon to learn.
+
+"Oh, I'm a lunger," Brissenden announced, offhand, a little later, having
+already stated that he came from Arizona.  "I've been down there a couple
+of years living on the climate."
+
+"Aren't you afraid to venture it up in this climate?"
+
+"Afraid?"
+
+There was no special emphasis of his repetition of Martin's word.  But
+Martin saw in that ascetic face the advertisement that there was nothing
+of which it was afraid.  The eyes had narrowed till they were eagle-like,
+and Martin almost caught his breath as he noted the eagle beak with its
+dilated nostrils, defiant, assertive, aggressive.  Magnificent, was what
+he commented to himself, his blood thrilling at the sight.  Aloud, he
+quoted:-
+
+   "'Under the bludgeoning of Chance
+   My head is bloody but unbowed.'"
+
+"You like Henley," Brissenden said, his expression changing swiftly to
+large graciousness and tenderness.  "Of course, I couldn't have expected
+anything else of you.  Ah, Henley!  A brave soul.  He stands out among
+contemporary rhymesters--magazine rhymesters--as a gladiator stands out
+in the midst of a band of eunuchs."
+
+"You don't like the magazines," Martin softly impeached.
+
+"Do you?" was snarled back at him so savagely as to startle him.
+
+"I--I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines," Martin
+faltered.
+
+"That's better," was the mollified rejoinder.  "You try to write, but you
+don't succeed.  I respect and admire your failure.  I know what you
+write.  I can see it with half an eye, and there's one ingredient in it
+that shuts it out of the magazines.  It's guts, and magazines have no use
+for that particular commodity.  What they want is wish-wash and slush,
+and God knows they get it, but not from you."
+
+"I'm not above hack-work," Martin contended.
+
+"On the contrary--"  Brissenden paused and ran an insolent eye over
+Martin's objective poverty, passing from the well-worn tie and the saw-
+edged collar to the shiny sleeves of the coat and on to the slight fray
+of one cuff, winding up and dwelling upon Martin's sunken cheeks.  "On
+the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far above you that you can never
+hope to rise to it.  Why, man, I could insult you by asking you to have
+something to eat."
+
+Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and Brissenden
+laughed triumphantly.
+
+"A full man is not insulted by such an invitation," he concluded.
+
+"You are a devil," Martin cried irritably.
+
+"Anyway, I didn't ask you."
+
+"You didn't dare."
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that.  I invite you now."
+
+Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if with the intention
+of departing to the restaurant forthwith.
+
+Martin's fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was drumming in his
+temples.
+
+"Bosco!  He eats 'em alive!  Eats 'em alive!"  Brissenden exclaimed,
+imitating the spieler of a locally famous snake-eater.
+
+"I could certainly eat you alive," Martin said, in turn running insolent
+eyes over the other's disease-ravaged frame.
+
+"Only I'm not worthy of it?"
+
+"On the contrary," Martin considered, "because the incident is not
+worthy."  He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome.  "I confess you
+made a fool of me, Brissenden.  That I am hungry and you are aware of it
+are only ordinary phenomena, and there's no disgrace.  You see, I laugh
+at the conventional little moralities of the herd; then you drift by, say
+a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the slave of the same little
+moralities."
+
+"You were insulted," Brissenden affirmed.
+
+"I certainly was, a moment ago.  The prejudice of early youth, you know.
+I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have since learned.
+They are the skeletons in my particular closet."
+
+"But you've got the door shut on them now?"
+
+"I certainly have."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+"Then let's go and get something to eat."
+
+"I'll go you," Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current Scotch
+and soda with the last change from his two dollars and seeing the waiter
+bullied by Brissenden into putting that change back on the table.
+
+Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly
+weight of Brissenden's hand upon his shoulder.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin's second
+visitor.  But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated
+Brissenden in her parlor's grandeur of respectability.
+
+"Hope you don't mind my coming?" Brissenden began.
+
+"No, no, not at all," Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him to
+the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed.  "But how did you know
+where I lived?"
+
+"Called up the Morses.  Miss Morse answered the 'phone.  And here I am."
+He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the table.
+"There's a book, by a poet.  Read it and keep it."  And then, in reply to
+Martin's protest: "What have I to do with books?  I had another
+hemorrhage this morning.  Got any whiskey?  No, of course not.  Wait a
+minute."
+
+He was off and away.  Martin watched his long figure go down the outside
+steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang the
+shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over, the collapsed
+ruin of the chest.  Martin got two tumblers, and fell to reading the book
+of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow's latest collection.
+
+"No Scotch," Brissenden announced on his return.  "The beggar sells
+nothing but American whiskey.  But here's a quart of it."
+
+"I'll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we'll make a toddy,"
+Martin offered.
+
+"I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?" he went on, holding up
+the volume in question.
+
+"Possibly fifty dollars," came the answer.  "Though he's lucky if he
+pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk bringing it
+out."
+
+"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?"
+
+Martin's tone and face alike showed his dejection.
+
+"Certainly not.  What fool expects to?  Out of rhyming, yes.  There's
+Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick.  They do very nicely.  But
+poetry--do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his living?--teaching in a
+boys' cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania, and of all private little
+hells such a billet is the limit.  I wouldn't trade places with him if he
+had fifty years of life before him.  And yet his work stands out from the
+ruck of the contemporary versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots.  And
+the reviews he gets!  Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!"
+
+"Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do
+write," Martin concurred.  "Why, I was appalled at the quantities of
+rubbish written about Stevenson and his work."
+
+"Ghouls and harpies!" Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth.  "Yes,
+I know the spawn--complacently pecking at him for his Father Damien
+letter, analyzing him, weighing him--"
+
+"Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos," Martin
+broke in.
+
+"Yes, that's it, a good phrase,--mouthing and besliming the True, and
+Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and saying,
+'Good dog, Fido.'  Faugh!  'The little chattering daws of men,' Richard
+Realf called them the night he died."
+
+"Pecking at star-dust," Martin took up the strain warmly; "at the
+meteoric flight of the master-men.  I once wrote a squib on them--the
+critics, or the reviewers, rather."
+
+"Let's see it," Brissenden begged eagerly.
+
+So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of "Star-dust," and during the reading
+of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to sip his toddy.
+
+"Strikes me you're a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world of
+cowled gnomes who cannot see," was his comment at the end of it.  "Of
+course it was snapped up by the first magazine?"
+
+Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book.  "It has been refused
+by twenty-seven of them."
+
+Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit of
+coughing.
+
+"Say, you needn't tell me you haven't tackled poetry," he gasped.  "Let
+me see some of it."
+
+"Don't read it now," Martin pleaded.  "I want to talk with you.  I'll
+make up a bundle and you can take it home."
+
+Brissenden departed with the "Love-cycle," and "The Peri and the Pearl,"
+returning next day to greet Martin with:-
+
+"I want more."
+
+Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin learned that
+Brissenden also was one.  He was swept off his feet by the other's work,
+and astounded that no attempt had been made to publish it.
+
+"A plague on all their houses!" was Brissenden's answer to Martin's
+volunteering to market his work for him.  "Love Beauty for its own sake,"
+was his counsel, "and leave the magazines alone.  Back to your ships and
+your sea--that's my advice to you, Martin Eden.  What do you want in
+these sick and rotten cities of men?  You are cutting your throat every
+day you waste in them trying to prostitute beauty to the needs of
+magazinedom.  What was it you quoted me the other day?--Oh, yes, 'Man,
+the latest of the ephemera.'  Well, what do you, the latest of the
+ephemera, want with fame?  If you got it, it would be poison to you.  You
+are too simple, too elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper
+on such pap.  I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.  Beauty
+is the only master to serve.  Serve her and damn the multitude!  Success!
+What in hell's success if it isn't right there in your Stevenson sonnet,
+which outranks Henley's 'Apparition,' in that 'Love-cycle,' in those sea-
+poems?
+
+"It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in the
+doing of it.  You can't tell me.  I know it.  You know it.  Beauty hurts
+you.  It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a
+knife of flame.  Why should you palter with magazines?  Let beauty be
+your end.  Why should you mint beauty into gold?  Anyway, you can't; so
+there's no use in my getting excited over it.  You can read the magazines
+for a thousand years and you won't find the value of one line of Keats.
+Leave fame and coin alone, sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to
+your sea."
+
+"Not for fame, but for love," Martin laughed.  "Love seems to have no
+place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of Love."
+
+Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly.  "You are so young,
+Martin boy, so young.  You will flutter high, but your wings are of the
+finest gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments.  Do not scorch them.  But
+of course you have scorched them already.  It required some glorified
+petticoat to account for that 'Love-cycle,' and that's the shame of it."
+
+"It glorifies love as well as the petticoat," Martin laughed.
+
+"The philosophy of madness," was the retort.  "So have I assured myself
+when wandering in hasheesh dreams.  But beware.  These bourgeois cities
+will kill you.  Look at that den of traitors where I met you.  Dry rot is
+no name for it.  One can't keep his sanity in such an atmosphere.  It's
+degrading.  There's not one of them who is not degrading, man and woman,
+all of them animated stomachs guided by the high intellectual and
+artistic impulses of clams--"
+
+He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin.  Then, with a flash of
+divination, he saw the situation.  The expression on his face turned to
+wondering horror.
+
+"And you wrote that tremendous 'Love-cycle' to her--that pale,
+shrivelled, female thing!"
+
+The next instant Martin's right hand had shot to a throttling clutch on
+his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth rattled.  But Martin,
+looking into his eyes, saw no fear there,--naught but a curious and
+mocking devil.  Martin remembered himself, and flung Brissenden, by the
+neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the same moment releasing his hold.
+
+Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to
+chuckle.
+
+"You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the flame," he
+said.
+
+"My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days," Martin apologized.  "Hope I
+didn't hurt you.  Here, let me mix a fresh toddy."
+
+"Ah, you young Greek!" Brissenden went on.  "I wonder if you take just
+pride in that body of yours.  You are devilish strong.  You are a young
+panther, a lion cub.  Well, well, it is you who must pay for that
+strength."
+
+"What do you mean?" Martin asked curiously, passing aim a glass.  "Here,
+down this and be good."
+
+"Because--" Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of it.
+"Because of the women.  They will worry you until you die, as they have
+already worried you, or else I was born yesterday.  Now there's no use in
+your choking me; I'm going to have my say.  This is undoubtedly your calf
+love; but for Beauty's sake show better taste next time.  What under
+heaven do you want with a daughter of the bourgeoisie?  Leave them alone.
+Pick out some great, wanton flame of a woman, who laughs at life and
+jeers at death and loves one while she may.  There are such women, and
+they will love you just as readily as any pusillanimous product of
+bourgeois sheltered life."
+
+"Pusillanimous?" Martin protested.
+
+"Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have been
+prattled into them, and afraid to live life.  They will love you, Martin,
+but they will love their little moralities more.  What you want is the
+magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls, the blazing
+butterflies and not the little gray moths.  Oh, you will grow tired of
+them, too, of all the female things, if you are unlucky enough to live.
+But you won't live.  You won't go back to your ships and sea; therefore,
+you'll hang around these pest-holes of cities until your bones are
+rotten, and then you'll die."
+
+"You can lecture me, but you can't make me talk back," Martin said.
+"After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the wisdom
+of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours."
+
+They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but they
+liked each other, and on Martin's part it was no less than a profound
+liking.  Day after day they were together, if for no more than the hour
+Brissenden spent in Martin's stuffy room.  Brissenden never arrived
+without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined together down-town, he
+drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal.  He invariably paid the way
+for both, and it was through him that Martin learned the refinements of
+food, drank his first champagne, and made acquaintance with Rhenish
+wines.
+
+But Brissenden was always an enigma.  With the face of an ascetic, he
+was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary.  He was
+unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living; and yet,
+dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it.  He was possessed by a
+madness to live, to thrill, "to squirm my little space in the cosmic dust
+whence I came," as he phrased it once himself.  He had tampered with
+drugs and done many strange things in quest of new thrills, new
+sensations.  As he told Martin, he had once gone three days without
+water, had done so voluntarily, in order to experience the exquisite
+delight of such a thirst assuaged.  Who or what he was, Martin never
+learned.  He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent
+grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+Martin was steadily losing his battle.  Economize as he would, the
+earnings from hack-work did not balance expenses.  Thanksgiving found him
+with his black suit in pawn and unable to accept the Morses' invitation
+to dinner.  Ruth was not made happy by his reason for not coming, and the
+corresponding effect on him was one of desperation.  He told her that he
+would come, after all; that he would go over to San Francisco, to the
+Transcontinental office, collect the five dollars due him, and with it
+redeem his suit of clothes.
+
+In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria.  He would have borrowed
+it, by preference, from Brissenden, but that erratic individual had
+disappeared.  Two weeks had passed since Martin had seen him, and he
+vainly cudgelled his brains for some cause of offence.  The ten cents
+carried Martin across the ferry to San Francisco, and as he walked up
+Market Street he speculated upon his predicament in case he failed to
+collect the money.  There would then be no way for him to return to
+Oakland, and he knew no one in San Francisco from whom to borrow another
+ten cents.
+
+The door to the Transcontinental office was ajar, and Martin, in the act
+of opening it, was brought to a sudden pause by a loud voice from within,
+which exclaimed:- "But that is not the question, Mr. Ford."  (Ford,
+Martin knew, from his correspondence, to be the editor's name.)  "The
+question is, are you prepared to pay?--cash, and cash down, I mean?  I am
+not interested in the prospects of the Transcontinental and what you
+expect to make it next year.  What I want is to be paid for what I do.
+And I tell you, right now, the Christmas Transcontinental don't go to
+press till I have the money in my hand.  Good day.  When you get the
+money, come and see me."
+
+The door jerked open, and the man flung past Martin, with an angry
+countenance and went down the corridor, muttering curses and clenching
+his fists.  Martin decided not to enter immediately, and lingered in the
+hallways for a quarter of an hour.  Then he shoved the door open and
+walked in.  It was a new experience, the first time he had been inside an
+editorial office.  Cards evidently were not necessary in that office, for
+the boy carried word to an inner room that there was a man who wanted to
+see Mr. Ford.  Returning, the boy beckoned him from halfway across the
+room and led him to the private office, the editorial sanctum.  Martin's
+first impression was of the disorder and cluttered confusion of the room.
+Next he noticed a bewhiskered, youthful-looking man, sitting at a roll-
+top desk, who regarded him curiously.  Martin marvelled at the calm
+repose of his face.  It was evident that the squabble with the printer
+had not affected his equanimity.
+
+"I--I am Martin Eden," Martin began the conversation.  ("And I want my
+five dollars," was what he would have liked to say.)
+
+But this was his first editor, and under the circumstances he did not
+desire to scare him too abruptly.  To his surprise, Mr. Ford leaped into
+the air with a "You don't say so!" and the next moment, with both hands,
+was shaking Martin's hand effusively.
+
+"Can't say how glad I am to see you, Mr. Eden.  Often wondered what you
+were like."
+
+Here he held Martin off at arm's length and ran his beaming eyes over
+Martin's second-best suit, which was also his worst suit, and which was
+ragged and past repair, though the trousers showed the careful crease he
+had put in with Maria's flat-irons.
+
+"I confess, though, I conceived you to be a much older man than you are.
+Your story, you know, showed such breadth, and vigor, such maturity and
+depth of thought.  A masterpiece, that story--I knew it when I had read
+the first half-dozen lines.  Let me tell you how I first read it.  But
+no; first let me introduce you to the staff."
+
+Still talking, Mr. Ford led him into the general office, where he
+introduced him to the associate editor, Mr. White, a slender, frail
+little man whose hand seemed strangely cold, as if he were suffering from
+a chill, and whose whiskers were sparse and silky.
+
+"And Mr. Ends, Mr. Eden.  Mr. Ends is our business manager, you know."
+
+Martin found himself shaking hands with a cranky-eyed, bald-headed man,
+whose face looked youthful enough from what little could be seen of it,
+for most of it was covered by a snow-white beard, carefully trimmed--by
+his wife, who did it on Sundays, at which times she also shaved the back
+of his neck.
+
+The three men surrounded Martin, all talking admiringly and at once,
+until it seemed to him that they were talking against time for a wager.
+
+"We often wondered why you didn't call," Mr. White was saying.
+
+"I didn't have the carfare, and I live across the Bay," Martin answered
+bluntly, with the idea of showing them his imperative need for the money.
+
+Surely, he thought to himself, my glad rags in themselves are eloquent
+advertisement of my need.  Time and again, whenever opportunity offered,
+he hinted about the purpose of his business.  But his admirers' ears were
+deaf.  They sang his praises, told him what they had thought of his story
+at first sight, what they subsequently thought, what their wives and
+families thought; but not one hint did they breathe of intention to pay
+him for it.
+
+"Did I tell you how I first read your story?" Mr. Ford said.  "Of course
+I didn't.  I was coming west from New York, and when the train stopped at
+Ogden, the train-boy on the new run brought aboard the current number of
+the Transcontinental."
+
+My God! Martin thought; you can travel in a Pullman while I starve for
+the paltry five dollars you owe me.  A wave of anger rushed over him.  The
+wrong done him by the Transcontinental loomed colossal, for strong upon
+him were all the dreary months of vain yearning, of hunger and privation,
+and his present hunger awoke and gnawed at him, reminding him that he had
+eaten nothing since the day before, and little enough then.  For the
+moment he saw red.  These creatures were not even robbers.  They were
+sneak-thieves.  By lies and broken promises they had tricked him out of
+his story.  Well, he would show them.  And a great resolve surged into
+his will to the effect that he would not leave the office until he got
+his money.  He remembered, if he did not get it, that there was no way
+for him to go back to Oakland.  He controlled himself with an effort, but
+not before the wolfish expression of his face had awed and perturbed
+them.
+
+They became more voluble than ever.  Mr. Ford started anew to tell how he
+had first read "The Ring of Bells," and Mr. Ends at the same time was
+striving to repeat his niece's appreciation of "The Ring of Bells," said
+niece being a school-teacher in Alameda.
+
+"I'll tell you what I came for," Martin said finally.  "To be paid for
+that story all of you like so well.  Five dollars, I believe, is what you
+promised me would be paid on publication."
+
+Mr. Ford, with an expression on his mobile features of mediate and happy
+acquiescence, started to reach for his pocket, then turned suddenly to
+Mr. Ends, and said that he had left his money home.  That Mr. Ends
+resented this, was patent; and Martin saw the twitch of his arm as if to
+protect his trousers pocket.  Martin knew that the money was there.
+
+"I am sorry," said Mr. Ends, "but I paid the printer not an hour ago, and
+he took my ready change.  It was careless of me to be so short; but the
+bill was not yet due, and the printer's request, as a favor, to make an
+immediate advance, was quite unexpected."
+
+Both men looked expectantly at Mr. White, but that gentleman laughed and
+shrugged his shoulders.  His conscience was clean at any rate.  He had
+come into the Transcontinental to learn magazine-literature, instead of
+which he had principally learned finance.  The Transcontinental owed him
+four months' salary, and he knew that the printer must be appeased before
+the associate editor.
+
+"It's rather absurd, Mr. Eden, to have caught us in this shape," Mr. Ford
+preambled airily.  "All carelessness, I assure you.  But I'll tell you
+what we'll do.  We'll mail you a check the first thing in the morning.
+You have Mr. Eden's address, haven't you, Mr. Ends?"
+
+Yes, Mr. Ends had the address, and the check would be mailed the first
+thing in the morning.  Martin's knowledge of banks and checks was hazy,
+but he could see no reason why they should not give him the check on this
+day just as well as on the next.
+
+"Then it is understood, Mr. Eden, that we'll mail you the check
+to-morrow?" Mr. Ford said.
+
+"I need the money to-day," Martin answered stolidly.
+
+"The unfortunate circumstances--if you had chanced here any other day,"
+Mr. Ford began suavely, only to be interrupted by Mr. Ends, whose cranky
+eyes justified themselves in his shortness of temper.
+
+"Mr. Ford has already explained the situation," he said with asperity.
+"And so have I.  The check will be mailed--"
+
+"I also have explained," Martin broke in, "and I have explained that I
+want the money to-day."
+
+He had felt his pulse quicken a trifle at the business manager's
+brusqueness, and upon him he kept an alert eye, for it was in that
+gentleman's trousers pocket that he divined the Transcontinental's ready
+cash was reposing.
+
+"It is too bad--" Mr. Ford began.
+
+But at that moment, with an impatient movement, Mr. Ends turned as if
+about to leave the room.  At the same instant Martin sprang for him,
+clutching him by the throat with one hand in such fashion that Mr. Ends'
+snow-white beard, still maintaining its immaculate trimness, pointed
+ceilingward at an angle of forty-five degrees.  To the horror of Mr.
+White and Mr. Ford, they saw their business manager shaken like an
+Astrakhan rug.
+
+"Dig up, you venerable discourager of rising young talent!" Martin
+exhorted.  "Dig up, or I'll shake it out of you, even if it's all in
+nickels."  Then, to the two affrighted onlookers: "Keep away!  If you
+interfere, somebody's liable to get hurt."
+
+Mr. Ends was choking, and it was not until the grip on his throat was
+eased that he was able to signify his acquiescence in the digging-up
+programme.  All together, after repeated digs, its trousers pocket
+yielded four dollars and fifteen cents.
+
+"Inside out with it," Martin commanded.
+
+An additional ten cents fell out.  Martin counted the result of his raid
+a second time to make sure.
+
+"You next!" he shouted at Mr. Ford.  "I want seventy-five cents more."
+
+Mr. Ford did not wait, but ransacked his pockets, with the result of
+sixty cents.
+
+"Sure that is all?" Martin demanded menacingly, possessing himself of it.
+"What have you got in your vest pockets?"
+
+In token of his good faith, Mr. Ford turned two of his pockets inside
+out.  A strip of cardboard fell to the floor from one of them.  He
+recovered it and was in the act of returning it, when Martin cried:-
+
+"What's that?--A ferry ticket?  Here, give it to me.  It's worth ten
+cents.  I'll credit you with it.  I've now got four dollars and ninety-
+five cents, including the ticket.  Five cents is still due me."
+
+He looked fiercely at Mr. White, and found that fragile creature in the
+act of handing him a nickel.
+
+"Thank you," Martin said, addressing them collectively.  "I wish you a
+good day."
+
+"Robber!" Mr. Ends snarled after him.
+
+"Sneak-thief!" Martin retorted, slamming the door as he passed out.
+
+Martin was elated--so elated that when he recollected that The Hornet
+owed him fifteen dollars for "The Peri and the Pearl," he decided
+forthwith to go and collect it.  But The Hornet was run by a set of clean-
+shaven, strapping young men, frank buccaneers who robbed everything and
+everybody, not excepting one another.  After some breakage of the office
+furniture, the editor (an ex-college athlete), ably assisted by the
+business manager, an advertising agent, and the porter, succeeded in
+removing Martin from the office and in accelerating, by initial impulse,
+his descent of the first flight of stairs.
+
+"Come again, Mr. Eden; glad to see you any time," they laughed down at
+him from the landing above.
+
+Martin grinned as he picked himself up.
+
+"Phew!" he murmured back.  "The Transcontinental crowd were nanny-goats,
+but you fellows are a lot of prize-fighters."
+
+More laughter greeted this.
+
+"I must say, Mr. Eden," the editor of The Hornet called down, "that for a
+poet you can go some yourself.  Where did you learn that right cross--if
+I may ask?"
+
+"Where you learned that half-Nelson," Martin answered.  "Anyway, you're
+going to have a black eye."
+
+"I hope your neck doesn't stiffen up," the editor wished solicitously:
+"What do you say we all go out and have a drink on it--not the neck, of
+course, but the little rough-house?"
+
+"I'll go you if I lose," Martin accepted.
+
+And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably agreeing that the battle
+was to the strong, and that the fifteen dollars for "The Peri and the
+Pearl" belonged by right to The Hornet's editorial staff.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+Arthur remained at the gate while Ruth climbed Maria's front steps.  She
+heard the rapid click of the type-writer, and when Martin let her in,
+found him on the last page of a manuscript.  She had come to make certain
+whether or not he would be at their table for Thanksgiving dinner; but
+before she could broach the subject Martin plunged into the one with
+which he was full.
+
+"Here, let me read you this," he cried, separating the carbon copies and
+running the pages of manuscript into shape.  "It's my latest, and
+different from anything I've done.  It is so altogether different that I
+am almost afraid of it, and yet I've a sneaking idea it is good.  You be
+judge.  It's an Hawaiian story.  I've called it 'Wiki-wiki.'"
+
+His face was bright with the creative glow, though she shivered in the
+cold room and had been struck by the coldness of his hands at greeting.
+She listened closely while he read, and though he from time to time had
+seen only disapprobation in her face, at the close he asked:-
+
+"Frankly, what do you think of it?"
+
+"I--I don't know," she, answered.  "Will it--do you think it will sell?"
+
+"I'm afraid not," was the confession.  "It's too strong for the
+magazines.  But it's true, on my word it's true."
+
+"But why do you persist in writing such things when you know they won't
+sell?" she went on inexorably.  "The reason for your writing is to make a
+living, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, that's right; but the miserable story got away with me.  I couldn't
+help writing it.  It demanded to be written."
+
+"But that character, that Wiki-Wiki, why do you make him talk so roughly?
+Surely it will offend your readers, and surely that is why the editors
+are justified in refusing your work."
+
+"Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way."
+
+"But it is not good taste."
+
+"It is life," he replied bluntly.  "It is real.  It is true.  And I must
+write life as I see it."
+
+She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they sat silent.  It was
+because he loved her that he did not quite understand her, and she could
+not understand him because he was so large that he bulked beyond her
+horizon.
+
+"Well, I've collected from the Transcontinental," he said in an effort to
+shift the conversation to a more comfortable subject.  The picture of the
+bewhiskered trio, as he had last seen them, mulcted of four dollars and
+ninety cents and a ferry ticket, made him chuckle.
+
+"Then you'll come!" she cried joyously.  "That was what I came to find
+out."
+
+"Come?" he muttered absently.  "Where?"
+
+"Why, to dinner to-morrow.  You know you said you'd recover your suit if
+you got that money."
+
+"I forgot all about it," he said humbly.  "You see, this morning the
+poundman got Maria's two cows and the baby calf, and--well, it happened
+that Maria didn't have any money, and so I had to recover her cows for
+her.  That's where the Transcontinental fiver went--'The Ring of Bells'
+went into the poundman's pocket."
+
+"Then you won't come?"
+
+He looked down at his clothing.
+
+"I can't."
+
+Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her blue eyes, but she
+said nothing.
+
+"Next Thanksgiving you'll have dinner with me in Delmonico's," he said
+cheerily; "or in London, or Paris, or anywhere you wish.  I know it."
+
+"I saw in the paper a few days ago," she announced abruptly, "that there
+had been several local appointments to the Railway Mail.  You passed
+first, didn't you?"
+
+He was compelled to admit that the call had come for him, but that he had
+declined it.  "I was so sure--I am so sure--of myself," he concluded.  "A
+year from now I'll be earning more than a dozen men in the Railway Mail.
+You wait and see."
+
+"Oh," was all she said, when he finished.  She stood up, pulling at her
+gloves.  "I must go, Martin.  Arthur is waiting for me."
+
+He took her in his arms and kissed her, but she proved a passive
+sweetheart.  There was no tenseness in her body, her arms did not go
+around him, and her lips met his without their wonted pressure.
+
+She was angry with him, he concluded, as he returned from the gate.  But
+why?  It was unfortunate that the poundman had gobbled Maria's cows.  But
+it was only a stroke of fate.  Nobody could be blamed for it.  Nor did it
+enter his head that he could have done aught otherwise than what he had
+done.  Well, yes, he was to blame a little, was his next thought, for
+having refused the call to the Railway Mail.  And she had not liked "Wiki-
+Wiki."
+
+He turned at the head of the steps to meet the letter-carrier on his
+afternoon round.  The ever recurrent fever of expectancy assailed Martin
+as he took the bundle of long envelopes.  One was not long.  It was short
+and thin, and outside was printed the address of The New York Outview.  He
+paused in the act of tearing the envelope open.  It could not be an
+acceptance.  He had no manuscripts with that publication.  Perhaps--his
+heart almost stood still at the--wild thought--perhaps they were ordering
+an article from him; but the next instant he dismissed the surmise as
+hopelessly impossible.
+
+It was a short, formal letter, signed by the office editor, merely
+informing him that an anonymous letter which they had received was
+enclosed, and that he could rest assured the Outview's staff never under
+any circumstances gave consideration to anonymous correspondence.
+
+The enclosed letter Martin found to be crudely printed by hand.  It was a
+hotchpotch of illiterate abuse of Martin, and of assertion that the "so-
+called Martin Eden" who was selling stories to magazines was no writer at
+all, and that in reality he was stealing stories from old magazines,
+typing them, and sending them out as his own.  The envelope was
+postmarked "San Leandro."  Martin did not require a second thought to
+discover the author.  Higginbotham's grammar, Higginbotham's
+colloquialisms, Higginbotham's mental quirks and processes, were apparent
+throughout.  Martin saw in every line, not the fine Italian hand, but the
+coarse grocer's fist, of his brother-in-law.
+
+But why? he vainly questioned.  What injury had he done Bernard
+Higginbotham?  The thing was so unreasonable, so wanton.  There was no
+explaining it.  In the course of the week a dozen similar letters were
+forwarded to Martin by the editors of various Eastern magazines.  The
+editors were behaving handsomely, Martin concluded.  He was wholly
+unknown to them, yet some of them had even been sympathetic.  It was
+evident that they detested anonymity.  He saw that the malicious attempt
+to hurt him had failed.  In fact, if anything came of it, it was bound to
+be good, for at least his name had been called to the attention of a
+number of editors.  Sometime, perhaps, reading a submitted manuscript of
+his, they might remember him as the fellow about whom they had received
+an anonymous letter.  And who was to say that such a remembrance might
+not sway the balance of their judgment just a trifle in his favor?
+
+It was about this time that Martin took a great slump in Maria's
+estimation.  He found her in the kitchen one morning groaning with pain,
+tears of weakness running down her cheeks, vainly endeavoring to put
+through a large ironing.  He promptly diagnosed her affliction as La
+Grippe, dosed her with hot whiskey (the remnants in the bottles for which
+Brissenden was responsible), and ordered her to bed.  But Maria was
+refractory.  The ironing had to be done, she protested, and delivered
+that night, or else there would be no food on the morrow for the seven
+small and hungry Silvas.
+
+To her astonishment (and it was something that she never ceased from
+relating to her dying day), she saw Martin Eden seize an iron from the
+stove and throw a fancy shirt-waist on the ironing-board.  It was Kate
+Flanagan's best Sunday waist, than whom there was no more exacting and
+fastidiously dressed woman in Maria's world.  Also, Miss Flanagan had
+sent special instruction that said waist must be delivered by that night.
+As every one knew, she was keeping company with John Collins, the
+blacksmith, and, as Maria knew privily, Miss Flanagan and Mr. Collins
+were going next day to Golden Gate Park.  Vain was Maria's attempt to
+rescue the garment.  Martin guided her tottering footsteps to a chair,
+from where she watched him with bulging eyes.  In a quarter of the time
+it would have taken her she saw the shirt-waist safely ironed, and ironed
+as well as she could have done it, as Martin made her grant.
+
+"I could work faster," he explained, "if your irons were only hotter."
+
+To her, the irons he swung were much hotter than she ever dared to use.
+
+"Your sprinkling is all wrong," he complained next.  "Here, let me teach
+you how to sprinkle.  Pressure is what's wanted.  Sprinkle under pressure
+if you want to iron fast."
+
+He procured a packing-case from the woodpile in the cellar, fitted a
+cover to it, and raided the scrap-iron the Silva tribe was collecting for
+the junkman.  With fresh-sprinkled garments in the box, covered with the
+board and pressed by the iron, the device was complete and in operation.
+
+"Now you watch me, Maria," he said, stripping off to his undershirt and
+gripping an iron that was what he called "really hot."
+
+"An' when he feenish da iron' he washa da wools," as she described it
+afterward.  "He say, 'Maria, you are da greata fool.  I showa you how to
+washa da wools,' an' he shows me, too.  Ten minutes he maka da
+machine--one barrel, one wheel-hub, two poles, justa like dat."
+
+Martin had learned the contrivance from Joe at the Shelly Hot Springs.
+The old wheel-hub, fixed on the end of the upright pole, constituted the
+plunger.  Making this, in turn, fast to the spring-pole attached to the
+kitchen rafters, so that the hub played upon the woollens in the barrel,
+he was able, with one hand, thoroughly to pound them.
+
+"No more Maria washa da wools," her story always ended.  "I maka da kids
+worka da pole an' da hub an' da barrel.  Him da smarta man, Mister Eden."
+
+Nevertheless, by his masterly operation and improvement of her kitchen-
+laundry he fell an immense distance in her regard.  The glamour of
+romance with which her imagination had invested him faded away in the
+cold light of fact that he was an ex-laundryman.  All his books, and his
+grand friends who visited him in carriages or with countless bottles of
+whiskey, went for naught.  He was, after all, a mere workingman, a member
+of her own class and caste.  He was more human and approachable, but, he
+was no longer mystery.
+
+Martin's alienation from his family continued.  Following upon Mr.
+Higginbotham's unprovoked attack, Mr. Hermann von Schmidt showed his
+hand.  The fortunate sale of several storiettes, some humorous verse, and
+a few jokes gave Martin a temporary splurge of prosperity.  Not only did
+he partially pay up his bills, but he had sufficient balance left to
+redeem his black suit and wheel.  The latter, by virtue of a twisted
+crank-hanger, required repairing, and, as a matter of friendliness with
+his future brother-in-law, he sent it to Von Schmidt's shop.
+
+The afternoon of the same day Martin was pleased by the wheel being
+delivered by a small boy.  Von Schmidt was also inclined to be friendly,
+was Martin's conclusion from this unusual favor.  Repaired wheels usually
+had to be called for.  But when he examined the wheel, he discovered no
+repairs had been made.  A little later in the day he telephoned his
+sister's betrothed, and learned that that person didn't want anything to
+do with him in "any shape, manner, or form."
+
+"Hermann von Schmidt," Martin answered cheerfully, "I've a good mind to
+come over and punch that Dutch nose of yours."
+
+"You come to my shop," came the reply, "an' I'll send for the police.  An'
+I'll put you through, too.  Oh, I know you, but you can't make no rough-
+house with me.  I don't want nothin' to do with the likes of you.  You're
+a loafer, that's what, an' I ain't asleep.  You ain't goin' to do no
+spongin' off me just because I'm marryin' your sister.  Why don't you go
+to work an' earn an honest livin', eh?  Answer me that."
+
+Martin's philosophy asserted itself, dissipating his anger, and he hung
+up the receiver with a long whistle of incredulous amusement.  But after
+the amusement came the reaction, and he was oppressed by his loneliness.
+Nobody understood him, nobody seemed to have any use for him, except
+Brissenden, and Brissenden had disappeared, God alone knew where.
+
+Twilight was falling as Martin left the fruit store and turned homeward,
+his marketing on his arm.  At the corner an electric car had stopped, and
+at sight of a lean, familiar figure alighting, his heart leapt with joy.
+It was Brissenden, and in the fleeting glimpse, ere the car started up,
+Martin noted the overcoat pockets, one bulging with books, the other
+bulging with a quart bottle of whiskey.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+Brissenden gave no explanation of his long absence, nor did Martin pry
+into it.  He was content to see his friend's cadaverous face opposite him
+through the steam rising from a tumbler of toddy.
+
+"I, too, have not been idle," Brissenden proclaimed, after hearing
+Martin's account of the work he had accomplished.
+
+He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and passed it to
+Martin, who looked at the title and glanced up curiously.
+
+"Yes, that's it," Brissenden laughed.  "Pretty good title, eh?
+'Ephemera'--it is the one word.  And you're responsible for it, what of
+your _man_, who is always the erected, the vitalized inorganic, the
+latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature strutting his little
+space on the thermometer.  It got into my head and I had to write it to
+get rid of it.  Tell me what you think of it."
+
+Martin's face, flushed at first, paled as he read on.  It was perfect
+art.  Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be called where
+the last conceivable atom of substance had found expression in so perfect
+construction as to make Martin's head swim with delight, to put
+passionate tears into his eyes, and to send chills creeping up and down
+his back.  It was a long poem of six or seven hundred lines, and it was a
+fantastic, amazing, unearthly thing.  It was terrific, impossible; and
+yet there it was, scrawled in black ink across the sheets of paper.  It
+dealt with man and his soul-gropings in their ultimate terms, plumbing
+the abysses of space for the testimony of remotest suns and rainbow
+spectrums.  It was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of
+a dying man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the wild
+flutter of fading heart-beats.  The poem swung in majestic rhythm to the
+cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry hosts, to
+the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebulae in the darkened
+void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a silver shuttle, ran
+the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous chirp amid the screaming of
+planets and the crash of systems.
+
+"There is nothing like it in literature," Martin said, when at last he
+was able to speak.  "It's wonderful!--wonderful!  It has gone to my head.
+I am drunken with it.  That great, infinitesimal question--I can't shake
+it out of my thoughts.  That questing, eternal, ever recurring, thin
+little wailing voice of man is still ringing in my ears.  It is like the
+dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of
+lions.  It is insatiable with microscopic desire.  I now I'm making a
+fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me.  You are--I don't know
+what you are--you are wonderful, that's all.  But how do you do it?  How
+do you do it?"
+
+Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.
+
+"I shall never write again.  I am a dauber in clay.  You have shown me
+the work of the real artificer-artisan.  Genius!  This is something more
+than genius.  It transcends genius.  It is truth gone mad.  It is true,
+man, every line of it.  I wonder if you realize that, you dogmatist.
+Science cannot give you the lie.  It is the truth of the sneer, stamped
+out from the black iron of the Cosmos and interwoven with mighty rhythms
+of sound into a fabric of splendor and beauty.  And now I won't say
+another word.  I am overwhelmed, crushed.  Yes, I will, too.  Let me
+market it for you."
+
+Brissenden grinned.  "There's not a magazine in Christendom that would
+dare to publish it--you know that."
+
+"I know nothing of the sort.  I know there's not a magazine in
+Christendom that wouldn't jump at it.  They don't get things like that
+every day.  That's no mere poem of the year.  It's the poem of the
+century."
+
+"I'd like to take you up on the proposition."
+
+"Now don't get cynical," Martin exhorted.  "The magazine editors are not
+wholly fatuous.  I know that.  And I'll close with you on the bet.  I'll
+wager anything you want that 'Ephemera' is accepted either on the first
+or second offering."
+
+"There's just one thing that prevents me from taking you."  Brissenden
+waited a moment.  "The thing is big--the biggest I've ever done.  I know
+that.  It's my swan song.  I am almighty proud of it.  I worship it.  It's
+better than whiskey.  It is what I dreamed of--the great and perfect
+thing--when I was a simple young man, with sweet illusions and clean
+ideals.  And I've got it, now, in my last grasp, and I'll not have it
+pawed over and soiled by a lot of swine.  No, I won't take the bet.  It's
+mine.  I made it, and I've shared it with you."
+
+"But think of the rest of the world," Martin protested.  "The function of
+beauty is joy-making."
+
+"It's my beauty."
+
+"Don't be selfish."
+
+"I'm not selfish."  Brissenden grinned soberly in the way he had when
+pleased by the thing his thin lips were about to shape.  "I'm as
+unselfish as a famished hog."
+
+In vain Martin strove to shake him from his decision.  Martin told him
+that his hatred of the magazines was rabid, fanatical, and that his
+conduct was a thousand times more despicable than that of the youth who
+burned the temple of Diana at Ephesus.  Under the storm of denunciation
+Brissenden complacently sipped his toddy and affirmed that everything the
+other said was quite true, with the exception of the magazine editors.
+His hatred of them knew no bounds, and he excelled Martin in denunciation
+when he turned upon them.
+
+"I wish you'd type it for me," he said.  "You know how a thousand times
+better than any stenographer.  And now I want to give you some advice."
+He drew a bulky manuscript from his outside coat pocket.  "Here's your
+'Shame of the Sun.'  I've read it not once, but twice and three times--the
+highest compliment I can pay you.  After what you've said about
+'Ephemera' I must be silent.  But this I will say: when 'The Shame of the
+Sun' is published, it will make a hit.  It will start a controversy that
+will be worth thousands to you just in advertising."
+
+Martin laughed.  "I suppose your next advice will be to submit it to the
+magazines."
+
+"By all means no--that is, if you want to see it in print.  Offer it to
+the first-class houses.  Some publisher's reader may be mad enough or
+drunk enough to report favorably on it.  You've read the books.  The meat
+of them has been transmuted in the alembic of Martin Eden's mind and
+poured into 'The Shame of the Sun,' and one day Martin Eden will be
+famous, and not the least of his fame will rest upon that work.  So you
+must get a publisher for it--the sooner the better."
+
+Brissenden went home late that night; and just as he mounted the first
+step of the car, he swung suddenly back on Martin and thrust into his
+hand a small, tightly crumpled wad of paper.
+
+"Here, take this," he said.  "I was out to the races to-day, and I had
+the right dope."
+
+The bell clanged and the car pulled out, leaving Martin wondering as to
+the nature of the crinkly, greasy wad he clutched in his hand.  Back in
+his room he unrolled it and found a hundred-dollar bill.
+
+He did not scruple to use it.  He knew his friend had always plenty of
+money, and he knew also, with profound certitude, that his success would
+enable him to repay it.  In the morning he paid every bill, gave Maria
+three months' advance on the room, and redeemed every pledge at the
+pawnshop.  Next he bought Marian's wedding present, and simpler presents,
+suitable to Christmas, for Ruth and Gertrude.  And finally, on the
+balance remaining to him, he herded the whole Silva tribe down into
+Oakland.  He was a winter late in redeeming his promise, but redeemed it
+was, for the last, least Silva got a pair of shoes, as well as Maria
+herself.  Also, there were horns, and dolls, and toys of various sorts,
+and parcels and bundles of candies and nuts that filled the arms of all
+the Silvas to overflowing.
+
+It was with this extraordinary procession trooping at his and Maria's
+heels into a confectioner's in quest if the biggest candy-cane ever made,
+that he encountered Ruth and her mother.  Mrs. Morse was shocked.  Even
+Ruth was hurt, for she had some regard for appearances, and her lover,
+cheek by jowl with Maria, at the head of that army of Portuguese
+ragamuffins, was not a pretty sight.  But it was not that which hurt so
+much as what she took to be his lack of pride and self-respect.  Further,
+and keenest of all, she read into the incident the impossibility of his
+living down his working-class origin.  There was stigma enough in the
+fact of it, but shamelessly to flaunt it in the face of the world--her
+world--was going too far.  Though her engagement to Martin had been kept
+secret, their long intimacy had not been unproductive of gossip; and in
+the shop, glancing covertly at her lover and his following, had been
+several of her acquaintances.  She lacked the easy largeness of Martin
+and could not rise superior to her environment.  She had been hurt to the
+quick, and her sensitive nature was quivering with the shame of it.  So
+it was, when Martin arrived later in the day, that he kept her present in
+his breast-pocket, deferring the giving of it to a more propitious
+occasion.  Ruth in tears--passionate, angry tears--was a revelation to
+him.  The spectacle of her suffering convinced him that he had been a
+brute, yet in the soul of him he could not see how nor why.  It never
+entered his head to be ashamed of those he knew, and to take the Silvas
+out to a Christmas treat could in no way, so it seemed to him, show lack
+of consideration for Ruth.  On the other hand, he did see Ruth's point of
+view, after she had explained it; and he looked upon it as a feminine
+weakness, such as afflicted all women and the best of women.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+"Come on,--I'll show you the real dirt," Brissenden said to him, one
+evening in January.
+
+They had dined together in San Francisco, and were at the Ferry Building,
+returning to Oakland, when the whim came to him to show Martin the "real
+dirt."  He turned and fled across the water-front, a meagre shadow in a
+flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to keep up with him.  At a
+wholesale liquor store he bought two gallon-demijohns of old port, and
+with one in each hand boarded a Mission Street car, Martin at his heels
+burdened with several quart-bottles of whiskey.
+
+If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he wondered as to what
+constituted the real dirt.
+
+"Maybe nobody will be there," Brissenden said, when they dismounted and
+plunged off to the right into the heart of the working-class ghetto,
+south of Market Street.  "In which case you'll miss what you've been
+looking for so long."
+
+"And what the deuce is that?" Martin asked.
+
+"Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonentities I found you
+consorting with in that trader's den.  You read the books and you found
+yourself all alone.  Well, I'm going to show you to-night some other men
+who've read the books, so that you won't be lonely any more."
+
+"Not that I bother my head about their everlasting discussions," he said
+at the end of a block.  "I'm not interested in book philosophy.  But
+you'll find these fellows intelligences and not bourgeois swine.  But
+watch out, they'll talk an arm off of you on any subject under the sun."
+
+"Hope Norton's there," he panted a little later, resisting Martin's
+effort to relieve him of the two demijohns.  "Norton's an idealist--a
+Harvard man.  Prodigious memory.  Idealism led him to philosophic
+anarchy, and his family threw him off.  Father's a railroad president and
+many times millionnaire, but the son's starving in 'Frisco, editing an
+anarchist sheet for twenty-five a month."
+
+Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not at all south of
+Market; so he had no idea of where he was being led.
+
+"Go ahead," he said; "tell me about them beforehand.  What do they do for
+a living?  How do they happen to be here?"
+
+"Hope Hamilton's there."  Brissenden paused and rested his hands.  "Strawn-
+Hamilton's his name--hyphenated, you know--comes of old Southern stock.
+He's a tramp--laziest man I ever knew, though he's clerking, or trying
+to, in a socialist cooperative store for six dollars a week.  But he's a
+confirmed hobo.  Tramped into town.  I've seen him sit all day on a bench
+and never a bite pass his lips, and in the evening, when I invited him to
+dinner--restaurant two blocks away--have him say, 'Too much trouble, old
+man.  Buy me a package of cigarettes instead.'  He was a Spencerian like
+you till Kreis turned him to materialistic monism.  I'll start him on
+monism if I can.  Norton's another monist--only he affirms naught but
+spirit.  He can give Kreis and Hamilton all they want, too."
+
+"Who is Kreis?" Martin asked.
+
+"His rooms we're going to.  One time professor--fired from
+university--usual story.  A mind like a steel trap.  Makes his living any
+old way.  I know he's been a street fakir when he was down.  Unscrupulous.
+Rob a corpse of a shroud--anything.  Difference between him--and the
+bourgeoisie is that he robs without illusion.  He'll talk Nietzsche, or
+Schopenhauer, or Kant, or anything, but the only thing in this world, not
+excepting Mary, that he really cares for, is his monism.  Haeckel is his
+little tin god.  The only way to insult him is to take a slap at
+Haeckel."
+
+"Here's the hang-out."  Brissenden rested his demijohn at the upstairs
+entrance, preliminary to the climb.  It was the usual two-story corner
+building, with a saloon and grocery underneath.  "The gang lives here--got
+the whole upstairs to themselves.  But Kreis is the only one who has two
+rooms.  Come on."
+
+No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden threaded the utter
+blackness like a familiar ghost.  He stopped to speak to Martin.
+
+"There's one fellow--Stevens--a theosophist.  Makes a pretty tangle when
+he gets going.  Just now he's dish-washer in a restaurant.  Likes a good
+cigar.  I've seen him eat in a ten-cent hash-house and pay fifty cents
+for the cigar he smoked afterward.  I've got a couple in my pocket for
+him, if he shows up."
+
+"And there's another fellow--Parry--an Australian, a statistician and a
+sporting encyclopaedia.  Ask him the grain output of Paraguay for 1903,
+or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what
+weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight
+champion of the United States in '68, and you'll get the correct answer
+with the automatic celerity of a slot-machine.  And there's Andy, a stone-
+mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; and another fellow,
+Harry, a baker, red hot socialist and strong union man.  By the way, you
+remember Cooks' and Waiters' strike--Hamilton was the chap who organized
+that union and precipitated the strike--planned it all out in advance,
+right here in Kreis's rooms.  Did it just for the fun of it, but was too
+lazy to stay by the union.  Yet he could have risen high if he wanted to.
+There's no end to the possibilities in that man--if he weren't so
+insuperably lazy."
+
+Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread of light marked
+the threshold of a door.  A knock and an answer opened it, and Martin
+found himself shaking hands with Kreis, a handsome brunette man, with
+dazzling white teeth, a drooping black mustache, and large, flashing
+black eyes.  Mary, a matronly young blonde, was washing dishes in the
+little back room that served for kitchen and dining room.  The front room
+served as bedchamber and living room.  Overhead was the week's washing,
+hanging in festoons so low that Martin did not see at first the two men
+talking in a corner.  They hailed Brissenden and his demijohns with
+acclamation, and, on being introduced, Martin learned they were Andy and
+Parry.  He joined them and listened attentively to the description of a
+prize-fight Parry had seen the night before; while Brissenden, in his
+glory, plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and the serving of wine
+and whiskey-and-sodas.  At his command, "Bring in the clan," Andy
+departed to go the round of the rooms for the lodgers.
+
+"We're lucky that most of them are here," Brissenden whispered to Martin.
+"There's Norton and Hamilton; come on and meet them.  Stevens isn't
+around, I hear.  I'm going to get them started on monism if I can.  Wait
+till they get a few jolts in them and they'll warm up."
+
+At first the conversation was desultory.  Nevertheless Martin could not
+fail to appreciate the keen play of their minds.  They were men with
+opinions, though the opinions often clashed, and, though they were witty
+and clever, they were not superficial.  He swiftly saw, no matter upon
+what they talked, that each man applied the correlation of knowledge and
+had also a deep-seated and unified conception of society and the Cosmos.
+Nobody manufactured their opinions for them; they were all rebels of one
+variety or another, and their lips were strangers to platitudes.  Never
+had Martin, at the Morses', heard so amazing a range of topics discussed.
+There seemed no limit save time to the things they were alive to.  The
+talk wandered from Mrs. Humphry Ward's new book to Shaw's latest play,
+through the future of the drama to reminiscences of Mansfield.  They
+appreciated or sneered at the morning editorials, jumped from labor
+conditions in New Zealand to Henry James and Brander Matthews, passed on
+to the German designs in the Far East and the economic aspect of the
+Yellow Peril, wrangled over the German elections and Bebel's last speech,
+and settled down to local politics, the latest plans and scandals in the
+union labor party administration, and the wires that were pulled to bring
+about the Coast Seamen's strike.  Martin was struck by the inside
+knowledge they possessed.  They knew what was never printed in the
+newspapers--the wires and strings and the hidden hands that made the
+puppets dance.  To Martin's surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the
+conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encountered in the
+few women he had met.  They talked together on Swinburne and Rossetti,
+after which she led him beyond his depth into the by-paths of French
+literature.  His revenge came when she defended Maeterlinck and he
+brought into action the carefully-thought-out thesis of "The Shame of the
+Sun."
+
+Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with tobacco
+smoke, when Brissenden waved the red flag.
+
+"Here's fresh meat for your axe, Kreis," he said; "a rose-white youth
+with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer.  Make a Haeckelite of
+him--if you can."
+
+Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic thing,
+while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet, girlish
+smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.
+
+Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered, until
+he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle.  Martin listened and
+fain would have rubbed his eyes.  It was impossible that this should be,
+much less in the labor ghetto south of Market.  The books were alive in
+these men.  They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual
+stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men.
+What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word,
+written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer.  It was living
+philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its
+very features worked with excitement.  Now and again other men joined in,
+and all followed the discussion with cigarettes going out in their hands
+and with alert, intent faces.
+
+Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now received
+at the hands of Norton was a revelation.  The logical plausibility of it,
+that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and
+Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn,
+sneered back at them as metaphysicians.  Phenomenon and noumenon were
+bandied back and forth.  They charged him with attempting to explain
+consciousness by itself.  He charged them with word-jugglery, with
+reasoning from words to theory instead of from facts to theory.  At this
+they were aghast.  It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of reasoning
+to start with facts and to give names to the facts.
+
+When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded him
+that all good little German philosophies when they died went to Oxford.  A
+little later Norton reminded them of Hamilton's Law of Parsimony, the
+application of which they immediately claimed for every reasoning process
+of theirs.  And Martin hugged his knees and exulted in it all.  But
+Norton was no Spencerian, and he, too, strove for Martin's philosophic
+soul, talking as much at him as to his two opponents.
+
+"You know Berkeley has never been answered," he said, looking directly at
+Martin.  "Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was not very near.  Even
+the stanchest of Spencer's followers will not go farther.  I was reading
+an essay of Saleeby's the other day, and the best Saleeby could say was
+that Herbert Spencer _nearly_ succeeded in answering Berkeley."
+
+"You know what Hume said?" Hamilton asked.  Norton nodded, but Hamilton
+gave it for the benefit of the rest.  "He said that Berkeley's arguments
+admit of no answer and produce no conviction."
+
+"In his, Hume's, mind," was the reply.  "And Hume's mind was the same as
+yours, with this difference: he was wise enough to admit there was no
+answering Berkeley."
+
+Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head, while
+Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages, seeking out
+tender places to prod and poke.  As the evening grew late, Norton,
+smarting under the repeated charges of being a metaphysician, clutching
+his chair to keep from jumping to his feet, his gray eyes snapping and
+his girlish face grown harsh and sure, made a grand attack upon their
+position.
+
+"All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but, pray,
+how do you reason?  You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific
+dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging about
+into places it has no right to be.  Long before the school of
+materialistic monism arose, the ground was removed so that there could be
+no foundation.  Locke was the man, John Locke.  Two hundred years
+ago--more than that, even in his 'Essay concerning the Human
+Understanding,' he proved the non-existence of innate ideas.  The best of
+it is that that is precisely what you claim.  To-night, again and again,
+you have asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.
+
+"And what does that mean?  It means that you can never know ultimate
+reality.  Your brains are empty when you are born.  Appearances, or
+phenomena, are all the content your minds can receive from your five
+senses.  Then noumena, which are not in your minds when you are born,
+have no way of getting in--"
+
+"I deny--" Kreis started to interrupt.
+
+"You wait till I'm done," Norton shouted.  "You can know only that much
+of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one way or
+another on our senses.  You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of
+the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is to efface
+you by your own argument.  I can't do it any other way, for you are both
+congenitally unable to understand a philosophic abstraction."
+
+"And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive
+science?  You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances.  You are
+aware only of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in
+your consciousness.  Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you
+are foolish enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with noumena.
+Yet, by the very definition of positive science, science is concerned
+only with appearances.  As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot
+transcend phenomena."
+
+"You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet,
+perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science
+proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence
+of matter.--You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to
+make myself intelligible to your understanding.  Be positive scientists,
+if you please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it
+alone.  Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer--"
+
+But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and Brissenden
+and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and Kreis and
+Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds as soon as he
+finished.
+
+"You have given me a glimpse of fairyland," Martin said on the
+ferry-boat.  "It makes life worth while to meet people like that.  My
+mind is all worked up.  I never appreciated idealism before.  Yet I can't
+accept it.  I know that I shall always be a realist.  I am so made, I
+guess.  But I'd like to have made a reply to Kreis and Hamilton, and I
+think I'd have had a word or two for Norton.  I didn't see that Spencer
+was damaged any.  I'm as excited as a child on its first visit to the
+circus.  I see I must read up some more.  I'm going to get hold of
+Saleeby.  I still think Spencer is unassailable, and next time I'm going
+to take a hand myself."
+
+But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his chin
+buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body wrapped in
+the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the propellers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to
+Brissenden's advice and command.  "The Shame of the Sun" he wrapped and
+mailed to The Acropolis.  He believed he could find magazine publication
+for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would commend him
+to the book-publishing houses.  "Ephemera" he likewise wrapped and mailed
+to a magazine.  Despite Brissenden's prejudice against the magazines,
+which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin decided that the great poem
+should see print.  He did not intend, however, to publish it without the
+other's permission.  His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high
+magazines, and, thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden for consent.
+
+Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a number of
+weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him with its
+insistent clamor to be created.  Apparently it was to be a rattling sea
+story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and romance, handling real
+characters, in a real world, under real conditions.  But beneath the
+swing and go of the story was to be something else--something that the
+superficial reader would never discern and which, on the other hand,
+would not diminish in any way the interest and enjoyment for such a
+reader.  It was this, and not the mere story, that impelled Martin to
+write it.  For that matter, it was always the great, universal motif that
+suggested plots to him.  After having found such a motif, he cast about
+for the particular persons and particular location in time and space
+wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing.  "Overdue" was the
+title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not be more
+than sixty thousand words--a bagatelle for him with his splendid vigor of
+production.  On this first day he took hold of it with conscious delight
+in the mastery of his tools.  He no longer worried for fear that the
+sharp, cutting edges should slip and mar his work.  The long months of
+intense application and study had brought their reward.  He could now
+devote himself with sure hand to the larger phases of the thing he
+shaped; and as he worked, hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the
+sure and cosmic grasp with which he held life and the affairs of life.
+"Overdue" would tell a story that would be true of its particular
+characters and its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was
+confident, great vital things that would be true of all time, and all
+sea, and all life--thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought, leaning back
+for a moment from the table.  Ay, thanks to Herbert Spencer and to the
+master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had placed in his hands.
+
+He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing.  "It will go!  It
+will go!" was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears.  Of course it
+would go.  At last he was turning out the thing at which the magazines
+would jump.  The whole story worked out before him in lightning flashes.
+He broke off from it long enough to write a paragraph in his note-book.
+This would be the last paragraph in "Overdue"; but so thoroughly was the
+whole book already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks
+before he had arrived at the end, the end itself.  He compared the tale,
+as yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to be
+immeasurably superior.  "There's only one man who could touch it," he
+murmured aloud, "and that's Conrad.  And it ought to make even him sit up
+and shake hands with me, and say, 'Well done, Martin, my boy.'"
+
+He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was to
+have dinner at the Morses'.  Thanks to Brissenden, his black suit was out
+of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties.  Down town he
+stopped off long enough to run into the library and search for Saleeby's
+books.  He drew out "The Cycle of Life," and on the car turned to the
+essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer.  As Martin read, he grew angry.
+His face flushed, his jaw set, and unconsciously his hand clenched,
+unclenched, and clenched again as if he were taking fresh grips upon some
+hateful thing out of which he was squeezing the life.  When he left the
+car, he strode along the sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he
+rang the Morse bell with such viciousness that it roused him to
+consciousness of his condition, so that he entered in good nature,
+smiling with amusement at himself.  No sooner, however, was he inside
+than a great depression descended upon him.  He fell from the height
+where he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
+"Bourgeois," "trader's den"--Brissenden's epithets repeated themselves in
+his mind.  But what of that? he demanded angrily.  He was marrying Ruth,
+not her family.
+
+It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
+spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy.  There was
+color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again--the eyes in
+which he had first read immortality.  He had forgotten immortality of
+late, and the trend of his scientific reading had been away from it; but
+here, in Ruth's eyes, he read an argument without words that transcended
+all worded arguments.  He saw that in her eyes before which all
+discussion fled away, for he saw love there.  And in his own eyes was
+love; and love was unanswerable.  Such was his passionate doctrine.
+
+The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left him
+supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life.  Nevertheless, at
+table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion consequent upon the hard
+day seized hold of him.  He was aware that his eyes were tired and that
+he was irritable.  He remembered it was at this table, at which he now
+sneered and was so often bored, that he had first eaten with civilized
+beings in what he had imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and
+refinement.  He caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long
+ago, a self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony
+of apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of
+eating-implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap
+to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to be
+frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did not
+possess.
+
+He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a
+passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will strive
+to locate the life preservers.  Well, that much had come out of it--love
+and Ruth.  All the rest had failed to stand the test of the books.  But
+Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he found a biological
+sanction.  Love was the most exalted expression of life.  Nature had been
+busy designing him, as she had been busy with all normal men, for the
+purpose of loving.  She had spent ten thousand centuries--ay, a hundred
+thousand and a million centuries--upon the task, and he was the best she
+could do.  She had made love the strongest thing in him, increased its
+power a myriad per cent with her gift of imagination, and sent him forth
+into the ephemera to thrill and melt and mate.  His hand sought Ruth's
+hand beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was given and
+received.  She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes were radiant
+and melting.  So were his in the thrill that pervaded him; nor did he
+realize how much that was radiant and melting in her eyes had been
+aroused by what she had seen in his.
+
+Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse's right, sat
+Judge Blount, a local superior court judge.  Martin had met him a number
+of times and had failed to like him.  He and Ruth's father were
+discussing labor union politics, the local situation, and socialism, and
+Mr. Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the latter topic.  At last
+Judge Blount looked across the table with benignant and fatherly pity.
+Martin smiled to himself.
+
+"You'll grow out of it, young man," he said soothingly.  "Time is the
+best cure for such youthful distempers."  He turned to Mr. Morse.  "I do
+not believe discussion is good in such cases.  It makes the patient
+obstinate."
+
+"That is true," the other assented gravely.  "But it is well to warn the
+patient occasionally of his condition."
+
+Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort.  The day had been too
+long, the day's effort too intense, and he was deep in the throes of the
+reaction.
+
+"Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors," he said; "but if you care a
+whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that you are poor
+diagnosticians.  In fact, you are both suffering from the disease you
+think you find in me.  As for me, I am immune.  The socialist philosophy
+that riots half-baked in your veins has passed me by."
+
+"Clever, clever," murmured the judge.  "An excellent ruse in controversy,
+to reverse positions."
+
+"Out of your mouth."  Martin's eyes were sparkling, but he kept control
+of himself.  "You see, Judge, I've heard your campaign speeches.  By some
+henidical process--henidical, by the way is a favorite word of mine which
+nobody understands--by some henidical process you persuade yourself that
+you believe in the competitive system and the survival of the strong, and
+at the same time you indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to
+shear the strength from the strong."
+
+"My young man--"
+
+"Remember, I've heard your campaign speeches," Martin warned.  "It's on
+record, your position on interstate commerce regulation, on regulation of
+the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the conservation of the forests,
+on a thousand and one restrictive measures that are nothing else than
+socialistic."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
+various outrageous exercises of power?"
+
+"That's not the point.  I mean to tell you that you are a poor
+diagnostician.  I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the
+microbe of socialism.  I mean to tell you that it is you who are
+suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe.  As for me,
+I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate
+opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing else than pseudo-
+socialism masquerading under a garb of words that will not stand the test
+of the dictionary."
+
+"I am a reactionary--so complete a reactionary that my position is
+incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social organization
+and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil.  You make believe
+that you believe in the survival of the strong and the rule of the
+strong.  I believe.  That is the difference.  When I was a trifle
+younger,--a few months younger,--I believed the same thing.  You see, the
+ideas of you and yours had impressed me.  But merchants and traders are
+cowardly rulers at best; they grunt and grub all their days in the trough
+of money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if you please.  I
+am the only individualist in this room.  I look to the state for nothing.
+I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the state
+from its own rotten futility."
+
+"Nietzsche was right.  I won't take the time to tell you who Nietzsche
+was, but he was right.  The world belongs to the strong--to the strong
+who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade
+and exchange.  The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond
+beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the 'yes-sayers.'  And they will eat
+you up, you socialists--who are afraid of socialism and who think
+yourselves individualists.  Your slave-morality of the meek and lowly
+will never save you.--Oh, it's all Greek, I know, and I won't bother you
+any more with it.  But remember one thing.  There aren't half a dozen
+individualists in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them."
+
+He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to Ruth.
+
+"I'm wrought up to-day," he said in an undertone.  "All I want to do is
+to love, not talk."
+
+He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-
+
+"I am unconvinced.  All socialists are Jesuits.  That is the way to tell
+them."
+
+"We'll make a good Republican out of you yet," said Judge Blount.
+
+"The man on horseback will arrive before that time," Martin retorted with
+good humor, and returned to Ruth.
+
+But Mr. Morse was not content.  He did not like the laziness and the
+disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective son-in-law
+of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose nature he had no
+understanding.  So he turned the conversation to Herbert Spencer.  Judge
+Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears had pricked at the first
+mention of the philosopher's name, listened to the judge enunciate a
+grave and complacent diatribe against Spencer.  From time to time Mr.
+Morse glanced at Martin, as much as to say, "There, my boy, you see."
+
+"Chattering daws," Martin muttered under his breath, and went on talking
+with Ruth and Arthur.
+
+But the long day and the "real dirt" of the night before were telling
+upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what had made him
+angry when he read it on the car.
+
+"What is the matter?" Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he was
+making to contain himself.
+
+"There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its prophet,"
+Judge Blount was saying at that moment.
+
+Martin turned upon him.
+
+"A cheap judgment," he remarked quietly.  "I heard it first in the City
+Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better.  I
+have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it nauseates
+me.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  To hear that great and noble
+man's name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a cesspool.  You
+are disgusting."
+
+It was like a thunderbolt.  Judge Blount glared at him with apoplectic
+countenance, and silence reigned.  Mr. Morse was secretly pleased.  He
+could see that his daughter was shocked.  It was what he wanted to do--to
+bring out the innate ruffianism of this man he did not like.
+
+Ruth's hand sought Martin's beseechingly under the table, but his blood
+was up.  He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and fraud of those
+who sat in the high places.  A Superior Court Judge!  It was only several
+years before that he had looked up from the mire at such glorious
+entities and deemed them gods.
+
+Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing himself
+to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter understood was
+for the benefit of the ladies.  Even this added to his anger.  Was there
+no honesty in the world?
+
+"You can't discuss Spencer with me," he cried.  "You do not know any more
+about Spencer than do his own countrymen.  But it is no fault of yours, I
+grant.  It is just a phase of the contemptible ignorance of the times.  I
+ran across a sample of it on my way here this evening.  I was reading an
+essay by Saleeby on Spencer.  You should read it.  It is accessible to
+all men.  You can buy it in any book-store or draw it from the public
+library.  You would feel ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance
+of that noble man compared with what Saleeby has collected on the
+subject.  It is a record of shame that would shame your shame."
+
+"'The philosopher of the half-educated,' he was called by an academic
+Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere he breathed.  I
+don't think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but there have been
+critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who have read no more than
+you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his followers to adduce one
+single idea from all his writings--from Herbert Spencer's writings, the
+man who has impressed the stamp of his genius over the whole field of
+scientific research and modern thought; the father of psychology; the man
+who revolutionized pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French
+peasant is taught the three R's according to principles laid down by him.
+And the little gnats of men sting his memory when they get their very
+bread and butter from the technical application of his ideas.  What
+little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to him.  It is
+certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in their parrot-
+learned knowledge would be absent."
+
+"And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford--a man who sits in an
+even higher place than you, Judge Blount--has said that Spencer will be
+dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker.
+Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them!  '"First Principles"
+is not wholly destitute of a certain literary power,' said one of them.
+And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather
+than an original thinker.  Yappers and blatherskites!  Yappers and
+blatherskites!"
+
+Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence.  Everybody in Ruth's family
+looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement, and they
+were horrified at Martin's outbreak.  The remainder of the dinner passed
+like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining their talk to each
+other, and the rest of the conversation being extremely desultory.  Then
+afterward, when Ruth and Martin were alone, there was a scene.
+
+"You are unbearable," she wept.
+
+But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, "The beasts!  The
+beasts!"
+
+When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-
+
+"By telling the truth about him?"
+
+"I don't care whether it was true or not," she insisted.  "There are
+certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult anybody."
+
+"Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?" Martin
+demanded.  "Surely to assault truth is a more serious misdemeanor than to
+insult a pygmy personality such as the judge's.  He did worse than that.
+He blackened the name of a great, noble man who is dead.  Oh, the beasts!
+The beasts!"
+
+His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him.  Never
+had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and unreasonable to
+her comprehension.  And yet, through her very terror ran the fibres of
+fascination that had drawn and that still drew her to him--that had
+compelled her to lean towards him, and, in that mad, culminating moment,
+lay her hands upon his neck.  She was hurt and outraged by what had taken
+place, and yet she lay in his arms and quivered while he went on
+muttering, "The beasts!  The beasts!"  And she still lay there when he
+said: "I'll not bother your table again, dear.  They do not like me, and
+it is wrong of me to thrust my objectionable presence upon them.  Besides,
+they are just as objectionable to me.  Faugh!  They are sickening.  And
+to think of it, I dreamed in my innocence that the persons who sat in the
+high places, who lived in fine houses and had educations and bank
+accounts, were worth while!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+"Come on, let's go down to the local."
+
+So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before--the
+second hemorrhage in three days.  The perennial whiskey glass was in his
+hands, and he drained it with shaking fingers.
+
+"What do I want with socialism?" Martin demanded.
+
+"Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches," the sick man urged.  "Get
+up and spout.  Tell them why you don't want socialism.  Tell them what
+you think about them and their ghetto ethics.  Slam Nietzsche into them
+and get walloped for your pains.  Make a scrap of it.  It will do them
+good.  Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too.  You see,
+I'd like to see you a socialist before I'm gone.  It will give you a
+sanction for your existence.  It is the one thing that will save you in
+the time of disappointment that is coming to you."
+
+"I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist," Martin
+pondered.  "You detest the crowd so.  Surely there is nothing in the
+canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul."  He pointed an accusing
+finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling.  "Socialism
+doesn't seem to save you."
+
+"I'm very sick," was the answer.  "With you it is different.  You have
+health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow.
+As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist.  I'll tell you.  It is
+because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and
+irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on
+horseback.  The slaves won't stand for it.  They are too many, and willy-
+nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets
+astride.  You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the
+whole slave-morality.  It's not a nice mess, I'll allow.  But it's been a-
+brewing and swallow it you must.  You are antediluvian anyway, with your
+Nietzsche ideas.  The past is past, and the man who says history repeats
+itself is a liar.  Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor
+chap to do?  We can't have the man on horseback, and anything is
+preferable to the timid swine that now rule.  But come on, anyway.  I'm
+loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I'll get drunk.
+And you know the doctor says--damn the doctor!  I'll fool him yet."
+
+It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland
+socialists, chiefly members of the working class.  The speaker, a clever
+Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time that he aroused his
+antagonism.  The man's stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest
+proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin
+was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the
+lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to
+the end of time.  To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a
+symbol.  He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole
+miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to
+biological law on the ragged confines of life.  They were the unfit.  In
+spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for
+cooperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man.  Out of the
+plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected
+only the best.  It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race-
+horses and cucumbers.  Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have
+devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put
+up with this particular method.  Of course, they could squirm as they
+perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and
+the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together
+for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and
+outwit the Cosmos.
+
+So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them
+hell.  He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the
+custom, and addressing the chairman.  He began in a low voice, haltingly,
+forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew
+was speaking.  In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to
+each speaker; but when Martin's five minutes were up, he was in full
+stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed.  He had
+caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation
+to extend Martin's time.  They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of
+their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word.  He
+spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the
+slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers
+as the slaves in question.  He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated
+the biological law of development.
+
+"And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of the
+slave-types can endure.  The old law of development still holds.  In the
+struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of
+the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak
+are crushed and tend to perish.  The result is that the strong and the
+progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the
+strength of each generation increases.  That is development.  But you
+slaves--it is too bad to be slaves, I grant--but you slaves dream of a
+society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings
+and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much
+as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will
+marry and have progeny--the weak as well as the strong.  What will be the
+result?  No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation
+increase.  On the contrary, it will diminish.  There is the Nemesis of
+your slave philosophy.  Your society of slaves--of, by, and for,
+slaves--must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which
+composes it weakens and goes to pieces.
+
+"Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics.  No state
+of slaves can stand--"
+
+"How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience.
+
+"And how about it?" Martin retorted.  "The thirteen colonies threw off
+their rulers and formed the Republic so-called.  The slaves were their
+own masters.  There were no more masters of the sword.  But you couldn't
+get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of
+masters--not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery
+traders and money-lenders.  And they enslaved you over again--but not
+frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right
+arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery
+and lies.  They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched
+your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than
+chattel slavery your slave boys and girls.  Two million of your children
+are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States.  Ten
+millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed."
+
+"But to return.  I have shown that no society of slaves can endure,
+because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of
+development.  No sooner can a slave society be organized than
+deterioration sets in.  It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law
+of development, but where is the new law of development that will
+maintain your strength?  Formulate it.  Is it already formulated?  Then
+state it."
+
+Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices.  A score of men were on
+their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair.  And one by one,
+encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and
+excited gestures, they replied to the attack.  It was a wild night--but
+it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas.  Some strayed from the
+point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin.  They shook
+him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights,
+not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws.
+They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the
+chairman rapped and pounded for order.
+
+It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a
+day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for
+sensation.  He was not a bright cub reporter.  He was merely facile and
+glib.  He was too dense to follow the discussion.  In fact, he had a
+comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of
+the working class.  Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the
+high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers.  Further,
+he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect
+reporter who is able to make something--even a great deal--out of
+nothing.
+
+He did not know what all the talk was about.  It was not necessary.  Words
+like _revolution_ gave him his cue.  Like a paleontologist, able to
+reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to
+reconstruct a whole speech from the one word _revolution_.  He did it
+that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest
+stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the
+show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red-
+shirt socialist utterance.  The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a
+large brush with which he laid on the local color--wild-eyed long-haired
+men, neurasthenic and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with
+passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a
+background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's paper.  It
+was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at
+that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader
+of the Oakland socialists.  He ran over the violent speech the cub
+reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by
+the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh.
+
+"Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that
+afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and
+dropped limply into the one chair.
+
+"But what do you care?" Brissenden asked.  "Surely you don't desire the
+approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?"
+
+Martin thought for a while, then said:-
+
+"No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit.  On the other
+hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's family a trifle
+awkward.  Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this
+miserable stuff will clinch his belief.  Not that I care for his
+opinion--but what's the odds?  I want to read you what I've been doing to-
+day.  It's 'Overdue,' of course, and I'm just about halfway through."
+
+He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a
+young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil-
+burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to
+Martin.
+
+"Sit down," Brissenden said.
+
+Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to
+broach his business.
+
+"I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview you,"
+he began.
+
+Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.
+
+"A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at
+Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying
+man.
+
+"And he wrote that report," Martin said softly.  "Why, he is only a boy!"
+
+"Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked.  "I'd give a thousand dollars
+to have my lungs back for five minutes."
+
+The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and
+around him and at him.  But he had been commended for his brilliant
+description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get
+a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace
+to society.
+
+"You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he said.
+"I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be
+better to take you right away before the sun gets lower.  Then we can
+have the interview afterward."
+
+"A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively.  "Poke him, Martin!  Poke
+him!"
+
+"I guess I'm getting old," was the answer.  "I know I ought, but I really
+haven't the heart.  It doesn't seem to matter."
+
+"For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged.
+
+"It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem worth
+while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me.  You see, it does take
+energy to give a fellow a poking.  Besides, what does it matter?"
+
+"That's right--that's the way to take it," the cub announced airily,
+though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door.
+
+"But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on,
+confining his attention to Brissenden.
+
+"It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the cub
+ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising.  That's what counts.  It
+was a favor to you."
+
+"It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated solemnly.
+
+"And it was a favor to me--think of that!" was Martin's contribution.
+
+"Let me see--where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked, assuming an
+air of expectant attention.
+
+"He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden.  "He remembers it all."
+
+"That is sufficient for me."  The cub was trying not to look worried.  "No
+decent reporter needs to bother with notes."
+
+"That was sufficient--for last night."  But Brissenden was not a disciple
+of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly.  "Martin, if you don't
+poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next
+moment."
+
+"How will a spanking do?" Martin asked.
+
+Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.
+
+The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub
+face downward across his knees.
+
+"Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your face.
+It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face."
+
+His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and
+steady rhythm.  The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not
+offer to bite.  Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited
+and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, "Here, just let me swat him
+once."
+
+"Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted.  "It
+is quite numb."
+
+He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.
+
+"I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish
+indignation running down his flushed cheeks.  "I'll make you sweat for
+this.  You'll see."
+
+"The pretty thing," Martin remarked.  "He doesn't realize that he has
+entered upon the downward path.  It is not honest, it is not square, it
+is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures the way he has
+done, and he doesn't know it."
+
+"He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause.
+
+"Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured.  My grocery will
+undoubtedly refuse me credit now.  The worst of it is that the poor boy
+will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper
+man and also a first-class scoundrel."
+
+"But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden.  "Who knows but what you may
+prove the humble instrument to save him.  Why didn't you let me swat him
+just once?  I'd like to have had a hand in it."
+
+"I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes," sobbed the
+erring soul.
+
+"No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak."  Martin shook his head
+lugubriously.  "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain.  The young man
+cannot reform.  He will become eventually a very great and successful
+newspaper man.  He has no conscience.  That alone will make him great."
+
+With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear
+that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still
+clutched.
+
+In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about
+himself that was new to him.  "We are the sworn enemies of society," he
+found himself quoted as saying in a column interview.  "No, we are not
+anarchists but socialists."  When the reporter pointed out to him that
+there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had
+shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation.  His face was described as
+bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were
+described.  Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery
+gleams in his blood-shot eyes.
+
+He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall
+Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the
+minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most
+revolutionary speeches.  The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor
+little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death's-head
+tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from
+twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon.
+
+The cub had been industrious.  He had scurried around and nosed out
+Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham's Cash
+Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front.  That
+gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had
+no patience with his brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience
+with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as
+a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered to
+him and who would go to jail yet.  Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian's husband,
+had likewise been interviewed.  He had called Martin the black sheep of
+the family and repudiated him.  "He tried to sponge off of me, but I put
+a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt had said to the reporter.  "He
+knows better than to come bumming around here.  A man who won't work is
+no good, take that from me."
+
+This time Martin was genuinely angry.  Brissenden looked upon the affair
+as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would
+be no easy task to explain to Ruth.  As for her father, he knew that he
+must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most
+of it to break off the engagement.  How much he would make of it he was
+soon to realize.  The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth.  Martin
+opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the
+open door when he had received it from the postman.  As he read,
+mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper
+of his old cigarette days.  He was not aware that the pocket was empty or
+that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a
+cigarette.
+
+It was not a passionate letter.  There were no touches of anger in it.
+But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded
+the note of hurt and disappointment.  She had expected better of him.  She
+had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him
+had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and
+decently.  And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and
+commanded that the engagement be broken.  That they were justified in
+this she could not but admit.  Their relation could never be a happy one.
+It had been unfortunate from the first.  But one regret she voiced in the
+whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin.  "If only you had
+settled down to some position and attempted to make something of
+yourself," she wrote.  "But it was not to be.  Your past life had been
+too wild and irregular.  I can understand that you are not to be blamed.
+You could act only according to your nature and your early training.  So
+I do not blame you, Martin.  Please remember that.  It was simply a
+mistake.  As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each
+other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too
+late." . . "There is no use trying to see me," she said toward the last.
+"It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother.
+I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry.  I shall
+have to do much living to atone for it."
+
+He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down
+and replied.  He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist
+meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the
+newspaper had put in his mouth.  Toward the end of the letter he was
+God's own lover pleading passionately for love.  "Please answer," he
+said, "and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing.  Do you love
+me?  That is all--the answer to that one question."
+
+But no answer came the next day, nor the next.  "Overdue" lay untouched
+upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the
+table grew larger.  For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was
+interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights.
+Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the
+servant who answered the bell.  Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too
+feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not
+worry him with his troubles.
+
+For Martin's troubles were many.  The aftermath of the cub reporter's
+deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated.  The Portuguese grocer
+refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American
+and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused
+further dealings with him--carrying his patriotism to such a degree that
+he cancelled Martin's account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it.
+The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation
+against Martin ran high.  No one would have anything to do with a
+socialist traitor.  Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she
+remained loyal.  The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe
+of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe
+distances they called him "hobo" and "bum."  The Silva tribe, however,
+stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his
+honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day
+and added to Maria's perplexities and troubles.
+
+Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned
+what he knew could not be otherwise--that Bernard Higginbotham was
+furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and
+that he had forbidden him the house.
+
+"Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged.  "Go away and get a
+job somewhere and steady down.  Afterwards, when this all blows over, you
+can come back."
+
+Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations.  How could he explain?
+He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him
+and his people.  He could never cross it and explain to them his
+position,--the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism.  There were
+not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make
+his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.  Their highest concept of
+right conduct, in his case, was to get a job.  That was their first word
+and their last.  It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas.  Get a job!
+Go to work!  Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.
+Small wonder the world belonged to the strong.  The slaves were obsessed
+by their own slavery.  A job was to them a golden fetich before which
+they fell down and worshipped.
+
+He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew
+that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker.
+
+"Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him.  "After a few months,
+when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin'
+delivery-wagon for him.  Any time you want me, just send for me an' I'll
+come.  Don't forget."
+
+She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through
+him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait.  As he watched her go,
+the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter.  The slave-class in
+the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when
+it was brought home to his own family.  And yet, if there was ever a
+slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude.  He
+grinned savagely at the paradox.  A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow
+his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion
+that strayed along--ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for
+that was what his pity for his sister really was.  The true noble men
+were above pity and compassion.  Pity and compassion had been generated
+in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the
+agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+
+"Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table.  Every
+manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table.  Only one
+manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera."  His
+bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people
+were once more worrying about the rent.  But such things no longer
+bothered him.  He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found
+his life must stand still.
+
+After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened.  He met Ruth
+on the street.  It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman,
+and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted
+to wave him aside.
+
+"If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman
+threatened.  "She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is
+insult."
+
+"If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll get
+your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly.  "And now, get out of
+my way and get the officer if you want to.  I'm going to talk with Ruth."
+
+"I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her.
+
+She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.
+
+"The question I asked in my letter," he prompted.
+
+Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift
+look.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded.
+
+"It is."  She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation.  "It is
+of my own free will.  You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet
+my friends.  They are all talking about me, I know.  That is all I can
+tell you.  You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you
+again."
+
+"Friends!  Gossip!  Newspaper misreports!  Surely such things are not
+stronger than love!  I can only believe that you never loved me."
+
+A blush drove the pallor from her face.
+
+"After what has passed?" she said faintly.  "Martin, you do not know what
+you are saying.  I am not common."
+
+"You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman
+blurted out, starting on with her.
+
+Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat
+pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.
+
+It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the
+steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it.  He found
+himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an
+awakened somnambulist.  He noticed "Overdue" lying on the table and drew
+up his chair and reached for his pen.  There was in his nature a logical
+compulsion toward completeness.  Here was something undone.  It had been
+deferred against the completion of something else.  Now that something
+else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it
+was finished.  What he would do next he did not know.  All that he did
+know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained.  A period had
+been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion.  He was
+not curious about the future.  He would soon enough find out what it held
+in store for him.  Whatever it was, it did not matter.  Nothing seemed to
+matter.
+
+For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing nobody,
+and eating meagrely.  On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought
+him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon.  A glance told him
+that "Ephemera" was accepted.  "We have submitted the poem to Mr.
+Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and he has reported so
+favorably upon it that we cannot let it go.  As an earnest of our
+pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for
+the August number, our July number being already made up.  Kindly extend
+our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden.  Please send by return
+mail his photograph and biographical data.  If our honorarium is
+unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a
+fair price."
+
+Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty
+dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph.  Then, too,
+there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.  Well, he had been right,
+after all.  Here was one magazine editor who knew real poetry when he saw
+it.  And the price was splendid, even though it was for the poem of a
+century.  As for Cartwright Bruce, Martin knew that he was the one critic
+for whose opinions Brissenden had any respect.
+
+Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the houses
+and cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that he was not
+more elated over his friend's success and over his own signal victory.
+The one critic in the United States had pronounced favorably on the poem,
+while his own contention that good stuff could find its way into the
+magazines had proved correct.  But enthusiasm had lost its spring in him,
+and he found that he was more anxious to see Brissenden than he was to
+carry the good news.  The acceptance of The Parthenon had recalled to him
+that during his five days' devotion to "Overdue" he had not heard from
+Brissenden nor even thought about him.  For the first time Martin
+realized the daze he had been in, and he felt shame for having forgotten
+his friend.  But even the shame did not burn very sharply.  He was numb
+to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones concerned in the writing
+of "Overdue."  So far as other affairs were concerned, he had been in a
+trance.  For that matter, he was still in a trance.  All this life
+through which the electric car whirred seemed remote and unreal, and he
+would have experienced little interest and less shock if the great stone
+steeple of the church he passed had suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon
+his head.
+
+At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden's room, and hurried down again.
+The room was empty.  All luggage was gone.
+
+"Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?" he asked the clerk, who looked at
+him curiously for a moment.
+
+"Haven't you heard?" he asked.
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+"Why, the papers were full of it.  He was found dead in bed.  Suicide.
+Shot himself through the head."
+
+"Is he buried yet?" Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one else's
+voice, from a long way off, asking the question.
+
+"No.  The body was shipped East after the inquest.  Lawyers engaged by
+his people saw to the arrangements."
+
+"They were quick about it, I must say," Martin commented.
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  It happened five days ago."
+
+"Five days ago?"
+
+"Yes, five days ago."
+
+"Oh," Martin said as he turned and went out.
+
+At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram to
+The Parthenon, advising them to proceed with the publication of the poem.
+He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare home,
+so he sent the message collect.
+
+Once in his room, he resumed his writing.  The days and nights came and
+went, and he sat at his table and wrote on.  He went nowhere, save to the
+pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when he was hungry and
+had something to cook, and just as methodically went without when he had
+nothing to cook.  Composed as the story was, in advance, chapter by
+chapter, he nevertheless saw and developed an opening that increased the
+power of it, though it necessitated twenty thousand additional words.  It
+was not that there was any vital need that the thing should be well done,
+but that his artistic canons compelled him to do it well.  He worked on
+in the daze, strangely detached from the world around him, feeling like a
+familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former life.  He
+remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the spirit of a man
+who was dead and who did not have sense enough to know it; and he paused
+for the moment to wonder if he were really dead and unaware of it.
+
+Came the day when "Overdue" was finished.  The agent of the type-writer
+firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while Martin, on the
+one chair, typed the last pages of the final chapter.  "Finis," he wrote,
+in capitals, at the end, and to him it was indeed finis.  He watched the
+type-writer carried out the door with a feeling of relief, then went over
+and lay down on the bed.  He was faint from hunger.  Food had not passed
+his lips in thirty-six hours, but he did not think about it.  He lay on
+his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or
+stupor slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness.  Half in delirium,
+he began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden had
+been fond of quoting to him.  Maria, listening anxiously outside his
+door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance.  The words in themselves
+were not significant to her, but the fact that he was saying them was.  "I
+have done," was the burden of the poem.
+
+   "'I have done--
+   Put by the lute.
+   Song and singing soon are over
+   As the airy shades that hover
+   In among the purple clover.
+   I have done--
+   Put by the lute.
+   Once I sang as early thrushes
+   Sing among the dewy bushes;
+   Now I'm mute.
+   I am like a weary linnet,
+   For my throat has no song in it;
+   I have had my singing minute.
+   I have done.
+   Put by the lute.'"
+
+Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove, where she
+filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion's share of
+chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from the bottom of
+the pot.  Martin roused himself and sat up and began to eat, between
+spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been talking in his sleep and
+that he did not have any fever.
+
+After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the edge
+of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw nothing until
+the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the morning's mail and
+which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into his darkened brain.  It is
+The Parthenon, he thought, the August Parthenon, and it must contain
+"Ephemera."  If only Brissenden were here to see!
+
+He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.
+"Ephemera" had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and Beardsley-like
+margin decorations.  On one side of the head-piece was Brissenden's
+photograph, on the other side was the photograph of Sir John Value, the
+British Ambassador.  A preliminary editorial note quoted Sir John Value
+as saying that there were no poets in America, and the publication of
+"Ephemera" was The Parthenon's.  "There, take that, Sir John Value!"
+Cartwright Bruce was described as the greatest critic in America, and he
+was quoted as saying that "Ephemera" was the greatest poem ever written
+in America.  And finally, the editor's foreword ended with: "We have not
+yet made up our minds entirely as to the merits of "Ephemera"; perhaps we
+shall never be able to do so.  But we have read it often, wondering at
+the words and their arrangement, wondering where Mr. Brissenden got them,
+and how he could fasten them together."  Then followed the poem.
+
+"Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man," Martin murmured, letting
+the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.
+
+The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted
+apathetically that he was not nauseated very much.  He wished he could
+get angry, but did not have energy enough to try.  He was too numb.  His
+blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal flow of
+indignation.  After all, what did it matter?  It was on a par with all
+the rest that Brissenden had condemned in bourgeois society.
+
+"Poor Briss," Martin communed; "he would never have forgiven me."
+
+Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which had
+once contained type-writer paper.  Going through its contents, he drew
+forth eleven poems which his friend had written.  These he tore
+lengthwise and crosswise and dropped into the waste basket.  He did it
+languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of the bed staring
+blankly before him.
+
+How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his
+sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white.  It was
+curious.  But as he watched it grow in definiteness he saw that it was a
+coral reef smoking in the white Pacific surges.  Next, in the line of
+breakers he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe.  In the stern he
+saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth dipping a flashing paddle.
+He recognized him.  He was Moti, the youngest son of Tati, the chief, and
+this was Tahiti, and beyond that smoking reef lay the sweet land of
+Papara and the chief's grass house by the river's mouth.  It was the end
+of the day, and Moti was coming home from the fishing.  He was waiting
+for the rush of a big breaker whereon to jump the reef.  Then he saw
+himself, sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the past,
+dipping a paddle that waited Moti's word to dig in like mad when the
+turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them.  Next, he was no
+longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out,
+they were both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the steep
+face of the flying turquoise.  Under the bow the water was hissing as
+from a steam jet, the air was filled with driven spray, there was a rush
+and rumble and long-echoing roar, and the canoe floated on the placid
+water of the lagoon.  Moti laughed and shook the salt water from his
+eyes, and together they paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where
+Tati's grass walls through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the
+setting sun.
+
+The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of his
+squalid room.  He strove in vain to see Tahiti again.  He knew there was
+singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing in the
+moonlight, but he could not see them.  He could see only the littered
+writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had stood, and the
+unwashed window-pane.  He closed his eyes with a groan, and slept.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the postman
+on his morning round.  Martin felt tired and passive, and went through
+his letters aimlessly.  One thin envelope, from a robber magazine,
+contained for twenty-two dollars.  He had been dunning for it for a year
+and a half.  He noted its amount apathetically.  The old-time thrill at
+receiving a publisher's check was gone.  Unlike his earlier checks, this
+one was not pregnant with promise of great things to come.  To him it was
+a check for twenty-two dollars, that was all, and it would buy him
+something to eat.
+
+Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in
+payment for some humorous verse which had been accepted months before.  It
+was for ten dollars.  An idea came to him, which he calmly considered.  He
+did not know what he was going to do, and he felt in no hurry to do
+anything.  In the meantime he must live.  Also he owed numerous debts.
+Would it not be a paying investment to put stamps on the huge pile of
+manuscripts under the table and start them on their travels again?  One
+or two of them might be accepted.  That would help him to live.  He
+decided on the investment, and, after he had cashed the checks at the
+bank down in Oakland, he bought ten dollars' worth of postage stamps.  The
+thought of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room was
+repulsive to him.  For the first time he refused to consider his debts.
+He knew that in his room he could manufacture a substantial breakfast at
+a cost of from fifteen to twenty cents.  But, instead, he went into the
+Forum Cafe and ordered a breakfast that cost two dollars.  He tipped the
+waiter a quarter, and spent fifty cents for a package of Egyptian
+cigarettes.  It was the first time he had smoked since Ruth had asked him
+to stop.  But he could see now no reason why he should not, and besides,
+he wanted to smoke.  And what did the money matter?  For five cents he
+could have bought a package of Durham and brown papers and rolled forty
+cigarettes--but what of it?  Money had no meaning to him now except what
+it would immediately buy.  He was chartless and rudderless, and he had no
+port to make, while drifting involved the least living, and it was living
+that hurt.
+
+The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every night.
+Though now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the Japanese
+restaurants where meals were served for ten cents, his wasted body filled
+out, as did the hollows in his cheeks.  He no longer abused himself with
+short sleep, overwork, and overstudy.  He wrote nothing, and the books
+were closed.  He walked much, out in the hills, and loafed long hours in
+the quiet parks.  He had no friends nor acquaintances, nor did he make
+any.  He had no inclination.  He was waiting for some impulse, from he
+knew not where, to put his stopped life into motion again.  In the
+meantime his life remained run down, planless, and empty and idle.
+
+Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the "real dirt."  But at
+the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance, he recoiled
+and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto.  He was frightened at
+the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and he fled furtively, for
+fear that some one of the "real dirt" might chance along and recognize
+him.
+
+Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how
+"Ephemera" was being maltreated.  It had made a hit.  But what a hit!
+Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether or not it was
+really poetry.  The local papers had taken it up, and daily there
+appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious editorials, and serious
+letters from subscribers.  Helen Della Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish
+of trumpets and rolling of tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the
+United States) denied Brissenden a seat beside her on Pegasus and wrote
+voluminous letters to the public, proving that he was no poet.
+
+The Parthenon came out in its next number patting itself on the back for
+the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and exploiting
+Brissenden's death with ruthless commercialism.  A newspaper with a sworn
+circulation of half a million published an original and spontaneous poem
+by Helen Della Delmar, in which she gibed and sneered at Brissenden.
+Also, she was guilty of a second poem, in which she parodied him.
+
+Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead.  He had hated
+the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of him had
+been thrown to the crowd.  Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on.  Every
+nincompoop in the land rushed into free print, floating their wizened
+little egos into the public eye on the surge of Brissenden's greatness.
+Quoth one paper: "We have received a letter from a gentleman who wrote a
+poem just like it, only better, some time ago."  Another paper, in deadly
+seriousness, reproving Helen Della Delmar for her parody, said: "But
+unquestionably Miss Delmar wrote it in a moment of badinage and not quite
+with the respect that one great poet should show to another and perhaps
+to the greatest.  However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous or not of the
+man who invented 'Ephemera,' it is certain that she, like thousands of
+others, is fascinated by his work, and that the day may come when she
+will try to write lines like his."
+
+Ministers began to preach sermons against "Ephemera," and one, who too
+stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy.  The
+great poem contributed to the gayety of the world.  The comic
+verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming
+laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes were
+perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told Archie
+Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of "Ephemera" would drive a man
+to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to the bottom of the
+river.
+
+Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger.  The effect
+produced upon him was one of great sadness.  In the crash of his whole
+world, with love on the pinnacle, the crash of magazinedom and the dear
+public was a small crash indeed.  Brissenden had been wholly right in his
+judgment of the magazines, and he, Martin, had spent arduous and futile
+years in order to find it out for himself.  The magazines were all
+Brissenden had said they were and more.  Well, he was done, he solaced
+himself.  He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a
+pestiferous marsh.  The visions of Tahiti--clean, sweet Tahiti--were
+coming to him more frequently.  And there were the low Paumotus, and the
+high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or
+frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at Papeete
+and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to Nukahiva and the
+Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a pig in honor of his
+coming, and where Tamari's flower-garlanded daughters would seize his
+hands and with song and laughter garland him with flowers.  The South
+Seas were calling, and he knew that sooner or later he would answer the
+call.
+
+In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long
+traverse he had made through the realm of knowledge.  When The Parthenon
+check of three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to him, he turned
+it over to the local lawyer who had attended to Brissenden's affairs for
+his family.  Martin took a receipt for the check, and at the same time
+gave a note for the hundred dollars Brissenden had let him have.
+
+The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese
+restaurants.  At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight, the
+tide turned.  But it had turned too late.  Without a thrill he opened a
+thick envelope from The Millennium, scanned the face of a check that
+represented three hundred dollars, and noted that it was the payment on
+acceptance for "Adventure."  Every debt he owed in the world, including
+the pawnshop, with its usurious interest, amounted to less than a hundred
+dollars.  And when he had paid everything, and lifted the hundred-dollar
+note with Brissenden's lawyer, he still had over a hundred dollars in
+pocket.  He ordered a suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals
+in the best cafes in town.  He still slept in his little room at Maria's,
+but the sight of his new clothes caused the neighborhood children to
+cease from calling him "hobo" and "tramp" from the roofs of woodsheds and
+over back fences.
+
+"Wiki-Wiki," his Hawaiian short story, was bought by Warren's Monthly for
+two hundred and fifty dollars.  The Northern Review took his essay, "The
+Cradle of Beauty," and Mackintosh's Magazine took "The Palmist"--the poem
+he had written to Marian.  The editors and readers were back from their
+summer vacations, and manuscripts were being handled quickly.  But Martin
+could not puzzle out what strange whim animated them to this general
+acceptance of the things they had persistently rejected for two years.
+Nothing of his had been published.  He was not known anywhere outside of
+Oakland, and in Oakland, with the few who thought they knew him, he was
+notorious as a red-shirt and a socialist.  So there was no explaining
+this sudden acceptability of his wares.  It was sheer jugglery of fate.
+
+After it had been refused by a number of magazines, he had taken
+Brissenden's rejected advice and started, "The Shame of the Sun" on the
+round of publishers.  After several refusals, Singletree, Darnley & Co.
+accepted it, promising fall publication.  When Martin asked for an
+advance on royalties, they wrote that such was not their custom, that
+books of that nature rarely paid for themselves, and that they doubted if
+his book would sell a thousand copies.  Martin figured what the book
+would earn him on such a sale.  Retailed at a dollar, on a royalty of
+fifteen per cent, it would bring him one hundred and fifty dollars.  He
+decided that if he had it to do over again he would confine himself to
+fiction.  "Adventure," one-fourth as long, had brought him twice as much
+from The Millennium.  That newspaper paragraph he had read so long ago
+had been true, after all.  The first-class magazines did not pay on
+acceptance, and they paid well.  Not two cents a word, but four cents a
+word, had The Millennium paid him.  And, furthermore, they bought good
+stuff, too, for were they not buying his?  This last thought he
+accompanied with a grin.
+
+He wrote to Singletree, Darnley & Co., offering to sell out his rights in
+"The Shame of the Sun" for a hundred dollars, but they did not care to
+take the risk.  In the meantime he was not in need of money, for several
+of his later stories had been accepted and paid for.  He actually opened
+a bank account, where, without a debt in the world, he had several
+hundred dollars to his credit.  "Overdue," after having been declined by
+a number of magazines, came to rest at the Meredith-Lowell Company.
+Martin remembered the five dollars Gertrude had given him, and his
+resolve to return it to her a hundred times over; so he wrote for an
+advance on royalties of five hundred dollars.  To his surprise a check
+for that amount, accompanied by a contract, came by return mail.  He
+cashed the check into five-dollar gold pieces and telephoned Gertrude
+that he wanted to see her.
+
+She arrived at the house panting and short of breath from the haste she
+had made.  Apprehensive of trouble, she had stuffed the few dollars she
+possessed into her hand-satchel; and so sure was she that disaster had
+overtaken her brother, that she stumbled forward, sobbing, into his arms,
+at the same time thrusting the satchel mutely at him.
+
+"I'd have come myself," he said.  "But I didn't want a row with Mr.
+Higginbotham, and that is what would have surely happened."
+
+"He'll be all right after a time," she assured him, while she wondered
+what the trouble was that Martin was in.  "But you'd best get a job first
+an' steady down.  Bernard does like to see a man at honest work.  That
+stuff in the newspapers broke 'm all up.  I never saw 'm so mad before."
+
+"I'm not going to get a job," Martin said with a smile.  "And you can
+tell him so from me.  I don't need a job, and there's the proof of it."
+
+He emptied the hundred gold pieces into her lap in a glinting, tinkling
+stream.
+
+"You remember that fiver you gave me the time I didn't have carfare?
+Well, there it is, with ninety-nine brothers of different ages but all of
+the same size."
+
+If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she was now in a panic
+of fear.  Her fear was such that it was certitude.  She was not
+suspicious.  She was convinced.  She looked at Martin in horror, and her
+heavy limbs shrank under the golden stream as though it were burning her.
+
+"It's yours," he laughed.
+
+She burst into tears, and began to moan, "My poor boy, my poor boy!"
+
+He was puzzled for a moment.  Then he divined the cause of her agitation
+and handed her the Meredith-Lowell letter which had accompanied the
+check.  She stumbled through it, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes,
+and when she had finished, said:-
+
+"An' does it mean that you come by the money honestly?"
+
+"More honestly than if I'd won it in a lottery.  I earned it."
+
+Slowly faith came back to her, and she reread the letter carefully.  It
+took him long to explain to her the nature of the transaction which had
+put the money into his possession, and longer still to get her to
+understand that the money was really hers and that he did not need it.
+
+"I'll put it in the bank for you," she said finally.
+
+"You'll do nothing of the sort.  It's yours, to do with as you please,
+and if you won't take it, I'll give it to Maria.  She'll know what to do
+with it.  I'd suggest, though, that you hire a servant and take a good
+long rest."
+
+"I'm goin' to tell Bernard all about it," she announced, when she was
+leaving.
+
+Martin winced, then grinned.
+
+"Yes, do," he said.  "And then, maybe, he'll invite me to dinner again."
+
+"Yes, he will--I'm sure he will!" she exclaimed fervently, as she drew
+him to her and kissed and hugged him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+One day Martin became aware that he was lonely.  He was healthy and
+strong, and had nothing to do.  The cessation from writing and studying,
+the death of Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big
+hole in his life; and his life refused to be pinned down to good living
+in cafes and the smoking of Egyptian cigarettes.  It was true the South
+Seas were calling to him, but he had a feeling that the game was not yet
+played out in the United States.  Two books were soon to be published,
+and he had more books that might find publication.  Money could be made
+out of them, and he would wait and take a sackful of it into the South
+Seas.  He knew a valley and a bay in the Marquesas that he could buy for
+a thousand Chili dollars.  The valley ran from the horseshoe, land-locked
+bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks and contained perhaps
+ten thousand acres.  It was filled with tropical fruits, wild chickens,
+and wild pigs, with an occasional herd of wild cattle, while high up
+among the peaks were herds of wild goats harried by packs of wild dogs.
+The whole place was wild.  Not a human lived in it. And he could buy it
+and the bay for a thousand Chili dollars.
+
+The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with water deep enough to
+accommodate the largest vessel afloat, and so safe that the South Pacific
+Directory recommended it to the best careening place for ships for
+hundreds of miles around.  He would buy a schooner--one of those yacht-
+like, coppered crafts that sailed like witches--and go trading copra and
+pearling among the islands.  He would make the valley and the bay his
+headquarters.  He would build a patriarchal grass house like Tati's, and
+have it and the valley and the schooner filled with dark-skinned
+servitors.  He would entertain there the factor of Taiohae, captains of
+wandering traders, and all the best of the South Pacific riffraff.  He
+would keep open house and entertain like a prince.  And he would forget
+the books he had opened and the world that had proved an illusion.
+
+To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money.
+Already it was beginning to flow in.  If one of the books made a strike,
+it might enable him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts.  Also he could
+collect the stories and the poems into books, and make sure of the valley
+and the bay and the schooner.  He would never write again.  Upon that he
+was resolved.  But in the meantime, awaiting the publication of the
+books, he must do something more than live dazed and stupid in the sort
+of uncaring trance into which he had fallen.
+
+He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers' Picnic took place
+that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he went.  He had
+been to the working-class picnics too often in his earlier life not to
+know what they were like, and as he entered the park he experienced a
+recrudescence of all the old sensations.  After all, they were his kind,
+these working people.  He had been born among them, he had lived among
+them, and though he had strayed for a time, it was well to come back
+among them.
+
+"If it ain't Mart!" he heard some one say, and the next moment a hearty
+hand was on his shoulder.  "Where you ben all the time?  Off to sea?  Come
+on an' have a drink."
+
+It was the old crowd in which he found himself--the old crowd, with here
+and there a gap, and here and there a new face.  The fellows were not
+bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics
+for the dancing, and the fighting, and the fun.  Martin drank with them,
+and began to feel really human once more.  He was a fool to have ever
+left them, he thought; and he was very certain that his sum of happiness
+would have been greater had he remained with them and let alone the books
+and the people who sat in the high places.  Yet the beer seemed not so
+good as of yore.  It didn't taste as it used to taste.  Brissenden had
+spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded, and wondered if, after all, the
+books had spoiled him for companionship with these friends of his youth.
+He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he went on to the
+dancing pavilion.  Jimmy, the plumber, he met there, in the company of a
+tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for Martin.
+
+"Gee, it's like old times," Jimmy explained to the gang that gave him the
+laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled away in a waltz.  "An' I don't
+give a rap.  I'm too damned glad to see 'm back.  Watch 'm waltz, eh?
+It's like silk.  Who'd blame any girl?"
+
+But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three of them, with half
+a dozen friends, watched the revolving couples and laughed and joked with
+one another.  Everybody was glad to see Martin back.  No book of his been
+published; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes.  They liked him
+for himself.  He felt like a prince returned from excile, and his lonely
+heart burgeoned in the geniality in which it bathed.  He made a mad day
+of it, and was at his best.  Also, he had money in his pockets, and, as
+in the old days when he returned from sea with a pay-day, he made the
+money fly.
+
+Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go by in the arms of a
+young workingman; and, later, when he made the round of the pavilion, he
+came upon her sitting by a refreshment table.  Surprise and greetings
+over, he led her away into the grounds, where they could talk without
+shouting down the music.  From the instant he spoke to her, she was his.
+He knew it.  She showed it in the proud humility of her eyes, in every
+caressing movement of her proudly carried body, and in the way she hung
+upon his speech.  She was not the young girl as he had known her.  She
+was a woman, now, and Martin noted that her wild, defiant beauty had
+improved, losing none of its wildness, while the defiance and the fire
+seemed more in control.  "A beauty, a perfect beauty," he murmured
+admiringly under his breath.  And he knew she was his, that all he had to
+do was to say "Come," and she would go with him over the world wherever
+he led.
+
+Even as the thought flashed through his brain he received a heavy blow on
+the side of his head that nearly knocked him down.  It was a man's fist,
+directed by a man so angry and in such haste that the fist had missed the
+jaw for which it was aimed.  Martin turned as he staggered, and saw the
+fist coming at him in a wild swing.  Quite as a matter of course he
+ducked, and the fist flew harmlessly past, pivoting the man who had
+driven it.  Martin hooked with his left, landing on the pivoting man with
+the weight of his body behind the blow.  The man went to the ground
+sidewise, leaped to his feet, and made a mad rush.  Martin saw his
+passion-distorted face and wondered what could be the cause of the
+fellow's anger.  But while he wondered, he shot in a straight left, the
+weight of his body behind the blow.  The man went over backward and fell
+in a crumpled heap.  Jimmy and others of the gang were running toward
+them.
+
+Martin was thrilling all over.  This was the old days with a vengeance,
+with their dancing, and their fighting, and their fun.  While he kept a
+wary eye on his antagonist, he glanced at Lizzie.  Usually the girls
+screamed when the fellows got to scrapping, but she had not screamed.  She
+was looking on with bated breath, leaning slightly forward, so keen was
+her interest, one hand pressed to her breast, her cheek flushed, and in
+her eyes a great and amazed admiration.
+
+The man had gained his feet and was struggling to escape the restraining
+arms that were laid on him.
+
+"She was waitin' for me to come back!" he was proclaiming to all and
+sundry.  "She was waitin' for me to come back, an' then that fresh guy
+comes buttin' in.  Let go o' me, I tell yeh.  I'm goin' to fix 'm."
+
+"What's eatin' yer?" Jimmy was demanding, as he helped hold the young
+fellow back.  "That guy's Mart Eden.  He's nifty with his mits, lemme
+tell you that, an' he'll eat you alive if you monkey with 'm."
+
+"He can't steal her on me that way," the other interjected.
+
+"He licked the Flyin' Dutchman, an' you know _him_," Jimmy went on
+expostulating.  "An' he did it in five rounds.  You couldn't last a
+minute against him.  See?"
+
+This information seemed to have a mollifying effect, and the irate young
+man favored Martin with a measuring stare.
+
+"He don't look it," he sneered; but the sneer was without passion.
+
+"That's what the Flyin' Dutchman thought," Jimmy assured him.  "Come on,
+now, let's get outa this.  There's lots of other girls.  Come on."
+
+The young fellow allowed himself to be led away toward the pavilion, and
+the gang followed after him.
+
+"Who is he?" Martin asked Lizzie.  "And what's it all about, anyway?"
+
+Already the zest of combat, which of old had been so keen and lasting,
+had died down, and he discovered that he was self-analytical, too much so
+to live, single heart and single hand, so primitive an existence.
+
+Lizzie tossed her head.
+
+"Oh, he's nobody," she said.  "He's just ben keepin' company with me."
+
+"I had to, you see," she explained after a pause.  "I was gettin' pretty
+lonesome.  But I never forgot."  Her voice sank lower, and she looked
+straight before her.  "I'd throw 'm down for you any time."
+
+Martin looking at her averted face, knowing that all he had to do was to
+reach out his hand and pluck her, fell to pondering whether, after all,
+there was any real worth in refined, grammatical English, and, so, forgot
+to reply to her.
+
+"You put it all over him," she said tentatively, with a laugh.
+
+"He's a husky young fellow, though," he admitted generously.  "If they
+hadn't taken him away, he might have given me my hands full."
+
+"Who was that lady friend I seen you with that night?" she asked
+abruptly.
+
+"Oh, just a lady friend," was his answer.
+
+"It was a long time ago," she murmured contemplatively.  "It seems like a
+thousand years."
+
+But Martin went no further into the matter.  He led the conversation off
+into other channels.  They had lunch in the restaurant, where he ordered
+wine and expensive delicacies and afterward he danced with her and with
+no one but her, till she was tired.  He was a good dancer, and she
+whirled around and around with him in a heaven of delight, her head
+against his shoulder, wishing that it could last forever.  Later in the
+afternoon they strayed off among the trees, where, in the good old
+fashion, she sat down while he sprawled on his back, his head in her lap.
+He lay and dozed, while she fondled his hair, looked down on his closed
+eyes, and loved him without reserve.  Looking up suddenly, he read the
+tender advertisement in her face.  Her eyes fluttered down, then they
+opened and looked into his with soft defiance.
+
+"I've kept straight all these years," she said, her voice so low that it
+was almost a whisper.
+
+In his heart Martin knew that it was the miraculous truth.  And at his
+heart pleaded a great temptation.  It was in his power to make her happy.
+Denied happiness himself, why should he deny happiness to her?  He could
+marry her and take her down with him to dwell in the grass-walled castle
+in the Marquesas.  The desire to do it was strong, but stronger still was
+the imperative command of his nature not to do it.  In spite of himself
+he was still faithful to Love.  The old days of license and easy living
+were gone.  He could not bring them back, nor could he go back to them.
+He was changed--how changed he had not realized until now.
+
+"I am not a marrying man, Lizzie," he said lightly.
+
+The hand caressing his hair paused perceptibly, then went on with the
+same gentle stroke.  He noticed her face harden, but it was with the
+hardness of resolution, for still the soft color was in her cheeks and
+she was all glowing and melting.
+
+"I did not mean that--" she began, then faltered.  "Or anyway I don't
+care."
+
+"I don't care," she repeated.  "I'm proud to be your friend.  I'd do
+anything for you.  I'm made that way, I guess."
+
+Martin sat up.  He took her hand in his.  He did it deliberately, with
+warmth but without passion; and such warmth chilled her.
+
+"Don't let's talk about it," she said.
+
+"You are a great and noble woman," he said.  "And it is I who should be
+proud to know you.  And I am, I am.  You are a ray of light to me in a
+very dark world, and I've got to be straight with you, just as straight
+as you have been."
+
+"I don't care whether you're straight with me or not.  You could do
+anything with me.  You could throw me in the dirt an' walk on me.  An'
+you're the only man in the world that can," she added with a defiant
+flash.  "I ain't taken care of myself ever since I was a kid for
+nothin'."
+
+"And it's just because of that that I'm not going to," he said gently.
+"You are so big and generous that you challenge me to equal generousness.
+I'm not marrying, and I'm not--well, loving without marrying, though I've
+done my share of that in the past.  I'm sorry I came here to-day and met
+you.  But it can't be helped now, and I never expected it would turn out
+this way."
+
+"But look here, Lizzie.  I can't begin to tell you how much I like you.  I
+do more than like you.  I admire and respect you.  You are magnificent,
+and you are magnificently good.  But what's the use of words?  Yet
+there's something I'd like to do.  You've had a hard life; let me make it
+easy for you."  (A joyous light welled into her eyes, then faded out
+again.)  "I'm pretty sure of getting hold of some money soon--lots of
+it."
+
+In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley and the bay, the grass-
+walled castle and the trim, white schooner.  After all, what did it
+matter?  He could go away, as he had done so often, before the mast, on
+any ship bound anywhere.
+
+"I'd like to turn it over to you.  There must be something you want--to
+go to school or business college.  You might like to study and be a
+stenographer.  I could fix it for you.  Or maybe your father and mother
+are living--I could set them up in a grocery store or something.  Anything
+you want, just name it, and I can fix it for you."
+
+She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, dry-eyed and
+motionless, but with an ache in the throat which Martin divined so
+strongly that it made his own throat ache.  He regretted that he had
+spoken.  It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her--mere money--compared
+with what she offered him.  He offered her an extraneous thing with which
+he could part without a pang, while she offered him herself, along with
+disgrace and shame, and sin, and all her hopes of heaven.
+
+"Don't let's talk about it," she said with a catch in her voice that she
+changed to a cough.  She stood up.  "Come on, let's go home.  I'm all
+tired out."
+
+The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly all departed.  But as
+Martin and Lizzie emerged from the trees they found the gang waiting for
+them.  Martin knew immediately the meaning of it.  Trouble was brewing.
+The gang was his body-guard.  They passed out through the gates of the
+park with, straggling in the rear, a second gang, the friends that
+Lizzie's young man had collected to avenge the loss of his lady.  Several
+constables and special police officers, anticipating trouble, trailed
+along to prevent it, and herded the two gangs separately aboard the train
+for San Francisco.  Martin told Jimmy that he would get off at Sixteenth
+Street Station and catch the electric car into Oakland.  Lizzie was very
+quiet and without interest in what was impending.  The train pulled in to
+Sixteenth Street Station, and the waiting electric car could be seen, the
+conductor of which was impatiently clanging the gong.
+
+"There she is," Jimmy counselled.  "Make a run for it, an' we'll hold 'em
+back.  Now you go!  Hit her up!"
+
+The hostile gang was temporarily disconcerted by the manoeuvre, then it
+dashed from the train in pursuit.  The staid and sober Oakland folk who
+sat upon the car scarcely noted the young fellow and the girl who ran for
+it and found a seat in front on the outside.  They did not connect the
+couple with Jimmy, who sprang on the steps, crying to the motorman:-
+
+"Slam on the juice, old man, and beat it outa here!"
+
+The next moment Jimmy whirled about, and the passengers saw him land his
+fist on the face of a running man who was trying to board the car.  But
+fists were landing on faces the whole length of the car.  Thus, Jimmy and
+his gang, strung out on the long, lower steps, met the attacking gang.
+The car started with a great clanging of its gong, and, as Jimmy's gang
+drove off the last assailants, they, too, jumped off to finish the job.
+The car dashed on, leaving the flurry of combat far behind, and its
+dumfounded passengers never dreamed that the quiet young man and the
+pretty working-girl sitting in the corner on the outside seat had been
+the cause of the row.
+
+Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the old fighting
+thrills.  But they quickly died away, and he was oppressed by a great
+sadness.  He felt very old--centuries older than those careless, care-
+free young companions of his others days.  He had travelled far, too far
+to go back.  Their mode of life, which had once been his, was now
+distasteful to him.  He was disappointed in it all.  He had developed
+into an alien.  As the steam beer had tasted raw, so their companionship
+seemed raw to him.  He was too far removed.  Too many thousands of opened
+books yawned between them and him.  He had exiled himself.  He had
+travelled in the vast realm of intellect until he could no longer return
+home.  On the other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for
+companionship remained unsatisfied.  He had found no new home.  As the
+gang could not understand him, as his own family could not understand
+him, as the bourgeoisie could not understand him, so this girl beside
+him, whom he honored high, could not understand him nor the honor he paid
+her.  His sadness was not untouched with bitterness as he thought it
+over.
+
+"Make it up with him," he advised Lizzie, at parting, as they stood in
+front of the workingman's shack in which she lived, near Sixth and
+Market.  He referred to the young fellow whose place he had usurped that
+day.
+
+"I can't--now," she said.
+
+"Oh, go on," he said jovially.  "All you have to do is whistle and he'll
+come running."
+
+"I didn't mean that," she said simply.
+
+And he knew what she had meant.
+
+She leaned toward him as he was about to say good night.  But she leaned
+not imperatively, not seductively, but wistfully and humbly.  He was
+touched to the heart.  His large tolerance rose up in him.  He put his
+arms around her, and kissed her, and knew that upon his own lips rested
+as true a kiss as man ever received.
+
+"My God!" she sobbed.  "I could die for you.  I could die for you."
+
+She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps.  He felt a quick
+moisture in his eyes.
+
+"Martin Eden," he communed.  "You're not a brute, and you're a damn poor
+Nietzscheman.  You'd marry her if you could and fill her quivering heart
+full with happiness.  But you can't, you can't.  And it's a damn shame."
+
+"'A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers,'" he muttered,
+remembering his Henly.  "'Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.'  It
+is--a blunder and a shame."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+
+"The Shame of the Sun" was published in October.  As Martin cut the cords
+of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary copies from the
+publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy sadness fell upon him.  He
+thought of the wild delight that would have been his had this happened a
+few short months before, and he contrasted that delight that should have
+been with his present uncaring coldness.  His book, his first book, and
+his pulse had not gone up a fraction of a beat, and he was only sad.  It
+meant little to him now.  The most it meant was that it might bring some
+money, and little enough did he care for money.
+
+He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.
+
+"I did it," he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment.  "I
+wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your vegetable
+soup went into the making of it.  Keep it.  It's yours.  Just to remember
+me by, you know."
+
+He was not bragging, not showing off.  His sole motive was to make her
+happy, to make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in him.  She
+put the book in the front room on top of the family Bible.  A sacred
+thing was this book her lodger had made, a fetich of friendship.  It
+softened the blow of his having been a laundryman, and though she could
+not understand a line of it, she knew that every line of it was great.
+She was a simple, practical, hard-working woman, but she possessed faith
+in large endowment.
+
+Just as emotionlessly as he had received "The Shame of the Sun" did he
+read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping bureau.  The
+book was making a hit, that was evident.  It meant more gold in the money
+sack.  He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all his promises, and still have
+enough left to build his grass-walled castle.
+
+Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of
+fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second
+edition of twice the size through the presses; and ere this was delivered
+a third edition of five thousand had been ordered.  A London firm made
+arrangements by cable for an English edition, and hot-footed upon this
+came the news of French, German, and Scandinavian translations in
+progress.  The attack upon the Maeterlinck school could not have been
+made at a more opportune moment.  A fierce controversy was precipitated.
+Saleeby and Haeckel indorsed and defended "The Shame of the Sun," for
+once finding themselves on the same side of a question.  Crookes and
+Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge attempted
+to formulate a compromise that would jibe with his particular cosmic
+theories.  Maeterlinck's followers rallied around the standard of
+mysticism.  Chesterton set the whole world laughing with a series of
+alleged non-partisan essays on the subject, and the whole affair,
+controversy and controversialists, was well-nigh swept into the pit by a
+thundering broadside from George Bernard Shaw.  Needless to say the arena
+was crowded with hosts of lesser lights, and the dust and sweat and din
+became terrific.
+
+"It is a most marvellous happening," Singletree, Darnley & Co. wrote
+Martin, "a critical philosophic essay selling like a novel.  You could
+not have chosen your subject better, and all contributory factors have
+been unwarrantedly propitious.  We need scarcely to assure you that we
+are making hay while the sun shines.  Over forty thousand copies have
+already been sold in the United States and Canada, and a new edition of
+twenty thousand is on the presses.  We are overworked, trying to supply
+the demand.  Nevertheless we have helped to create that demand.  We have
+already spent five thousand dollars in advertising.  The book is bound to
+be a record-breaker."
+
+"Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book which we
+have taken the liberty of forwarding to you.  You will please note that
+we have increased your royalties to twenty per cent, which is about as
+high as a conservative publishing house dares go.  If our offer is
+agreeable to you, please fill in the proper blank space with the title of
+your book.  We make no stipulations concerning its nature.  Any book on
+any subject.  If you have one already written, so much the better.  Now
+is the time to strike.  The iron could not be hotter."
+
+"On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an advance
+on royalties of five thousand dollars.  You see, we have faith in you,
+and we are going in on this thing big.  We should like, also, to discuss
+with you the drawing up of a contract for a term of years, say ten,
+during which we shall have the exclusive right of publishing in book-form
+all that you produce.  But more of this anon."
+
+Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental arithmetic,
+finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty thousand to be nine
+thousand dollars.  He signed the new contract, inserting "The Smoke of
+Joy" in the blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers along with
+the twenty storiettes he had written in the days before he discovered the
+formula for the newspaper storiette.  And promptly as the United States
+mail could deliver and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.'s check for
+five thousand dollars.
+
+"I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about two
+o'clock," Martin said, the morning the check arrived.  "Or, better, meet
+me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o'clock.  I'll be looking out for
+you."
+
+At the appointed time she was there; but _shoes_ was the only clew to the
+mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered a
+distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by a shoe-
+store and dived into a real estate office.  What happened thereupon
+resided forever after in her memory as a dream.  Fine gentlemen smiled at
+her benevolently as they talked with Martin and one another; a
+type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an imposing document; her
+own landlord was there, too, and affixed his signature; and when all was
+over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her,
+saying, "Well, Maria, you won't have to pay me no seven dollars and a
+half this month."
+
+Maria was too stunned for speech.
+
+"Or next month, or the next, or the next," her landlord said.
+
+She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor.  And it was not until
+she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her own kind,
+and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she really knew that she
+was the owner of the little house in which she had lived and for which
+she had paid rent so long.
+
+"Why don't you trade with me no more?" the Portuguese grocer asked Martin
+that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the car; and
+Martin explained that he wasn't doing his own cooking any more, and then
+went in and had a drink of wine on the house.  He noted it was the best
+wine the grocer had in stock.
+
+"Maria," Martin announced that night, "I'm going to leave you.  And
+you're going to leave here yourself soon.  Then you can rent the house
+and be a landlord yourself.  You've a brother in San Leandro or Haywards,
+and he's in the milk business.  I want you to send all your washing back
+unwashed--understand?--unwashed, and to go out to San Leandro to-morrow,
+or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see that brother of yours.  Tell him
+to come to see me.  I'll be stopping at the Metropole down in Oakland.
+He'll know a good milk-ranch when he sees one."
+
+And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a dairy,
+with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account that
+steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore shoes and
+went to school.  Few persons ever meet the fairy princes they dream
+about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was hard, never dreaming
+about fairy princes, entertained hers in the guise of an ex-laundryman.
+
+In the meantime the world had begun to ask: "Who is this Martin Eden?"  He
+had declined to give any biographical data to his publishers, but the
+newspapers were not to be denied.  Oakland was his own town, and the
+reporters nosed out scores of individuals who could supply information.
+All that he was and was not, all that he had done and most of what he had
+not done, was spread out for the delectation of the public, accompanied
+by snapshots and photographs--the latter procured from the local
+photographer who had once taken Martin's picture and who promptly
+copyrighted it and put it on the market.  At first, so great was his
+disgust with the magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought
+against publicity; but in the end, because it was easier than not to, he
+surrendered.  He found that he could not refuse himself to the special
+writers who travelled long distances to see him.  Then again, each day
+was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was occupied with writing
+and studying, those hours had to be occupied somehow; so he yielded to
+what was to him a whim, permitted interviews, gave his opinions on
+literature and philosophy, and even accepted invitations of the
+bourgeoisie.  He had settled down into a strange and comfortable state of
+mind.  He no longer cared.  He forgave everybody, even the cub reporter
+who had painted him red and to whom he now granted a full page with
+specially posed photographs.
+
+He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she regretted the
+greatness that had come to him.  It widened the space between them.
+Perhaps it was with the hope of narrowing it that she yielded to his
+persuasions to go to night school and business college and to have
+herself gowned by a wonderful dressmaker who charged outrageous prices.
+She improved visibly from day to day, until Martin wondered if he was
+doing right, for he knew that all her compliance and endeavor was for his
+sake.  She was trying to make herself of worth in his eyes--of the sort
+of worth he seemed to value.  Yet he gave her no hope, treating her in
+brotherly fashion and rarely seeing her.
+
+"Overdue" was rushed upon the market by the Meredith-Lowell Company in
+the height of his popularity, and being fiction, in point of sales it
+made even a bigger strike than "The Shame of the Sun."  Week after week
+his was the credit of the unprecedented performance of having two books
+at the head of the list of best-sellers.  Not only did the story take
+with the fiction-readers, but those who read "The Shame of the Sun" with
+avidity were likewise attracted to the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of
+mastery with which he had handled it.  First he had attacked the
+literature of mysticism, and had done it exceeding well; and, next, he
+had successfully supplied the very literature he had exposited, thus
+proving himself to be that rare genius, a critic and a creator in one.
+
+Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like,
+through the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested
+by the stir he was making.  One thing was puzzling him, a little thing
+that would have puzzled the world had it known.  But the world would have
+puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather than over the little thing that to
+him loomed gigantic.  Judge Blount invited him to dinner.  That was the
+little thing, or the beginning of the little thing, that was soon to
+become the big thing.  He had insulted Judge Blount, treated him
+abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street, invited him to
+dinner.  Martin bethought himself of the numerous occasions on which he
+had met Judge Blount at the Morses' and when Judge Blount had not invited
+him to dinner.  Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he asked
+himself.  He had not changed.  He was the same Martin Eden.  What made
+the difference?  The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared
+inside the covers of books?  But it was work performed.  It was not
+something he had done since.  It was achievement accomplished at the very
+time Judge Blount was sharing this general view and sneering at his
+Spencer and his intellect.  Therefore it was not for any real value, but
+for a purely fictitious value that Judge Blount invited him to dinner.
+
+Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at his
+complacence.  And at the dinner, where, with their womankind, were half a
+dozen of those that sat in high places, and where Martin found himself
+quite the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded by Judge Hanwell, urged
+privately that Martin should permit his name to be put up for the
+Styx--the ultra-select club to which belonged, not the mere men of
+wealth, but the men of attainment.  And Martin declined, and was more
+puzzled than ever.
+
+He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts.  He was
+overwhelmed by requests from editors.  It had been discovered that he was
+a stylist, with meat under his style.  The Northern Review, after
+publishing "The Cradle of Beauty," had written him for half a dozen
+similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not
+Burton's Magazine, in a speculative mood, offered him five hundred
+dollars each for five essays.  He wrote back that he would supply the
+demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay.  He remembered that all these
+manuscripts had been refused by the very magazines that were now
+clamoring for them.  And their refusals had been cold-blooded, automatic,
+stereotyped.  They had made him sweat, and now he intended to make them
+sweat.  Burton's Magazine paid his price for five essays, and the
+remaining four, at the same rate, were snapped up by Mackintosh's
+Monthly, The Northern Review being too poor to stand the pace.  Thus went
+out to the world "The High Priests of Mystery," "The Wonder-Dreamers,"
+"The Yardstick of the Ego," "Philosophy of Illusion," "God and Clod,"
+"Art and Biology," "Critics and Test-tubes," "Star-dust," and "The
+Dignity of Usury,"--to raise storms and rumblings and mutterings that
+were many a day in dying down.
+
+Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, which he did, but
+it was always for work performed.  He refused resolutely to pledge
+himself to any new thing.  The thought of again setting pen to paper
+maddened him.  He had seen Brissenden torn to pieces by the crowd, and
+despite the fact that him the crowd acclaimed, he could not get over the
+shock nor gather any respect for the crowd.  His very popularity seemed a
+disgrace and a treason to Brissenden.  It made him wince, but he made up
+his mind to go on and fill the money-bag.
+
+He received letters from editors like the following: "About a year ago we
+were unfortunate enough to refuse your collection of love-poems.  We were
+greatly impressed by them at the time, but certain arrangements already
+entered into prevented our taking them.  If you still have them, and if
+you will be kind enough to forward them, we shall be glad to publish the
+entire collection on your own terms.  We are also prepared to make a most
+advantageous offer for bringing them out in book-form."
+
+Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it instead.  He read
+it over before mailing, and was particularly impressed by its sophomoric
+amateurishness and general worthlessness.  But he sent it; and it was
+published, to the everlasting regret of the editor.  The public was
+indignant and incredulous.  It was too far a cry from Martin Eden's high
+standard to that serious bosh.  It was asserted that he had never written
+it, that the magazine had faked it very clumsily, or that Martin Eden was
+emulating the elder Dumas and at the height of success was hiring his
+writing done for him.  But when he explained that the tragedy was an
+early effort of his literary childhood, and that the magazine had refused
+to be happy unless it got it, a great laugh went up at the magazine's
+expense and a change in the editorship followed.  The tragedy was never
+brought out in book-form, though Martin pocketed the advance royalties
+that had been paid.
+
+Coleman's Weekly sent Martin a lengthy telegram, costing nearly three
+hundred dollars, offering him a thousand dollars an article for twenty
+articles.  He was to travel over the United States, with all expenses
+paid, and select whatever topics interested him.  The body of the
+telegram was devoted to hypothetical topics in order to show him the
+freedom of range that was to be his.  The only restriction placed upon
+him was that he must confine himself to the United States.  Martin sent
+his inability to accept and his regrets by wire "collect."
+
+"Wiki-Wiki," published in Warren's Monthly, was an instantaneous success.
+It was brought out forward in a wide-margined, beautifully decorated
+volume that struck the holiday trade and sold like wildfire.  The critics
+were unanimous in the belief that it would take its place with those two
+classics by two great writers, "The Bottle Imp" and "The Magic Skin."
+
+The public, however, received the "Smoke of Joy" collection rather
+dubiously and coldly.  The audacity and unconventionality of the
+storiettes was a shock to bourgeois morality and prejudice; but when
+Paris went mad over the immediate translation that was made, the American
+and English reading public followed suit and bought so many copies that
+Martin compelled the conservative house of Singletree, Darnley & Co. to
+pay a flat royalty of twenty-five per cent for a third book, and thirty
+per cent flat for a fourth.  These two volumes comprised all the short
+stories he had written and which had received, or were receiving, serial
+publication.  "The Ring of Bells" and his horror stories constituted one
+collection; the other collection was composed of "Adventure," "The Pot,"
+"The Wine of Life," "The Whirlpool," "The Jostling Street," and four
+other stories.  The Lowell-Meredith Company captured the collection of
+all his essays, and the Maxmillian Company got his "Sea Lyrics" and the
+"Love-cycle," the latter receiving serial publication in the Ladies' Home
+Companion after the payment of an extortionate price.
+
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of the last
+manuscript.  The grass-walled castle and the white, coppered schooner
+were very near to him.  Well, at any rate he had discovered Brissenden's
+contention that nothing of merit found its way into the magazines.  His
+own success demonstrated that Brissenden had been wrong.
+
+And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had been right, after
+all.  "The Shame of the Sun" had been the cause of his success more than
+the stuff he had written.  That stuff had been merely incidental.  It had
+been rejected right and left by the magazines.  The publication of "The
+Shame of the Sun" had started a controversy and precipitated the
+landslide in his favor.  Had there been no "Shame of the Sun" there would
+have been no landslide, and had there been no miracle in the go of "The
+Shame of the Sun" there would have been no landslide.  Singletree,
+Darnley & Co. attested that miracle.  They had brought out a first
+edition of fifteen hundred copies and been dubious of selling it.  They
+were experienced publishers and no one had been more astounded than they
+at the success which had followed.  To them it had been in truth a
+miracle.  They never got over it, and every letter they wrote him
+reflected their reverent awe of that first mysterious happening.  They
+did not attempt to explain it.  There was no explaining it.  It had
+happened.  In the face of all experience to the contrary, it had
+happened.
+
+So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of his
+popularity.  It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and poured its
+gold into his money-sack, and from what little he knew of the bourgeoisie
+it was not clear to him how it could possibly appreciate or comprehend
+what he had written.  His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the
+hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books.  He
+was the fad of the hour, the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while
+the gods nodded.  The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him
+with the same brute non-understanding with which they had flung
+themselves on Brissenden's "Ephemera" and torn it to pieces--a
+wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him.  Fawn or fang, it
+was all a matter of chance.  One thing he knew with absolute certitude:
+"Ephemera" was infinitely greater than anything he had done.  It was
+infinitely greater than anything he had in him.  It was a poem of
+centuries.  Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry tribute indeed,
+for that same mob had wallowed "Ephemera" into the mire.  He sighed
+heavily and with satisfaction.  He was glad the last manuscript was sold
+and that he would soon be done with it all.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+
+Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metropole.  Whether he
+had happened there just casually, intent on other affairs, or whether he
+had come there for the direct purpose of inviting him to dinner, Martin
+never could quite make up his mind, though he inclined toward the second
+hypothesis.  At any rate, invited to dinner he was by Mr. Morse--Ruth's
+father, who had forbidden him the house and broken off the engagement.
+
+Martin was not angry.  He was not even on his dignity.  He tolerated Mr.
+Morse, wondering the while how it felt to eat such humble pie.  He did
+not decline the invitation.  Instead, he put it off with vagueness and
+indefiniteness and inquired after the family, particularly after Mrs.
+Morse and Ruth.  He spoke her name without hesitancy, naturally, though
+secretly surprised that he had had no inward quiver, no old, familiar
+increase of pulse and warm surge of blood.
+
+He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he accepted.  Persons
+got themselves introduced to him in order to invite him to dinner.  And
+he went on puzzling over the little thing that was becoming a great
+thing.  Bernard Higginbotham invited him to dinner.  He puzzled the
+harder.  He remembered the days of his desperate starvation when no one
+invited him to dinner.  That was the time he needed dinners, and went
+weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine.  That
+was the paradox of it.  When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him,
+and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners and was losing his
+appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left.  But why?  There
+was no justice in it, no merit on his part.  He was no different.  All
+the work he had done was even at that time work performed.  Mr. and Mrs.
+Morse had condemned him for an idler and a shirk and through Ruth had
+urged that he take a clerk's position in an office.  Furthermore, they
+had been aware of his work performed.  Manuscript after manuscript of his
+had been turned over to them by Ruth.  They had read them.  It was the
+very same work that had put his name in all the papers, and, it was his
+name being in all the papers that led them to invite him.
+
+One thing was certain: the Morses had not cared to have him for himself
+or for his work.  Therefore they could not want him now for himself or
+for his work, but for the fame that was his, because he was somebody
+amongst men, and--why not?--because he had a hundred thousand dollars or
+so.  That was the way bourgeois society valued a man, and who was he to
+expect it otherwise?  But he was proud.  He disdained such valuation.  He
+desired to be valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all, was
+an expression of himself.  That was the way Lizzie valued him.  The work,
+with her, did not even count.  She valued him, himself.  That was the way
+Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued him.  That had been
+proved often enough in the days when he ran with them; it had been proved
+that Sunday at Shell Mound Park.  His work could go hang.  What they
+liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart Eden, one of the
+bunch and a pretty good guy.
+
+Then there was Ruth.  She had liked him for himself, that was
+indisputable.  And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the
+bourgeois standard of valuation more.  She had opposed his writing, and
+principally, it seemed to him, because it did not earn money.  That had
+been her criticism of his "Love-cycle."  She, too, had urged him to get a
+job.  It was true, she refined it to "position," but it meant the same
+thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature stuck.  He had read her
+all that he wrote--poems, stories, essays--"Wiki-Wiki," "The Shame of the
+Sun," everything.  And she had always and consistently urged him to get a
+job, to go to work--good God!--as if he hadn't been working, robbing
+sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.
+
+So the little thing grew bigger.  He was healthy and normal, ate
+regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was
+becoming an obsession.  Work performed.  The phrase haunted his brain.  He
+sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over
+Higginbotham's Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain himself
+from shouting out:-
+
+"It was work performed!  And now you feed me, when then you let me
+starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn't get a
+job.  And the work was already done, all done.  And now, when I speak,
+you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay
+respectful attention to whatever I choose to say.  I tell you your party
+is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you
+hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say.  And why?
+Because I'm famous; because I've a lot of money.  Not because I'm Martin
+Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool.  I could tell you
+the moon is made of green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion,
+at least you would not repudiate it, because I've got dollars, mountains
+of them.  And it was all done long ago; it was work performed, I tell
+you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your feet."
+
+But Martin did not shout out.  The thought gnawed in his brain, an
+unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant.  As
+he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking.
+He was a success himself, and proud of it.  He was self-made.  No one had
+helped him.  He owed no man.  He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and
+bringing up a large family.  And there was Higginbotham's Cash Store,
+that monument of his own industry and ability.  He loved Higginbotham's
+Cash Store as some men loved their wives.  He opened up his heart to
+Martin, showed with what keenness and with what enormous planning he had
+made the store.  And he had plans for it, ambitious plans.  The
+neighborhood was growing up fast.  The store was really too small.  If he
+had more room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving and
+money-saving improvements.  And he would do it yet.  He was straining
+every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and put up
+another two-story frame building.  The upstairs he could rent, and the
+whole ground-floor of both buildings would be Higginbotham's Cash Store.
+His eyes glistened when he spoke of the new sign that would stretch clear
+across both buildings.
+
+Martin forgot to listen.  The refrain of "Work performed," in his own
+brain, was drowning the other's clatter.  The refrain maddened him, and
+he tried to escape from it.
+
+"How much did you say it would cost?" he asked suddenly.
+
+His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the business
+opportunities of the neighborhood.  He hadn't said how much it would
+cost.  But he knew.  He had figured it out a score of times.
+
+"At the way lumber is now," he said, "four thousand could do it."
+
+"Including the sign?"
+
+"I didn't count on that.  It'd just have to come, onc't the buildin' was
+there."
+
+"And the ground?"
+
+"Three thousand more."
+
+He leaned forward, licking his lips, nervously spreading and closing his
+fingers, while he watched Martin write a check.  When it was passed over
+to him, he glanced at the amount-seven thousand dollars.
+
+"I--I can't afford to pay more than six per cent," he said huskily.
+
+Martin wanted to laugh, but, instead, demanded:-
+
+"How much would that be?"
+
+"Lemme see.  Six per cent--six times seven--four hundred an' twenty."
+
+"That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn't it?"
+
+Higginbotham nodded.
+
+"Then, if you've no objection, well arrange it this way."  Martin glanced
+at Gertrude.  "You can have the principal to keep for yourself, if you'll
+use the thirty-five dollars a month for cooking and washing and
+scrubbing.  The seven thousand is yours if you'll guarantee that Gertrude
+does no more drudgery.  Is it a go?"
+
+Mr. Higginbotham swallowed hard.  That his wife should do no more
+housework was an affront to his thrifty soul.  The magnificent present
+was the coating of a pill, a bitter pill.  That his wife should not work!
+It gagged him.
+
+"All right, then," Martin said.  "I'll pay the thirty-five a month, and--"
+
+He reached across the table for the check.  But Bernard Higginbotham got
+his hand on it first, crying:
+
+"I accept!  I accept!"
+
+When Martin got on the electric car, he was very sick and tired.  He
+looked up at the assertive sign.
+
+"The swine," he groaned.  "The swine, the swine."
+
+When Mackintosh's Magazine published "The Palmist," featuring it with
+decorations by Berthier and with two pictures by Wenn, Hermann von
+Schmidt forgot that he had called the verses obscene.  He announced that
+his wife had inspired the poem, saw to it that the news reached the ears
+of a reporter, and submitted to an interview by a staff writer who was
+accompanied by a staff photographer and a staff artist.  The result was a
+full page in a Sunday supplement, filled with photographs and idealized
+drawings of Marian, with many intimate details of Martin Eden and his
+family, and with the full text of "The Palmist" in large type, and
+republished by special permission of Mackintosh's Magazine.  It caused
+quite a stir in the neighborhood, and good housewives were proud to have
+the acquaintances of the great writer's sister, while those who had not
+made haste to cultivate it.  Hermann von Schmidt chuckled in his little
+repair shop and decided to order a new lathe.  "Better than advertising,"
+he told Marian, "and it costs nothing."
+
+"We'd better have him to dinner," she suggested.
+
+And to dinner Martin came, making himself agreeable with the fat
+wholesale butcher and his fatter wife--important folk, they, likely to be
+of use to a rising young man like Hermann Von Schmidt.  No less a bait,
+however, had been required to draw them to his house than his great
+brother-in-law.  Another man at table who had swallowed the same bait was
+the superintendent of the Pacific Coast agencies for the Asa Bicycle
+Company.  Him Von Schmidt desired to please and propitiate because from
+him could be obtained the Oakland agency for the bicycle.  So Hermann von
+Schmidt found it a goodly asset to have Martin for a brother-in-law, but
+in his heart of hearts he couldn't understand where it all came in.  In
+the silent watches of the night, while his wife slept, he had floundered
+through Martin's books and poems, and decided that the world was a fool
+to buy them.
+
+And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situation only too well,
+as he leaned back and gloated at Von Schmidt's head, in fancy punching it
+well-nigh off of him, sending blow after blow home just right--the
+chuckle-headed Dutchman!  One thing he did like about him, however.  Poor
+as he was, and determined to rise as he was, he nevertheless hired one
+servant to take the heavy work off of Marian's hands.  Martin talked with
+the superintendent of the Asa agencies, and after dinner he drew him
+aside with Hermann, whom he backed financially for the best bicycle store
+with fittings in Oakland.  He went further, and in a private talk with
+Hermann told him to keep his eyes open for an automobile agency and
+garage, for there was no reason that he should not be able to run both
+establishments successfully.
+
+With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, Marian, at parting,
+told Martin how much she loved him and always had loved him.  It was
+true, there was a perceptible halt midway in her assertion, which she
+glossed over with more tears and kisses and incoherent stammerings, and
+which Martin inferred to be her appeal for forgiveness for the time she
+had lacked faith in him and insisted on his getting a job.
+
+"He can't never keep his money, that's sure," Hermann von Schmidt
+confided to his wife.  "He got mad when I spoke of interest, an' he said
+damn the principal and if I mentioned it again, he'd punch my Dutch head
+off.  That's what he said--my Dutch head.  But he's all right, even if he
+ain't no business man.  He's given me my chance, an' he's all right."
+
+Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the more they poured, the
+more he puzzled.  He sat, the guest of honor, at an Arden Club banquet,
+with men of note whom he had heard about and read about all his life; and
+they told him how, when they had read "The Ring of Bells" in the
+Transcontinental, and "The Peri and the Pearl" in The Hornet, they had
+immediately picked him for a winner.  My God! and I was hungry and in
+rags, he thought to himself.  Why didn't you give me a dinner then?  Then
+was the time.  It was work performed.  If you are feeding me now for work
+performed, why did you not feed me then when I needed it?  Not one word
+in "The Ring of Bells," nor in "The Peri and the Pearl" has been changed.
+No; you're not feeding me now for work performed.  You are feeding me
+because everybody else is feeding me and because it is an honor to feed
+me.  You are feeding me now because you are herd animals; because you are
+part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic thought in the mob-mind
+just now is to feed me.  And where does Martin Eden and the work Martin
+Eden performed come in in all this? he asked himself plaintively, then
+arose to respond cleverly and wittily to a clever and witty toast.
+
+So it went.  Wherever he happened to be--at the Press Club, at the
+Redwood Club, at pink teas and literary gatherings--always were
+remembered "The Ring of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" when they
+were first published.  And always was Martin's maddening and unuttered
+demand: Why didn't you feed me then?  It was work performed.  "The Ring
+of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" are not changed one iota.  They
+were just as artistic, just as worth while, then as now.  But you are not
+feeding me for their sake, nor for the sake of anything else I have
+written.  You're feeding me because it is the style of feeding just now,
+because the whole mob is crazy with the idea of feeding Martin Eden.
+
+And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch in among the
+company a young hoodlum in square-cut coat and under a stiff-rim Stetson
+hat.  It happened to him at the Gallina Society in Oakland one afternoon.
+As he rose from his chair and stepped forward across the platform, he saw
+stalk through the wide door at the rear of the great room the young
+hoodlum with the square-cut coat and stiff-rim hat.  Five hundred
+fashionably gowned women turned their heads, so intent and steadfast was
+Martin's gaze, to see what he was seeing.  But they saw only the empty
+centre aisle.  He saw the young tough lurching down that aisle and
+wondered if he would remove the stiff-rim which never yet had he seen him
+without.  Straight down the aisle he came, and up the platform.  Martin
+could have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when he thought of
+all that lay before him.  Across the platform he swaggered, right up to
+Martin, and into the foreground of Martin's consciousness disappeared.
+The five hundred women applauded softly with gloved hands, seeking to
+encourage the bashful great man who was their guest.  And Martin shook
+the vision from his brain, smiled, and began to speak.
+
+The Superintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Martin on the street
+and remembered him, recalling seances in his office when Martin was
+expelled from school for fighting.
+
+"I read your 'Ring of Bells' in one of the magazines quite a time ago,"
+he said.  "It was as good as Poe.  Splendid, I said at the time,
+splendid!"
+
+Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed me on the street
+and did not know me, Martin almost said aloud.  Each time I was hungry
+and heading for the pawnbroker.  Yet it was work performed.  You did not
+know me then.  Why do you know me now?
+
+"I was remarking to my wife only the other day," the other was saying,
+"wouldn't it be a good idea to have you out to dinner some time?  And she
+quite agreed with me.  Yes, she quite agreed with me."
+
+"Dinner?" Martin said so sharply that it was almost a snarl.
+
+"Why, yes, yes, dinner, you know--just pot luck with us, with your old
+superintendent, you rascal," he uttered nervously, poking Martin in an
+attempt at jocular fellowship.
+
+Martin went down the street in a daze.  He stopped at the corner and
+looked about him vacantly.
+
+"Well, I'll be damned!" he murmured at last.  "The old fellow was afraid
+of me."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+
+Kreis came to Martin one day--Kreis, of the "real dirt"; and Martin
+turned to him with relief, to receive the glowing details of a scheme
+sufficiently wild-catty to interest him as a fictionist rather than an
+investor.  Kreis paused long enough in the midst of his exposition to
+tell him that in most of his "Shame of the Sun" he had been a chump.
+
+"But I didn't come here to spout philosophy," Kreis went on.  "What I
+want to know is whether or not you will put a thousand dollars in on this
+deal?"
+
+"No, I'm not chump enough for that, at any rate," Martin answered.  "But
+I'll tell you what I will do.  You gave me the greatest night of my life.
+You gave me what money cannot buy.  Now I've got money, and it means
+nothing to me.  I'd like to turn over to you a thousand dollars of what I
+don't value for what you gave me that night and which was beyond price.
+You need the money.  I've got more than I need.  You want it.  You came
+for it.  There's no use scheming it out of me.  Take it."
+
+Kreis betrayed no surprise.  He folded the check away in his pocket.
+
+"At that rate I'd like the contract of providing you with many such
+nights," he said.
+
+"Too late."  Martin shook his head.  "That night was the one night for
+me.  I was in paradise.  It's commonplace with you, I know.  But it
+wasn't to me.  I shall never live at such a pitch again.  I'm done with
+philosophy.  I want never to hear another word of it."
+
+"The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my philosophy," Kreis
+remarked, as he paused in the doorway.  "And then the market broke."
+
+Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and smiled and nodded.
+He smiled back and lifted his hat.  The episode did not affect him.  A
+month before it might have disgusted him, or made him curious and set him
+to speculating about her state of consciousness at that moment.  But now
+it was not provocative of a second thought.  He forgot about it the next
+moment.  He forgot about it as he would have forgotten the Central Bank
+Building or the City Hall after having walked past them.  Yet his mind
+was preternaturally active.  His thoughts went ever around and around in
+a circle.  The centre of that circle was "work performed"; it ate at his
+brain like a deathless maggot.  He awoke to it in the morning.  It
+tormented his dreams at night.  Every affair of life around him that
+penetrated through his senses immediately related itself to "work
+performed."  He drove along the path of relentless logic to the
+conclusion that he was nobody, nothing.  Mart Eden, the hoodlum, and Mart
+Eden, the sailor, had been real, had been he; but Martin Eden! the famous
+writer, did not exist.  Martin Eden, the famous writer, was a vapor that
+had arisen in the mob-mind and by the mob-mind had been thrust into the
+corporeal being of Mart Eden, the hoodlum and sailor.  But it couldn't
+fool him.  He was not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping and
+sacrificing dinners to.  He knew better.
+
+He read the magazines about himself, and pored over portraits of himself
+published therein until he was unable to associate his identity with
+those portraits.  He was the fellow who had lived and thrilled and loved;
+who had been easy-going and tolerant of the frailties of life; who had
+served in the forecastle, wandered in strange lands, and led his gang in
+the old fighting days.  He was the fellow who had been stunned at first
+by the thousands of books in the free library, and who had afterward
+learned his way among them and mastered them; he was the fellow who had
+burned the midnight oil and bedded with a spur and written books himself.
+But the one thing he was not was that colossal appetite that all the mob
+was bent upon feeding.
+
+There were things, however, in the magazines that amused him.  All the
+magazines were claiming him.  Warren's Monthly advertised to its
+subscribers that it was always on the quest after new writers, and that,
+among others, it had introduced Martin Eden to the reading public.  The
+White Mouse claimed him; so did The Northern Review and Mackintosh's
+Magazine, until silenced by The Globe, which pointed triumphantly to its
+files where the mangled "Sea Lyrics" lay buried.  Youth and Age, which
+had come to life again after having escaped paying its bills, put in a
+prior claim, which nobody but farmers' children ever read.  The
+Transcontinental made a dignified and convincing statement of how it
+first discovered Martin Eden, which was warmly disputed by The Hornet,
+with the exhibit of "The Peri and the Pearl."  The modest claim of
+Singletree, Darnley & Co. was lost in the din.  Besides, that publishing
+firm did not own a magazine wherewith to make its claim less modest.
+
+The newspapers calculated Martin's royalties.  In some way the
+magnificent offers certain magazines had made him leaked out, and Oakland
+ministers called upon him in a friendly way, while professional begging
+letters began to clutter his mail.  But worse than all this were the
+women.  His photographs were published broadcast, and special writers
+exploited his strong, bronzed face, his scars, his heavy shoulders, his
+clear, quiet eyes, and the slight hollows in his cheeks like an
+ascetic's.  At this last he remembered his wild youth and smiled.  Often,
+among the women he met, he would see now one, now another, looking at
+him, appraising him, selecting him.  He laughed to himself.  He
+remembered Brissenden's warning and laughed again.  The women would never
+destroy him, that much was certain.  He had gone past that stage.
+
+Once, walking with Lizzie toward night school, she caught a glance
+directed toward him by a well-gowned, handsome woman of the bourgeoisie.
+The glance was a trifle too long, a shade too considerative.  Lizzie knew
+it for what it was, and her body tensed angrily.  Martin noticed, noticed
+the cause of it, told her how used he was becoming to it and that he did
+not care anyway.
+
+"You ought to care," she answered with blazing eyes.  "You're sick.
+That's what's the matter."
+
+"Never healthier in my life.  I weigh five pounds more than I ever did."
+
+"It ain't your body.  It's your head.  Something's wrong with your think-
+machine.  Even I can see that, an' I ain't nobody."
+
+He walked on beside her, reflecting.
+
+"I'd give anything to see you get over it," she broke out impulsively.
+"You ought to care when women look at you that way, a man like you.  It's
+not natural.  It's all right enough for sissy-boys.  But you ain't made
+that way.  So help me, I'd be willing an' glad if the right woman came
+along an' made you care."
+
+When he left Lizzie at night school, he returned to the Metropole.
+
+Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and sat staring
+straight before him.  He did not doze.  Nor did he think.  His mind was a
+blank, save for the intervals when unsummoned memory pictures took form
+and color and radiance just under his eyelids.  He saw these pictures,
+but he was scarcely conscious of them--no more so than if they had been
+dreams.  Yet he was not asleep.  Once, he roused himself and glanced at
+his watch.  It was just eight o'clock.  He had nothing to do, and it was
+too early for bed.  Then his mind went blank again, and the pictures
+began to form and vanish under his eyelids.  There was nothing
+distinctive about the pictures.  They were always masses of leaves and
+shrub-like branches shot through with hot sunshine.
+
+A knock at the door aroused him.  He was not asleep, and his mind
+immediately connected the knock with a telegram, or letter, or perhaps
+one of the servants bringing back clean clothes from the laundry.  He was
+thinking about Joe and wondering where he was, as he said, "Come in."
+
+He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn toward the door.  He
+heard it close softly.  There was a long silence.  He forgot that there
+had been a knock at the door, and was still staring blankly before him
+when he heard a woman's sob.  It was involuntary, spasmodic, checked, and
+stifled--he noted that as he turned about.  The next instant he was on
+his feet.
+
+"Ruth!" he said, amazed and bewildered.
+
+Her face was white and strained.  She stood just inside the door, one
+hand against it for support, the other pressed to her side.  She extended
+both hands toward him piteously, and started forward to meet him.  As he
+caught her hands and led her to the Morris chair he noticed how cold they
+were.  He drew up another chair and sat down on the broad arm of it.  He
+was too confused to speak.  In his own mind his affair with Ruth was
+closed and sealed.  He felt much in the same way that he would have felt
+had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry suddenly invaded the Hotel Metropole
+with a whole week's washing ready for him to pitch into.  Several times
+he was about to speak, and each time he hesitated.
+
+"No one knows I am here," Ruth said in a faint voice, with an appealing
+smile.
+
+"What did you say?"
+
+He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.
+
+She repeated her words.
+
+"Oh," he said, then wondered what more he could possibly say.
+
+"I saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes."
+
+"Oh," he said again.
+
+He had never been so tongue-tied in his life.  Positively he did not have
+an idea in his head.  He felt stupid and awkward, but for the life of him
+he could think of nothing to say.  It would have been easier had the
+intrusion been the Shelly Hot Springs laundry.  He could have rolled up
+his sleeves and gone to work.
+
+"And then you came in," he said finally.
+
+She nodded, with a slightly arch expression, and loosened the scarf at
+her throat.
+
+"I saw you first from across the street when you were with that girl."
+
+"Oh, yes," he said simply.  "I took her down to night school."
+
+"Well, aren't you glad to see me?" she said at the end of another
+silence.
+
+"Yes, yes."  He spoke hastily.  "But wasn't it rash of you to come here?"
+
+"I slipped in.  Nobody knows I am here.  I wanted to see you.  I came to
+tell you I have been very foolish.  I came because I could no longer stay
+away, because my heart compelled me to come, because--because I wanted to
+come."
+
+She came forward, out of her chair and over to him.  She rested her hand
+on his shoulder a moment, breathing quickly, and then slipped into his
+arms.  And in his large, easy way, desirous of not inflicting hurt,
+knowing that to repulse this proffer of herself was to inflict the most
+grievous hurt a woman could receive, he folded his arms around her and
+held her close.  But there was no warmth in the embrace, no caress in the
+contact.  She had come into his arms, and he held her, that was all.  She
+nestled against him, and then, with a change of position, her hands crept
+up and rested upon his neck.  But his flesh was not fire beneath those
+hands, and he felt awkward and uncomfortable.
+
+"What makes you tremble so?" he asked.  "Is it a chill?  Shall I light
+the grate?"
+
+He made a movement to disengage himself, but she clung more closely to
+him, shivering violently.
+
+"It is merely nervousness," she said with chattering teeth.  "I'll
+control myself in a minute.  There, I am better already."
+
+Slowly her shivering died away.  He continued to hold her, but he was no
+longer puzzled.  He knew now for what she had come.
+
+"My mother wanted me to marry Charley Hapgood," she announced.
+
+"Charley Hapgood, that fellow who speaks always in platitudes?" Martin
+groaned.  Then he added, "And now, I suppose, your mother wants you to
+marry me."
+
+He did not put it in the form of a question.  He stated it as a
+certitude, and before his eyes began to dance the rows of figures of his
+royalties.
+
+"She will not object, I know that much," Ruth said.
+
+"She considers me quite eligible?"
+
+Ruth nodded.
+
+"And yet I am not a bit more eligible now than I was when she broke our
+engagement," he meditated.  "I haven't changed any.  I'm the same Martin
+Eden, though for that matter I'm a bit worse--I smoke now.  Don't you
+smell my breath?"
+
+In reply she pressed her open fingers against his lips, placed them
+graciously and playfully, and in expectancy of the kiss that of old had
+always been a consequence.  But there was no caressing answer of Martin's
+lips.  He waited until the fingers were removed and then went on.
+
+"I am not changed.  I haven't got a job.  I'm not looking for a job.
+Furthermore, I am not going to look for a job.  And I still believe that
+Herbert Spencer is a great and noble man and that Judge Blount is an
+unmitigated ass.  I had dinner with him the other night, so I ought to
+know."
+
+"But you didn't accept father's invitation," she chided.
+
+"So you know about that?  Who sent him?  Your mother?"
+
+She remained silent.
+
+"Then she did send him.  I thought so.  And now I suppose she has sent
+you."
+
+"No one knows that I am here," she protested.  "Do you think my mother
+would permit this?"
+
+"She'd permit you to marry me, that's certain."
+
+She gave a sharp cry.  "Oh, Martin, don't be cruel.  You have not kissed
+me once.  You are as unresponsive as a stone.  And think what I have
+dared to do."  She looked about her with a shiver, though half the look
+was curiosity.  "Just think of where I am."
+
+"_I could die for you!  I could die for you_!"--Lizzie's words were
+ringing in his ears.
+
+"Why didn't you dare it before?" he asked harshly.  "When I hadn't a job?
+When I was starving?  When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an
+artist, the same Martin Eden?  That's the question I've been propounding
+to myself for many a day--not concerning you merely, but concerning
+everybody.  You see I have not changed, though my sudden apparent
+appreciation in value compels me constantly to reassure myself on that
+point.  I've got the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and
+toes.  I am the same.  I have not developed any new strength nor virtue.
+My brain is the same old brain.  I haven't made even one new
+generalization on literature or philosophy.  I am personally of the same
+value that I was when nobody wanted me.  And what is puzzling me is why
+they want me now.  Surely they don't want me for myself, for myself is
+the same old self they did not want.  Then they must want me for
+something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that
+is not I!  Shall I tell you what that something is?  It is for the
+recognition I have received.  That recognition is not I.  It resides in
+the minds of others.  Then again for the money I have earned and am
+earning.  But that money is not I.  It resides in banks and in the
+pockets of Tom, Dick, and Harry.  And is it for that, for the recognition
+and the money, that you now want me?"
+
+"You are breaking my heart," she sobbed.  "You know I love you, that I am
+here because I love you."
+
+"I am afraid you don't see my point," he said gently.  "What I mean is:
+if you love me, how does it happen that you love me now so much more than
+you did when your love was weak enough to deny me?"
+
+"Forget and forgive," she cried passionately.  "I loved you all the time,
+remember that, and I am here, now, in your arms."
+
+"I'm afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying to
+weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is."
+
+She withdrew herself from his arms, sat upright, and looked at him long
+and searchingly.  She was about to speak, then faltered and changed her
+mind.
+
+"You see, it appears this way to me," he went on.  "When I was all that I
+am now, nobody out of my own class seemed to care for me.  When my books
+were all written, no one who had read the manuscripts seemed to care for
+them.  In point of fact, because of the stuff I had written they seemed
+to care even less for me.  In writing the stuff it seemed that I had
+committed acts that were, to say the least, derogatory.  'Get a job,'
+everybody said."
+
+She made a movement of dissent.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said; "except in your case you told me to get a position.
+The homely word _job_, like much that I have written, offends you.  It is
+brutal.  But I assure you it was no less brutal to me when everybody I
+knew recommended it to me as they would recommend right conduct to an
+immoral creature.  But to return.  The publication of what I had written,
+and the public notice I received, wrought a change in the fibre of your
+love.  Martin Eden, with his work all performed, you would not marry.
+Your love for him was not strong enough to enable you to marry him.  But
+your love is now strong enough, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that
+its strength arises from the publication and the public notice.  In your
+case I do not mention royalties, though I am certain that they apply to
+the change wrought in your mother and father.  Of course, all this is not
+flattering to me.  But worst of all, it makes me question love, sacred
+love.  Is love so gross a thing that it must feed upon publication and
+public notice?  It would seem so.  I have sat and thought upon it till my
+head went around."
+
+"Poor, dear head."  She reached up a hand and passed the fingers
+soothingly through his hair.  "Let it go around no more.  Let us begin
+anew, now.  I loved you all the time.  I know that I was weak in yielding
+to my mother's will.  I should not have done so.  Yet I have heard you
+speak so often with broad charity of the fallibility and frailty of
+humankind.  Extend that charity to me.  I acted mistakenly.  Forgive me."
+
+"Oh, I do forgive," he said impatiently.  "It is easy to forgive where
+there is really nothing to forgive.  Nothing that you have done requires
+forgiveness.  One acts according to one's lights, and more than that one
+cannot do.  As well might I ask you to forgive me for my not getting a
+job."
+
+"I meant well," she protested.  "You know that I could not have loved you
+and not meant well."
+
+"True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning."
+
+"Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection.  "You would have
+destroyed my writing and my career.  Realism is imperative to my nature,
+and the bourgeois spirit hates realism.  The bourgeoisie is cowardly.  It
+is afraid of life.  And all your effort was to make me afraid of life.
+You would have formalized me.  You would have compressed me into a two-by-
+four pigeonhole of life, where all life's values are unreal, and false,
+and vulgar."  He felt her stir protestingly.  "Vulgarity--a hearty
+vulgarity, I'll admit--is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture.
+As I say, you wanted to formalize me, to make me over into one of your
+own class, with your class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices."
+He shook his head sadly.  "And you do not understand, even now, what I am
+saying.  My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them mean.
+What I say is so much fantasy to you.  Yet to me it is vital reality.  At
+the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this raw boy, crawling
+up out of the mire of the abyss, should pass judgment upon your class and
+call it vulgar."
+
+She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body shivered
+with recurrent nervousness.  He waited for a time for her to speak, and
+then went on.
+
+"And now you want to renew our love.  You want us to be married.  You
+want me.  And yet, listen--if my books had not been noticed, I'd
+nevertheless have been just what I am now.  And you would have stayed
+away.  It is all those damned books--"
+
+"Don't swear," she interrupted.
+
+Her reproof startled him.  He broke into a harsh laugh.
+
+"That's it," he said, "at a high moment, when what seems your life's
+happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same old way--afraid
+of life and a healthy oath."
+
+She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her act,
+and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was consequently
+resentful.  They sat in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately
+and he pondering upon his love which had departed.  He knew, now, that he
+had not really loved her.  It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, an
+ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of
+his love-poems.  The real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings
+and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind, he
+had never loved.
+
+She suddenly began to speak.
+
+"I know that much you have said is so.  I have been afraid of life.  I
+did not love you well enough.  I have learned to love better.  I love you
+for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by which you have
+become.  I love you for the ways wherein you differ from what you call my
+class, for your beliefs which I do not understand but which I know I can
+come to understand.  I shall devote myself to understanding them.  And
+even your smoking and your swearing--they are part of you and I will love
+you for them, too.  I can still learn.  In the last ten minutes I have
+learned much.  That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have
+already learned.  Oh, Martin!--"
+
+She was sobbing and nestling close against him.
+
+For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy, and she
+acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening face.
+
+"It is too late," he said.  He remembered Lizzie's words.  "I am a sick
+man--oh, not my body.  It is my soul, my brain.  I seem to have lost all
+values.  I care for nothing.  If you had been this way a few months ago,
+it would have been different.  It is too late, now."
+
+"It is not too late," she cried.  "I will show you.  I will prove to you
+that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and all
+that is dearest to me.  All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will
+flout.  I am no longer afraid of life.  I will leave my father and
+mother, and let my name become a by-word with my friends.  I will come to
+you here and now, in free love if you will, and I will be proud and glad
+to be with you.  If I have been a traitor to love, I will now, for love's
+sake, be a traitor to all that made that earlier treason."
+
+She stood before him, with shining eyes.
+
+"I am waiting, Martin," she whispered, "waiting for you to accept me.
+Look at me."
+
+It was splendid, he thought, looking at her.  She had redeemed herself
+for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman, superior to
+the iron rule of bourgeois convention.  It was splendid, magnificent,
+desperate.  And yet, what was the matter with him?  He was not thrilled
+nor stirred by what she had done.  It was splendid and magnificent only
+intellectually.  In what should have been a moment of fire, he coldly
+appraised her.  His heart was untouched.  He was unaware of any desire
+for her.  Again he remembered Lizzie's words.
+
+"I am sick, very sick," he said with a despairing gesture.  "How sick I
+did not know till now.  Something has gone out of me.  I have always been
+unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life.  Life has
+so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything.  If there were
+room, I should want you, now.  You see how sick I am."
+
+He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child, crying,
+that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate through the
+tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the
+presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses of vegetation, shot
+through hotly with sunshine that took form and blazed against this
+background of his eyelids.  It was not restful, that green foliage.  The
+sunlight was too raw and glaring.  It hurt him to look at it, and yet he
+looked, he knew not why.
+
+He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob.  Ruth was
+at the door.
+
+"How shall I get out?" she questioned tearfully.  "I am afraid."
+
+"Oh, forgive me," he cried, springing to his feet.  "I'm not myself, you
+know.  I forgot you were here."  He put his hand to his head.  "You see,
+I'm not just right.  I'll take you home.  We can go out by the servants'
+entrance.  No one will see us.  Pull down that veil and everything will
+be all right."
+
+She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the narrow
+stairs.
+
+"I am safe now," she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at the same
+time starting to take her hand from his arm.
+
+"No, no, I'll see you home," he answered.
+
+"No, please don't," she objected.  "It is unnecessary."
+
+Again she started to remove her hand.  He felt a momentary curiosity.  Now
+that she was out of danger she was afraid.  She was in almost a panic to
+be quit of him.  He could see no reason for it and attributed it to her
+nervousness.  So he restrained her withdrawing hand and started to walk
+on with her.  Halfway down the block, he saw a man in a long overcoat
+shrink back into a doorway.  He shot a glance in as he passed by, and,
+despite the high turned-up collar, he was certain that he recognized
+Ruth's brother, Norman.
+
+During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversation.  She was
+stunned.  He was apathetic.  Once, he mentioned that he was going away,
+back to the South Seas, and, once, she asked him to forgive her having
+come to him.  And that was all.  The parting at her door was
+conventional.  They shook hands, said good night, and he lifted his hat.
+The door swung shut, and he lighted a cigarette and turned back for his
+hotel.  When he came to the doorway into which he had seen Norman shrink,
+he stopped and looked in in a speculative humor.
+
+"She lied," he said aloud.  "She made believe to me that she had dared
+greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought her was
+waiting to take her back."  He burst into laughter.  "Oh, these
+bourgeois!  When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with his sister.
+When I have a bank account, he brings her to me."
+
+As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same direction,
+begged him over his shoulder.
+
+"Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?" were the words.
+
+But it was the voice that made Martin turn around.  The next instant he
+had Joe by the hand.
+
+"D'ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?" the other was
+saying.  "I said then we'd meet again.  I felt it in my bones.  An' here
+we are."
+
+"You're looking good," Martin said admiringly, "and you've put on
+weight."
+
+"I sure have."  Joe's face was beaming.  "I never knew what it was to
+live till I hit hoboin'.  I'm thirty pounds heavier an' feel tiptop all
+the time.  Why, I was worked to skin an' bone in them old days.  Hoboin'
+sure agrees with me."
+
+"But you're looking for a bed just the same," Martin chided, "and it's a
+cold night."
+
+"Huh?  Lookin' for a bed?"  Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket and
+brought it out filled with small change.  "That beats hard graft," he
+exulted.  "You just looked good; that's why I battered you."
+
+Martin laughed and gave in.
+
+"You've several full-sized drunks right there," he insinuated.
+
+Joe slid the money back into his pocket.
+
+"Not in mine," he announced.  "No gettin' oryide for me, though there
+ain't nothin' to stop me except I don't want to.  I've ben drunk once
+since I seen you last, an' then it was unexpected, bein' on an empty
+stomach.  When I work like a beast, I drink like a beast.  When I live
+like a man, I drink like a man--a jolt now an' again when I feel like it,
+an' that's all."
+
+Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to the hotel.  He
+paused in the office to look up steamer sailings.  The Mariposa sailed
+for Tahiti in five days.
+
+"Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me," he told the
+clerk.  "No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the weather-side,--the
+port-side, remember that, the port-side.  You'd better write it down."
+
+Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently as a
+child.  The occurrences of the evening had made no impression on him.  His
+mind was dead to impressions.  The glow of warmth with which he met Joe
+had been most fleeting.  The succeeding minute he had been bothered by
+the ex-laundryman's presence and by the compulsion of conversation.  That
+in five more days he sailed for his loved South Seas meant nothing to
+him.  So he closed his eyes and slept normally and comfortably for eight
+uninterrupted hours.  He was not restless.  He did not change his
+position, nor did he dream.  Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each
+day that he awoke, he awoke with regret.  Life worried and bored him, and
+time was a vexation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+
+"Say, Joe," was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next morning,
+"there's a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street.  He's made a pot of
+money, and he's going back to France.  It's a dandy, well-appointed,
+small steam laundry.  There's a start for you if you want to settle down.
+Here, take this; buy some clothes with it and be at this man's office by
+ten o'clock.  He looked up the laundry for me, and he'll take you out and
+show you around.  If you like it, and think it is worth the price--twelve
+thousand--let me know and it is yours.  Now run along.  I'm busy.  I'll
+see you later."
+
+"Now look here, Mart," the other said slowly, with kindling anger, "I
+come here this mornin' to see you.  Savve?  I didn't come here to get no
+laundry.  I come a here for a talk for old friends' sake, and you shove a
+laundry at me.  I tell you, what you can do.  You can take that laundry
+an' go to hell."
+
+He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him around.
+
+"Now look here, Joe," he said; "if you act that way, I'll punch your
+head.  An for old friends' sake I'll punch it hard.  Savve?--you will,
+will you?"
+
+Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and
+writhing out of the advantage of the other's hold.  They reeled about the
+room, locked in each other's arms, and came down with a crash across the
+splintered wreckage of a wicker chair.  Joe was underneath, with arms
+spread out and held and with Martin's knee on his chest.  He was panting
+and gasping for breath when Martin released him.
+
+"Now we'll talk a moment," Martin said.  "You can't get fresh with me.  I
+want that laundry business finished first of all.  Then you can come back
+and we'll talk for old sake's sake.  I told you I was busy.  Look at
+that."
+
+A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of letters
+and magazines.
+
+"How can I wade through that and talk with you?  You go and fix up that
+laundry, and then we'll get together."
+
+"All right," Joe admitted reluctantly.  "I thought you was turnin' me
+down, but I guess I was mistaken.  But you can't lick me, Mart, in a
+stand-up fight.  I've got the reach on you."
+
+"We'll put on the gloves sometime and see," Martin said with a smile.
+
+"Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going."  Joe extended his arm.  "You
+see that reach?  It'll make you go a few."
+
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the
+laundryman.  He was becoming anti-social.  Daily he found it a severer
+strain to be decent with people.  Their presence perturbed him, and the
+effort of conversation irritated him.  They made him restless, and no
+sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses
+to get rid of them.
+
+He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in
+his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-formed thoughts
+occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at wide
+intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.
+
+He roused himself and began glancing through his mail.  There were a
+dozen requests for autographs--he knew them at sight; there were
+professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging
+from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who
+demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow
+sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to purchase the Peninsula of
+Lower California for the purpose of communist colonization.  There were
+letters from women seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for
+enclosed was her receipt for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her good faith
+and as proof of her respectability.
+
+Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters, the
+former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their knees for
+his books--his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept all he possessed
+in pawn for so many dreary months in order to fund them in postage.  There
+were unexpected checks for English serial rights and for advance payments
+on foreign translations.  His English agent announced the sale of German
+translation rights in three of his books, and informed him that Swedish
+editions, from which he could expect nothing because Sweden was not a
+party to the Berne Convention, were already on the market.  Then there
+was a nominal request for his permission for a Russian translation, that
+country being likewise outside the Berne Convention.
+
+He turned to the huge bundle of clippings which had come in from his
+press bureau, and read about himself and his vogue, which had become a
+furore.  All his creative output had been flung to the public in one
+magnificent sweep.  That seemed to account for it.  He had taken the
+public off its feet, the way Kipling had, that time when he lay near to
+death and all the mob, animated by a mob-mind thought, began suddenly to
+read him.  Martin remembered how that same world-mob, having read him and
+acclaimed him and not understood him in the least, had, abruptly, a few
+months later, flung itself upon him and torn him to pieces.  Martin
+grinned at the thought.  Who was he that he should not be similarly
+treated in a few more months?  Well, he would fool the mob.  He would be
+away, in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls and
+copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and bonitas,
+hunting wild goats among the cliffs of the valley that lay next to the
+valley of Taiohae.
+
+In the moment of that thought the desperateness of his situation dawned
+upon him.  He saw, cleared eyed, that he was in the Valley of the Shadow.
+All the life that was in him was fading, fainting, making toward death.
+
+He realized how much he slept, and how much he desired to sleep.  Of old,
+he had hated sleep.  It had robbed him of precious moments of living.
+Four hours of sleep in the twenty-four had meant being robbed of four
+hours of life.  How he had grudged sleep!  Now it was life he grudged.
+Life was not good; its taste in his mouth was without tang, and bitter.
+This was his peril.  Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way
+toward ceasing.  Some remote instinct for preservation stirred in him,
+and he knew he must get away.  He glanced about the room, and the thought
+of packing was burdensome.  Perhaps it would be better to leave that to
+the last.  In the meantime he might be getting an outfit.
+
+He put on his hat and went out, stopping in at a gun-store, where he
+spent the remainder of the morning buying automatic rifles, ammunition,
+and fishing tackle.  Fashions changed in trading, and he knew he would
+have to wait till he reached Tahiti before ordering his trade-goods.  They
+could come up from Australia, anyway.  This solution was a source of
+pleasure.  He had avoided doing something, and the doing of anything just
+now was unpleasant.  He went back to the hotel gladly, with a feeling of
+satisfaction in that the comfortable Morris chair was waiting for him;
+and he groaned inwardly, on entering his room, at sight of Joe in the
+Morris chair.
+
+Joe was delighted with the laundry.  Everything was settled, and he would
+enter into possession next day.  Martin lay on the bed, with closed eyes,
+while the other talked on.  Martin's thoughts were far away--so far away
+that he was rarely aware that he was thinking.  It was only by an effort
+that he occasionally responded.  And yet this was Joe, whom he had always
+liked.  But Joe was too keen with life.  The boisterous impact of it on
+Martin's jaded mind was a hurt.  It was an aching probe to his tired
+sensitiveness.  When Joe reminded him that sometime in the future they
+were going to put on the gloves together, he could almost have screamed.
+
+"Remember, Joe, you're to run the laundry according to those old rules
+you used to lay down at Shelly Hot Springs," he said.  "No overworking.
+No working at night.  And no children at the mangles.  No children
+anywhere.  And a fair wage."
+
+Joe nodded and pulled out a note-book.
+
+"Look at here.  I was workin' out them rules before breakfast this A.M.
+What d'ye think of them?"
+
+He read them aloud, and Martin approved, worrying at the same time as to
+when Joe would take himself off.
+
+It was late afternoon when he awoke.  Slowly the fact of life came back
+to him.  He glanced about the room.  Joe had evidently stolen away after
+he had dozed off.  That was considerate of Joe, he thought.  Then he
+closed his eyes and slept again.
+
+In the days that followed Joe was too busy organizing and taking hold of
+the laundry to bother him much; and it was not until the day before
+sailing that the newspapers made the announcement that he had taken
+passage on the Mariposa.  Once, when the instinct of preservation
+fluttered, he went to a doctor and underwent a searching physical
+examination.  Nothing could be found the matter with him.  His heart and
+lungs were pronounced magnificent.  Every organ, so far as the doctor
+could know, was normal and was working normally.
+
+"There is nothing the matter with you, Mr. Eden," he said, "positively
+nothing the matter with you.  You are in the pink of condition.  Candidly,
+I envy you your health.  It is superb.  Look at that chest.  There, and
+in your stomach, lies the secret of your remarkable constitution.
+Physically, you are a man in a thousand--in ten thousand.  Barring
+accidents, you should live to be a hundred."
+
+And Martin knew that Lizzie's diagnosis had been correct.  Physically he
+was all right.  It was his "think-machine" that had gone wrong, and there
+was no cure for that except to get away to the South Seas.  The trouble
+was that now, on the verge of departure, he had no desire to go.  The
+South Seas charmed him no more than did bourgeois civilization.  There
+was no zest in the thought of departure, while the act of departure
+appalled him as a weariness of the flesh.  He would have felt better if
+he were already on board and gone.
+
+The last day was a sore trial.  Having read of his sailing in the morning
+papers, Bernard Higginbotham, Gertrude, and all the family came to say
+good-by, as did Hermann von Schmidt and Marian.  Then there was business
+to be transacted, bills to be paid, and everlasting reporters to be
+endured.  He said good-by to Lizzie Connolly, abruptly, at the entrance
+to night school, and hurried away.  At the hotel he found Joe, too busy
+all day with the laundry to have come to him earlier.  It was the last
+straw, but Martin gripped the arms of his chair and talked and listened
+for half an hour.
+
+"You know, Joe," he said, "that you are not tied down to that laundry.
+There are no strings on it.  You can sell it any time and blow the money.
+Any time you get sick of it and want to hit the road, just pull out.  Do
+what will make you the happiest."
+
+Joe shook his head.
+
+"No more road in mine, thank you kindly.  Hoboin's all right, exceptin'
+for one thing--the girls.  I can't help it, but I'm a ladies' man.  I
+can't get along without 'em, and you've got to get along without 'em when
+you're hoboin'.  The times I've passed by houses where dances an' parties
+was goin' on, an' heard the women laugh, an' saw their white dresses and
+smiling faces through the windows--Gee!  I tell you them moments was
+plain hell.  I like dancin' an' picnics, an' walking in the moonlight,
+an' all the rest too well.  Me for the laundry, and a good front, with
+big iron dollars clinkin' in my jeans.  I seen a girl already, just
+yesterday, and, d'ye know, I'm feelin' already I'd just as soon marry her
+as not.  I've ben whistlin' all day at the thought of it.  She's a beaut,
+with the kindest eyes and softest voice you ever heard.  Me for her, you
+can stack on that.  Say, why don't you get married with all this money to
+burn?  You could get the finest girl in the land."
+
+Martin shook his head with a smile, but in his secret heart he was
+wondering why any man wanted to marry.  It seemed an amazing and
+incomprehensible thing.
+
+From the deck of the Mariposa, at the sailing hour, he saw Lizzie
+Connolly hiding in the skirts of the crowd on the wharf.  Take her with
+you, came the thought.  It is easy to be kind.  She will be supremely
+happy.  It was almost a temptation one moment, and the succeeding moment
+it became a terror.  He was in a panic at the thought of it.  His tired
+soul cried out in protest.  He turned away from the rail with a groan,
+muttering, "Man, you are too sick, you are too sick."
+
+He fled to his stateroom, where he lurked until the steamer was clear of
+the dock.  In the dining saloon, at luncheon, he found himself in the
+place of honor, at the captain's right; and he was not long in
+discovering that he was the great man on board.  But no more
+unsatisfactory great man ever sailed on a ship.  He spent the afternoon
+in a deck-chair, with closed eyes, dozing brokenly most of the time, and
+in the evening went early to bed.
+
+After the second day, recovered from seasickness, the full passenger list
+was in evidence, and the more he saw of the passengers the more he
+disliked them.  Yet he knew that he did them injustice.  They were good
+and kindly people, he forced himself to acknowledge, and in the moment of
+acknowledgment he qualified--good and kindly like all the bourgeoisie,
+with all the psychological cramp and intellectual futility of their kind,
+they bored him when they talked with him, their little superficial minds
+were so filled with emptiness; while the boisterous high spirits and the
+excessive energy of the younger people shocked him.  They were never
+quiet, ceaselessly playing deck-quoits, tossing rings, promenading, or
+rushing to the rail with loud cries to watch the leaping porpoises and
+the first schools of flying fish.
+
+He slept much.  After breakfast he sought his deck-chair with a magazine
+he never finished.  The printed pages tired him.  He puzzled that men
+found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair.  When
+the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he must awaken.
+There was no satisfaction in being awake.
+
+Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and went forward into
+the forecastle with the sailors.  But the breed of sailors seemed to have
+changed since the days he had lived in the forecastle.  He could find no
+kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures.  He was in
+despair.  Up above nobody had wanted Martin Eden for his own sake, and he
+could not go back to those of his own class who had wanted him in the
+past.  He did not want them.  He could not stand them any more than he
+could stand the stupid first-cabin passengers and the riotous young
+people.
+
+Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a
+sick person.  During every conscious moment life blazed in a raw glare
+around him and upon him.  It hurt.  It hurt intolerably.  It was the
+first time in his life that Martin had travelled first class.  On ships
+at sea he had always been in the forecastle, the steerage, or in the
+black depths of the coal-hold, passing coal.  In those days, climbing up
+the iron ladders out the pit of stifling heat, he had often caught
+glimpses of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing but enjoy
+themselves, under awnings spread to keep the sun and wind away from them,
+with subservient stewards taking care of their every want and whim, and
+it had seemed to him that the realm in which they moved and had their
+being was nothing else than paradise.  Well, here he was, the great man
+on board, in the midmost centre of it, sitting at the captain's right
+hand, and yet vainly harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest
+of the Paradise he had lost.  He had found no new one, and now he could
+not find the old one.
+
+He strove to stir himself and find something to interest him.  He
+ventured the petty officers' mess, and was glad to get away.  He talked
+with a quartermaster off duty, an intelligent man who promptly prodded
+him with the socialist propaganda and forced into his hands a bunch of
+leaflets and pamphlets.  He listened to the man expounding the
+slave-morality, and as he listened, he thought languidly of his own
+Nietzsche philosophy.  But what was it worth, after all?  He remembered
+one of Nietzsche's mad utterances wherein that madman had doubted truth.
+And who was to say?  Perhaps Nietzsche had been right.  Perhaps there was
+no truth in anything, no truth in truth--no such thing as truth.  But his
+mind wearied quickly, and he was content to go back to his chair and
+doze.
+
+Miserable as he was on the steamer, a new misery came upon him.  What
+when the steamer reached Tahiti?  He would have to go ashore.  He would
+have to order his trade-goods, to find a passage on a schooner to the
+Marquesas, to do a thousand and one things that were awful to
+contemplate.  Whenever he steeled himself deliberately to think, he could
+see the desperate peril in which he stood.  In all truth, he was in the
+Valley of the Shadow, and his danger lay in that he was not afraid.  If
+he were only afraid, he would make toward life.  Being unafraid, he was
+drifting deeper into the shadow.  He found no delight in the old familiar
+things of life.  The Mariposa was now in the northeast trades, and this
+wine of wind, surging against him, irritated him.  He had his chair moved
+to escape the embrace of this lusty comrade of old days and nights.
+
+The day the Mariposa entered the doldrums, Martin was more miserable than
+ever.  He could no longer sleep.  He was soaked with sleep, and perforce
+he must now stay awake and endure the white glare of life.  He moved
+about restlessly.  The air was sticky and humid, and the rain-squalls
+were unrefreshing.  He ached with life.  He walked around the deck until
+that hurt too much, then sat in his chair until he was compelled to walk
+again.  He forced himself at last to finish the magazine, and from the
+steamer library he culled several volumes of poetry.  But they could not
+hold him, and once more he took to walking.
+
+He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him, for when
+he went below, he could not sleep.  This surcease from life had failed
+him.  It was too much.  He turned on the electric light and tried to
+read.  One of the volumes was a Swinburne.  He lay in bed, glancing
+through its pages, until suddenly he became aware that he was reading
+with interest.  He finished the stanza, attempted to read on, then came
+back to it.  He rested the book face downward on his breast and fell to
+thinking.  That was it.  The very thing.  Strange that it had never come
+to him before.  That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting that
+way all the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the happy way
+out.  He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him.  He glanced at the
+open port-hole.  Yes, it was large enough.  For the first time in weeks
+he felt happy.  At last he had discovered the cure of his ill.  He picked
+up the book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-
+
+   "'From too much love of living,
+   From hope and fear set free,
+   We thank with brief thanksgiving
+   Whatever gods may be
+   That no life lives forever;
+   That dead men rise up never;
+   That even the weariest river
+   Winds somewhere safe to sea.'"
+
+He looked again at the open port.  Swinburne had furnished the key.  Life
+was ill, or, rather, it had become ill--an unbearable thing.  "That dead
+men rise up never!"  That line stirred him with a profound feeling of
+gratitude.  It was the one beneficent thing in the universe.  When life
+became an aching weariness, death was ready to soothe away to everlasting
+sleep.  But what was he waiting for?  It was time to go.
+
+He arose and thrust his head out the port-hole, looking down into the
+milky wash.  The Mariposa was deeply loaded, and, hanging by his hands,
+his feet would be in the water.  He could slip in noiselessly.  No one
+would hear.  A smother of spray dashed up, wetting his face.  It tasted
+salt on his lips, and the taste was good.  He wondered if he ought to
+write a swan-song, but laughed the thought away.  There was no time.  He
+was too impatient to be gone.
+
+Turning off the light in his room so that it might not betray him, he
+went out the port-hole feet first.  His shoulders stuck, and he forced
+himself back so as to try it with one arm down by his side.  A roll of
+the steamer aided him, and he was through, hanging by his hands.  When
+his feet touched the sea, he let go.  He was in a milky froth of water.
+The side of the Mariposa rushed past him like a dark wall, broken here
+and there by lighted ports.  She was certainly making time.  Almost
+before he knew it, he was astern, swimming gently on the foam-crackling
+surface.
+
+A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed aloud.  It had taken a
+piece out, and the sting of it reminded him of why he was there.  In the
+work to do he had forgotten the purpose of it.  The lights of the
+Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming
+confidently, as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land
+a thousand miles or so away.
+
+It was the automatic instinct to live.  He ceased swimming, but the
+moment he felt the water rising above his mouth the hands struck out
+sharply with a lifting movement.  The will to live, was his thought, and
+the thought was accompanied by a sneer.  Well, he had will,--ay, will
+strong enough that with one last exertion it could destroy itself and
+cease to be.
+
+He changed his position to a vertical one.  He glanced up at the quiet
+stars, at the same time emptying his lungs of air.  With swift, vigorous
+propulsion of hands and feet, he lifted his shoulders and half his chest
+out of water.  This was to gain impetus for the descent.  Then he let
+himself go and sank without movement, a white statue, into the sea.  He
+breathed in the water deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a man
+taking an anaesthetic.  When he strangled, quite involuntarily his arms
+and legs clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and into the
+clear sight of the stars.
+
+The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly endeavoring not to
+breathe the air into his bursting lungs.  Well, he would have to try a
+new way.  He filled his lungs with air, filled them full.  This supply
+would take him far down.  He turned over and went down head first,
+swimming with all his strength and all his will.  Deeper and deeper he
+went.  His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent
+trails of the darting bonita.  As he swam, he hoped that they would not
+strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will.  But they did
+not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last kindness of
+life.
+
+Down, down, he swam till his arms and leg grew tired and hardly moved.  He
+knew that he was deep.  The pressure on his ear-drums was a pain, and
+there was a buzzing in his head.  His endurance was faltering, but he
+compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped
+and the air drove from his lungs in a great explosive rush.  The bubbles
+rubbed and bounded like tiny balloons against his cheeks and eyes as they
+took their upward flight.  Then came pain and strangulation.  This hurt
+was not death, was the thought that oscillated through his reeling
+consciousness.  Death did not hurt.  It was life, the pangs of life, this
+awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him.
+
+His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically
+and feebly.  But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them
+beat and churn.  He was too deep down.  They could never bring him to the
+surface.  He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision.  Colors
+and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him.  What was
+that?  It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain--a flashing,
+bright white light.  It flashed swifter and swifter.  There was a long
+rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and
+interminable stairway.  And somewhere at the bottom he fell into
+darkness.  That much he knew.  He had fallen into darkness.  And at the
+instant he knew, he ceased to know.
+
+
+
+
+
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diff --git a/old/old/1056.zip b/old/old/1056.zip
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+by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions,
+all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a
+copyright notice is included.  Therefore, we do NOT keep these books
+in compliance with any particular paper edition, usually otherwise.
+
+
+
+
+
+Martin Eden
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+
+The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a
+young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap.  He wore rough clothes
+that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the
+spacious hall in which he found himself.  He did not know what to
+do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the
+other took it from him.  The act was done quietly and naturally,
+and the awkward young fellow appreciated it.  "He understands," was
+his thought.  "He'll see me through all right."
+
+He walked at the other's heels with a swing to his shoulders, and
+his legs spread unwittingly, as if the level floors were tilting up
+and sinking down to the heave and lunge of the sea.  The wide rooms
+seemed too narrow for his rolling gait, and to himself he was in
+terror lest his broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or
+sweep the bric-a-brac from the low mantel.  He recoiled from side
+to side between the various objects and multiplied the hazards that
+in reality lodged only in his mind.  Between a grand piano and a
+centre-table piled high with books was space for a half a dozen to
+walk abreast, yet he essayed it with trepidation.  His heavy arms
+hung loosely at his sides.  He did not know what to do with those
+arms and hands, and when, to his excited vision, one arm seemed
+liable to brush against the books on the table, he lurched away
+like a frightened horse, barely missing the piano stool.  He
+watched the easy walk of the other in front of him, and for the
+first time realized that his walk was different from that of other
+men.  He experienced a momentary pang of shame that he should walk
+so uncouthly.  The sweat burst through the skin of his forehead in
+tiny beads, and he paused and mopped his bronzed face with his
+handkerchief.
+
+"Hold on, Arthur, my boy," he said, attempting to mask his anxiety
+with facetious utterance.  "This is too much all at once for yours
+truly.  Give me a chance to get my nerve.  You know I didn't want
+to come, an' I guess your fam'ly ain't hankerin' to see me
+neither."
+
+"That's all right," was the reassuring answer.  "You mustn't be
+frightened at us.  We're just homely people - Hello, there's a
+letter for me."
+
+He stepped back to the table, tore open the envelope, and began to
+read, giving the stranger an opportunity to recover himself.  And
+the stranger understood and appreciated.  His was the gift of
+sympathy, understanding; and beneath his alarmed exterior that
+sympathetic process went on.  He mopped his forehead dry and
+glanced about him with a controlled face, though in the eyes there
+was an expression such as wild animals betray when they fear the
+trap.  He was surrounded by the unknown, apprehensive of what might
+happen, ignorant of what he should do, aware that he walked and
+bore himself awkwardly, fearful that every attribute and power of
+him was similarly afflicted.  He was keenly sensitive, hopelessly
+self-conscious, and the amused glance that the other stole privily
+at him over the top of the letter burned into him like a dagger-
+thrust.  He saw the glance, but he gave no sign, for among the
+things he had learned was discipline.  Also, that dagger-thrust
+went to his pride.  He cursed himself for having come, and at the
+same time resolved that, happen what would, having come, he would
+carry it through.  The lines of his face hardened, and into his
+eyes came a fighting light.  He looked about more unconcernedly,
+sharply observant, every detail of the pretty interior registering
+itself on his brain.  His eyes were wide apart; nothing in their
+field of vision escaped; and as they drank in the beauty before
+them the fighting light died out and a warm glow took its place.
+He was responsive to beauty, and here was cause to respond.
+
+An oil painting caught and held him.  A heavy surf thundered and
+burst over an outjutting rock; lowering storm-clouds covered the
+sky; and, outside the line of surf, a pilot-schooner, close-hauled,
+heeled over till every detail of her deck was visible, was surging
+along against a stormy sunset sky.  There was beauty, and it drew
+him irresistibly.  He forgot his awkward walk and came closer to
+the painting, very close.  The beauty faded out of the canvas.  His
+face expressed his bepuzzlement.  He stared at what seemed a
+careless daub of paint, then stepped away.  Immediately all the
+beauty flashed back into the canvas.  "A trick picture," was his
+thought, as he dismissed it, though in the midst of the
+multitudinous impressions he was receiving he found time to feel a
+prod of indignation that so much beauty should be sacrificed to
+make a trick.  He did not know painting.  He had been brought up on
+chromos and lithographs that were always definite and sharp, near
+or far.  He had seen oil paintings, it was true, in the show
+windows of shops, but the glass of the windows had prevented his
+eager eyes from approaching too near.
+
+He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and saw the
+books on the table.  Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a
+yearning as promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a
+starving man at sight of food.  An impulsive stride, with one lurch
+to right and left of the shoulders, brought him to the table, where
+he began affectionately handling the books.  He glanced at the
+titles and the authors' names, read fragments of text, caressing
+the volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once, recognized a book
+he had read.  For the rest, they were strange books and strange
+authors.  He chanced upon a volume of Swinburne and began reading
+steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face glowing.  Twice he
+closed the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the
+author.  Swinburne! he would remember that name.  That fellow had
+eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flashing light.  But who
+was Swinburne?  Was he dead a hundred years or so, like most of the
+poets?  Or was he alive still, and writing?  He turned to the
+title-page . . . yes, he had written other books; well, he would go
+to the free library the first thing in the morning and try to get
+hold of some of Swinburne's stuff.  He went back to the text and
+lost himself.  He did not notice that a young woman had entered the
+room.  The first he knew was when he heard Arthur's voice saying:-
+
+"Ruth, this is Mr. Eden."
+
+The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he turned he was
+thrilling to the first new impression, which was not of the girl,
+but of her brother's words.  Under that muscled body of his he was
+a mass of quivering sensibilities.  At the slightest impact of the
+outside world upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and
+emotions leapt and played like lambent flame.  He was
+extraordinarily receptive and responsive, while his imagination,
+pitched high, was ever at work establishing relations of likeness
+and difference.  "Mr. Eden," was what he had thrilled to - he who
+had been called "Eden," or "Martin Eden," or just "Martin," all his
+life.  And "MISTER!"  It was certainly going some, was his internal
+comment.  His mind seemed to turn, on the instant, into a vast
+camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness endless
+pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and
+beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets,
+wherein the thread of association was the fashion in which he had
+been addressed in those various situations.
+
+And then he turned and saw the girl.  The phantasmagoria of his
+brain vanished at sight of her.  She was a pale, ethereal creature,
+with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair.  He did
+not know how she was dressed, except that the dress was as
+wonderful as she.  He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a
+slender stem.  No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such
+sublimated beauty was not of the earth.  Or perhaps the books were
+right, and there were many such as she in the upper walks of life.
+She might well be sung by that chap, Swinburne.  Perhaps he had had
+somebody like her in mind when he painted that girl, Iseult, in the
+book there on the table.  All this plethora of sight, and feeling,
+and thought occurred on the instant.  There was no pause of the
+realities wherein he moved.  He saw her hand coming out to his, and
+she looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly,
+like a man.  The women he had known did not shake hands that way.
+For that matter, most of them did not shake hands at all.  A flood
+of associations, visions of various ways he had made the
+acquaintance of women, rushed into his mind and threatened to swamp
+it.  But he shook them aside and looked at her.  Never had he seen
+such a woman.  The women he had known!  Immediately, beside her, on
+either hand, ranged the women he had known.  For an eternal second
+he stood in the midst of a portrait gallery, wherein she occupied
+the central place, while about her were limned many women, all to
+be weighed and measured by a fleeting glance, herself the unit of
+weight and measure.  He saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls
+of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the
+south of Market.  There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy
+cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico.  These, in turn, were
+crowded out by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on
+wooden clogs; by Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with
+degeneracy; by full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned
+and brown-skinned.  All these were blotted out by a grotesque and
+terrible nightmare brood - frowsy, shuffling creatures from the
+pavements of Whitechapel, gin-bloated hags of the stews, and all
+the vast hell's following of harpies, vile-mouthed and filthy, that
+under the guise of monstrous female form prey upon sailors, the
+scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit.
+
+"Won't you sit down, Mr. Eden?" the girl was saying.  "I have been
+looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us.  It was
+brave of you - "
+
+He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at
+all, what he had done, and that any fellow would have done it.  She
+noticed that the hand he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in
+the process of healing, and a glance at the other loose-hanging
+hand showed it to be in the same condition.  Also, with quick,
+critical eye, she noted a scar on his cheek, another that peeped
+out from under the hair of the forehead, and a third that ran down
+and disappeared under the starched collar.  She repressed a smile
+at sight of the red line that marked the chafe of the collar
+against the bronzed neck.  He was evidently unused to stiff
+collars.  Likewise her feminine eye took in the clothes he wore,
+the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the
+shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that
+advertised bulging biceps muscles.
+
+While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at
+all, he was obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair.  He
+found time to admire the ease with which she sat down, then lurched
+toward a chair facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the
+awkward figure he was cutting.  This was a new experience for him.
+All his life, up to then, he had been unaware of being either
+graceful or awkward.  Such thoughts of self had never entered his
+mind.  He sat down gingerly on the edge of the chair, greatly
+worried by his hands.  They were in the way wherever he put them.
+Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his exit with
+longing eyes.  He felt lost, alone there in the room with that pale
+spirit of a woman.  There was no bar-keeper upon whom to call for
+drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a can of beer
+and by means of that social fluid start the amenities of friendship
+flowing.
+
+"You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden," the girl was saying.
+"How did it happen?  I am sure it must have been some adventure."
+
+"A Mexican with a knife, miss," he answered, moistening his parched
+lips and clearing hip throat.  "It was just a fight.  After I got
+the knife away, he tried to bite off my nose."
+
+Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision of that
+hot, starry night at Salina Cruz, the white strip of beach, the
+lights of the sugar steamers in the harbor, the voices of the
+drunken sailors in the distance, the jostling stevedores, the
+flaming passion in the Mexican's face, the glint of the beast-eyes
+in the starlight, the sting of the steel in his neck, and the rush
+of blood, the crowd and the cries, the two bodies, his and the
+Mexican's, locked together, rolling over and over and tearing up
+the sand, and from away off somewhere the mellow tinkling of a
+guitar.  Such was the picture, and he thrilled to the memory of it,
+wondering if the man could paint it who had painted the pilot-
+schooner on the wall.  The white beach, the stars, and the lights
+of the sugar steamers would look great, he thought, and midway on
+the sand the dark group of figures that surrounded the fighters.
+The knife occupied a place in the picture, he decided, and would
+show well, with a sort of gleam, in the light of the stars.  But of
+all this no hint had crept into his speech.  "He tried to bite off
+my nose," he concluded.
+
+"Oh," the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed the
+shock in her sensitive face.
+
+He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment shone faintly
+on his sunburned cheeks, though to him it burned as hotly as when
+his cheeks had been exposed to the open furnace-door in the fire-
+room.  Such sordid things as stabbing affrays were evidently not
+fit subjects for conversation with a lady.  People in the books, in
+her walk of life, did not talk about such things - perhaps they did
+not know about them, either.
+
+There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get
+started.  Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek.
+Even as she asked, he realized that she was making an effort to
+talk his talk, and he resolved to get away from it and talk hers.
+
+"It was just an accident," he said, putting his hand to his cheek.
+"One night, in a calm, with a heavy sea running, the main-boom-lift
+carried away, an' next the tackle.  The lift was wire, an' it was
+threshin' around like a snake.  The whole watch was tryin' to grab
+it, an' I rushed in an' got swatted."
+
+"Oh," she said, this time with an accent of comprehension, though
+secretly his speech had been so much Greek to her and she was
+wondering what a LIFT was and what SWATTED meant.
+
+"This man Swineburne," he began, attempting to put his plan into
+execution and pronouncing the I long.
+
+"Who?"
+
+"Swineburne," he repeated, with the same mispronunciation.  "The
+poet."
+
+"Swinburne," she corrected.
+
+"Yes, that's the chap," he stammered, his cheeks hot again.  "How
+long since he died?"
+
+"Why, I haven't heard that he was dead."  She looked at him
+curiously.  "Where did you make his acquaintance?"
+
+"I never clapped eyes on him," was the reply.  "But I read some of
+his poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come
+in.  How do you like his poetry?"
+
+And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject
+he had suggested.  He felt better, and settled back slightly from
+the edge of the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands,
+as if it might get away from him and buck him to the floor.  He had
+succeeded in making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he
+strove to follow her, marvelling at all the knowledge that was
+stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale
+beauty of her face.  Follow her he did, though bothered by
+unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by critical
+phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but
+that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling.  Here
+was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and
+wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be.  He forgot himself
+and stared at her with hungry eyes.  Here was something to live
+for, to win to, to fight for - ay, and die for.  The books were
+true.  There were such women in the world.  She was one of them.
+She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases
+spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures
+of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman's sake - for a
+pale woman, a flower of gold.  And through the swaying, palpitant
+vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman,
+sitting there and talking of literature and art.  He listened as
+well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of
+the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was
+shining in his eyes.  But she, who knew little of the world of men,
+being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes.  She had never
+had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her.  She
+stumbled and halted in her utterance.  The thread of argument
+slipped from her.  He frightened her, and at the same time it was
+strangely pleasant to be so looked upon.  Her training warned her
+of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her
+instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to
+hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another
+world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line
+of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all
+too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence.  She
+was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she
+was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.
+
+"As I was saying - what was I saying?"  She broke off abruptly and
+laughed merrily at her predicament.
+
+"You was saying that this man Swinburne failed bein' a great poet
+because - an' that was as far as you got, miss," he prompted, while
+to himself he seemed suddenly hungry, and delicious little thrills
+crawled up and down his spine at the sound of her laughter.  Like
+silver, he thought to himself, like tinkling silver bells; and on
+the instant, and for an instant, he was transported to a far land,
+where under pink cherry blossoms, he smoked a cigarette and
+listened to the bells of the peaked pagoda calling straw-sandalled
+devotees to worship.
+
+"Yes, thank you," she said.  "Swinburne fails, when all is said,
+because he is, well, indelicate.  There are many of his poems that
+should never be read.  Every line of the really great poets is
+filled with beautiful truth, and calls to all that is high and
+noble in the human.  Not a line of the great poets can be spared
+without impoverishing the world by that much."
+
+"I thought it was great," he said hesitatingly, "the little I read.
+I had no idea he was such a - a scoundrel.  I guess that crops out
+in his other books."
+
+"There are many lines that could be spared from the book you were
+reading," she said, her voice primly firm and dogmatic.
+
+"I must 'a' missed 'em," he announced.  "What I read was the real
+goods.  It was all lighted up an' shining, an' it shun right into
+me an' lighted me up inside, like the sun or a searchlight.  That's
+the way it landed on me, but I guess I ain't up much on poetry,
+miss."
+
+He broke off lamely.  He was confused, painfully conscious of his
+inarticulateness.  He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what
+he had read, but his speech was inadequate.  He could not express
+what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a
+strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar
+running rigging.  Well, he decided, it was up to him to get
+acquainted in this new world.  He had never seen anything that he
+couldn't get the hang of when he wanted to and it was about time
+for him to want to learn to talk the things that were inside of him
+so that she could understand.  SHE was bulking large on his
+horizon.
+
+"Now Longfellow - " she was saying.
+
+"Yes, I've read 'm," he broke in impulsively, spurred on to exhibit
+and make the most of his little store of book knowledge, desirous
+of showing her that he was not wholly a stupid clod.  "'The Psalm
+of Life,' 'Excelsior,' an' . . . I guess that's all."
+
+She nodded her head and smiled, and he felt, somehow, that her
+smile was tolerant, pitifully tolerant.  He was a fool to attempt
+to make a pretence that way.  That Longfellow chap most likely had
+written countless books of poetry.
+
+"Excuse me, miss, for buttin' in that way.  I guess the real facts
+is that I don't know nothin' much about such things.  It ain't in
+my class.  But I'm goin' to make it in my class."
+
+It sounded like a threat.  His voice was determined, his eyes were
+flashing, the lines of his face had grown harsh.  And to her it
+seemed that the angle of his jaw had changed; its pitch had become
+unpleasantly aggressive.  At the same time a wave of intense
+virility seemed to surge out from him and impinge upon her.
+
+"I think you could make it in - in your class," she finished with a
+laugh.  "You are very strong."
+
+Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, heavy corded,
+almost bull-like, bronzed by the sun, spilling over with rugged
+health and strength.  And though he sat there, blushing and humble,
+again she felt drawn to him.  She was surprised by a wanton thought
+that rushed into her mind.  It seemed to her that if she could lay
+her two hands upon that neck that all its strength and vigor would
+flow out to her.  She was shocked by this thought.  It seemed to
+reveal to her an undreamed depravity in her nature.  Besides,
+strength to her was a gross and brutish thing.  Her ideal of
+masculine beauty had always been slender gracefulness.  Yet the
+thought still persisted.  It bewildered her that she should desire
+to place her hands on that sunburned neck.  In truth, she was far
+from robust, and the need of her body and mind was for strength.
+But she did not know it.  She knew only that no man had ever
+affected her before as this one had, who shocked her from moment to
+moment with his awful grammar.
+
+"Yes, I ain't no invalid," he said.  "When it comes down to hard-
+pan, I can digest scrap-iron.  But just now I've got dyspepsia.
+Most of what you was sayin' I can't digest.  Never trained that
+way, you see.  I like books and poetry, and what time I've had I've
+read 'em, but I've never thought about 'em the way you have.
+That's why I can't talk about 'em.  I'm like a navigator adrift on
+a strange sea without chart or compass.  Now I want to get my
+bearin's.  Mebbe you can put me right.  How did you learn all this
+you've ben talkin'?"
+
+"By going to school, I fancy, and by studying," she answered.
+
+"I went to school when I was a kid," he began to object.
+
+"Yes; but I mean high school, and lectures, and the university."
+
+"You've gone to the university?" he demanded in frank amazement.
+He felt that she had become remoter from him by at least a million
+miles.
+
+"I'm going there now.  I'm taking special courses in English."
+
+He did not know what "English" meant, but he made a mental note of
+that item of ignorance and passed on.
+
+"How long would I have to study before I could go to the
+university?" he asked.
+
+She beamed encouragement upon his desire for knowledge, and said:
+"That depends upon how much studying you have already done.  You
+have never attended high school?  Of course not.  But did you
+finish grammar school?"
+
+"I had two years to run, when I left," he answered.  "But I was
+always honorably promoted at school."
+
+The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he had gripped
+the arms of the chair so savagely that every finger-end was
+stinging.  At the same moment he became aware that a woman was
+entering the room.  He saw the girl leave her chair and trip
+swiftly across the floor to the newcomer.  They kissed each other,
+and, with arms around each other's waists, they advanced toward
+him.  That must be her mother, he thought.  She was a tall, blond
+woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful.  Her gown was what he
+might expect in such a house.  His eyes delighted in the graceful
+lines of it.  She and her dress together reminded him of women on
+the stage.  Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and
+gowns entering the London theatres while he stood and watched and
+the policemen shoved him back into the drizzle beyond the awning.
+Next his mind leaped to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too,
+from the sidewalk, he had seen grand ladies.  Then the city and the
+harbor of Yokohama, in a thousand pictures, began flashing before
+his eyes.  But he swiftly dismissed the kaleidoscope of memory,
+oppressed by the urgent need of the present.  He knew that he must
+stand up to be introduced, and he struggled painfully to his feet,
+where he stood with trousers bagging at the knees, his arms loose-
+hanging and ludicrous, his face set hard for the impending ordeal.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+
+The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.
+Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at
+times seemed impossible.  But at last he had made it, and was
+seated alongside of Her.  The array of knives and forks frightened
+him.  They bristled with unknown perils, and he gazed at them,
+fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across which
+moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates
+sat eating salt beef with sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping
+thick pea-soup out of pannikins by means of battered iron spoons.
+The stench of bad beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, to
+the accompaniment of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads,
+echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters.  He watched them
+eating, and decided that they ate like pigs.  Well, he would be
+careful here.  He would make no noise.  He would keep his mind upon
+it all the time.
+
+He glanced around the table.  Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur's
+brother, Norman.  They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and
+his heart warmed toward them.  How they loved each other, the
+members of this family!  There flashed into his mind the picture of
+her mother, of the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them
+walking toward him with arms entwined.  Not in his world were such
+displays of affection between parents and children made.  It was a
+revelation of the heights of existence that were attained in the
+world above.  It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in this
+small glimpse of that world.  He was moved deeply by appreciation
+of it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness.  He
+had starved for love all his life.  His nature craved love.  It was
+an organic demand of his being.  Yet he had gone without, and
+hardened himself in the process.  He had not known that he needed
+love.  Nor did he know it now.  He merely saw it in operation, and
+thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.
+
+He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there.  It was difficult enough
+getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother,
+Norman.  Arthur he already knew somewhat.  The father would have
+been too much for him, he felt sure.  It seemed to him that he had
+never worked so hard in his life.  The severest toil was child's
+play compared with this.  Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on his
+forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from the exertion of
+doing so many unaccustomed things at once.  He had to eat as he had
+never eaten before, to handle strange tools, to glance
+surreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish each new thing,
+to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him
+and being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a
+yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, aching
+restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life
+whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again straying off
+in speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her.  Also, when
+his secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to any one
+else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in any
+particular occasion, that person's features were seized upon by his
+mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine
+what they were - all in relation to her.  Then he had to talk, to
+hear what was said to him and what was said back and forth, and to
+answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of
+speech that required a constant curb.  And to add confusion to
+confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that
+appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded
+puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution.  He was
+oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls.
+Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they
+would come on and what they looked like.  He had heard of such
+things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next few
+minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings who
+used them - ay, and he would use them himself.  And most important
+of all, far down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was
+the problem of how he should comport himself toward these persons.
+What should his attitude be?  He wrestled continually and anxiously
+with the problem.  There were cowardly suggestions that he should
+make believe, assume a part; and there were still more cowardly
+suggestions that warned him he would fail in such course, that his
+nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that he would make a
+fool of himself.
+
+It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide
+upon his attitude, that he was very quiet.  He did not know that
+his quietness was giving the lie to Arthur's words of the day
+before, when that brother of hers had announced that he was going
+to bring a wild man home to dinner and for them not to be alarmed,
+because they would find him an interesting wild man.  Martin Eden
+could not have found it in him, just then, to believe that her
+brother could be guilty of such treachery - especially when he had
+been the means of getting this particular brother out of an
+unpleasant row.  So he sat at table, perturbed by his own unfitness
+and at the same time charmed by all that went on about him.  For
+the first time he realized that eating was something more than a
+utilitarian function.  He was unaware of what he ate.  It was
+merely food.  He was feasting his love of beauty at this table
+where eating was an aesthetic function.  It was an intellectual
+function, too.  His mind was stirred.  He heard words spoken that
+were meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only in
+books and that no man or woman he had known was of large enough
+mental caliber to pronounce.  When he heard such words dropping
+carelessly from the lips of the members of this marvellous family,
+her family, he thrilled with delight.  The romance, and beauty, and
+high vigor of the books were coming true.  He was in that rare and
+blissful state wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out from the
+crannies of fantasy and become fact.
+
+Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept
+himself in the background, listening, observing, and pleasuring,
+replying in reticent monosyllables, saying, "Yes, miss," and "No,
+miss," to her, and "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," to her mother.
+He curbed the impulse, arising out of his sea-training, to say
+"Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to her brothers.  He felt that it would
+be inappropriate and a confession of inferiority on his part -
+which would never do if he was to win to her.  Also, it was a
+dictate of his pride.  "By God!" he cried to himself, once; "I'm
+just as good as them, and if they do know lots that I don't, I
+could learn 'm a few myself, all the same!"  And the next moment,
+when she or her mother addressed him as "Mr. Eden," his aggressive
+pride was forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with delight.  He
+was a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, at
+dinner, with people he had read about in books.  He was in the
+books himself, adventuring through the printed pages of bound
+volumes.
+
+But while he belied Arthur's description, and appeared a gentle
+lamb rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course
+of action.  He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle
+would never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature.  He
+talked only when he had to, and then his speech was like his walk
+to the table, filled with jerks and halts as he groped in his
+polyglot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew were fit
+but which he feared he could not pronounce, rejecting other words
+he knew would not be understood or would be raw and harsh.  But all
+the time he was oppressed by the consciousness that this
+carefulness of diction was making a booby of him, preventing him
+from expressing what he had in him.  Also, his love of freedom
+chafed against the restriction in much the same way his neck chafed
+against the starched fetter of a collar.  Besides, he was confident
+that he could not keep it up.  He was by nature powerful of thought
+and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent.
+He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that
+struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then
+he forgot himself and where he was, and the old words - the tools
+of speech he knew - slipped out.
+
+Once, he declined something from the servant who interrupted and
+pestered at his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically,
+"Pew!"
+
+On the instant those at the table were keyed up and expectant, the
+servant was smugly pleased, and he was wallowing in mortification.
+But he recovered himself quickly.
+
+"It's the Kanaka for 'finish,'" he explained, "and it just come out
+naturally.  It's spelt p-a-u."
+
+He caught her curious and speculative eyes fixed on his hands, and,
+being in explanatory mood, he said:-
+
+"I just come down the Coast on one of the Pacific mail steamers.
+She was behind time, an' around the Puget Sound ports we worked
+like niggers, storing cargo-mixed freight, if you know what that
+means.  That's how the skin got knocked off."
+
+"Oh, it wasn't that," she hastened to explain, in turn.  "Your
+hands seemed too small for your body."
+
+His cheeks were hot.  He took it as an exposure of another of his
+deficiencies.
+
+"Yes," he said depreciatingly.  "They ain't big enough to stand the
+strain.  I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders.  They
+are too strong, an' when I smash a man on the jaw the hands get
+smashed, too."
+
+He was not happy at what he had said.  He was filled with disgust
+at himself.  He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked
+about things that were not nice.
+
+"It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did - and you a
+stranger," she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though not
+of the reason for it.
+
+He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warm
+surge of gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-worded
+tongue.
+
+"It wasn't nothin' at all," he said.  "Any guy 'ud do it for
+another.  That bunch of hoodlums was lookin' for trouble, an'
+Arthur wasn't botherin' 'em none.  They butted in on 'm, an' then I
+butted in on them an' poked a few.  That's where some of the skin
+off my hands went, along with some of the teeth of the gang.  I
+wouldn't 'a' missed it for anything.  When I seen - "
+
+He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own
+depravity and utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did.
+And while Arthur took up the tale, for the twentieth time, of his
+adventure with the drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how
+Martin Eden had rushed in and rescued him, that individual, with
+frowning brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, and
+wrestled more determinedly with the problem of how he should
+conduct himself toward these people.  He certainly had not
+succeeded so far.  He wasn't of their tribe, and he couldn't talk
+their lingo, was the way he put it to himself.  He couldn't fake
+being their kind.  The masquerade would fail, and besides,
+masquerade was foreign to his nature.  There was no room in him for
+sham or artifice.  Whatever happened, he must be real.  He couldn't
+talk their talk just yet, though in time he would.  Upon that he
+was resolved.  But in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be
+his own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible to
+them and so as not to shook them too much.  And furthermore, he
+wouldn't claim, not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar with
+anything that was unfamiliar.  In pursuance of this decision, when
+the two brothers, talking university shop, had used "trig" several
+times, Martin Eden demanded:-
+
+"What is TRIG?"
+
+"Trignometry," Norman said; "a higher form of math."
+
+"And what is math?" was the next question, which, somehow, brought
+the laugh on Norman.
+
+"Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer.
+
+Martin Eden nodded.  He had caught a glimpse of the apparently
+illimitable vistas of knowledge.  What he saw took on tangibility.
+His abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete
+form.  In the alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematics
+and the whole field of knowledge which they betokened were
+transmuted into so much landscape.  The vistas he saw were vistas
+of green foliage and forest glades, all softly luminous or shot
+through with flashing lights.  In the distance, detail was veiled
+and blurred by a purple haze, but behind this purple haze, he knew,
+was the glamour of the unknown, the lure of romance.  It was like
+wine to him.  Here was adventure, something to do with head and
+hand, a world to conquer - and straightway from the back of his
+consciousness rushed the thought, CONQUERING, TO WIN TO HER, THAT
+LILY-PALE SPIRIT SITTING BESIDE HIM.
+
+The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur,
+who, all evening, had been trying to draw his wild man out.  Martin
+Eden remembered his decision.  For the first time he became
+himself, consciously and deliberately at first, but soon lost in
+the joy of creating in making life as he knew it appear before his
+listeners' eyes.  He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling
+schooner Halcyon when she was captured by a revenue cutter.  He saw
+with wide eyes, and he could tell what he saw.  He brought the
+pulsing sea before them, and the men and the ships upon the sea.
+He communicated his power of vision, till they saw with his eyes
+what he had seen.  He selected from the vast mass of detail with an
+artist's touch, drawing pictures of life that glowed and burned
+with light and color, injecting movement so that his listeners
+surged along with him on the flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm,
+and power.  At times he shocked them with the vividness of the
+narrative and his terms of speech, but beauty always followed fast
+upon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved by humor, by
+interpretations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors' minds.
+
+And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes.
+His fire warmed her.  She wondered if she had been cold all her
+days.  She wanted to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was
+like a volcano spouting forth strength, robustness, and health.
+She felt that she must lean toward him, and resisted by an effort.
+Then, too, there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him.
+She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by toil so that
+the very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh itself, by that
+red chafe of the collar and those bulging muscles.  His roughness
+frightened her; each roughness of speech was an insult to her ear,
+each rough phase of his life an insult to her soul.  And ever and
+again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil
+to have such power over her.  All that was most firmly established
+in her mind was rocking.  His romance and adventure were battering
+at the conventions.  Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life
+was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy,
+to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived
+and pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside.  "Therefore,
+play!" was the cry that rang through her.  "Lean toward him, if so
+you will, and place your two hands upon his neck!"  She wanted to
+cry out at the recklessness of the thought, and in vain she
+appraised her own cleanness and culture and balanced all that she
+was against what he was not.  She glanced about her and saw the
+others gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would have
+despaired had not she seen horror in her mother's eyes - fascinated
+horror, it was true, but none the less horror.  This man from outer
+darkness was evil.  Her mother saw it, and her mother was right.
+She would trust her mother's judgment in this as she had always
+trusted it in all things.  The fire of him was no longer warm, and
+the fear of him was no longer poignant.
+
+Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, aggressively,
+with the vague intent of emphasizing the impassableness of the gulf
+that separated them.  Her music was a club that she swung brutally
+upon his head; and though it stunned him and crushed him down, it
+incited him.  He gazed upon her in awe.  In his mind, as in her
+own, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered his
+ambition to win across it.  But he was too complicated a plexus of
+sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a whole evening, especially
+when there was music.  He was remarkably susceptible to music.  It
+was like strong drink, firing him to audacities of feeling, - a
+drug that laid hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring
+through the sky.  It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with
+beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings.  He did not
+understand the music she played.  It was different from the dance-
+hall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard.  But he
+had caught hints of such music from the books, and he accepted her
+playing largely on faith, patiently waiting, at first, for the
+lifting measures of pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because
+those measures were not long continued.  Just as he caught the
+swing of them and started, his imagination attuned in flight,
+always they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was
+meaningless to him, and that dropped his imagination, an inert
+weight, back to earth.
+
+Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all
+this.  He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the
+message that her hands pronounced upon the keys.  Then he dismissed
+the thought as unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself more
+freely to the music.  The old delightful condition began to be
+induced.  His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh became
+spirit; before his eyes and behind his eyes shone a great glory;
+and then the scene before him vanished and he was away, rocking
+over the world that was to him a very dear world.  The known and
+the unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged his
+vision.  He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod
+market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen.
+The scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had known
+it on warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against the
+southeast trades through long tropic days, sinking palm-tufted
+coral islets in the turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tufted
+coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead.  Swift as thought the
+pictures came and went.  One instant he was astride a broncho and
+flying through the fairy-colored Painted Desert country; the next
+instant he was gazing down through shimmering heat into the whited
+sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing ocean
+where great ice islands towered and glistened in the sun.  He lay
+on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the mellow-
+sounding surf.  The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue
+fires, in the light of which danced the HULA dancers to the
+barbaric love-calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling
+UKULELES and rumbling tom-toms.  It was a sensuous, tropic night.
+In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the
+stars.  Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern
+Cross burned low in the sky.
+
+He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his
+consciousness was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind
+that poured against those strings and set them vibrating with
+memories and dreams.  He did not merely feel.  Sensation invested
+itself in form and color and radiance, and what his imagination
+dared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way.  Past,
+present, and future mingled; and he went on oscillating across the
+broad, warm world, through high adventure and noble deeds to Her -
+ay, and with her, winning her, his arm about her, and carrying her
+on in flight through the empery of his mind.
+
+And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all
+this in his face.  It was a transfigured face, with great shining
+eyes that gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leap
+and pulse of life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit.  She was
+startled.  The raw, stumbling lout was gone.  The ill-fitting
+clothes, battered hands, and sunburned face remained; but these
+seemed the prison-bars through which she saw a great soul looking
+forth, inarticulate and dumb because of those feeble lips that
+would not give it speech.  Only for a flashing moment did she see
+this, then she saw the lout returned, and she laughed at the whim
+of her fancy.  But the impression of that fleeting glimpse
+lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling
+retreat and go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another
+of Browning - she was studying Browning in one of her English
+courses.  He seemed such a boy, as he stood blushing and stammering
+his thanks, that a wave of pity, maternal in its prompting, welled
+up in her.  She did not remember the lout, nor the imprisoned soul,
+nor the man who had stared at her in all masculineness and
+delighted and frightened her.  She saw before her only a boy, who
+was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt like a
+nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and who was saying jerkily:-
+
+"The greatest time of my life.  You see, I ain't used to things. .
+. "  He looked about him helplessly.  "To people and houses like
+this.  It's all new to me, and I like it."
+
+"I hope you'll call again," she said, as he was saying good night
+to her brothers.
+
+He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and
+was gone.
+
+"Well, what do you think of him?" Arthur demanded.
+
+"He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone," she answered.  "How old
+is he?"
+
+"Twenty - almost twenty-one.  I asked him this afternoon.  I didn't
+think he was that young."
+
+And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she
+kissed her brothers goodnight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+
+As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
+pocket.  It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
+tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette.  He
+drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it
+in a long and lingering exhalation.  "By God!" he said aloud, in a
+voice of awe and wonder.  "By God!" he repeated.  And yet again he
+murmured, "By God!"  Then his hand went to his collar, which he
+ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his pocket.  A cold
+drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his
+vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern.  He was only dimly
+aware that it was raining.  He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams
+and reconstructing the scenes just past.
+
+He had met the woman at last - the woman that he had thought little
+about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had
+expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet.  He had sat next
+to her at table.  He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into
+her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit; - but no more
+beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh
+that gave it expression and form.  He did not think of her flesh as
+flesh, - which was new to him; for of the women he had known that
+was the only way he thought.  Her flesh was somehow different.  He
+did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills and
+frailties of bodies.  Her body was more than the garb of her
+spirit.  It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
+crystallization of her divine essence.  This feeling of the divine
+startled him.  It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought.  No
+word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before.
+He had never believed in the divine.  He had always been
+irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their
+immortality of the soul.  There was no life beyond, he had
+contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting.  But
+what he had seen in her eyes was soul - immortal soul that could
+never die.  No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him the
+message of immortality.  But she had.  She had whispered it to him
+the first moment she looked at him.  Her face shimmered before his
+eyes as he walked along, - pale and serious, sweet and sensitive,
+smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and
+pure as he had never dreamed purity could be.  Her purity smote him
+like a blow.  It startled him.  He had known good and bad; but
+purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.
+And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of
+goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal
+life.
+
+And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life.  He was
+not fit to carry water for her - he knew that; it was a miracle of
+luck and a fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be
+with her and talk with her that night.  It was accidental.  There
+was no merit in it.  He did not deserve such fortune.  His mood was
+essentially religious.  He was humble and meek, filled with self-
+disparagement and abasement.  In such frame of mind sinners come to
+the penitent form.  He was convicted of sin.  But as the meek and
+lowly at the penitent form catch splendid glimpses of their future
+lordly existence, so did he catch similar glimpses of the state he
+would gain to by possessing her.  But this possession of her was
+dim and nebulous and totally different from possession as he had
+known it.  Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw himself
+climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her,
+pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her.  It was a soul-
+possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free
+comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought.
+He did not think it.  For that matter, he did not think at all.
+Sensation usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with
+emotions he had never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of
+sensibility where feeling itself was exalted and spiritualized and
+carried beyond the summits of life.
+
+He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud:
+"By God!  By God!"
+
+A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted
+his sailor roll.
+
+"Where did you get it?" the policeman demanded.
+
+Martin Eden came back to earth.  His was a fluid organism, swiftly
+adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks
+and crannies.  With the policeman's hail he was immediately his
+ordinary self, grasping the situation clearly.
+
+"It's a beaut, ain't it?" he laughed back.  "I didn't know I was
+talkin' out loud."
+
+"You'll be singing next," was the policeman's diagnosis.
+
+"No, I won't.  Gimme a match an' I'll catch the next car home."
+
+He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on.  "Now
+wouldn't that rattle you?" he ejaculated under his breath.  "That
+copper thought I was drunk."  He smiled to himself and meditated.
+"I guess I was," he added; "but I didn't think a woman's face'd do
+it."
+
+He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley.  It
+was crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and
+ever and again barking out college yells.  He studied them
+curiously.  They were university boys.  They went to the same
+university that she did, were in her class socially, could know
+her, could see her every day if they wanted to.  He wondered that
+they did not want to, that they had been out having a good time
+instead of being with her that evening, talking with her, sitting
+around her in a worshipful and adoring circle.  His thoughts
+wandered on.  He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a loose-
+lipped mouth.  That fellow was vicious, he decided.  On shipboard
+he would be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler.  He, Martin Eden, was a
+better man than that fellow.  The thought cheered him.  It seemed
+to draw him nearer to Her.  He began comparing himself with the
+students.  He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body
+and felt confident that he was physically their master.  But their
+heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her
+talk, - the thought depressed him.  But what was a brain for? he
+demanded passionately.  What they had done, he could do.  They had
+been studying about life from the books while he had been busy
+living life.  His brain was just as full of knowledge as theirs,
+though it was a different kind of knowledge.  How many of them
+could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout?  His life
+spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and daring,
+hardship and toil.  He remembered his failures and scrapes in the
+process of learning.  He was that much to the good, anyway.  Later
+on they would have to begin living life and going through the mill
+as he had gone.  Very well.  While they were busy with that, he
+could be learning the other side of life from the books.
+
+As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated
+Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story
+building along the front of which ran the proud sign,
+HIGGINBOTHAM'S CASH STORE.  Martin Eden got off at this corner.  He
+stared up for a moment at the sign.  It carried a message to him
+beyond its mere wording.  A personality of smallness and egotism
+and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters
+themselves.  Bernard Higginbotham had married his sister, and he
+knew him well.  He let himself in with a latch-key and climbed the
+stairs to the second floor.  Here lived his brother-in-law.  The
+grocery was below.  There was a smell of stale vegetables in the
+air.  As he groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-
+cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and
+brought up against a door with a resounding bang.  "The pincher,"
+was his thought; "too miserly to burn two cents' worth of gas and
+save his boarders' necks."
+
+He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his
+sister and Bernard Higginbotham.  She was patching a pair of his
+trousers, while his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his
+feet dangling in dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the
+second chair.  He glanced across the top of the paper he was
+reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes.
+Martin Eden never looked at him without experiencing a sense of
+repulsion.  What his sister had seen in the man was beyond him.
+The other affected him as so much vermin, and always aroused in him
+an impulse to crush him under his foot.  "Some day I'll beat the
+face off of him," was the way he often consoled himself for
+enduring the man's existence.  The eyes, weasel-like and cruel,
+were looking at him complainingly.
+
+"Well," Martin demanded.  "Out with it."
+
+"I had that door painted only last week," Mr. Higginbotham half
+whined, half bullied; "and you know what union wages are.  You
+should be more careful."
+
+Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness
+of it.  He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a
+chromo on the wall.  It surprised him.  He had always liked it, but
+it seemed that now he was seeing it for the first time.  It was
+cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in this house.
+His mind went back to the house he had just left, and he saw,
+first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting
+sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving.  He forgot where he was
+and Bernard Higginbotham's existence, till that gentleman
+demanded:-
+
+"Seen a ghost?"
+
+Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent,
+cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the
+same eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below -
+subservient eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.
+
+"Yes," Martin answered.  "I seen a ghost.  Good night.  Good night,
+Gertrude."
+
+He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the
+slatternly carpet.
+
+"Don't bang the door," Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.
+
+He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and
+closed the door softly behind him.
+
+Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.
+
+"He's ben drinkin'," he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper.  "I told
+you he would."
+
+She nodded her head resignedly.
+
+"His eyes was pretty shiny," she confessed; "and he didn't have no
+collar, though he went away with one.  But mebbe he didn't have
+more'n a couple of glasses."
+
+"He couldn't stand up straight," asserted her husband.  "I watched
+him.  He couldn't walk across the floor without stumblin'.  You
+heard 'm yourself almost fall down in the hall."
+
+"I think it was over Alice's cart," she said.  "He couldn't see it
+in the dark."
+
+Mr. Higginbotham's voice and wrath began to rise.  All day he
+effaced himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his
+family, the privilege of being himself.
+
+"I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk."
+
+His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the
+enunciation of each word like the die of a machine.  His wife
+sighed and remained silent.  She was a large, stout woman, always
+dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh,
+her work, and her husband.
+
+"He's got it in him, I tell you, from his father," Mr. Higginbotham
+went on accusingly.  "An' he'll croak in the gutter the same way.
+You know that."
+
+She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching.  They were agreed that
+Martin had come home drunk.  They did not have it in their souls to
+know beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and
+that glowing face betokened youth's first vision of love.
+
+"Settin' a fine example to the children," Mr. Higginbotham snorted,
+suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and
+which he resented.  Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him
+more.  "If he does it again, he's got to get out.  Understand!  I
+won't put up with his shinanigan - debotchin' innocent children
+with his boozing."  Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which was a
+new one in his vocabulary, recently gleaned from a newspaper
+column.  "That's what it is, debotchin' - there ain't no other name
+for it."
+
+Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on.
+Mr. Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.
+
+"Has he paid last week's board?" he shot across the top of the
+newspaper.
+
+She nodded, then added, "He still has some money."
+
+"When is he goin' to sea again?"
+
+"When his pay-day's spent, I guess," she answered.  "He was over to
+San Francisco yesterday looking for a ship.  But he's got money,
+yet, an' he's particular about the kind of ship he signs for."
+
+"It's not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs," Mr.
+Higginbotham snorted.  "Particular!  Him!"
+
+"He said something about a schooner that's gettin' ready to go off
+to some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he'd
+sail on her if his money held out."
+
+"If he only wanted to steady down, I'd give him a job drivin' the
+wagon," her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his
+voice.  "Tom's quit."
+
+His wife looked alarm and interrogation.
+
+"Quit to-night.  Is goin' to work for Carruthers.  They paid 'm
+more'n I could afford."
+
+"I told you you'd lose 'm," she cried out.  "He was worth more'n
+you was giving him."
+
+"Now look here, old woman," Higginbotham bullied, "for the
+thousandth time I've told you to keep your nose out of the
+business.  I won't tell you again."
+
+"I don't care," she sniffled.  "Tom was a good boy."  Her husband
+glared at her.  This was unqualified defiance.
+
+"If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the
+wagon," he snorted.
+
+"He pays his board, just the same," was the retort.  "An' he's my
+brother, an' so long as he don't owe you money you've got no right
+to be jumping on him all the time.  I've got some feelings, if I
+have been married to you for seven years."
+
+"Did you tell 'm you'd charge him for gas if he goes on readin' in
+bed?" he demanded.
+
+Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply.  Her revolt faded away, her spirit
+wilting down into her tired flesh.  Her husband was triumphant.  He
+had her.  His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in
+the sniffles she emitted.  He extracted great happiness from
+squelching her, and she squelched easily these days, though it had
+been different in the first years of their married life, before the
+brood of children and his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.
+
+"Well, you tell 'm to-morrow, that's all," he said.  "An' I just
+want to tell you, before I forget it, that you'd better send for
+Marian to-morrow to take care of the children.  With Tom quit, I'll
+have to be out on the wagon, an' you can make up your mind to it to
+be down below waitin' on the counter."
+
+"But to-morrow's wash day," she objected weakly.
+
+"Get up early, then, an' do it first.  I won't start out till ten
+o'clock."
+
+He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+
+Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his
+brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and
+entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-
+stand, and one chair.  Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a
+servant when his wife could do the work.  Besides, the servant's
+room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one.  Martin
+placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat,
+and sat down on the bed.  A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted
+the weight of his body, but he did not notice them.  He started to
+take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall
+opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had
+leaked through the roof.  On this befouled background visions began
+to flow and burn.  He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his
+lips began to move and he murmured, "Ruth."
+
+"Ruth."  He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful.
+It delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition
+of it.  "Ruth."  It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with.
+Each time he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing
+the foul wall with a golden radiance.  This radiance did not stop
+at the wall.  It extended on into infinity, and through its golden
+depths his soul went questing after hers.  The best that was in him
+was out in splendid flood.  The very thought of her ennobled and
+purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.
+This was new to him.  He had never known women who had made him
+better.  They had always had the counter effect of making him
+beastly.  He did not know that many of them had done their best,
+bad as it was.  Never having been conscious of himself, he did not
+know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and
+which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth.
+Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about
+them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had
+been better because of him.  Always in sublime carelessness had he
+lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always
+reached out and dragged at him with vile hands.  This was not just
+to them, nor to himself.  But he, who for the first time was
+becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he
+burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.
+
+He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-
+glass over the wash-stand.  He passed a towel over it and looked
+again, long and carefully.  It was the first time he had ever
+really seen himself.  His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that
+moment they had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the
+world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at
+himself.  He saw the head and face of a young fellow of twenty,
+but, being unused to such appraisement, he did not know how to
+value it.  Above a square-domed forehead he saw a mop of brown
+hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that were a
+delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and fingers
+tingle to pass caresses through it.  But he passed it by as without
+merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high,
+square forehead, - striving to penetrate it and learn the quality
+of its content.  What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his
+insistent interrogation.  What was it capable of?  How far would it
+take him?  Would it take him to her?
+
+He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were
+often quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs
+of the sun-washed deep.  He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to
+her.  He tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of
+his, but failed in the jugglery.  He could successfully put himself
+inside other men's minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life
+he knew.  He did not know her way of life.  She was wonder and
+mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers?  Well, they
+were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness
+nor meanness.  The brown sunburn of his face surprised him.  He had
+not dreamed he was so black.  He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and
+compared the white underside if the arm with his face.  Yes, he was
+a white man, after all.  But the arms were sunburned, too.  He
+twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and
+gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun.  It was
+very white.  He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the
+thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor
+did he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women
+who could boast fairer or smoother skins than he - fairer than
+where he had escaped the ravages of the sun.
+
+His might have been a cherub's mouth, had not the full, sensuous
+lips a trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth.  At
+times, so tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh,
+even ascetic.  They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover.
+They could taste the sweetness of life with relish, and they could
+put the sweetness aside and command life.  The chin and jaw, strong
+and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped the lips to
+command life.  Strength balanced sensuousness and had upon it a
+tonic effect, compelling him to love beauty that was healthy and
+making him vibrate to sensations that were wholesome.  And between
+the lips were teeth that had never known nor needed the dentist's
+care.  They were white and strong and regular, he decided, as he
+looked at them.  But as he looked, he began to be troubled.
+Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and vaguely
+remembered, was the impression that there were people who washed
+their teeth every day.  They were the people from up above - people
+in her class.  She must wash her teeth every day, too.  What would
+she think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all
+the days of his life?  He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form
+the habit.  He would begin at once, to-morrow.  It was not by mere
+achievement that he could hope to win to her.  He must make a
+personal reform in all things, even to tooth-washing and neck-gear,
+though a starched collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom.
+
+He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over the
+calloused palm and gazing at the dirt that was ingrained in the
+flesh itself and which no brush could scrub away.  How different
+was her palm!  He thrilled deliciously at the remembrance.  Like a
+rose-petal, he thought; cool and soft as a snowflake.  He had never
+thought that a mere woman's hand could be so sweetly soft.  He
+caught himself imagining the wonder of a caress from such a hand,
+and flushed guiltily.  It was too gross a thought for her.  In ways
+it seemed to impugn her high spirituality.  She was a pale, slender
+spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but nevertheless the softness
+of her palm persisted in his thoughts.  He was used to the harsh
+callousness of factory girls and working women.  Well he knew why
+their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was soft
+because she had never used it to work with.  The gulf yawned
+between her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not
+have to work for a living.  He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the
+people who did not labor.  It towered before him on the wall, a
+figure in brass, arrogant and powerful.  He had worked himself; his
+first memories seemed connected with work, and all his family had
+worked.  There was Gertrude.  When her hands were not hard from the
+endless housework, they were swollen and red like boiled beef, what
+of the washing.  And there was his sister Marian.  She had worked
+in the cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty hands
+were all scarred with the tomato-knives.  Besides, the tips of two
+of her fingers had been left in the cutting machine at the paper-
+box factory the preceding winter.  He remembered the hard palms of
+his mother as she lay in her coffin.  And his father had worked to
+the last fading gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been
+half an inch thick when he died.  But Her hands were soft, and her
+mother's hands, and her brothers'.  This last came to him as a
+surprise; it was tremendously indicative of the highness of their
+caste, of the enormous distance that stretched between her and him.
+
+He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off
+his shoes.  He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman's
+face and by a woman's soft, white hands.  And then, suddenly,
+before his eyes, on the foul plaster-wall appeared a vision.  He
+stood in front of a gloomy tenement house.  It was night-time, in
+the East End of London, and before him stood Margey, a little
+factory girl of fifteen.  He had seen her home after the bean-
+feast.  She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit for
+swine.  His hand was going out to hers as he said good night.  She
+had put her lips up to be kissed, but he wasn't going to kiss her.
+Somehow he was afraid of her.  And then her hand closed on his and
+pressed feverishly.  He felt her callouses grind and grate on his,
+and a great wave of pity welled over him.  He saw her yearning,
+hungry eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed from
+childhood into a frightened and ferocious maturity; then he put his
+arms about her in large tolerance and stooped and kissed her on the
+lips.  Her glad little cry rang in his ears, and he felt her
+clinging to him like a cat.  Poor little starveling!  He continued
+to stare at the vision of what had happened in the long ago.  His
+flesh was crawling as it had crawled that night when she clung to
+him, and his heart was warm with pity.  It was a gray scene, greasy
+gray, and the rain drizzled greasily on the pavement stones.  And
+then a radiant glory shone on the wall, and up through the other
+vision, displacing it, glimmered Her pale face under its crown of
+golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a star.
+
+He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed
+them.  Just the same, she told me to call again, he thought.  He
+took another look at himself in the glass, and said aloud, with
+great solemnity:-
+
+"Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the free library
+an' read up on etiquette.  Understand!"
+
+He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under his body.
+
+"But you've got to quit cussin', Martin, old boy; you've got to
+quit cussin'," he said aloud.
+
+Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and
+audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+
+He awoke next morning from rosy scenes of dream to a steamy
+atmosphere that smelled of soapsuds and dirty clothes, and that was
+vibrant with the jar and jangle of tormented life.  As he came out
+of his room he heard the slosh of water, a sharp exclamation, and a
+resounding smack as his sister visited her irritation upon one of
+her numerous progeny.  The squall of the child went through him
+like a knife.  He was aware that the whole thing, the very air he
+breathed, was repulsive and mean.  How different, he thought, from
+the atmosphere of beauty and repose of the house wherein Ruth
+dwelt.  There it was all spiritual.  Here it was all material, and
+meanly material.
+
+"Come here, Alfred," he called to the crying child, at the same
+time thrusting his hand into his trousers pocket, where he carried
+his money loose in the same large way that he lived life in
+general.  He put a quarter in the youngster's hand and held him in
+his arms a moment, soothing his sobs.  "Now run along and get some
+candy, and don't forget to give some to your brothers and sisters.
+Be sure and get the kind that lasts longest."
+
+His sister lifted a flushed face from the wash-tub and looked at
+him.
+
+"A nickel'd ha' ben enough," she said.  "It's just like you, no
+idea of the value of money.  The child'll eat himself sick."
+
+"That's all right, sis," he answered jovially.  "My money'll take
+care of itself.  If you weren't so busy, I'd kiss you good
+morning."
+
+He wanted to be affectionate to this sister, who was good, and who,
+in her way, he knew, loved him.  But, somehow, she grew less
+herself as the years went by, and more and more baffling.  It was
+the hard work, the many children, and the nagging of her husband,
+he decided, that had changed her.  It came to him, in a flash of
+fancy, that her nature seemed taking on the attributes of stale
+vegetables, smelly soapsuds, and of the greasy dimes, nickels, and
+quarters she took in over the counter of the store.
+
+"Go along an' get your breakfast," she said roughly, though
+secretly pleased.  Of all her wandering brood of brothers he had
+always been her favorite.  "I declare I WILL kiss you," she said,
+with a sudden stir at her heart.
+
+With thumb and forefinger she swept the dripping suds first from
+one arm and then from the other.  He put his arms round her massive
+waist and kissed her wet steamy lips. The tears welled into her
+eyes - not so much from strength of feeling as from the weakness of
+chronic overwork.  She shoved him away from her, but not before he
+caught a glimpse of her moist eyes.
+
+"You'll find breakfast in the oven," she said hurriedly.  "Jim
+ought to be up now.  I had to get up early for the washing.  Now
+get along with you and get out of the house early.  It won't be
+nice to-day, what of Tom quittin' an' nobody but Bernard to drive
+the wagon."
+
+Martin went into the kitchen with a sinking heart, the image of her
+red face and slatternly form eating its way like acid into his
+brain.  She might love him if she only had some time, he concluded.
+But she was worked to death.  Bernard Higginbotham was a brute to
+work her so hard.  But he could not help but feel, on the other
+hand, that there had not been anything beautiful in that kiss.  It
+was true, it was an unusual kiss.  For years she had kissed him
+only when he returned from voyages or departed on voyages. But this
+kiss had tasted soapsuds, and the lips, he had noticed, were
+flabby.  There had been no quick, vigorous lip-pressure such as
+should accompany any kiss.  Hers was the kiss of a tired woman who
+had been tired so long that she had forgotten how to kiss.  He
+remembered her as a girl, before her marriage, when she would dance
+with the best, all night, after a hard day's work at the laundry,
+and think nothing of leaving the dance to go to another day's hard
+work.  And then he thought of Ruth and the cool sweetness that must
+reside in her lips as it resided in all about her.  Her kiss would
+be like her hand-shake or the way she looked at one, firm and
+frank.  In imagination he dared to think of her lips on his, and so
+vividly did he imagine that he went dizzy at the thought and seemed
+to rift through clouds of rose-petals, filling his brain with their
+perfume.
+
+In the kitchen he found Jim, the other boarder, eating mush very
+languidly, with a sick, far-away look in his eyes.  Jim was a
+plumber's apprentice whose weak chin and hedonistic temperament,
+coupled with a certain nervous stupidity, promised to take him
+nowhere in the race for bread and butter.
+
+"Why don't you eat?" he demanded, as Martin dipped dolefully into
+the cold, half-cooked oatmeal mush.  "Was you drunk again last
+night?"
+
+Martin shook his head.  He was oppressed by the utter squalidness
+of it all.  Ruth Morse seemed farther removed than ever.
+
+"I was," Jim went on with a boastful, nervous giggle.  "I was
+loaded right to the neck.  Oh, she was a daisy.  Billy brought me
+home."
+
+Martin nodded that he heard, - it was a habit of nature with him to
+pay heed to whoever talked to him, - and poured a cup of lukewarm
+coffee.
+
+"Goin' to the Lotus Club dance to-night?" Jim demanded.  "They're
+goin' to have beer, an' if that Temescal bunch comes, there'll be a
+rough-house.  I don't care, though.  I'm takin' my lady friend just
+the same.  Cripes, but I've got a taste in my mouth!"
+
+He made a wry face and attempted to wash the taste away with
+coffee.
+
+"D'ye know Julia?"
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+"She's my lady friend," Jim explained, "and she's a peach.  I'd
+introduce you to her, only you'd win her.  I don't see what the
+girls see in you, honest I don't; but the way you win them away
+from the fellers is sickenin'."
+
+"I never got any away from you," Martin answered uninterestedly.
+The breakfast had to be got through somehow.
+
+"Yes, you did, too," the other asserted warmly.  "There was
+Maggie."
+
+"Never had anything to do with her.  Never danced with her except
+that one night."
+
+"Yes, an' that's just what did it," Jim cried out.  "You just
+danced with her an' looked at her, an' it was all off.  Of course
+you didn't mean nothin' by it, but it settled me for keeps.
+Wouldn't look at me again.  Always askin' about you.  She'd have
+made fast dates enough with you if you'd wanted to."
+
+"But I didn't want to."
+
+"Wasn't necessary.  I was left at the pole."  Jim looked at him
+admiringly.  "How d'ye do it, anyway, Mart?"
+
+"By not carin' about 'em," was the answer.
+
+"You mean makin' b'lieve you don't care about them?" Jim queried
+eagerly.
+
+Martin considered for a moment, then answered, "Perhaps that will
+do, but with me I guess it's different.  I never have cared - much.
+If you can put it on, it's all right, most likely."
+
+"You should 'a' ben up at Riley's barn last night," Jim announced
+inconsequently.  "A lot of the fellers put on the gloves.  There
+was a peach from West Oakland.  They called 'm 'The Rat.'  Slick as
+silk.  No one could touch 'm.  We was all wishin' you was there.
+Where was you anyway?"
+
+"Down in Oakland," Martin replied.
+
+"To the show?"
+
+Martin shoved his plate away and got up.
+
+"Comin' to the dance to-night?" the other called after him.
+
+"No, I think not," he answered.
+
+He went downstairs and out into the street, breathing great breaths
+of air.  He had been suffocating in that atmosphere, while the
+apprentice's chatter had driven him frantic.  There had been times
+when it was all he could do to refrain from reaching over and
+mopping Jim's face in the mush-plate.  The more he had chattered,
+the more remote had Ruth seemed to him.  How could he, herding with
+such cattle, ever become worthy of her?  He was appalled at the
+problem confronting him, weighted down by the incubus of his
+working-class station.  Everything reached out to hold him down -
+his sister, his sister's house and family, Jim the apprentice,
+everybody he knew, every tie of life.  Existence did not taste good
+in his mouth.  Up to then he had accepted existence, as he had
+lived it with all about him, as a good thing.  He had never
+questioned it, except when he read books; but then, they were only
+books, fairy stories of a fairer and impossible world.  But now he
+had seen that world, possible and real, with a flower of a woman
+called Ruth in the midmost centre of it; and thenceforth he must
+know bitter tastes, and longings sharp as pain, and hopelessness
+that tantalized because it fed on hope.
+
+He had debated between the Berkeley Free Library and the Oakland
+Free Library, and decided upon the latter because Ruth lived in
+Oakland.  Who could tell? - a library was a most likely place for
+her, and he might see her there.  He did not know the way of
+libraries, and he wandered through endless rows of fiction, till
+the delicate-featured French-looking girl who seemed in charge,
+told him that the reference department was upstairs.  He did not
+know enough to ask the man at the desk, and began his adventures in
+the philosophy alcove.  He had heard of book philosophy, but had
+not imagined there had been so much written about it.  The high,
+bulging shelves of heavy tomes humbled him and at the same time
+stimulated him.  Here was work for the vigor of his brain.  He
+found books on trigonometry in the mathematics section, and ran the
+pages, and stared at the meaningless formulas and figures.  He
+could read English, but he saw there an alien speech.  Norman and
+Arthur knew that speech.  He had heard them talking it.  And they
+were her brothers.  He left the alcove in despair.  From every side
+the books seemed to press upon him and crush him.
+
+He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge bulked so
+big.  He was frightened.  How could his brain ever master it all?
+Later, he remembered that there were other men, many men, who had
+mastered it; and he breathed a great oath, passionately, under his
+breath, swearing that his brain could do what theirs had done.
+
+And so he wandered on, alternating between depression and elation
+as he stared at the shelves packed with wisdom.  In one
+miscellaneous section he came upon a "Norrie's Epitome."  He turned
+the pages reverently.  In a way, it spoke a kindred speech.  Both
+he and it were of the sea.  Then he found a "Bowditch" and books by
+Lecky and Marshall.  There it was; he would teach himself
+navigation.  He would quit drinking, work up, and become a captain.
+Ruth seemed very near to him in that moment.  As a captain, he
+could marry her (if she would have him).  And if she wouldn't, well
+- he would live a good life among men, because of Her, and he would
+quit drinking anyway.  Then he remembered the underwriters and the
+owners, the two masters a captain must serve, either of which could
+and would break him and whose interests were diametrically opposed.
+He cast his eyes about the room and closed the lids down on a
+vision of ten thousand books.  No; no more of the sea for him.
+There was power in all that wealth of books, and if he would do
+great things, he must do them on the land.  Besides, captains were
+not allowed to take their wives to sea with them.
+
+Noon came, and afternoon.  He forgot to eat, and sought on for the
+books on etiquette; for, in addition to career, his mind was vexed
+by a simple and very concrete problem:  WHEN YOU MEET A YOUNG LADY
+AND SHE ASKS YOU TO CALL, HOW SOON CAN YOU CALL? was the way he
+worded it to himself.  But when he found the right shelf, he sought
+vainly for the answer.  He was appalled at the vast edifice of
+etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes of visiting-card conduct
+between persons in polite society.  He abandoned his search.  He
+had not found what he wanted, though he had found that it would
+take all of a man's time to be polite, and that he would have to
+live a preliminary life in which to learn how to be polite.
+
+"Did you find what you wanted?" the man at the desk asked him as he
+was leaving.
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered.  "You have a fine library here."
+
+The man nodded.  "We should be glad to see you here often.  Are you
+a sailor?"
+
+"Yes, sir," he answered.  "And I'll come again."
+
+Now, how did he know that? he asked himself as he went down the
+stairs.
+
+And for the first block along the street he walked very stiff and
+straight and awkwardly, until he forgot himself in his thoughts,
+whereupon his rolling gait gracefully returned to him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+
+A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin
+Eden.  He was famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands
+had gripped his life with a giant's grasp.  He could not steel
+himself to call upon her.  He was afraid that he might call too
+soon, and so be guilty of an awful breach of that awful thing
+called etiquette.  He spent long hours in the Oakland and Berkeley
+libraries, and made out application blanks for membership for
+himself, his sisters Gertrude and Marian, and Jim, the latter's
+consent being obtained at the expense of several glasses of beer.
+With four cards permitting him to draw books, he burned the gas
+late in the servant's room, and was charged fifty cents a week for
+it by Mr. Higginbotham.
+
+The many books he read but served to whet his unrest.  Every page
+of every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge.  His
+hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.  Also, he did not know
+where to begin, and continually suffered from lack of preparation.
+The commonest references, that he could see plainly every reader
+was expected to know, he did not know.  And the same was true of
+the poetry he read which maddened him with delight.  He read more
+of Swinburne than was contained in the volume Ruth had lent him;
+and "Dolores" he understood thoroughly.  But surely Ruth did not
+understand it, he concluded.  How could she, living the refined
+life she did?  Then he chanced upon Kipling's poems, and was swept
+away by the lilt and swing and glamour with which familiar things
+had been invested.  He was amazed at the man's sympathy with life
+and at his incisive psychology.  PSYCHOLOGY was a new word in
+Martin's vocabulary.  He had bought a dictionary, which deed had
+decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day on which
+he must sail in search of more.  Also, it incensed Mr.
+Higginbotham, who would have preferred the money taking the form of
+board.
+
+He dared not go near Ruth's neighborhood in the daytime, but night
+found him lurking like a thief around the Morse home, stealing
+glimpses at the windows and loving the very walls that sheltered
+her.  Several times he barely escaped being caught by her brothers,
+and once he trailed Mr. Morse down town and studied his face in the
+lighted streets, longing all the while for some quick danger of
+death to threaten so that he might spring in and save her father.
+On another night, his vigil was rewarded by a glimpse of Ruth
+through a second-story window.  He saw only her head and shoulders,
+and her arms raised as she fixed her hair before a mirror.  It was
+only for a moment, but it was a long moment to him, during which
+his blood turned to wine and sang through his veins.  Then she
+pulled down the shade.  But it was her room - he had learned that;
+and thereafter he strayed there often, hiding under a dark tree on
+the opposite side of the street and smoking countless cigarettes.
+One afternoon he saw her mother coming out of a bank, and received
+another proof of the enormous distance that separated Ruth from
+him.  She was of the class that dealt with banks.  He had never
+been inside a bank in his life, and he had an idea that such
+institutions were frequented only by the very rich and the very
+powerful.
+
+In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution.  Her cleanness and
+purity had reacted upon him, and he felt in his being a crying need
+to be clean.  He must be that if he were ever to be worthy of
+breathing the same air with her.  He washed his teeth, and scrubbed
+his hands with a kitchen scrub-brush till he saw a nail-brush in a
+drug-store window and divined its use.  While purchasing it, the
+clerk glanced at his nails, suggested a nail-file, and so he became
+possessed of an additional toilet-tool.  He ran across a book in
+the library on the care of the body, and promptly developed a
+penchant for a cold-water bath every morning, much to the amazement
+of Jim, and to the bewilderment of Mr. Higginbotham, who was not in
+sympathy with such high-fangled notions and who seriously debated
+whether or not he should charge Martin extra for the water.
+Another stride was in the direction of creased trousers.  Now that
+Martin was aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the difference
+between the baggy knees of the trousers worn by the working class
+and the straight line from knee to foot of those worn by the men
+above the working class.  Also, he learned the reason why, and
+invaded his sister's kitchen in search of irons and ironing-board.
+He had misadventures at first, hopelessly burning one pair and
+buying another, which expenditure again brought nearer the day on
+which he must put to sea.
+
+But the reform went deeper than mere outward appearance.  He still
+smoked, but he drank no more.  Up to that time, drinking had seemed
+to him the proper thing for men to do, and he had prided himself on
+his strong head which enabled him to drink most men under the
+table.  Whenever he encountered a chance shipmate, and there were
+many in San Francisco, he treated them and was treated in turn, as
+of old, but he ordered for himself root beer or ginger ale and
+good-naturedly endured their chaffing.  And as they waxed maudlin
+he studied them, watching the beast rise and master them and
+thanking God that he was no longer as they.  They had their
+limitations to forget, and when they were drunk, their dim, stupid
+spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his heaven of
+intoxicated desire.  With Martin the need for strong drink had
+vanished.  He was drunken in new and more profound ways - with
+Ruth, who had fired him with love and with a glimpse of higher and
+eternal life; with books, that had set a myriad maggots of desire
+gnawing in his brain; and with the sense of personal cleanliness he
+was achieving, that gave him even more superb health than what he
+had enjoyed and that made his whole body sing with physical well-
+being.
+
+One night he went to the theatre, on the blind chance that he might
+see her there, and from the second balcony he did see her.  He saw
+her come down the aisle, with Arthur and a strange young man with a
+football mop of hair and eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him
+to instant apprehension and jealousy.  He saw her take her seat in
+the orchestra circle, and little else than her did he see that
+night - a pair of slender white shoulders and a mass of pale gold
+hair, dim with distance.  But there were others who saw, and now
+and again, glancing at those about him, he noted two young girls
+who looked back from the row in front, a dozen seats along, and who
+smiled at him with bold eyes.  He had always been easy-going.  It
+was not in his nature to give rebuff.  In the old days he would
+have smiled back, and gone further and encouraged smiling.  But now
+it was different.  He did smile back, then looked away, and looked
+no more deliberately.  But several times, forgetting the existence
+of the two girls, his eyes caught their smiles.  He could not re-
+thumb himself in a day, nor could he violate the intrinsic
+kindliness of his nature; so, at such moments, he smiled at the
+girls in warm human friendliness.  It was nothing new to him.  He
+knew they were reaching out their woman's hands to him.  But it was
+different now.  Far down there in the orchestra circle was the one
+woman in all the world, so different, so terrifically different,
+from these two girls of his class, that he could feel for them only
+pity and sorrow.  He had it in his heart to wish that they could
+possess, in some small measure, her goodness and glory.  And not
+for the world could he hurt them because of their outreaching.  He
+was not flattered by it; he even felt a slight shame at his
+lowliness that permitted it.  He knew, did he belong in Ruth's
+class, that there would be no overtures from these girls; and with
+each glance of theirs he felt the fingers of his own class
+clutching at him to hold him down.
+
+He left his seat before the curtain went down on the last act,
+intent on seeing Her as she passed out.  There were always numbers
+of men who stood on the sidewalk outside, and he could pull his cap
+down over his eyes and screen himself behind some one's shoulder so
+that she should not see him.  He emerged from the theatre with the
+first of the crowd; but scarcely had he taken his position on the
+edge of the sidewalk when the two girls appeared.  They were
+looking for him, he knew; and for the moment he could have cursed
+that in him which drew women.  Their casual edging across the
+sidewalk to the curb, as they drew near, apprised him of discovery.
+They slowed down, and were in the thick of the crown as they came
+up with him.  One of them brushed against him and apparently for
+the first time noticed him.  She was a slender, dark girl, with
+black, defiant eyes.  But they smiled at him, and he smiled back.
+
+"Hello," he said.
+
+It was automatic; he had said it so often before under similar
+circumstances of first meetings.  Besides, he could do no less.
+There was that large tolerance and sympathy in his nature that
+would permit him to do no less.  The black-eyed girl smiled
+gratification and greeting, and showed signs of stopping, while her
+companion, arm linked in arm, giggled and likewise showed signs of
+halting.  He thought quickly.  It would never do for Her to come
+out and see him talking there with them.  Quite naturally, as a
+matter of course, he swung in along-side the dark-eyed one and
+walked with her.  There was no awkwardness on his part, no numb
+tongue.  He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the
+badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the
+preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs.
+At the corner where the main stream of people flowed onward, he
+started to edge out into the cross street.  But the girl with the
+black eyes caught his arm, following him and dragging her companion
+after her, as she cried:
+
+"Hold on, Bill!  What's yer rush?  You're not goin' to shake us so
+sudden as all that?"
+
+He halted with a laugh, and turned, facing them.  Across their
+shoulders he could see the moving throng passing under the street
+lamps.  Where he stood it was not so light, and, unseen, he would
+be able to see Her as she passed by.  She would certainly pass by,
+for that way led home.
+
+"What's her name?" he asked of the giggling girl, nodding at the
+dark-eyed one.
+
+"You ask her," was the convulsed response.
+
+"Well, what is it?" he demanded, turning squarely on the girl in
+question.
+
+"You ain't told me yours, yet," she retorted.
+
+"You never asked it," he smiled.  "Besides, you guessed the first
+rattle.  It's Bill, all right, all right."
+
+"Aw, go 'long with you."  She looked him in the eyes, her own
+sharply passionate and inviting.  "What is it, honest?"
+
+Again she looked.  All the centuries of woman since sex began were
+eloquent in her eyes.  And he measured her in a careless way, and
+knew, bold now, that she would begin to retreat, coyly and
+delicately, as he pursued, ever ready to reverse the game should he
+turn fainthearted.  And, too, he was human, and could feel the draw
+of her, while his ego could not but appreciate the flattery of her
+kindness.  Oh, he knew it all, and knew them well, from A to Z.
+Good, as goodness might be measured in their particular class,
+hard-working for meagre wages and scorning the sale of self for
+easier ways, nervously desirous for some small pinch of happiness
+in the desert of existence, and facing a future that was a gamble
+between the ugliness of unending toil and the black pit of more
+terrible wretchedness, the way whereto being briefer though better
+paid.
+
+"Bill," he answered, nodding his head.  "Sure, Pete, Bill an' no
+other."
+
+"No joshin'?" she queried.
+
+"It ain't Bill at all," the other broke in.
+
+"How do you know?" he demanded.  "You never laid eyes on me
+before."
+
+"No need to, to know you're lyin'," was the retort.
+
+"Straight, Bill, what is it?" the first girl asked.
+
+"Bill'll do," he confessed.
+
+She reached out to his arm and shook him playfully.  "I knew you
+was lyin', but you look good to me just the same."
+
+He captured the hand that invited, and felt on the palm familiar
+markings and distortions.
+
+"When'd you chuck the cannery?" he asked.
+
+"How'd yeh know?" and, "My, ain't cheh a mind-reader!" the girls
+chorussed.
+
+And while he exchanged the stupidities of stupid minds with them,
+before his inner sight towered the book-shelves of the library,
+filled with the wisdom of the ages.  He smiled bitterly at the
+incongruity of it, and was assailed by doubts.  But between inner
+vision and outward pleasantry he found time to watch the theatre
+crowd streaming by.  And then he saw Her, under the lights, between
+her brother and the strange young man with glasses, and his heart
+seemed to stand still.  He had waited long for this moment.  He had
+time to note the light, fluffy something that hid her queenly head,
+the tasteful lines of her wrapped figure, the gracefulness of her
+carriage and of the hand that caught up her skirts; and then she
+was gone and he was left staring at the two girls of the cannery,
+at their tawdry attempts at prettiness of dress, their tragic
+efforts to be clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap ribbons,
+and the cheap rings on the fingers.  He felt a tug at his arm, and
+heard a voice saying:-
+
+"Wake up, Bill!  What's the matter with you?"
+
+"What was you sayin'?" he asked.
+
+"Oh, nothin'," the dark girl answered, with a toss of her head.  "I
+was only remarkin' - "
+
+"What?"
+
+"Well, I was whisperin' it'd be a good idea if you could dig up a
+gentleman friend - for her" (indicating her companion), "and then,
+we could go off an' have ice-cream soda somewhere, or coffee, or
+anything."
+
+He was afflicted by a sudden spiritual nausea.  The transition from
+Ruth to this had been too abrupt.  Ranged side by side with the
+bold, defiant eyes of the girl before him, he saw Ruth's clear,
+luminous eyes, like a saint's, gazing at him out of unplumbed
+depths of purity.  And, somehow, he felt within him a stir of
+power.  He was better than this.  Life meant more to him than it
+meant to these two girls whose thoughts did not go beyond ice-cream
+and a gentleman friend.  He remembered that he had led always a
+secret life in his thoughts.  These thoughts he had tried to share,
+but never had he found a woman capable of understanding - nor a
+man.  He had tried, at times, but had only puzzled his listeners.
+And as his thoughts had been beyond them, so, he argued now, he
+must be beyond them.  He felt power move in him, and clenched his
+fists.  If life meant more to him, then it was for him to demand
+more from life, but he could not demand it from such companionship
+as this.  Those bold black eyes had nothing to offer.  He knew the
+thoughts behind them - of ice-cream and of something else.  But
+those saint's eyes alongside - they offered all he knew and more
+than he could guess.  They offered books and painting, beauty and
+repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence.  Behind
+those black eyes he knew every thought process.  It was like
+clockwork.  He could watch every wheel go around.  Their bid was
+low pleasure, narrow as the grave, that palled, and the grave was
+at the end of it.  But the bid of the saint's eyes was mystery, and
+wonder unthinkable, and eternal life.  He had caught glimpses of
+the soul in them, and glimpses of his own soul, too.
+
+"There's only one thing wrong with the programme," he said aloud.
+"I've got a date already."
+
+The girl's eyes blazed her disappointment.
+
+"To sit up with a sick friend, I suppose?" she sneered.
+
+"No, a real, honest date with - " he faltered, "with a girl."
+
+"You're not stringin' me?" she asked earnestly.
+
+He looked her in the eyes and answered:  "It's straight, all right.
+But why can't we meet some other time?  You ain't told me your name
+yet.  An' where d'ye live?"
+
+"Lizzie," she replied, softening toward him, her hand pressing his
+arm, while her body leaned against his.  "Lizzie Connolly.  And I
+live at Fifth an' Market."
+
+He talked on a few minutes before saying good night.  He did not go
+home immediately; and under the tree where he kept his vigils he
+looked up at a window and murmured:  "That date was with you, Ruth.
+I kept it for you."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+
+A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met
+Ruth Morse, and still he dared not call.  Time and again he nerved
+himself up to call, but under the doubts that assailed him his
+determination died away.  He did not know the proper time to call,
+nor was there any one to tell him, and he was afraid of committing
+himself to an irretrievable blunder.  Having shaken himself free
+from his old companions and old ways of life, and having no new
+companions, nothing remained for him but to read, and the long
+hours he devoted to it would have ruined a dozen pairs of ordinary
+eyes.  But his eyes were strong, and they were backed by a body
+superbly strong.  Furthermore, his mind was fallow.  It had lain
+fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the books was
+concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing.  It had never been jaded
+by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp
+teeth that would not let go.
+
+It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived
+centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook.  But he was
+baffled by lack of preparation.  He attempted to read books that
+required years of preliminary specialization.  One day he would
+read a book of antiquated philosophy, and the next day one that was
+ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the conflict
+and contradiction of ideas.  It was the same with the economists.
+On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam
+Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew
+that the ideas of another were obsolete.  He was bewildered, and
+yet he wanted to know.  He had become interested, in a day, in
+economics, industry, and politics.  Passing through the City Hall
+Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of which were
+half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly
+carrying on a discussion.  He joined the listeners, and heard a
+new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the people.
+One was a tramp, another was a labor agitator, a third was a law-
+school student, and the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen.
+For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single
+tax, and learned that there were warring social philosophies.  He
+heard hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging
+to fields of thought that his meagre reading had never touched
+upon.  Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely,
+and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such
+strange expressions.  Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter
+who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old
+man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that WHAT
+IS IS RIGHT, and another old man who discoursed interminably about
+the cosmos and the father-atom and the mother-atom.
+
+Martin Eden's head was in a state of addlement when he went away
+after several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the
+definitions of a dozen unusual words.  And when he left the
+library, he carried under his arm four volumes:  Madam Blavatsky's
+"Secret Doctrine," "Progress and Poverty," "The Quintessence of
+Socialism," and, "Warfare of Religion and Science."  Unfortunately,
+he began on the "Secret Doctrine."  Every line bristled with many-
+syllabled words he did not understand.  He sat up in bed, and the
+dictionary was in front of him more often than the book.  He looked
+up so many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten
+their meaning and had to look them up again.  He devised the plan
+of writing the definitions in a note-book, and filled page after
+page with them.  And still he could not understand.  He read until
+three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but not one
+essential thought in the text had he grasped.  He looked up, and it
+seemed that the room was lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship
+upon the sea.  Then he hurled the "Secret Doctrine" and many curses
+across the room, turned off the gas, and composed himself to sleep.
+Nor did he have much better luck with the other three books.  It
+was not that his brain was weak or incapable; it could think these
+thoughts were it not for lack of training in thinking and lack of
+the thought-tools with which to think.  He guessed this, and for a
+while entertained the idea of reading nothing but the dictionary
+until he had mastered every word in it.
+
+Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, finding
+his greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more
+understandable.  He loved beauty, and there he found beauty.
+Poetry, like music, stirred him profoundly, and, though he did not
+know it, he was preparing his mind for the heavier work that was to
+come.  The pages of his mind were blank, and, without effort, much
+he read and liked, stanza by stanza, was impressed upon those
+pages, so that he was soon able to extract great joy from chanting
+aloud or under his breath the music and the beauty of the printed
+words he had read.  Then he stumbled upon Gayley's "Classic Myths"
+and Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," side by side on a library shelf.  It
+was illumination, a great light in the darkness of his ignorance,
+and he read poetry more avidly than ever.
+
+The man at the desk in the library had seen Martin there so often
+that he had become quite cordial, always greeting him with a smile
+and a nod when he entered.  It was because of this that Martin did
+a daring thing.  Drawing out some books at the desk, and while the
+man was stamping the cards, Martin blurted out:-
+
+"Say, there's something I'd like to ask you."
+
+The man smiled and paid attention.
+
+"When you meet a young lady an' she asks you to call, how soon can
+you call?"
+
+Martin felt his shirt press and cling to his shoulders, what of the
+sweat of the effort.
+
+"Why I'd say any time," the man answered.
+
+"Yes, but this is different," Martin objected.  "She - I - well,
+you see, it's this way:  maybe she won't be there.  She goes to the
+university."
+
+"Then call again."
+
+"What I said ain't what I meant," Martin confessed falteringly,
+while he made up his mind to throw himself wholly upon the other's
+mercy.  "I'm just a rough sort of a fellow, an' I ain't never seen
+anything of society.  This girl is all that I ain't, an' I ain't
+anything that she is.  You don't think I'm playin' the fool, do
+you?" he demanded abruptly.
+
+"No, no; not at all, I assure you," the other protested.  "Your
+request is not exactly in the scope of the reference department,
+but I shall be only too pleased to assist you."
+
+Martin looked at him admiringly.
+
+"If I could tear it off that way, I'd be all right," he said.
+
+"I beg pardon?"
+
+"I mean if I could talk easy that way, an' polite, an' all the
+rest."
+
+"Oh," said the other, with comprehension.
+
+"What is the best time to call?  The afternoon? - not too close to
+meal-time?  Or the evening?  Or Sunday?"
+
+"I'll tell you," the librarian said with a brightening face.  "You
+call her up on the telephone and find out."
+
+"I'll do it," he said, picking up his books and starting away.
+
+He turned back and asked:-
+
+"When you're speakin' to a young lady - say, for instance, Miss
+Lizzie Smith - do you say 'Miss Lizzie'? or 'Miss Smith'?"
+
+"Say 'Miss Smith,'" the librarian stated authoritatively.  "Say
+'Miss Smith' always - until you come to know her better."
+
+So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.
+
+"Come down any time; I'll be at home all afternoon," was Ruth's
+reply over the telephone to his stammered request as to when he
+could return the borrowed books.
+
+She met him at the door herself, and her woman's eyes took in
+immediately the creased trousers and the certain slight but
+indefinable change in him for the better.  Also, she was struck by
+his face.  It was almost violent, this health of his, and it seemed
+to rush out of him and at her in waves of force.  She felt the urge
+again of the desire to lean toward him for warmth, and marvelled
+again at the effect his presence produced upon her.  And he, in
+turn, knew again the swimming sensation of bliss when he felt the
+contact of her hand in greeting.  The difference between them lay
+in that she was cool and self-possessed while his face flushed to
+the roots of the hair.  He stumbled with his old awkwardness after
+her, and his shoulders swung and lurched perilously.
+
+Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on easily
+- more easily by far than he had expected.  She made it easy for
+him; and the gracious spirit with which she did it made him love
+her more madly than ever.  They talked first of the borrowed books,
+of the Swinburne he was devoted to, and of the Browning he did not
+understand; and she led the conversation on from subject to
+subject, while she pondered the problem of how she could be of help
+to him.  She had thought of this often since their first meeting.
+She wanted to help him.  He made a call upon her pity and
+tenderness that no one had ever made before, and the pity was not
+so much derogatory of him as maternal in her.  Her pity could not
+be of the common sort, when the man who drew it was so much man as
+to shock her with maidenly fears and set her mind and pulse
+thrilling with strange thoughts and feelings.  The old fascination
+of his neck was there, and there was sweetness in the thought of
+laying her hands upon it.  It seemed still a wanton impulse, but
+she had grown more used to it.  She did not dream that in such
+guise new-born love would epitomize itself.  Nor did she dream that
+the feeling he excited in her was love.  She thought she was merely
+interested in him as an unusual type possessing various potential
+excellencies, and she even felt philanthropic about it.
+
+She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different.
+He knew that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never
+before desired anything in his life.  He had loved poetry for
+beauty's sake; but since he met her the gates to the vast field of
+love-poetry had been opened wide.  She had given him understanding
+even more than Bulfinch and Gayley.  There was a line that a week
+before he would not have favored with a second thought - "God's own
+mad lover dying on a kiss"; but now it was ever insistent in his
+mind.  He marvelled at the wonder of it and the truth; and as he
+gazed upon her he knew that he could die gladly upon a kiss.  He
+felt himself God's own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood
+could have given him greater pride.  And at last he knew the
+meaning of life and why he had been born.
+
+As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring.  He
+reviewed all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at
+the door, and longed for it again.  His gaze wandered often toward
+her lips, and he yearned for them hungrily.  But there was nothing
+gross or earthly about this yearning.  It gave him exquisite
+delight to watch every movement and play of those lips as they
+enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were not ordinary lips
+such as all men and women had.  Their substance was not mere human
+clay.  They were lips of pure spirit, and his desire for them
+seemed absolutely different from the desire that had led him to
+other women's lips.  He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical
+lips upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor
+with which one would kiss the robe of God.  He was not conscious of
+this transvaluation of values that had taken place in him, and was
+unaware that the light that shone in his eyes when he looked at her
+was quite the same light that shines in all men's eyes when the
+desire of love is upon them.  He did not dream how ardent and
+masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting
+the alchemy of her spirit.  Her penetrative virginity exalted and
+disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool
+chastity, and he would have been startled to learn that there was
+that shining out of his eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through
+her and kindled a kindred warmth.  She was subtly perturbed by it,
+and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted her train
+of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her to grope
+for the remainder of ideas partly uttered.  Speech was always easy
+with her, and these interruptions would have puzzled her had she
+not decided that it was because he was a remarkable type.  She was
+very sensitive to impressions, and it was not strange, after all,
+that this aura of a traveller from another world should so affect
+her.
+
+The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help
+him, and she turned the conversation in that direction; but it was
+Martin who came to the point first.
+
+"I wonder if I can get some advice from you," he began, and
+received an acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound.
+"You remember the other time I was here I said I couldn't talk
+about books an' things because I didn't know how?  Well, I've ben
+doin' a lot of thinkin' ever since.  I've ben to the library a
+whole lot, but most of the books I've tackled have ben over my
+head.  Mebbe I'd better begin at the beginnin'.  I ain't never had
+no advantages.  I've worked pretty hard ever since I was a kid, an'
+since I've ben to the library, lookin' with new eyes at books - an'
+lookin' at new books, too - I've just about concluded that I ain't
+ben reading the right kind.  You know the books you find in cattle-
+camps an' fo'c's'ls ain't the same you've got in this house, for
+instance.  Well, that's the sort of readin' matter I've ben
+accustomed to.  And yet - an' I ain't just makin' a brag of it -
+I've ben different from the people I've herded with.  Not that I'm
+any better than the sailors an' cow-punchers I travelled with, - I
+was cow-punchin' for a short time, you know, - but I always liked
+books, read everything I could lay hands on, an' - well, I guess I
+think differently from most of 'em.
+
+"Now, to come to what I'm drivin' at.  I was never inside a house
+like this.  When I come a week ago, an' saw all this, an' you, an'
+your mother, an' brothers, an' everything - well, I liked it.  I'd
+heard about such things an' read about such things in some of the
+books, an' when I looked around at your house, why, the books come
+true.  But the thing I'm after is I liked it.  I wanted it.  I want
+it now.  I want to breathe air like you get in this house - air
+that is filled with books, and pictures, and beautiful things,
+where people talk in low voices an' are clean, an' their thoughts
+are clean.  The air I always breathed was mixed up with grub an'
+house-rent an' scrappin' an booze an' that's all they talked about,
+too.  Why, when you was crossin' the room to kiss your mother, I
+thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen.  I've seen a
+whole lot of life, an' somehow I've seen a whole lot more of it
+than most of them that was with me.  I like to see, an' I want to
+see more, an' I want to see it different.
+
+"But I ain't got to the point yet.  Here it is.  I want to make my
+way to the kind of life you have in this house.  There's more in
+life than booze, an' hard work, an' knockin' about.  Now, how am I
+goin' to get it?  Where do I take hold an' begin?  I'm willin' to
+work my passage, you know, an' I can make most men sick when it
+comes to hard work.  Once I get started, I'll work night an' day.
+Mebbe you think it's funny, me askin' you about all this.  I know
+you're the last person in the world I ought to ask, but I don't
+know anybody else I could ask - unless it's Arthur.  Mebbe I ought
+to ask him.  If I was - "
+
+His voice died away.  His firmly planned intention had come to a
+halt on the verge of the horrible probability that he should have
+asked Arthur and that he had made a fool of himself.  Ruth did not
+speak immediately.  She was too absorbed in striving to reconcile
+the stumbling, uncouth speech and its simplicity of thought with
+what she saw in his face.  She had never looked in eyes that
+expressed greater power.  Here was a man who could do anything, was
+the message she read there, and it accorded ill with the weakness
+of his spoken thought.  And for that matter so complex and quick
+was her own mind that she did not have a just appreciation of
+simplicity.  And yet she had caught an impression of power in the
+very groping of this mind.  It had seemed to her like a giant
+writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down.  Her face
+was all sympathy when she did speak.
+
+"What you need, you realize yourself, and it is education.  You
+should go back and finish grammar school, and then go through to
+high school and university."
+
+"But that takes money," he interrupted.
+
+"Oh!" she cried.  "I had not thought of that.  But then you have
+relatives, somebody who could assist you?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"My father and mother are dead.  I've two sisters, one married, an'
+the other'll get married soon, I suppose.  Then I've a string of
+brothers, - I'm the youngest, - but they never helped nobody.
+They've just knocked around over the world, lookin' out for number
+one.  The oldest died in India.  Two are in South Africa now, an'
+another's on a whaling voyage, an' one's travellin' with a circus -
+he does trapeze work.  An' I guess I'm just like them.  I've taken
+care of myself since I was eleven - that's when my mother died.
+I've got to study by myself, I guess, an' what I want to know is
+where to begin."
+
+"I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar.
+Your grammar is - "  She had intended saying "awful," but she
+amended it to "is not particularly good."
+
+He flushed and sweated.
+
+"I know I must talk a lot of slang an' words you don't understand.
+But then they're the only words I know - how to speak.  I've got
+other words in my mind, picked 'em up from books, but I can't
+pronounce 'em, so I don't use 'em."
+
+"It isn't what you say, so much as how you say it.  You don't mind
+my being frank, do you?  I don't want to hurt you."
+
+"No, no," he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness.
+"Fire away.  I've got to know, an' I'd sooner know from you than
+anybody else."
+
+"Well, then, you say, 'You was'; it should be, 'You were.'  You say
+'I seen' for 'I saw.'  You use the double negative - "
+
+"What's the double negative?" he demanded; then added humbly, "You
+see, I don't even understand your explanations."
+
+"I'm afraid I didn't explain that," she smiled.  "A double negative
+is - let me see - well, you say, 'never helped nobody.'  'Never' is
+a negative.  'Nobody' is another negative.  It is a rule that two
+negatives make a positive.  'Never helped nobody' means that, not
+helping nobody, they must have helped somebody."
+
+"That's pretty clear," he said.  "I never thought of it before.
+But it don't mean they MUST have helped somebody, does it?  Seems
+to me that 'never helped nobody' just naturally fails to say
+whether or not they helped somebody.  I never thought of it before,
+and I'll never say it again."
+
+She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his
+mind.  As soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but
+corrected her error.
+
+"You'll find it all in the grammar," she went on.  "There's
+something else I noticed in your speech.  You say 'don't' when you
+shouldn't.  'Don't' is a contraction and stands for two words.  Do
+you know them?"
+
+He thought a moment, then answered, "'Do not.'"
+
+She nodded her head, and said, "And you use 'don't' when you mean
+'does not.'"
+
+He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.
+
+"Give me an illustration," he asked.
+
+"Well - "  She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she
+thought, while he looked on and decided that her expression was
+most adorable.  "'It don't do to be hasty.'  Change 'don't' to 'do
+not,' and it reads, 'It do not do to be hasty,' which is perfectly
+absurd."
+
+He turned it over in his mind and considered.
+
+"Doesn't it jar on your ear?" she suggested.
+
+"Can't say that it does," he replied judicially.
+
+"Why didn't you say, 'Can't say that it do'?" she queried.
+
+"That sounds wrong," he said slowly.  "As for the other I can't
+make up my mind.  I guess my ear ain't had the trainin' yours has."
+
+"There is no such word as 'ain't,'" she said, prettily emphatic.
+
+Martin flushed again.
+
+"And you say 'ben' for 'been,'" she continued; "'come' for 'came';
+and the way you chop your endings is something dreadful."
+
+"How do you mean?"  He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get
+down on his knees before so marvellous a mind.  "How do I chop?"
+
+"You don't complete the endings.  'A-n-d' spells 'and.'  You
+pronounce it 'an'.'  'I-n-g' spells 'ing.'  Sometimes you pronounce
+it 'ing' and sometimes you leave off the 'g.'  And then you slur by
+dropping initial letters and diphthongs.  'T-h-e-m' spells 'them.'
+You pronounce it - oh, well, it is not necessary to go over all of
+them.  What you need is the grammar.  I'll get one and show you how
+to begin."
+
+As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had
+read in the etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as
+to whether he was doing the right thing, and fearing that she might
+take it as a sign that he was about to go.
+
+"By the way, Mr. Eden," she called back, as she was leaving the
+room.  "What is BOOZE?  You used it several times, you know."
+
+"Oh, booze," he laughed.  "It's slang.  It means whiskey an' beer -
+anything that will make you drunk."
+
+"And another thing," she laughed back.  "Don't use 'you' when you
+are impersonal.  'You' is very personal, and your use of it just
+now was not precisely what you meant."
+
+"I don't just see that."
+
+"Why, you said just now, to me, 'whiskey and beer - anything that
+will make you drunk' - make me drunk, don't you see?"
+
+"Well, it would, wouldn't it?"
+
+"Yes, of course," she smiled.  "But it would be nicer not to bring
+me into it.  Substitute 'one' for 'you' and see how much better it
+sounds."
+
+When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair near his - he
+wondered if he should have helped her with the chair - and sat down
+beside him.  She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads
+were inclined toward each other.  He could hardly follow her
+outlining of the work he must do, so amazed was he by her
+delightful propinquity.  But when she began to lay down the
+importance of conjugation, he forgot all about her.  He had never
+heard of conjugation, and was fascinated by the glimpse he was
+catching into the tie-ribs of language.  He leaned closer to the
+page, and her hair touched his cheek.  He had fainted but once in
+his life, and he thought he was going to faint again.  He could
+scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his
+throat and suffocating him.  Never had she seemed so accessible as
+now.  For the moment the great gulf that separated them was
+bridged.  But there was no diminution in the loftiness of his
+feeling for her.  She had not descended to him.  It was he who had
+been caught up into the clouds and carried to her.  His reverence
+for her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious awe and
+fervor.  It seemed to him that he had intruded upon the holy of
+holies, and slowly and carefully he moved his head aside from the
+contact which thrilled him like an electric shock and of which she
+had not been aware.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+
+Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his
+grammar, reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the
+books that caught his fancy.  Of his own class he saw nothing.  The
+girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried
+Jim with questions, and some of the fellows who put on the glove at
+Riley's were glad that Martin came no more.  He made another
+discovery of treasure-trove in the library.  As the grammar had
+shown him the tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the
+tie-ribs of poetry, and he began to learn metre and construction
+and form, beneath the beauty he loved finding the why and wherefore
+of that beauty.  Another modern book he found treated poetry as a
+representative art, treated it exhaustively, with copious
+illustrations from the best in literature.  Never had he read
+fiction with so keen zest as he studied these books.  And his fresh
+mind, untaxed for twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire,
+gripped hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the student
+mind.
+
+When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he
+had known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and
+harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with
+this new world and expanded.  His mind made for unity, and he was
+surprised when at first he began to see points of contact between
+the two worlds.  And he was ennobled, as well, by the loftiness of
+thought and beauty he found in the books.  This led him to believe
+more firmly than ever that up above him, in society like Ruth and
+her family, all men and women thought these thoughts and lived
+them.  Down below where he lived was the ignoble, and he wanted to
+purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled all his days, and to
+rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt the upper classes.  All
+his childhood and youth had been troubled by a vague unrest; he had
+never known what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he had
+hunted vainly for until he met Ruth.  And now his unrest had become
+sharp and painful, and he knew at last, clearly and definitely,
+that it was beauty, and intellect, and love that he must have.
+
+During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each
+time was an added inspiration.  She helped him with his English,
+corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic.  But
+their intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study.  He had
+seen too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be wholly
+content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis; and there
+were times when their conversation turned on other themes - the
+last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied.  And when
+she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he ascended to the
+topmost heaven of delight.  Never, in all the women he had heard
+speak, had he heard a voice like hers.  The least sound of it was a
+stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word
+she uttered.  It was the quality of it, the repose, and the musical
+modulation - the soft, rich, indefinable product of culture and a
+gentle soul.  As he listened to her, there rang in the ears of his
+memory the harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and, in
+lesser degrees of harshness, the strident voices of working women
+and of the girls of his own class.  Then the chemistry of vision
+would begin to work, and they would troop in review across his
+mind, each, by contrast, multiplying Ruth's glories.  Then, too,
+his bliss was heightened by the knowledge that her mind was
+comprehending what she read and was quivering with appreciation of
+the beauty of the written thought.  She read to him much from "The
+Princess," and often he saw her eyes swimming with tears, so finely
+was her aesthetic nature strung.  At such moments her own emotions
+elevated him till he was as a god, and, as he gazed at her and
+listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading its
+deepest secrets.  And then, becoming aware of the heights of
+exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided that this was love
+and that love was the greatest thing in the world.  And in review
+would pass along the corridors of memory all previous thrills and
+burnings he had known, - the drunkenness of wine, the caresses of
+women, the rough play and give and take of physical contests, - and
+they seemed trivial and mean compared with this sublime ardor he
+now enjoyed.
+
+The situation was obscured to Ruth.  She had never had any
+experiences of the heart.  Her only experiences in such matters
+were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated
+by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality; and she little knew that
+this rough sailor was creeping into her heart and storing there
+pent forces that would some day burst forth and surge through her
+in waves of fire.  She did not know the actual fire of love.  Her
+knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she conceived of it
+as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew or the ripple of quiet
+water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer nights.  Her idea of
+love was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one
+softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of
+ethereal calm.  She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of
+love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes.  She
+knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the world; and
+the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion.  The conjugal
+affection of her father and mother constituted her ideal of love-
+affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging, without
+shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence with
+a loved one.
+
+So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange
+individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the
+effects he produced upon her.  It was only natural.  In similar
+ways she had experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild
+animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or
+shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning.  There was something
+cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him.  He
+came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces.  The blaze of
+tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles
+was the primordial vigor of life.  He was marred and scarred by
+that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts
+of which began beyond her horizon.  He was untamed, wild, and in
+secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so
+mildly to her hand.  Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse
+to tame the wild thing.  It was an unconscious impulse, and
+farthest from her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay
+of him into a likeness of her father's image, which image she
+believed to be the finest in the world.  Nor was there any way, out
+of her inexperience, for her to know that the cosmic feel she
+caught of him was that most cosmic of things, love, which with
+equal power drew men and women together across the world, compelled
+stags to kill each other in the rutting season, and drove even the
+elements irresistibly to unite.
+
+His swift development was a source of surprise and interest.  She
+detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by
+day, like flowers in congenial soil.  She read Browning aloud to
+him, and was often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave
+to mooted passages.  It was beyond her to realize that, out of his
+experience of men and women and life, his interpretations were far
+more frequently correct than hers.  His conceptions seemed naive to
+her, though she was often fired by his daring flights of
+comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide among the stars that
+she could not follow and could only sit and thrill to the impact of
+unguessed power.  Then she played to him - no longer at him - and
+probed him with music that sank to depths beyond her plumb-line.
+His nature opened to music as a flower to the sun, and the
+transition was quick from his working-class rag-time and jingles to
+her classical display pieces that she knew nearly by heart.  Yet he
+betrayed a democratic fondness for Wagner, and the "Tannhauser"
+overture, when she had given him the clew to it, claimed him as
+nothing else she played.  In an immediate way it personified his
+life.  All his past was the VENUSBURG motif, while her he
+identified somehow with the PILGRIM'S CHORUS motif; and from the
+exalted state this elevated him to, he swept onward and upward into
+that vast shadow-realm of spirit-groping, where good and evil war
+eternally.
+
+Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind temporary doubts
+as to the correctness of her own definitions and conceptions of
+music.  But her singing he did not question.  It was too wholly
+her, and he sat always amazed at the divine melody of her pure
+soprano voice.  And he could not help but contrast it with the weak
+pipings and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and
+untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats
+of the women of the seaport towns.  She enjoyed singing and playing
+to him.  In truth, it was the first time she had ever had a human
+soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him was a delight to
+mould; for she thought she was moulding it, and her intentions were
+good.  Besides, it was pleasant to be with him.  He did not repel
+her.  That first repulsion had been really a fear of her
+undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep.  Though she did
+not know it, she had a feeling in him of proprietary right.  Also,
+he had a tonic effect upon her.  She was studying hard at the
+university, and it seemed to strengthen her to emerge from the
+dusty books and have the fresh sea-breeze of his personality blow
+upon her.  Strength!  Strength was what she needed, and he gave it
+to her in generous measure.  To come into the same room with him,
+or to meet him at the door, was to take heart of life.  And when he
+had gone, she would return to her books with a keener zest and
+fresh store of energy.
+
+She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was
+an awkward thing to play with souls.  As her interest in Martin
+increased, the remodelling of his life became a passion with her.
+
+"There is Mr. Butler," she said one afternoon, when grammar and
+arithmetic and poetry had been put aside.
+
+"He had comparatively no advantages at first.  His father had been
+a bank cashier, but he lingered for years, dying of consumption in
+Arizona, so that when he was dead, Mr. Butler, Charles Butler he
+was called, found himself alone in the world.  His father had come
+from Australia, you know, and so he had no relatives in California.
+He went to work in a printing-office, - I have heard him tell of it
+many times, - and he got three dollars a week, at first.  His
+income to-day is at least thirty thousand a year.  How did he do
+it?  He was honest, and faithful, and industrious, and economical.
+He denied himself the enjoyments that most boys indulge in.  He
+made it a point to save so much every week, no matter what he had
+to do without in order to save it.  Of course, he was soon earning
+more than three dollars a week, and as his wages increased he saved
+more and more.
+
+"He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to night school.
+He had his eyes fixed always on the future.  Later on he went to
+night high school.  When he was only seventeen, he was earning
+excellent wages at setting type, but he was ambitious.  He wanted a
+career, not a livelihood, and he was content to make immediate
+sacrifices for his ultimate again.  He decided upon the law, and he
+entered father's office as an office boy - think of that! - and got
+only four dollars a week.  But he had learned how to be economical,
+and out of that four dollars he went on saving money."
+
+She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it.
+His face was lighted up with interest in the youthful struggles of
+Mr. Butler; but there was a frown upon his face as well.
+
+"I'd say they was pretty hard lines for a young fellow," he
+remarked.  "Four dollars a week!  How could he live on it?  You can
+bet he didn't have any frills.  Why, I pay five dollars a week for
+board now, an' there's nothin' excitin' about it, you can lay to
+that.  He must have lived like a dog.  The food he ate - "
+
+"He cooked for himself," she interrupted, "on a little kerosene
+stove."
+
+"The food he ate must have been worse than what a sailor gets on
+the worst-feedin' deep-water ships, than which there ain't much
+that can be possibly worse."
+
+"But think of him now!" she cried enthusiastically.  "Think of what
+his income affords him.  His early denials are paid for a thousand-
+fold."
+
+Martin looked at her sharply.
+
+"There's one thing I'll bet you," he said, "and it is that Mr.
+Butler is nothin' gay-hearted now in his fat days.  He fed himself
+like that for years an' years, on a boy's stomach, an' I bet his
+stomach's none too good now for it."
+
+Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.
+
+"I'll bet he's got dyspepsia right now!" Martin challenged.
+
+"Yes, he has," she confessed; "but - "
+
+"An' I bet," Martin dashed on, "that he's solemn an' serious as an
+old owl, an' doesn't care a rap for a good time, for all his thirty
+thousand a year.  An' I'll bet he's not particularly joyful at
+seein' others have a good time.  Ain't I right?"
+
+She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:-
+
+"But he is not that type of man.  By nature he is sober and
+serious.  He always was that."
+
+"You can bet he was," Martin proclaimed.  "Three dollars a week,
+an' four dollars a week, an' a young boy cookin' for himself on an
+oil-burner an' layin' up money, workin' all day an' studyin' all
+night, just workin' an' never playin', never havin' a good time,
+an' never learnin' how to have a good time - of course his thirty
+thousand came along too late."
+
+His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner sight all
+the thousands of details of the boy's existence and of his narrow
+spiritual development into a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year man.
+With the swiftness and wide-reaching of multitudinous thought
+Charles Butler's whole life was telescoped upon his vision.
+
+"Do you know," he added, "I feel sorry for Mr. Butler.  He was too
+young to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of
+thirty thousand a year that's clean wasted upon him.  Why, thirty
+thousand, lump sum, wouldn't buy for him right now what ten cents
+he was layin' up would have bought him, when he was a kid, in the
+way of candy an' peanuts or a seat in nigger heaven."
+
+It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth.
+Not only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but
+she always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or
+modify her own convictions.  Had she been fourteen instead of
+twenty-four, she might have been changed by them; but she was
+twenty-four, conservative by nature and upbringing, and already
+crystallized into the cranny of life where she had been born and
+formed.  It was true, his bizarre judgments troubled her in the
+moments they were uttered, but she ascribed them to his novelty of
+type and strangeness of living, and they were soon forgotten.
+Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength of their
+utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that
+accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him.  She
+would never have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her
+horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with
+wider and deeper concepts.  Her own limits were the limits of her
+horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in
+others.  And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and
+that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she
+dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon
+until it was identified with hers.
+
+"But I have not finished my story," she said.  "He worked, so
+father says, as no other office boy he ever had.  Mr. Butler was
+always eager to work.  He never was late, and he was usually at the
+office a few minutes before his regular time.  And yet he saved his
+time.  Every spare moment was devoted to study.  He studied book-
+keeping and type-writing, and he paid for lessons in shorthand by
+dictating at night to a court reporter who needed practice.  He
+quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable.  Father
+appreciated him and saw that he was bound to rise.  It was on
+father's suggestion that he went to law college.  He became a
+lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took him
+in as junior partner.  He is a great man.  He refused the United
+States Senate several times, and father says he could become a
+justice of the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants
+to.  Such a life is an inspiration to all of us.  It shows us that
+a man with will may rise superior to his environment."
+
+"He is a great man," Martin said sincerely.
+
+But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred
+upon his sense of beauty and life.  He could not find an adequate
+motive in Mr. Butler's life of pinching and privation.  Had he done
+it for love of a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would
+have understood.  God's own mad lover should do anything for the
+kiss, but not for thirty thousand dollars a year.  He was
+dissatisfied with Mr. Butler's career.  There was something paltry
+about it, after all.  Thirty thousand a year was all right, but
+dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely
+income of all its value.
+
+Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made
+it clear that more remodelling was necessary.  Hers was that common
+insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their
+color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human
+creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than
+they.  It was the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew
+thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary
+god-substituting to the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire
+to shape this man from other crannies of life into the likeness of
+the men who lived in her particular cranny of life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+
+Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a
+lover's desire.  His store of money exhausted, he had shipped
+before the mast on the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon
+Islands, after eight months of failure to find treasure, had
+witnessed the breaking up of the expedition.  The men had been paid
+off in Australia, and Martin had immediately shipped on a deep-
+water vessel for San Francisco.  Not alone had those eight months
+earned him enough money to stay on land for many weeks, but they
+had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and reading.
+
+His was the student's mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
+indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth.  The grammar he
+had taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded
+brain had mastered it.  He noticed the bad grammar used by his
+shipmates, and made a point of mentally correcting and
+reconstructing their crudities of speech.  To his great joy he
+discovered that his ear was becoming sensitive and that he was
+developing grammatical nerves.  A double negative jarred him like a
+discord, and often, from lack of practice, it was from his own lips
+that the jar came.  His tongue refused to learn new tricks in a
+day.
+
+After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the
+dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary.  He
+found that this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he
+steadily went over and over his lengthening list of pronunciations
+and definitions, while he invariably memorized himself to sleep.
+"Never did anything," "if I were," and "those things," were
+phrases, with many variations, that he repeated under his breath in
+order to accustom his tongue to the language spoken by Ruth.  "And"
+and "ing," with the "d" and "g" pronounced emphatically, he went
+over thousands of times; and to his surprise he noticed that he was
+beginning to speak cleaner and more correct English than the
+officers themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who
+had financed the expedition.
+
+The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into
+possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and
+Martin had washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted
+access to the precious volumes.  For a time, so steeped was he in
+the plays and in the many favorite passages that impressed
+themselves almost without effort on his brain, that all the world
+seemed to shape itself into forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy
+and his very thoughts were in blank verse.  It trained his ear and
+gave him a fine appreciation for noble English; withal it
+introduced into his mind much that was archaic and obsolete.
+
+The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he
+had learned of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned
+much of himself.  Along with his humbleness because he knew so
+little, there arose a conviction of power.  He felt a sharp
+gradation between himself and his shipmates, and was wise enough to
+realize that the difference lay in potentiality rather than
+achievement.  What he could do, - they could do; but within him he
+felt a confused ferment working that told him there was more in him
+than he had done.  He was tortured by the exquisite beauty of the
+world, and wished that Ruth were there to share it with him.  He
+decided that he would describe to her many of the bits of South Sea
+beauty.  The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and
+urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth.
+And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea.  He would
+write.  He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw,
+one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through
+which it felt.  He would write - everything - poetry and prose,
+fiction and description, and plays like Shakespeare.  There was
+career and the way to win to Ruth.  The men of literature were the
+world's giants, and he conceived them to be far finer than the Mr.
+Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and could be Supreme
+Court justices if they wanted to.
+
+Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return
+voyage to San Francisco was like a dream.  He was drunken with
+unguessed power and felt that he could do anything.  In the midst
+of the great and lonely sea he gained perspective.  Clearly, and
+for the first lime, he saw Ruth and her world.  It was all
+visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which he could take up
+in his two hands and turn around and about and examine.  There was
+much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as a
+whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it.
+To write!  The thought was fire in him.  He would begin as soon as
+he got back.  The first thing he would do would be to describe the
+voyage of the treasure-hunters.  He would sell it to some San
+Francisco newspaper.  He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and
+she would be surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print.
+While he wrote, he could go on studying.  There were twenty-four
+hours in each day.  He was invincible.  He knew how to work, and
+the citadels would go down before him.  He would not have to go to
+sea again - as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a vision of
+a steam yacht.  There were other writers who possessed steam
+yachts.  Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow
+succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content to earn
+enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying.  And
+then, after some time, - a very indeterminate time, - when he had
+learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and
+his name would be on all men's lips.  But greater than that,
+infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have proved
+himself worthy of Ruth.  Fame was all very well, but it was for
+Ruth that his splendid dream arose.  He was not a fame-monger, but
+merely one of God's mad lovers.
+
+Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up
+his old room at Bernard Higginbotham's and set to work.  He did not
+even let Ruth know he was back.  He would go and see her when he
+finished the article on the treasure-hunters.  It was not so
+difficult to abstain from seeing her, because of the violent heat
+of creative fever that burned in him.  Besides, the very article he
+was writing would bring her nearer to him.  He did not know how
+long an article he should write, but he counted the words in a
+double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the SAN FRANCISCO
+EXAMINER, and guided himself by that.  Three days, at white heat,
+completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a
+large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he
+picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs
+and quotation marks.  He had never thought of such things before;
+and he promptly set to work writing the article over, referring
+continually to the pages of the rhetoric and learning more in a day
+about composition than the average schoolboy in a year.  When he
+had copied the article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he
+read in a newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered
+the iron law that manuscripts should never be rolled and that they
+should be written on one side of the paper.  He had violated the
+law on both counts.  Also, he learned from the item that first-
+class papers paid a minimum of ten dollars a column.  So, while he
+copied the manuscript a third time, he consoled himself by
+multiplying ten columns by ten dollars.  The product was always the
+same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was better than
+seafaring.  If it hadn't been for his blunders, he would have
+finished the article in three days.  One hundred dollars in three
+days!  It would have taken him three months and longer on the sea
+to earn a similar amount.  A man was a fool to go to sea when he
+could write, he concluded, though the money in itself meant nothing
+to him.  Its value was in the liberty it would get him, the
+presentable garments it would buy him, all of which would bring him
+nearer, swiftly nearer, to the slender, pale girl who had turned
+his life back upon itself and given him inspiration.
+
+He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to
+the editor of the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER.  He had an idea that
+anything accepted by a paper was published immediately, and as he
+had sent the manuscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on
+the following Sunday.  He conceived that it would be fine to let
+that event apprise Ruth of his return.  Then, Sunday afternoon, he
+would call and see her.  In the meantime he was occupied by another
+idea, which he prided himself upon as being a particularly sane,
+careful, and modest idea.  He would write an adventure story for
+boys and sell it to THE YOUTH'S COMPANION.  He went to the free
+reading-room and looked through the files of THE YOUTH'S COMPANION.
+Serial stories, he found, were usually published in that weekly in
+five instalments of about three thousand words each.  He discovered
+several serials that ran to seven instalments, and decided to write
+one of that length.
+
+He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once - a voyage that
+was to have been for three years and which had terminated in
+shipwreck at the end of six months.  While his imagination was
+fanciful, even fantastic at times, he had a basic love of reality
+that compelled him to write about the things he knew.  He knew
+whaling, and out of the real materials of his knowledge he
+proceeded to manufacture the fictitious adventures of the two boys
+he intended to use as joint heroes.  It was easy work, he decided
+on Saturday evening.  He had completed on that day the first
+instalment of three thousand words - much to the amusement of Jim,
+and to the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who sneered
+throughout meal-time at the "litery" person they had discovered in
+the family.
+
+Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in-law's surprise
+on Sunday morning when he opened his EXAMINER and saw the article
+on the treasure-hunters.  Early that morning he was out himself to
+the front door, nervously racing through the many-sheeted
+newspaper.  He went through it a second time, very carefully, then
+folded it up and left it where he had found it.  He was glad he had
+not told any one about his article.  On second thought he concluded
+that he had been wrong about the speed with which things found
+their way into newspaper columns.  Besides, there had not been any
+news value in his article, and most likely the editor would write
+to him about it first.
+
+After breakfast he went on with his serial.  The words flowed from
+his pen, though he broke off from the writing frequently to look up
+definitions in the dictionary or to refer to the rhetoric.  He
+often read or re-read a chapter at a time, during such pauses; and
+he consoled himself that while he was not writing the great things
+he felt to be in him, he was learning composition, at any rate, and
+training himself to shape up and express his thoughts.  He toiled
+on till dark, when he went out to the reading-room and explored
+magazines and weeklies until the place closed at ten o'clock.  This
+was his programme for a week.  Each day he did three thousand
+words, and each evening he puzzled his way through the magazines,
+taking note of the stories, articles, and poems that editors saw
+fit to publish.  One thing was certain:  What these multitudinous
+writers did he could do, and only give him time and he would do
+what they could not do.  He was cheered to read in BOOK NEWS, in a
+paragraph on the payment of magazine writers, not that Rudyard
+Kipling received a dollar per word, but that the minimum rate paid
+by first-class magazines was two cents a word.  THE YOUTH'S
+COMPANION was certainly first class, and at that rate the three
+thousand words he had written that day would bring him sixty
+dollars - two months' wages on the sea!
+
+On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words
+long.  At two cents a word, he calculated, that would bring him
+four hundred and twenty dollars.  Not a bad week's work.  It was
+more money than he had ever possessed at one time.  He did not know
+how he could spend it all.  He had tapped a gold mine.  Where this
+came from he could always get more.  He planned to buy some more
+clothes, to subscribe to many magazines, and to buy dozens of
+reference books that at present he was compelled to go to the
+library to consult.  And still there was a large portion of the
+four hundred and twenty dollars unspent.  This worried him until
+the thought came to him of hiring a servant for Gertrude and of
+buying a bicycle for Marion.
+
+He mailed the bulky manuscript to THE YOUTH'S COMPANION, and on
+Saturday afternoon, after having planned an article on pearl-
+diving, he went to see Ruth.  He had telephoned, and she went
+herself to greet him at the door.  The old familiar blaze of health
+rushed out from him and struck her like a blow.  It seemed to enter
+into her body and course through her veins in a liquid glow, and to
+set her quivering with its imparted strength.  He flushed warmly as
+he took her hand and looked into her blue eyes, but the fresh
+bronze of eight months of sun hid the flush, though it did not
+protect the neck from the gnawing chafe of the stiff collar.  She
+noted the red line of it with amusement which quickly vanished as
+she glanced at his clothes.  They really fitted him, - it was his
+first made-to-order suit, - and he seemed slimmer and better
+modelled.  In addition, his cloth cap had been replaced by a soft
+hat, which she commanded him to put on and then complimented him on
+his appearance.  She did not remember when she had felt so happy.
+This change in him was her handiwork, and she was proud of it and
+fired with ambition further to help him.
+
+But the most radical change of all, and the one that pleased her
+most, was the change in his speech.  Not only did he speak more
+correctly, but he spoke more easily, and there were many new words
+in his vocabulary.  When he grew excited or enthusiastic, however,
+he dropped back into the old slurring and the dropping of final
+consonants.  Also, there was an awkward hesitancy, at times, as he
+essayed the new words he had learned.  On the other hand, along
+with his ease of expression, he displayed a lightness and
+facetiousness of thought that delighted her.  It was his old spirit
+of humor and badinage that had made him a favorite in his own
+class, but which he had hitherto been unable to use in her presence
+through lack of words and training.  He was just beginning to
+orientate himself and to feel that he was not wholly an intruder.
+But he was very tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set the
+pace of sprightliness and fancy, keeping up with her but never
+daring to go beyond her.
+
+He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan to write for
+a livelihood and of going on with his studies.  But he was
+disappointed at her lack of approval.  She did not think much of
+his plan.
+
+"You see," she said frankly, "writing must be a trade, like
+anything else.  Not that I know anything about it, of course.  I
+only bring common judgment to bear.  You couldn't hope to be a
+blacksmith without spending three years at learning the trade - or
+is it five years!  Now writers are so much better paid than
+blacksmiths that there must be ever so many more men who would like
+to write, who - try to write."
+
+"But then, may not I be peculiarly constituted to write?" he
+queried, secretly exulting at the language he had used, his swift
+imagination throwing the whole scene and atmosphere upon a vast
+screen along with a thousand other scenes from his life - scenes
+that were rough and raw, gross and bestial.
+
+The whole composite vision was achieved with the speed of light,
+producing no pause in the conversation, nor interrupting his calm
+train of thought.  On the screen of his imagination he saw himself
+and this sweet and beautiful girl, facing each other and conversing
+in good English, in a room of books and paintings and tone and
+culture, and all illuminated by a bright light of steadfast
+brilliance; while ranged about and fading away to the remote edges
+of the screen were antithetical scenes, each scene a picture, and
+he the onlooker, free to look at will upon what he wished.  He saw
+these other scenes through drifting vapors and swirls of sullen fog
+dissolving before shafts of red and garish light.  He saw cowboys
+at the bar, drinking fierce whiskey, the air filled with obscenity
+and ribald language, and he saw himself with them drinking and
+cursing with the wildest, or sitting at table with them, under
+smoking kerosene lamps, while the chips clicked and clattered and
+the cards were dealt around.  He saw himself, stripped to the
+waist, with naked fists, fighting his great fight with Liverpool
+Red in the forecastle of the Susquehanna; and he saw the bloody
+deck of the John Rogers, that gray morning of attempted mutiny, the
+mate kicking in death-throes on the main-hatch, the revolver in the
+old man's hand spitting fire and smoke, the men with passion-
+wrenched faces, of brutes screaming vile blasphemies and falling
+about him - and then he returned to the central scene, calm and
+clean in the steadfast light, where Ruth sat and talked with him
+amid books and paintings; and he saw the grand piano upon which she
+would later play to him; and he heard the echoes of his own
+selected and correct words, "But then, may I not be peculiarly
+constituted to write?"
+
+"But no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for
+blacksmithing," she was laughing, "I never heard of one becoming a
+blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship."
+
+"What would you advise?" he asked.  "And don't forget that I feel
+in me this capacity to write - I can't explain it; I just know that
+it is in me."
+
+"You must get a thorough education," was the answer, "whether or
+not you ultimately become a writer.  This education is
+indispensable for whatever career you select, and it must not be
+slipshod or sketchy.  You should go to high school."
+
+"Yes - " he began; but she interrupted with an afterthought:-
+
+"Of course, you could go on with your writing, too."
+
+"I would have to," he said grimly.
+
+"Why?"  She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did not quite
+like the persistence with which he clung to his notion.
+
+"Because, without writing there wouldn't be any high school.  I
+must live and buy books and clothes, you know."
+
+"I'd forgotten that," she laughed.  "Why weren't you born with an
+income?"
+
+"I'd rather have good health and imagination," he answered.  "I can
+make good on the income, but the other things have to be made good
+for - "  He almost said "you," then amended his sentence to, "have
+to be made good for one."
+
+"Don't say 'make good,'" she cried, sweetly petulant.  "It's slang,
+and it's horrid."
+
+He flushed, and stammered, "That's right, and I only wish you'd
+correct me every time."
+
+"I - I'd like to," she said haltingly.  "You have so much in you
+that is good that I want to see you perfect."
+
+He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of
+being moulded by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the
+image of her ideal of man.  And when she pointed out the
+opportuneness of the time, that the entrance examinations to high
+school began on the following Monday, he promptly volunteered that
+he would take them.
+
+Then she played and sang to him, while he gazed with hungry
+yearning at her, drinking in her loveliness and marvelling that
+there should not be a hundred suitors listening there and longing
+for her as he listened and longed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+
+He stopped to dinner that evening, and, much to Ruth's
+satisfaction, made a favorable impression on her father.  They
+talked about the sea as a career, a subject which Martin had at his
+finger-ends, and Mr. Morse remarked afterward that he seemed a very
+clear-headed young man.  In his avoidance of slang and his search
+after right words, Martin was compelled to talk slowly, which
+enabled him to find the best thoughts that were in him.  He was
+more at ease than that first night at dinner, nearly a year before,
+and his shyness and modesty even commended him to Mrs. Morse, who
+was pleased at his manifest improvement.
+
+"He is the first man that ever drew passing notice from Ruth," she
+told her husband.  "She has been so singularly backward where men
+are concerned that I have been worried greatly."
+
+Mr. Morse looked at his wife curiously.
+
+"You mean to use this young sailor to wake her up?" he questioned.
+
+"I mean that she is not to die an old maid if I can help it," was
+the answer.  "If this young Eden can arouse her interest in mankind
+in general, it will be a good thing."
+
+"A very good thing," he commented.  "But suppose, - and we must
+suppose, sometimes, my dear, - suppose he arouses her interest too
+particularly in him?"
+
+"Impossible," Mrs. Morse laughed.  "She is three years older than
+he, and, besides, it is impossible.  Nothing will ever come of it.
+Trust that to me."
+
+And so Martin's role was arranged for him, while he, led on by
+Arthur and Norman, was meditating an extravagance.  They were going
+out for a ride into the hills Sunday morning on their wheels, which
+did not interest Martin until he learned that Ruth, too, rode a
+wheel and was going along.  He did not ride, nor own a wheel, but
+if Ruth rode, it was up to him to begin, was his decision; and when
+he said good night, he stopped in at a cyclery on his way home and
+spent forty dollars for a wheel.  It was more than a month's hard-
+earned wages, and it reduced his stock of money amazingly; but when
+he added the hundred dollars he was to receive from the EXAMINER to
+the four hundred and twenty dollars that was the least THE YOUTH'S
+COMPANION could pay him, he felt that he had reduced the perplexity
+the unwonted amount of money had caused him.  Nor did he mind, in
+the course of learning to ride the wheel home, the fact that he
+ruined his suit of clothes.  He caught the tailor by telephone that
+night from Mr. Higginbotham's store and ordered another suit.  Then
+he carried the wheel up the narrow stairway that clung like a fire-
+escape to the rear wall of the building, and when he had moved his
+bed out from the wall, found there was just space enough in the
+small room for himself and the wheel.
+
+Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school
+examination, but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he
+spent the day in the white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and
+romance that burned in him.  The fact that the EXAMINER of that
+morning had failed to publish his treasure-hunting article did not
+dash his spirits.  He was at too great a height for that, and
+having been deaf to a twice-repeated summons, he went without the
+heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr. Higginbotham invariably graced
+his table.  To Mr. Higginbotham such a dinner was advertisement of
+his worldly achievement and prosperity, and he honored it by
+delivering platitudinous sermonettes upon American institutions and
+the opportunity said institutions gave to any hard-working man to
+rise - the rise, in his case, which he pointed out unfailingly,
+being from a grocer's clerk to the ownership of Higginbotham's Cash
+Store.
+
+Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished "Pearl-diving" on
+Monday morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high
+school.  And when, days later, he applied for the results of his
+examinations, he learned that he had failed in everything save
+grammar.
+
+"Your grammar is excellent," Professor Hilton informed him, staring
+at him through heavy spectacles; "but you know nothing, positively
+nothing, in the other branches, and your United States history is
+abominable - there is no other word for it, abominable.  I should
+advise you - "
+
+Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and
+unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes.  He was professor of
+physics in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre
+salary, and a select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.
+
+"Yes, sir," Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at the
+desk in the library was in Professor Hilton's place just then.
+
+"And I should advise you to go back to the grammar school for at
+least two years.  Good day."
+
+Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though he was
+surprised at Ruth's shocked expression when he told her Professor
+Hilton's advice.  Her disappointment was so evident that he was
+sorry he had failed, but chiefly so for her sake.
+
+"You see I was right," she said.  "You know far more than any of
+the students entering high school, and yet you can't pass the
+examinations.  It is because what education you have is
+fragmentary, sketchy.  You need the discipline of study, such as
+only skilled teachers can give you.  You must be thoroughly
+grounded.  Professor Hilton is right, and if I were you, I'd go to
+night school.  A year and a half of it might enable you to catch up
+that additional six months.  Besides, that would leave you your
+days in which to write, or, if you could not make your living by
+your pen, you would have your days in which to work in some
+position."
+
+But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school,
+when am I going to see you? - was Martin's first thought, though he
+refrained from uttering it.  Instead, he said:-
+
+"It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school.  But I
+wouldn't mind that if I thought it would pay.  But I don't think it
+will pay.  I can do the work quicker than they can teach me.  It
+would be a loss of time - " he thought of her and his desire to
+have her - "and I can't afford the time.  I haven't the time to
+spare, in fact."
+
+"There is so much that is necessary."  She looked at him gently,
+and he was a brute to oppose her.  "Physics and chemistry - you
+can't do them without laboratory study; and you'll find algebra and
+geometry almost hopeless with instruction.  You need the skilled
+teachers, the specialists in the art of imparting knowledge."
+
+He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least
+vainglorious way in which to express himself.
+
+"Please don't think I'm bragging," he began.  "I don't intend it
+that way at all.  But I have a feeling that I am what I may call a
+natural student.  I can study by myself.  I take to it kindly, like
+a duck to water.  You see yourself what I did with grammar.  And
+I've learned much of other things - you would never dream how much.
+And I'm only getting started.  Wait till I get - "  He hesitated
+and assured himself of the pronunciation before he said "momentum.
+I'm getting my first real feel of things now.  I'm beginning to
+size up the situation - "
+
+"Please don't say 'size up,'" she interrupted.
+
+"To get a line on things," he hastily amended.
+
+"That doesn't mean anything in correct English," she objected.
+
+He floundered for a fresh start.
+
+"What I'm driving at is that I'm beginning to get the lay of the
+land."
+
+Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.
+
+"Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room.  Whenever I go into the
+library, I am impressed that way.  The part played by teachers is
+to teach the student the contents of the chart-room in a systematic
+way.  The teachers are guides to the chart-room, that's all.  It's
+not something that they have in their own heads.  They don't make
+it up, don't create it.  It's all in the chart-room and they know
+their way about in it, and it's their business to show the place to
+strangers who might else get lost.  Now I don't get lost easily.  I
+have the bump of location.  I usually know where I'm at - What's
+wrong now?"
+
+"Don't say 'where I'm at.'"
+
+"That's right," he said gratefully, "where I am.  But where am I at
+- I mean, where am I?  Oh, yes, in the chart-room.  Well, some
+people - "
+
+"Persons," she corrected.
+
+"Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get
+along without them.  I've spent a lot of time in the chart-room
+now, and I'm on the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I
+want to refer to, what coasts I want to explore.  And from the way
+I line it up, I'll explore a whole lot more quickly by myself.  The
+speed of a fleet, you know, is the speed of the slowest ship, and
+the speed of the teachers is affected the same way.  They can't go
+any faster than the ruck of their scholars, and I can set a faster
+pace for myself than they set for a whole schoolroom."
+
+"'He travels the fastest who travels alone,'" she quoted at him.
+
+But I'd travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to
+blurt out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit
+spaces and starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm
+around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face.  In the same
+instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech.  God!  If
+he could so frame words that she could see what he then saw!  And
+he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the
+desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror
+of his mind.  Ah, that was it!  He caught at the hem of the secret.
+It was the very thing that the great writers and master-poets did.
+That was why they were giants.  They knew how to express what they
+thought, and felt, and saw.  Dogs asleep in the sun often whined
+and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made
+them whine and bark.  He had often wondered what it was.  And that
+was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun.  He saw noble and
+beautiful visions, but he could only whine and bark at Ruth.  But
+he would cease sleeping in the sun.  He would stand up, with open
+eyes, and he would struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes
+unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her his visioned
+wealth.  Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of
+making words obedient servitors, and of making combinations of
+words mean more than the sum of their separate meanings.  He was
+stirred profoundly by the passing glimpse at the secret, and he was
+again caught up in the vision of sunlit spaces and starry voids -
+until it came to him that it was very quiet, and he saw Ruth
+regarding him with an amused expression and a smile in her eyes.
+
+"I have had a great visioning," he said, and at the sound of his
+words in his own ears his heart gave a leap.  Where had those words
+come from?  They had adequately expressed the pause his vision had
+put in the conversation.  It was a miracle.  Never had he so
+loftily framed a lofty thought.  But never had he attempted to
+frame lofty thoughts in words.  That was it.  That explained it.
+He had never tried.  But Swinburne had, and Tennyson, and Kipling,
+and all the other poets.  His mind flashed on to his "Pearl-
+diving."  He had never dared the big things, the spirit of the
+beauty that was a fire in him.  That article would be a different
+thing when he was done with it.  He was appalled by the vastness of
+the beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind
+flashed and dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not
+chant that beauty in noble verse as the great poets did.  And there
+was all the mysterious delight and spiritual wonder of his love for
+Ruth.  Why could he not chant that, too, as the poets did?  They
+had sung of love.  So would he.  By God! -
+
+And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing.
+Carried away, he had breathed it aloud.  The blood surged into his
+face, wave upon wave, mastering the bronze of it till the blush of
+shame flaunted itself from collar-rim to the roots of his hair.
+
+"I - I - beg your pardon," he stammered.  "I was thinking."
+
+"It sounded as if you were praying," she said bravely, but she felt
+herself inside to be withering and shrinking.  It was the first
+time she had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she
+was shocked, not merely as a matter of principle and training, but
+shocked in spirit by this rough blast of life in the garden of her
+sheltered maidenhood.
+
+But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.
+Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything.  He had
+not had a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and
+succeeding, too.  It never entered her head that there could be any
+other reason for her being kindly disposed toward him.  She was
+tenderly disposed toward him, but she did not know it.  She had no
+way of knowing it.  The placid poise of twenty-four years without a
+single love affair did not fit her with a keen perception of her
+own feelings, and she who had never warmed to actual love was
+unaware that she was warming now.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+
+Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been
+finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by
+his attempts to write poetry.  His poems were love poems, inspired
+by Ruth, but they were never completed.  Not in a day could he
+learn to chant in noble verse.  Rhyme and metre and structure were
+serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them,
+an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great
+poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own.  It
+was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought
+after but could not capture.  It seemed a glow to him, a warm and
+trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching, though sometimes he was
+rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving them into phrases
+that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted across his
+vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty.  It was baffling.  He
+ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as
+everybody gibbered.  He read his fragments aloud.  The metre
+marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and
+equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he
+felt within were lacking.  He could not understand, and time and
+again, in despair, defeated and depressed, he returned to his
+article.  Prose was certainly an easier medium.
+
+Following the "Pearl-diving," he wrote an article on the sea as a
+career, another on turtle-catching, and a third on the northeast
+trades.  Then he tried, as an experiment, a short story, and before
+he broke his stride he had finished six short stories and
+despatched them to various magazines.  He wrote prolifically,
+intensely, from morning till night, and late at night, except when
+he broke off to go to the reading-room, draw books from the
+library, or to call on Ruth.  He was profoundly happy.  Life was
+pitched high.  He was in a fever that never broke.  The joy of
+creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his.  All the
+life about him - the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the
+slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr.
+Higginbotham - was a dream.  The real world was in his mind, and
+the stories he wrote were so many pieces of reality out of his
+mind.
+
+The days were too short.  There was so much he wanted to study.  He
+cut his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along
+upon it.  He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back
+to five.  He could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon
+any one of his pursuits.  It was with regret that he ceased from
+writing to study, that he ceased from study to go to the library,
+that he tore himself away from that chart-room of knowledge or from
+the magazines in the reading-room that were filled with the secrets
+of writers who succeeded in selling their wares.  It was like
+severing heart strings, when he was with Ruth, to stand up and go;
+and he scorched through the dark streets so as to get home to his
+books at the least possible expense of time.  And hardest of all
+was it to shut up the algebra or physics, put note-book and pencil
+aside, and close his tired eyes in sleep.  He hated the thought of
+ceasing to live, even for so short a time, and his sole consolation
+was that the alarm clock was set five hours ahead.  He would lose
+only five hours anyway, and then the jangling bell would jerk him
+out of unconsciousness and he would have before him another
+glorious day of nineteen hours.
+
+In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was ebbing low,
+and there was no money coming in.  A month after he had mailed it,
+the adventure serial for boys was returned to him by THE YOUTH'S
+COMPANION.  The rejection slip was so tactfully worded that he felt
+kindly toward the editor.  But he did not feel so kindly toward the
+editor of the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER.  After waiting two whole
+weeks, Martin had written to him.  A week later he wrote again.  At
+the end of the month, he went over to San Francisco and personally
+called upon the editor.  But he did not meet that exalted
+personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of tender years
+and red hair, who guarded the portals.  At the end of the fifth
+week the manuscript came back to him, by mail, without comment.
+There was no rejection slip, no explanation, nothing.  In the same
+way his other articles were tied up with the other leading San
+Francisco papers.  When he recovered them, he sent them to the
+magazines in the East, from which they were returned more promptly,
+accompanied always by the printed rejection slips.
+
+The short stories were returned in similar fashion.  He read them
+over and over, and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out
+the cause of their rejection, until, one day, he read in a
+newspaper that manuscripts should always be typewritten.  That
+explained it.  Of course editors were so busy that they could not
+afford the time and strain of reading handwriting.  Martin rented a
+typewriter and spent a day mastering the machine.  Each day he
+typed what he composed, and he typed his earlier manuscripts as
+fast as they were returned him.  He was surprised when the typed
+ones began to come back.  His jaw seemed to become squarer, his
+chin more aggressive, and he bundled the manuscripts off to new
+editors.
+
+The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own
+work.  He tried it out on Gertrude.  He read his stories aloud to
+her.  Her eyes glistened, and she looked at him proudly as she
+said:-
+
+"Ain't it grand, you writin' those sort of things."
+
+"Yes, yes," he demanded impatiently.  "But the story - how did you
+like it?"
+
+"Just grand," was the reply.  "Just grand, an' thrilling, too.  I
+was all worked up."
+
+He could see that her mind was not clear.  The perplexity was
+strong in her good-natured face.  So he waited.
+
+"But, say, Mart," after a long pause, "how did it end?  Did that
+young man who spoke so highfalutin' get her?"
+
+And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made
+artistically obvious, she would say:-
+
+"That's what I wanted to know.  Why didn't you write that way in
+the story?"
+
+One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories,
+namely, that she liked happy endings.
+
+"That story was perfectly grand," she announced, straightening up
+from the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her
+forehead with a red, steamy hand; "but it makes me sad.  I want to
+cry.  There is too many sad things in the world anyway.  It makes
+me happy to think about happy things.  Now if he'd married her, and
+- You don't mind, Mart?" she queried apprehensively.  "I just
+happen to feel that way, because I'm tired, I guess.  But the story
+was grand just the same, perfectly grand.  Where are you goin' to
+sell it?"
+
+"That's a horse of another color," he laughed.
+
+"But if you DID sell it, what do you think you'd get for it?"
+
+"Oh, a hundred dollars.  That would be the least, the way prices
+go."
+
+"My!  I do hope you'll sell it!"
+
+"Easy money, eh?"  Then he added proudly:  "I wrote it in two days.
+That's fifty dollars a day."
+
+He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare.  He would
+wait till some were published, he decided, then she would
+understand what he had been working for.  In the meantime he toiled
+on.  Never had the spirit of adventure lured him more strongly than
+on this amazing exploration of the realm of mind.  He bought the
+text-books on physics and chemistry, and, along with his algebra,
+worked out problems and demonstrations.  He took the laboratory
+proofs on faith, and his intense power of vision enabled him to see
+the reactions of chemicals more understandingly than the average
+student saw them in the laboratory.  Martin wandered on through the
+heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he was getting to the nature
+of things.  He had accepted the world as the world, but now he was
+comprehending the organization of it, the play and interplay of
+force and matter.  Spontaneous explanations of old matters were
+continually arising in his mind.  Levers and purchases fascinated
+him, and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks and
+tackles at sea.  The theory of navigation, which enabled the ships
+to travel unerringly their courses over the pathless ocean, was
+made clear to him.  The mysteries of storm, and rain, and tide were
+revealed, and the reason for the existence of trade-winds made him
+wonder whether he had written his article on the northeast trade
+too soon.  At any rate he knew he could write it better now.  One
+afternoon he went out with Arthur to the University of California,
+and, with bated breath and a feeling of religious awe, went through
+the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics
+professor lecturing to his classes.
+
+But he did not neglect his writing.  A stream of short stories
+flowed from his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of
+verse - the kind he saw printed in the magazines - though he lost
+his head and wasted two weeks on a tragedy in blank verse, the
+swift rejection of which, by half a dozen magazines, dumfounded
+him.  Then he discovered Henley and wrote a series of sea-poems on
+the model of "Hospital Sketches."  They were simple poems, of light
+and color, and romance and adventure.  "Sea Lyrics," he called
+them, and he judged them to be the best work he had yet done.
+There were thirty, and he completed them in a month, doing one a
+day after having done his regular day's work on fiction, which
+day's work was the equivalent to a week's work of the average
+successful writer.  The toil meant nothing to him.  It was not
+toil.  He was finding speech, and all the beauty and wonder that
+had been pent for years behind his inarticulate lips was now
+pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.
+
+He showed the "Sea Lyrics" to no one, not even to the editors.  He
+had become distrustful of editors.  But it was not distrust that
+prevented him from submitting the "Lyrics."  They were so beautiful
+to him that he was impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some
+glorious, far-off time when he would dare to read to her what he
+had written.  Against that time he kept them with him, reading them
+aloud, going over them until he knew them by heart.
+
+He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his
+sleep, his subjective mind rioting through his five hours of
+surcease and combining the thoughts and events of the day into
+grotesque and impossible marvels.  In reality, he never rested, and
+a weaker body or a less firmly poised brain would have been
+prostrated in a general break-down.  His late afternoon calls on
+Ruth were rarer now, for June was approaching, when she would take
+her degree and finish with the university.  Bachelor of Arts! -
+when he thought of her degree, it seemed she fled beyond him faster
+than he could pursue.
+
+One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually
+stayed for dinner and for music afterward.  Those were his red-
+letter days.  The atmosphere of the house, in such contrast with
+that in which he lived, and the mere nearness to her, sent him
+forth each time with a firmer grip on his resolve to climb the
+heights.  In spite of the beauty in him, and the aching desire to
+create, it was for her that he struggled.  He was a lover first and
+always.  All other things he subordinated to love.
+
+Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his love-
+adventure.  The world itself was not so amazing because of the
+atoms and molecules that composed it according to the propulsions
+of irresistible force; what made it amazing was the fact that Ruth
+lived in it.  She was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or
+dreamed, or guessed.
+
+But he was oppressed always by her remoteness.  She was so far from
+him, and he did not know how to approach her.  He had been a
+success with girls and women in his own class; but he had never
+loved any of them, while he did love her, and besides, she was not
+merely of another class.  His very love elevated her above all
+classes.  She was a being apart, so far apart that he did not know
+how to draw near to her as a lover should draw near.  It was true,
+as he acquired knowledge and language, that he was drawing nearer,
+talking her speech, discovering ideas and delights in common; but
+this did not satisfy his lover's yearning.  His lover's imagination
+had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any kinship
+with him in the flesh.  It was his own love that thrust her from
+him and made her seem impossible for him.  Love itself denied him
+the one thing that it desired.
+
+And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was
+bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it
+was ever narrower.  They had been eating cherries - great,
+luscious, black cherries with a juice of the color of dark wine.
+And later, as she read aloud to him from "The Princess," he chanced
+to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips.  For the moment
+her divinity was shattered.  She was clay, after all, mere clay,
+subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or
+anybody's clay.  Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed
+them as cherries dyed his.  And if so with her lips, then was it so
+with all of her.  She was woman, all woman, just like any woman.
+It came upon him abruptly.  It was a revelation that stunned him.
+It was as if he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen
+worshipped purity polluted.
+
+Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began
+pounding and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who
+was not a spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a
+cherry could stain.  He trembled at the audacity of his thought;
+but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean,
+assured him he was right.  Something of this change in him must
+have reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at
+him, and smiled.  His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to her lips,
+and the sight of the stain maddened him.  His arms all but flashed
+out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless life.
+She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will fought to
+hold him back.
+
+"You were not following a word," she pouted.
+
+Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he
+looked into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of
+what he felt, he became abashed.  He had indeed in thought dared
+too far.  Of all the women he had known there was no woman who
+would not have guessed - save her.  And she had not guessed.  There
+was the difference.  She was different.  He was appalled by his own
+grossness, awed by her clear innocence, and he gazed again at her
+across the gulf.  The bridge had broken down.
+
+But still the incident had brought him nearer.  The memory of it
+persisted, and in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt
+upon it eagerly.  The gulf was never again so wide.  He had
+accomplished a distance vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts,
+or a dozen bachelorships.  She was pure, it was true, as he had
+never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips.  She was
+subject to the laws of the universe just as inexorably as he was.
+She had to eat to live, and when she got her feet wet, she caught
+cold.  But that was not the point.  If she could feel hunger and
+thirst, and heat and cold, then could she feel love - and love for
+a man.  Well, he was a man.  And why could he not be the man?
+"It's up to me to make good," he would murmur fervently.  "I will
+be THE man.  I will make myself THE man.  I will make good."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+
+Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry
+the beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his
+brain, Martin was called to the telephone.
+
+"It's a lady's voice, a fine lady's," Mr. Higginbotham, who had
+called him, jeered.
+
+Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a
+wave of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth's voice.  In his
+battle with the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the
+sound of her voice his love for her smote him like a sudden blow.
+And such a voice! - delicate and sweet, like a strain of music
+heard far off and faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a
+perfect tone, crystal-pure.  No mere woman had a voice like that.
+There was something celestial about it, and it came from other
+worlds.  He could scarcely hear what it said, so ravished was he,
+though he controlled his face, for he knew that Mr. Higginbotham's
+ferret eyes were fixed upon him.
+
+It was not much that Ruth wanted to say - merely that Norman had
+been going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a
+headache, and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and
+that if he had no other engagement, would he be good enough to take
+her?
+
+Would he!  He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice.  It
+was amazing.  He had always seen her in her own house.  And he had
+never dared to ask her to go anywhere with him.  Quite
+irrelevantly, still at the telephone and talking with her, he felt
+an overpowering desire to die for her, and visions of heroic
+sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his whirling brain.  He loved her
+so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.  In that moment of mad
+happiness that she should go out with him, go to a lecture with him
+- with him, Martin Eden - she soared so far above him that there
+seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her.  It was the
+only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty
+emotion he felt for her.  It was the sublime abnegation of true
+love that comes to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the
+telephone, in a whirlwind of fire and glory; and to die for her, he
+felt, was to have lived and loved well.  And he was only twenty-
+one, and he had never been in love before.
+
+His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from
+the organ which had stirred him.  His eyes were shining like an
+angel's, and his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly
+dross, and pure and holy.
+
+"Makin' dates outside, eh?" his brother-in-law sneered.  "You know
+what that means.  You'll be in the police court yet."
+
+But Martin could not come down from the height.  Not even the
+bestiality of the allusion could bring him back to earth.  Anger
+and hurt were beneath him.  He had seen a great vision and was as a
+god, and he could feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot
+of a man.  He did not look at him, and though his eyes passed over
+him, he did not see him; and as in a dream he passed out of the
+room to dress.  It was not until he had reached his own room and
+was tying his necktie that he became aware of a sound that lingered
+unpleasantly in his ears.  On investigating this sound he
+identified it as the final snort of Bernard Higginbotham, which
+somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.
+
+As Ruth's front door closed behind them and he came down the steps
+with her, he found himself greatly perturbed.  It was not unalloyed
+bliss, taking her to the lecture.  He did not know what he ought to
+do.  He had seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that
+the women took the men's arms.  But then, again, he had seen them
+when they didn't; and he wondered if it was only in the evening
+that arms were taken, or only between husbands and wives and
+relatives.
+
+Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie.  Minnie
+had always been a stickler.  She had called him down the second
+time she walked out with him, because he had gone along on the
+inside, and she had laid the law down to him that a gentleman
+always walked on the outside - when he was with a lady.  And Minnie
+had made a practice of kicking his heels, whenever they crossed
+from one side of the street to the other, to remind him to get over
+on the outside.  He wondered where she had got that item of
+etiquette, and whether it had filtered down from above and was all
+right.
+
+It wouldn't do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had
+reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind Ruth and took up his
+station on the outside.  Then the other problem presented itself.
+Should he offer her his arm?  He had never offered anybody his arm
+in his life.  The girls he had known never took the fellows' arms.
+For the first several times they walked freely, side by side, and
+after that it was arms around the waists, and heads against the
+fellows' shoulders where the streets were unlighted.  But this was
+different.  She wasn't that kind of a girl.  He must do something.
+
+He crooked the arm next to her - crooked it very slightly and with
+secret tentativeness, not invitingly, but just casually, as though
+he was accustomed to walk that way.  And then the wonderful thing
+happened.  He felt her hand upon his arm.  Delicious thrills ran
+through him at the contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed
+that he had left the solid earth and was flying with her through
+the air.  But he was soon back again, perturbed by a new
+complication.  They were crossing the street.  This would put him
+on the inside.  He should be on the outside.  Should he therefore
+drop her arm and change over?  And if he did so, would he have to
+repeat the manoeuvre the next time?  And the next?  There was
+something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about and
+play the fool.  Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and
+when he found himself on the inside, he talked quickly and
+earnestly, making a show of being carried away by what he was
+saying, so that, in case he was wrong in not changing sides, his
+enthusiasm would seem the cause for his carelessness.
+
+As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem.
+In the blaze of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her
+giggly friend.  Only for an instant he hesitated, then his hand
+went up and his hat came off.  He could not be disloyal to his
+kind, and it was to more than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was
+lifted.  She nodded and looked at him boldly, not with soft and
+gentle eyes like Ruth's, but with eyes that were handsome and hard,
+and that swept on past him to Ruth and itemized her face and dress
+and station.  And he was aware that Ruth looked, too, with quick
+eyes that were timid and mild as a dove's, but which saw, in a look
+that was a flutter on and past, the working-class girl in her cheap
+finery and under the strange hat that all working-class girls were
+wearing just then.
+
+"What a pretty girl!" Ruth said a moment later.
+
+Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-
+
+"I don't know.  I guess it's all a matter of personal taste, but
+she doesn't strike me as being particularly pretty."
+
+"Why, there isn't one woman in ten thousand with features as
+regular as hers.  They are splendid.  Her face is as clear-cut as a
+cameo.  And her eyes are beautiful."
+
+"Do you think so?" Martin queried absently, for to him there was
+only one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her
+hand upon his arm.
+
+"Do I think so?  If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr.
+Eden, and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be
+fairly dazzled by her, and so would all men."
+
+"She would have to be taught how to speak," he commented, "or else
+most of the men wouldn't understand her.  I'm sure you couldn't
+understand a quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally."
+
+"Nonsense!  You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your
+point."
+
+"You forget how I talked when you first met me.  I have learned a
+new language since then.  Before that time I talked as that girl
+talks.  Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in
+your language to explain that you do not know that other girl's
+language.  And do you know why she carries herself the way she
+does?  I think about such things now, though I never used to think
+about them, and I am beginning to understand - much."
+
+"But why does she?"
+
+"She has worked long hours for years at machines.  When one's body
+is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like
+putty according to the nature of the work.  I can tell at a glance
+the trades of many workingmen I meet on the street.  Look at me.
+Why am I rolling all about the shop?  Because of the years I put in
+on the sea.  If I'd put in the same years cow-punching, with my
+body young and pliable, I wouldn't be rolling now, but I'd be bow-
+legged.  And so with that girl.  You noticed that her eyes were
+what I might call hard.  She has never been sheltered.  She has had
+to take care of herself, and a young girl can't take care of
+herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like - like yours, for
+example."
+
+"I think you are right," Ruth said in a low voice.  "And it is too
+bad.  She is such a pretty girl."
+
+He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity.  And then he
+remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his
+fortune that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm
+to a lecture.
+
+Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-
+glass, that night when he got back to his room.  He gazed at
+himself long and curiously.  Who are you?  What are you?  Where do
+you belong?  You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
+You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
+vulgar, and unbeautiful.  You belong with the oxen and the drudges,
+in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches.  There are the
+stale vegetables now.  Those potatoes are rotting.  Smell them,
+damn you, smell them.  And yet you dare to open the books, to
+listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to
+speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
+thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
+Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million
+miles beyond you and who lives in the stars!  Who are you? and what
+are you? damn you!  And are you going to make good?
+
+He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge
+of the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes.  Then he got out
+note-book and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations,
+while the hours slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of
+dawn flooded against his window.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+
+It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers
+that held forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was
+responsible for the great discovery.  Once or twice in the month,
+while riding through the park on his way to the library, Martin
+dismounted from his wheel and listened to the arguments, and each
+time he tore himself away reluctantly.  The tone of discussion was
+much lower than at Mr. Morse's table.  The men were not grave and
+dignified.  They lost their tempers easily and called one another
+names, while oaths and obscene allusions were frequent on their
+lips.  Once or twice he had seen them come to blows.  And yet, he
+knew not why, there seemed something vital about the stuff of these
+men's thoughts.  Their logomachy was far more stimulating to his
+intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse.
+These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and
+fought one another's ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to
+be more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.
+
+Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park,
+but one afternoon a disciple of Spencer's appeared, a seedy tramp
+with a dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the
+absence of a shirt.  Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of
+many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice,
+wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist
+workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert
+Spencer is his prophet."  Martin was puzzled as to what the
+discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried
+with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the
+frequency with which the tramp had mentioned "First Principles,"
+Martin drew out that volume.
+
+So the great discovery began.  Once before he had tried Spencer,
+and choosing the "Principles of Psychology" to begin with, he had
+failed as abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky.  There
+had been no understanding the book, and he had returned it unread.
+But this night, after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a
+sonnet, he got into bed and opened "First Principles."  Morning
+found him still reading.  It was impossible for him to sleep.  Nor
+did he write that day.  He lay on the bed till his body grew tired,
+when he tried the hard floor, reading on his back, the book held in
+the air above him, or changing from side to side.  He slept that
+night, and did his writing next morning, and then the book tempted
+him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to everything and
+oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth gave to him.
+His first consciousness of the immediate world about him was when
+Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know if
+he thought they were running a restaurant.
+
+Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days.  He wanted
+to know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over
+the world.  But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had
+known, and that he never could have known had he continued his
+sailing and wandering forever.  He had merely skimmed over the
+surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating
+fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations - and
+all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly
+world of whim and chance.  The mechanism of the flight of birds he
+had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but it had never
+entered his head to try to explain the process whereby birds, as
+organic flying mechanisms, had been developed.  He had never
+dreamed there was such a process.  That birds should have come to
+be, was unguessed.  They always had been.  They just happened.
+
+And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything.  His
+ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless.
+The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing,
+and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own
+intellectual powers.  In similar manner his attempt to study
+evolution had been confined to a hopelessly technical volume by
+Romanes.  He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had
+gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a lot of
+little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies.  And
+now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but an accepted
+process of development; that scientists no longer disagreed about
+it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.
+
+And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him,
+reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and
+presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of
+realization that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors
+make and put into glass bottles.  There was no caprice, no chance.
+All was law.  It was in obedience to law that the bird flew, and it
+was in obedience to the same law that fermenting slime had writhed
+and squirmed and put out legs and wings and become a bird.
+
+Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and
+here he was at a higher pitch than ever.  All the hidden things
+were laying their secrets bare.  He was drunken with comprehension.
+At night, asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and
+awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent
+stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered.  At table he
+failed to hear the conversation about petty and ignoble things, his
+eager mind seeking out and following cause and effect in everything
+before him.  In the meat on the platter he saw the shining sun and
+traced its energy back through all its transformations to its
+source a hundred million miles away, or traced its energy ahead to
+the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to cut the meat,
+and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to cut the
+meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his
+brain.  He was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the
+"Bughouse," whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister's
+face, nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham's
+finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in
+his brother-in-law's head.
+
+What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the
+correlation of knowledge - of all knowledge.  He had been curious
+to know things, and whatever he acquired he had filed away in
+separate memory compartments in his brain.  Thus, on the subject of
+sailing he had an immense store.  On the subject of woman he had a
+fairly large store.  But these two subjects had been unrelated.
+Between the two memory compartments there had been no connection.
+That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any connection
+whatever between a woman with hysterics and a schooner carrying a
+weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as
+ridiculous and impossible.  But Herbert Spencer had shown him not
+only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for
+there to be no connection.  All things were related to all other
+things from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the
+myriads of atoms in the grain of sand under one's foot.  This new
+concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself
+engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things
+under the sun and on the other side of the sun.  He drew up lists
+of the most incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded
+in establishing kinship between them all - kinship between love,
+poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems,
+monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas,
+cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco.  Thus,
+he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it, or
+wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a
+terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown
+goal, but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all
+there was to know.  And the more he knew, the more passionately he
+admired the universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it
+all.
+
+"You fool!" he cried at his image in the looking-glass.  "You
+wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you
+to write about.  What did you have in you? - some childish notions,
+a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great
+black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and
+an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.
+And you wanted to write!  Why, you're just on the edge of beginning
+to get something in you to write about.  You wanted to create
+beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of
+beauty?  You wanted to write about life when you knew nothing of
+the essential characteristics of life.  You wanted to write about
+the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese
+puzzle to you and all that you could have written would have been
+about what you did not know of the scheme of existence.  But cheer
+up, Martin, my boy.  You'll write yet.  You know a little, a very
+little, and you're on the right road now to know more.  Some day,
+if you're lucky, you may come pretty close to knowing all that may
+be known.  Then you will write."
+
+He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his
+joy and wonder in it.  But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic
+over it.  She tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it
+from her own studies.  It did not stir her deeply, as it did him,
+and he would have been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it
+was not new and fresh to her as it was to him.  Arthur and Norman,
+he found, believed in evolution and had read Spencer, though it did
+not seem to have made any vital impression upon them, while the
+young fellow with the glasses and the mop of hair, Will Olney,
+sneered disagreeably at Spencer and repeated the epigram, "There is
+no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet."
+
+But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that
+Olney was not in love with Ruth.  Later, he was dumfounded to learn
+from various little happenings not only that Olney did not care for
+Ruth, but that he had a positive dislike for her.  Martin could not
+understand this.  It was a bit of phenomena that he could not
+correlate with all the rest of the phenomena in the universe.  But
+nevertheless he felt sorry for the young fellow because of the
+great lack in his nature that prevented him from a proper
+appreciation of Ruth's fineness and beauty.  They rode out into the
+hills several Sundays on their wheels, and Martin had ample
+opportunity to observe the armed truce that existed between Ruth
+and Olney.  The latter chummed with Norman, throwing Arthur and
+Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.
+
+Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was
+with Ruth, and great, also, because they were putting him more on a
+par with the young men of her class.  In spite of their long years
+of disciplined education, he was finding himself their intellectual
+equal, and the hours spent with them in conversation was so much
+practice for him in the use of the grammar he had studied so hard.
+He had abandoned the etiquette books, falling back upon observation
+to show him the right things to do.  Except when carried away by
+his enthusiasm, he was always on guard, keenly watchful of their
+actions and learning their little courtesies and refinements of
+conduct.
+
+The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a
+source of surprise to Martin.  "Herbert Spencer," said the man at
+the desk in the library, "oh, yes, a great mind."  But the man did
+not seem to know anything of the content of that great mind.  One
+evening, at dinner, when Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the
+conversation upon Spencer.  Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned the
+English philosopher's agnosticism, but confessed that he had not
+read "First Principles"; while Mr. Butler stated that he had no
+patience with Spencer, had never read a line of him, and had
+managed to get along quite well without him.  Doubts arose in
+Martin's mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would
+have accepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up.  As
+it was, he found Spencer's explanation of things convincing; and,
+as he phrased it to himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent
+to a navigator throwing the compass and chronometer overboard.  So
+Martin went on into a thorough study of evolution, mastering more
+and more the subject himself, and being convinced by the
+corroborative testimony of a thousand independent writers.  The
+more he studied, the more vistas he caught of fields of knowledge
+yet unexplored, and the regret that days were only twenty-four
+hours long became a chronic complaint with him.
+
+One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up
+algebra and geometry.  Trigonometry he had not even attempted.
+Then he cut chemistry from his study-list, retaining only physics.
+
+"I am not a specialist," he said, in defence, to Ruth.  "Nor am I
+going to try to be a specialist.  There are too many special fields
+for any one man, in a whole lifetime, to master a tithe of them.  I
+must pursue general knowledge.  When I need the work of
+specialists, I shall refer to their books."
+
+"But that is not like having the knowledge yourself," she
+protested.
+
+"But it is unnecessary to have it.  We profit from the work of the
+specialists.  That's what they are for.  When I came in, I noticed
+the chimney-sweeps at work.  They're specialists, and when they get
+done, you will enjoy clean chimneys without knowing anything about
+the construction of chimneys."
+
+"That's far-fetched, I am afraid."
+
+She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in her gaze and
+manner.  But he was convinced of the rightness of his position.
+
+"All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in the world,
+in fact, rely on the specialists.  Herbert Spencer did that.  He
+generalized upon the findings of thousands of investigators.  He
+would have had to live a thousand lives in order to do it all
+himself.  And so with Darwin.  He took advantage of all that had
+been learned by the florists and cattle-breeders."
+
+"You're right, Martin," Olney said.  "You know what you're after,
+and Ruth doesn't.  She doesn't know what she is after for herself
+even."
+
+" - Oh, yes," Olney rushed on, heading off her objection, "I know
+you call it general culture.  But it doesn't matter what you study
+if you want general culture.  You can study French, or you can
+study German, or cut them both out and study Esperanto, you'll get
+the culture tone just the same.  You can study Greek or Latin, too,
+for the same purpose, though it will never be any use to you.  It
+will be culture, though.  Why, Ruth studied Saxon, became clever in
+it, - that was two years ago, - and all that she remembers of it
+now is 'Whan that sweet Aprile with his schowers soote' - isn't
+that the way it goes?"
+
+"But it's given you the culture tone just the same," he laughed,
+again heading her off.  "I know.  We were in the same classes."
+
+"But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to something,"
+Ruth cried out.  Her eyes were flashing, and in her cheeks were two
+spots of color.  "Culture is the end in itself."
+
+"But that is not what Martin wants."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"What do you want, Martin?" Olney demanded, turning squarely upon
+him.
+
+Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.
+
+"Yes, what do you want?" Ruth asked.  "That will settle it."
+
+"Yes, of course, I want culture," Martin faltered.  "I love beauty,
+and culture will give me a finer and keener appreciation of
+beauty."
+
+She nodded her head and looked triumph.
+
+"Rot, and you know it," was Olney's comment.  "Martin's after
+career, not culture.  It just happens that culture, in his case, is
+incidental to career.  If he wanted to be a chemist, culture would
+be unnecessary.  Martin wants to write, but he's afraid to say so
+because it will put you in the wrong."
+
+"And why does Martin want to write?" he went on.  "Because he isn't
+rolling in wealth.  Why do you fill your head with Saxon and
+general culture?  Because you don't have to make your way in the
+world.  Your father sees to that.  He buys your clothes for you,
+and all the rest.  What rotten good is our education, yours and
+mine and Arthur's and Norman's?  We're soaked in general culture,
+and if our daddies went broke to-day, we'd be falling down to-
+morrow on teachers' examinations.  The best job you could get,
+Ruth, would be a country school or music teacher in a girls'
+boarding-school."
+
+"And pray what would you do?" she asked.
+
+"Not a blessed thing.  I could earn a dollar and a half a day,
+common labor, and I might get in as instructor in Hanley's cramming
+joint - I say might, mind you, and I might be chucked out at the
+end of the week for sheer inability."
+
+Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced
+that Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he
+accorded Ruth.  A new conception of love formed in his mind as he
+listened.  Reason had nothing to do with love.  It mattered not
+whether the woman he loved reasoned correctly or incorrectly.  Love
+was above reason.  If it just happened that she did not fully
+appreciate his necessity for a career, that did not make her a bit
+less lovable.  She was all lovable, and what she thought had
+nothing to do with her lovableness.
+
+"What's that?" he replied to a question from Olney that broke in
+upon his train of thought.
+
+"I was saying that I hoped you wouldn't be fool enough to tackle
+Latin."
+
+"But Latin is more than culture," Ruth broke in.  "It is
+equipment."
+
+"Well, are you going to tackle it?" Olney persisted.
+
+Martin was sore beset.  He could see that Ruth was hanging eagerly
+upon his answer.
+
+"I am afraid I won't have time," he said finally.  "I'd like to,
+but I won't have time."
+
+"You see, Martin's not seeking culture," Olney exulted.  "He's
+trying to get somewhere, to do something."
+
+"Oh, but it's mental training.  It's mind discipline.  It's what
+makes disciplined minds."  Ruth looked expectantly at Martin, as if
+waiting for him to change his judgment.  "You know, the foot-ball
+players have to train before the big game.  And that is what Latin
+does for the thinker.  It trains."
+
+"Rot and bosh!  That's what they told us when we were kids.  But
+there is one thing they didn't tell us then.  They let us find it
+out for ourselves afterwards."  Olney paused for effect, then
+added, "And what they didn't tell us was that every gentleman
+should have studied Latin, but that no gentleman should know
+Latin."
+
+"Now that's unfair," Ruth cried.  "I knew you were turning the
+conversation just in order to get off something."
+
+"It's clever all right," was the retort, "but it's fair, too.  The
+only men who know their Latin are the apothecaries, the lawyers,
+and the Latin professors.  And if Martin wants to be one of them, I
+miss my guess.  But what's all that got to do with Herbert Spencer
+anyway?  Martin's just discovered Spencer, and he's wild over him.
+Why?  Because Spencer is taking him somewhere.  Spencer couldn't
+take me anywhere, nor you.  We haven't got anywhere to go.  You'll
+get married some day, and I'll have nothing to do but keep track of
+the lawyers and business agents who will take care of the money my
+father's going to leave me."
+
+Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting
+shot.
+
+"You leave Martin alone, Ruth.  He knows what's best for himself.
+Look at what he's done already.  He makes me sick sometimes, sick
+and ashamed of myself.  He knows more now about the world, and
+life, and man's place, and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or
+I, or you, too, for that matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and
+French, and Saxon, and culture."
+
+"But Ruth is my teacher," Martin answered chivalrously.  "She is
+responsible for what little I have learned."
+
+"Rats!"  Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious.
+"I suppose you'll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her
+recommendation - only you didn't.  And she doesn't know anything
+more about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon's
+mines.  What's that jawbreaker definition about something or other,
+of Spencer's, that you sprang on us the other day - that
+indefinite, incoherent homogeneity thing?  Spring it on her, and
+see if she understands a word of it.  That isn't culture, you see.
+Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, Martin, I won't have any
+respect for you."
+
+And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been
+aware of an irk in it as well.  It was about studies and lessons,
+dealing with the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone
+of it conflicted with the big things that were stirring in him -
+with the grip upon life that was even then crooking his fingers
+like eagle's talons, with the cosmic thrills that made him ache,
+and with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all.  He
+likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a strange land,
+filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering and vainly
+trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren in the
+new land.  And so with him.  He was alive, painfully alive, to the
+great universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and
+grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should
+study Latin.
+
+"What in hell has Latin to do with it?" he demanded before his
+mirror that night.  "I wish dead people would stay dead.  Why
+should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead?  Beauty is
+alive and everlasting.  Languages come and go.  They are the dust
+of the dead."
+
+And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very
+well, and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar
+fashion when he was with Ruth.  He was only a schoolboy, with a
+schoolboy's tongue, when he was in her presence.
+
+"Give me time," he said aloud.  "Only give me time."
+
+Time!  Time!  Time! was his unending plaint.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+
+It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and his love for
+Ruth, that he finally decided not to take up Latin.  His money
+meant time.  There was so much that was more important than Latin,
+so many studies that clamored with imperious voices.  And he must
+write.  He must earn money.  He had had no acceptances.  Twoscore
+of manuscripts were travelling the endless round of the magazines.
+How did the others do it?  He spent long hours in the free reading-
+room, going over what others had written, studying their work
+eagerly and critically, comparing it with his own, and wondering,
+wondering, about the secret trick they had discovered which enabled
+them to sell their work.
+
+He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead.
+No light, no life, no color, was shot through it.  There was no
+breath of life in it, and yet it sold, at two cents a word, twenty
+dollars a thousand - the newspaper clipping had said so.  He was
+puzzled by countless short stories, written lightly and cleverly he
+confessed, but without vitality or reality.  Life was so strange
+and wonderful, filled with an immensity of problems, of dreams, and
+of heroic toils, and yet these stories dealt only with the
+commonplaces of life.  He felt the stress and strain of life, its
+fevers and sweats and wild insurgences - surely this was the stuff
+to write about!  He wanted to glorify the leaders of forlorn hopes,
+the mad lovers, the giants that fought under stress and strain,
+amid terror and tragedy, making life crackle with the strength of
+their endeavor.  And yet the magazine short stories seemed intent
+on glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sordid dollar-chasers, and the
+commonplace little love affairs of commonplace little men and
+women.  Was it because the editors of the magazines were
+commonplace? he demanded.  Or were they afraid of life, these
+writers and editors and readers?
+
+But his chief trouble was that he did not know any editors or
+writers.  And not merely did he not know any writers, but he did
+not know anybody who had ever attempted to write.  There was nobody
+to tell him, to hint to him, to give him the least word of advice.
+He began to doubt that editors were real men.  They seemed cogs in
+a machine.  That was what it was, a machine.  He poured his soul
+into stories, articles, and poems, and intrusted them to the
+machine.  He folded them just so, put the proper stamps inside the
+long envelope along with the manuscript, sealed the envelope, put
+more stamps outside, and dropped it into the mail-box.  It
+travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of time
+the postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope,
+on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed.  There was
+no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of
+cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and
+stuck on the stamps.  It was like the slot machines wherein one
+dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had
+delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate.
+It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he
+got chocolate or gum.  And so with the editorial machine.  One slot
+brought checks and the other brought rejection slips.  So far he
+had found only the latter slot.
+
+It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible
+machinelikeness of the process.  These slips were printed in
+stereotyped forms and he had received hundreds of them - as many as
+a dozen or more on each of his earlier manuscripts.  If he had
+received one line, one personal line, along with one rejection of
+all his rejections, he would have been cheered.  But not one editor
+had given that proof of existence.  And he could conclude only that
+there were no warm human men at the other end, only mere cogs, well
+oiled and running beautifully in the machine.
+
+He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and he would have
+been content to continue feeding the machine for years; but he was
+bleeding to death, and not years but weeks would determine the
+fight.  Each week his board bill brought him nearer destruction,
+while the postage on forty manuscripts bled him almost as severely.
+He no longer bought books, and he economized in petty ways and
+sought to delay the inevitable end; though he did not know how to
+economize, and brought the end nearer by a week when he gave his
+sister Marian five dollars for a dress.
+
+He struggled in the dark, without advice, without encouragement,
+and in the teeth of discouragement.  Even Gertrude was beginning to
+look askance.  At first she had tolerated with sisterly fondness
+what she conceived to be his foolishness; but now, out of sisterly
+solicitude, she grew anxious.  To her it seemed that his
+foolishness was becoming a madness.  Martin knew this and suffered
+more keenly from it than from the open and nagging contempt of
+Bernard Higginbotham.  Martin had faith in himself, but he was
+alone in this faith.  Not even Ruth had faith.  She had wanted him
+to devote himself to study, and, though she had not openly
+disapproved of his writing, she had never approved.
+
+He had never offered to show her his work.  A fastidious delicacy
+had prevented him.  Besides, she had been studying heavily at the
+university, and he felt averse to robbing her of her time.  But
+when she had taken her degree, she asked him herself to let her see
+something of what he had been doing.  Martin was elated and
+diffident.  Here was a judge.  She was a bachelor of arts.  She had
+studied literature under skilled instructors.  Perhaps the editors
+were capable judges, too.  But she would be different from them.
+She would not hand him a stereotyped rejection slip, nor would she
+inform him that lack of preference for his work did not necessarily
+imply lack of merit in his work.  She would talk, a warm human
+being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important of all, she
+would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden.  In his work she
+would discern what his heart and soul were like, and she would come
+to understand something, a little something, of the stuff of his
+dreams and the strength of his power.
+
+Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of his short
+stories, hesitated a moment, then added his "Sea Lyrics."  They
+mounted their wheels on a late June afternoon and rode for the
+hills.  It was the second time he had been out with her alone, and
+as they rode along through the balmy warmth, just chilled by she
+sea-breeze to refreshing coolness, he was profoundly impressed by
+the fact that it was a very beautiful and well-ordered world and
+that it was good to be alive and to love.  They left their wheels
+by the roadside and climbed to the brown top of an open knoll where
+the sunburnt grass breathed a harvest breath of dry sweetness and
+content.
+
+"Its work is done," Martin said, as they seated themselves, she
+upon his coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth.  He
+sniffed the sweetness of the tawny grass, which entered his brain
+and set his thoughts whirling on from the particular to the
+universal.  "It has achieved its reason for existence," he went on,
+patting the dry grass affectionately.  "It quickened with ambition
+under the dreary downpour of last winter, fought the violent early
+spring, flowered, and lured the insects and the bees, scattered its
+seeds, squared itself with its duty and the world, and - "
+
+"Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical
+eyes?" she interrupted.
+
+"Because I've been studying evolution, I guess.  It's only recently
+that I got my eyesight, if the truth were told."
+
+"But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical,
+that you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub
+the down off their beautiful wings."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before.
+I just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that
+was just beautiful without rhyme or reason.  I did not know
+anything about beauty.  But now I know, or, rather, am just
+beginning to know.  This grass is more beautiful to me now that I
+know why it is grass, and all the hidden chemistry of sun and rain
+and earth that makes it become grass.  Why, there is romance in the
+life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure, too.  The very
+thought of it stirs me.  When I think of the play of force and
+matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could
+write an epic on the grass.
+
+"How well you talk," she said absently, and he noted that she was
+looking at him in a searching way.
+
+He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood
+flushing red on his neck and brow.
+
+"I hope I am learning to talk," he stammered.  "There seems to be
+so much in me I want to say.  But it is all so big.  I can't find
+ways to say what is really in me.  Sometimes it seems to me that
+all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside
+of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman.  I feel - oh, I
+can't describe it - I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I
+babble like a little child.  It is a great task to transmute
+feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in
+turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the
+selfsame feeling and sensation.  It is a lordly task.  See, I bury
+my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils
+sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies.  It is a
+breath of the universe I have breathed.  I know song and laughter,
+and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions
+that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I
+would like to tell them to you, to the world.  But how can I?  My
+tongue is tied.  I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to
+describe to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass.  But I
+have not succeeded.  I have no more than hinted in awkward speech.
+My words seem gibberish to me.  And yet I am stifled with desire to
+tell.  Oh! - " he threw up his hands with a despairing gesture -
+"it is impossible!  It is not understandable!  It is
+incommunicable!"
+
+"But you do talk well," she insisted.  "Just think how you have
+improved in the short time I have known you.  Mr. Butler is a noted
+public speaker.  He is always asked by the State Committee to go
+out on stump during campaign.  Yet you talked just as well as he
+the other night at dinner.  Only he was more controlled.  You get
+too excited; but you will get over that with practice.  Why, you
+would make a good public speaker.  You can go far - if you want to.
+You are masterly.  You can lead men, I am sure, and there is no
+reason why you should not succeed at anything you set your hand to,
+just as you have succeeded with grammar.  You would make a good
+lawyer.  You should shine in politics.  There is nothing to prevent
+you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made.  And
+minus the dyspepsia," she added with a smile.
+
+They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always
+to the need of thorough grounding in education and to the
+advantages of Latin as part of the foundation for any career.  She
+drew her ideal of the successful man, and it was largely in her
+father's image, with a few unmistakable lines and touches of color
+from the image of Mr. Butler.  He listened eagerly, with receptive
+ears, lying on his back and looking up and joying in each movement
+of her lips as she talked.  But his brain was not receptive.  There
+was nothing alluring in the pictures she drew, and he was aware of
+a dull pain of disappointment and of a sharper ache of love for
+her.  In all she said there was no mention of his writing, and the
+manuscripts he had brought to read lay neglected on the ground.
+
+At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height
+above the horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them
+up.
+
+"I had forgotten," she said quickly.  "And I am so anxious to
+hear."
+
+He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his
+very best.  He called it "The Wine of Life," and the wine of it,
+that had stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his
+brain now as he read it.  There was a certain magic in the original
+conception, and he had adorned it with more magic of phrase and
+touch.  All the old fire and passion with which he had written it
+were reborn in him, and he was swayed and swept away so that he was
+blind and deaf to the faults of it.  But it was not so with Ruth.
+Her trained ear detected the weaknesses and exaggerations, the
+overemphasis of the tyro, and she was instantly aware each time the
+sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered.  She scarcely noted the
+rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous, at which
+moments she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness.
+That was her final judgment on the story as a whole - amateurish,
+though she did not tell him so.  Instead, when he had done, she
+pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the story.
+
+But he was disappointed.  Her criticism was just.  He acknowledged
+that, but he had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with
+her for the purpose of schoolroom correction.  The details did not
+matter.  They could take care of themselves.  He could mend them,
+he could learn to mend them.  Out of life he had captured something
+big and attempted to imprison it in the story.  It was the big
+thing out of life he had read to her, not sentence-structure and
+semicolons.  He wanted her to feel with him this big thing that was
+his, that he had seen with his own eyes, grappled with his own
+brain, and placed there on the page with his own hands in printed
+words.  Well, he had failed, was his secret decision.  Perhaps the
+editors were right.  He had felt the big thing, but he had failed
+to transmute it.  He concealed his disappointment, and joined so
+easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize that deep
+down in him was running a strong undercurrent of disagreement.
+
+"This next thing I've called 'The Pot'," he said, unfolding the
+manuscript.  "It has been refused by four or five magazines now,
+but still I think it is good.  In fact, I don't know what to think
+of it, except that I've caught something there.  Maybe it won't
+affect you as it does me.  It's a short thing - only two thousand
+words."
+
+"How dreadful!" she cried, when he had finished.  "It is horrible,
+unutterably horrible!"
+
+He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched
+hands, with secret satisfaction.  He had succeeded.  He had
+communicated the stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain.
+It had struck home.  No matter whether she liked it or not, it had
+gripped her and mastered her, made her sit there and listen and
+forget details.
+
+"It is life," he said, "and life is not always beautiful.  And yet,
+perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful
+there.  It seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because
+it is there - "
+
+"But why couldn't the poor woman - " she broke in disconnectedly.
+Then she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out:
+"Oh!  It is degrading!  It is not nice!  It is nasty!"
+
+For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still.  NASTY!
+He had never dreamed it.  He had not meant it.  The whole sketch
+stood before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of
+illumination he sought vainly for nastiness.  Then his heart began
+to beat again.  He was not guilty.
+
+"Why didn't you select a nice subject?" she was saying.  "We know
+there are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason - "
+
+She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following
+her.  He was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal
+face, so innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity
+seemed always to enter into him, driving out of him all dross and
+bathing him in some ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft
+and velvety as starshine.  WE KNOW THERE ARE NASTY THINGS IN THE
+WORLD!  He cuddled to him the notion of her knowing, and chuckled
+over it as a love joke.  The next moment, in a flashing vision of
+multitudinous detail, he sighted the whole sea of life's nastiness
+that he had known and voyaged over and through, and he forgave her
+for not understanding the story.  It was through no fault of hers
+that she could not understand.  He thanked God that she had been
+born and sheltered to such innocence.  But he knew life, its
+foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the
+slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on
+it to the world.  Saints in heaven - how could they be anything but
+fair and pure?  No praise to them.  But saints in slime - ah, that
+was the everlasting wonder!  That was what made life worth while.
+To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise
+himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-
+dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and
+viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and
+truth, and high spiritual endowment -
+
+He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.
+
+"The tone of it all is low.  And there is so much that is high.
+Take 'In Memoriam.'"
+
+He was impelled to suggest "Locksley Hall," and would have done so,
+had not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her,
+the female of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment,
+creeping and crawling up the vast ladder of life for a thousand
+thousand centuries, had emerged on the topmost rung, having become
+one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and with power to make him
+know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to desire to taste
+divinity - him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some amazing
+fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless
+mistakes and abortions of unending creation.  There was the
+romance, and the wonder, and the glory.  There was the stuff to
+write, if he could only find speech.  Saints in heaven! - They were
+only saints and could not help themselves.  But he was a man.
+
+"You have strength," he could hear her saying, "but it is untutored
+strength."
+
+"Like a bull in a china shop," he suggested, and won a smile.
+
+"And you must develop discrimination.  You must consult taste, and
+fineness, and tone."
+
+"I dare too much," he muttered.
+
+She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another
+story.
+
+"I don't know what you'll make of this," he said apologetically.
+"It's a funny thing.  I'm afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but
+my intentions were good.  Don't bother about the little features of
+it.  Just see if you catch the feel of the big thing in it.  It is
+big, and it is true, though the chance is large that I have failed
+to make it intelligible."
+
+He read, and as he read he watched her.  At last he had reached
+her, he thought.  She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon
+him, scarcely breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought,
+by the witchery of the thing he had created.  He had entitled the
+story "Adventure," and it was the apotheosis of adventure - not of
+the adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage
+taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and
+whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and
+nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death
+at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous
+delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging
+insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to
+royal culminations and lordly achievements.
+
+It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story,
+and it was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and
+listened.  Her eyes were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and
+before he finished it seemed to him that she was almost panting.
+Truly, she was warmed; but she was warmed, not by the story, but by
+him.  She did not think much of the story; it was Martin's
+intensity of power, the old excess of strength that seemed to pour
+from his body and on and over her.  The paradox of it was that it
+was the story itself that was freighted with his power, that was
+the channel, for the time being, through which his strength poured
+out to her.  She was aware only of the strength, and not of the
+medium, and when she seemed most carried away by what he had
+written, in reality she had been carried away by something quite
+foreign to it - by a thought, terrible and perilous, that had
+formed itself unsummoned in her brain.  She had caught herself
+wondering what marriage was like, and the becoming conscious of the
+waywardness and ardor of the thought had terrified her.  It was
+unmaidenly.  It was not like her.  She had never been tormented by
+womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy,
+dense even to the full significance of that delicate master's
+delicate allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the
+relations of queens and knights.  She had been asleep, always, and
+now life was thundering imperatively at all her doors.  Mentally
+she was in a panic to shoot the bolts and drop the bars into place,
+while wanton instincts urged her to throw wide her portals and bid
+the deliciously strange visitor to enter in.
+
+Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict.  He had no doubt
+of what it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:
+
+"It is beautiful."
+
+"It is beautiful," she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.
+
+Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere
+beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made
+beauty its handmaiden.  He sprawled silently on the ground,
+watching the grisly form of a great doubt rising before him.  He
+had failed.  He was inarticulate.  He had seen one of the greatest
+things in the world, and he had not expressed it.
+
+"What did you think of the - "  He hesitated, abashed at his first
+attempt to use a strange word.  "Of the MOTIF?" he asked.
+
+"It was confused," she answered.  "That is my only criticism in the
+large way.  I followed the story, but there seemed so much else.
+It is too wordy.  You clog the action by introducing so much
+extraneous material."
+
+"That was the major MOTIF," he hurriedly explained, "the big
+underrunning MOTIF, the cosmic and universal thing.  I tried to
+make it keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial
+after all.  I was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly.
+I did not succeed in suggesting what I was driving at.  But I'll
+learn in time."
+
+She did not follow him.  She was a bachelor of arts, but he had
+gone beyond her limitations.  This she did not comprehend,
+attributing her incomprehension to his incoherence.
+
+"You were too voluble," she said.  "But it was beautiful, in
+places."
+
+He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he
+would read her the "Sea Lyrics."  He lay in dull despair, while she
+watched him searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and
+wayward thoughts of marriage.
+
+"You want to be famous?" she asked abruptly.
+
+"Yes, a little bit," he confessed.  "That is part of the adventure.
+It is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that
+counts.  And after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means
+to something else.  I want to be famous very much, for that matter,
+and for that reason."
+
+"For your sake," he wanted to add, and might have added had she
+proved enthusiastic over what he had read to her.
+
+But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that
+would at least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was
+which he had hinted at.  There was no career for him in literature.
+Of that she was convinced.  He had proved it to-day, with his
+amateurish and sophomoric productions.  He could talk well, but he
+was incapable of expressing himself in a literary way.  She
+compared Tennyson, and Browning, and her favorite prose masters
+with him, and to his hopeless discredit.  Yet she did not tell him
+her whole mind.  Her strange interest in him led her to temporize.
+His desire to write was, after all, a little weakness which he
+would grow out of in time.  Then he would devote himself to the
+more serious affairs of life.  And he would succeed, too.  She knew
+that.  He was so strong that he could not fail - if only he would
+drop writing.
+
+"I wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden," she said.
+
+He flushed with pleasure.  She was interested, that much was sure.
+And at least she had not given him a rejection slip.  She had
+called certain portions of his work beautiful, and that was the
+first encouragement he had ever received from any one.
+
+"I will," he said passionately.  "And I promise you, Miss Morse,
+that I will make good.  I have come far, I know that; and I have
+far to go, and I will cover it if I have to do it on my hands and
+knees."  He held up a bunch of manuscript.  "Here are the 'Sea
+Lyrics.'  When you get home, I'll turn them over to you to read at
+your leisure.  And you must be sure to tell me just what you think
+of them.  What I need, you know, above all things, is criticism.
+And do, please, be frank with me."
+
+"I will be perfectly frank," she promised, with an uneasy
+conviction that she had not been frank with him and with a doubt if
+she could be quite frank with him the next time.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+
+"The first battle, fought and finished," Martin said to the
+looking-glass ten days later.  "But there will be a second battle,
+and a third battle, and battles to the end of time, unless - "
+
+He had not finished the sentence, but looked about the mean little
+room and let his eyes dwell sadly upon a heap of returned
+manuscripts, still in their long envelopes, which lay in a corner
+on the floor.  He had no stamps with which to continue them on
+their travels, and for a week they had been piling up.  More of
+them would come in on the morrow, and on the next day, and the
+next, till they were all in.  And he would be unable to start them
+out again.  He was a month's rent behind on the typewriter, which
+he could not pay, having barely enough for the week's board which
+was due and for the employment office fees.
+
+He sat down and regarded the table thoughtfully.  There were ink
+stains upon it, and he suddenly discovered that he was fond of it.
+
+"Dear old table," he said, "I've spent some happy hours with you,
+and you've been a pretty good friend when all is said and done.
+You never turned me down, never passed me out a reward-of-unmerit
+rejection slip, never complained about working overtime."
+
+He dropped his arms upon the table and buried his face in them.
+His throat was aching, and he wanted to cry.  It reminded him of
+his first fight, when he was six years old, when he punched away
+with the tears running down his cheeks while the other boy, two
+years his elder, had beaten and pounded him into exhaustion.  He
+saw the ring of boys, howling like barbarians as he went down at
+last, writhing in the throes of nausea, the blood streaming from
+his nose and the tears from his bruised eyes.
+
+"Poor little shaver," he murmured.  "And you're just as badly
+licked now.  You're beaten to a pulp.  You're down and out."
+
+But the vision of that first fight still lingered under his
+eyelids, and as he watched he saw it dissolve and reshape into the
+series of fights which had followed.  Six months later Cheese-Face
+(that was the boy) had whipped him again.  But he had blacked
+Cheese-Face's eye that time.  That was going some.  He saw them
+all, fight after fight, himself always whipped and Cheese-Face
+exulting over him.  But he had never run away.  He felt
+strengthened by the memory of that.  He had always stayed and taken
+his medicine.  Cheese-Face had been a little fiend at fighting, and
+had never once shown mercy to him.  But he had stayed!  He had
+stayed with it!
+
+Next, he saw a narrow alley, between ramshackle frame buildings.
+The end of the alley was blocked by a one-story brick building, out
+of which issued the rhythmic thunder of the presses, running off
+the first edition of the ENQUIRER.  He was eleven, and Cheese-Face
+was thirteen, and they both carried the ENQUIRER.  That was why
+they were there, waiting for their papers.  And, of course, Cheese-
+Face had picked on him again, and there was another fight that was
+indeterminate, because at quarter to four the door of the press-
+room was thrown open and the gang of boys crowded in to fold their
+papers.
+
+"I'll lick you to-morrow," he heard Cheese-Face promise; and he
+heard his own voice, piping and trembling with unshed tears,
+agreeing to be there on the morrow.
+
+And he had come there the next day, hurrying from school to be
+there first, and beating Cheese-Face by two minutes.  The other
+boys said he was all right, and gave him advice, pointing out his
+faults as a scrapper and promising him victory if he carried out
+their instructions.  The same boys gave Cheese-Face advice, too.
+How they had enjoyed the fight!  He paused in his recollections
+long enough to envy them the spectacle he and Cheese-Face had put
+up.  Then the fight was on, and it went on, without rounds, for
+thirty minutes, until the press-room door was opened.
+
+He watched the youthful apparition of himself, day after day,
+hurrying from school to the ENQUIRER alley.  He could not walk very
+fast.  He was stiff and lame from the incessant fighting.  His
+forearms were black and blue from wrist to elbow, what of the
+countless blows he had warded off, and here and there the tortured
+flesh was beginning to fester.  His head and arms and shoulders
+ached, the small of his back ached, - he ached all over, and his
+brain was heavy and dazed.  He did not play at school.  Nor did he
+study.  Even to sit still all day at his desk, as he did, was a
+torment.  It seemed centuries since he had begun the round of daily
+fights, and time stretched away into a nightmare and infinite
+future of daily fights.  Why couldn't Cheese-Face be licked? he
+often thought; that would put him, Martin, out of his misery.  It
+never entered his head to cease fighting, to allow Cheese-Face to
+whip him.
+
+And so he dragged himself to the ENQUIRER alley, sick in body and
+soul, but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal
+enemy, Cheese-Face, who was just as sick as he, and just a bit
+willing to quit if it were not for the gang of newsboys that looked
+on and made pride painful and necessary.  One afternoon, after
+twenty minutes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other
+according to set rules that did not permit kicking, striking below
+the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese-Face, panting for
+breath and reeling, offered to call it quits.  And Martin, head on
+arms, thrilled at the picture he caught of himself, at that moment
+in the afternoon of long ago, when he reeled and panted and choked
+with the blood that ran into his mouth and down his throat from his
+cut lips; when he tottered toward Cheese-Face, spitting out a
+mouthful of blood so that he could speak, crying out that he would
+never quit, though Cheese-Face could give in if he wanted to.  And
+Cheese-Face did not give in, and the fight went on.
+
+The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed the
+afternoon fight.  When he put up his arms, each day, to begin, they
+pained exquisitely, and the first few blows, struck and received,
+racked his soul; after that things grew numb, and he fought on
+blindly, seeing as in a dream, dancing and wavering, the large
+features and burning, animal-like eyes of Cheese-Face.  He
+concentrated upon that face; all else about him was a whirling
+void.  There was nothing else in the world but that face, and he
+would never know rest, blessed rest, until he had beaten that face
+into a pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until the bleeding
+knuckles that somehow belonged to that face had beaten him into a
+pulp.  And then, one way or the other, he would have rest.  But to
+quit, - for him, Martin, to quit, - that was impossible!
+
+Came the day when he dragged himself into the ENQUIRER alley, and
+there was no Cheese-Face.  Nor did Cheese-Face come.  The boys
+congratulated him, and told him that he had licked Cheese-Face.
+But Martin was not satisfied.  He had not licked Cheese-Face, nor
+had Cheese-Face licked him.  The problem had not been solved.  It
+was not until afterward that they learned that Cheese-Face's father
+had died suddenly that very day.
+
+Martin skipped on through the years to the night in the nigger
+heaven at the Auditorium.  He was seventeen and just back from sea.
+A row started.  Somebody was bullying somebody, and Martin
+interfered, to be confronted by Cheese-Face's blazing eyes.
+
+"I'll fix you after de show," his ancient enemy hissed.
+
+Martin nodded.  The nigger-heaven bouncer was making his way toward
+the disturbance.
+
+"I'll meet you outside, after the last act," Martin whispered, the
+while his face showed undivided interest in the buck-and-wing
+dancing on the stage.
+
+The bouncer glared and went away.
+
+"Got a gang?" he asked Cheese-Face, at the end of the act.
+
+"Sure."
+
+"Then I got to get one," Martin announced.
+
+Between the acts he mustered his following - three fellows he knew
+from the nail works, a railroad fireman, and half a dozen of the
+Boo Gang, along with as many more from the dread Eighteen-and-
+Market Gang.
+
+When the theatre let out, the two gangs strung along
+inconspicuously on opposite sides of the street.  When they came to
+a quiet corner, they united and held a council of war.
+
+"Eighth Street Bridge is the place," said a red-headed fellow
+belonging to Cheese-Face's Gang.  "You kin fight in the middle,
+under the electric light, an' whichever way the bulls come in we
+kin sneak the other way."
+
+"That's agreeable to me," Martin said, after consulting with the
+leaders of his own gang.
+
+The Eighth Street Bridge, crossing an arm of San Antonio Estuary,
+was the length of three city blocks.  In the middle of the bridge,
+and at each end, were electric lights.  No policeman could pass
+those end-lights unseen.  It was the safe place for the battle that
+revived itself under Martin's eyelids.  He saw the two gangs,
+aggressive and sullen, rigidly keeping apart from each other and
+backing their respective champions; and he saw himself and Cheese-
+Face stripping.  A short distance away lookouts were set, their
+task being to watch the lighted ends of the bridge.  A member of
+the Boo Gang held Martin's coat, and shirt, and cap, ready to race
+with them into safety in case the police interfered.  Martin
+watched himself go into the centre, facing Cheese-Face, and he
+heard himself say, as he held up his hand warningly:-
+
+"They ain't no hand-shakin' in this.  Understand?  They ain't
+nothin' but scrap.  No throwin' up the sponge.  This is a grudge-
+fight an' it's to a finish.  Understand?  Somebody's goin' to get
+licked."
+
+Cheese-Face wanted to demur, - Martin could see that, - but Cheese-
+Face's old perilous pride was touched before the two gangs.
+
+"Aw, come on," he replied.  "Wot's the good of chewin' de rag about
+it?  I'm wit' cheh to de finish."
+
+Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory
+of youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to
+maim, to destroy.  All the painful, thousand years' gains of man in
+his upward climb through creation were lost.  Only the electric
+light remained, a milestone on the path of the great human
+adventure.  Martin and Cheese-Face were two savages, of the stone
+age, of the squatting place and the tree refuge.  They sank lower
+and lower into the muddy abyss, back into the dregs of the raw
+beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemically, as atoms
+strive, as the star-dust if the heavens strives, colliding,
+recoiling, and colliding again and eternally again.
+
+"God!  We are animals!  Brute-beasts!"  Martin muttered aloud, as
+he watched the progress of the fight.  It was to him, with his
+splendid power of vision, like gazing into a kinetoscope.  He was
+both onlooker and participant.  His long months of culture and
+refinement shuddered at the sight; then the present was blotted out
+of his consciousness and the ghosts of the past possessed him, and
+he was Martin Eden, just returned from sea and fighting Cheese-Face
+on the Eighth Street Bridge.  He suffered and toiled and sweated
+and bled, and exulted when his naked knuckles smashed home.
+
+They were twin whirlwinds of hatred, revolving about each other
+monstrously.  The time passed, and the two hostile gangs became
+very quiet.  They had never witnessed such intensity of ferocity,
+and they were awed by it.  The two fighters were greater brutes
+than they.  The first splendid velvet edge of youth and condition
+wore off, and they fought more cautiously and deliberately.  There
+had been no advantage gained either way.  "It's anybody's fight,"
+Martin heard some one saying.  Then he followed up a feint, right
+and left, was fiercely countered, and felt his cheek laid open to
+the bone.  No bare knuckle had done that.  He heard mutters of
+amazement at the ghastly damage wrought, and was drenched with his
+own blood.  But he gave no sign.  He became immensely wary, for he
+was wise with knowledge of the low cunning and foul vileness of his
+kind.  He watched and waited, until he feigned a wild rush, which
+he stopped midway, for he had seen the glint of metal.
+
+"Hold up yer hand!" he screamed.  "Them's brass knuckles, an' you
+hit me with 'em!"
+
+Both gangs surged forward, growling and snarling.  In a second
+there would be a free-for-all fight, and he would be robbed of his
+vengeance.  He was beside himself.
+
+"You guys keep out!" he screamed hoarsely.  "Understand?   Say,
+d'ye understand?"
+
+They shrank away from him.  They were brutes, but he was the arch-
+brute, a thing of terror that towered over them and dominated them.
+
+"This is my scrap, an' they ain't  goin' to be no buttin' in.
+Gimme them knuckles."
+
+Cheese-Face, sobered and a bit frightened, surrendered the foul
+weapon.
+
+"You passed 'em to him, you red-head sneakin' in behind the push
+there," Martin went on, as he tossed the knuckles into the water.
+"I seen you, an' I was wonderin' what you was up to.  If you try
+anything like that again, I'll beat cheh to death.  Understand?"
+
+They fought on, through exhaustion and beyond, to exhaustion
+immeasurable and inconceivable, until the crowd of brutes, its
+blood-lust sated, terrified by what it saw, begged them impartially
+to cease.  And Cheese-Face, ready to drop and die, or to stay on
+his legs and die, a grisly monster out of whose features all
+likeness to Cheese-Face had been beaten, wavered and hesitated; but
+Martin sprang in and smashed him again and again.
+
+Next, after a seeming century or so, with Cheese-Face weakening
+fast, in a mix-up of blows there was a loud snap, and Martin's
+right arm dropped to his side.  It was a broken bone.  Everybody
+heard it and knew; and Cheese-Face knew, rushing like a tiger in
+the other's extremity and raining blow on blow.  Martin's gang
+surged forward to interfere.  Dazed by the rapid succession of
+blows, Martin warned them back with vile and earnest curses sobbed
+out and groaned in ultimate desolation and despair.
+
+He punched on, with his left hand only, and as he punched,
+doggedly, only half-conscious, as from a remote distance he heard
+murmurs of fear in the gangs, and one who said with shaking voice:
+"This ain't a scrap, fellows.  It's murder, an' we ought to stop
+it."
+
+But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on wearily and
+endlessly with his one arm, battering away at a bloody something
+before him that was not a face but a horror, an oscillating,
+hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his
+wavering vision and would not go away.  And he punched on and on,
+slower and slower, as the last shreds of vitality oozed from him,
+through centuries and aeons and enormous lapses of time, until, in
+a dim way, he became aware that the nameless thing was sinking,
+slowly sinking down to the rough board-planking of the bridge.  And
+the next moment he was standing over it, staggering and swaying on
+shaky legs, clutching at the air for support, and saying in a voice
+he did not recognize:-
+
+"D'ye want any more?  Say, d'ye want any more?"
+
+He was still saying it, over and over, - demanding, entreating,
+threatening, to know if it wanted any more, - when he felt the
+fellows of his gang laying hands on him, patting him on the back
+and trying to put his coat on him.  And then came a sudden rush of
+blackness and oblivion.
+
+The tin alarm-clock on the table ticked on, but Martin Eden, his
+face buried on his arms, did not hear it.  He heard nothing.  He
+did not think.  So absolutely had he relived life that he had
+fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street
+Bridge.  For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured.
+Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming,
+sweat pouring down his face, shouting:-
+
+"I licked you, Cheese-Face!  It took me eleven years, but I licked
+you!"
+
+His knees were trembling under him, he felt faint, and he staggered
+back to the bed, sinking down and sitting on the edge of it.  He
+was still in the clutch of the past.  He looked about the room,
+perplexed, alarmed, wondering where he was, until he caught sight
+of the pile of manuscripts in the corner.  Then the wheels of
+memory slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware
+of the present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had
+won from their pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love
+for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal,
+who would die of horror did she witness but one moment of what he
+had just lived through - one moment of all the muck of life through
+which he had waded.
+
+He arose to his feet and confronted himself in the looking-glass.
+
+"And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden," he said solemnly.
+"And you cleanse your eyes in a great brightness, and thrust your
+shoulders among the stars, doing what all life has done, letting
+the 'ape and tiger die' and wresting highest heritage from all
+powers that be."
+
+He looked more closely at himself and laughed.
+
+"A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?" he queried.  "Well, never
+mind.  You licked Cheese-Face, and you'll lick the editors if it
+takes twice eleven years to do it in.  You can't stop here.  You've
+got to go on.  It's to a finish, you know."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+
+The alarm-clock went off, jerking Martin out of sleep with a
+suddenness that would have given headache to one with less splendid
+constitution.  Though he slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a
+cat, and he awoke eagerly, glad that the five hours of
+unconsciousness were gone.  He hated the oblivion of sleep.  There
+was too much to do, too much of life to live.  He grudged every
+moment of life sleep robbed him of, and before the clock had ceased
+its clattering he was head and ears in the washbasin and thrilling
+to the cold bite of the water.
+
+But he did not follow his regular programme.  There was no
+unfinished story waiting his hand, no new story demanding
+articulation.  He had studied late, and it was nearly time for
+breakfast.  He tried to read a chapter in Fiske, but his brain was
+restless and he closed the book.  To-day witnessed the beginning of
+the new battle, wherein for some time there would be no writing.
+He was aware of a sadness akin to that with which one leaves home
+and family.  He looked at the manuscripts in the corner.  That was
+it.  He was going away from them, his pitiful, dishonored children
+that were welcome nowhere.  He went over and began to rummage among
+them, reading snatches here and there, his favorite portions.  "The
+Pot" he honored with reading aloud, as he did "Adventure."  "Joy,"
+his latest-born, completed the day before and tossed into the
+corner for lack of stamps, won his keenest approbation.
+
+"I can't understand," he murmured.  "Or maybe it's the editors who
+can't understand.  There's nothing wrong with that.  They publish
+worse every month.  Everything they publish is worse - nearly
+everything, anyway."
+
+After breakfast he put the type-writer in its case and carried it
+down into Oakland.
+
+"I owe a month on it," he told the clerk in the store.  "But you
+tell the manager I'm going to work and that I'll be in in a month
+or so and straighten up."
+
+He crossed on the ferry to San Francisco and made his way to an
+employment office.  "Any kind of work, no trade," he told the
+agent; and was interrupted by a new-comer, dressed rather
+foppishly, as some workingmen dress who have instincts for finer
+things.  The agent shook his head despondently.
+
+"Nothin' doin' eh?" said the other.  "Well, I got to get somebody
+to-day."
+
+He turned and stared at Martin, and Martin, staring back, noted the
+puffed and discolored face, handsome and weak, and knew that he had
+been making a night of it.
+
+"Lookin' for a job?" the other queried.  "What can you do?"
+
+"Hard labor, sailorizing, run a type-writer, no shorthand, can sit
+on a horse, willing to do anything and tackle anything," was the
+answer.
+
+The other nodded.
+
+"Sounds good to me.  My name's Dawson, Joe Dawson, an' I'm tryin'
+to scare up a laundryman."
+
+"Too much for me."  Martin caught an amusing glimpse of himself
+ironing fluffy white things that women wear.  But he had taken a
+liking to the other, and he added:  "I might do the plain washing.
+I learned that much at sea."  Joe Dawson thought visibly for a
+moment.
+
+"Look here, let's get together an' frame it up.  Willin' to
+listen?"
+
+Martin nodded.
+
+"This is a small laundry, up country, belongs to Shelly Hot
+Springs, - hotel, you know.  Two men do the work, boss and
+assistant.  I'm the boss.  You don't work for me, but you work
+under me.  Think you'd be willin' to learn?"
+
+Martin paused to think.  The prospect was alluring.  A few months
+of it, and he would have time to himself for study.  He could work
+hard and study hard.
+
+"Good grub an' a room to yourself," Joe said.
+
+That settled it.  A room to himself where he could burn the
+midnight oil unmolested.
+
+"But work like hell," the other added.
+
+Martin caressed his swelling shoulder-muscles significantly.  "That
+came from hard work."
+
+"Then let's get to it."  Joe held his hand to his head for a
+moment.  "Gee, but it's a stem-winder.  Can hardly see.  I went
+down the line last night - everything - everything.  Here's the
+frame-up.  The wages for two is a hundred and board.  I've ben
+drawin' down sixty, the second man forty.  But he knew the biz.
+You're green.  If I break you in, I'll be doing plenty of your work
+at first.  Suppose you begin at thirty, an' work up to the forty.
+I'll play fair.  Just as soon as you can do your share you get the
+forty."
+
+"I'll go you," Martin announced, stretching out his hand, which the
+other shook.  "Any advance? - for rail-road ticket and extras?"
+
+"I blew it in," was Joe's sad answer, with another reach at his
+aching head.  "All I got is a return ticket."
+
+"And I'm broke - when I pay my board."
+
+"Jump it," Joe advised.
+
+"Can't.  Owe it to my sister."
+
+Joe whistled a long, perplexed whistle, and racked his brains to
+little purpose.
+
+"I've got the price of the drinks," he said desperately.  "Come on,
+an' mebbe we'll cook up something."
+
+Martin declined.
+
+"Water-wagon?"
+
+This time Martin nodded, and Joe lamented, "Wish I was."
+
+"But I somehow just can't," he said in extenuation.  "After I've
+ben workin' like hell all week I just got to booze up.  If I
+didn't, I'd cut my throat or burn up the premises.  But I'm glad
+you're on the wagon.  Stay with it."
+
+Martin knew of the enormous gulf between him and this man - the
+gulf the books had made; but he found no difficulty in crossing
+back over that gulf.  He had lived all his life in the working-
+class world, and the CAMARADERIE of labor was second nature with
+him.  He solved the difficulty of transportation that was too much
+for the other's aching head.  He would send his trunk up to Shelly
+Hot Springs on Joe's ticket.  As for himself, there was his wheel.
+It was seventy miles, and he could ride it on Sunday and be ready
+for work Monday morning.  In the meantime he would go home and pack
+up.  There was no one to say good-by to.  Ruth and her whole family
+were spending the long summer in the Sierras, at Lake Tahoe.
+
+He arrived at Shelly Hot Springs, tired and dusty, on Sunday night.
+Joe greeted him exuberantly.  With a wet towel bound about his
+aching brow, he had been at work all day.
+
+"Part of last week's washin' mounted up, me bein' away to get you,"
+he explained.  "Your box arrived all right.  It's in your room.
+But it's a hell of a thing to call a trunk.  An' what's in it?
+Gold bricks?"
+
+Joe sat on the bed while Martin unpacked.  The box was a packing-
+case for breakfast food, and Mr. Higginbotham had charged him half
+a dollar for it.  Two rope handles, nailed on by Martin, had
+technically transformed it into a trunk eligible for the baggage-
+car.  Joe watched, with bulging eyes, a few shirts and several
+changes of underclothes come out of the box, followed by books, and
+more books.
+
+"Books clean to the bottom?" he asked.
+
+Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books on a kitchen table
+which served in the room in place of a wash-stand.
+
+"Gee!" Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the deduction to
+arise in his brain.  At last it came.
+
+"Say, you don't care for the girls - much?" he queried.
+
+"No," was the answer.  "I used to chase a lot before I tackled the
+books.  But since then there's no time."
+
+"And there won't be any time here.  All you can do is work an'
+sleep."
+
+Martin thought of his five hours' sleep a night, and smiled.  The
+room was situated over the laundry and was in the same building
+with the engine that pumped water, made electricity, and ran the
+laundry machinery.  The engineer, who occupied the adjoining room,
+dropped in to meet the new hand and helped Martin rig up an
+electric bulb, on an extension wire, so that it travelled along a
+stretched cord from over the table to the bed.
+
+The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was routed out for a
+quarter-to-seven breakfast.  There happened to be a bath-tub for
+the servants in the laundry building, and he electrified Joe by
+taking a cold bath.
+
+"Gee, but you're a hummer!" Joe announced, as they sat down to
+breakfast in a corner of the hotel kitchen.
+
+With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the assistant
+gardener, and two or three men from the stable.  They ate hurriedly
+and gloomily, with but little conversation, and as Martin ate and
+listened he realized how far he had travelled from their status.
+Their small mental caliber was depressing to him, and he was
+anxious to get away from them.  So he bolted his breakfast, a
+sickly, sloppy affair, as rapidly as they, and heaved a sigh of
+relief when he passed out through the kitchen door.
+
+It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, wherein the most
+modern machinery did everything that was possible for machinery to
+do.  Martin, after a few instructions, sorted the great heaps of
+soiled clothes, while Joe started the masher and made up fresh
+supplies of soft-soap, compounded of biting chemicals that
+compelled him to swathe his mouth and nostrils and eyes in bath-
+towels till he resembled a mummy.  Finished the sorting, Martin
+lent a hand in wringing the clothes.  This was done by dumping them
+into a spinning receptacle that went at a rate of a few thousand
+revolutions a minute, tearing the matter from the clothes by
+centrifugal force.  Then Martin began to alternate between the
+dryer and the wringer, between times "shaking out" socks and
+stockings.  By the afternoon, one feeding and one, stacking up,
+they were running socks and stockings through the mangle while the
+irons were heating.  Then it was hot irons and underclothes till
+six o'clock, at which time Joe shook his head dubiously.
+
+"Way behind," he said.  "Got to work after supper."  And after
+supper they worked until ten o'clock, under the blazing electric
+lights, until the last piece of under-clothing was ironed and
+folded away in the distributing room.  It was a hot California
+night, and though the windows were thrown wide, the room, with its
+red-hot ironing-stove, was a furnace.  Martin and Joe, down to
+undershirts, bare armed, sweated and panted for air.
+
+"Like trimming cargo in the tropics," Martin said, when they went
+upstairs.
+
+"You'll do," Joe answered.  "You take hold like a good fellow.  If
+you keep up the pace, you'll be on thirty dollars only one month.
+The second month you'll be gettin' your forty.  But don't tell me
+you never ironed before.  I know better."
+
+"Never ironed a rag in my life, honestly, until to-day," Martin
+protested.
+
+He was surprised at his weariness when he act into his room,
+forgetful of the fact that he had been on his feet and working
+without let up for fourteen hours.  He set the alarm clock at six,
+and measured back five hours to one o'clock.  He could read until
+then.  Slipping off his shoes, to ease his swollen feet, he sat
+down at the table with his books.  He opened Fiske, where he had
+left off to read.  But he found trouble began to read it through a
+second time.  Then he awoke, in pain from his stiffened muscles and
+chilled by the mountain wind that had begun to blow in through the
+window.  He looked at the clock.  It marked two.  He had been
+asleep four hours.  He pulled off his clothes and crawled into bed,
+where he was asleep the moment after his head touched the pillow.
+
+Tuesday was a day of similar unremitting toil.  The speed with
+which Joe worked won Martin's admiration.  Joe was a dozen of
+demons for work.  He was keyed up to concert pitch, and there was
+never a moment in the long day when he was not fighting for
+moments.  He concentrated himself upon his work and upon how to
+save time, pointing out to Martin where he did in five motions what
+could be done in three, or in three motions what could be done in
+two.  "Elimination of waste motion," Martin phrased it as he
+watched and patterned after.  He was a good workman himself, quick
+and deft, and it had always been a point of pride with him that no
+man should do any of his work for him or outwork him.  As a result,
+he concentrated with a similar singleness of purpose, greedily
+snapping up the hints and suggestions thrown out by his working
+mate.  He "rubbed out' collars and cuffs, rubbing the starch out
+from between the double thicknesses of linen so that there would be
+no blisters when it came to the ironing, and doing it at a pace
+that elicited Joe's praise.
+
+There was never an interval when something was not at hand to be
+done.  Joe waited for nothing, waited on nothing, and went on the
+jump from task to task.  They starched two hundred white shirts,
+with a single gathering movement seizing a shirt so that the
+wristbands, neckband, yoke, and bosom protruded beyond the circling
+right hand.  At the same moment the left hand held up the body of
+the shirt so that it would not enter the starch, and at the moment
+the right hand dipped into the starch - starch so hot that, in
+order to wring it out, their hands had to thrust, and thrust
+continually, into a bucket of cold water.  And that night they
+worked till half-past ten, dipping "fancy starch" -  all the
+frilled and airy, delicate wear of ladies.
+
+"Me for the tropics and no clothes," Martin laughed.
+
+"And me out of a job," Joe answered seriously.  "I don't know
+nothin' but laundrying."
+
+"And you know it well."
+
+"I ought to.  Began in the Contra Costa in Oakland when I was
+eleven, shakin' out for the mangle.  That was eighteen years ago,
+an' I've never done a tap of anything else.  But this job is the
+fiercest I ever had.  Ought to be one more man on it at least.  We
+work to-morrow night.  Always run the mangle Wednesday nights -
+collars an' cuffs."
+
+Martin set his alarm, drew up to the table, and opened Fiske.  He
+did not finish the first paragraph.  The lines blurred and ran
+together and his head nodded.  He walked up and down, batting his
+head savagely with his fists, but he could not conquer the numbness
+of sleep.  He propped the book before him, and propped his eyelids
+with his fingers, and fell asleep with his eyes wide open.  Then he
+surrendered, and, scarcely conscious of what he did, got off his
+clothes and into bed.  He slept seven hours of heavy, animal-like
+sleep, and awoke by the alarm, feeling that he had not had enough.
+
+"Doin' much readin'?" Joe asked.
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+"Never mind.  We got to run the mangle to-night, but Thursday we'll
+knock off at six.  That'll give you a chance."
+
+Martin washed woollens that day, by hand, in a large barrel, with
+strong soft-soap, by means of a hub from a wagon wheel, mounted on
+a plunger-pole that was attached to a spring-pole overhead.
+
+"My invention," Joe said proudly.  "Beats a washboard an' your
+knuckles, and, besides, it saves at least fifteen minutes in the
+week, an' fifteen minutes ain't to be sneezed at in this shebang."
+
+Running the collars and cuffs through the mangle was also Joe's
+idea.  That night, while they toiled on under the electric lights,
+he explained it.
+
+"Something no laundry ever does, except this one.  An' I got to do
+it if I'm goin' to get done Saturday afternoon at three o'clock.
+But I know how, an' that's the difference.  Got to have right heat,
+right pressure, and run 'em through three times.  Look at that!"
+He held a cuff aloft.  "Couldn't do it better by hand or on a
+tiler."
+
+Thursday, Joe was in a rage.  A bundle of extra "fancy starch" had
+come in.
+
+"I'm goin' to quit," he announced.  "I won't stand for it.  I'm
+goin' to quit it cold.  What's the good of me workin' like a slave
+all week, a-savin' minutes, an' them a-comin' an' ringin' in fancy-
+starch extras on me?  This is a free country, an' I'm to tell that
+fat Dutchman what I think of him.  An' I won't tell 'm in French.
+Plain United States is good enough for me.  Him a-ringin' in fancy
+starch extras!"
+
+"We got to work to-night," he said the next moment, reversing his
+judgment and surrendering to fate.
+
+And Martin did no reading that night.  He had seen no daily paper
+all week, and, strangely to him, felt no desire to see one.  He was
+not interested in the news.  He was too tired and jaded to be
+interested in anything, though he planned to leave Saturday
+afternoon, if they finished at three, and ride on his wheel to
+Oakland.  It was seventy miles, and the same distance back on
+Sunday afternoon would leave him anything but rested for the second
+week's work.  It would have been easier to go on the train, but the
+round trip was two dollars and a half, and he was intent on saving
+money.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+
+Martin learned to do many things.  In the course of the first week,
+in one afternoon, he and Joe accounted for the two hundred white
+shirts.  Joe ran the tiler, a machine wherein a hot iron was hooked
+on a steel string which furnished the pressure.  By this means he
+ironed the yoke, wristbands, and neckband, setting the latter at
+right angles to the shirt, and put the glossy finish on the bosom.
+As fast as he finished them, he flung the shirts on a rack between
+him and Martin, who caught them up and "backed" them.  This task
+consisted of ironing all the unstarched portions of the shirts.
+
+It was exhausting work, carried on, hour after hour, at top speed.
+Out on the broad verandas of the hotel, men and women, in cool
+white, sipped iced drinks and kept their circulation down.  But in
+the laundry the air was sizzling.  The huge stove roared red hot
+and white hot, while the irons, moving over the damp cloth, sent up
+clouds of steam.  The heat of these irons was different from that
+used by housewives.  An iron that stood the ordinary test of a wet
+finger was too cold for Joe and Martin, and such test was useless.
+They went wholly by holding the irons close to their cheeks,
+gauging the heat by some secret mental process that Martin admired
+but could not understand.  When the fresh irons proved too hot,
+they hooked them on iron rods and dipped them into cold water.
+This again required a precise and subtle judgment.  A fraction of a
+second too long in the water and the fine and silken edge of the
+proper heat was lost, and Martin found time to marvel at the
+accuracy he developed - an automatic accuracy, founded upon
+criteria that were machine-like and unerring.
+
+But there was little time in which to marvel.  All Martin's
+consciousness was concentrated in the work.  Ceaselessly active,
+head and hand, an intelligent machine, all that constituted him a
+man was devoted to furnishing that intelligence.  There was no room
+in his brain for the universe and its mighty problems.  All the
+broad and spacious corridors of his mind were closed and
+hermetically sealed.  The echoing chamber of his soul was a narrow
+room, a conning tower, whence were directed his arm and shoulder
+muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the swift-moving iron along
+its steaming path in broad, sweeping strokes, just so many strokes
+and no more, just so far with each stroke and not a fraction of an
+inch farther, rushing along interminable sleeves, sides, backs, and
+tails, and tossing the finished shirts, without rumpling, upon the
+receiving frame.  And even as his hurrying soul tossed, it was
+reaching for another shirt.  This went on, hour after hour, while
+outside all the world swooned under the overhead California sun.
+But there was no swooning in that superheated room.  The cool
+guests on the verandas needed clean linen.
+
+The sweat poured from Martin.  He drank enormous quantities of
+water, but so great was the heat of the day and of his exertions,
+that the water sluiced through the interstices of his flesh and out
+at all his pores.  Always, at sea, except at rare intervals, the
+work he performed had given him ample opportunity to commune with
+himself.  The master of the ship had been lord of Martin's time;
+but here the manager of the hotel was lord of Martin's thoughts as
+well.  He had no thoughts save for the nerve-racking, body-
+destroying toil.  Outside of that it was impossible to think.  He
+did not know that he loved Ruth.  She did not even exist, for his
+driven soul had no time to remember her.  It was only when he
+crawled to bed at night, or to breakfast in the morning, that she
+asserted herself to him in fleeting memories.
+
+"This is hell, ain't it?" Joe remarked once.
+
+Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation.  The statement had
+been obvious and unnecessary.  They did not talk while they worked.
+Conversation threw them out of their stride, as it did this time,
+compelling Martin to miss a stroke of his iron and to make two
+extra motions before he caught his stride again.
+
+On Friday morning the washer ran.  Twice a week they had to put
+through hotel linen, - the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table-
+cloths, and napkins.  This finished, they buckled down to "fancy
+starch."  It was slow work, fastidious and delicate, and Martin did
+not learn it so readily.  Besides, he could not take chances.
+Mistakes were disastrous.
+
+"See that," Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could
+have crumpled from view in one hand.  "Scorch that an' it's twenty
+dollars out of your wages."
+
+So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his muscular
+tension, though nervous tension rose higher than ever, and he
+listened sympathetically to the other's blasphemies as he toiled
+and suffered over the beautiful things that women wear when they do
+not have to do their own laundrying.  "Fancy starch" was Martin's
+nightmare, and it was Joe's, too.  It was "fancy starch" that
+robbed them of their hard-won minutes.  They toiled at it all day.
+At seven in the evening they broke off to run the hotel linen
+through the mangle.  At ten o'clock, while the hotel guests slept,
+the two laundrymen sweated on at "fancy starch" till midnight, till
+one, till two.  At half-past two they knocked off.
+
+Saturday morning it was "fancy starch," and odds and ends, and at
+three in the afternoon the week's work was done.
+
+"You ain't a-goin' to ride them seventy miles into Oakland on top
+of this?" Joe demanded, as they sat on the stairs and took a
+triumphant smoke.
+
+"Got to," was the answer.
+
+"What are you goin' for? - a girl?"
+
+"No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket.  I want to
+renew some books at the library."
+
+"Why don't you send 'em down an' up by express?  That'll cost only
+a quarter each way."
+
+Martin considered it.
+
+"An' take a rest to-morrow," the other urged.  "You need it.  I
+know I do.  I'm plumb tuckered out."
+
+He looked it.  Indomitable, never resting, fighting for seconds and
+minutes all week, circumventing delays and crushing down obstacles,
+a fount of resistless energy, a high-driven human motor, a demon
+for work, now that he had accomplished the week's task he was in a
+state of collapse.  He was worn and haggard, and his handsome face
+drooped in lean exhaustion.  He pulled his cigarette spiritlessly,
+and his voice was peculiarly dead and monotonous.  All the snap and
+fire had gone out of him.  His triumph seemed a sorry one.
+
+"An' next week we got to do it all over again," he said sadly.
+"An' what's the good of it all, hey?  Sometimes I wish I was a
+hobo.  They don't work, an' they get their livin'.  Gee!  I wish I
+had a glass of beer; but I can't get up the gumption to go down to
+the village an' get it.  You'll stay over, an' send your books dawn
+by express, or else you're a damn fool."
+
+"But what can I do here all day Sunday?" Martin asked.
+
+"Rest.  You don't know how tired you are.  Why, I'm that tired
+Sunday I can't even read the papers.  I was sick once - typhoid.
+In the hospital two months an' a half.  Didn't do a tap of work all
+that time.  It was beautiful."
+
+"It was beautiful," he repeated dreamily, a minute later.
+
+Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head laundryman
+had disappeared.  Most likely he had gone for a glass of beer
+Martin decided, but the half-mile walk down to the village to find
+out seemed a long journey to him.  He lay on his bed with his shoes
+off, trying to make up his mind.  He did not reach out for a book.
+He was too tired to feel sleepy, and he lay, scarcely thinking, in
+a semi-stupor of weariness, until it was time for supper.  Joe did
+not appear for that function, and when Martin heard the gardener
+remark that most likely he was ripping the slats off the bar,
+Martin understood.  He went to bed immediately afterward, and in
+the morning decided that he was greatly rested.  Joe being still
+absent, Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay down in a shady nook
+under the trees.  The morning passed, he knew not how.  He did not
+sleep, nobody disturbed him, and he did not finish the paper.  He
+came back to it in the afternoon, after dinner, and fell asleep
+over it.
+
+So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard at work, sorting
+clothes, while Joe, a towel bound tightly around his head, with
+groans and blasphemies, was running the washer and mixing soft-
+soap.
+
+"I simply can't help it," he explained.  "I got to drink when
+Saturday night comes around."
+
+Another week passed, a great battle that continued under the
+electric lights each night and that culminated on Saturday
+afternoon at three o'clock, when Joe tasted his moment of wilted
+triumph and then drifted down to the village to forget.  Martin's
+Sunday was the same as before.  He slept in the shade of the trees,
+toiled aimlessly through the newspaper, and spent long hours lying
+on his back, doing nothing, thinking nothing.  He was too dazed to
+think, though he was aware that he did not like himself.  He was
+self-repelled, as though he had undergone some degradation or was
+intrinsically foul.  All that was god-like in him was blotted out.
+The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to
+feel the prod of it.  He was dead.  His soul seemed dead.  He was a
+beast, a work-beast.  He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting down
+through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky
+whisper as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling
+to disclosure.  Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste
+was bad in his mouth.  A black screen was drawn across his mirror
+of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sick-room where
+entered no ray of light.  He envied Joe, down in the village,
+rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with
+maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things,
+fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of Monday morning
+and the week of deadening toil to come.
+
+A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life.
+He was oppressed by a sense of failure.  There was reason for the
+editors refusing his stuff.  He could see that clearly now, and
+laugh at himself and the dreams he had dreamed.  Ruth returned his
+"Sea Lyrics" by mail.  He read her letter apathetically.  She did
+her best to say how much she liked them and that they were
+beautiful.  But she could not lie, and she could not disguise the
+truth from herself.  She knew they were failures, and he read her
+disapproval in every perfunctory and unenthusiastic line of her
+letter.  And she was right.  He was firmly convinced of it as he
+read the poems over.  Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and
+as he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had
+had in mind when he wrote them.  His audacities of phrase struck
+him as grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities,
+and everything was absurd, unreal, and impossible.  He would have
+burned the "Sea Lyrics" on the spot, had his will been strong
+enough to set them aflame.  There was the engine-room, but the
+exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not worth while.  All
+his exertion was used in washing other persons' clothes.  He did
+not have any left for private affairs.
+
+He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together
+and answer Ruth's letter.  But Saturday afternoon, after work was
+finished and he had taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered
+him.  "I guess I'll go down and see how Joe's getting on," was the
+way he put it to himself; and in the same moment he knew that he
+lied.  But he did not have the energy to consider the lie.  If he
+had had the energy, he would have refused to consider the lie,
+because he wanted to forget.  He started for the village slowly and
+casually, increasing his pace in spite of himself as he neared the
+saloon.
+
+"I thought you was on the water-wagon," was Joe's greeting.
+
+Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey,
+filling his own glass brimming before he passed the bottle.
+
+"Don't take all night about it," he said roughly.
+
+The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin refused to wait
+for him, tossing the glass off in a gulp and refilling it.
+
+"Now, I can wait for you," he said grimly; "but hurry up."
+
+Joe hurried, and they drank together.
+
+"The work did it, eh?" Joe queried.
+
+Martin refused to discuss the matter.
+
+"It's fair hell, I know," the other went on, "but I kind of hate to
+see you come off the wagon, Mart.  Well, here's how!"
+
+Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and
+awing the barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery
+blue eyes and hair parted in the middle.
+
+"It's something scandalous the way they work us poor devils," Joe
+was remarking.  "If I didn't bowl up, I'd break loose an' burn down
+the shebang.  My bowlin' up is all that saves 'em, I can tell you
+that."
+
+But Martin made no answer.  A few more drinks, and in his brain he
+felt the maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl.  Ah, it was
+living, the first breath of life he had breathed in three weeks.
+His dreams came back to him.  Fancy came out of the darkened room
+and lured him on, a thing of flaming brightness.  His mirror of
+vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of
+imagery.  Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand in hand, and all
+power was his.  He tried to tell it to Joe, but Joe had visions of
+his own, infallible schemes whereby he would escape the slavery of
+laundry-work and become himself the owner of a great steam laundry.
+
+"I tell yeh, Mart, they won't be no kids workin' in my laundry -
+not on yer life.  An' they won't be no workin' a livin' soul after
+six P.M.  You hear me talk!  They'll be machinery enough an' hands
+enough to do it all in decent workin' hours, an' Mart, s'help me,
+I'll make yeh superintendent of the shebang - the whole of it, all
+of it.  Now here's the scheme.  I get on the water-wagon an' save
+my money for two years - save an' then - "
+
+But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper,
+until that worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers
+who, coming in, accepted Martin's invitation.  Martin dispensed
+royal largess, inviting everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and
+the gardener's assistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the
+furtive hobo who slid in like a shadow and like a shadow hovered at
+the end of the bar.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+
+Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to
+the washer.
+
+"I say," he began.
+
+"Don't talk to me," Martin snarled.
+
+"I'm sorry, Joe," he said at noon, when they knocked off for
+dinner.
+
+Tears came into the other's eyes.
+
+"That's all right, old man," he said.  "We're in hell, an' we can't
+help ourselves.  An', you know, I kind of like you a whole lot.
+That's what made it - hurt.  I cottoned to you from the first."
+
+Martin shook his hand.
+
+"Let's quit," Joe suggested.  "Let's chuck it, an' go hoboin'.  I
+ain't never tried it, but it must be dead easy.  An' nothin' to do.
+Just think of it, nothin' to do.  I was sick once, typhoid, in the
+hospital, an' it was beautiful.  I wish I'd get sick again."
+
+The week dragged on.  The hotel was full, and extra "fancy starch"
+poured in upon them.  They performed prodigies of valor.  They
+fought late each night under the electric lights, bolted their
+meals, and even got in a half hour's work before breakfast.  Martin
+no longer took his cold baths.  Every moment was drive, drive,
+drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd of moments, herding them
+carefully, never losing one, counting them over like a miser
+counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish
+machine, aided ably by that other machine that thought of itself as
+once having been one Martin Eden, a man.
+
+But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think.  The
+house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its
+shadowy caretaker.  He was a shadow.  Joe was right.  They were
+both shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil.  Or was it a
+dream?  Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the
+heavy irons back and forth over the white garments, it came to him
+that it was a dream.  In a short while, or maybe after a thousand
+years or so, he would awake, in his little room with the ink-
+stained table, and take up his writing where he had left off the
+day before.  Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the awakening
+would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down out
+of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the
+tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind
+blowing through his flesh.
+
+Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o'clock.
+
+"Guess I'll go down an' get a glass of beer," Joe said, in the
+queer, monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.
+
+Martin seemed suddenly to wake up.  He opened the kit bag and oiled
+his wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the
+bearings.  Joe was halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed
+by, bending low over the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-
+six gear with rhythmic strength, his face set for seventy miles of
+road and grade and dust.  He slept in Oakland that night, and on
+Sunday covered the seventy miles back.  And on Monday morning,
+weary, he began the new week's work, but he had kept sober.
+
+A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled
+as a machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a
+glimmering bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to
+scorch off the hundred and forty miles.  But this was not rest.  It
+was super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering
+bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life.  At
+the end of the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to
+resist, he drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life
+and found life until Monday morning.
+
+Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty
+miles, obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the
+numbness of still greater exertion.  At the end of three months he
+went down a third time to the village with Joe.  He forgot, and
+lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast
+he was making of himself - not by the drink, but by the work.  The
+drink was an effect, not a cause.  It followed inevitably upon the
+work, as the night follows upon the day.  Not by becoming a toil-
+beast could he win to the heights, was the message the whiskey
+whispered to him, and he nodded approbation.  The whiskey was wise.
+It told secrets on itself.
+
+He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and
+while they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and
+scribbled.
+
+"A telegram, Joe," he said.  "Read it."
+
+Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer.  But what he read
+seemed to sober him.  He looked at the other reproachfully, tears
+oozing into his eyes and down his cheeks.
+
+"You ain't goin' back on me, Mart?" he queried hopelessly.
+
+Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the
+message to the telegraph office.
+
+"Hold on," Joe muttered thickly.  "Lemme think."
+
+He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin's arm
+around him and supporting him, while he thought.
+
+"Make that two laundrymen," he said abruptly.  "Here, lemme fix
+it."
+
+"What are you quitting for?" Martin demanded.
+
+"Same reason as you."
+
+"But I'm going to sea.  You can't do that."
+
+"Nope," was the answer, "but I can hobo all right, all right."
+
+Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-
+
+"By God, I think you're right!  Better a hobo than a beast of toil.
+Why, man, you'll live.  And that's more than you ever did before."
+
+"I was in hospital, once," Joe corrected.  "It was beautiful.
+Typhoid - did I tell you?"
+
+While Martin changed the telegram to "two laundrymen," Joe went
+on:-
+
+"I never wanted to drink when I was in hospital.  Funny, ain't it?
+But when I've ben workin' like a slave all week, I just got to bowl
+up.  Ever noticed that cooks drink like hell? - an' bakers, too?
+It's the work.  They've sure got to.  Here, lemme pay half of that
+telegram."
+
+"I'll shake you for it," Martin offered.
+
+"Come on, everybody drink," Joe called, as they rattled the dice
+and rolled them out on the damp bar.
+
+Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation.  He did not mind his
+aching head, nor did he take interest in his work.  Whole herds of
+moments stole away and were lost while their careless shepherd
+gazed out of the window at the sunshine and the trees.
+
+"Just look at it!" he cried.  "An' it's all mine!  It's free.  I
+can lie down under them trees an' sleep for a thousan' years if I
+want to.  Aw, come on, Mart, let's chuck it.  What's the good of
+waitin' another moment.  That's the land of nothin' to do out
+there, an' I got a ticket for it - an' it ain't no return ticket,
+b'gosh!"
+
+A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes for the
+washer, Joe spied the hotel manager's shirt.  He knew its mark, and
+with a sudden glorious consciousness of freedom he threw it on the
+floor and stamped on it.
+
+"I wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!" he shouted.  "In
+it, an' right there where I've got you!  Take that! an' that! an'
+that! damn you!  Hold me back, somebody!  Hold me back!"
+
+Martin laughed and held him to his work.  On Tuesday night the new
+laundrymen arrived, and the rest of the week was spent breaking
+them into the routine.  Joe sat around and explained his system,
+but he did no more work.
+
+"Not a tap," he announced.  "Not a tap.  They can fire me if they
+want to, but if they do, I'll quit.  No more work in mine, thank
+you kindly.  Me for the freight cars an' the shade under the trees.
+Go to it, you slaves!  That's right.  Slave an' sweat!  Slave an'
+sweat!  An' when you're dead, you'll rot the same as me, an' what's
+it matter how you live? - eh?  Tell me that - what's it matter in
+the long run?"
+
+On Saturday they drew their pay and came to the parting of the
+ways.
+
+"They ain't no use in me askin' you to change your mind an' hit the
+road with me?" Joe asked hopelessly:
+
+Martin shook his head.  He was standing by his wheel, ready to
+start.  They shook hands, and Joe held on to his for a moment, as
+he said:-
+
+"I'm goin' to see you again, Mart, before you an' me die.  That's
+straight dope.  I feel it in my bones.  Good-by, Mart, an' be good.
+I like you like hell, you know."
+
+He stood, a forlorn figure, in the middle of the road, watching
+until Martin turned a bend and was gone from sight.
+
+"He's a good Indian, that boy," he muttered.  "A good Indian."
+
+Then he plodded down the road himself, to the water tank, where
+half a dozen empties lay on a side-track waiting for the up
+freight.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+
+Ruth and her family were home again, and Martin, returned to
+Oakland, saw much of her.  Having gained her degree, she was doing
+no more studying; and he, having worked all vitality out of his
+mind and body, was doing no writing.  This gave them time for each
+other that they had never had before, and their intimacy ripened
+fast.
+
+At first, Martin had done nothing but rest.  He had slept a great
+deal, and spent long hours musing and thinking and doing nothing.
+He was like one recovering from some terrible bout if hardship.
+The first signs of reawakening came when he discovered more than
+languid interest in the daily paper.  Then he began to read again -
+light novels, and poetry; and after several days more he was head
+over heels in his long-neglected Fiske.  His splendid body and
+health made new vitality, and he possessed all the resiliency and
+rebound of youth.
+
+Ruth showed her disappointment plainly when he announced that he
+was going to sea for another voyage as soon as he was well rested.
+
+"Why do you want to do that?" she asked.
+
+"Money," was the answer.  "I'll have to lay in a supply for my next
+attack on the editors.  Money is the sinews of war, in my case -
+money and patience."
+
+"But if all you wanted was money, why didn't you stay in the
+laundry?"
+
+"Because the laundry was making a beast of me.  Too much work of
+that sort drives to drink."
+
+She stared at him with horror in her eyes.
+
+"Do you mean - ?" she quavered.
+
+It would have been easy for him to get out of it; but his natural
+impulse was for frankness, and he remembered his old resolve to be
+frank, no matter what happened.
+
+"Yes," he answered.  "Just that.  Several times."
+
+She shivered and drew away from him.
+
+"No man that I have ever known did that - ever did that."
+
+"Then they never worked in the laundry at Shelly Hot Springs," he
+laughed bitterly.  "Toil is a good thing.  It is necessary for
+human health, so all the preachers say, and Heaven knows I've never
+been afraid of it.  But there is such a thing as too much of a good
+thing, and the laundry up there is one of them.  And that's why I'm
+going to sea one more voyage.  It will be my last, I think, for
+when I come back, I shall break into the magazines.  I am certain
+of it."
+
+She was silent, unsympathetic, and he watched her moodily,
+realizing how impossible it was for her to understand what he had
+been through.
+
+"Some day I shall write it up - 'The Degradation of Toil' or the
+'Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,' or something like that
+for a title."
+
+Never, since the first meeting, had they seemed so far apart as
+that day.  His confession, told in frankness, with the spirit of
+revolt behind, had repelled her.  But she was more shocked by the
+repulsion itself than by the cause of it.  It pointed out to her
+how near she had drawn to him, and once accepted, it paved the way
+for greater intimacy.  Pity, too, was aroused, and innocent,
+idealistic thoughts of reform.  She would save this raw young man
+who had come so far.  She would save him from the curse of his
+early environment, and she would save him from himself in spite of
+himself.  And all this affected her as a very noble state of
+consciousness; nor did she dream that behind it and underlying it
+were the jealousy and desire of love.
+
+They rode on their wheels much in the delightful fall weather, and
+out in the hills they read poetry aloud, now one and now the other,
+noble, uplifting poetry that turned one's thoughts to higher
+things.  Renunciation, sacrifice, patience, industry, and high
+endeavor were the principles she thus indirectly preached - such
+abstractions being objectified in her mind by her father, and Mr.
+Butler, and by Andrew Carnegie, who, from a poor immigrant boy had
+arisen to be the book-giver of the world.  All of which was
+appreciated and enjoyed by Martin.  He followed her mental
+processes more clearly now, and her soul was no longer the sealed
+wonder it had been.  He was on terms of intellectual equality with
+her.  But the points of disagreement did not affect his love.  His
+love was more ardent than ever, for he loved her for what she was,
+and even her physical frailty was an added charm in his eyes.  He
+read of sickly Elizabeth Barrett, who for years had not placed her
+feet upon the ground, until that day of flame when she eloped with
+Browning and stood upright, upon the earth, under the open sky; and
+what Browning had done for her, Martin decided he could do for
+Ruth.  But first, she must love him.  The rest would be easy.  He
+would give her strength and health.  And he caught glimpses of
+their life, in the years to come, wherein, against a background of
+work and comfort and general well-being, he saw himself and Ruth
+reading and discussing poetry, she propped amid a multitude of
+cushions on the ground while she read aloud to him.  This was the
+key to the life they would live.  And always he saw that particular
+picture.  Sometimes it was she who leaned against him while he
+read, one arm about her, her head upon his shoulder.  Sometimes
+they pored together over the printed pages of beauty.  Then, too,
+she loved nature, and with generous imagination he changed the
+scene of their reading - sometimes they read in closed-in valleys
+with precipitous walls, or in high mountain meadows, and, again,
+down by the gray sand-dunes with a wreath of billows at their feet,
+or afar on some volcanic tropic isle where waterfalls descended and
+became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that swayed and
+shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind.  But always, in the
+foreground, lords of beauty and eternally reading and sharing, lay
+he and Ruth, and always in the background that was beyond the
+background of nature, dim and hazy, were work and success and money
+earned that made them free of the world and all its treasures.
+
+"I should recommend my little girl to be careful," her mother
+warned her one day.
+
+"I know what you mean.  But it is impossible.  He if; not - "
+
+Ruth was blushing, but it was the blush of maidenhood called upon
+for the first time to discuss the sacred things of life with a
+mother held equally sacred.
+
+"Your kind."  Her mother finished the sentence for her.
+
+Ruth nodded.
+
+"I did not want to say it, but he is not.  He is rough, brutal,
+strong - too strong.  He has not - "
+
+She hesitated and could not go on.  It was a new experience,
+talking over such matters with her mother.  And again her mother
+completed her thought for her.
+
+"He has not lived a clean life, is what you wanted to say."
+
+Again Ruth nodded, and again a blush mantled her face.
+
+"It is just that," she said.  "It has not been his fault, but he
+has played much with - "
+
+"With pitch?"
+
+"Yes, with pitch.  And he frightens me.  Sometimes I am positively
+in terror of him, when he talks in that free and easy way of the
+things he has done - as if they did not matter.  They do matter,
+don't they?"
+
+They sat with their arms twined around each other, and in the pause
+her mother patted her hand and waited for her to go on.
+
+"But I am interested in him dreadfully," she continued.  "In a way
+he is my protege.  Then, too, he is my first boy friend - but not
+exactly friend; rather protege and friend combined.  Sometimes,
+too, when he frightens me, it seems that he is a bulldog I have
+taken for a plaything, like some of the 'frat' girls, and he is
+tugging hard, and showing his teeth, and threatening to break
+loose."
+
+Again her mother waited.
+
+"He interests me, I suppose, like the bulldog.  And there is much
+good in him, too; but there is much in him that I would not like in
+- in the other way.  You see, I have been thinking.  He swears, he
+smokes, he drinks, he has fought with his fists (he has told me so,
+and he likes it; he says so).  He is all that a man should not be -
+a man I would want for my - " her voice sank very low - "husband.
+Then he is too strong.  My prince must be tall, and slender, and
+dark - a graceful, bewitching prince.  No, there is no danger of my
+failing in love with Martin Eden.  It would be the worst fate that
+could befall me."
+
+"But it is not that that I spoke about," her mother equivocated.
+"Have you thought about him?  He is so ineligible in every way, you
+know, and suppose he should come to love you?"
+
+"But he does - already," she cried.
+
+"It was to be expected," Mrs. Morse said gently.  "How could it be
+otherwise with any one who knew you?"
+
+"Olney hates me!" she exclaimed passionately.  "And I hate Olney.
+I feel always like a cat when he is around.  I feel that I must be
+nasty to him, and even when I don't happen to feel that way, why,
+he's nasty to me, anyway.  But I am happy with Martin Eden.  No one
+ever loved me before - no man, I mean, in that way.  And it is
+sweet to be loved - that way.  You know what I mean, mother dear.
+It is sweet to feel that you are really and truly a woman."  She
+buried her face in her mother's lap, sobbing.  "You think I am
+dreadful, I know, but I am honest, and I tell you just how I feel."
+
+Mrs. Morse was strangely sad and happy.  Her child-daughter, who
+was a bachelor of arts, was gone; but in her place was a woman-
+daughter.  The experiment had succeeded.  The strange void in
+Ruth's nature had been filled, and filled without danger or
+penalty.  This rough sailor-fellow had been the instrument, and,
+though Ruth did not love him, he had made her conscious of her
+womanhood.
+
+"His hand trembles," Ruth was confessing, her face, for shame's
+sake, still buried.  "It is most amusing and ridiculous, but I feel
+sorry for him, too.  And when his hands are too trembly, and his
+eyes too shiny, why, I lecture him about his life and the wrong way
+he is going about it to mend it.  But he worships me, I know.  His
+eyes and his hands do not lie.  And it makes me feel grown-up, the
+thought of it, the very thought of it; and I feel that I am
+possessed of something that is by rights my own - that makes me
+like the other girls - and - and young women.  And, then, too, I
+knew that I was not like them before, and I knew that it worried
+you.  You thought you did not let me know that dear worry of yours,
+but I did, and I wanted to - 'to make good,' as Martin Eden says."
+
+It was a holy hour for mother and daughter, and their eyes were wet
+as they talked on in the twilight, Ruth all white innocence and
+frankness, her mother sympathetic, receptive, yet calmly explaining
+and guiding.
+
+"He is four years younger than you," she said.  "He has no place in
+the world.  He has neither position nor salary.  He is impractical.
+Loving you, he should, in the name of common sense, be doing
+something that would give him the right to marry, instead of
+paltering around with those stories of his and with childish
+dreams.  Martin Eden, I am afraid, will never grow up.  He does not
+take to responsibility and a man's work in the world like your
+father did, or like all our friends, Mr. Butler for one.  Martin
+Eden, I am afraid, will never be a money-earner.  And this world is
+so ordered that money is necessary to happiness - oh, no, not these
+swollen fortunes, but enough of money to permit of common comfort
+and decency.  He - he has never spoken?"
+
+"He has not breathed a word.  He has not attempted to; but if he
+did, I would not let him, because, you see, I do not love him."
+
+"I am glad of that.  I should not care to see my daughter, my one
+daughter, who is so clean and pure, love a man like him.  There are
+noble men in the world who are clean and true and manly.  Wait for
+them.  You will find one some day, and you will love him and be
+loved by him, and you will be happy with him as your father and I
+have been happy with each other.  And there is one thing you must
+always carry in mind - "
+
+"Yes, mother."
+
+Mrs. Morse's voice was low and sweet as she said, "And that is the
+children."
+
+"I - have thought about them," Ruth confessed, remembering the
+wanton thoughts that had vexed her in the past, her face again red
+with maiden shame that she should be telling such things.
+
+"And it is that, the children, that makes Mr. Eden impossible,"
+Mrs. Morse went on incisively.  "Their heritage must be clean, and
+he is, I am afraid, not clean.  Your father has told me of sailors'
+lives, and - and you understand."
+
+Ruth pressed her mother's hand in assent, feeling that she really
+did understand, though her conception was of something vague,
+remote, and terrible that was beyond the scope of imagination.
+
+"You know I do nothing without telling you," she began.  " - Only,
+sometimes you must ask me, like this time.  I wanted to tell you,
+but I did not know how.  It is false modesty, I know it is that,
+but you can make it easy for me.  Sometimes, like this time, you
+must ask me, you must give me a chance."
+
+"Why, mother, you are a woman, too!" she cried exultantly, as they
+stood up, catching her mother's hands and standing erect, facing
+her in the twilight, conscious of a strangely sweet equality
+between them.  "I should never have thought of you in that way if
+we had not had this talk.  I had to learn that I was a woman to
+know that you were one, too."
+
+"We are women together," her mother said, drawing her to her and
+kissing her.  "We are women together," she repeated, as they went
+out of the room, their arms around each other's waists, their
+hearts swelling with a new sense of companionship.
+
+"Our little girl has become a woman," Mrs. Morse said proudly to
+her husband an hour later.
+
+"That means," he said, after a long look at his wife, "that means
+she is in love."
+
+"No, but that she is loved," was the smiling rejoinder.  "The
+experiment has succeeded.  She is awakened at last."
+
+"Then we'll have to get rid of him."  Mr. Morse spoke briskly, in
+matter-of-fact, businesslike tones.
+
+But his wife shook her head.  "It will not be necessary.  Ruth says
+he is going to sea in a few days.  When he comes back, she will not
+be here.  We will send her to Aunt Clara's.  And, besides, a year
+in the East, with the change in climate, people, ideas, and
+everything, is just the thing she needs."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+
+The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more.  Stories and
+poems were springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he
+made notes of them against the future time when he would give them
+expression.  But he did not write.  This was his little vacation;
+he had resolved to devote it to rest and love, and in both matters
+he prospered.  He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each
+day he saw Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experienced the old
+shock of his strength and health.
+
+"Be careful," her mother warned her once again.  "I am afraid you
+are seeing too much of Martin Eden."
+
+But Ruth laughed from security.  She was sure of herself, and in a
+few days he would be off to sea.  Then, by the time he returned,
+she would be away on her visit East.  There was a magic, however,
+in the strength and health of Martin.  He, too, had been told of
+her contemplated Eastern trip, and he felt the need for haste.  Yet
+he did not know how to make love to a girl like Ruth.  Then, too,
+he was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of experience
+with girls and women who had been absolutely different from her.
+They had known about love and life and flirtation, while she knew
+nothing about such things.  Her prodigious innocence appalled him,
+freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in
+spite of himself, of his own unworthiness.  Also he was handicapped
+in another way.  He had himself never been in love before.  He had
+liked women in that turgid past of his, and been fascinated by some
+of them, but he had not known what it was to love them.  He had
+whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to him.
+They had been diversions, incidents, part of the game men play, but
+a small part at most.  And now, and for the first time, he was a
+suppliant, tender and timid and doubting.  He did not know the way
+of love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his loved one's
+clear innocence.
+
+In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling
+on through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of
+conduct which was to the effect that when one played a strange
+game, he should let the other fellow play first.  This had stood
+him in good stead a thousand times and trained him as an observer
+as well.  He knew how to watch the thing that was strange, and to
+wait for a weakness, for a place of entrance, to divulge itself.
+It was like sparring for an opening in fist-fighting.  And when
+such an opening came, he knew by long experience to play for it and
+to play hard.
+
+So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but
+not daring.  He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of
+himself.  Had he but known it, he was following the right course
+with her.  Love came into the world before articulate speech, and
+in its own early youth it had learned ways and means that it had
+never forgotten.  It was in this old, primitive way that Martin
+wooed Ruth.  He did not know he was doing it at first, though later
+he divined it.  The touch of his hand on hers was vastly more
+potent than any word he could utter, the impact of his strength on
+her imagination was more alluring than the printed poems and spoken
+passions of a thousand generations of lovers.  Whatever his tongue
+could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but
+the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to
+her instinct.  Her judgment was as young as she, but her instincts
+were as old as the race and older.  They had been young when love
+was young, and they were wiser than convention and opinion and all
+the new-born things.  So her judgment did not act.  There was no
+call upon it, and she did not realize the strength of the appeal
+Martin made from moment to moment to her love-nature.  That he
+loved her, on the other hand, was as clear as day, and she
+consciously delighted in beholding his love-manifestations - the
+glowing eyes with their tender lights, the trembling hands, and the
+never failing swarthy flush that flooded darkly under his sunburn.
+She even went farther, in a timid way inciting him, but doing it so
+delicately that he never suspected, and doing it half-consciously,
+so that she scarcely suspected herself.  She thrilled with these
+proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and she took an
+Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon him.
+
+Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing
+unwittingly and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by
+contact.  The touch of his hand was pleasant to her, and something
+deliciously more than pleasant.  Martin did not know it, but he did
+know that it was not distasteful to her.  Not that they touched
+hands often, save at meeting and parting; but that in handling the
+bicycles, in strapping on the books of verse they carried into the
+hills, and in conning the pages of books side by side, there were
+opportunities for hand to stray against hand.  And there were
+opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his cheek, and for
+shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over the beauty
+of the books.  She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which
+arose from nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he
+desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his head in
+her lap and dream with closed eyes about the future that was to be
+theirs.  On Sunday picnics at Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park,
+in the past, he had rested his head on many laps, and, usually, he
+had slept soundly and selfishly while the girls shaded his face
+from the sun and looked down and loved him and wondered at his
+lordly carelessness of their love.  To rest his head in a girl's
+lap had been the easiest thing in the world until now, and now he
+found Ruth's lap inaccessible and impossible.  Yet it was right
+here, in his reticence, that the strength of his wooing lay.  It
+was because of this reticence that he never alarmed her.  Herself
+fastidious and timid, she never awakened to the perilous trend of
+their intercourse.  Subtly and unaware she grew toward him and
+closer to him, while he, sensing the growing closeness, longed to
+dare but was afraid.
+
+Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened
+living room with a blinding headache.
+
+"Nothing can do it any good," she had answered his inquiries.  "And
+besides, I don't take headache powders.  Doctor Hall won't permit
+me."
+
+"I can cure it, I think, and without drugs," was Martin's answer.
+"I am not sure, of course, but I'd like to try.  It's simply
+massage.  I learned the trick first from the Japanese.  They are a
+race of masseurs, you know.  Then I learned it all over again with
+variations from the Hawaiians.  They call it LOMI-LOMI.  It can
+accomplish most of the things drugs accomplish and a few things
+that drugs can't."
+
+Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.
+
+"That is so good," she said.
+
+She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, "Aren't
+you tired?"
+
+The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would
+be.  Then she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing
+balm of his strength:  Life poured from the ends of his fingers,
+driving the pain before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the
+easement of pain, she fell asleep and he stole away.
+
+She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.
+
+"I slept until dinner," she said.  "You cured me completely, Mr.
+Eden, and I don't know how to thank you."
+
+He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied
+to her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone
+conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth
+Barrett.  What had been done could be done again, and he, Martin
+Eden, could do it and would do it for Ruth Morse.  He went back to
+his room and to the volume of Spencer's "Sociology" lying open on
+the bed.  But he could not read.  Love tormented him and overrode
+his will, so that, despite all determination, he found himself at
+the little ink-stained table.  The sonnet he composed that night
+was the first of a love-cycle of fifty sonnets which was completed
+within two months.  He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese"
+in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for
+great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own
+sweet love-madness.
+
+The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the "Love-cycle,"
+to reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got
+more closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature
+of their policy and content.  The hours he spent with Ruth were
+maddening alike in promise and in inconclusiveness.  It was a week
+after he cured her headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt
+was proposed by Norman and seconded by Arthur and Olney.  Martin
+was the only one capable of handling a boat, and he was pressed
+into service.  Ruth sat near him in the stern, while the three
+young fellows lounged amidships, deep in a wordy wrangle over
+"frat" affairs.
+
+The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault
+of the sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a
+sudden feeling of loneliness.  She glanced at him.  A puff of wind
+was heeling the boat over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand
+on tiller and the other on main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the
+same time peering ahead to make out the near-lying north shore.  He
+was unaware of her gaze, and she watched him intently, speculating
+fancifully about the strange warp of soul that led him, a young man
+with signal powers, to fritter away his time on the writing of
+stories and poems foredoomed to mediocrity and failure.
+
+Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen in the
+starlight, and over the firm-poised head, and the old desire to lay
+her hands upon his neck came back to her.  The strength she
+abhorred attracted her.  Her feeling of loneliness became more
+pronounced, and she felt tired.  Her position on the heeling boat
+irked her, and she remembered the headache he had cured and the
+soothing rest that resided in him.  He was sitting beside her,
+quite beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward him.  Then
+arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest herself
+against his strength - a vague, half-formed impulse, which, even as
+she considered it, mastered her and made her lean toward him.  Or
+was it the heeling of the boat?  She did not know.  She never knew.
+She knew only that she was leaning against him and that the
+easement and soothing rest were very good.  Perhaps it had been the
+boat's fault, but she made no effort to retrieve it.  She leaned
+lightly against his shoulder, but she leaned, and she continued to
+lean when he shifted his position to make it more comfortable for
+her.
+
+It was a madness, but she refused to consider the madness.  She was
+no longer herself but a woman, with a woman's clinging need; and
+though she leaned ever so lightly, the need seemed satisfied.  She
+was no longer tired.  Martin did not speak.  Had he, the spell
+would have been broken.  But his reticence of love prolonged it.
+He was dazed and dizzy.  He could not understand what was
+happening.  It was too wonderful to be anything but a delirium.  He
+conquered a mad desire to let go sheet and tiller and to clasp her
+in his arms.  His intuition told him it was the wrong thing to do,
+and he was glad that sheet and tiller kept his hands occupied and
+fended off temptation.  But he luffed the boat less delicately,
+spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as to prolong the
+tack to the north shore.  The shore would compel him to go about,
+and the contact would be broken.  He sailed with skill, stopping
+way on the boat without exciting the notice of the wranglers, and
+mentally forgiving his hardest voyages in that they had made this
+marvellous night possible, giving him mastery over sea and boat and
+wind so that he could sail with her beside him, her dear weight
+against him on his shoulder.
+
+When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail,
+illuminating the boat with pearly radiance, Ruth moved away from
+him.  And, even as she moved, she felt him move away.  The impulse
+to avoid detection was mutual.  The episode was tacitly and
+secretly intimate.  She sat apart from him with burning cheeks,
+while the full force of it came home to her.  She had been guilty
+of something she would not have her brothers see, nor Olney see.
+Why had she done it?  She had never done anything like it in her
+life, and yet she had been moonlight-sailing with young men before.
+She had never desired to do anything like it.  She was overcome
+with shame and with the mystery of her own burgeoning womanhood.
+She stole a glance at Martin, who was busy putting the boat about
+on the other tack, and she could have hated him for having made her
+do an immodest and shameful thing.  And he, of all men!  Perhaps
+her mother was right, and she was seeing too much of him.  It would
+never happen again, she resolved, and she would see less of him in
+the future.  She entertained a wild idea of explaining to him the
+first time they were alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning
+casually the attack of faintness that had overpowered her just
+before the moon came up.  Then she remembered how they had drawn
+mutually away before the revealing moon, and she knew he would know
+it for a lie.
+
+In the days that swiftly followed she was no longer herself but a
+strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment and scornful of
+self-analysis, refusing to peer into the future or to think about
+herself and whither she was drifting.  She was in a fever of
+tingling mystery, alternately frightened and charmed, and in
+constant bewilderment.  She had one idea firmly fixed, however,
+which insured her security.  She would not let Martin speak his
+love.  As long as she did this, all would be well.  In a few days
+he would be off to sea.  And even if he did speak, all would be
+well.  It could not be otherwise, for she did not love him.  Of
+course, it would be a painful half hour for him, and an
+embarrassing half hour for her, because it would be her first
+proposal.  She thrilled deliciously at the thought.  She was really
+a woman, with a man ripe to ask for her in marriage.  It was a lure
+to all that was fundamental in her sex.  The fabric of her life, of
+all that constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous.  The thought
+fluttered in her mind like a flame-attracted moth.  She went so far
+as to imagine Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his
+mouth; and she rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness
+and exhorting him to true and noble manhood.  And especially he
+must stop smoking cigarettes.  She would make a point of that.  But
+no, she must not let him speak at all.  She could stop him, and she
+had told her mother that she would.  All flushed and burning, she
+regretfully dismissed the conjured situation.  Her first proposal
+would have to be deferred to a more propitious time and a more
+eligible suitor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+
+Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the
+hush of the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with
+hazy sun and wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the
+slumber of the air.  Filmy purple mists, that were not vapors but
+fabrics woven of color, hid in the recesses of the hills.  San
+Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her heights.  The
+intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing
+craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide.  Far Tamalpais,
+barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by the Golden Gate,
+the latter a pale gold pathway under the westering sun.  Beyond,
+the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line tumbled
+cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first
+blustering breath of winter.
+
+The erasure of summer was at hand.  Yet summer lingered, fading and
+fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys,
+spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures,
+dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well.  And
+among the hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side
+by side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading aloud
+from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved Browning as it is
+given to few men to be loved.
+
+But the reading languished.  The spell of passing beauty all about
+them was too strong.  The golden year was dying as it had lived, a
+beautiful and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and
+content freighted heavily the air.  It entered into them, dreamy
+and languorous, weakening the fibres of resolution, suffusing the
+face of morality, or of judgment, with haze and purple mist.
+Martin felt tender and melting, and from time to time warm glows
+passed over him.  His head was very near to hers, and when
+wandering phantoms of breeze stirred her hair so that it touched
+his face, the printed pages swam before his eyes.
+
+"I don't believe you know a word of what you are reading," she said
+once when he had lost his place.
+
+He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of
+becoming awkward, when a retort came to his lips.
+
+"I don't believe you know either.  What was the last sonnet about?"
+
+"I don't know," she laughed frankly.  "I've already forgotten.
+Don't let us read any more.  The day is too beautiful."
+
+"It will be our last in the hills for some time," he announced
+gravely.  "There's a storm gathering out there on the sea-rim."
+
+The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and they sat idly
+and silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed
+and did not see.  Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck.  She did not
+lean toward him.  She was drawn by some force outside of herself
+and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny.  It was only an
+inch to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her part.
+Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly touches a
+flower, and just as lightly was the counter-pressure.  She felt his
+shoulder press hers, and a tremor run through him.  Then was the
+time for her to draw back.  But she had become an automaton.  Her
+actions had passed beyond the control of her will - she never
+thought of control or will in the delicious madness that was upon
+her.  His arm began to steal behind her and around her.  She waited
+its slow progress in a torment of delight.  She waited, she knew
+not for what, panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and
+a fever of expectancy in all her blood.  The girdling arm lifted
+higher and drew her toward him, drew her slowly and caressingly.
+She could wait no longer.  With a tired sigh, and with an impulsive
+movement all her own, unpremeditated, spasmodic, she rested her
+head upon his breast.  His head bent over swiftly, and, as his lips
+approached, hers flew to meet them.
+
+This must be love, she thought, in the one rational moment that was
+vouchsafed her.  If it was not love, it was too shameful.  It could
+be nothing else than love.  She loved the man whose arms were
+around her and whose lips were pressed to hers.  She pressed more,
+tightly to him, with a snuggling movement of her body.  And a
+moment later, tearing herself half out of his embrace, suddenly and
+exultantly she reached up and placed both hands upon Martin Eden's
+sunburnt neck.  So exquisite was the pang of love and desire
+fulfilled that she uttered a low moan, relaxed her hands, and lay
+half-swooning in his arms.
+
+Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken for a long
+time.  Twice he bent and kissed her, and each time her lips met his
+shyly and her body made its happy, nestling movement.  She clung to
+him, unable to release herself, and he sat, half supporting her in
+his arms, as he gazed with unseeing eyes at the blur of the great
+city across the bay.  For once there were no visions in his brain.
+Only colors and lights and glows pulsed there, warm as the day and
+warm as his love.  He bent over her.  She was speaking.
+
+"When did you love me?" she whispered.
+
+"From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid eye on
+you.  I was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has
+passed since then I have only grown the madder.  I am maddest, now,
+dear.  I am almost a lunatic, my head is so turned with joy."
+
+"I am glad I am a woman, Martin - dear," she said, after a long
+sigh.
+
+He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then asked:-
+
+"And you?  When did you first know?"
+
+"Oh, I knew it all the time, almost, from the first."
+
+"And I have been as blind as a bat!" he cried, a ring of vexation
+in his voice.  "I never dreamed it until just how, when I - when I
+kissed you."
+
+"I didn't mean that."  She drew herself partly away and looked at
+him.  "I meant I knew you loved almost from the first."
+
+"And you?" he demanded.
+
+"It came to me suddenly."  She was speaking very slowly, her eyes
+warm and fluttery and melting, a soft flush on her cheeks that did
+not go away.  "I never knew until just now when - you put your arms
+around me.  And I never expected to marry you, Martin, not until
+just now.  How did you make me love you?"
+
+"I don't know," he laughed, "unless just by loving you, for I loved
+you hard enough to melt the heart of a stone, much less the heart
+of the living, breathing woman you are."
+
+ "This is so different from what I thought love would be," she
+announced irrelevantly.
+
+"What did you think it would be like?"
+
+"I didn't think it would be like this."  She was looking into his
+eyes at the moment, but her own dropped as she continued, "You see,
+I didn't know what this was like."
+
+He offered to draw her toward him again, but it was no more than a
+tentative muscular movement of the girdling arm, for he feared that
+he might be greedy.  Then he felt her body yielding, and once again
+she was close in his arms and lips were pressed on lips.
+
+"What will my people say?" she queried, with sudden apprehension,
+in one of the pauses.
+
+"I don't know.  We can find out very easily any time we are so
+minded."
+
+"But if mamma objects?  I am sure I am afraid to tell her."
+
+"Let me tell her," he volunteered valiantly.  "I think your mother
+does not like me, but I can win her around.  A fellow who can win
+you can win anything.  And if we don't - "
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Why, we'll have each other.  But there's no danger not winning
+your mother to our marriage.  She loves you too well."
+
+"I should not like to break her heart," Ruth said pensively.
+
+He felt like assuring her that mothers' hearts were not so easily
+broken, but instead he said, "And love is the greatest thing in the
+world."
+
+"Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me.  I am frightened
+now, when I think of you and of what you have been.  You must be
+very, very good to me.  Remember, after all, that I am only a
+child.  I never loved before."
+
+"Nor I.  We are both children together.  And we are fortunate above
+most, for we have found our first love in each other."
+
+"But that is impossible!" she cried, withdrawing herself from his
+arms with a swift, passionate movement.  "Impossible for you.  You
+have been a sailor, and sailors, I have heard, are - are - "
+
+Her voice faltered and died away.
+
+"Are addicted to having a wife in every port?" he suggested.  "Is
+that what you mean?"
+
+"Yes," she answered in a low voice.
+
+"But that is not love."  He spoke authoritatively.  "I have been in
+many ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw
+you that first night.  Do you know, when I said good night and went
+away, I was almost arrested."
+
+"Arrested?"
+
+"Yes.  The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too - with
+love for you."
+
+"But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for
+you, and we have strayed away from the point."
+
+"I said that I never loved anybody but you," he replied.  "You are
+my first, my very first."
+
+"And yet you have been a sailor," she objected.
+
+"But that doesn't prevent me from loving you the first."
+
+"And there have been women - other women - oh!"
+
+And to Martin Eden's supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of
+tears that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive
+away.  And all the while there was running through his head
+Kipling's line:  "AND THE COLONEL'S LADY AND JUDY O'GRADY ARE
+SISTERS UNDER THEIR SKINS."  It was true, he decided; though the
+novels he had read had led him to believe otherwise.  His idea, for
+which the novels were responsible, had been that only formal
+proposals obtained in the upper classes.  It was all right enough,
+down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each other
+by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights
+to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable.  Yet the
+novels were wrong.  Here was a proof of it.  The same pressures and
+caresses, unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious with the
+girls of the working-class, were equally efficacious with the girls
+above the working-class.  They were all of the same flesh, after
+all, sisters under their skins; and he might have known as much
+himself had he remembered his Spencer.  As he held Ruth in his arms
+and soothed her, he took great consolation in the thought that the
+Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady were pretty much alike under their
+skins.  It brought Ruth closer to him, made her possible.  Her dear
+flesh was as anybody's flesh, as his flesh.  There was no bar to
+their marriage.  Class difference was the only difference, and
+class was extrinsic.  It could be shaken off.  A slave, he had
+read, had risen to the Roman purple.  That being so, then he could
+rise to Ruth.  Under her purity, and saintliness, and culture, and
+ethereal beauty of soul, she was, in things fundamentally human,
+just like Lizzie Connolly and all Lizzie Connollys.  All that was
+possible of them was possible of her.  She could love, and hate,
+maybe have hysterics; and she could certainly be jealous, as she
+was jealous now, uttering her last sobs in his arms.
+
+"Besides, I am older than you," she remarked suddenly, opening her
+eyes and looking up at him, "three years older."
+
+"Hush, you are only a child, and I am forty years older than you,
+in experience," was his answer.
+
+In truth, they were children together, so far as love was
+concerned, and they were as naive and immature in the expression of
+their love as a pair of children, and this despite the fact that
+she was crammed with a university education and that his head was
+full of scientific philosophy and the hard facts of life.
+
+They sat on through the passing glory of the day, talking as lovers
+are prone to talk, marvelling at the wonder of love and at destiny
+that had flung them so strangely together, and dogmatically
+believing that they loved to a degree never attained by lovers
+before.  And they returned insistently, again and again, to a
+rehearsal of their first impressions of each other and to hopeless
+attempts to analyze just precisely what they felt for each other
+and how much there was of it.
+
+The cloud-masses on the western horizon received the descending
+sun, and the circle of the sky turned to rose, while the zenith
+glowed with the same warm color.  The rosy light was all about
+them, flooding over them, as she sang, "Good-by, Sweet Day."  She
+sang softly, leaning in the cradle of his arm, her hands in his,
+their hearts in each other's hands.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+
+Mrs. Morse did not require a mother's intuition to read the
+advertisement in Ruth's face when she returned home.  The flush
+that would not leave the cheeks told the simple story, and more
+eloquently did the eyes, large and bright, reflecting an
+unmistakable inward glory.
+
+"What has happened?" Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till
+Ruth had gone to bed.
+
+"You know?" Ruth queried, with trembling lips.
+
+For reply, her mother's arm went around her, and a hand was softly
+caressing her hair.
+
+"He did not speak," she blurted out.  "I did not intend that it
+should happen, and I would never have let him speak - only he
+didn't speak."
+
+"But if he did not speak, then nothing could have happened, could
+it?"
+
+"But it did, just the same."
+
+"In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling about?" Mrs.
+Morse was bewildered.  "I don't think know what happened, after
+all.  What did happen?"
+
+Ruth looked at her mother in surprise.
+
+"I thought you knew.  Why, we're engaged, Martin and I."
+
+Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation.
+
+"No, he didn't speak," Ruth explained.  "He just loved me, that was
+all.  I was as surprised as you are.  He didn't say a word.  He
+just put his arm around me.  And - and I was not myself.  And he
+kissed me, and I kissed him.  I couldn't help it.  I just had to.
+And then I knew I loved him."
+
+She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of her mother's
+kiss, but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent.
+
+"It is a dreadful accident, I know," Ruth recommenced with a
+sinking voice.  "And I don't know how you will ever forgive me.
+But I couldn't help it.  I did not dream that I loved him until
+that moment.  And you must tell father for me."
+
+"Would it not be better not to tell your father?  Let me see Martin
+Eden, and talk with him, and explain.  He will understand and
+release you."
+
+"No! no!" Ruth cried, starting up.  "I do not want to be released.
+I love him, and love is very sweet.  I am going to marry him - of
+course, if you will let me."
+
+"We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father and I - oh,
+no, no; no man picked out for you, or anything like that.  Our
+plans go no farther than your marrying some man in your own station
+in life, a good and honorable gentleman, whom you will select
+yourself, when you love him."
+
+"But I love Martin already," was the plaintive protest.
+
+"We would not influence your choice in any way; but you are our
+daughter, and we could not bear to see you make a marriage such as
+this.  He has nothing but roughness and coarseness to offer you in
+exchange for all that is refined and delicate in you.  He is no
+match for you in any way.  He could not support you.  We have no
+foolish ideas about wealth, but comfort is another matter, and our
+daughter should at least marry a man who can give her that - and
+not a penniless adventurer, a sailor, a cowboy, a smuggler, and
+Heaven knows what else, who, in addition to everything, is hare-
+brained and irresponsible."
+
+Ruth was silent.  Every word she recognized as true.
+
+"He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what
+geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.
+A man thinking of marriage should be preparing for marriage.  But
+not he.  As I have said, and I know you agree with me, he is
+irresponsible.  And why should he not be?  It is the way of
+sailors.  He has never learned to be economical or temperate.  The
+spendthrift years have marked him.  It is not his fault, of course,
+but that does not alter his nature.  And have you thought of the
+years of licentiousness he inevitably has lived?  Have you thought
+of that, daughter?  You know what marriage means."
+
+Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother.
+
+"I have thought."  Ruth waited a long time for the thought to frame
+itself.  "And it is terrible.  It sickens me to think of it.  I
+told you it was a dreadful accident, my loving him; but I can't
+help myself.  Could you help loving father?  Then it is the same
+with me.  There is something in me, in him - I never knew it was
+there until to-day - but it is there, and it makes me love him.  I
+never thought to love him, but, you see, I do," she concluded, a
+certain faint triumph in her voice.
+
+They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion agreeing to
+wait an indeterminate time without doing anything.
+
+The same conclusion was reached, a little later that night, between
+Mrs. Morse and her husband, after she had made due confession of
+the miscarriage of her plans.
+
+"It could hardly have come otherwise," was Mr. Morse's judgment.
+"This sailor-fellow has been the only man she was in touch with.
+Sooner or later she was going to awaken anyway; and she did awaken,
+and lo! here was this sailor-fellow, the only accessible man at the
+moment, and of course she promptly loved him, or thought she did,
+which amounts to the same thing."
+
+Mrs. Morse took it upon herself to work slowly and indirectly upon
+Ruth, rather than to combat her.  There would be plenty of time for
+this, for Martin was not in position to marry.
+
+"Let her see all she wants of him," was Mr. Morse's advice.  "The
+more she knows him, the less she'll love him, I wager.  And give
+her plenty of contrast.  Make a point of having young people at the
+house.  Young women and young men, all sorts of young men, clever
+men, men who have done something or who are doing things, men of
+her own class, gentlemen.  She can gauge him by them.  They will
+show him up for what he is.  And after all, he is a mere boy of
+twenty-one.  Ruth is no more than a child.  It is calf love with
+the pair of them, and they will grow out of it."
+
+So the matter rested.  Within the family it was accepted that Ruth
+and Martin were engaged, but no announcement was made.  The family
+did not think it would ever be necessary.  Also, it was tacitly
+understood that it was to be a long engagement.  They did not ask
+Martin to go to work, nor to cease writing.  They did not intend to
+encourage him to mend himself.  And he aided and abetted them in
+their unfriendly designs, for going to work was farthest from his
+thoughts.
+
+"I wonder if you'll like what I have done!" he said to Ruth several
+days later.  "I've decided that boarding with my sister is too
+expensive, and I am going to board myself.  I've rented a little
+room out in North Oakland, retired neighborhood and all the rest,
+you know, and I've bought an oil-burner on which to cook."
+
+Ruth was overjoyed.  The oil-burner especially pleased her.
+
+"That was the way Mr. Butler began his start," she said.
+
+Martin frowned inwardly at the citation of that worthy gentleman,
+and went on:  "I put stamps on all my manuscripts and started them
+off to the editors again.  Then to-day I moved in, and to-morrow I
+start to work."
+
+"A position!" she cried, betraying the gladness of her surprise in
+all her body, nestling closer to him, pressing his hand, smiling.
+"And you never told me!  What is it?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"I meant that I was going to work at my writing."  Her face fell,
+and he went on hastily.  "Don't misjudge me.  I am not going in
+this time with any iridescent ideas.  It is to be a cold, prosaic,
+matter-of-fact business proposition.  It is better than going to
+sea again, and I shall earn more money than any position in Oakland
+can bring an unskilled man."
+
+"You see, this vacation I have taken has given me perspective.  I
+haven't been working the life out of my body, and I haven't been
+writing, at least not for publication.  All I've done has been to
+love you and to think.  I've read some, too, but it has been part
+of my thinking, and I have read principally magazines.  I have
+generalized about myself, and the world, my place in it, and my
+chance to win to a place that will be fit for you.  Also, I've been
+reading Spencer's 'Philosophy of Style,' and found out a lot of
+what was the matter with me - or my writing, rather; and for that
+matter with most of the writing that is published every month in
+the magazines."
+
+"But the upshot of it all - of my thinking and reading and loving -
+is that I am going to move to Grub Street.  I shall leave
+masterpieces alone and do hack-work - jokes, paragraphs, feature
+articles, humorous verse, and society verse - all the rot for which
+there seems so much demand.  Then there are the newspaper
+syndicates, and the newspaper short-story syndicates, and the
+syndicates for the Sunday supplements.  I can go ahead and hammer
+out the stuff they want, and earn the equivalent of a good salary
+by it.  There are free-lances, you know, who earn as much as four
+or five hundred a month.  I don't care to become as they; but I'll
+earn a good living, and have plenty of time to myself, which I
+wouldn't have in any position."
+
+"Then, I'll have my spare time for study and for real work.  In
+between the grind I'll try my hand at masterpieces, and I'll study
+and prepare myself for the writing of masterpieces.  Why, I am
+amazed at the distance I have come already.  When I first tried to
+write, I had nothing to write about except a few paltry experiences
+which I neither understood nor appreciated.  But I had no thoughts.
+I really didn't.  I didn't even have the words with which to think.
+My experiences were so many meaningless pictures.  But as I began
+to add to my knowledge, and to my vocabulary, I saw something more
+in my experiences than mere pictures.  I retained the pictures and
+I found their interpretation.  That was when I began to do good
+work, when I wrote 'Adventure,'  'Joy,' 'The Pot,' 'The Wine of
+Life,' 'The Jostling Street,' the 'Love-cycle,' and the 'Sea
+Lyrics.'  I shall write more like them, and better; but I shall do
+it in my spare time.  My feet are on the solid earth, now.  Hack-
+work and income first, masterpieces afterward.  Just to show you, I
+wrote half a dozen jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and
+just as I was going to bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at
+a triolet - a humorous one; and inside an hour I had written four.
+They ought to be worth a dollar apiece.  Four dollars right there
+for a few afterthoughts on the way to bed."
+
+"Of course it's all valueless, just so much dull and sordid
+plodding; but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at
+sixty dollars a month, adding up endless columns of meaningless
+figures until one dies.  And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in
+touch with things literary and gives me time to try bigger things."
+
+"But what good are these bigger-things, these masterpieces?" Ruth
+demanded.  "You can't sell them."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can," he began; but she interrupted.
+
+"All those you named, and which you say yourself are good - you
+have not sold any of them.  We can't get married on masterpieces
+that won't sell."
+
+"Then we'll get married on triolets that will sell," he asserted
+stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive
+sweetheart toward him.
+
+"Listen to this," he went on in attempted gayety.  "It's not art,
+but it's a dollar.
+
+
+"He came in
+When I was out,
+To borrow some tin
+Was why he came in,
+And he went without;
+So I was in
+And he was out."
+
+
+The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at
+variance with the dejection that came into his face as he finished.
+He had drawn no smile from Ruth.  She was looking at him in an
+earnest and troubled way.
+
+"It may be a dollar," she said, "but it is a jester's dollar, the
+fee of a clown.  Don't you see, Martin, the whole thing is
+lowering.  I want the man I love and honor to be something finer
+and higher than a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel."
+
+"You want him to be like - say Mr. Butler?" he suggested.
+
+"I know you don't like Mr. Butler," she began.
+
+"Mr. Butler's all right," he interrupted.  "It's only his
+indigestion I find fault with.  But to save me I can't see any
+difference between writing jokes or comic verse and running a type-
+writer, taking dictation, or keeping sets of books.  It is all a
+means to an end.  Your theory is for me to begin with keeping books
+in order to become a successful lawyer or man of business.  Mine is
+to begin with hack-work and develop into an able author."
+
+"There is a difference," she insisted.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can't sell.
+You have tried, you know that, - but the editors won't buy it."
+
+"Give me time, dear," he pleaded.  "The hack-work is only
+makeshift, and I don't take it seriously.  Give me two years.  I
+shall succeed in that time, and the editors will be glad to buy my
+good work.  I know what I am saying; I have faith in myself.  I
+know what I have in me; I know what literature is, now; I know the
+average rot that is poured out by a lot of little men; and I know
+that at the end of two years I shall be on the highroad to success.
+As for business, I shall never succeed at it.  I am not in sympathy
+with it.  It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and mercenary, and
+tricky.  Anyway I am not adapted for it.  I'd never get beyond a
+clerkship, and how could you and I be happy on the paltry earnings
+of a clerk?  I want the best of everything in the world for you,
+and the only time when I won't want it will be when there is
+something better.  And I'm going to get it, going to get all of it.
+The income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap.  A
+'best-seller' will earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred
+thousand dollars - sometimes more and sometimes less; but, as a
+rule, pretty close to those figures."
+
+She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.
+
+"Well?" he asked.
+
+"I had hoped and planned otherwise.  I had thought, and I still
+think, that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand -
+you already know type-writing - and go into father's office.  You
+have a good mind, and I am confident you would succeed as a
+lawyer."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+
+That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter
+her nor diminish her in Martin's eyes.  In the breathing spell of
+the vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self-
+analysis, and thereby learned much of himself.  He had discovered
+that he loved beauty more than fame, and that what desire he had
+for fame was largely for Ruth's sake.  It was for this reason that
+his desire for fame was strong.  He wanted to be great in the
+world's eyes; "to make good," as he expressed it, in order that the
+woman he loved should be proud of him and deem him worthy.
+
+As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of
+serving her was to him sufficient wage.  And more than beauty he
+loved Ruth.  He considered love the finest thing in the world.  It
+was love that had worked the revolution in him, changing him from
+an uncouth sailor to a student and an artist; therefore, to him,
+the finest and greatest of the three, greater than learning and
+artistry, was love.  Already he had discovered that his brain went
+beyond Ruth's, just as it went beyond the brains of her brothers,
+or the brain of her father.  In spite of every advantage of
+university training, and in the face of her bachelorship of arts,
+his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or so of
+self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of the
+world and art and life that she could never hope to possess.
+
+All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor
+her love for him.  Love was too fine and noble, and he was too
+loyal a lover for him to besmirch love with criticism.  What did
+love have to do with Ruth's divergent views on art, right conduct,
+the French Revolution, or equal suffrage?  They were mental
+processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational.  He
+could not belittle love.  He worshipped it.  Love lay on the
+mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason.  It was a
+sublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and
+it came rarely.  Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he
+favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a
+refined process of the same scientific reasoning he reached the
+conclusion that the human organism achieved its highest purpose in
+love, that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as the
+highest guerdon of life.  Thus, he considered the lover blessed
+over all creatures, and it was a delight to him to think of "God's
+own mad lover," rising above the things of earth, above wealth and
+judgment, public opinion and applause, rising above life itself and
+"dying on a kiss."
+
+Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he
+reasoned out later.  In the meantime he worked, taking no
+recreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a
+Spartan.  He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small
+room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and
+a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood
+of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at
+irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she
+bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents.  From
+detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admire
+her as he observed the brave fight she made.  There were but four
+rooms in the little house - three, when Martin's was subtracted.
+One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous
+with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous
+departed babes, was kept strictly for company.  The blinds were
+always down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enter
+the sacred precinct save on state occasions.  She cooked, and all
+ate, in the kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and
+ironed clothes on all days of the week except Sunday; for her
+income came largely from taking in washing from her more prosperous
+neighbors.  Remained the bedroom, small as the one occupied by
+Martin, into which she and her seven little ones crowded and slept.
+It was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished,
+and from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly every
+detail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the soft
+chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of birds.  Another
+source of income to Maria were her cows, two of them, which she
+milked night and morning and which gained a surreptitious
+livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either side
+the public side walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged
+boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping
+their eyes out for the poundmen.
+
+In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept
+house.  Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch,
+was the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-
+writing stand.  The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds
+of the total space of the room.  The table was flanked on one side
+by a gaudy bureau, manufactured for profit and not for service, the
+thin veneer of which was shed day by day.  This bureau stood in the
+corner, and in the opposite corner, on the table's other flank, was
+the kitchen - the oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which
+were dishes and cooking utensils, a shelf on the wall for
+provisions, and a bucket of water on the floor.  Martin had to
+carry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no tap in his
+room.  On days when there was much steam to his cooking, the
+harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous.  Over the
+bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle.  At first
+he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva,
+loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him
+out.  Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling
+southeaster drenched the wheel a night-long.  Then he had retreated
+with it to his room and slung it aloft.
+
+A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had
+accumulated and for which there was no room on the table or under
+the table.  Hand in hand with reading, he had developed the habit
+of making notes, and so copiously did he make them that there would
+have been no existence for him in the confined quarters had he not
+rigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the notes
+were hung.  Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was a
+difficult task.  He could not open the door without first closing
+the closet door, and VICE VERSA.  It was impossible for him
+anywhere to traverse the room in a straight line.  To go from the
+door to the head of the bed was a zigzag course that he was never
+quite able to accomplish in the dark without collisions.  Having
+settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to steer
+sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen.  Next, he sheered to the
+left, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too
+generous, brought him against the corner of the table.  With a
+sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to
+the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the
+other the table.  When the one chair in the room was at its usual
+place before the table, the canal was unnavigable.  When the chair
+was not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he
+sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the water
+boiled, and even becoming skilful enough to manage a paragraph or
+two while steak was frying.  Also, so small was the little corner
+that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reach
+anything he needed.  In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting
+down; standing up, he was too often in his own way.
+
+In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything,
+he possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the same
+time nutritious and cheap.  Pea-soup was a common article in his
+diet, as well as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown and
+cooked in Mexican style.  Rice, cooked as American housewives never
+cook it and can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin's table
+at least once a day.  Dried fruits were less expensive than fresh,
+and he had usually a pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, for
+they took the place of butter on his bread.  Occasionally he graced
+his table with a piece of round-steak, or with a soup-bone.
+Coffee, without cream or milk, he had twice a day, in the evening
+substituting tea; but both coffee and tea were excellently cooked.
+
+There was need for him to be economical.  His vacation had consumed
+nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his
+market that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the first
+returns from his hack-work.  Except at such times as he saw Ruth,
+or dropped in to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in
+each day accomplishing at least three days' labor of ordinary men.
+He slept a scant five hours, and only one with a constitution of
+iron could have held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, to
+nineteen consecutive hours of toil.  He never lost a moment.  On
+the looking-glass were lists of definitions and pronunciations;
+when shaving, or dressing, or combing his hair, he conned these
+lists over.  Similar lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and
+they were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in
+washing the dishes.  New lists continually displaced the old ones.
+Every strange or partly familiar word encountered in his reading
+was immediately jotted down, and later, when a sufficient number
+had been accumulated, were typed and pinned to the wall or looking-
+glass.  He even carried them in his pockets, and reviewed them at
+odd moments on the street, or while waiting in butcher shop or
+grocery to be served.
+
+He went farther in the matter.  Reading the works of men who had
+arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the
+tricks by which they had been achieved - the tricks of narrative,
+of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the
+epigrams; and of all these he made lists for study.  He did not
+ape.  He sought principles.  He drew up lists of effective and
+fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many
+writers, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism,
+and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of his
+own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly.  In
+similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of
+living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like
+flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of
+the arid desert of common speech.  He sought always for the
+principle that lay behind and beneath.  He wanted to know how the
+thing was done; after that he could do it for himself.  He was not
+content with the fair face of beauty.  He dissected beauty in his
+crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated
+with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and
+learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create
+beauty itself.
+
+He was so made that he could work only with understanding.  He
+could not work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was
+producing and trusting to chance and the star of his genius that
+the effect produced should be right and fine.  He had no patience
+with chance effects.  He wanted to know why and how.  His was
+deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem,
+the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in
+sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious
+possession.  Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.  On the
+other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases
+that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood
+all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and
+incommunicable connotations.  Before such he bowed down and
+marvelled, knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of
+any man.  And no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of
+the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he
+was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he
+did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated.  He knew
+full well, from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimate
+knowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty was no less
+than that of life - nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life
+were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same
+nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and
+wonder.
+
+In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his
+essay entitled "Star-dust," in which he had his fling, not at the
+principles of criticism, but at the principal critics.  It was
+brilliant, deep, philosophical, and deliciously touched with
+laughter.  Also it was promptly rejected by the magazines as often
+as it was submitted.  But having cleared his mind of it, he went
+serenely on his way.  It was a habit he developed, of incubating
+and maturing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing into
+the type-writer with it.  That it did not see print was a matter a
+small moment with him.  The writing of it was the culminating act
+of a long mental process, the drawing together of scattered threads
+of thought and the final generalizing upon all the data with which
+his mind was burdened.  To write such an article was the conscious
+effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh
+material and problems.  It was in a way akin to that common habit
+of men and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who
+periodically and volubly break their long-suffering silence and
+"have their say" till the last word is said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+
+The weeks passed.  Martin ran out of money, and publishers' checks
+were far away as ever.  All his important manuscripts had come back
+and been started out again, and his hack-work fared no better.  His
+little kitchen was no longer graced with a variety of foods.
+Caught in the pinch with a part sack of rice and a few pounds of
+dried apricots, rice and apricots was his menu three times a day
+for five days hand-running.  Then he startled to realize on his
+credit.  The Portuguese grocer, to whom he had hitherto paid cash,
+called a halt when Martin's bill reached the magnificent total of
+three dollars and eighty-five cents.
+
+"For you see," said the grocer, "you no catcha da work, I losa da
+mon'."
+
+And Martin could reply nothing.  There was no way of explaining.
+It was not true business principle to allow credit to a strong-
+bodied young fellow of the working-class who was too lazy to work.
+
+"You catcha da job, I let you have mora da grub," the grocer
+assured Martin.  "No job, no grub.  Thata da business."  And then,
+to show that it was purely business foresight and not prejudice,
+"Hava da drink on da house - good friends justa da same."
+
+So Martin drank, in his easy way, to show that he was good friends
+with the house, and then went supperless to bed.
+
+The fruit store, where Martin had bought his vegetables, was run by
+an American whose business principles were so weak that he let
+Martin run a bill of five dollars before stopping his credit.  The
+baker stopped at two dollars, and the butcher at four dollars.
+Martin added his debts and found that he was possessed of a total
+credit in all the world of fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents.
+He was up with his type-writer rent, but he estimated that he could
+get two months' credit on that, which would be eight dollars.  When
+that occurred, he would have exhausted all possible credit.
+
+The last purchase from the fruit store had been a sack of potatoes,
+and for a week he had potatoes, and nothing but potatoes, three
+times a day.  An occasional dinner at Ruth's helped to keep
+strength in his body, though he found it tantalizing enough to
+refuse further helping when his appetite was raging at sight of so
+much food spread before it.  Now and again, though afflicted with
+secret shame, he dropped in at his sister's at meal-time and ate as
+much as he dared - more than he dared at the Morse table.
+
+Day by day he worked on, and day by day the postman delivered to
+him rejected manuscripts.  He had no money for stamps, so the
+manuscripts accumulated in a heap under the table.  Came a day when
+for forty hours he had not tasted food.  He could not hope for a
+meal at Ruth's, for she was away to San Rafael on a two weeks'
+visit; and for very shame's sake he could not go to his sister's.
+To cap misfortune, the postman, in his afternoon round, brought him
+five returned manuscripts.  Then it was that Martin wore his
+overcoat down into Oakland, and came back without it, but with five
+dollars tinkling in his pocket.  He paid a dollar each on account
+to the four tradesmen, and in his kitchen fried steak and onions,
+made coffee, and stewed a large pot of prunes.  And having dined,
+he sat down at his table-desk and completed before midnight an
+essay which he entitled "The Dignity of Usury."  Having typed it
+out, he flung it under the table, for there had been nothing left
+from the five dollars with which to buy stamps.
+
+Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, reducing
+the amount available for food by putting stamps on all his
+manuscripts and sending them out.  He was disappointed with his
+hack-work.  Nobody cared to buy.  He compared it with what he found
+in the newspapers, weeklies, and cheap magazines, and decided that
+his was better, far better, than the average; yet it would not
+sell.  Then he discovered that most of the newspapers printed a
+great deal of what was called "plate" stuff, and he got the address
+of the association that furnished it.  His own work that he sent in
+was returned, along with a stereotyped slip informing him that the
+staff supplied all the copy that was needed.
+
+In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of
+incident and anecdote.  Here was a chance.  His paragraphs were
+returned, and though he tried repeatedly he never succeeded in
+placing one.  Later on, when it no longer mattered, he learned that
+the associate editors and sub-editors augmented their salaries by
+supplying those paragraphs themselves.  The comic weeklies returned
+his jokes and humorous verse, and the light society verse he wrote
+for the large magazines found no abiding-place.  Then there was the
+newspaper storiette.  He knew that he could write better ones than
+were published.  Managing to obtain the addresses of two newspaper
+syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes.  When he had written
+twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased.  And yet, from
+day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and weeklies, scores
+and scores of storiettes, not one of which would compare with his.
+In his despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever,
+that he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-
+deluded pretender.
+
+The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever.  He folded the
+stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and
+from three weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps
+and handed him the manuscript.  Surely there were no live, warm
+editors at the other end.  It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups
+- a clever mechanism operated by automatons.  He reached stages of
+despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at all.  He had never
+received a sign of the existence of one, and from absence of
+judgment in rejecting all he wrote it seemed plausible that editors
+were myths, manufactured and maintained by office boys,
+typesetters, and pressmen.
+
+The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and
+they were not all happy.  He was afflicted always with a gnawing
+restlessness, more tantalizing than in the old days before he
+possessed her love; for now that he did possess her love, the
+possession of her was far away as ever.  He had asked for two
+years; time was flying, and he was achieving nothing.  Again, he
+was always conscious of the fact that she did not approve what he
+was doing.  She did not say so directly.  Yet indirectly she let
+him understand it as clearly and definitely as she could have
+spoken it.  It was not resentment with her, but disapproval; though
+less sweet-natured women might have resented where she was no more
+than disappointed.  Her disappointment lay in that this man she had
+taken to mould, refused to be moulded.  To a certain extent she had
+found his clay plastic, then it had developed stubbornness,
+declining to be shaped in the image of her father or of Mr. Butler.
+
+What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse yet,
+misunderstood.  This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could
+live in any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought
+wilful and most obstinate because she could not shape him to live
+in her pigeonhole, which was the only one she knew.  She could not
+follow the flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her,
+she deemed him erratic.  Nobody else's brain ever got beyond her.
+She could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and
+Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow Martin, she believed
+the fault lay with him.  It was the old tragedy of insularity
+trying to serve as mentor to the universal.
+
+"You worship at the shrine of the established," he told her once,
+in a discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater.  "I grant that
+as authorities to quote they are most excellent - the two foremost
+literary critics in the United States.  Every school teacher in the
+land looks up to Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism.
+Yet I read his stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of the
+felicitous expression of the inane.  Why, he is no more than a
+ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess.  And Praps is no
+better.  His 'Hemlock Mosses,' for instance is beautifully written.
+Not a comma is out of place; and the tone - ah! - is lofty, so
+lofty.  He is the best-paid critic in the United States.  Though,
+Heaven forbid! he's not a critic at all.  They do criticism better
+in England.
+
+"But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it
+so beautifully and morally and contentedly.  Their reviews remind
+me of a British Sunday.  They are the popular mouthpieces.  They
+back up your professors of English, and your professors of English
+back them up.  And there isn't an original idea in any of their
+skulls.  They know only the established, - in fact, they are the
+established.  They are weak minded, and the established impresses
+itself upon them as easily as the name of the brewery is impressed
+on a beer bottle.  And their function is to catch all the young
+fellows attending the university, to drive out of their minds any
+glimmering originality that may chance to be there, and to put upon
+them the stamp of the established."
+
+"I think I am nearer the truth," she replied, "when I stand by the
+established, than you are, raging around like an iconoclastic South
+Sea Islander."
+
+"It was the missionary who did the image breaking," he laughed.
+"And unfortunately, all the missionaries are off among the heathen,
+so there are none left at home to break those old images, Mr.
+Vanderwater and Mr. Praps."
+
+"And the college professors, as well," she added.
+
+He shook his head emphatically.  "No; the science professors should
+live.  They're really great.  But it would be a good deed to break
+the heads of nine-tenths of the English professors - little,
+microscopic-minded parrots!"
+
+Which was rather severe on the professors, but which to Ruth was
+blasphemy.  She could not help but measure the professors, neat,
+scholarly, in fitting clothes, speaking in well-modulated voices,
+breathing of culture and refinement, with this almost indescribable
+young fellow whom somehow she loved, whose clothes never would fit
+him, whose heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew excited
+when he talked, substituting abuse for calm statement and
+passionate utterance for cool self-possession.  They at least
+earned good salaries and were - yes, she compelled herself to face
+it - were gentlemen; while he could not earn a penny, and he was
+not as they.
+
+She did not weigh Martin's words nor judge his argument by them.
+Her conclusion that his argument was wrong was reached -
+unconsciously, it is true - by a comparison of externals.  They,
+the professors, were right in their literary judgments because they
+were successes.  Martin's literary judgments were wrong because he
+could not sell his wares.  To use his own phrase, they made good,
+and he did not make good.  And besides, it did not seem reasonable
+that he should be right - he who had stood, so short a time before,
+in that same living room, blushing and awkward, acknowledging his
+introduction, looking fearfully about him at the bric-a-brac his
+swinging shoulders threatened to break, asking how long since
+Swinburne died, and boastfully announcing that he had read
+"Excelsior" and the "Psalm of Life."
+
+Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she worshipped the
+established.  Martin followed the processes of her thoughts, but
+forbore to go farther.  He did not love her for what she thought of
+Praps and Vanderwater and English professors, and he was coming to
+realize, with increasing conviction, that he possessed brain-areas
+and stretches of knowledge which she could never comprehend nor
+know existed.
+
+In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera
+not only unreasonable but wilfully perverse.
+
+"How did you like it?" she asked him one night, on the way home
+from the opera.
+
+It was a night when he had taken her at the expense of a month's
+rigid economizing on food.  After vainly waiting for him to speak
+about it, herself still tremulous and stirred by what she had just
+seen and heard, she had asked the question.
+
+"I liked the overture," was his answer.  "It was splendid."
+
+"Yes, but the opera itself?"
+
+"That was splendid too; that is, the orchestra was, though I'd have
+enjoyed it more if those jumping-jacks had kept quiet or gone off
+the stage."
+
+Ruth was aghast.
+
+"You don't mean Tetralani or Barillo?" she queried.
+
+"All of them - the whole kit and crew."
+
+"But they are great artists," she protested.
+
+"They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics and
+unrealities."
+
+"But don't you like Barillo's voice?" Ruth asked.  "He is next to
+Caruso, they say."
+
+"Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even better.  Her
+voice is exquisite - or at least I think so."
+
+"But, but - " Ruth stammered.  "I don't know what you mean, then.
+You admire their voices, yet say they spoiled the music."
+
+"Precisely that.  I'd give anything to hear them in concert, and
+I'd give even a bit more not to hear them when the orchestra is
+playing.  I'm afraid I am a hopeless realist.  Great singers are
+not great actors.  To hear Barillo sing a love passage with the
+voice of an angel, and to hear Tetralani reply like another angel,
+and to hear it all accompanied by a perfect orgy of glowing and
+colorful music - is ravishing, most ravishing.  I do not admit it.
+I assert it.  But the whole effect is spoiled when I look at them -
+at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking feet and weighing a
+hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a scant five feet four,
+greasy-featured, with the chest of a squat, undersized blacksmith,
+and at the pair of them, attitudinizing, clasping their breasts,
+flinging their arms in the air like demented creatures in an
+asylum; and when I am expected to accept all this as the faithful
+illusion of a love-scene between a slender and beautiful princess
+and a handsome, romantic, young prince - why, I can't accept it,
+that's all.  It's rot; it's absurd; it's unreal.  That's what's the
+matter with it.  It's not real.  Don't tell me that anybody in this
+world ever made love that way.  Why, if I'd made love to you in
+such fashion, you'd have boxed my ears."
+
+"But you misunderstand," Ruth protested.  "Every form of art has
+its limitations."  (She was busy recalling a lecture she had heard
+at the university on the conventions of the arts.)  "In painting
+there are only two dimensions to the canvas, yet you accept the
+illusion of three dimensions which the art of a painter enables him
+to throw into the canvas.  In writing, again, the author must be
+omnipotent.  You accept as perfectly legitimate the author's
+account of the secret thoughts of the heroine, and yet all the time
+you know that the heroine was alone when thinking these thoughts,
+and that neither the author nor any one else was capable of hearing
+them.  And so with the stage, with sculpture, with opera, with
+every art form.  Certain irreconcilable things must be accepted."
+
+"Yes, I understood that," Martin answered.  "All the arts have
+their conventions."  (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word.
+It was as if he had studied at the university himself, instead of
+being ill-equipped from browsing at haphazard through the books in
+the library.)  "But even the conventions must be real.  Trees,
+painted on flat cardboard and stuck up on each side of the stage,
+we accept as a forest.  It is a real enough convention.  But, on
+the other hand, we would not accept a sea scene as a forest.  We
+can't do it.  It violates our senses.  Nor would you, or, rather,
+should you, accept the ravings and writhings and agonized
+contortions of those two lunatics to-night as a convincing
+portrayal of love."
+
+"But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?"
+she protested.
+
+"No, no, not for a moment.  I merely maintain my right as an
+individual.  I have just been telling you what I think, in order to
+explain why the elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the
+orchestra for me.  The world's judges of music may all be right.
+But I am I, and I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous
+judgment of mankind.  If I don't like a thing, I don't like it,
+that's all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a
+liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like
+it, or make believe they like it.  I can't follow the fashions in
+the things I like or dislike."
+
+"But music, you know, is a matter of training," Ruth argued; "and
+opera is even more a matter of training.  May it not be - "
+
+"That I am not trained in opera?" he dashed in.
+
+She nodded.
+
+"The very thing," he agreed.  "And I consider I am fortunate in not
+having been caught when I was young.  If I had, I could have wept
+sentimental tears to-night, and the clownish antics of that
+precious pair would have but enhanced the beauty of their voices
+and the beauty of the accompanying orchestra.  You are right.  It's
+mostly a matter of training.  And I am too old, now.  I must have
+the real or nothing.  An illusion that won't convince is a palpable
+lie, and that's what grand opera is to me when little Barillo
+throws a fit, clutches mighty Tetralani in his arms (also in a
+fit), and tells her how passionately he adores her."
+
+Again Ruth measured his thoughts by comparison of externals and in
+accordance with her belief in the established.  Who was he that he
+should be right and all the cultured world wrong?  His words and
+thoughts made no impression upon her.  She was too firmly
+intrenched in the established to have any sympathy with
+revolutionary ideas.  She had always been used to music, and she
+had enjoyed opera ever since she was a child, and all her world had
+enjoyed it, too.  Then by what right did Martin Eden emerge, as he
+had so recently emerged, from his rag-time and working-class songs,
+and pass judgment on the world's music?  She was vexed with him,
+and as she walked beside him she had a vague feeling of outrage.
+At the best, in her most charitable frame of mind, she considered
+the statement of his views to be a caprice, an erratic and
+uncalled-for prank.  But when he took her in his arms at the door
+and kissed her good night in tender lover-fashion, she forgot
+everything in the outrush of her own love to him.  And later, on a
+sleepless pillow, she puzzled, as she had often puzzled of late, as
+to how it was that she loved so strange a man, and loved him
+despite the disapproval of her people.
+
+And next day Martin Eden cast hack-work aside, and at white heat
+hammered out an essay to which he gave the title, "The Philosophy
+of Illusion."  A stamp started it on its travels, but it was
+destined to receive many stamps and to be started on many travels
+in the months that followed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+
+Maria Silva was poor, and all the ways of poverty were clear to
+her.  Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signifying a not-nice condition
+of existence.  That was her total knowledge on the subject.  She
+knew Martin was poor, and his condition she associated in her mind
+with the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of other
+men who had become successes.  Also, while aware that poverty was
+anything but delectable, she had a comfortable middle-class feeling
+that poverty was salutary, that it was a sharp spur that urged on
+to success all men who were not degraded and hopeless drudges.  So
+that her knowledge that Martin was so poor that he had pawned his
+watch and overcoat did not disturb her.  She even considered it the
+hopeful side of the situation, believing that sooner or later it
+would arouse him and compel him to abandon his writing.
+
+Ruth never read hunger in Martin's face, which had grown lean and
+had enlarged the slight hollows in the cheeks.  In fact, she marked
+the change in his face with satisfaction.  It seemed to refine him,
+to remove from him much of the dross of flesh and the too animal-
+like vigor that lured her while she detested it.  Sometimes, when
+with her, she noted an unusual brightness in his eyes, and she
+admired it, for it made him appear more the poet and the scholar -
+the things he would have liked to be and which she would have liked
+him to be.  But Maria Silva read a different tale in the hollow
+cheeks and the burning eyes, and she noted the changes in them from
+day to day, by them following the ebb and flow of his fortunes.
+She saw him leave the house with his overcoat and return without
+it, though the day was chill and raw, and promptly she saw his
+cheeks fill out slightly and the fire of hunger leave his eyes.  In
+the same way she had seen his wheel and watch go, and after each
+event she had seen his vigor bloom again.
+
+Likewise she watched his toils, and knew the measure of the
+midnight oil he burned.  Work!  She knew that he outdid her, though
+his work was of a different order.  And she was surprised to behold
+that the less food he had, the harder he worked.  On occasion, in a
+casual sort of way, when she thought hunger pinched hardest, she
+would send him in a loaf of new baking, awkwardly covering the act
+with banter to the effect that it was better than he could bake.
+And again, she would send one of her toddlers in to him with a
+great pitcher of hot soup, debating inwardly the while whether she
+was justified in taking it from the mouths of her own flesh and
+blood.  Nor was Martin ungrateful, knowing as he did the lives of
+the poor, and that if ever in the world there was charity, this was
+it.
+
+On a day when she had filled her brood with what was left in the
+house, Maria invested her last fifteen cents in a gallon of cheap
+wine.  Martin, coming into her kitchen to fetch water, was invited
+to sit down and drink.  He drank her very-good health, and in
+return she drank his.  Then she drank to prosperity in his
+undertakings, and he drank to the hope that James Grant would show
+up and pay her for his washing.  James Grant was a journeymen
+carpenter who did not always pay his bills and who owed Maria three
+dollars.
+
+Both Maria and Martin drank the sour new wine on empty stomachs,
+and it went swiftly to their heads.  Utterly differentiated
+creatures that they were, they were lonely in their misery, and
+though the misery was tacitly ignored, it was the bond that drew
+them together.  Maria was amazed to learn that he had been in the
+Azores, where she had lived until she was eleven.  She was doubly
+amazed that he had been in the Hawaiian Islands, whither she had
+migrated from the Azores with her people.  But her amazement passed
+all bounds when he told her he had been on Maui, the particular
+island whereon she had attained womanhood and married.  Kahului,
+where she had first met her husband, - he, Martin, had been there
+twice!  Yes, she remembered the sugar steamers, and he had been on
+them - well, well, it was a small world.  And Wailuku!  That place,
+too!  Did he know the head-luna of the plantation?  Yes, and had
+had a couple of drinks with him.
+
+And so they reminiscenced and drowned their hunger in the raw, sour
+wine.  To Martin the future did not seem so dim.  Success trembled
+just before him.  He was on the verge of clasping it.  Then he
+studied the deep-lined face of the toil-worn woman before him,
+remembered her soups and loaves of new baking, and felt spring up
+in him the warmest gratitude and philanthropy.
+
+"Maria," he exclaimed suddenly.  "What would you like to have?"
+
+She looked at him, bepuzzled.
+
+"What would you like to have now, right now, if you could get it?"
+
+"Shoe alla da roun' for da childs - seven pairs da shoe."
+
+"You shall have them," he announced, while she nodded her head
+gravely.  "But I mean a big wish, something big that you want."
+
+Her eyes sparkled good-naturedly.  He was choosing to make fun with
+her, Maria, with whom few made fun these days.
+
+"Think hard," he cautioned, just as she was opening her mouth to
+speak.
+
+"Alla right," she answered.  "I thinka da hard.  I lika da house,
+dis house - all mine, no paya da rent, seven dollar da month."
+
+"You shall have it," he granted, "and in a short time.  Now wish
+the great wish.  Make believe I am God, and I say to you anything
+you want you can have.  Then you wish that thing, and I listen."
+
+Maria considered solemnly for a space.
+
+"You no 'fraid?" she asked warningly.
+
+"No, no," he laughed, "I'm not afraid.  Go ahead."
+
+"Most verra big," she warned again.
+
+"All right.  Fire away."
+
+"Well, den - "  She drew a big breath like a child, as she voiced
+to the uttermost all she cared to demand of life.  "I lika da have
+one milka ranch - good milka ranch.  Plenty cow, plenty land,
+plenty grass.  I lika da have near San Le-an; my sister liva dere.
+I sella da milk in Oakland.  I maka da plentee mon.  Joe an' Nick
+no runna da cow.  Dey go-a to school.  Bimeby maka da good
+engineer, worka da railroad.  Yes, I lika da milka ranch."
+
+She paused and regarded Martin with twinkling eyes.
+
+"You shall have it," he answered promptly.
+
+She nodded her head and touched her lips courteously to the wine-
+glass and to the giver of the gift she knew would never be given.
+His heart was right, and in her own heart she appreciated his
+intention as much as if the gift had gone with it.
+
+"No, Maria," he went on; "Nick and Joe won't have to peddle milk,
+and all the kids can go to school and wear shoes the whole year
+round.  It will be a first-class milk ranch - everything complete.
+There will be a house to live in and a stable for the horses, and
+cow-barns, of course.  There will be chickens, pigs, vegetables,
+fruit trees, and everything like that; and there will be enough
+cows to pay for a hired man or two.  Then you won't have anything
+to do but take care of the children.  For that matter, if you find
+a good man, you can marry and take it easy while he runs the
+ranch."
+
+And from such largess, dispensed from his future, Martin turned and
+took his one good suit of clothes to the pawnshop.  His plight was
+desperate for him to do this, for it cut him off from Ruth.  He had
+no second-best suit that was presentable, and though he could go to
+the butcher and the baker, and even on occasion to his sister's, it
+was beyond all daring to dream of entering the Morse home so
+disreputably apparelled.
+
+He toiled on, miserable and well-nigh hopeless.  It began to appear
+to him that the second battle was lost and that he would have to go
+to work.  In doing this he would satisfy everybody - the grocer,
+his sister, Ruth, and even Maria, to whom he owed a month's room
+rent.  He was two months behind with his type-writer, and the
+agency was clamoring for payment or for the return of the machine.
+In desperation, all but ready to surrender, to make a truce with
+fate until he could get a fresh start, he took the civil service
+examinations for the Railway Mail.  To his surprise, he passed
+first.  The job was assured, though when the call would come to
+enter upon his duties nobody knew.
+
+It was at this time, at the lowest ebb, that the smooth-running
+editorial machine broke down.  A cog must have slipped or an oil-
+cup run dry, for the postman brought him one morning a short, thin
+envelope.  Martin glanced at the upper left-hand corner and read
+the name and address of the TRANSCONTINENTAL MONTHLY.  His heart
+gave a great leap, and he suddenly felt faint, the sinking feeling
+accompanied by a strange trembling of the knees.  He staggered into
+his room and sat down on the bed, the envelope still unopened, and
+in that moment came understanding to him how people suddenly fall
+dead upon receipt of extraordinarily good news.
+
+Of course this was good news.  There was no manuscript in that thin
+envelope, therefore it was an acceptance.  He knew the story in the
+hands of the TRANSCONTINENTAL.  It was "The Ring of Bells," one of
+his horror stories, and it was an even five thousand words.  And,
+since first-class magazines always paid on acceptance, there was a
+check inside.  Two cents a word - twenty dollars a thousand; the
+check must be a hundred dollars.  One hundred dollars!  As he tore
+the envelope open, every item of all his debts surged in his brain
+- $3.85 to the grocer; butcher $4.00 flat; baker, $2.00; fruit
+store, $5.00; total, $14.85.  Then there was room rent, $2.50;
+another month in advance, $2.50; two months' type-writer, $8.00; a
+month in advance, $4.00; total, $31.85.  And finally to be added,
+his pledges, plus interest, with the pawnbroker - watch, $5.50;
+overcoat, $5.50; wheel, $7.75; suit of clothes, $5.50 (60 %
+interest, but what did it matter?) - grand total, $56.10.  He saw,
+as if visible in the air before him, in illuminated figures, the
+whole sum, and the subtraction that followed and that gave a
+remainder of $43.90.  When he had squared every debt, redeemed
+every pledge, he would still have jingling in his pockets a
+princely $43.90.  And on top of that he would have a month's rent
+paid in advance on the type-writer and on the room.
+
+By this time he had drawn the single sheet of type-written letter
+out and spread it open.  There was no check.  He peered into the
+envelope, held it to the light, but could not trust his eyes, and
+in trembling haste tore the envelope apart.  There was no check.
+He read the letter, skimming it line by line, dashing through the
+editor's praise of his story to the meat of the letter, the
+statement why the check had not been sent.  He found no such
+statement, but he did find that which made him suddenly wilt.  The
+letter slid from his hand.  His eyes went lack-lustre, and he lay
+back on the pillow, pulling the blanket about him and up to his
+chin.
+
+Five dollars for "The Ring of Bells" - five dollars for five
+thousand words!  Instead of two cents a word, ten words for a cent!
+And the editor had praised it, too.  And he would receive the check
+when the story was published.  Then it was all poppycock, two cents
+a word for minimum rate and payment upon acceptance.  It was a lie,
+and it had led him astray.  He would never have attempted to write
+had he known that.  He would have gone to work - to work for Ruth.
+He went back to the day he first attempted to write, and was
+appalled at the enormous waste of time - and all for ten words for
+a cent.  And the other high rewards of writers, that he had read
+about, must be lies, too.  His second-hand ideas of authorship were
+wrong, for here was the proof of it.
+
+The TRANSCONTINENTAL sold for twenty-five cents, and its dignified
+and artistic cover proclaimed it as among the first-class
+magazines.  It was a staid, respectable magazine, and it had been
+published continuously since long before he was born.  Why, on the
+outside cover were printed every month the words of one of the
+world's great writers, words proclaiming the inspired mission of
+the TRANSCONTINENTAL by a star of literature whose first
+coruscations had appeared inside those self-same covers.  And the
+high and lofty, heaven-inspired TRANSCONTINENTAL paid five dollars
+for five thousand words!  The great writer had recently died in a
+foreign land - in dire poverty, Martin remembered, which was not to
+be wondered at, considering the magnificent pay authors receive.
+
+Well, he had taken the bait, the newspaper lies about writers and
+their pay, and he had wasted two years over it.  But he would
+disgorge the bait now.  Not another line would he ever write.  He
+would do what Ruth wanted him to do, what everybody wanted him to
+do - get a job.  The thought of going to work reminded him of Joe -
+Joe, tramping through the land of nothing-to-do.  Martin heaved a
+great sigh of envy.  The reaction of nineteen hours a day for many
+days was strong upon him.  But then, Joe was not in love, had none
+of the responsibilities of love, and he could afford to loaf
+through the land of nothing-to-do.  He, Martin, had something to
+work for, and go to work he would.  He would start out early next
+morning to hunt a job.  And he would let Ruth know, too, that he
+had mended his ways and was willing to go into her father's office.
+
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent, the
+market price for art.  The disappointment of it, the lie of it, the
+infamy of it, were uppermost in his thoughts; and under his closed
+eyelids, in fiery figures, burned the "$3.85" he owed the grocer.
+He shivered, and was aware of an aching in his bones.  The small of
+his back ached especially.  His head ached, the top of it ached,
+the back of it ached, the brains inside of it ached and seemed to
+be swelling, while the ache over his brows was intolerable.  And
+beneath the brows, planted under his lids, was the merciless
+"$3.85."  He opened his eyes to escape it, but the white light of
+the room seemed to sear the balls and forced him to close his eyes,
+when the "$3.85" confronted him again.
+
+Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent - that
+particular thought took up its residence in his brain, and he could
+no more escape it than he could the "$3.85" under his eyelids.  A
+change seemed to come over the latter, and he watched curiously,
+till "$2.00" burned in its stead.  Ah, he thought, that was the
+baker.  The next sum that appeared was "$2.50."  It puzzled him,
+and he pondered it as if life and death hung on the solution.  He
+owed somebody two dollars and a half, that was certain, but who was
+it?  To find it was the task set him by an imperious and malignant
+universe, and he wandered through the endless corridors of his
+mind, opening all manner of lumber rooms and chambers stored with
+odds and ends of memories and knowledge as he vainly sought the
+answer.  After several centuries it came to him, easily, without
+effort, that it was Maria.  With a great relief he turned his soul
+to the screen of torment under his lids.  He had solved the
+problem; now he could rest.  But no, the "$2.50" faded away, and in
+its place burned "$8.00."  Who was that?  He must go the dreary
+round of his mind again and find out.
+
+How long he was gone on this quest he did not know, but after what
+seemed an enormous lapse of time, he was called back to himself by
+a knock at the door, and by Maria's asking if he was sick.  He
+replied in a muffled voice he did not recognize, saying that he was
+merely taking a nap.  He was surprised when he noted the darkness
+of night in the room.  He had received the letter at two in the
+afternoon, and he realized that he was sick.
+
+Then the "$8.00" began to smoulder under his lids again, and he
+returned himself to servitude.  But he grew cunning.  There was no
+need for him to wander through his mind.  He had been a fool.  He
+pulled a lever and made his mind revolve about him, a monstrous
+wheel of fortune, a merry-go-round of memory, a revolving sphere of
+wisdom.  Faster and faster it revolved, until its vortex sucked him
+in and he was flung whirling through black chaos.
+
+Quite naturally he found himself at a mangle, feeding starched
+cuffs.  But as he fed he noticed figures printed in the cuffs.  It
+was a new way of marking linen, he thought, until, looking closer,
+he saw "$3.85" on one of the cuffs.  Then it came to him that it
+was the grocer's bill, and that these were his bills flying around
+on the drum of the mangle.  A crafty idea came to him.  He would
+throw the bills on the floor and so escape paying them.  No sooner
+thought than done, and he crumpled the cuffs spitefully as he flung
+them upon an unusually dirty floor.  Ever the heap grew, and though
+each bill was duplicated a thousand times, he found only one for
+two dollars and a half, which was what he owed Maria.  That meant
+that Maria would not press for payment, and he resolved generously
+that it would be the only one he would pay; so he began searching
+through the cast-out heap for hers.  He sought it desperately, for
+ages, and was still searching when the manager of the hotel
+entered, the fat Dutchman.  His face blazed with wrath, and he
+shouted in stentorian tones that echoed down the universe, "I shall
+deduct the cost of those cuffs from your wages!"  The pile of cuffs
+grew into a mountain, and Martin knew that he was doomed to toil
+for a thousand years to pay for them.  Well, there was nothing left
+to do but kill the manager and burn down the laundry.  But the big
+Dutchman frustrated him, seizing him by the nape of the neck and
+dancing him up and down.  He danced him over the ironing tables,
+the stove, and the mangles, and out into the wash-room and over the
+wringer and washer.  Martin was danced until his teeth rattled and
+his head ached, and he marvelled that the Dutchman was so strong.
+
+And then he found himself before the mangle, this time receiving
+the cuffs an editor of a magazine was feeding from the other side.
+Each cuff was a check, and Martin went over them anxiously, in a
+fever of expectation, but they were all blanks.  He stood there and
+received the blanks for a million years or so, never letting one go
+by for fear it might be filled out.  At last he found it.  With
+trembling fingers he held it to the light.  It was for five
+dollars.  "Ha! Ha!" laughed the editor across the mangle.  "Well,
+then, I shall kill you," Martin said.  He went out into the wash-
+room to get the axe, and found Joe starching manuscripts.  He tried
+to make him desist, then swung the axe for him.  But the weapon
+remained poised in mid-air, for Martin found himself back in the
+ironing room in the midst of a snow-storm.  No, it was not snow
+that was falling, but checks of large denomination, the smallest
+not less than a thousand dollars.  He began to collect them and
+sort them out, in packages of a hundred, tying each package
+securely with twine.
+
+He looked up from his task and saw Joe standing before him juggling
+flat-irons, starched shirts, and manuscripts.  Now and again he
+reached out and added a bundle of checks to the flying miscellany
+that soared through the roof and out of sight in a tremendous
+circle.  Martin struck at him, but he seized the axe and added it
+to the flying circle.  Then he plucked Martin and added him.
+Martin went up through the roof, clutching at manuscripts, so that
+by the time he came down he had a large armful.  But no sooner down
+than up again, and a second and a third time and countless times he
+flew around the circle.  From far off he could hear a childish
+treble singing:  "Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around,
+around."
+
+He recovered the axe in the midst of the Milky Way of checks,
+starched shirts, and manuscripts, and prepared, when he came down,
+to kill Joe.  But he did not come down.  Instead, at two in the
+morning, Maria, having heard his groans through the thin partition,
+came into his room, to put hot flat-irons against his body and damp
+cloths upon his aching eyes.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+
+Martin Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the morning.  It
+was late afternoon before he came out of his delirium and gazed
+with aching eyes about the room.  Mary, one of the tribe of Silva,
+eight years old, keeping watch, raised a screech at sight of his
+returning consciousness.  Maria hurried into the room from the
+kitchen.  She put her work-calloused hand upon his hot forehead and
+felt his pulse.
+
+"You lika da eat?" she asked.
+
+He shook his head.  Eating was farthest from his desire, and he
+wondered that he should ever have been hungry in his life.
+
+"I'm sick, Maria," he said weakly.  "What is it?  Do you know?"
+
+"Grip," she answered.  "Two or three days you alla da right.
+Better you no eat now.  Bimeby plenty can eat, to-morrow can eat
+maybe."
+
+Martin was not used to sickness, and when Maria and her little girl
+left him, he essayed to get up and dress.  By a supreme exertion of
+will, with rearing brain and eyes that ached so that he could not
+keep them open, he managed to get out of bed, only to be left
+stranded by his senses upon the table.  Half an hour later he
+managed to regain the bed, where he was content to lie with closed
+eyes and analyze his various pains and weaknesses.  Maria came in
+several times to change the cold cloths on his forehead.  Otherwise
+she left him in peace, too wise to vex him with chatter.  This
+moved him to gratitude, and he murmured to himself, "Maria, you
+getta da milka ranch, all righta, all right."
+
+Then he remembered his long-buried past of yesterday.
+
+It seemed a life-time since he had received that letter from the
+TRANSCONTINENTAL, a life-time since it was all over and done with
+and a new page turned.  He had shot his bolt, and shot it hard, and
+now he was down on his back.  If he hadn't starved himself, he
+wouldn't have been caught by La Grippe.  He had been run down, and
+he had not had the strength to throw off the germ of disease which
+had invaded his system.  This was what resulted.
+
+"What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his
+own life?" he demanded aloud.  "This is no place for me.  No more
+literature in mine.  Me for the counting-house and ledger, the
+monthly salary, and the little home with Ruth."
+
+Two days later, having eaten an egg and two slices of toast and
+drunk a cup of tea, he asked for his mail, but found his eyes still
+hurt too much to permit him to read.
+
+"You read for me, Maria," he said.  "Never mind the big, long
+letters.  Throw them under the table.  Read me the small letters."
+
+"No can," was the answer.  "Teresa, she go to school, she can."
+
+So Teresa Silva, aged nine, opened his letters and read them to
+him.  He listened absently to a long dun from the type-writer
+people, his mind busy with ways and means of finding a job.
+Suddenly he was shocked back to himself.
+
+"'We offer you forty dollars for all serial rights in your story,'"
+Teresa slowly spelled out, "'provided you allow us to make the
+alterations suggested.'"
+
+"What magazine is that?" Martin shouted.  "Here, give it to me!"
+
+He could see to read, now, and he was unaware of the pain of the
+action.  It was the WHITE MOUSE that was offering him forty
+dollars, and the story was "The Whirlpool," another of his early
+horror stories.  He read the letter through again and again.  The
+editor told him plainly that he had not handled the idea properly,
+but that it was the idea they were buying because it was original.
+If they could cut the story down one-third, they would take it and
+send him forty dollars on receipt of his answer.
+
+He called for pen and ink, and told the editor he could cut the
+story down three-thirds if he wanted to, and to send the forty
+dollars right along.
+
+The letter despatched to the letter-box by Teresa, Martin lay back
+and thought.  It wasn't a lie, after all.  The WHITE MOUSE paid on
+acceptance.  There were three thousand words in "The Whirlpool."
+Cut down a third, there would be two thousand.  At forty dollars
+that would be two cents a word.  Pay on acceptance and two cents a
+word - the newspapers had told the truth.  And he had thought the
+WHITE MOUSE a third-rater!  It was evident that he did not know the
+magazines.  He had deemed the TRANSCONTINENTAL a first-rater, and
+it paid a cent for ten words.  He had classed the WHITE MOUSE as of
+no account, and it paid twenty times as much as the
+TRANSCONTINENTAL and also had paid on acceptance.
+
+Well, there was one thing certain:  when he got well, he would not
+go out looking for a job.  There were more stories in his head as
+good as "The Whirlpool," and at forty dollars apiece he could earn
+far more than in any job or position.  Just when he thought the
+battle lost, it was won.  He had proved for his career.  The way
+was clear.  Beginning with the WHITE MOUSE he would add magazine
+after magazine to his growing list of patrons.  Hack-work could be
+put aside.  For that matter, it had been wasted time, for it had
+not brought him a dollar.  He would devote himself to work, good
+work, and he would pour out the best that was in him.  He wished
+Ruth was there to share in his joy, and when he went over the
+letters left lying on his bed, he found one from her.  It was
+sweetly reproachful, wondering what had kept him away for so
+dreadful a length of time.  He reread the letter adoringly,
+dwelling over her handwriting, loving each stroke of her pen, and
+in the end kissing her signature.
+
+And when he answered, he told her recklessly that he had not been
+to see her because his best clothes were in pawn.  He told her that
+he had been sick, but was once more nearly well, and that inside
+ten days or two weeks (as soon as a letter could travel to New York
+City and return) he would redeem his clothes and be with her.
+
+But Ruth did not care to wait ten days or two weeks.  Besides, her
+lover was sick.  The next afternoon, accompanied by Arthur, she
+arrived in the Morse carriage, to the unqualified delight of the
+Silva tribe and of all the urchins on the street, and to the
+consternation of Maria.  She boxed the ears of the Silvas who
+crowded about the visitors on the tiny front porch, and in more
+than usual atrocious English tried to apologize for her appearance.
+Sleeves rolled up from soap-flecked arms and a wet gunny-sack
+around her waist told of the task at which she had been caught.  So
+flustered was she by two such grand young people asking for her
+lodger, that she forgot to invite them to sit down in the little
+parlor.  To enter Martin's room, they passed through the kitchen,
+warm and moist and steamy from the big washing in progress.  Maria,
+in her excitement, jammed the bedroom and bedroom-closet doors
+together, and for five minutes, through the partly open door,
+clouds of steam, smelling of soap-suds and dirt, poured into the
+sick chamber.
+
+Ruth succeeded in veering right and left and right again, and in
+running the narrow passage between table and bed to Martin's side;
+but Arthur veered too wide and fetched up with clatter and bang of
+pots and pans in the corner where Martin did his cooking.  Arthur
+did not linger long.  Ruth occupied the only chair, and having done
+his duty, he went outside and stood by the gate, the centre of
+seven marvelling Silvas, who watched him as they would have watched
+a curiosity in a side-show.  All about the carriage were gathered
+the children from a dozen blocks, waiting and eager for some tragic
+and terrible denouement.  Carriages were seen on their street only
+for weddings and funerals.  Here was neither marriage nor death:
+therefore, it was something transcending experience and well worth
+waiting for.
+
+Martin had been wild to see Ruth.  His was essentially a love-
+nature, and he possessed more than the average man's need for
+sympathy.  He was starving for sympathy, which, with him, meant
+intelligent understanding; and he had yet to learn that Ruth's
+sympathy was largely sentimental and tactful, and that it proceeded
+from gentleness of nature rather than from understanding of the
+objects of her sympathy.  So it was while Martin held her hand and
+gladly talked, that her love for him prompted her to press his hand
+in return, and that her eyes were moist and luminous at sight of
+his helplessness and of the marks suffering had stamped upon his
+face.
+
+But while he told her of his two acceptances, of his despair when
+he received the one from the TRANSCONTINENTAL, and of the
+corresponding delight with which he received the one from the WHITE
+MOUSE, she did not follow him.  She heard the words he uttered and
+understood their literal import, but she was not with him in his
+despair and his delight.  She could not get out of herself.  She
+was not interested in selling stories to magazines.  What was
+important to her was matrimony.  She was not aware of it, however,
+any more than she was aware that her desire that Martin take a
+position was the instinctive and preparative impulse of motherhood.
+She would have blushed had she been told as much in plain, set
+terms, and next, she might have grown indignant and asserted that
+her sole interest lay in the man she loved and her desire for him
+to make the best of himself.  So, while Martin poured out his heart
+to her, elated with the first success his chosen work in the world
+had received, she paid heed to his bare words only, gazing now and
+again about the room, shocked by what she saw.
+
+For the first time Ruth gazed upon the sordid face of poverty.
+Starving lovers had always seemed romantic to her, - but she had
+had no idea how starving lovers lived.  She had never dreamed it
+could be like this.  Ever her gaze shifted from the room to him and
+back again.  The steamy smell of dirty clothes, which had entered
+with her from the kitchen, was sickening.  Martin must be soaked
+with it, Ruth concluded, if that awful woman washed frequently.
+Such was the contagiousness of degradation.  When she looked at
+Martin, she seemed to see the smirch left upon him by his
+surroundings.  She had never seen him unshaven, and the three days'
+growth of beard on his face was repulsive to her.  Not alone did it
+give him the same dark and murky aspect of the Silva house, inside
+and out, but it seemed to emphasize that animal-like strength of
+his which she detested.  And here he was, being confirmed in his
+madness by the two acceptances he took such pride in telling her
+about.  A little longer and he would have surrendered and gone to
+work.  Now he would continue on in this horrible house, writing and
+starving for a few more months.
+
+"What is that smell?" she asked suddenly.
+
+"Some of Maria's washing smells, I imagine," was the answer.  "I am
+growing quite accustomed to them."
+
+"No, no; not that.  It is something else.  A stale, sickish smell."
+
+Martin sampled the air before replying.
+
+"I can't smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke," he
+announced.
+
+"That's it.  It is terrible.  Why do you smoke so much, Martin?"
+
+"I don't know, except that I smoke more than usual when I am
+lonely.  And then, too, it's such a long-standing habit.  I learned
+when I was only a youngster."
+
+"It is not a nice habit, you know," she reproved.  "It smells to
+heaven."
+
+"That's the fault of the tobacco.  I can afford only the cheapest.
+But wait until I get that forty-dollar check.  I'll use a brand
+that is not offensive even to the angels.  But that wasn't so bad,
+was it, two acceptances in three days?  That forty-five dollars
+will pay about all my debts."
+
+"For two years' work?" she queried.
+
+"No, for less than a week's work.  Please pass me that book over on
+the far corner of the table, the account book with the gray cover."
+He opened it and began turning over the pages rapidly.  "Yes, I was
+right.  Four days for 'The Ring of Bells,' two days for 'The
+Whirlpool.'  That's forty-five dollars for a week's work, one
+hundred and eighty dollars a month.  That beats any salary I can
+command.  And, besides, I'm just beginning.  A thousand dollars a
+month is not too much to buy for you all I want you to have.  A
+salary of five hundred a month would be too small.  That forty-five
+dollars is just a starter.  Wait till I get my stride.  Then watch
+my smoke."
+
+Ruth misunderstood his slang, and reverted to cigarettes.
+
+"You smoke more than enough as it is, and the brand of tobacco will
+make no difference.  It is the smoking itself that is not nice, no
+matter what the brand may be.  You are a chimney, a living volcano,
+a perambulating smoke-stack, and you are a perfect disgrace, Martin
+dear, you know you are."
+
+She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he looked at
+her delicate face and into her pure, limpid eyes, as of old he was
+struck with his own unworthiness.
+
+"I wish you wouldn't smoke any more," she whispered.  "Please, for
+- my sake."
+
+"All right, I won't," he cried.  "I'll do anything you ask, dear
+love, anything; you know that."
+
+A great temptation assailed her.  In an insistent way she had
+caught glimpses of the large, easy-going side of his nature, and
+she felt sure, if she asked him to cease attempting to write, that
+he would grant her wish.  In the swift instant that elapsed, the
+words trembled on her lips.  But she did not utter them.  She was
+not quite brave enough; she did not quite dare.  Instead, she
+leaned toward him to meet him, and in his arms murmured:-
+
+"You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own.
+I am sure smoking hurts you; and besides, it is not good to be a
+slave to anything, to a drug least of all."
+
+"I shall always be your slave," he smiled.
+
+"In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands."
+
+She looked at him mischievously, though deep down she was already
+regretting that she had not preferred her largest request.
+
+"I live but to obey, your majesty."
+
+"Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not omit to shave
+every day.  Look how you have scratched my cheek."
+
+And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter.  But she had made
+one point, and she could not expect to make more than one at a
+time.  She felt a woman's pride in that she had made him stop
+smoking.  Another time she would persuade him to take a position,
+for had he not said he would do anything she asked?
+
+She left his side to explore the room, examining the clothes-lines
+of notes overhead, learning the mystery of the tackle used for
+suspending his wheel under the ceiling, and being saddened by the
+heap of manuscripts under the table which represented to her just
+so much wasted time.  The oil-stove won her admiration, but on
+investigating the food shelves she found them empty.
+
+"Why, you haven't anything to eat, you poor dear," she said with
+tender compassion.  "You must be starving."
+
+"I store my food in Maria's safe and in her pantry," he lied.  "It
+keeps better there.  No danger of my starving.  Look at that."
+
+She had come back to his side, and she saw him double his arm at
+the elbow, the biceps crawling under his shirt-sleeve and swelling
+into a knot of muscle, heavy and hard.  The sight repelled her.
+Sentimentally, she disliked it.  But her pulse, her blood, every
+fibre of her, loved it and yearned for it, and, in the old,
+inexplicable way, she leaned toward him, not away from him.  And in
+the moment that followed, when he crushed her in his arms, the
+brain of her, concerned with the superficial aspects of life, was
+in revolt; while the heart of her, the woman of her, concerned with
+life itself, exulted triumphantly.  It was in moments like this
+that she felt to the uttermost the greatness of her love for
+Martin, for it was almost a swoon of delight to her to feel his
+strong arms about her, holding her tightly, hurting her with the
+grip of their fervor.  At such moments she found justification for
+her treason to her standards, for her violation of her own high
+ideals, and, most of all, for her tacit disobedience to her mother
+and father.  They did not want her to marry this man.  It shocked
+them that she should love him.  It shocked her, too, sometimes,
+when she was apart from him, a cool and reasoning creature.  With
+him, she loved him - in truth, at times a vexed and worried love;
+but love it was, a love that was stronger than she.
+
+"This La Grippe is nothing," he was saying.  "It hurts a bit, and
+gives one a nasty headache, but it doesn't compare with break-bone
+fever."
+
+"Have you had that, too?" she queried absently, intent on the
+heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms.
+
+And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his
+words startled her.
+
+He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of
+the Hawaiian Islands.
+
+"But why did you go there?" she demanded.
+
+Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal.
+
+"Because I didn't know," he answered.  "I never dreamed of lepers.
+When I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed
+inland for some place of hiding.  For three days I lived off
+guavas, OHIA-apples, and bananas, all of which grew wild in the
+jungle.  On the fourth day I found the trail - a mere foot-trail.
+It led inland, and it led up.  It was the way I wanted to go, and
+it showed signs of recent travel.  At one place it ran along the
+crest of a ridge that was no more than a knife-edge.  The trail
+wasn't three feet wide on the crest, and on either side the ridge
+fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep.  One man, with
+plenty of ammunition, could have held it against a hundred
+thousand.
+
+"It was the only way in to the hiding-place.  Three hours after I
+found the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket
+in the midst of lava peaks.  The whole place was terraced for taro-
+patches, fruit trees grew there, and there were eight or ten grass
+huts.  But as soon as I saw the inhabitants I knew what I'd struck.
+One sight of them was enough."
+
+"What did you do?" Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening, like any
+Desdemona, appalled and fascinated.
+
+"Nothing for me to do.  Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty
+far gone, but he ruled like a king.  He had discovered the little
+valley and founded the settlement - all of which was against the
+law.  But he had guns, plenty of ammunition, and those Kanakas,
+trained to the shooting of wild cattle and wild pig, were dead
+shots.  No, there wasn't any running away for Martin Eden.  He
+stayed - for three months."
+
+"But how did you escape?"
+
+"I'd have been there yet, if it hadn't been for a girl there, a
+half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian.  She was a
+beauty, poor thing, and well educated.  Her mother, in Honolulu,
+was worth a million or so.  Well, this girl got me away at last.
+Her mother financed the settlement, you see, so the girl wasn't
+afraid of being punished for letting me go.  But she made me swear,
+first, never to reveal the hiding-place; and I never have.  This is
+the first time I have even mentioned it.  The girl had just the
+first signs of leprosy.  The fingers of her right hand were
+slightly twisted, and there was a small spot on her arm.  That was
+all.  I guess she is dead, now."
+
+"But weren't you frightened?  And weren't you glad to get away
+without catching that dreadful disease?"
+
+"Well," he confessed, "I was a bit shivery at first; but I got used
+to it.  I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though.  That made
+me forget to be afraid.  She was such a beauty, in spirit as well
+as in appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was
+doomed to lie there, living the life of a primitive savage and
+rotting slowly away.  Leprosy is far more terrible than you can
+imagine it."
+
+"Poor thing," Ruth murmured softly.  "It's a wonder she let you get
+away."
+
+"How do you mean?" Martin asked unwittingly.
+
+"Because she must have loved you," Ruth said, still softly.
+"Candidly, now, didn't she?"
+
+Martin's sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and
+by the indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness
+had made his face even pale; and across this pallor flowed the slow
+wave of a blush.  He was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut
+him off.
+
+"Never mind, don't answer; it's not necessary," she laughed.
+
+But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter,
+and that the light in her eyes was cold.  On the spur of the moment
+it reminded him of a gale he had once experienced in the North
+Pacific.  And for the moment the apparition of the gale rose before
+his eyes - a gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon,
+the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight.  Next, he saw the
+girl in the leper refuge and remembered it was for love of him that
+she had let him go.
+
+"She was noble," he said simply.  "She gave me life."
+
+That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob in
+her throat, and noticed that she turned her face away to gaze out
+of the window.  When she turned it back to him, it was composed,
+and there was no hint of the gale in her eyes.
+
+"I'm such a silly," she said plaintively.  "But I can't help it.  I
+do so love you, Martin, I do, I do.  I shall grow more catholic in
+time, but at present I can't help being jealous of those ghosts of
+the past, and you know your past is full of ghosts."
+
+"It must be," she silenced his protest.  "It could not be
+otherwise.  And there's poor Arthur motioning me to come.  He's
+tired waiting.  And now good-by, dear."
+
+"There's some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that
+helps men to stop the use of tobacco," she called back from the
+door, "and I am going to send you some."
+
+The door closed, but opened again.
+
+"I do, I do," she whispered to him; and this time she was really
+gone.
+
+Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note
+the texture of Ruth's garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown
+that produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the
+carriage.  The crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the
+carriage disappeared from view, then transferred their stare to
+Maria, who had abruptly become the most important person on the
+street.  But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria's
+reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been for her
+lodger.  After that Maria dropped back into her old obscurity and
+Martin began to notice the respectful manner in which he was
+regarded by the small fry of the neighborhood.  As for Maria,
+Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per cent, and had the
+Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would
+have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-and-eighty-five-
+cents' worth of credit.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+
+The sun of Martin's good fortune rose.  The day after Ruth's visit,
+he received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal
+weekly in payment for three of his triolets.  Two days later a
+newspaper published in Chicago accepted his "Treasure Hunters,"
+promising to pay ten dollars for it on publication.  The price was
+small, but it was the first article he had written, his very first
+attempt to express his thought on the printed page.  To cap
+everything, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, was
+accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile monthly calling
+itself YOUTH AND AGE.  It was true the serial was twenty-one
+thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on
+publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand
+words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had
+attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its
+clumsy worthlessness.
+
+But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness
+of mediocrity.  What characterized them was the clumsiness of too
+great strength - the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he
+crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes
+with a war-club.  So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early
+efforts for songs.  He knew them for what they were, and it had not
+taken him long to acquire this knowledge.  What he pinned his faith
+to was his later work.  He had striven to be something more than a
+mere writer of magazine fiction.  He had sought to equip himself
+with the tools of artistry.  On the other hand, he had not
+sacrificed strength.  His conscious aim had been to increase his
+strength by avoiding excess of strength.  Nor had he departed from
+his love of reality.  His work was realism, though he had
+endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination.
+What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human
+aspiration and faith.  What he wanted was life as it was, with all
+its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.
+
+He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of
+fiction.  One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin;
+the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams
+and divine possibilities.  Both the god and the clod schools erred,
+in Martin's estimation, and erred through too great singleness of
+sight and purpose.  There was a compromise that approximated the
+truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it
+challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod.  It was his
+story, "Adventure," which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin
+believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was
+in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his views on the
+whole general subject.
+
+But "Adventure," and all that he deemed his best work, still went
+begging among the editors.  His early work counted for nothing in
+his eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories,
+two of which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his
+best work.  To him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic,
+though invested with all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their
+power.  This investiture of the grotesque and impossible with
+reality, he looked upon as a trick - a skilful trick at best.
+Great literature could not reside in such a field.  Their artistry
+was high, but he denied the worthwhileness of artistry when
+divorced from humanness.  The trick had been to fling over the face
+of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in the
+half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written before
+he emerged upon the high peaks of "Adventure," "Joy," "The Pot,"
+and "The Wine of Life."
+
+The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a
+precarious existence against the arrival of the WHITE MOUSE check.
+He cashed the first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer,
+paying a dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars
+between the baker and the fruit store.  Martin was not yet rich
+enough to afford meat, and he was on slim allowance when the WHITE
+MOUSE check arrived.  He was divided on the cashing of it.  He had
+never been in a bank in his life, much less been in one on
+business, and he had a naive and childlike desire to walk into one
+of the big banks down in Oakland and fling down his indorsed check
+for forty dollars.  On the other hand, practical common sense ruled
+that he should cash it with his grocer and thereby make an
+impression that would later result in an increase of credit.
+Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying his
+bill with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of
+jingling coin.  Also, he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed
+his suit and his bicycle, paid one month's rent on the type-writer,
+and paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month in
+advance.  This left him in his pocket, for emergencies, a balance
+of nearly three dollars.
+
+In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune.  Immediately on
+recovering his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he
+could not refrain from jingling the little handful of silver in his
+pocket.  He had been so long without money that, like a rescued
+starving man who cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight,
+Martin could not keep his hand off the silver.  He was not mean,
+nor avaricious, but the money meant more than so many dollars and
+cents.  It stood for success, and the eagles stamped upon the coins
+were to him so many winged victories.
+
+It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world.  It
+certainly appeared more beautiful to him.  For weeks it had been a
+very dull and sombre world; but now, with nearly all debts paid,
+three dollars jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the
+consciousness of success, the sun shone bright and warm, and even a
+rain-squall that soaked unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry
+happening to him.  When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often
+upon the thousands he knew were starving the world over; but now
+that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands starving was no
+longer pregnant in his brain.  He forgot about them, and, being in
+love, remembered the countless lovers in the world.  Without
+deliberately thinking about it, MOTIFS for love-lyrics began to
+agitate his brain.  Swept away by the creative impulse, he got off
+the electric car, without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.
+
+He found a number of persons in the Morse home.  Ruth's two girl-
+cousins were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under
+pretext of entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding
+Ruth with young people.  The campaign had begun during Martin's
+enforced absence, and was already in full swing.  She was making a
+point of having at the house men who were doing things.  Thus, in
+addition to the cousins Dorothy and Florence, Martin encountered
+two university professors, one of Latin, the other of English; a
+young army officer just back from the Philippines, one-time school-
+mate of Ruth's; a young fellow named Melville, private secretary to
+Joseph Perkins, head of the San Francisco Trust Company; and
+finally of the men, a live bank cashier, Charles Hapgood, a
+youngish man of thirty-five, graduate of Stanford University,
+member of the Nile Club and the Unity Club, and a conservative
+speaker for the Republican Party during campaigns - in short, a
+rising young man in every way.  Among the women was one who painted
+portraits, another who was a professional musician, and still
+another who possessed the degree of Doctor of Sociology and who was
+locally famous for her social settlement work in the slums of San
+Francisco.  But the women did not count for much in Mrs. Morse's
+plan.  At the best, they were necessary accessories.  The men who
+did things must be drawn to the house somehow.
+
+"Don't get excited when you talk," Ruth admonished Martin, before
+the ordeal of introduction began.
+
+He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his
+own awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to
+their old trick of threatening destruction to furniture and
+ornaments.  Also, he was rendered self-conscious by the company.
+He had never before been in contact with such exalted beings nor
+with so many of them.  Melville, the bank cashier, fascinated him,
+and he resolved to investigate him at the first opportunity.  For
+underneath Martin's awe lurked his assertive ego, and he felt the
+urge to measure himself with these men and women and to find out
+what they had learned from the books and life which he had not
+learned.
+
+Ruth's eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on,
+and she was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got
+acquainted with her cousins.  He certainly did not grow excited,
+while being seated removed from him the worry of his shoulders.
+Ruth knew them for clever girls, superficially brilliant, and she
+could scarcely understand their praise of Martin later that night
+at going to bed.  But he, on the other hand, a wit in his own
+class, a gay quizzer and laughter-maker at dances and Sunday
+picnics, had found the making of fun and the breaking of good-
+natured lances simple enough in this environment.  And on this
+evening success stood at his back, patting him on the shoulder and
+telling him that he was making good, so that he could afford to
+laugh and make laughter and remain unabashed.
+
+Later, Ruth's anxiety found justification.  Martin and Professor
+Caldwell had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though
+Martin no longer wove the air with his hands, to Ruth's critical
+eye he permitted his own eyes to flash and glitter too frequently,
+talked too rapidly and warmly, grew too intense, and allowed his
+aroused blood to redden his cheeks too much.  He lacked decorum and
+control, and was in decided contrast to the young professor of
+English with whom he talked.
+
+But Martin was not concerned with appearances!  He had been swift
+to note the other's trained mind and to appreciate his command of
+knowledge.  Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize
+Martin's concept of the average English professor.  Martin wanted
+him to talk shop, and, though he seemed averse at first, succeeded
+in making him do it.  For Martin did not see why a man should not
+talk shop.
+
+"It's absurd and unfair," he had told Ruth weeks before, "this
+objection to talking shop.  For what reason under the sun do men
+and women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is
+in them?  And the best that is in them is what they are interested
+in, the thing by which they make their living, the thing they've
+specialized on and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed
+about.  Imagine Mr. Butler living up to social etiquette and
+enunciating his views on Paul Verlaine or the German drama or the
+novels of D'Annunzio.  We'd be bored to death.  I, for one, if I
+must listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear him talk about his law.
+It's the best that is in him, and life is so short that I want the
+best of every man and woman I meet."
+
+"But," Ruth had objected, "there are the topics of general interest
+to all."
+
+"There, you mistake," he had rushed on.  "All persons in society,
+all cliques in society - or, rather, nearly all persons and cliques
+- ape their betters.  Now, who are the best betters?  The idlers,
+the wealthy idlers.  They do not know, as a rule, the things known
+by the persons who are doing something in the world.  To listen to
+conversation about such things would mean to be bored, wherefore
+the idlers decree that such things are shop and must not be talked
+about.  Likewise they decree the things that are not shop and which
+may be talked about, and those things are the latest operas, latest
+novels, cards, billiards, cocktails, automobiles, horse shows,
+trout fishing, tuna-fishing, big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and
+so forth - and mark you, these are the things the idlers know.  In
+all truth, they constitute the shop-talk of the idlers.  And the
+funniest part of it is that many of the clever people, and all the
+would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to impose upon them.
+As for me, I want the best a man's got in him, call it shop
+vulgarity or anything you please."
+
+And Ruth had not understood.  This attack of his on the established
+had seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.
+
+So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness,
+challenging him to speak his mind.  As Ruth paused beside them she
+heard Martin saying:-
+
+"You surely don't pronounce such heresies in the University of
+California?"
+
+Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders.  "The honest taxpayer
+and the politician, you know.  Sacramento gives us our
+appropriations and therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the
+Board of Regents, and to the party press, or to the press of both
+parties."
+
+"Yes, that's clear; but how about you?" Martin urged.  "You must be
+a fish out of the water."
+
+"Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond.  Sometimes I am
+fairly sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris,
+in Grub Street, in a hermit's cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian
+crowd, drinking claret, - dago-red they call it in San Francisco, -
+dining in cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing
+vociferously radical views upon all creation.  Really, I am
+frequently almost sure that I was cut out to be a radical.  But
+then, there are so many questions on which I am not sure.  I grow
+timid when I am face to face with my human frailty, which ever
+prevents me from grasping all the factors in any problem - human,
+vital problems, you know."
+
+And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had
+come the "Song of the Trade Wind":-
+
+
+"I am strongest at noon,
+But under the moon
+I stiffen the bunt of the sail."
+
+
+He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the
+other reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade,
+steady, and cool, and strong.  He was equable, he was to be relied
+upon, and withal there was a certain bafflement about him.  Martin
+had the feeling that he never spoke his full mind, just as he had
+often had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest
+but always held reserves of strength that were never used.
+Martin's trick of visioning was active as ever.  His brain was a
+most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its
+contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection.
+Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin's mind immediately
+presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily
+expressed themselves to him in vision.  It was sheerly automatic,
+and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living
+present.  Just as Ruth's face, in a momentary jealousy had called
+before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor
+Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white
+billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not
+disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new memory-
+visions rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were
+thrown upon the screen of his consciousness.  These visions came
+out of the actions and sensations of the past, out of things and
+events and books of yesterday and last week - a countless host of
+apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever thronged his mind.
+
+So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell's easy flow of
+speech - the conversation of a clever, cultured man - that Martin
+kept seeing himself down all his past.  He saw himself when he had
+been quite the hoodlum, wearing a "stiff-rim" Stetson hat and a
+square-cut, double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the
+shoulders and possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police
+permitted.  He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to
+palliate it.  At one time in his life he had been just a common
+hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the police and
+terrorized honest, working-class householders.  But his ideals had
+changed.  He glanced about him at the well-bred, well-dressed men
+and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere of culture
+and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his early
+youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness,
+stalked across the room.  This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he
+saw merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual
+university professor.
+
+For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place.  He
+had fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and
+everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by
+his willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command
+respect.  But he had never taken root.  He had fitted in
+sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself.  He
+had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always
+the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on through life
+seeking it until he found books and art and love.  And here he was,
+in the midst of all this, the only one of all the comrades he had
+adventured with who could have made themselves eligible for the
+inside of the Morse home.
+
+But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following
+Professor Caldwell closely.  And as he followed, comprehendingly
+and critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other's
+knowledge.  As for himself, from moment to moment the conversation
+showed him gaps and open stretches, whole subjects with which he
+was unfamiliar.  Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that
+he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge.  It was a
+matter only of time, when he would fill in the outline.  Then watch
+out, he thought - 'ware shoal, everybody!  He felt like sitting at
+the feet of the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but, as he
+listened, he began to discern a weakness in the other's judgments -
+a weakness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught it
+had it not been ever present.  And when he did catch it, he leapt
+to equality at once.
+
+Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.
+
+"I'll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your
+judgments," he said.  "You lack biology.  It has no place in your
+scheme of things. - Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology,
+from the ground up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the
+vitalized inorganic right on up to the widest aesthetic and
+sociological generalizations."
+
+Ruth was appalled.  She had sat two lecture courses under Professor
+Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all
+knowledge.
+
+"I scarcely follow you," he said dubiously.
+
+Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.
+
+"Then I'll try to explain," he said.  "I remember reading in
+Egyptian history something to the effect that understanding could
+not be had of Egyptian art without first studying the land
+question."
+
+"Quite right," the professor nodded.
+
+"And it seems to me," Martin continued, "that knowledge of the land
+question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had
+without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of
+life.  How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and
+customs, without understanding, not merely the nature of the
+creatures that made them, but the nature of the stuff out of which
+the creatures are made?  Is literature less human than the
+architecture and sculpture of Egypt?  Is there one thing in the
+known universe that is not subject to the law of evolution? - Oh, I
+know there is an elaborate evolution of the various arts laid down,
+but it seems to me to be too mechanical.  The human himself is left
+out.  The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music and song and
+dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the evolution
+of the human himself, the development of the basic and intrinsic
+parts that were in him before he made his first tool or gibbered
+his first chant?  It is that which you do not consider, and which I
+call biology.  It is biology in its largest aspects.
+
+"I know I express myself incoherently, but I've tried to hammer out
+the idea.  It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed
+and ready to deliver it.  You spoke yourself of the human frailty
+that prevented one from taking all the factors into consideration.
+And you, in turn, - or so it seems to me, - leave out the
+biological factor, the very stuff out of which has been spun the
+fabric of all the arts, the warp and the woof of all human actions
+and achievements."
+
+To Ruth's amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that
+the professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance
+for Martin's youth.  Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute,
+silent and fingering his watch chain.
+
+"Do you know," he said at last, "I've had that same criticism
+passed on me once before - by a very great man, a scientist and
+evolutionist, Joseph Le Conte.  But he is dead, and I thought to
+remain undetected; and now you come along and expose me.
+Seriously, though - and this is confession - I think there is
+something in your contention - a great deal, in fact.  I am too
+classical, not enough up-to-date in the interpretative branches of
+science, and I can only plead the disadvantages of my education and
+a temperamental slothfulness that prevents me from doing the work.
+I wonder if you'll believe that I've never been inside a physics or
+chemistry laboratory?  It is true, nevertheless.  Le Conte was
+right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to an extent - how much I
+do not know."
+
+Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him
+aside, whispering:-
+
+"You shouldn't have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way.  There
+may be others who want to talk with him."
+
+"My mistake," Martin admitted contritely.  "But I'd got him stirred
+up, and he was so interesting that I did not think.  Do you know,
+he is the brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked
+with.  And I'll tell you something else.  I once thought that
+everybody who went to universities, or who sat in the high places
+in society, was just as brilliant and intelligent as he."
+
+"He's an exception," she answered.
+
+"I should say so.  Whom do you want me to talk to now? - Oh, say,
+bring me up against that cashier-fellow."
+
+Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have
+wished better behavior on her lover's part.  Not once did his eyes
+flash nor his cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which
+he talked surprised her.  But in Martin's estimation the whole
+tribe of bank cashiers fell a few hundred per cent, and for the
+rest of the evening he labored under the impression that bank
+cashiers and talkers of platitudes were synonymous phrases.  The
+army officer he found good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome
+young fellow, content to occupy the place in life into which birth
+and luck had flung him.  On learning that he had completed two
+years in the university, Martin was puzzled to know where he had
+stored it away.  Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the
+platitudinous bank cashier.
+
+"I really don't object to platitudes," he told Ruth later; "but
+what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent,
+superior certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken
+to do it.  Why, I could give that man the whole history of the
+Reformation in the time he took to tell me that the Union-Labor
+Party had fused with the Democrats.  Do you know, he skins his
+words as a professional poker-player skins the cards that are dealt
+out to him.  Some day I'll show you what I mean."
+
+"I'm sorry you don't like him," was her reply.  "He's a favorite of
+Mr. Butler's.  Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest - calls him
+the Rock, Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can
+well be built."
+
+"I don't doubt it - from the little I saw of him and the less I
+heard from him; but I don't think so much of banks as I did.  You
+don't mind my speaking my mind this way, dear?"
+
+"No, no; it is most interesting."
+
+"Yes," Martin went on heartily, "I'm no more than a barbarian
+getting my first impressions of civilization.  Such impressions
+must be entertainingly novel to the civilized person."
+
+"What did you think of my cousins?" Ruth queried.
+
+"I liked them better than the other women.  There's plenty of fun
+in them along with paucity of pretence."
+
+"Then you did like the other women?"
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-
+parrot.  I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like
+Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought.
+As for the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore.  She'd make a
+good wife for the cashier.  And the musician woman!  I don't care
+how nimble her fingers are, how perfect her technique, how
+wonderful her expression - the fact is, she knows nothing about
+music."
+
+"She plays beautifully," Ruth protested.
+
+"Yes, she's undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but
+the intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her.  I asked her
+what music meant to her - you know I'm always curious to know that
+particular thing; and she did not know what it meant to her, except
+that she adored it, that it was the greatest of the arts, and that
+it meant more than life to her."
+
+"You were making them talk shop," Ruth charged him.
+
+"I confess it.  And if they were failures on shop, imagine my
+sufferings if they had discoursed on other subjects.  Why, I used
+to think that up here, where all the advantages of culture were
+enjoyed - "  He paused for a moment, and watched the youthful shade
+of himself, in stiff-rim and square-cut, enter the door and swagger
+across the room.  "As I was saying, up here I thought all men and
+women were brilliant and radiant.  But now, from what little I've
+seen of them, they strike me as a pack of ninnies, most of them,
+and ninety percent of the remainder as bores.  Now there's
+Professor Caldwell - he's different.  He's a man, every inch of him
+and every atom of his gray matter."
+
+Ruth's face brightened.
+
+"Tell me about him," she urged.  "Not what is large and brilliant -
+I know those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse.  I am
+most curious to know."
+
+"Perhaps I'll get myself in a pickle."  Martin debated humorously
+for a moment.  "Suppose you tell me first.  Or maybe you find in
+him nothing less than the best."
+
+"I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for
+two years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression."
+
+"Bad impression, you mean?  Well, here goes.  He is all the fine
+things you think about him, I guess.  At least, he is the finest
+specimen of intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a
+secret shame."
+
+"Oh, no, no!" he hastened to cry.  "Nothing paltry nor vulgar.
+What I mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the
+bottom of things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes
+believe to himself that he never saw it.  Perhaps that's not the
+clearest way to express it.  Here's another way.  A man who has
+found the path to the hidden temple but has not followed it; who
+has, perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and striven afterward
+to convince himself that it was only a mirage of foliage.  Yet
+another way.  A man who could have done things but who placed no
+value on the doing, and who, all the time, in his innermost heart,
+is regretting that he has not done them; who has secretly laughed
+at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned
+for the rewards and for the joy of doing."
+
+"I don't read him that way," she said.  "And for that matter, I
+don't see just what you mean."
+
+"It is only a vague feeling on my part," Martin temporized.  "I
+have no reason for it.  It is only a feeling, and most likely it is
+wrong.  You certainly should know him better than I."
+
+From the evening at Ruth's Martin brought away with him strange
+confusions and conflicting feelings.  He was disappointed in his
+goal, in the persons he had climbed to be with.  On the other hand,
+he was encouraged with his success.  The climb had been easier than
+he expected.  He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with
+false modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings
+among whom he had climbed - with the exception, of course, of
+Professor Caldwell.  About life and the books he knew more than
+they, and he wondered into what nooks and crannies they had cast
+aside their educations.  He did not know that he was himself
+possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did he know that the persons
+who were given to probing the depths and to thinking ultimate
+thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of the world's
+Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely eagles
+sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its
+swarming freight of gregarious life.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+
+But success had lost Martin's address, and her messengers no longer
+came to his door.  For twenty-five days, working Sundays and
+holidays, he toiled on "The Shame of the Sun," a long essay of some
+thirty thousand words.  It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism
+of the Maeterlinck school - an attack from the citadel of positive
+science upon the wonder-dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that
+retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with
+ascertained fact.  It was a little later that he followed up the
+attack with two short essays, "The Wonder-Dreamers" and "The
+Yardstick of the Ego."  And on essays, long and short, he began to
+pay the travelling expenses from magazine to magazine.
+
+During the twenty-five days spent on "The Shame of the Sun," he
+sold hack-work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents.  A
+joke had brought in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-
+grade comic weekly, had fetched a dollar.  Then two humorous poems
+had earned two dollars and three dollars respectively.  As a
+result, having exhausted his credit with the tradesmen (though he
+had increased his credit with the grocer to five dollars), his
+wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker.  The type-
+writer people were again clamoring for money, insistently pointing
+out that according to the agreement rent was to be paid strictly in
+advance.
+
+Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack-
+work.  Perhaps there was a living in it, after all.  Stored away
+under his table were the twenty storiettes which had been rejected
+by the newspaper short-story syndicate.  He read them over in order
+to find out how not to write newspaper storiettes, and so doing,
+reasoned out the perfect formula.  He found that the newspaper
+storiette should never be tragic, should never end unhappily, and
+should never contain beauty of language, subtlety of thought, nor
+real delicacy of sentiment.  Sentiment it must contain, plenty of
+it, pure and noble, of the sort that in his own early youth had
+brought his applause from "nigger heaven" - the "For-God-my-
+country-and-the-Czar" and "I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest" brand of
+sentiment.
+
+Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted "The Duchess" for
+tone, and proceeded to mix according to formula.  The formula
+consists of three parts:  (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart;
+(2) by some deed or event they are reunited; (3) marriage bells.
+The third part was an unvarying quantity, but the first and second
+parts could be varied an infinite number of times.  Thus, the pair
+of lovers could be jarred apart by misunderstood motives, by
+accident of fate, by jealous rivals, by irate parents, by crafty
+guardians, by scheming relatives, and so forth and so forth; they
+could be reunited by a brave deed of the man lover, by a similar
+deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one lover or the
+other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming relative,
+or jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same, by discovery of
+some unguessed secret, by lover storming girl's heart, by lover
+making long and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly.  It was
+very fetching to make the girl propose in the course of being
+reunited, and Martin discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly
+piquant and fetching ruses.  But marriage bells at the end was the
+one thing he could take no liberties with; though the heavens
+rolled up as a scroll and the stars fell, the wedding bells must go
+on ringing just the same.  In quantity, the formula prescribed
+twelve hundred words minimum dose, fifteen hundred words maximum
+dose.
+
+Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin
+worked out half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when
+constructing storiettes.  These forms were like the cunning tables
+used by mathematicians, which may be entered from top, bottom,
+right, and left, which entrances consist of scores of lines and
+dozens of columns, and from which may be drawn, without reasoning
+or thinking, thousands of different conclusions, all unchallengably
+precise and true.  Thus, in the course of half an hour with his
+forms, Martin could frame up a dozen or so storiettes, which he put
+aside and filled in at his convenience.  He found that he could
+fill one in, after a day of serious work, in the hour before going
+to bed.  As he later confessed to Ruth, he could almost do it in
+his sleep.  The real work was in constructing the frames, and that
+was merely mechanical.
+
+He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for
+once he knew the editorial mind when he said positively to himself
+that the first two he sent off would bring checks.  And checks they
+brought, for four dollars each, at the end of twelve days.
+
+In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries
+concerning the magazines.  Though the TRANSCONTINENTAL had
+published "The Ring of Bells," no check was forthcoming.  Martin
+needed it, and he wrote for it.  An evasive answer and a request
+for more of his work was all he received.  He had gone hungry two
+days waiting for the reply, and it was then that he put his wheel
+back in pawn.  He wrote regularly, twice a week, to the
+TRANSCONTINENTAL for his five dollars, though it was only semi-
+occasionally that he elicited a reply.  He did not know that the
+TRANSCONTINENTAL had been staggering along precariously for years,
+that it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing, with
+a crazy circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and partly
+on patriotic appealing, and with advertisements that were scarcely
+more than charitable donations.  Nor did he know that the
+TRANSCONTINENTAL was the sole livelihood of the editor and the
+business manager, and that they could wring their livelihood out of
+it only by moving to escape paying rent and by never paying any
+bill they could evade.  Nor could he have guessed that the
+particular five dollars that belonged to him had been appropriated
+by the business manager for the painting of his house in Alameda,
+which painting he performed himself, on week-day afternoons,
+because he could not afford to pay union wages and because the
+first scab he had employed had had a ladder jerked out from under
+him and been sent to the hospital with a broken collar-bone.
+
+The ten dollars for which Martin had sold "Treasure Hunters" to the
+Chicago newspaper did not come to hand.  The article had been
+published, as he had ascertained at the file in the Central
+Reading-room, but no word could he get from the editor.  His
+letters were ignored.  To satisfy himself that they had been
+received, he registered several of them.  It was nothing less than
+robbery, he concluded - a cold-blooded steal; while he starved, he
+was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale of which
+was the sole way of getting bread to eat.
+
+YOUTH AND AGE was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his
+twenty-one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business.  With
+it went all hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.
+
+To cap the situation, "The Pot," which he looked upon as one of the
+best things he had written, was lost to him.  In despair, casting
+about frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to THE
+BILLOW, a society weekly in San Francisco.  His chief reason for
+submitting it to that publication was that, having only to travel
+across the bay from Oakland, a quick decision could be reached.
+Two weeks later he was overjoyed to see, in the latest number on
+the news-stand, his story printed in full, illustrated, and in the
+place of honor.  He went home with leaping pulse, wondering how
+much they would pay him for one of the best things he had done.
+Also, the celerity with which it had been accepted and published
+was a pleasant thought to him.  That the editor had not informed
+him of the acceptance made the surprise more complete.  After
+waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation
+conquered diffidence, and he wrote to the editor of THE BILLOW,
+suggesting that possibly through some negligence of the business
+manager his little account had been overlooked.
+
+Even if it isn't more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself,
+it will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a
+dozen like it, and possibly as good.
+
+Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least elicited
+Martin's admiration.
+
+"We thank you," it ran, "for your excellent contribution.  All of
+us in the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was
+given the place of honor and immediate publication.  We earnestly
+hope that you liked the illustrations.
+
+"On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring
+under the misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts.
+This is not our custom, and of course yours was unsolicited.  We
+assumed, naturally, when we received your story, that you
+understood the situation.  We can only deeply regret this
+unfortunate misunderstanding, and assure you of our unfailing
+regard.  Again, thanking you for your kind contribution, and hoping
+to receive more from you in the near future, we remain, etc."
+
+There was also a postscript to the effect that though THE BILLOW
+carried no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a
+complimentary subscription for the ensuing year.
+
+After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet
+of all his manuscripts:  "Submitted at your usual rate."
+
+Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at MY usual
+rate.
+
+He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection,
+under the sway of which he rewrote and polished "The Jostling
+Street," "The Wine of Life," "Joy," the "Sea Lyrics," and others of
+his earlier work.  As of old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all
+too little to suit him.  He wrote prodigiously, and he read
+prodigiously, forgetting in his toil the pangs caused by giving up
+his tobacco.  Ruth's promised cure for the habit, flamboyantly
+labelled, he stowed away in the most inaccessible corner of his
+bureau.  Especially during his stretches of famine he suffered from
+lack of the weed; but no matter how often he mastered the craving,
+it remained with him as strong as ever.  He regarded it as the
+biggest thing he had ever achieved.  Ruth's point of view was that
+he was doing no more than was right.  She brought him the anti-
+tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, and in a few days
+forgot all about it.
+
+His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them,
+were successful.  By means of them he redeemed all his pledges,
+paid most of his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his
+wheel.  The storiettes at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him
+time for ambitious work; while the one thing that upheld him was
+the forty dollars he had received from THE WHITE MOUSE.  He
+anchored his faith to that, and was confident that the really
+first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer at least an equal
+rate, if not a better one.  But the thing was, how to get into the
+first-class magazines.  His best stories, essays, and poems went
+begging among them, and yet, each month, he read reams of dull,
+prosy, inartistic stuff between all their various covers.  If only
+one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat
+of pride to write me one cheering line!  No matter if my work is
+unusual, no matter if it is unfit, for prudential reasons, for
+their pages, surely there must be some sparks in it, somewhere, a
+few, to warm them to some sort of appreciation.  And thereupon he
+would get out one or another of his manuscripts, such as
+"Adventure," and read it over and over in a vain attempt to
+vindicate the editorial silence.
+
+As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came
+to an end.  For several weeks he had been worried by a strange
+silence on the part of the newspaper storiette syndicate.  Then,
+one day, came back to him through the mail ten of his immaculate
+machine-made storiettes.  They were accompanied by a brief letter
+to the effect that the syndicate was overstocked, and that some
+months would elapse before it would be in the market again for
+manuscripts.  Martin had even been extravagant m the strength of
+those on ten storiettes.  Toward the last the syndicate had been
+paying him five dollars each for them and accepting every one he
+sent.  So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had
+lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank.  So it
+was that he entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he
+continued selling his earlier efforts to publications that would
+not pay and submitting his later work to magazines that would not
+buy.  Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker down in
+Oakland.  A few jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the
+New York weeklies, made existence barely possible for him.  It was
+at this time that he wrote letters of inquiry to the several great
+monthly and quarterly reviews, and learned in reply that they
+rarely considered unsolicited articles, and that most of their
+contents were written upon order by well-known specialists who were
+authorities in their various fields.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+
+It was a hard summer for Martin.  Manuscript readers and editors
+were away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a
+decision in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three
+months or more.  The consolation he drew from it was that a saving
+in postage was effected by the deadlock.  Only the robber-
+publications seemed to remain actively in business, and to them
+Martin disposed of all his early efforts, such as "Pearl-diving,"
+"The Sea as a Career," "Turtle-catching," and "The Northeast
+Trades."  For these manuscripts he never received a penny.  It is
+true, after six months' correspondence, he effected a compromise,
+whereby he received a safety razor for "Turtle-catching," and that
+THE ACROPOLIS, having agreed to give him five dollars cash and five
+yearly subscriptions:  for "The Northeast Trades," fulfilled the
+second part of the agreement.
+
+For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a
+Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold
+taste and a penny-dreadful purse.  "The Peri and the Pearl," a
+clever skit of a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white
+hot from his brain, won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco
+magazine published in the interest of a great railroad.  When the
+editor wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin wrote
+back to inquire if the transportation was transferable.  It was
+not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the
+return of the poem.  Back it came, with the editor's regrets, and
+Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to THE HORNET, a
+pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation of
+the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist who founded it.
+But THE HORNET'S light had begun to dim long before Martin was
+born.  The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the poem,
+but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it.  Several of
+his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew
+a reply.  It was written by a new editor, who coolly informed
+Martin that he declined to be held responsible for the old editor's
+mistakes, and that he did not think much of "The Peri and the
+Pearl" anyway.
+
+But THE GLOBE, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel
+treatment of all.  He had refrained from offering his "Sea Lyrics"
+for publication, until driven to it by starvation.  After having
+been rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in THE
+GLOBE office.  There were thirty poems in the collection, and he
+was to receive a dollar apiece for them.  The first month four were
+published, and he promptly received a cheek for four dollars; but
+when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter.
+In some cases the titles had been altered:  "Finis," for instance,
+being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to
+"The Song of the Coral Reef."  In one case, an absolutely different
+title, a misappropriate title, was substituted.  In place of his
+own, "Medusa Lights," the editor had printed, "The Backward Track."
+But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying.  Martin
+groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair.
+Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled
+about in the most incomprehensible manner.  Sometimes lines and
+stanzas not his own were substituted for his.  He could not believe
+that a sane editor could be guilty of such maltreatment, and his
+favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have been doctored by
+the office boy or the stenographer.  Martin wrote immediately,
+begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to return
+them to him.
+
+He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
+letters were ignored.  Month by month the slaughter went on till
+the thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a
+check for those which had appeared in the current number.
+
+Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the WHITE MOUSE
+forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and
+more to hack-work.  He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the
+agricultural weeklies and trade journals, though among the
+religious weeklies he found he could easily starve.  At his lowest
+ebb, when his black suit was in pawn, he made a ten-strike - or so
+it seemed to him - in a prize contest arranged by the County
+Committee of the Republican Party.  There were three branches of
+the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at himself bitterly
+the while in that he was driven to such straits to live.  His poem
+won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second
+prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the
+Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars.  Which was
+very gratifying to him until he tried to collect.  Something had
+gone wrong in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a
+state senator were members of it, the money was not forthcoming.
+While this affair was hanging fire, he proved that he understood
+the principles of the Democratic Party by winning the first prize
+for his essay in a similar contest.  And, moreover, he received the
+money, twenty-five dollars.  But the forty dollars won in the first
+contest he never received.
+
+Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long
+walk from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too
+much time, he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle.
+The latter gave him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and
+enabled him to see Ruth just the same.  A pair of knee duck
+trousers and an old sweater made him a presentable wheel costume,
+so that he could go with Ruth on afternoon rides.  Besides, he no
+longer had opportunity to see much of her in her own home, where
+Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her campaign of
+entertainment.  The exalted beings he met there, and to whom he had
+looked up but a short time before, now bored him.  They were no
+longer exalted.  He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard
+times, disappointments, and close application to work, and the
+conversation of such people was maddening.  He was not unduly
+egotistic.  He measured the narrowness of their minds by the minds
+of the thinkers in the books he read.  At Ruth's home he never met
+a large mind, with the exception of Professor Caldwell, and
+Caldwell he had met there only once.  As for the rest, they were
+numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant.  It was
+their ignorance that astounded him.  What was the matter with them?
+What had they done with their educations?  They had had access to
+the same books he had.  How did it happen that they had drawn
+nothing from them?
+
+He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers,
+existed.  He had his proofs from the books, the books that had
+educated him beyond the Morse standard.  And he knew that higher
+intellects than those of the Morse circle were to be found in the
+world.  He read English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses
+of men and women talking politics and philosophy.  And he read of
+salons in great cities, even in the United States, where art and
+intellect congregated.  Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived
+that all well-groomed persons above the working class were persons
+with power of intellect and vigor of beauty.  Culture and collars
+had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing
+that college educations and mastery were the same things.
+
+Well, he would fight his way on and up higher.  And he would take
+Ruth with him.  Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she
+would shine anywhere.  As it was clear to him that he had been
+handicapped by his early environment, so now he perceived that she
+was similarly handicapped.  She had not had a chance to expand.
+The books on her father's shelves, the paintings on the walls, the
+music on the piano - all was just so much meretricious display.  To
+real literature, real painting, real music, the Morses and their
+kind, were dead.  And bigger than such things was life, of which
+they were densely, hopelessly ignorant.  In spite of their
+Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative
+broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative
+science:  their mental processes were mediaeval, while their
+thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
+struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
+youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older - the same that
+moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved
+the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam's rib;
+that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe
+out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the
+famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so
+scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a
+notorious scrawl on the page of history.
+
+So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him
+that the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men,
+and bank cashiers he had met and the members of the working class
+he had known was on a par with the difference in the food they ate,
+clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they lived.  Certainly,
+in all of them was lacking the something more which he found in
+himself and in the books.  The Morses had shown him the best their
+social position could produce, and he was not impressed by it.  A
+pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the
+superior of those he met at the Morses'; and, when his one decent
+suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of
+life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would
+suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.
+
+"You hate and fear the socialists," he remarked to Mr. Morse, one
+evening at dinner; "but why?  You know neither them nor their
+doctrines."
+
+The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse,
+who had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood.  The
+cashier was Martin's black beast, and his temper was a trifle short
+where the talker of platitudes was concerned.
+
+"Yes," he had said, "Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising
+young man - somebody told me as much.  And it is true.  He'll make
+the Governor's Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the
+United States Senate."
+
+"What makes you think so?" Mrs. Morse had inquired.
+
+"I've heard him make a campaign speech.  It was so cleverly stupid
+and unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot
+help but regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so
+much like the platitudes of the average voter that - oh, well, you
+know you flatter any man by dressing up his own thoughts for him
+and presenting them to him."
+
+"I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood," Ruth had chimed
+in.
+
+"Heaven forbid!"
+
+The look of horror on Martin's face stirred Mrs. Morse to
+belligerence.
+
+"You surely don't mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?" she
+demanded icily.
+
+"No more than the average Republican," was the retort, "or average
+Democrat, either.  They are all stupid when they are not crafty,
+and very few of them are crafty.  The only wise Republicans are the
+millionnaires and their conscious henchmen.  They know which side
+their bread is buttered on, and they know why."
+
+"I am a Republican," Mr. Morse put in lightly.  "Pray, how do you
+classify me?"
+
+"Oh, you are an unconscious henchman."
+
+"Henchman?"
+
+"Why, yes.  You do corporation work.  You have no working-class nor
+criminal practice.  You don't depend upon wife-beaters and
+pickpockets for your income.  You get your livelihood from the
+masters of society, and whoever feeds a man is that man's master.
+Yes, you are a henchman.  You are interested in advancing the
+interests of the aggregations of capital you serve."
+
+Mr. Morse's face was a trifle red.
+
+"I confess, sir," he said, "that you talk like a scoundrelly
+socialist."
+
+Then it was that Martin made his remark:
+
+"You hate and fear the socialists; but why?  You know neither them
+nor their doctrines."
+
+"Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism," Mr. Morse replied,
+while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse
+beamed happily at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege
+lord's antagonism.
+
+"Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty,
+equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a
+socialist," Martin said with a smile.  "Because I question
+Jefferson and the unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind,
+does not make me a socialist.  Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far
+nearer socialism than I who am its avowed enemy."
+
+"Now you please to be facetious," was all the other could say.
+
+"Not at all.  I speak in all seriousness.  You still believe in
+equality, and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the
+corporations, from day to day, are busily engaged in burying
+equality.  And you call me a socialist because I deny equality,
+because I affirm just what you live up to.  The Republicans are
+foes to equality, though most of them fight the battle against
+equality with the very word itself the slogan on their lips.  In
+the name of equality they destroy equality.  That was why I called
+them stupid.  As for myself, I am an individualist.  I believe the
+race is to the swift, the battle to the strong.  Such is the lesson
+I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned.  As
+I said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary
+and eternal foe of socialism."
+
+"But you frequent socialist meetings," Mr. Morse challenged.
+
+"Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps.  How else are you
+to learn about the enemy?  Besides, I enjoy myself at their
+meetings.  They are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have
+read the books.  Any one of them knows far more about sociology and
+all the other ologies than the average captain of industry.  Yes, I
+have been to half a dozen of their meetings, but that doesn't make
+me a socialist any more than hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me
+a Republican."
+
+"I can't help it," Mr. Morse said feebly, "but I still believe you
+incline that way."
+
+Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn't know what I was
+talking about.  He hasn't understood a word of it.  What did he do
+with his education, anyway?
+
+Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with
+economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to
+him a grisly monster.  Personally, he was an intellectual moralist,
+and more offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the
+morality of those about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the
+economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.
+
+A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home.
+His sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious
+young mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly
+learning the trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair
+shop.  Also, having got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel,
+he was prosperous.  Marian had called on Martin in his room a short
+time before to announce her engagement, during which visit she had
+playfully inspected Martin's palm and told his fortune.  On her
+next visit she brought Hermann von Schmidt along with her.  Martin
+did the honors and congratulated both of them in language so easy
+and graceful as to affect disagreeably the peasant-mind of his
+sister's lover.  This bad impression was further heightened by
+Martin's reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse with which
+he had commemorated Marian's previous visit.  It was a bit of
+society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named "The Palmist."
+He was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment
+in his sister's face.  Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon
+her betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that
+worthy's asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen
+disapproval.  The incident passed over, they made an early
+departure, and Martin forgot all about it, though for the moment he
+had been puzzled that any woman, even of the working class, should
+not have been flattered and delighted by having poetry written
+about her.
+
+Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone.
+Nor did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him
+sorrowfully for what he had done.
+
+"Why, Marian," he chided, "you talk as though you were ashamed of
+your relatives, or of your brother at any rate."
+
+"And I am, too," she blurted out.
+
+Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her
+eyes.  The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.
+
+"But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing
+poetry about my own sister?"
+
+"He ain't jealous," she sobbed.  "He says it was indecent, ob -
+obscene."
+
+Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded
+to resurrect and read a carbon copy of "The Palmist."
+
+"I can't see it," he said finally, proffering the manuscript to
+her.  "Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene
+- that was the word, wasn't it?"
+
+"He says so, and he ought to know," was the answer, with a wave
+aside of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing.  "And
+he says you've got to tear it up.  He says he won't have no wife of
+his with such things written about her which anybody can read.  He
+says it's a disgrace, an' he won't stand for it."
+
+"Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense," Martin
+began; then abruptly changed his mind.
+
+He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting
+to convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was
+absurd and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.
+
+"All right," he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen
+pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.
+
+He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original
+type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York
+magazine.  Marian and her husband would never know, and neither
+himself nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless
+poem ever were published.
+
+Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.
+
+"Can I?" she pleaded.
+
+He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the
+torn pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her
+jacket - ocular evidence of the success of her mission.  She
+reminded him of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and
+gorgeous flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the
+working class whom he had seen twice.  But they were on a par, the
+pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he smiled with inward
+amusement at the caprice of his fancy which suggested the
+appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse's drawing-room.  The
+amusement faded, and he was aware of a great loneliness.  This
+sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were milestones of the
+road he had travelled.  And he had left them behind.  He glanced
+affectionately about him at his few books.  They were all the
+comrades left to him.
+
+"Hello, what's that?" he demanded in startled surprise.
+
+Marian repeated her question.
+
+"Why don't I go to work?"  He broke into a laugh that was only
+half-hearted.  "That Hermann of yours has been talking to you."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Don't lie," he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his
+charge.
+
+"Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business;
+that when I write poetry about the girl he's keeping company with
+it's his business, but that outside of that he's got no say so.
+Understand?
+
+"So you don't think I'll succeed as a writer, eh?" he went on.
+"You think I'm no good? - that I've fallen down and am a disgrace
+to the family?"
+
+"I think it would be much better if you got a job," she said
+firmly, and he saw she was sincere.  "Hermann says - "
+
+"Damn Hermann!" he broke out good-naturedly.  "What I want to know
+is when you're going to get married.  Also, you find out from your
+Hermann if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present
+from me."
+
+He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice
+broke out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and
+her betrothed, all the members of his own class and the members of
+Ruth's class, directing their narrow little lives by narrow little
+formulas - herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their
+lives by one another's opinions, failing of being individuals and
+of really living life because of the childlike formulas by which
+they were enslaved.  He summoned them before him in apparitional
+procession:  Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler,
+Hermann von Schmidt cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by
+one and in pairs he judged them and dismissed them - judged them by
+the standards of intellect and morality he had learned from the
+books.  Vainly he asked:  Where are the great souls, the great men
+and women?  He found them not among the careless, gross, and stupid
+intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow room.
+He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her
+swine.  When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself
+alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and unsummoned.  Martin
+watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted
+coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had
+once been he.
+
+"You were like all the rest, young fellow," Martin sneered.  "Your
+morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs.  You did
+not think and act for yourself.  Your opinions, like your clothes,
+were ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval.  You
+were cock of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing.
+You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to, - you know
+you really despised it, - but because the other fellows patted you
+on the shoulder.  You licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn't give
+in, and you wouldn't give in partly because you were an abysmal
+brute and for the rest because you believed what every one about
+you believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivorous
+ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow-creatures'
+anatomies.  Why, you whelp, you even won other fellows' girls away
+from them, not because you wanted the girls, but because in the
+marrow of those about you, those who set your moral pace, was the
+instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal.  Well, the years
+have passed, and what do you think about it now?"
+
+As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis.  The
+stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder
+garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of
+the eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from
+an inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge.  The
+apparition was very like his present self, and, as he regarded it,
+he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book
+over which it pored.  He glanced at the title and read, "The
+Science of AEsthetics."  Next, he entered into the apparition,
+trimmed the student-lamp, and himself went on reading "The Science
+of AEsthetics."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+
+On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that
+which had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his
+"Love-cycle" to Ruth.  It was in the afternoon, and, as before,
+they had ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills.  Now and
+again she had interrupted his reading with exclamations of
+pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with its
+fellows, he waited her judgment.
+
+She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating
+to frame in words the harshness of her thought.
+
+"I think they are beautiful, very beautiful," she said; "but you
+can't sell them, can you?  You see what I mean," she said, almost
+pleaded.  "This writing of yours is not practical.  Something is
+the matter - maybe it is with the market - that prevents you from
+earning a living by it.  And please, dear, don't misunderstand me.
+I am flattered, and made proud, and all that - I could not be a
+true woman were it otherwise - that you should write these poems to
+me.  But they do not make our marriage possible.  Don't you see,
+Martin?  Don't think me mercenary.  It is love, the thought of our
+future, with which I am burdened.  A whole year has gone by since
+we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no nearer.
+Don't think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
+really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake.  Why don't you try
+to get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing?
+Why not become a reporter? - for a while, at least?"
+
+"It would spoil my style," was his answer, in a low, monotonous
+voice.  "You have no idea how I've worked for style."
+
+"But those storiettes," she argued.  "You called them hack-work.
+You wrote many of them.  Didn't they spoil your style?"
+
+"No, the cases are different.  The storiettes were ground out,
+jaded, at the end of a long day of application to style.  But a
+reporter's work is all hack from morning till night, is the one
+paramount thing of life.  And it is a whirlwind life, the life of
+the moment, with neither past nor future, and certainly without
+thought of any style but reportorial style, and that certainly is
+not literature.  To become a reporter now, just as my style is
+taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide.
+As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a
+violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty.
+I tell you it was sickening.  I was guilty of sin.  And I was
+secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go
+into pawn.  But the joy of writing the 'Love-cycle'!  The creative
+joy in its noblest form!  That was compensation for everything."
+
+Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the
+creative joy.  She used the phrase - it was on her lips he had
+first heard it.  She had read about it, studied about it, in the
+university in the course of earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but
+she was not original, not creative, and all manifestations of
+culture on her part were but harpings of the harpings of others.
+
+"May not the editor have been right in his revision of your 'Sea
+Lyrics'?" she questioned.  "Remember, an editor must have proved
+qualifications or else he would not be an editor."
+
+"That's in line with the persistence of the established," he
+rejoined, his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of
+him.  "What is, is not only right, but is the best possible.  The
+existence of anything is sufficient vindication of its fitness to
+exist - to exist, mark you, as the average person unconsciously
+believes, not merely in present conditions, but in all conditions.
+It is their ignorance, of course, that makes them believe such rot
+- their ignorance, which is nothing more nor less than the
+henidical mental process described by Weininger.  They think they
+think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the lives
+of the few who really think."
+
+He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking
+over Ruth's head.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know who this Weininger is," she retorted.  "And
+you are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you.  What I
+was speaking of was the qualification of editors - "
+
+"And I'll tell you," he interrupted.  "The chief qualification of
+ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure.  They have failed
+as writers.  Don't think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and
+the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the
+joy of writing.  They have tried to write, and they have failed.
+And right there is the cursed paradox of it.  Every portal to
+success in literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures
+in literature.  The editors, sub-editors, associate editors, most
+of them, and the manuscript-readers for the magazines and book-
+publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to
+write and who have failed.  And yet they, of all creatures under
+the sun the most unfit, are the very creatures who decide what
+shall and what shall not find its way into print - they, who have
+proved themselves not original, who have demonstrated that they
+lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius.
+And after them come the reviewers, just so many more failures.
+Don't tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and attempted to
+write poetry or fiction; for they have, and they have failed.  Why,
+the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil.  But you
+know my opinion on the reviewers and the alleged critics.  There
+are great critics, but they are as rare as comets.  If I fail as a
+writer, I shall have proved for the career of editorship.  There's
+bread and butter and jam, at any rate."
+
+Ruth's mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover's views was
+buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.
+
+"But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you
+have shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the
+great writers ever arrived?"
+
+"They arrived by achieving the impossible," he answered.  "They did
+such blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed
+them.  They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-
+one wager against them.  They arrived because they were Carlyle's
+battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down.  And that is what
+I must do; I must achieve the impossible."
+
+"But if you fail?  You must consider me as well, Martin."
+
+"If I fail?"  He regarded her for a moment as though the thought
+she had uttered was unthinkable.  Then intelligence illumined his
+eyes.  "If I fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an
+editor's wife."
+
+She frowned at his facetiousness - a pretty, adorable frown that
+made him put his arm around her and kiss it away.
+
+"There, that's enough," she urged, by an effort of will withdrawing
+herself from the fascination of his strength.  "I have talked with
+father and mother.  I never before asserted myself so against them.
+I demanded to be heard.  I was very undutiful.  They are against
+you, you know; but I assured them over and over of my abiding love
+for you, and at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you could
+begin right away in his office.  And then, of his own accord, he
+said he would pay you enough at the start so that we could get
+married and have a little cottage somewhere.  Which I think was
+very fine of him - don't you?"
+
+Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically
+reaching for the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to
+roll a cigarette, muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went
+on.
+
+"Frankly, though, and don't let it hurt you - I tell you, to show
+you precisely how you stand with him - he doesn't like your radical
+views, and he thinks you are lazy.  Of course I know you are not.
+I know you work hard."
+
+How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin's mind.
+
+"Well, then," he said, "how about my views?  Do you think they are
+so radical?"
+
+He held her eyes and waited the answer.
+
+"I think them, well, very disconcerting," she replied.
+
+The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the
+grayness of life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had
+made for him to go to work.  And she, having gone as far as she
+dared, was willing to wait the answer till she should bring the
+question up again.
+
+She had not long to wait.  Martin had a question of his own to
+propound to her.  He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith
+in him, and within the week each was answered.  Martin precipitated
+it by reading to her his "The Shame of the Sun."
+
+"Why don't you become a reporter?" she asked when he had finished.
+"You love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed.  You could
+rise in journalism and make a name for yourself.  There are a
+number of great special correspondents.  Their salaries are large,
+and their field is the world.  They are sent everywhere, to the
+heart of Africa, like Stanley, or to interview the Pope, or to
+explore unknown Thibet."
+
+"Then you don't like my essay?" he rejoined.  "You believe that I
+have some show in journalism but none in literature?"
+
+"No, no; I do like it.  It reads well.  But I am afraid it's over
+the heads of your readers.  At least it is over mine.  It sounds
+beautiful, but I don't understand it.  Your scientific slang is
+beyond me.  You are an extremist, you know, dear, and what may be
+intelligible to you may not be intelligible to the rest of us."
+
+"I imagine it's the philosophic slang that bothers you," was all he
+could say.
+
+He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had
+expressed, and her verdict stunned him.
+
+"No matter how poorly it is done," he persisted, "don't you see
+anything in it? - in the thought of it, I mean?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"No, it is so different from anything I have read.  I read
+Maeterlinck and understand him - "
+
+"His mysticism, you understand that?" Martin flashed out.
+
+"Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon
+him, I don't understand.  Of course, if originality counts - "
+
+He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by
+speech.  He became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that
+she had been speaking for some time.
+
+"After all, your writing has been a toy to you," she was saying.
+"Surely you have played with it long enough.  It is time to take up
+life seriously - OUR life, Martin.  Hitherto you have lived solely
+your own."
+
+"You want me to go to work?" he asked.
+
+"Yes.  Father has offered - "
+
+"I understand all that," he broke in; "but what I want to know is
+whether or not you have lost faith in me?"
+
+She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.
+
+"In your writing, dear," she admitted in a half-whisper.
+
+"You've read lots of my stuff," he went on brutally.  "What do you
+think of it?  Is it utterly hopeless?  How does it compare with
+other men's work?"
+
+"But they sell theirs, and you - don't."
+
+"That doesn't answer my question.  Do you think that literature is
+not at all my vocation?"
+
+"Then I will answer."  She steeled herself to do it.  "I don't
+think you were made to write.  Forgive me, dear.  You compel me to
+say it; and you know I know more about literature than you do."
+
+"Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts," he said meditatively; "and you
+ought to know."
+
+"But there is more to be said," he continued, after a pause painful
+to both.  "I know what I have in me.  No one knows that so well as
+I.  I know I shall succeed.  I will not be kept down.  I am afire
+with what I have to say in verse, and fiction, and essay.  I do not
+ask you to have faith in that, though.  I do not ask you to have
+faith in me, nor in my writing.  What I do ask of you is to love me
+and have faith in love."
+
+"A year ago I believed for two years.  One of those years is yet to
+run.  And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that
+year is run I shall have succeeded.  You remember what you told me
+long ago, that I must serve my apprenticeship to writing.  Well, I
+have served it.  I have crammed it and telescoped it.  With you at
+the end awaiting me, I have never shirked.  Do you know, I have
+forgotten what it is to fall peacefully asleep.  A few million
+years ago I knew what it was to sleep my fill and to awake
+naturally from very glut of sleep.  I am awakened always now by an
+alarm clock.  If I fall asleep early or late, I set the alarm
+accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my last
+conscious actions."
+
+"When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading
+for a lighter one.  And when I doze over that, I beat my head with
+my knuckles in order to drive sleep away.  Somewhere I read of a
+man who was afraid to sleep.  Kipling wrote the story.  This man
+arranged a spur so that when unconsciousness came, his naked body
+pressed against the iron teeth.  Well, I've done the same.  I look
+at the time, and I resolve that not until midnight, or not until
+one o'clock, or two o'clock, or three o'clock, shall the spur be
+removed.  And so it rowels me awake until the appointed time.  That
+spur has been my bed-mate for months.  I have grown so desperate
+that five and a half hours of sleep is an extravagance.  I sleep
+four hours now.  I am starved for sleep.  There are times when I am
+light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with its rest
+and sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted by
+Longfellow's lines:
+
+
+"'The sea is still and deep;
+All things within its bosom sleep;
+A single step and all is o'er,
+A plunge, a bubble, and no more.'
+
+
+"Of course, this is sheer nonsense.  It comes from nervousness,
+from an overwrought mind.  But the point is:  Why have I done this?
+For you.  To shorten my apprenticeship.  To compel Success to
+hasten.  And my apprenticeship is now served.  I know my equipment.
+I swear that I learn more each month than the average college man
+learns in a year.  I know it, I tell you.  But were my need for you
+to understand not so desperate I should not tell you.  It is not
+boasting.  I measure the results by the books.  Your brothers, to-
+day, are ignorant barbarians compared with me and the knowledge I
+have wrung from the books in the hours they were sleeping.  Long
+ago I wanted to be famous.  I care very little for fame now.  What
+I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or clothing,
+or recognition.  I have a dream of laying my head on your breast
+and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere
+another year is gone."
+
+His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his
+will opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward
+him.  The strength that had always poured out from him to her was
+now flowering in his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the
+vigor of life and intellect surging in him.  And in that moment,
+and for the moment, she was aware of a rift that showed in her
+certitude - a rift through which she caught sight of the real
+Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and as animal-trainers have
+their moments of doubt, so she, for the instant, seemed to doubt
+her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.
+
+"And another thing," he swept on.  "You love me.  But why do you
+love me?  The thing in me that compels me to write is the very
+thing that draws your love.  You love me because I am somehow
+different from the men you have known and might have loved.  I was
+not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business
+squabbling, and legal jangling.  Make me do such things, make me
+like those other men, doing the work they do, breathing the air
+they breathe, developing the point of view they have developed, and
+you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed the
+thing you love.  My desire to write is the most vital thing in me.
+Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to write, nor
+would you have desired me for a husband."
+
+"But you forget," she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind
+glimpsing a parallel.  "There have been eccentric inventors,
+starving their families while they sought such chimeras as
+perpetual motion.  Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered
+with them and for them, not because of but in spite of their
+infatuation for perpetual motion."
+
+"True," was the reply.  "But there have been inventors who were not
+eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical
+things; and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded.  Certainly I
+do not seek any impossibilities - "
+
+"You have called it 'achieving the impossible,'" she interpolated.
+
+"I spoke figuratively.  I seek to do what men have done before me -
+to write and to live by my writing."
+
+Her silence spurred him on.
+
+"To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?"
+he demanded.
+
+He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his - the pitying
+mother-hand for the hurt child.  And to her, just then, he was the
+hurt child, the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.
+
+Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the
+antagonism of her father and mother.
+
+"But you love me?" he asked.
+
+"I do!  I do!" she cried.
+
+"And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me."
+Triumph sounded in his voice.  "For I have faith in your love, not
+fear of their enmity.  All things may go astray in this world, but
+not love.  Love cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints
+and stumbles by the way."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+
+Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway -
+as it proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance.  Waiting
+on the corner for a car, she had seen him first, and noted the
+eager, hungry lines of his face and the desperate, worried look of
+his eyes.  In truth, he was desperate and worried.  He had just
+come from a fruitless interview with the pawnbroker, from whom he
+had tried to wring an additional loan on his wheel.  The muddy fall
+weather having come on, Martin had pledged his wheel some time
+since and retained his black suit.
+
+"There's the black suit," the pawnbroker, who knew his every asset,
+had answered.  "You needn't tell me you've gone and pledged it with
+that Jew, Lipka.  Because if you have - "
+
+The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-
+
+"No, no; I've got it.  But I want to wear it on a matter of
+business."
+
+"All right," the mollified usurer had replied.  "And I want it on a
+matter of business before I can let you have any more money.  You
+don't think I'm in it for my health?"
+
+"But it's a forty-dollar wheel, in good condition," Martin had
+argued.  "And you've only let me have seven dollars on it.  No, not
+even seven.  Six and a quarter; you took the interest in advance."
+
+"If you want some more, bring the suit," had been the reply that
+sent Martin out of the stuffy little den, so desperate at heart as
+to reflect it in his face and touch his sister to pity.
+
+Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car came along and
+stopped to take on a crowd of afternoon shoppers.  Mrs.
+Higginbotham divined from the grip on her arm as he helped her on,
+that he was not going to follow her.  She turned on the step and
+looked down upon him.  His haggard face smote her to the heart
+again.
+
+"Ain't you comin'?" she asked
+
+The next moment she had descended to his side.
+
+"I'm walking - exercise, you know," he explained.
+
+"Then I'll go along for a few blocks," she announced.  "Mebbe it'll
+do me good.  I ain't ben feelin' any too spry these last few days."
+
+Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her general
+slovenly appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the drooping
+shoulders, the tired face with the sagging lines, and in the heavy
+fall of her feet, without elasticity - a very caricature of the
+walk that belongs to a free and happy body.
+
+"You'd better stop here," he said, though she had already come to a
+halt at the first corner, "and take the next car."
+
+"My goodness! - if I ain't all tired a'ready!" she panted.  "But
+I'm just as able to walk as you in them soles.  They're that thin
+they'll bu'st long before you git out to North Oakland."
+
+"I've a better pair at home," was the answer.
+
+"Come out to dinner to-morrow," she invited irrelevantly.  "Mr.
+Higginbotham won't be there.  He's goin' to San Leandro on
+business."
+
+Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back the wolfish,
+hungry look that leapt into his eyes at the suggestion of dinner.
+
+"You haven't a penny, Mart, and that's why you're walkin'.
+Exercise!"  She tried to sniff contemptuously, but succeeded in
+producing only a sniffle.  "Here, lemme see."
+
+And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar piece into
+his hand.  "I guess I forgot your last birthday, Mart," she mumbled
+lamely.
+
+Martin's hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold.  In the
+same instant he knew he ought not to accept, and found himself
+struggling in the throes of indecision.  That bit of gold meant
+food, life, and light in his body and brain, power to go on
+writing, and - who was to say? - maybe to write something that
+would bring in many pieces of gold.  Clear on his vision burned the
+manuscripts of two essays he had just completed.  He saw them under
+the table on top of the heap of returned manuscripts for which he
+had no stamps, and he saw their titles, just as he had typed them -
+"The High Priests of Mystery," and "The Cradle of Beauty."  He had
+never submitted them anywhere.  They were as good as anything he
+had done in that line.  If only he had stamps for them!  Then the
+certitude of his ultimate success rose up in him, an able ally of
+hunger, and with a quick movement he slipped the coin into his
+pocket.
+
+"I'll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over," he gulped out,
+his throat painfully contracted and in his eyes a swift hint of
+moisture.
+
+"Mark my words!" he cried with abrupt positiveness.  "Before the
+year is out I'll put an even hundred of those little yellow-boys
+into your hand.  I don't ask you to believe me.  All you have to do
+is wait and see."
+
+Nor did she believe.  Her incredulity made her uncomfortable, and
+failing of other expedient, she said:-
+
+"I know you're hungry, Mart.  It's sticking out all over you.  Come
+in to meals any time.  I'll send one of the children to tell you
+when Mr. Higginbotham ain't to be there.  An' Mart - "
+
+He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she was about to
+say, so visible was her thought process to him.
+
+"Don't you think it's about time you got a job?"
+
+"You don't think I'll win out?" he asked.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Nobody has faith in me, Gertrude, except myself."  His voice was
+passionately rebellious.  "I've done good work already, plenty of
+it, and sooner or later it will sell."
+
+"How do you know it is good?"
+
+"Because - "  He faltered as the whole vast field of literature and
+the history of literature stirred in his brain and pointed the
+futility of his attempting to convey to her the reasons for his
+faith.  "Well, because it's better than ninety-nine per cent of
+what is published in the magazines."
+
+"I wish't you'd listen to reason," she answered feebly, but with
+unwavering belief in the correctness of her diagnosis of what was
+ailing him.  "I wish't you'd listen to reason," she repeated, "an'
+come to dinner to-morrow."
+
+After Martin had helped her on the car, he hurried to the post-
+office and invested three of the five dollars in stamps; and when,
+later in the day, on the way to the Morse home, he stopped in at
+the post-office to weigh a large number of long, bulky envelopes,
+he affixed to them all the stamps save three of the two-cent
+denomination.
+
+It proved a momentous night for Martin, for after dinner he met
+Russ Brissenden.  How he chanced to come there, whose friend he was
+or what acquaintance brought him, Martin did not know.  Nor had he
+the curiosity to inquire about him of Ruth.  In short, Brissenden
+struck Martin as anaemic and feather-brained, and was promptly
+dismissed from his mind.  An hour later he decided that Brissenden
+was a boor as well, what of the way he prowled about from one room
+to another, staring at the pictures or poking his nose into books
+and magazines he picked up from the table or drew from the shelves.
+Though a stranger in the house he finally isolated himself in the
+midst of the company, huddling into a capacious Morris chair and
+reading steadily from a thin volume he had drawn from his pocket.
+As he read, he abstractedly ran his fingers, with a caressing
+movement, through his hair.  Martin noticed him no more that
+evening, except once when he observed him chaffing with great
+apparent success with several of the young women.
+
+It chanced that when Martin was leaving, he overtook Brissenden
+already half down the walk to the street.
+
+"Hello, is that you?" Martin said.
+
+The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung alongside.
+Martin made no further attempt at conversation, and for several
+blocks unbroken silence lay upon them.
+
+"Pompous old ass!"
+
+The suddenness and the virulence of the exclamation startled
+Martin.  He felt amused, and at the same time was aware of a
+growing dislike for the other.
+
+"What do you go to such a place for?" was abruptly flung at him
+after another block of silence.
+
+"Why do you?" Martin countered.
+
+"Bless me, I don't know," came back.  "At least this is my first
+indiscretion.  There are twenty-four hours in each day, and I must
+spend them somehow.  Come and have a drink."
+
+"All right," Martin answered.
+
+The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of his
+acceptance.  At home was several hours' hack-work waiting for him
+before he went to bed, and after he went to bed there was a volume
+of Weismann waiting for him, to say nothing of Herbert Spencer's
+Autobiography, which was as replete for him with romance as any
+thrilling novel.  Why should he waste any time with this man he did
+not like? was his thought.  And yet, it was not so much the man nor
+the drink as was it what was associated with the drink - the bright
+lights, the mirrors and dazzling array of glasses, the warm and
+glowing faces and the resonant hum of the voices of men.  That was
+it, it was the voices of men, optimistic men, men who breathed
+success and spent their money for drinks like men.  He was lonely,
+that was what was the matter with him; that was why he had snapped
+at the invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook.
+Not since with Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception
+of the wine he took with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a
+drink at a public bar.  Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving
+for liquor such as physical exhaustion did, and he had felt no need
+for it.  But just now he felt desire for the drink, or, rather, for
+the atmosphere wherein drinks were dispensed and disposed of.  Such
+a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden and he lounged in
+capacious leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.
+
+They talked.  They talked about many things, and now Brissenden and
+now Martin took turn in ordering Scotch and soda.  Martin, who was
+extremely strong-headed, marvelled at the other's capacity for
+liquor, and ever and anon broke off to marvel at the other's
+conversation.  He was not long in assuming that Brissenden knew
+everything, and in deciding that here was the second intellectual
+man he had met.  But he noted that Brissenden had what Professor
+Caldwell lacked - namely, fire, the flashing insight and
+perception, the flaming uncontrol of genius.  Living language
+flowed from him.  His thin lips, like the dies of a machine,
+stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again, pursing
+caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin
+lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and
+glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery and
+inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a
+bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife,
+phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry
+spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said
+something more - the poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive
+and without words which could express, and which none the less
+found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations
+of common words.  He, by some wonder of vision, saw beyond the
+farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language for
+narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing
+known words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin's
+consciousness messages that were incommunicable to ordinary souls.
+
+Martin forgot his first impression of dislike.  Here was the best
+the books had to offer coming true.  Here was an intelligence, a
+living man for him to look up to.  "I am down in the dirt at your
+feet," Martin repeated to himself again and again.
+
+"You've studied biology," he said aloud, in significant allusion.
+
+To his surprise Brissenden shook his head.
+
+"But you are stating truths that are substantiated only by
+biology," Martin insisted, and was rewarded by a blank stare.
+"Your conclusions are in line with the books which you must have
+read."
+
+"I am glad to hear it," was the answer.  "That my smattering of
+knowledge should enable me to short-cut my way to truth is most
+reassuring.  As for myself, I never bother to find out if I am
+right or not.  It is all valueless anyway.  Man can never know the
+ultimate verities."
+
+"You are a disciple of Spencer!" Martin cried triumphantly.
+
+"I haven't read him since adolescence, and all I read then was his
+'Education.'"
+
+"I wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly," Martin broke out
+half an hour later.  He had been closely analyzing Brissenden's
+mental equipment.  "You are a sheer dogmatist, and that's what
+makes it so marvellous.  You state dogmatically the latest facts
+which science has been able to establish only by E POSTERIORI
+reasoning.  You jump at correct conclusions.  You certainly short-
+cut with a vengeance.  You feel your way with the speed of light,
+by some hyperrational process, to truth."
+
+"Yes, that was what used to bother Father Joseph, and Brother
+Dutton," Brissenden replied.  "Oh, no," he added; "I am not
+anything.  It was a lucky trick of fate that sent me to a Catholic
+college for my education.  Where did you pick up what you know?"
+
+And while Martin told him, he was busy studying Brissenden, ranging
+from a long, lean, aristocratic face and drooping shoulders to the
+overcoat on a neighboring chair, its pockets sagged and bulged by
+the freightage of many books.  Brissenden's face and long, slender
+hands were browned by the sun - excessively browned, Martin
+thought.  This sunburn bothered Martin.  It was patent that
+Brissenden was no outdoor man.  Then how had he been ravaged by the
+sun?  Something morbid and significant attached to that sunburn,
+was Martin's thought as he returned to a study of the face, narrow,
+with high cheek-bones and cavernous hollows, and graced with as
+delicate and fine an aquiline nose as Martin had ever seen.  There
+was nothing remarkable about the size of the eyes.  They were
+neither large nor small, while their color was a nondescript brown;
+but in them smouldered a fire, or, rather, lurked an expression
+dual and strangely contradictory.  Defiant, indomitable, even harsh
+to excess, they at the same time aroused pity.  Martin found
+himself pitying him he knew not why, though he was soon to learn.
+
+"Oh, I'm a lunger," Brissenden announced, offhand, a little later,
+having already stated that he came from Arizona.  "I've been down
+there a couple of years living on the climate."
+
+"Aren't you afraid to venture it up in this climate?"
+
+"Afraid?"
+
+There was no special emphasis of his repetition of Martin's word.
+But Martin saw in that ascetic face the advertisement that there
+was nothing of which it was afraid.  The eyes had narrowed till
+they were eagle-like, and Martin almost caught his breath as he
+noted the eagle beak with its dilated nostrils, defiant, assertive,
+aggressive.  Magnificent, was what he commented to himself, his
+blood thrilling at the sight.  Aloud, he quoted:-
+
+
+"'Under the bludgeoning of Chance
+My head is bloody but unbowed.'"
+
+
+"You like Henley," Brissenden said, his expression changing swiftly
+to large graciousness and tenderness.  "Of course, I couldn't have
+expected anything else of you.  Ah, Henley!  A brave soul.  He
+stands out among contemporary rhymesters - magazine rhymesters - as
+a gladiator stands out in the midst of a band of eunuchs."
+
+"You don't like the magazines," Martin softly impeached.
+
+"Do you?" was snarled back at him so savagely as to startle him.
+
+"I - I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines," Martin
+faltered.
+
+"That's better," was the mollified rejoinder.  "You try to write,
+but you don't succeed.  I respect and admire your failure.  I know
+what you write.  I can see it with half an eye, and there's one
+ingredient in it that shuts it out of the magazines.  It's guts,
+and magazines have no use for that particular commodity.  What they
+want is wish-wash and slush, and God knows they get it, but not
+from you."
+
+"I'm not above hack-work," Martin contended.
+
+"On the contrary - "  Brissenden paused and ran an insolent eye
+over Martin's objective poverty, passing from the well-worn tie and
+the saw-edged collar to the shiny sleeves of the coat and on to the
+slight fray of one cuff, winding up and dwelling upon Martin's
+sunken cheeks.  "On the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far
+above you that you can never hope to rise to it.  Why, man, I could
+insult you by asking you to have something to eat."
+
+Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and
+Brissenden laughed triumphantly.
+
+"A full man is not insulted by such an invitation," he concluded.
+
+"You are a devil," Martin cried irritably.
+
+"Anyway, I didn't ask you."
+
+"You didn't dare."
+
+"Oh, I don't know about that.  I invite you now."
+
+Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if with the
+intention of departing to the restaurant forthwith.
+
+Martin's fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was drumming in
+his temples.
+
+"Bosco!  He eats 'em alive!  Eats 'em alive!"  Brissenden
+exclaimed, imitating the SPIELER of a locally famous snake-eater.
+
+"I could certainly eat you alive," Martin said, in turn running
+insolent eyes over the other's disease-ravaged frame.
+
+"Only I'm not worthy of it?"
+
+"On the contrary," Martin considered, "because the incident is not
+worthy."  He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome.  "I confess
+you made a fool of me, Brissenden.  That I am hungry and you are
+aware of it are only ordinary phenomena, and there's no disgrace.
+You see, I laugh at the conventional little moralities of the herd;
+then you drift by, say a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the
+slave of the same little moralities."
+
+"You were insulted," Brissenden affirmed.
+
+"I certainly was, a moment ago.  The prejudice of early youth, you
+know.  I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have
+since learned.  They are the skeletons in my particular closet."
+
+"But you've got the door shut on them now?"
+
+"I certainly have."
+
+"Sure?"
+
+"Sure."
+
+"Then let's go and get something to eat."
+
+"I'll go you," Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current
+Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and
+seeing the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change
+back on the table.
+
+Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly
+weight of Brissenden's hand upon his shoulder.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII
+
+
+
+Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin's second
+visitor.  But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated
+Brissenden in her parlor's grandeur of respectability.
+
+"Hope you don't mind my coming?" Brissenden began.
+
+"No, no, not at all," Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him
+to the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed.  "But how did you
+know where I lived?"
+
+"Called up the Morses.  Miss Morse answered the 'phone.  And here I
+am."  He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the
+table.  "There's a book, by a poet.  Read it and keep it."  And
+then, in reply to Martin's protest:  "What have I to do with books?
+I had another hemorrhage this morning.  Got any whiskey?  No, of
+course not.  Wait a minute."
+
+He was off and away.  Martin watched his long figure go down the
+outside steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang
+the shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over, the
+collapsed ruin of the chest.  Martin got two tumblers, and fell to
+reading the book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow's latest collection.
+
+"No Scotch," Brissenden announced on his return.  "The beggar sells
+nothing but American whiskey.  But here's a quart of it."
+
+"I'll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we'll make a
+toddy," Martin offered.
+
+"I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?" he went on,
+holding up the volume in question.
+
+"Possibly fifty dollars," came the answer.  "Though he's lucky if
+he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk
+bringing it out."
+
+"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?"
+
+Martin's tone and face alike showed his dejection.
+
+"Certainly not.  What fool expects to?  Out of rhyming, yes.
+There's Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick.  They do very
+nicely.  But poetry - do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his
+living? - teaching in a boys' cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania,
+and of all private little hells such a billet is the limit.  I
+wouldn't trade places with him if he had fifty years of life before
+him.  And yet his work stands out from the ruck of the contemporary
+versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots.  And the reviews he gets!
+Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!"
+
+"Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who
+do write," Martin concurred.  "Why, I was appalled at the
+quantities of rubbish written about Stevenson and his work."
+
+"Ghouls and harpies!" Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth.
+"Yes, I know the spawn - complacently pecking at him for his Father
+Damien letter, analyzing him, weighing him - "
+
+"Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos,"
+Martin broke in.
+
+"Yes, that's it, a good phrase, - mouthing and besliming the True,
+and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and
+saying, 'Good dog, Fido.'  Faugh!  'The little chattering daws of
+men,' Richard Realf called them the night he died."
+
+"Pecking at star-dust," Martin took up the strain warmly; "at the
+meteoric flight of the master-men.  I once wrote a squib on them -
+the critics, or the reviewers, rather."
+
+"Let's see it," Brissenden begged eagerly.
+
+So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of "Star-dust," and during the
+reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to
+sip his toddy.
+
+"Strikes me you're a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world
+of cowled gnomes who cannot see," was his comment at the end of it.
+"Of course it was snapped up by the first magazine?"
+
+Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book.  "It has been
+refused by twenty-seven of them."
+
+Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit
+of coughing.
+
+"Say, you needn't tell me you haven't tackled poetry," he gasped.
+"Let me see some of it."
+
+"Don't read it now," Martin pleaded.  "I want to talk with you.
+I'll make up a bundle and you can take it home."
+
+Brissenden departed with the "Love-cycle," and "The Peri and the
+Pearl," returning next day to greet Martin with:-
+
+"I want more."
+
+Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin
+learned that Brissenden also was one.  He was swept off his feet by
+the other's work, and astounded that no attempt had been made to
+publish it.
+
+"A plague on all their houses!" was Brissenden's answer to Martin's
+volunteering to market his work for him.  "Love Beauty for its own
+sake," was his counsel, "and leave the magazines alone.  Back to
+your ships and your sea - that's my advice to you, Martin Eden.
+What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men?  You are
+cutting your throat every day you waste in them trying to
+prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom.  What was it you
+quoted me the other day? - Oh, yes, 'Man, the latest of the
+ephemera.'  Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want
+with fame?  If you got it, it would be poison to you.  You are too
+simple, took elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper
+on such pap.  I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.
+Beauty is the only master to serve.  Serve her and damn the
+multitude!  Success!  What in hell's success if it isn't right
+there in your Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley's
+'Apparition,' in that 'Love-cycle,' in those sea-poems?
+
+"It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but
+in the doing of it.  You can't tell me.  I know it.  You know it.
+Beauty hurts you.  It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that
+does not heal, a knife of flame.  Why should you palter with
+magazines?  Let beauty be your end.  Why should you mint beauty
+into gold?  Anyway, you can't; so there's no use in my getting
+excited over it.  You can read the magazines for a thousand years
+and you won't find the value of one line of Keats.  Leave fame and
+coin alone, sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to your
+sea."
+
+"Not for fame, but for love," Martin laughed.  "Love seems to have
+no place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of
+Love."
+
+Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly.  "You are so
+young, Martin boy, so young.  You will flutter high, but your wings
+are of the finest gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments.  Do not
+scorch them.  But of course you have scorched them already.  It
+required some glorified petticoat to account for that 'Love-cycle,'
+and that's the shame of it."
+
+"It glorifies love as well as the petticoat," Martin laughed.
+
+"The philosophy of madness," was the retort.  "So have I assured
+myself when wandering in hasheesh dreams.  But beware.  These
+bourgeois cities will kill you.  Look at that den of traitors where
+I met you.  Dry rot is no name for it.  One can't keep his sanity
+in such an atmosphere.  It's degrading.  There's not one of them
+who is not degrading, man and woman, all of them animated stomachs
+guided by the high intellectual and artistic impulses of clams - "
+
+He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin.  Then, with a flash of
+divination, he saw the situation.  The expression on his face
+turned to wondering horror.
+
+"And you wrote that tremendous 'Love-cycle' to her - that pale,
+shrivelled, female thing!"
+
+The next instant Martin's right hand had shot to a throttling
+clutch on his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth
+rattled.  But Martin, looking into his eyes, saw no fear there, -
+naught but a curious and mocking devil.  Martin remembered himself,
+and flung Brissenden, by the neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the
+same moment releasing his hold.
+
+Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to
+chuckle.
+
+"You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the
+flame," he said.
+
+"My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days," Martin apologized.
+"Hope I didn't hurt you.  Here, let me mix a fresh toddy."
+
+"Ah, you young Greek!" Brissenden went on.  "I wonder if you take
+just pride in that body of yours.  You are devilish strong.  You
+are a young panther, a lion cub.  Well, well, it is you who must
+pay for that strength."
+
+"What do you mean?" Martin asked curiously, passing aim a glass.
+"Here, down this and be good."
+
+"Because - " Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of
+it.  "Because of the women.  They will worry you until you die, as
+they have already worried you, or else I was born yesterday.  Now
+there's no use in your choking me; I'm going to have my say.  This
+is undoubtedly your calf love; but for Beauty's sake show better
+taste next time.  What under heaven do you want with a daughter of
+the bourgeoisie?  Leave them alone.  Pick out some great, wanton
+flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves
+one while she may.  There are such women, and they will love you
+just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois sheltered
+life."
+
+"Pusillanimous?" Martin protested.
+
+"Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have
+been prattled into them, and afraid to live life.  They will love
+you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more.  What
+you want is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls,
+the blazing butterflies and not the little gray moths.  Oh, you
+will grow tired of them, too, of all the female things, if you are
+unlucky enough to live.  But you won't live.  You won't go back to
+your ships and sea; therefore, you'll hang around these pest-holes
+of cities until your bones are rotten, and then you'll die."
+
+"You can lecture me, but you can't make me talk back," Martin said.
+"After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the
+wisdom of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours."
+
+They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but
+they liked each other, and on Martin's part it was no less than a
+profound liking.  Day after day they were together, if for no more
+than the hour Brissenden spent in Martin's stuffy room.  Brissenden
+never arrived without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined
+together down-town, he drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal.
+He invariably paid the way for both, and it was through him that
+Martin learned the refinements of food, drank his first champagne,
+and made acquaintance with Rhenish wines.
+
+But Brissenden was always an enigma.  With the face of an ascetic,
+he was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary.  He
+was unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living;
+and yet, dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it.  He was
+possessed by a madness to live, to thrill, "to squirm my little
+space in the cosmic dust whence I came," as he phrased it once
+himself.  He had tampered with drugs and done many strange things
+in quest of new thrills, new sensations.  As he told Martin, he had
+once gone three days without water, had done so voluntarily, in
+order to experience the exquisite delight of such a thirst
+assuaged.  Who or what he was, Martin never learned.  He was a man
+without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose
+present was a bitter fever of living.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+
+Martin was steadily losing his battle.  Economize as he would, the
+earnings from hack-work did not balance expenses.  Thanksgiving
+found him with his black suit in pawn and unable to accept the
+Morses' invitation to dinner.  Ruth was not made happy by his
+reason for not coming, and the corresponding effect on him was one
+of desperation.  He told her that he would come, after all; that he
+would go over to San Francisco, to the TRANSCONTINENTAL office,
+collect the five dollars due him, and with it redeem his suit of
+clothes.
+
+In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria.  He would have
+borrowed it, by preference, from Brissenden, but that erratic
+individual had disappeared.  Two weeks had passed since Martin had
+seen him, and he vainly cudgelled his brains for some cause of
+offence.  The ten cents carried Martin across the ferry to San
+Francisco, and as he walked up Market Street he speculated upon his
+predicament in case he failed to collect the money.  There would
+then be no way for him to return to Oakland, and he knew no one in
+San Francisco from whom to borrow another ten cents.
+
+The door to the TRANSCONTINENTAL office was ajar, and Martin, in
+the act of opening it, was brought to a sudden pause by a loud
+voice from within, which exclaimed:- "But that is not the question,
+Mr. Ford."  (Ford, Martin knew, from his correspondence, to be the
+editor's name.)  "The question is, are you prepared to pay? - cash,
+and cash down, I mean?  I am not interested in the prospects of the
+TRANSCONTINENTAL and what you expect to make it next year.  What I
+want is to be paid for what I do.  And I tell you, right now, the
+Christmas TRANSCONTINENTAL don't go to press till I have the money
+in my hand.  Good day.  When you get the money, come and see me."
+
+The door jerked open, and the man flung past Martin, with an angry
+countenance and went down the corridor, muttering curses and
+clenching his fists.  Martin decided not to enter immediately, and
+lingered in the hallways for a quarter of an hour.  Then he shoved
+the door open and walked in.  It was a new experience, the first
+time he had been inside an editorial office.  Cards evidently were
+not necessary in that office, for the boy carried word to an inner
+room that there was a man who wanted to see Mr. Ford.  Returning,
+the boy beckoned him from halfway across the room and led him to
+the private office, the editorial sanctum.  Martin's first
+impression was of the disorder and cluttered confusion of the room.
+Next he noticed a bewhiskered, youthful-looking man, sitting at a
+roll-top desk, who regarded him curiously.  Martin marvelled at the
+calm repose of his face.  It was evident that the squabble with the
+printer had not affected his equanimity.
+
+"I - I am Martin Eden," Martin began the conversation.  ("And I
+want my five dollars," was what he would have liked to say.)
+
+But this was his first editor, and under the circumstances he did
+not desire to scare him too abruptly.  To his surprise, Mr. Ford
+leaped into the air with a "You don't say so!" and the next moment,
+with both hands, was shaking Martin's hand effusively.
+
+"Can't say how glad I am to see you, Mr. Eden.  Often wondered what
+you were like."
+
+Here he held Martin off at arm's length and ran his beaming eyes
+over Martin's second-best suit, which was also his worst suit, and
+which was ragged and past repair, though the trousers showed the
+careful crease he had put in with Maria's flat-irons.
+
+"I confess, though, I conceived you to be a much older man than you
+are.  Your story, you know, showed such breadth, and vigor, such
+maturity and depth of thought.  A masterpiece, that story - I knew
+it when I had read the first half-dozen lines.  Let me tell you how
+I first read it.  But no; first let me introduce you to the staff."
+
+Still talking, Mr. Ford led him into the general office, where he
+introduced him to the associate editor, Mr. White, a slender, frail
+little man whose hand seemed strangely cold, as if he were
+suffering from a chill, and whose whiskers were sparse and silky.
+
+"And Mr. Ends, Mr. Eden.  Mr. Ends is our business manager, you
+know."
+
+Martin found himself shaking hands with a cranky-eyed, bald-headed
+man, whose face looked youthful enough from what little could be
+seen of it, for most of it was covered by a snow-white beard,
+carefully trimmed - by his wife, who did it on Sundays, at which
+times she also shaved the back of his neck.
+
+The three men surrounded Martin, all talking admiringly and at
+once, until it seemed to him that they were talking against time
+for a wager.
+
+"We often wondered why you didn't call," Mr. White was saying.
+
+"I didn't have the carfare, and I live across the Bay," Martin
+answered bluntly, with the idea of showing them his imperative need
+for the money.
+
+Surely, he thought to himself, my glad rags in themselves are
+eloquent advertisement of my need.  Time and again, whenever
+opportunity offered, he hinted about the purpose of his business.
+But his admirers' ears were deaf.  They sang his praises, told him
+what they had thought of his story at first sight, what they
+subsequently thought, what their wives and families thought; but
+not one hint did they breathe of intention to pay him for it.
+
+"Did I tell you how I first read your story?" Mr. Ford said.  "Of
+course I didn't.  I was coming west from New York, and when the
+train stopped at Ogden, the train-boy on the new run brought aboard
+the current number of the TRANSCONTINENTAL."
+
+My God! Martin thought; you can travel in a Pullman while I starve
+for the paltry five dollars you owe me.  A wave of anger rushed
+over him.  The wrong done him by the TRANSCONTINENTAL loomed
+colossal, for strong upon him were all the dreary months of vain
+yearning, of hunger and privation, and his present hunger awoke and
+gnawed at him, reminding him that he had eaten nothing since the
+day before, and little enough then.  For the moment he saw red.
+These creatures were not even robbers.  They were sneak-thieves.
+By lies and broken promises they had tricked him out of his story.
+Well, he would show them.  And a great resolve surged into his will
+to the effect that he would not leave the office until he got his
+money.  He remembered, if he did not get it, that there was no way
+for him to go back to Oakland.  He controlled himself with an
+effort, but not before the wolfish expression of his face had awed
+and perturbed them.
+
+They became more voluble than ever.  Mr. Ford started anew to tell
+how he had first read "The Ring of Bells," and Mr. Ends at the same
+time was striving to repeat his niece's appreciation of "The Ring
+of Bells," said niece being a school-teacher in Alameda.
+
+"I'll tell you what I came for," Martin said finally.  "To be paid
+for that story all of you like so well.  Five dollars, I believe,
+is what you promised me would be paid on publication."
+
+Mr. Ford, with an expression on his mobile features of mediate and
+happy acquiescence, started to reach for his pocket, then turned
+suddenly to Mr. Ends, and said that he had left his money home.
+That Mr. Ends resented this, was patent; and Martin saw the twitch
+of his arm as if to protect his trousers pocket.  Martin knew that
+the money was there.
+
+"I am sorry," said Mr. Ends, "but I paid the printer not an hour
+ago, and he took my ready change.  It was careless of me to be so
+short; but the bill was not yet due, and the printer's request, as
+a favor, to make an immediate advance, was quite unexpected."
+
+Both men looked expectantly at Mr. White, but that gentleman
+laughed and shrugged his shoulders.  His conscience was clean at
+any rate.  He had come into the TRANSCONTINENTAL to learn magazine-
+literature, instead of which he had principally learned finance.
+The TRANSCONTINENTAL owed him four months' salary, and he knew that
+the printer must be appeased before the associate editor.
+
+"It's rather absurd, Mr. Eden, to have caught us in this shape,"
+Mr. Ford preambled airily.  "All carelessness, I assure you.  But
+I'll tell you what we'll do.  We'll mail you a check the first
+thing in the morning.  You have Mr. Eden's address, haven't you,
+Mr. Ends?"
+
+Yes, Mr. Ends had the address, and the check would be mailed the
+first thing in the morning.  Martin's knowledge of banks and checks
+was hazy, but he could see no reason why they should not give him
+the check on this day just as well as on the next.
+
+"Then it is understood, Mr. Eden, that we'll mail you the check to-
+morrow?" Mr. Ford said.
+
+"I need the money to-day," Martin answered stolidly.
+
+"The unfortunate circumstances - if you had chanced here any other
+day," Mr. Ford began suavely, only to be interrupted by Mr. Ends,
+whose cranky eyes justified themselves in his shortness of temper.
+
+"Mr. Ford has already explained the situation," he said with
+asperity.  "And so have I.  The check will be mailed - "
+
+"I also have explained," Martin broke in, "and I have explained
+that I want the money to-day."
+
+He had felt his pulse quicken a trifle at the business manager's
+brusqueness, and upon him he kept an alert eye, for it was in that
+gentleman's trousers pocket that he divined the TRANSCONTINENTAL'S
+ready cash was reposing.
+
+"It is too bad - " Mr. Ford began.
+
+But at that moment, with an impatient movement, Mr. Ends turned as
+if about to leave the room.  At the same instant Martin sprang for
+him, clutching him by the throat with one hand in such fashion that
+Mr. Ends' snow-white beard, still maintaining its immaculate
+trimness, pointed ceilingward at an angle of forty-five degrees.
+To the horror of Mr. White and Mr. Ford, they saw their business
+manager shaken like an Astrakhan rug.
+
+"Dig up, you venerable discourager of rising young talent!" Martin
+exhorted.  "Dig up, or I'll shake it out of you, even if it's all
+in nickels."  Then, to the two affrighted onlookers:  "Keep away!
+If you interfere, somebody's liable to get hurt."
+
+Mr. Ends was choking, and it was not until the grip on his throat
+was eased that he was able to signify his acquiescence in the
+digging-up programme.  All together, after repeated digs, its
+trousers pocket yielded four dollars and fifteen cents.
+
+"Inside out with it," Martin commanded.
+
+An additional ten cents fell out.  Martin counted the result of his
+raid a second time to make sure.
+
+"You next!" he shouted at Mr. Ford.  "I want seventy-five cents
+more."
+
+Mr. Ford did not wait, but ransacked his pockets, with the result
+of sixty cents.
+
+"Sure that is all?" Martin demanded menacingly, possessing himself
+of it.  "What have you got in your vest pockets?"
+
+In token of his good faith, Mr. Ford turned two of his pockets
+inside out.  A strip of cardboard fell to the floor from one of
+them.  He recovered it and was in the act of returning it, when
+Martin cried:-
+
+"What's that? - A ferry ticket?  Here, give it to me.  It's worth
+ten cents.  I'll credit you with it.  I've now got four dollars and
+ninety-five cents, including the ticket.  Five cents is still due
+me."
+
+He looked fiercely at Mr. White, and found that fragile creature in
+the act of handing him a nickel.
+
+"Thank you," Martin said, addressing them collectively.  "I wish
+you a good day."
+
+"Robber!" Mr. Ends snarled after him.
+
+"Sneak-thief!" Martin retorted, slamming the door as he passed out.
+
+Martin was elated - so elated that when he recollected that THE
+HORNET owed him fifteen dollars for "The Peri and the Pearl," he
+decided forthwith to go and collect it.  But THE HORNET was run by
+a set of clean-shaven, strapping young men, frank buccaneers who
+robbed everything and everybody, not excepting one another.  After
+some breakage of the office furniture, the editor (an ex-college
+athlete), ably assisted by the business manager, an advertising
+agent, and the porter, succeeded in removing Martin from the office
+and in accelerating, by initial impulse, his descent of the first
+flight of stairs.
+
+"Come again, Mr. Eden; glad to see you any time," they laughed down
+at him from the landing above.
+
+Martin grinned as he picked himself up.
+
+"Phew!" he murmured back.  "The TRANSCONTINENTAL crowd were nanny-
+goats, but you fellows are a lot of prize-fighters."
+
+More laughter greeted this.
+
+"I must say, Mr. Eden," the editor of THE HORNET called down, "that
+for a poet you can go some yourself.  Where did you learn that
+right cross - if I may ask?"
+
+"Where you learned that half-Nelson," Martin answered.  "Anyway,
+you're going to have a black eye."
+
+"I hope your neck doesn't stiffen up," the editor wished
+solicitously:  "What do you say we all go out and have a drink on
+it - not the neck, of course, but the little rough-house?"
+
+"I'll go you if I lose," Martin accepted.
+
+And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably agreeing that the
+battle was to the strong, and that the fifteen dollars for "The
+Peri and the Pearl" belonged by right to THE HORNET'S editorial
+staff.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV
+
+
+
+Arthur remained at the gate while Ruth climbed Maria's front steps.
+She heard the rapid click of the type-writer, and when Martin let
+her in, found him on the last page of a manuscript.  She had come
+to make certain whether or not he would be at their table for
+Thanksgiving dinner; but before she could broach the subject Martin
+plunged into the one with which he was full.
+
+"Here, let me read you this," he cried, separating the carbon
+copies and running the pages of manuscript into shape.  "It's my
+latest, and different from anything I've done.  It is so altogether
+different that I am almost afraid of it, and yet I've a sneaking
+idea it is good.  You be judge.  It's an Hawaiian story.  I've
+called it 'Wiki-wiki.'"
+
+His face was bright with the creative glow, though she shivered in
+the cold room and had been struck by the coldness of his hands at
+greeting.  She listened closely while he read, and though he from
+time to time had seen only disapprobation in her face, at the close
+he asked:-
+
+"Frankly, what do you think of it?"
+
+"I - I don't know," she, answered.  "Will it - do you think it will
+sell?"
+
+"I'm afraid not," was the confession.  "It's too strong for the
+magazines.  But it's true, on my word it's true."
+
+"But why do you persist in writing such things when you know they
+won't sell?" she went on inexorably.  "The reason for your writing
+is to make a living, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes, that's right; but the miserable story got away with me.  I
+couldn't help writing it.  It demanded to be written."
+
+"But that character, that Wiki-Wiki, why do you make him talk so
+roughly?  Surely it will offend your readers, and surely that is
+why the editors are justified in refusing your work."
+
+"Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way."
+
+"But it is not good taste."
+
+"It is life," he replied bluntly.  "It is real.  It is true.  And I
+must write life as I see it."
+
+She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they sat silent.  It
+was because he loved her that he did not quite understand her, and
+she could not understand him because he was so large that he bulked
+beyond her horizon
+
+"Well, I've collected from the TRANSCONTINENTAL," he said in an
+effort to shift the conversation to a more comfortable subject.
+The picture of the bewhiskered trio, as he had last seen them,
+mulcted of four dollars and ninety cents and a ferry ticket, made
+him chuckle.
+
+"Then you'll come!" she cried joyously.  "That was what I came to
+find out."
+
+"Come?" he muttered absently.  "Where?"
+
+"Why, to dinner to-morrow.  You know you said you'd recover your
+suit if you got that money."
+
+"I forgot all about it," he said humbly.  "You see, this morning
+the poundman got Maria's two cows and the baby calf, and - well, it
+happened that Maria didn't have any money, and so I had to recover
+her cows for her.  That's where the TRANSCONTINENTAL fiver went -
+'The Ring of Bells' went into the poundman's pocket."
+
+"Then you won't come?"
+
+He looked down at his clothing.
+
+"I can't."
+
+Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her blue eyes,
+but she said nothing.
+
+"Next Thanksgiving you'll have dinner with me in Delmonico's," he
+said cheerily; "or in London, or Paris, or anywhere you wish.  I
+know it."
+
+"I saw in the paper a few days ago," she announced abruptly, "that
+there had been several local appointments to the Railway Mail.  You
+passed first, didn't you?"
+
+He was compelled to admit that the call had come for him, but that
+he had declined it.  "I was so sure - I am so sure - of myself," he
+concluded.  "A year from now I'll be earning more than a dozen men
+in the Railway Mail.  You wait and see."
+
+"Oh," was all she said, when he finished.  She stood up, pulling at
+her gloves.  "I must go, Martin.  Arthur is waiting for me."
+
+He took her in his arms and kissed her, but she proved a passive
+sweetheart.  There was no tenseness in her body, her arms did not
+go around him, and her lips met his without their wonted pressure.
+
+She was angry with him, he concluded, as he returned from the gate.
+But why?  It was unfortunate that the poundman had gobbled Maria's
+cows.  But it was only a stroke of fate.  Nobody could be blamed
+for it.  Nor did it enter his head that he could have done aught
+otherwise than what he had done.  Well, yes, he was to blame a
+little, was his next thought, for having refused the call to the
+Railway Mail.  And she had not liked "Wiki-Wiki."
+
+He turned at the head of the steps to meet the letter-carrier on
+his afternoon round.  The ever recurrent fever of expectancy
+assailed Martin as he took the bundle of long envelopes.  One was
+not long.  It was short and thin, and outside was printed the
+address of THE NEW YORK OUTVIEW.  He paused in the act of tearing
+the envelope open.  It could not be an acceptance.  He had no
+manuscripts with that publication.  Perhaps - his heart almost
+stood still at the - wild thought - perhaps they were ordering an
+article from him; but the next instant he dismissed the surmise as
+hopelessly impossible.
+
+It was a short, formal letter, signed by the office editor, merely
+informing him that an anonymous letter which they had received was
+enclosed, and that he could rest assured the OUTVIEW'S staff never
+under any circumstances gave consideration to anonymous
+correspondence.
+
+The enclosed letter Martin found to be crudely printed by hand.  It
+was a hotchpotch of illiterate abuse of Martin, and of assertion
+that the "so-called Martin Eden" who was selling stories to
+magazines was no writer at all, and that in reality he was stealing
+stories from old magazines, typing them, and sending them out as
+his own.  The envelope was postmarked "San Leandro."  Martin did
+not require a second thought to discover the author.
+Higginbotham's grammar, Higginbotham's colloquialisms,
+Higginbotham's mental quirks and processes, were apparent
+throughout.  Martin saw in every line, not the fine Italian hand,
+but the coarse grocer's fist, of his brother-in-law.
+
+But why? he vainly questioned.  What injury had he done Bernard
+Higginbotham?  The thing was so unreasonable, so wanton.  There was
+no explaining it.  In the course of the week a dozen similar
+letters were forwarded to Martin by the editors of various Eastern
+magazines.  The editors were behaving handsomely, Martin concluded.
+He was wholly unknown to them, yet some of them had even been
+sympathetic.  It was evident that they detested anonymity.  He saw
+that the malicious attempt to hurt him had failed.  In fact, if
+anything came of it, it was bound to be good, for at least his name
+had been called to the attention of a number of editors.  Sometime,
+perhaps, reading a submitted manuscript of his, they might remember
+him as the fellow about whom they had received an anonymous letter.
+And who was to say that such a remembrance might not sway the
+balance of their judgment just a trifle in his favor?
+
+It was about this time that Martin took a great slump in Maria's
+estimation.  He found her in the kitchen one morning groaning with
+pain, tears of weakness running down her cheeks, vainly endeavoring
+to put through a large ironing.  He promptly diagnosed her
+affliction as La Grippe, dosed her with hot whiskey (the remnants
+in the bottles for which Brissenden was responsible), and ordered
+her to bed.  But Maria was refractory.  The ironing had to be done,
+she protested, and delivered that night, or else there would be no
+food on the morrow for the seven small and hungry Silvas.
+
+To her astonishment (and it was something that she never ceased
+from relating to her dying day), she saw Martin Eden seize an iron
+from the stove and throw a fancy shirt-waist on the ironing-board.
+It was Kate Flanagan's best Sunday waist, than whom there was no
+more exacting and fastidiously dressed woman in Maria's world.
+Also, Miss Flanagan had sent special instruction that said waist
+must be delivered by that night.  As every one knew, she was
+keeping company with John Collins, the blacksmith, and, as Maria
+knew privily, Miss Flanagan and Mr. Collins were going next day to
+Golden Gate Park.  Vain was Maria's attempt to rescue the garment.
+Martin guided her tottering footsteps to a chair, from where she
+watched him with bulging eyes.  In a quarter of the time it would
+have taken her she saw the shirt-waist safely ironed, and ironed as
+well as she could have done it, as Martin made her grant.
+
+"I could work faster," he explained, "if your irons were only
+hotter."
+
+To her, the irons he swung were much hotter than she ever dared to
+use.
+
+"Your sprinkling is all wrong," he complained next.  "Here, let me
+teach you how to sprinkle.  Pressure is what's wanted.  Sprinkle
+under pressure if you want to iron fast."
+
+He procured a packing-case from the woodpile in the cellar, fitted
+a cover to it, and raided the scrap-iron the Silva tribe was
+collecting for the junkman.  With fresh-sprinkled garments in the
+box, covered with the board and pressed by the iron, the device was
+complete and in operation.
+
+"Now you watch me, Maria," he said, stripping off to his undershirt
+and gripping an iron that was what he called "really hot."
+
+"An' when he feenish da iron' he washa da wools," as she described
+it afterward.  "He say, 'Maria, you are da greata fool.  I showa
+you how to washa da wools,' an' he shows me, too.  Ten minutes he
+maka da machine - one barrel, one wheel-hub, two poles, justa like
+dat."
+
+Martin had learned the contrivance from Joe at the Shelly Hot
+Springs.  The old wheel-hub, fixed on the end of the upright pole,
+constituted the plunger.  Making this, in turn, fast to the spring-
+pole attached to the kitchen rafters, so that the hub played upon
+the woollens in the barrel, he was able, with one hand, thoroughly
+to pound them.
+
+"No more Maria washa da wools," her story always ended.  "I maka da
+kids worka da pole an' da hub an' da barrel.  Him da smarta man,
+Mister Eden."
+
+Nevertheless, by his masterly operation and improvement of her
+kitchen-laundry he fell an immense distance in her regard.  The
+glamour of romance with which her imagination had invested him
+faded away in the cold light of fact that he was an ex-laundryman.
+All his books, and his grand friends who visited him in carriages
+or with countless bottles of whiskey, went for naught.  He was,
+after all, a mere workingman, a member of her own class and caste.
+He was more human and approachable, but, he was no longer mystery.
+
+Martin's alienation from his family continued.  Following upon Mr.
+Higginbotham's unprovoked attack, Mr. Hermann von Schmidt showed
+his hand.  The fortunate sale of several storiettes, some humorous
+verse, and a few jokes gave Martin a temporary splurge of
+prosperity.  Not only did he partially pay up his bills, but he had
+sufficient balance left to redeem his black suit and wheel.  The
+latter, by virtue of a twisted crank-hanger, required repairing,
+and, as a matter of friendliness with his future brother-in-law, he
+sent it to Von Schmidt's shop.
+
+The afternoon of the same day Martin was pleased by the wheel being
+delivered by a small boy.  Von Schmidt was also inclined to be
+friendly, was Martin's conclusion from this unusual favor.
+Repaired wheels usually had to be called for.  But when he examined
+the wheel, he discovered no repairs had been made.  A little later
+in the day he telephoned his sister's betrothed, and learned that
+that person didn't want anything to do with him in "any shape,
+manner, or form."
+
+"Hermann von Schmidt," Martin answered cheerfully, "I've a good
+mind to come over and punch that Dutch nose of yours."
+
+"You come to my shop," came the reply, "an' I'll send for the
+police.  An' I'll put you through, too.  Oh, I know you, but you
+can't make no rough-house with me.  I don't want nothin' to do with
+the likes of you.  You're a loafer, that's what, an' I ain't
+asleep.  You ain't goin' to do no spongin' off me just because I'm
+marryin' your sister.  Why don't you go to work an' earn an honest
+livin', eh?  Answer me that."
+
+Martin's philosophy asserted itself, dissipating his anger, and he
+hung up the receiver with a long whistle of incredulous amusement.
+But after the amusement came the reaction, and he was oppressed by
+his loneliness.  Nobody understood him, nobody seemed to have any
+use for him, except Brissenden, and Brissenden had disappeared, God
+alone knew where.
+
+Twilight was falling as Martin left the fruit store and turned
+homeward, his marketing on his arm.  At the corner an electric car
+had stopped, and at sight of a lean, familiar figure alighting, his
+heart leapt with joy.  It was Brissenden, and in the fleeting
+glimpse, ere the car started up, Martin noted the overcoat pockets,
+one bulging with books, the other bulging with a quart bottle of
+whiskey.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV
+
+
+
+Brissenden gave no explanation of his long absence, nor did Martin
+pry into it.  He was content to see his friend's cadaverous face
+opposite him through the steam rising from a tumbler of toddy.
+
+"I, too, have not been idle," Brissenden proclaimed, after hearing
+Martin's account of the work he had accomplished.
+
+He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and passed it to
+Martin, who looked at the title and glanced up curiously.
+
+"Yes, that's it," Brissenden laughed.  "Pretty good title, eh?
+'Ephemera' - it is the one word.  And you're responsible for it,
+what of your MAN, who is always the erected, the vitalized
+inorganic, the latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature
+strutting his little space on the thermometer.  It got into my head
+and I had to write it to get rid of it.  Tell me what you think of
+it."
+
+Martin's face, flushed at first, paled as he read on.  It was
+perfect art.  Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be
+called where the last conceivable atom of substance had found
+expression in so perfect construction as to make Martin's head swim
+with delight, to put passionate tears into his eyes, and to send
+chills creeping up and down his back.  It was a long poem of six or
+seven hundred lines, and it was a fantastic, amazing, unearthly
+thing.  It was terrific, impossible; and yet there it was, scrawled
+in black ink across the sheets of paper.  It dealt with man and his
+soul-gropings in their ultimate terms, plumbing the abysses of
+space for the testimony of remotest suns and rainbow spectrums.  It
+was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of a dying
+man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the wild
+flutter of fading heart-beats.  The poem swung in majestic rhythm
+to the cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry
+hosts, to the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebular in
+the darkened void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a
+silver shuttle, ran the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous
+chirp amid the screaming of planets and the crash of systems.
+
+"There is nothing like it in literature," Martin said, when at last
+he was able to speak.  "It's wonderful! - wonderful!  It has gone
+to my head.  I am drunken with it.  That great, infinitesimal
+question - I can't shake it out of my thoughts.  That questing,
+eternal, ever recurring, thin little wailing voice of man is still
+ringing in my ears.  It is like the dead-march of a gnat amid the
+trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of lions.  It is insatiable
+with microscopic desire.  I now I'm making a fool of myself, but
+the thing has obsessed me.  You are - I don't know what you are -
+you are wonderful, that's all.  But how do you do it?  How do you
+do it?"
+
+Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.
+
+"I shall never write again.  I am a dauber in clay.  You have shown
+me the work of the real artificer-artisan.  Genius!  This is
+something more than genius.  It transcends genius.  It is truth
+gone mad.  It is true, man, every line of it.  I wonder if you
+realize that, you dogmatist.  Science cannot give you the lie.  It
+is the truth of the sneer, stamped out from the black iron of the
+Cosmos and interwoven with mighty rhythms of sound into a fabric of
+splendor and beauty.  And now I won't say another word.  I am
+overwhelmed, crushed.  Yes, I will, too.  Let me market it for
+you."
+
+Brissenden grinned.  "There's not a magazine in Christendom that
+would dare to publish it - you know that."
+
+"I know nothing of the sort.  I know there's not a magazine in
+Christendom that wouldn't jump at it.  They don't get things like
+that every day.  That's no mere poem of the year.  It's the poem of
+the century."
+
+"I'd like to take you up on the proposition."
+
+"Now don't get cynical," Martin exhorted.  "The magazine editors
+are not wholly fatuous.  I know that.  And I'll close with you on
+the bet.  I'll wager anything you want that 'Ephemera' is accepted
+either on the first or second offering."
+
+"There's just one thing that prevents me from taking you."
+Brissenden waited a moment.  "The thing is big - the biggest I've
+ever done.  I know that.  It's my swan song.  I am almighty proud
+of it.  I worship it.  It's better than whiskey.  It is what I
+dreamed of - the great and perfect thing - when I was a simple
+young man, with sweet illusions and clean ideals.  And I've got it,
+now, in my last grasp, and I'll not have it pawed over and soiled
+by a lot of swine.  No, I won't take the bet.  It's mine.  I made
+it, and I've shared it with you."
+
+"But think of the rest of the world," Martin protested.  "The
+function of beauty is joy-making."
+
+"It's my beauty."
+
+"Don't be selfish."
+
+"I'm not selfish."  Brissenden grinned soberly in the way he had
+when pleased by the thing his thin lips were about to shape.  "I'm
+as unselfish as a famished hog."
+
+In vain Martin strove to shake him from his decision.  Martin told
+him that his hatred of the magazines was rabid, fanatical, and that
+his conduct was a thousand times more despicable than that of the
+youth who burned the temple of Diana at Ephesus.  Under the storm
+of denunciation Brissenden complacently sipped his toddy and
+affirmed that everything the other said was quite true, with the
+exception of the magazine editors.  His hatred of them knew no
+bounds, and he excelled Martin in denunciation when he turned upon
+them.
+
+"I wish you'd type it for me," he said.  "You know how a thousand
+times better than any stenographer.  And now I want to give you
+some advice."  He drew a bulky manuscript from his outside coat
+pocket.  "Here's your 'Shame of the Sun.'  I've read it not once,
+but twice and three times - the highest compliment I can pay you.
+After what you've said about 'Ephemera' I must be silent.  But this
+I will say:  when 'The Shame of the Sun' is published, it will make
+a hit.  It will start a controversy that will be worth thousands to
+you just in advertising."
+
+Martin laughed.  "I suppose your next advice will be to submit it
+to the magazines."
+
+"By all means no - that is, if you want to see it in print.  Offer
+it to the first-class houses.  Some publisher's reader may be mad
+enough or drunk enough to report favorably on it.  You've read the
+books.  The meat of them has been transmuted in the alembic of
+Martin Eden's mind and poured into 'The Shame of the Sun,' and one
+day Martin Eden will be famous, and not the least of his fame will
+rest upon that work.  So you must get a publisher for it - the
+sooner the better."
+
+Brissenden went home late that night; and just as he mounted the
+first step of the car, he swung suddenly back on Martin and thrust
+into his hand a small, tightly crumpled wad of paper.
+
+"Here, take this," he said.  "I was out to the races to-day, and I
+had the right dope."
+
+The bell clanged and the car pulled out, leaving Martin wondering
+as to the nature of the crinkly, greasy wad he clutched in his
+hand.  Back in his room he unrolled it and found a hundred-dollar
+bill.
+
+He did not scruple to use it.  He knew his friend had always plenty
+of money, and he knew also, with profound certitude, that his
+success would enable him to repay it.  In the morning he paid every
+bill, gave Maria three months' advance on the room, and redeemed
+every pledge at the pawnshop.  Next he bought Marian's wedding
+present, and simpler presents, suitable to Christmas, for Ruth and
+Gertrude.  And finally, on the balance remaining to him, he herded
+the whole Silva tribe down into Oakland.  He was a winter late in
+redeeming his promise, but redeemed it was, for the last, least
+Silva got a pair of shoes, as well as Maria herself.  Also, there
+were horns, and dolls, and toys of various sorts, and parcels and
+bundles of candies and nuts that filled the arms of all the Silvas
+to overflowing.
+
+It was with this extraordinary procession trooping at his and
+Maria's heels into a confectioner's in quest if the biggest candy-
+cane ever made, that he encountered Ruth and her mother.  Mrs.
+Morse was shocked.  Even Ruth was hurt, for she had some regard for
+appearances, and her lover, cheek by jowl with Maria, at the head
+of that army of Portuguese ragamuffins, was not a pretty sight.
+But it was not that which hurt so much as what she took to be his
+lack of pride and self-respect.  Further, and keenest of all, she
+read into the incident the impossibility of his living down his
+working-class origin.  There was stigma enough in the fact of it,
+but shamelessly to flaunt it in the face of the world - her world -
+was going too far.  Though her engagement to Martin had been kept
+secret, their long intimacy had not been unproductive of gossip;
+and in the shop, glancing covertly at her lover and his following,
+had been several of her acquaintances.  She lacked the easy
+largeness of Martin and could not rise superior to her environment.
+She had been hurt to the quick, and her sensitive nature was
+quivering with the shame of it.  So it was, when Martin arrived
+later in the day, that he kept her present in his breast-pocket,
+deferring the giving of it to a more propitious occasion.  Ruth in
+tears - passionate, angry tears - was a revelation to him.  The
+spectacle of her suffering convinced him that he had been a brute,
+yet in the soul of him he could not see how nor why.  It never
+entered his head to be ashamed of those he knew, and to take the
+Silvas out to a Christmas treat could in no way, so it seemed to
+him, show lack of consideration for Ruth.  On the other hand, he
+did see Ruth's point of view, after she had explained it; and he
+looked upon it as a feminine weakness, such as afflicted all women
+and the best of women.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI
+
+
+
+"Come on, - I'll show you the real dirt," Brissenden said to him,
+one evening in January.
+
+They had dined together in San Francisco, and were at the Ferry
+Building, returning to Oakland, when the whim came to him to show
+Martin the "real dirt."  He turned and fled across the water-front,
+a meagre shadow in a flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to
+keep up with him.  At a wholesale liquor store he bought two
+gallon-demijohns of old port, and with one in each hand boarded a
+Mission Street car, Martin at his heels burdened with several
+quart-bottles of whiskey.
+
+If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he wondered as to
+what constituted the real dirt.
+
+"Maybe nobody will be there," Brissenden said, when they dismounted
+and plunged off to the right into the heart of the working-class
+ghetto, south of Market Street.  "In which case you'll miss what
+you've been looking for so long."
+
+"And what the deuce is that?" Martin asked.
+
+"Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonentities I found
+you consorting with in that trader's den.  You read the books and
+you found yourself all alone.  Well, I'm going to show you to-night
+some other men who've read the books, so that you won't be lonely
+any more."
+
+"Not that I bother my head about their everlasting discussions," he
+said at the end of a block.  "I'm not interested in book
+philosophy.  But you'll find these fellows intelligences and not
+bourgeois swine.  But watch out, they'll talk an arm off of you on
+any subject under the sun."
+
+"Hope Norton's there," he panted a little later, resisting Martin's
+effort to relieve him of the two demijohns.  "Norton's an idealist
+- a Harvard man.  Prodigious memory.  Idealism led him to
+philosophic anarchy, and his family threw him off.  Father's a
+railroad president and many times millionnaire, but the son's
+starving in 'Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet for twenty-five a
+month."
+
+Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not at all south
+of Market; so he had no idea of where he was being led.
+
+"Go ahead," he said; "tell me about them beforehand.  What do they
+do for a living?  How do they happen to be here?"
+
+"Hope Hamilton's there."  Brissenden paused and rested his hands.
+"Strawn-Hamilton's his name - hyphenated, you know - comes of old
+Southern stock.  He's a tramp - laziest man I ever knew, though
+he's clerking, or trying to, in a socialist cooperative store for
+six dollars a week.  But he's a confirmed hobo.  Tramped into town.
+I've seen him sit all day on a bench and never a bite pass his
+lips, and in the evening, when I invited him to dinner - restaurant
+two blocks away - have him say, 'Too much trouble, old man.  Buy me
+a package of cigarettes instead.'  He was a Spencerian like you
+till Kreis turned him to materialistic monism.  I'll start him on
+monism if I can.  Norton's another monist - only he affirms naught
+but spirit.  He can give Kreis and Hamilton all they want, too."
+
+"Who is Kreis?" Martin asked.
+
+"His rooms we're going to.  One time professor - fired from
+university - usual story.  A mind like a steel trap.  Makes his
+living any old way.  I know he's been a street fakir when he was
+down.  Unscrupulous.  Rob a corpse of a shroud - anything.
+Difference between him - and the bourgeoisie is that he robs
+without illusion.  He'll talk Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant,
+or anything, but the only thing in this world, not excepting Mary,
+that he really cares for, is his monism.  Haeckel is his little tin
+god.  The only way to insult him is to take a slap at Haeckel."
+
+"Here's the hang-out."  Brissenden rested his demijohn at the
+upstairs entrance, preliminary to the climb.  It was the usual two-
+story corner building, with a saloon and grocery underneath.  "The
+gang lives here - got the whole upstairs to themselves.  But Kreis
+is the only one who has two rooms.  Come on."
+
+No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden threaded the
+utter blackness like a familiar ghost.  He stopped to speak to
+Martin.
+
+"There's one fellow - Stevens - a theosophist.  Makes a pretty
+tangle when he gets going.  Just now he's dish-washer in a
+restaurant.  Likes a good cigar.  I've seen him eat in a ten-cent
+hash-house and pay fifty cents for the cigar he smoked afterward.
+I've got a couple in my pocket for him, if he shows up."
+
+"And there's another fellow - Parry - an Australian, a statistician
+and a sporting encyclopaedia.  Ask him the grain output of Paraguay
+for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for
+1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who
+was welter-weight champion of the United States in '68, and you'll
+get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-
+machine.  And there's Andy, a stone-mason, has ideas on everything,
+a good chess-player; and another fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot
+socialist and strong union man.  By the way, you remember Cooks'
+and Waiters' strike - Hamilton was the chap who organized that
+union and precipitated the strike - planned it all out in advance,
+right here in Kreis's rooms.  Did it just for the fun of it, but
+was too lazy to stay by the union.  Yet he could have risen high if
+he wanted to.  There's no end to the possibilities in that man - if
+he weren't so insuperably lazy."
+
+Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread of light
+marked the threshold of a door.  A knock and an answer opened it,
+and Martin found himself shaking hands with Kreis, a handsome
+brunette man, with dazzling white teeth, a drooping black mustache,
+and large, flashing black eyes.  Mary, a matronly young blonde, was
+washing dishes in the little back room that served for kitchen and
+dining room.  The front room served as bedchamber and living room.
+Overhead was the week's washing, hanging in festoons so low that
+Martin did not see at first the two men talking in a corner.  They
+hailed Brissenden and his demijohns with acclamation, and, on being
+introduced, Martin learned they were Andy and Parry.  He joined
+them and listened attentively to the description of a prize-fight
+Parry had seen the night before; while Brissenden, in his glory,
+plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and the serving of wine and
+whiskey-and-sodas.  At his command, "Bring in the clan," Andy
+departed to go the round of the rooms for the lodgers.
+
+"We're lucky that most of them are here," Brissenden whispered to
+Martin.  "There's Norton and Hamilton; come on and meet them.
+Stevens isn't around, I hear.  I'm going to get them started on
+monism if I can.  Wait till they get a few jolts in them and
+they'll warm up."
+
+At first the conversation was desultory.  Nevertheless Martin could
+not fail to appreciate the keen play of their minds.  They were men
+with opinions, though the opinions often clashed, and, though they
+were witty and clever, they were not superficial.  He swiftly saw,
+no matter upon what they talked, that each man applied the
+correlation of knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified
+conception of society and the Cosmos.  Nobody manufactured their
+opinions for them; they were all rebels of one variety or another,
+and their lips were strangers to platitudes.  Never had Martin, at
+the Morses', heard so amazing a range of topics discussed.  There
+seemed no limit save time to the things they were alive to.  The
+talk wandered from Mrs. Humphry Ward's new book to Shaw's latest
+play, through the future of the drama to reminiscences of
+Mansfield.  They appreciated or sneered at the morning editorials,
+jumped from labor conditions in New Zealand to Henry James and
+Brander Matthews, passed on to the German designs in the Far East
+and the economic aspect of the Yellow Peril, wrangled over the
+German elections and Bebel's last speech, and settled down to local
+politics, the latest plans and scandals in the union labor party
+administration, and the wires that were pulled to bring about the
+Coast Seamen's strike.  Martin was struck by the inside knowledge
+they possessed.  They knew what was never printed in the newspapers
+- the wires and strings and the hidden hands that made the puppets
+dance.  To Martin's surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the
+conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encountered
+in the few women he had met.  They talked together on Swinburne and
+Rossetti, after which she led him beyond his depth into the by-
+paths of French literature.  His revenge came when she defended
+Maeterlinck and he brought into action the carefully-thought-out
+thesis of "The Shame of the Sun."
+
+Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with
+tobacco smoke, when Brissenden waved the red flag.
+
+"Here's fresh meat for your axe, Kreis," he said; "a rose-white
+youth with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer.  Make a
+Haeckelite of him - if you can."
+
+Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic
+thing, while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet,
+girlish smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.
+
+Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered,
+until he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle.  Martin
+listened and fain would have rubbed his eyes.  It was impossible
+that this should be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market.
+The books were alive in these men.  They talked with fire and
+enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen
+drink and anger stir other men.  What he heard was no longer the
+philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical
+demigods like Kant and Spencer.  It was living philosophy, with
+warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features
+worked with excitement.  Now and again other men joined in, and all
+followed the discussion with cigarettes going out in their hands
+and with alert, intent faces.
+
+Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now
+received at the hands of Norton was a revelation.  The logical
+plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed
+missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a
+metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as
+metaphysicians.  PHENOMENON and NOUMENON were bandied back and
+forth.  They charged him with attempting to explain consciousness
+by itself.  He charged them with word-jugglery, with reasoning from
+words to theory instead of from facts to theory.  At this they were
+aghast.  It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of reasoning to
+start with facts and to give names to the facts.
+
+When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded
+him that all good little German philosophies when they died went to
+Oxford.  A little later Norton reminded them of Hamilton's Law of
+Parsimony, the application of which they immediately claimed for
+every reasoning process of theirs.  And Martin hugged his knees and
+exulted in it all.  But Norton was no Spencerian, and he, too,
+strove for Martin's philosophic soul, talking as much at him as to
+his two opponents.
+
+"You know Berkeley has never been answered," he said, looking
+directly at Martin.  "Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was
+not very near.  Even the stanchest of Spencer's followers will not
+go farther.  I was reading an essay of Saleeby's the other day, and
+the best Saleeby could say was that Herbert Spencer NEARLY
+succeeded in answering Berkeley."
+
+"You know what Hume said?" Hamilton asked.  Norton nodded, but
+Hamilton gave it for the benefit of the rest.  "He said that
+Berkeley's arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction."
+
+"In his, Hume's, mind," was the reply.  "And Hume's mind was the
+same as yours, with this difference:  he was wise enough to admit
+there was no answering Berkeley."
+
+Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head,
+while Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages,
+seeking out tender places to prod and poke.  As the evening grew
+late, Norton, smarting under the repeated charges of being a
+metaphysician, clutching his chair to keep from jumping to his
+feet, his gray eyes snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and
+sure, made a grand attack upon their position.
+
+"All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but,
+pray, how do you reason?  You have nothing to stand on, you
+unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are
+always lugging about into places it has no right to be.  Long
+before the school of materialistic monism arose, the ground was
+removed so that there could be no foundation.  Locke was the man,
+John Locke.  Two hundred years ago - more than that, even in his
+'Essay concerning the Human Understanding,' he proved the non-
+existence of innate ideas.  The best of it is that that is
+precisely what you claim.  To-night, again and again, you have
+asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.
+
+"And what does that mean?  It means that you can never know
+ultimate reality.  Your brains are empty when you are born.
+Appearances, or phenomena, are all the content your minds can
+receive from your five senses.  Then noumena, which are not in your
+minds when you are born, have no way of getting in - "
+
+"I deny - " Kreis started to interrupt.
+
+"You wait till I'm done," Norton shouted.  "You can know only that
+much of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in
+one way or another on our senses.  You see, I am willing to admit,
+for the sake of the argument, that matter exists; and what I am
+about to do is to efface you by your own argument.  I can't do it
+any other way, for you are both congenitally unable to understand a
+philosophic abstraction."
+
+"And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own
+positive science?  You know it only by its phenomena, its
+appearances.  You are aware only of its changes, or of such changes
+in it as cause changes in your consciousness.  Positive science
+deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to
+be ontologists and to deal with noumena.  Yet, by the very
+definition of positive science, science is concerned only with
+appearances.  As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot
+transcend phenomena."
+
+"You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and
+yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm
+that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the
+point, the existence of matter. - You know I granted the reality of
+matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your
+understanding.  Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology
+has no place in positive science, so leave it alone.  Spencer is
+right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer - "
+
+But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and
+Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and
+Kreis and Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds
+as soon as he finished.
+
+"You have given me a glimpse of fairyland," Martin said on the
+ferry-boat.  "It makes life worth while to meet people like that.
+My mind is all worked up.  I never appreciated idealism before.
+Yet I can't accept it.  I know that I shall always be a realist.  I
+am so made, I guess.  But I'd like to have made a reply to Kreis
+and Hamilton, and I think I'd have had a word or two for Norton.  I
+didn't see that Spencer was damaged any.  I'm as excited as a child
+on its first visit to the circus.  I see I must read up some more.
+I'm going to get hold of Saleeby.  I still think Spencer is
+unassailable, and next time I'm going to take a hand myself."
+
+But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his
+chin buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body
+wrapped in the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the
+propellers.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII
+
+
+
+The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to
+Brissenden's advice and command.  "The Shame of the Sun" he wrapped
+and mailed to THE ACROPOLIS.  He believed he could find magazine
+publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines
+would commend him to the book-publishing houses.  "Ephemera" he
+likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine.  Despite Brissenden's
+prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with
+him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print.  He did
+not intend, however, to publish it without the other's permission.
+His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and,
+thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden for consent.
+
+Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a
+number of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him
+with its insistent clamor to be created.  Apparently it was to be a
+rattling sea story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and
+romance, handling real characters, in a real world, under real
+conditions.  But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be
+something else - something that the superficial reader would never
+discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way
+the interest and enjoyment for such a reader.  It was this, and not
+the mere story, that impelled Martin to write it.  For that matter,
+it was always the great, universal motif that suggested plots to
+him.  After having found such a motif, he cast about for the
+particular persons and particular location in time and space
+wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing.  "Overdue" was
+the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would
+not be more than sixty thousand words - a bagatelle for him with
+his splendid vigor of production.  On this first day he took hold
+of it with conscious delight in the mastery of his tools.  He no
+longer worried for fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip
+and mar his work.  The long months of intense application and study
+had brought their reward.  He could now devote himself with sure
+hand to the larger phases of the thing he shaped; and as he worked,
+hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the sure and cosmic
+grasp with which he held life and the affairs of life.  "Overdue"
+would tell a story that would be true of its particular characters
+and its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was
+confident, great vital things that would be true of all time, and
+all sea, and all life - thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought,
+leaning back for a moment from the table.  Ay, thanks to Herbert
+Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had
+placed in his hands.
+
+He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing.  "It will
+go!  It will go!" was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears.
+Of course it would go.  At last he was turning out the thing at
+which the magazines would jump.  The whole story worked out before
+him in lightning flashes.  He broke off from it long enough to
+write a paragraph in his note-book.  This would be the last
+paragraph in "Overdue"; but so thoroughly was the whole book
+already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he
+had arrived at the end, the end itself.  He compared the tale, as
+yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to
+be immeasurably superior.  "There's only one man who could touch
+it," he murmured aloud, "and that's Conrad.  And it ought to make
+even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, 'Well done,
+Martin, my boy.'"
+
+He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was
+to have dinner at the Morses'.  Thanks to Brissenden, his black
+suit was out of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties.
+Down town he stopped off long enough to run into the library and
+search for Saleeby's books.  He drew out 'The Cycle of Life," and
+on the car turned to the essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer.  As
+Martin read, he grew angry.  His face flushed, his jaw set, and
+unconsciously his hand clenched, unclenched, and clenched again as
+if he were taking fresh grips upon some hateful thing out of which
+he was squeezing the life.  When he left the car, he strode along
+the sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse
+bell with such viciousness that it roused him to consciousness of
+his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smiling with
+amusement at himself.  No sooner, however, was he inside than a
+great depression descended upon him.  He fell from the height where
+he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
+"Bourgeois," "trader's den" - Brissenden's epithets repeated
+themselves in his mind.  But what of that? he demanded angrily.  He
+was marrying Ruth, not her family.
+
+It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
+spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy.  There
+was color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again -
+the eyes in which he had first read immortality.  He had forgotten
+immortality of late, and the trend of his scientific reading had
+been away from it; but here, in Ruth's eyes, he read an argument
+without words that transcended all worded arguments.  He saw that
+in her eyes before which all discussion fled away, for he saw love
+there.  And in his own eyes was love; and love was unanswerable.
+Such was his passionate doctrine.
+
+The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left
+him supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life.
+Nevertheless, at table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion
+consequent upon the hard day seized hold of him.  He was aware that
+his eyes were tired and that he was irritable.  He remembered it
+was at this table, at which he now sneered and was so often bored,
+that he had first eaten with civilized beings in what he had
+imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and refinement.  He
+caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long ago, a
+self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony of
+apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of eating-
+implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap
+to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to
+be frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did
+not possess.
+
+He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a
+passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will
+strive to locate the life preservers.  Well, that much had come out
+of it - love and Ruth.  All the rest had failed to stand the test
+of the books.  But Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he
+found a biological sanction.  Love was the most exalted expression
+of life.  Nature had been busy designing him, as she had been busy
+with all normal men, for the purpose of loving.  She had spent ten
+thousand centuries - ay, a hundred thousand and a million centuries
+- upon the task, and he was the best she could do.  She had made
+love the strongest thing in him, increased its power a myriad per
+cent with her gift of imagination, and sent him forth into the
+ephemera to thrill and melt and mate.  His hand sought Ruth's hand
+beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was given and
+received.  She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes were
+radiant and melting.  So were his in the thrill that pervaded him;
+nor did he realize how much that was radiant and melting in her
+eyes had been aroused by what she had seen in his.
+
+Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse's right,
+sat Judge Blount, a local superior court judge.  Martin had met him
+a number of times and had failed to like him.  He and Ruth's father
+were discussing labor union politics, the local situation, and
+socialism, and Mr. Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the
+latter topic.  At last Judge Blount looked across the table with
+benignant and fatherly pity.  Martin smiled to himself.
+
+"You'll grow out of it, young man," he said soothingly.  "Time is
+the best cure for such youthful distempers."  He turned to Mr.
+Morse.  "I do not believe discussion is good in such cases.  It
+makes the patient obstinate."
+
+"That is true," the other assented gravely.  "But it is well to
+warn the patient occasionally of his condition."
+
+Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort.  The day had
+been too long, the day's effort too intense, and he was deep in the
+throes of the reaction.
+
+"Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors," he said; "but if you
+care a whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that
+you are poor diagnosticians.  In fact, you are both suffering from
+the disease you think you find in me.  As for me, I am immune.  The
+socialist philosophy that riots half-baked in your veins has passed
+me by."
+
+"Clever, clever," murmured the judge.  "An excellent ruse in
+controversy, to reverse positions."
+
+"Out of your mouth."  Martin's eyes were sparkling, but he kept
+control of himself.  "You see, Judge, I've heard your campaign
+speeches.  By some henidical process - henidical, by the way is a
+favorite word of mine which nobody understands - by some henidical
+process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive
+system and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you
+indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear the
+strength from the strong."
+
+"My young man - "
+
+"Remember, I've heard your campaign speeches," Martin warned.
+"It's on record, your position on interstate commerce regulation,
+on regulation of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the
+conservation of the forests, on a thousand and one restrictive
+measures that are nothing else than socialistic."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
+various outrageous exercises of power?"
+
+"That's not the point.  I mean to tell you that you are a poor
+diagnostician.  I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the
+microbe of socialism.  I mean to tell you that it is you who are
+suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe.  As
+for me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an
+inveterate opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing
+else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that
+will not stand the test of the dictionary."
+
+"I am a reactionary - so complete a reactionary that my position is
+incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social
+organization and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil.
+You make believe that you believe in the survival of the strong and
+the rule of the strong.  I believe.  That is the difference.  When
+I was a trifle younger, - a few months younger, - I believed the
+same thing.  You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed me.
+But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they grunt
+and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have
+swung back to aristocracy, if you please.  I am the only
+individualist in this room.  I look to the state for nothing.  I
+look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the
+state from its own rotten futility."
+
+"Nietzsche was right.  I won't take the time to tell you who
+Nietzsche was, but he was right.  The world belongs to the strong -
+to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the
+swine-trough of trade and exchange.  The world belongs to the true
+nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the
+'yes-sayers.'  And they will eat you up, you socialists - who are
+afraid of socialism and who think yourselves individualists.  Your
+slave-morality of the meek and lowly will never save you. - Oh,
+it's all Greek, I know, and I won't bother you any more with it.
+But remember one thing.  There aren't half a dozen individualists
+in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them."
+
+He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to
+Ruth.
+
+"I'm wrought up to-day," he said in an undertone.  "All I want to
+do is to love, not talk."
+
+He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-
+
+"I am unconvinced.  All socialists are Jesuits.  That is the way to
+tell them."
+
+"We'll make a good Republican out of you yet," said Judge Blount.
+
+"The man on horseback will arrive before that time," Martin
+retorted with good humor, and returned to Ruth.
+
+But Mr. Morse was not content.  He did not like the laziness and
+the disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective
+son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose
+nature he had no understanding.  So he turned the conversation to
+Herbert Spencer.  Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose
+ears had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher's name,
+listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe
+against Spencer.  From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as
+much as to say, "There, my boy, you see."
+
+"Chattering daws," Martin muttered under his breath, and went on
+talking with Ruth and Arthur.
+
+But the long day and the "real dirt" of the night before were
+telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what
+had made him angry when he read it on the car.
+
+"What is the matter?" Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he
+was making to contain himself.
+
+"There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its
+prophet," Judge Blount was saying at that moment.
+
+Martin turned upon him.
+
+"A cheap judgment," he remarked quietly.  "I heard it first in the
+City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known
+better.  I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap
+of it nauseates me.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  To hear
+that great and noble man's name upon your lips is like finding a
+dew-drop in a cesspool.  You are disgusting."
+
+It was like a thunderbolt.  Judge Blount glared at him with
+apoplectic countenance, and silence reigned.  Mr. Morse was
+secretly pleased.  He could see that his daughter was shocked.  It
+was what he wanted to do - to bring out the innate ruffianism of
+this man he did not like.
+
+Ruth's hand sought Martin's beseechingly under the table, but his
+blood was up.  He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and
+fraud of those who sat in the high places.  A Superior Court Judge!
+It was only several years before that he had looked up from the
+mire at such glorious entities and deemed them gods.
+
+Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing
+himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter
+understood was for the benefit of the ladies.  Even this added to
+his anger.  Was there no honesty in the world?
+
+"You can't discuss Spencer with me," he cried.  "You do not know
+any more about Spencer than do his own countrymen.  But it is no
+fault of yours, I grant.  It is just a phase of the contemptible
+ignorance of the times.  I ran across a sample of it on my way here
+this evening.  I was reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer.  You
+should read it.  It is accessible to all men.  You can buy it in
+any book-store or draw it from the public library.  You would feel
+ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance of that noble man
+compared with what Saleeby has collected on the subject.  It is a
+record of shame that would shame your shame."
+
+"'The philosopher of the half-educated,' he was called by an
+academic Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere
+he breathed.  I don't think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but
+there have been critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who
+have read no more than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his
+followers to adduce one single idea from all his writings - from
+Herbert Spencer's writings, the man who has impressed the stamp of
+his genius over the whole field of scientific research and modern
+thought; the father of psychology; the man who revolutionized
+pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French peasant is taught
+the three R's according to principles laid down by him.  And the
+little gnats of men sting his memory when they get their very bread
+and butter from the technical application of his ideas.  What
+little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to him.  It
+is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in
+their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent."
+
+"And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford - a man who sits
+in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount - has said that
+Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather
+than a thinker.  Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of
+them!  '"First Principles" is not wholly destitute of a certain
+literary power,' said one of them.  And others of them have said
+that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker.
+Yappers and blatherskites!  Yappers and blatherskites!"
+
+Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence.  Everybody in Ruth's
+family looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement,
+and they were horrified at Martin's outbreak.  The remainder of the
+dinner passed like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining
+their talk to each other, and the rest of the conversation being
+extremely desultory.  Then afterward, when Ruth and Martin were
+alone, there was a scene.
+
+"You are unbearable," she wept.
+
+But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, "The beasts!
+The beasts!"
+
+When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-
+
+"By telling the truth about him?"
+
+"I don't care whether it was true or not," she insisted.  "There
+are certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult
+anybody."
+
+"Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?"
+Martin demanded.  "Surely to assault truth is a more serious
+misdemeanor than to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge's.
+He did worse than that.  He blackened the name of a great, noble
+man who is dead.  Oh, the beasts!  The beasts!"
+
+His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him.
+Never had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and
+unreasonable to her comprehension.  And yet, through her very
+terror ran the fibres of fascination that had drawn and that still
+drew her to him - that had compelled her to lean towards him, and,
+in that mad, culminating moment, lay her hands upon his neck.  She
+was hurt and outraged by what had taken place, and yet she lay in
+his arms and quivered while he went on muttering, "The beasts!  The
+beasts!"  And she still lay there when he said:  "I'll not bother
+your table again, dear.  They do not like me, and it is wrong of me
+to thrust my objectionable presence upon them.  Besides, they are
+just as objectionable to me.  Faugh!  They are sickening.  And to
+think of it, I dreamed in my innocence that the persons who sat in
+the high places, who lived in fine houses and had educations and
+bank accounts, were worth while!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII
+
+
+
+"Come on, let's go down to the local."
+
+So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before
+- the second hemorrhage in three days.  The perennial whiskey glass
+was in his hands, and he drained it with shaking fingers.
+
+"What do I want with socialism?" Martin demanded.
+
+"Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches," the sick man urged.
+"Get up and spout.  Tell them why you don't want socialism.  Tell
+them what you think about them and their ghetto ethics.  Slam
+Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains.  Make a scrap
+of it.  It will do them good.  Discussion is what they want, and
+what you want, too.  You see, I'd like to see you a socialist
+before I'm gone.  It will give you a sanction for your existence.
+It is the one thing that will save you in the time of
+disappointment that is coming to you."
+
+"I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist,"
+Martin pondered.  "You detest the crowd so.  Surely there is
+nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul."
+He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other
+was refilling.  "Socialism doesn't seem to save you."
+
+"I'm very sick," was the answer.  "With you it is different.  You
+have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to
+life somehow.  As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist.  I'll
+tell you.  It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the
+present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day
+is past for your man on horseback.  The slaves won't stand for it.
+They are too many, and willy-nilly they'll drag down the would-be
+equestrian before ever he gets astride.  You can't get away from
+them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality.  It's
+not a nice mess, I'll allow.  But it's been a-brewing and swallow
+it you must.  You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche
+ideas.  The past is past, and the man who says history repeats
+itself is a liar.  Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a
+poor chap to do?  We can't have the man on horseback, and anything
+is preferable to the timid swine that now rule.  But come on,
+anyway.  I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any
+longer, I'll get drunk.  And you know the doctor says - damn the
+doctor!  I'll fool him yet."
+
+It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the
+Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class.  The
+speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time
+that he aroused his antagonism.  The man's stooped and narrow
+shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the
+crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of
+the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who
+had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time.
+To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol.  He was
+the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable
+mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to
+biological law on the ragged confines of life.  They were the
+unfit.  In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike
+proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the
+exceptional man.  Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from
+her prolific hand she selected only the best.  It was by the same
+method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and cucumbers.
+Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better
+method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with
+this particular method.  Of course, they could squirm as they
+perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the
+platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they
+counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the
+penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos.
+
+So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to
+give them hell.  He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform,
+as was the custom, and addressing the chairman.  He began in a low
+voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in
+his brain while the Jew was speaking.  In such meetings five
+minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's
+five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their
+doctrines but half completed.  He had caught their interest, and
+the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's
+time.  They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect,
+and they listened intently, following every word.  He spoke with
+fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves
+and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers
+as the slaves in question.  He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and
+enunciated the biological law of development.
+
+"And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of
+the slave-types can endure.  The old law of development still
+holds.  In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong
+and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and
+the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish.  The result
+is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so
+long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation
+increases.  That is development.  But you slaves - it is too bad to
+be slaves, I grant - but you slaves dream of a society where the
+law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and
+inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much
+as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all
+will marry and have progeny - the weak as well as the strong.  What
+will be the result?  No longer will the strength and life-value of
+each generation increase.  On the contrary, it will diminish.
+There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy.  Your society of
+slaves - of, by, and for, slaves - must inevitably weaken and go to
+pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces.
+
+"Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics.  No
+state of slaves can stand - "
+
+"How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience.
+
+"And how about it?" Martin retorted.  "The thirteen colonies threw
+off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called.  The slaves
+were their own masters.  There were no more masters of the sword.
+But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there
+arose a new set of masters - not the great, virile, noble men, but
+the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders.  And they
+enslaved you over again - but not frankly, as the true, noble men
+would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by
+spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies.  They
+have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave
+legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel
+slavery your slave boys and girls.  Two million of your children
+are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States.
+Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly
+fed."
+
+"But to return.  I have shown that no society of slaves can endure,
+because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of
+development.  No sooner can a slave society be organized than
+deterioration sets in.  It is easy for you to talk of annulling the
+law of development, but where is the new law of development that
+will maintain your strength?  Formulate it.  Is it already
+formulated?  Then state it."
+
+Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices.  A score of men
+were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair.  And
+one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire
+and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack.
+It was a wild night - but it was wild intellectually, a battle of
+ideas.  Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers
+replied directly to Martin.  They shook him with lines of thought
+that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new
+biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws.  They
+were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the
+chairman rapped and pounded for order.
+
+It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there
+on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of
+journalism for sensation.  He was not a bright cub reporter.  He
+was merely facile and glib.  He was too dense to follow the
+discussion.  In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was
+vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class.  Also,
+he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and
+dictated the policies of nations and newspapers.  Further, he had
+an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect
+reporter who is able to make something - even a great deal - out of
+nothing.
+
+He did not know what all the talk was about.  It was not necessary.
+Words like REVOLUTION gave him his cue.  Like a paleontologist,
+able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was
+able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word REVOLUTION.
+He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made
+the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the
+arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism
+into the most lurid, red-shirt socialist utterance.  The cub
+reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid
+on the local color - wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and
+degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists
+raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths,
+yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX
+
+
+
+Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's
+paper.  It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on
+the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was
+the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists.  He ran over
+the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and,
+though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he
+tossed the paper aside with a laugh.
+
+"Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that
+afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived
+and dropped limply into the one chair.
+
+"But what do you care?" Brissenden asked.  "Surely you don't desire
+the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?"
+
+Martin thought for a while, then said:-
+
+"No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit.  On the
+other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's
+family a trifle awkward.  Her father always contended I was a
+socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief.  Not
+that I care for his opinion - but what's the odds?  I want to read
+you what I've been doing to-day.  It's 'Overdue,' of course, and
+I'm just about halfway through."
+
+He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in
+a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting
+the oil-burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze
+wandered on to Martin.
+
+"Sit down," Brissenden said.
+
+Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to
+broach his business.
+
+"I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview
+you," he began.
+
+Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.
+
+"A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at
+Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and
+dying man.
+
+"And he wrote that report," Martin said softly.  "Why, he is only a
+boy!"
+
+"Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked.  "I'd give a thousand
+dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes."
+
+The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him
+and around him and at him.  But he had been commended for his
+brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been
+detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader
+of the organized menace to society.
+
+"You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he
+said.  "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it
+will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower.
+Then we can have the interview afterward."
+
+"A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively.  "Poke him, Martin!
+Poke him!"
+
+"I guess I'm getting old," was the answer.  "I know I ought, but I
+really haven't the heart.  It doesn't seem to matter."
+
+"For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged.
+
+"It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem
+worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me.  You see, it
+does take energy to give a fellow a poking.  Besides, what does it
+matter?"
+
+"That's right - that's the way to take it," the cub announced
+airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the
+door.
+
+"But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on,
+confining his attention to Brissenden.
+
+"It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the
+cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising.  That's what
+counts.  It was a favor to you."
+
+"It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated
+solemnly.
+
+"And it was a favor to me - think of that!" was Martin's
+contribution.
+
+"Let me see - where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked,
+assuming an air of expectant attention.
+
+"He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden.  "He remembers it all."
+
+"That is sufficient for me."  The cub was trying not to look
+worried.  "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes."
+
+"That was sufficient - for last night."  But Brissenden was not a
+disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly.
+"Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead
+on the floor the next moment."
+
+"How will a spanking do?" Martin asked.
+
+Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.
+
+The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the
+cub face downward across his knees.
+
+"Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your
+face.  It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face."
+
+His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a
+swift and steady rhythm.  The cub struggled and cursed and
+squirmed, but did not offer to bite.  Brissenden looked on gravely,
+though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle,
+pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once."
+
+"Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted.
+"It is quite numb."
+
+He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.
+
+"I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish
+indignation running down his flushed cheeks.  "I'll make you sweat
+for this.  You'll see."
+
+"The pretty thing," Martin remarked.  "He doesn't realize that he
+has entered upon the downward path.  It is not honest, it is not
+square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures
+the way he has done, and he doesn't know it."
+
+"He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause.
+
+"Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured.  My grocery will
+undoubtedly refuse me credit now.  The worst of it is that the poor
+boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class
+newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel."
+
+"But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden.  "Who knows but what you
+may prove the humble instrument to save him.  Why didn't you let me
+swat him just once?  I'd like to have had a hand in it."
+
+"I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes,"
+sobbed the erring soul.
+
+"No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak."  Martin shook his head
+lugubriously.  "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain.  The young
+man cannot reform.  He will become eventually a very great and
+successful newspaper man.  He has no conscience.  That alone will
+make him great."
+
+With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last
+for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle
+he still clutched.
+
+In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about
+himself that was new to him.  "We are the sworn enemies of
+society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview.
+"No, we are not anarchists but socialists."  When the reporter
+pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the
+two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent
+affirmation.  His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical,
+and various other signs of degeneration were described.  Especially
+notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-
+shot eyes.
+
+He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City
+Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there
+inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and
+made the most revolutionary speeches.  The cub painted a high-light
+picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair,
+and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked
+as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement
+in some fortress dungeon.
+
+The cub had been industrious.  He had scurried around and nosed out
+Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of
+Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself
+standing out in front.  That gentleman was depicted as an
+intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his
+brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the
+brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a
+lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered
+to him and who would go to jail yet.  Hermann Yon Schmidt, Marian's
+husband, had likewise been interviewed.  He had called Martin the
+black sheep of the family and repudiated him.  "He tried to sponge
+off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt
+had said to the reporter.  "He knows better than to come bumming
+around here.  A man who won't work is no good, take that from me."
+
+This time Martin was genuinely angry.  Brissenden looked upon the
+affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew
+that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth.  As for her
+father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened
+and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement.
+How much he would make of it he was soon to realize.  The afternoon
+mail brought a letter from Ruth.  Martin opened it with a
+premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when
+he had received it from the postman.  As he read, mechanically his
+hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old
+cigarette days.  He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that
+he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a
+cigarette.
+
+It was not a passionate letter.  There were no touches of anger in
+it.  But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last,
+was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment.  She had expected
+better of him.  She had thought he had got over his youthful
+wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while
+to enable him to live seriously and decently.  And now her father
+and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement
+be broken.  That they were justified in this she could not but
+admit.  Their relation could never be a happy one.  It had been
+unfortunate from the first.  But one regret she voiced in the whole
+letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin.  "If only you had
+settled down to some position and attempted to make something of
+yourself," she wrote.  "But it was not to be.  Your past life had
+been too wild and irregular.  I can understand that you are not to
+be blamed.  You could act only according to your nature and your
+early training.  So I do not blame you, Martin.  Please remember
+that.  It was simply a mistake.  As father and mother have
+contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be
+happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use
+trying to see me," she said toward the last.  "It would be an
+unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother.  I feel,
+as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry.  I shall
+have to do much living to atone for it."
+
+He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat
+down and replied.  He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the
+socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the
+converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth.  Toward the
+end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for
+love.  "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to
+tell me but one thing.  Do you love me?  That is all - the answer
+to that one question."
+
+But no answer came the next day, nor the next.  "Overdue" lay
+untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned
+manuscripts under the table grew larger.  For the first time
+Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed
+through long, restless nights.  Three times he called at the Morse
+home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell.
+Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and,
+though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his
+troubles.
+
+For Martin's troubles were many.  The aftermath of the cub
+reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated.  The
+Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the
+greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a
+traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him -
+carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's
+account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it.  The talk in the
+neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against
+Martin ran high.  No one would have anything to do with a socialist
+traitor.  Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained
+loyal.  The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of
+the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe
+distances they called him "hobo" and "bum."  The Silva tribe,
+however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched
+battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite
+the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and
+troubles.
+
+Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and
+learned what he knew could not be otherwise - that Bernard
+Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family
+into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house.
+
+"Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged.  "Go away and
+get a job somewhere and steady down.  Afterwards, when this all
+blows over, you can come back."
+
+Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations.  How could he
+explain?  He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that
+yawned between him and his people.  He could never cross it and
+explain to them his position, - the Nietzschean position, in regard
+to socialism.  There were not words enough in the English language,
+nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible
+to them.  Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was
+to get a job.  That was their first word and their last.  It
+constituted their whole lexicon of ideas.  Get a job!  Go to work!
+Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.  Small
+wonder the world belonged to the strong.  The slaves were obsessed
+by their own slavery.  A job was to them a golden fetich before
+which they fell down and worshipped.
+
+He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he
+knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the
+pawnbroker.
+
+"Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him.  "After a few
+months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job
+of drivin' delivery-wagon for him.  Any time you want me, just send
+for me an' I'll come.  Don't forget."
+
+She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot
+through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait.  As he
+watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter.
+The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not
+wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family.
+And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that
+slave was his sister Gertrude.  He grinned savagely at the paradox.
+A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to
+be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along -
+ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what
+his pity for his sister really was.  The true noble men were above
+pity and compassion.  Pity and compassion had been generated in the
+subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the
+agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL
+
+
+
+"Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table.  Every
+manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table.  Only one
+manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera."
+His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer
+people were once more worrying about the rent.  But such things no
+longer bothered him.  He was seeking a new orientation, and until
+that was found his life must stand still.
+
+After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened.  He met
+Ruth on the street.  It was true, she was accompanied by her
+brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and
+that Norman attempted to wave him aside.
+
+"If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman
+threatened.  "She does not wish to speak with you, and your
+insistence is insult."
+
+"If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll
+get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly.  "And now,
+get out of my way and get the officer if you want to.  I'm going to
+talk with Ruth."
+
+"I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her.
+
+She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.
+
+"The question I asked in my letter," he prompted.
+
+Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a
+swift look.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded.
+
+"It is."  She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation.
+"It is of my own free will.  You have disgraced me so that I am
+ashamed to meet my friends.  They are all talking about me, I know.
+That is all I can tell you.  You have made me very unhappy, and I
+never wish to see you again."
+
+"Friends!  Gossip!  Newspaper misreports!  Surely such things are
+not stronger than love!  I can only believe that you never loved
+me."
+
+A blush drove the pallor from her face.
+
+"After what has passed?" she said faintly.  "Martin, you do not
+know what you are saying.  I am not common."
+
+"You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman
+blurted out, starting on with her.
+
+Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his
+coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.
+
+It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went
+up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it.
+He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about
+him like an awakened somnambulist.  He noticed "Overdue" lying on
+the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen.  There was
+in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness.  Here was
+something undone.  It had been deferred against the completion of
+something else.  Now that something else had been finished, and he
+would apply himself to this task until it was finished.  What he
+would do next he did not know.  All that he did know was that a
+climacteric in his life had been attained.  A period had been
+reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion.  He
+was not curious about the future.  He would soon enough find out
+what it held in store for him.  Whatever it was, it did not matter.
+Nothing seemed to matter.
+
+For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing
+nobody, and eating meagrely.  On the morning of the sixth day the
+postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of THE PARTHENON.
+A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted.  "We have submitted
+the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and
+he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go.  As
+an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you
+that we have set it for the August number, our July number being
+already made up.  Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr.
+Brissenden.  Please send by return mail his photograph and
+biographical data.  If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly
+telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price."
+
+Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty
+dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph.  Then,
+too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.  Well, he had
+been right, after all.  Here was one magazine editor who knew real
+poetry when he saw it.  And the price was splendid, even though it
+was for the poem of a century.  As for Cartwright Bruce, Martin
+knew that he was the one critic for whose opinions Brissenden had
+any respect.
+
+Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the
+houses and cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that
+he was not more elated over his friend's success and over his own
+signal victory.  The one critic in the United States had pronounced
+favorably on the poem, while his own contention that good stuff
+could find its way into the magazines had proved correct.  But
+enthusiasm had lost its spring in him, and he found that he was
+more anxious to see Brissenden than he was to carry the good news.
+The acceptance of THE PARTHENON had recalled to him that during his
+five days' devotion to "Overdue" he had not heard from Brissenden
+nor even thought about him.  For the first time Martin realized the
+daze he had been in, and he felt shame for having forgotten his
+friend.  But even the shame did not burn very sharply.  He was numb
+to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones concerned in the
+writing of "Overdue."  So far as other affairs were concerned, he
+had been in a trance.  For that matter, he was still in a trance.
+All this life through which the electric car whirred seemed remote
+and unreal, and he would have experienced little interest and less
+shook if the great stone steeple of the church he passed had
+suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon his head.
+
+At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden's room, and hurried down
+again.  The room was empty.  All luggage was gone.
+
+"Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?" he asked the clerk, who
+looked at him curiously for a moment.
+
+"Haven't you heard?" he asked.
+
+Martin shook his head.
+
+"Why, the papers were full of it.  He was found dead in bed.
+Suicide.  Shot himself through the head."
+
+"Is he buried yet?" Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one
+else's voice, from a long way off, asking the question.
+
+"No.  The body was shipped East after the inquest.  Lawyers engaged
+by his people saw to the arrangements."
+
+"They were quick about it, I must say," Martin commented.
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  It happened five days ago."
+
+"Five days ago?"
+
+"Yes, five days ago."
+
+"Oh," Martin said as he turned and went out.
+
+At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram
+to THE PARTHENON, advising them to proceed with the publication of
+the poem.  He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay
+his carfare home, so he sent the message collect.
+
+Once in his room, he resumed his writing.  The days and nights came
+and went, and he sat at his table and wrote on.  He went nowhere,
+save to the pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when
+he was hungry and had something to cook, and just as methodically
+went without when he had nothing to cook.  Composed as the story
+was, in advance, chapter by chapter, he nevertheless saw and
+developed an opening that increased the power of it, though it
+necessitated twenty thousand additional words.  It was not that
+there was any vital need that the thing should be well done, but
+that his artistic canons compelled him to do it well.  He worked on
+in the daze, strangely detached from the world around him, feeling
+like a familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former
+life.  He remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the
+spirit of a man who was dead and who did not have sense enough to
+know it; and he paused for the moment to wonder if he were really
+dead did unaware of it.
+
+Came the day when "Overdue" was finished.  The agent of the type-
+writer firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while
+Martin, on the one chair, typed the last pages of the final
+chapter.  "Finis," he wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it
+was indeed finis.  He watched the type-writer carried out the door
+with a feeling of relief, then went over and lay down on the bed.
+He was faint from hunger.  Food had not passed his lips in thirty-
+six hours, but he did not think about it.  He lay on his back, with
+closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or stupor
+slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness.  Half in delirium,
+he began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden
+had been fond of quoting to him.  Maria, listening anxiously
+outside his door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance.  The
+words in themselves were not significant to her, but the fact that
+he was saying them was.  "I have done," was the burden of the poem.
+
+
+"'I have done -
+Put by the lute.
+Song and singing soon are over
+As the airy shades that hover
+In among the purple clover.
+I have done -
+Put by the lute.
+Once I sang as early thrushes
+Sing among the dewy bushes;
+Now I'm mute.
+I am like a weary linnet,
+For my throat has no song in it;
+I have had my singing minute.
+I have done.
+Put by the lute.'"
+
+
+Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove,
+where she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion's
+share of chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from
+the bottom of the pot.  Martin roused himself and sat up and began
+to eat, between spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been
+talking in his sleep and that he did not have any fever.
+
+After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the
+edge of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw
+nothing until the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the
+morning's mail and which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into
+his darkened brain.  It is THE PARTHENON, he thought, the August
+PARTHENON, and it must contain "Ephemera."  If only Brissenden were
+here to see!
+
+He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.
+"Ephemera" had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and
+Beardsley-like margin decorations.  On one side of the head-piece
+was Brissenden's photograph, on the other side was the photograph
+of Sir John Value, the British Ambassador.  A preliminary editorial
+note quoted Sir John Value as saying that there were no poets in
+America, and the publication of "Ephemera" was THE PARTHENON'S.
+"There, take that, Sir John Value!"  Cartwright Bruce was described
+as the greatest critic in America, and he was quoted as saying that
+"Ephemera" was the greatest poem ever written in America.  And
+finally, the editor's foreword ended with:  "We have not yet made
+up our minds entirely as to the merits of "Ephemera"; perhaps we
+shall never be able to do so.  But we have read it often, wondering
+at the words and their arrangement, wondering where Mr. Brissenden
+got them, and how he could fasten them together."  Then followed
+the poem.
+
+"Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man," Martin murmured,
+letting the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.
+
+The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted
+apathetically that he was not nauseated very much.  He wished he
+could get angry, but did not have energy enough to try.  He was too
+numb.  His blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal
+flow of indignation.  After all, what did it matter?  It was on a
+par with all the rest that Brissenden had condemned in bourgeois
+society.
+
+"Poor Briss," Martin communed; "he would never have forgiven me."
+
+Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which
+had once contained type-writer paper.  Going through its contents,
+he drew forth eleven poems which his friend had written.  These he
+tore lengthwise and crosswise and dropped into the waste basket.
+He did it languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of
+the bed staring blankly before him.
+
+How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his
+sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white.  It
+was curious.  But as he watched it grow in definiteness he saw that
+it was a coral reef smoking in the white Pacific surges.  Next, in
+the line of breakers he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe.
+In the stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth
+dipping a flashing paddle.  He recognized him.  He was Moti, the
+youngest son of Tati, the chief, and this was Tahiti, and beyond
+that smoking reef lay the sweet land of Papara and the chief's
+grass house by the river's mouth.  It was the end of the day, and
+Moti was coming home from the fishing.  He was waiting for the rush
+of a big breaker whereon to jump the reef.  Then he saw himself,
+sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the past,
+dipping a paddle that waited Moti's word to dig in like mad when
+the turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them.  Next, he
+was no longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was
+crying out, they were both thrusting hard with their paddles,
+racing on the steep face of the flying turquoise.  Under the bow
+the water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was filled with
+driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long-echoing roar,
+and the canoe floated on the placid water of the lagoon.  Moti
+laughed and shook the salt water from his eyes, and together they
+paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where Tati's grass walls
+through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the setting sun.
+
+The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of
+his squalid room.  He strove in vain to see Tahiti again.  He knew
+there was singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing
+in the moonlight, but he could not see them.  He could see only the
+littered writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had
+stood, and the unwashed window-pane.  He closed his eyes with a
+groan, and slept.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI
+
+
+
+He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the
+postman on his morning round.  Martin felt tired and passive, and
+went through his letters aimlessly.  One thin envelope, from a
+robber magazine, contained for twenty-two dollars.  He had been
+dunning for it for a year and a half.  He noted its amount
+apathetically.  The old-time thrill at receiving a publisher's
+check was gone.  Unlike his earlier checks, this one was not
+pregnant with promise of great things to come.  To him it was a
+check for twenty-two dollars, that was all, and it would buy him
+something to eat.
+
+Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in
+payment for some humorous verse which had been accepted months
+before.  It was for ten dollars.  An idea came to him, which he
+calmly considered.  He did not know what he was going to do, and he
+felt in no hurry to do anything.  In the meantime he must live.
+Also he owed numerous debts.  Would it not be a paying investment
+to put stamps on the huge pile of manuscripts under the table and
+start them on their travels again?  One or two of them might be
+accepted.  That would help him to live.  He decided on the
+investment, and, after he had cashed the checks at the bank down in
+Oakland, he bought ten dollars' worth of postage stamps.  The
+thought of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room
+was repulsive to him.  For the first time he refused to consider
+his debts.  He knew that in his room he could manufacture a
+substantial breakfast at a cost of from fifteen to twenty cents.
+But, instead, he went into the Forum Cafe and ordered a breakfast
+that cost two dollars.  He tipped the waiter a quarter, and spent
+fifty cents for a package of Egyptian cigarettes.  It was the first
+time he had smoked since Ruth had asked him to stop.  But he could
+see now no reason why he should not, and besides, he wanted to
+smoke.  And what did the money matter?  For five cents he could
+have bought a package of Durham and brown papers and rolled forty
+cigarettes - but what of it?  Money had no meaning to him now
+except what it would immediately buy.  He was chartless and
+rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved the
+least living, and it was living that hurt.
+
+The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every
+night.  Though now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the
+Japanese restaurants where meals were served for ten cents, his
+wasted body filled out, as did the hollows in his cheeks.  He no
+longer abused himself with short sleep, overwork, and overstudy.
+He wrote nothing, and the books were closed.  He walked much, out
+in the hills, and loafed long hours in the quiet parks.  He had no
+friends nor acquaintances, nor did he make any.  He had no
+inclination.  He was waiting for some impulse, from he knew not
+where, to put his stopped life into motion again.  In the meantime
+his life remained run down, planless, and empty and idle.
+
+Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the "real dirt."
+But at the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance,
+he recoiled and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto.  He
+was frightened at the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and
+he fled furtively, for fear that some one of the "real dirt" might
+chance along and recognize him.
+
+Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how
+"Ephemera" was being maltreated.  It had made a hit.  But what a
+hit!  Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether
+or not it was really poetry.  The local papers had taken it up, and
+daily there appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious
+editorials, and serious letters from subscribers.  Helen Della
+Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and rolling of
+tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the United States) denied
+Brissenden a seat beside her on Pegasus and wrote voluminous
+letters to the public, proving that he was no poet.
+
+THE PARTHENON came out in its next number patting itself on the
+back for the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and
+exploiting Brissenden's death with ruthless commercialism.  A
+newspaper with a sworn circulation of half a million published an
+original and spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in which she
+gibed and sneered at Brissenden.  Also, she was guilty of a second
+poem, in which she parodied him.
+
+Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead.  He had
+hated the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of
+him had been thrown to the crowd.  Daily the vivisection of Beauty
+went on.  Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print,
+floating their wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge
+of Brissenden's greatness.  Quoth one paper:  "We have received a
+letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just like it, only better,
+some time ago."  Another paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving
+Helen Della Delmar for her parody, said:  "But unquestionably Miss
+Delmar wrote it in a moment of badinage and not quite with the
+respect that one great poet should show to another and perhaps to
+the greatest.  However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous or not of
+the man who invented 'Ephemera,' it is certain that she, like
+thousands of others, is fascinated by his work, and that the day
+may come when she will try to write lines like his."
+
+Ministers began to preach sermons against "Ephemera," and one, who
+too stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy.
+The great poem contributed to the gayety of the world.  The comic
+verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming
+laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes
+were perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told
+Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of "Ephemera" would
+drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to
+the bottom of the river.
+
+Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger.  The
+effect produced upon him was one of great sadness.  In the crash of
+his whole world, with love on the pinnacle, the crash of
+magazinedom and the dear public was a small crash indeed.
+Brissenden had been wholly right in his judgment of the magazines,
+and he, Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find
+it out for himself.  The magazines were all Brissenden had said
+they were and more.  Well, he was done, he solaced himself.  He had
+hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.
+The visions of Tahiti - clean, sweet Tahiti - were coming to him
+more frequently.  And there were the low Paumotus, and the high
+Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or
+frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at
+Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to
+Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill
+a pig in honor of his coming, and where Tamari's flower-garlanded
+daughters would seize his hands and with song and laughter garland
+him with flowers.  The South Seas were calling, and he knew that
+sooner or later he would answer the call.
+
+In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long
+traverse he had made through the realm of knowledge.  When THE
+PARTHENON check of three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to
+him, he turned it over to the local lawyer who had attended to
+Brissenden's affairs for his family.  Martin took a receipt for the
+check, and at the same time gave a note for the hundred dollars
+Brissenden had let him have.
+
+The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese
+restaurants.  At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight,
+the tide turned.  But it had turned too late.  Without a thrill he
+opened a thick envelope from THE MILLENNIUM, scanned the face of a
+check that represented three hundred dollars, and noted that it was
+the payment on acceptance for "Adventure."  Every debt he owed in
+the world, including the pawnshop, with its usurious interest,
+amounted to less than a hundred dollars.  And when he had paid
+everything, and lifted the hundred-dollar note with Brissenden's
+lawyer, he still had over a hundred dollars in pocket.  He ordered
+a suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals in the best
+cafes in town.  He still slept in his little room at Maria's, but
+the sight of his new clothes caused the neighborhood children to
+cease from calling him "hobo" and "tramp" from the roofs of
+woodsheds and over back fences.
+
+"Wiki-Wiki," his Hawaiian short story, was bought by WARREN'S
+MONTHLY for two hundred and fifty dollars.  THE NORTHERN REVIEW
+took his essay, "The Cradle of Beauty," and MACKINTOSH'S MAGAZINE
+took "The Palmist" - the poem he had written to Marian.  The
+editors and readers were back from their summer vacations, and
+manuscripts were being handled quickly.  But Martin could not
+puzzle out what strange whim animated them to this general
+acceptance of the things they had persistently rejected for two
+years.  Nothing of his had been published.  He was not known
+anywhere outside of Oakland, and in Oakland, with the few who
+thought they knew him, he was notorious as a red-shirt and a
+socialist.  So there was no explaining this sudden acceptability of
+his wares.  It was sheer jugglery of fate.
+
+After it had been refused by a number of magazines, he had taken
+Brissenden's rejected advice and started, "The Shame of the Sun" on
+the round of publishers.  After several refusals, Singletree,
+Darnley & Co. accepted it, promising fall publication.  When Martin
+asked for an advance on royalties, they wrote that such was not
+their custom, that books of that nature rarely paid for themselves,
+and that they doubted if his book would sell a thousand copies.
+Martin figured what the book would earn him on such a sale.
+Retailed at a dollar, on a royalty of fifteen per cent, it would
+bring him one hundred and fifty dollars.  He decided that if he had
+it to do over again he would confine himself to fiction.
+"Adventure," one-fourth as long, had brought him twice as much from
+THE MILLENNIUM.  That newspaper paragraph he had read so long ago
+had been true, after all.  The first-class magazines did not pay on
+acceptance, and they paid well.  Not two cents a word, but four
+cents a word, had THE MILLENNIUM paid him.  And, furthermore, they
+bought good stuff, too, for were they not buying his?  This last
+thought he accompanied with a grin.
+
+He wrote to Singletree, Darnley & Co., offering to sell out his
+rights in "The Shame of the Sun" for a hundred dollars, but they
+did not care to take the risk.  In the meantime he was not in need
+of money, for several of his later stories had been accepted and
+paid for.  He actually opened a bank account, where, without a debt
+in the world, he had several hundred dollars to his credit.
+"Overdue," after having been declined by a number of magazines,
+came to rest at the Meredith-Lowell Company.  Martin remembered the
+five dollars Gertrude had given him, and his resolve to return it
+to her a hundred times over; so he wrote for an advance on
+royalties of five hundred dollars.  To his surprise a check for
+that amount, accompanied by a contract, came by return mail.  He
+cashed the check into five-dollar gold pieces and telephoned
+Gertrude that he wanted to see her.
+
+She arrived at the house panting and short of breath from the haste
+she had made.  Apprehensive of trouble, she had stuffed the few
+dollars she possessed into her hand-satchel; and so sure was she
+that disaster had overtaken her brother, that she stumbled forward,
+sobbing, into his arms, at the same time thrusting the satchel
+mutely at him.
+
+"I'd have come myself," he said.  "But I didn't want a row with Mr.
+Higginbotham, and that is what would have surely happened."
+
+"He'll be all right after a time," she assured him, while she
+wondered what the trouble was that Martin was in.  "But you'd best
+get a job first an' steady down.  Bernard does like to see a man at
+honest work.  That stuff in the newspapers broke 'm all up.  I
+never saw 'm so mad before."
+
+"I'm not going to get a job," Martin said with a smile.  "And you
+can tell him so from me.  I don't need a job, and there's the proof
+of it."
+
+He emptied the hundred gold pieces into her lap in a glinting,
+tinkling stream.
+
+"You remember that fiver you gave me the time I didn't have
+carfare?  Well, there it is, with ninety-nine brothers of different
+ages but all of the same size."
+
+If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she was now in a
+panic of fear.  Her fear was such that it was certitude.  She was
+not suspicious.  She was convinced.  She looked at Martin in
+horror, and her heavy limbs shrank under the golden stream as
+though it were burning her.
+
+"It's yours," he laughed.
+
+She burst into tears, and began to moan, "My poor boy, my poor
+boy!"
+
+He was puzzled for a moment.  Then he divined the cause of her
+agitation and handed her the Meredith-Lowell letter which had
+accompanied the check.  She stumbled through it, pausing now and
+again to wipe her eyes, and when she had finished, said:-
+
+"An' does it mean that you come by the money honestly?"
+
+"More honestly than if I'd won it in a lottery.  I earned it."
+
+Slowly faith came back to her, and she reread the letter carefully.
+It took him long to explain to her the nature of the transaction
+which had put the money into his possession, and longer still to
+get her to understand that the money was really hers and that he
+did not need it.
+
+"I'll put it in the bank for you," she said finally.
+
+"You'll do nothing of the sort.  It's yours, to do with as you
+please, and if you won't take it, I'll give it to Maria.  She'll
+know what to do with it.  I'd suggest, though, that you hire a
+servant and take a good long rest."
+
+"I'm goin' to tell Bernard all about it," she announced, when she
+was leaving.
+
+Martin winced, then grinned.
+
+"Yes, do," he said.  "And then, maybe, he'll invite me to dinner
+again."
+
+"Yes, he will - I'm sure he will!" she exclaimed fervently, as she
+drew him to her and kissed and hugged him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+
+One day Martin became aware that he was lonely.  He was healthy and
+strong, and had nothing to do.  The cessation from writing and
+studying, the death of Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth
+had made a big hole in his life; and his life refused to be pinned
+down to good living in cafes and the smoking of Egyptian
+cigarettes.  It was true the South Seas were calling to him, but he
+had a feeling that the game was not yet played out in the United
+States.  Two books were soon to be published, and he had more books
+that might find publication.  Money could be made out of them, and
+he would wait and take a sackful of it into the South Seas.  He
+knew a valley and a bay in the Marquesas that he could buy for a
+thousand Chili dollars.  The valley ran from the horseshoe, land-
+locked bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks and
+contained perhaps ten thousand acres.  It was filled with tropical
+fruits, wild chickens, and wild pigs, with an occasional herd of
+wild cattle, while high up among the peaks were herds of wild goats
+harried by packs of wild dogs.  The whole place was wild.  Not a
+human lived in it. And he could buy it and the bay for a thousand
+Chili dollars.
+
+The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with water deep
+enough to accommodate the largest vessel afloat, and so safe that
+the South Pacific Directory recommended it to the best careening
+place for ships for hundreds of miles around.  He would buy a
+schooner - one of those yacht-like, coppered crafts that sailed
+like witches - and go trading copra and pearling among the islands.
+He would make the valley and the bay his headquarters.  He would
+build a patriarchal grass house like Tati's, and have it and the
+valley and the schooner filled with dark-skinned servitors.  He
+would entertain there the factor of Taiohae, captains of wandering
+traders, and all the best of the South Pacific riffraff.  He would
+keep open house and entertain like a prince.  And he would forget
+the books he had opened and the world that had proved an illusion.
+
+To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with
+money.  Already it was beginning to flow in.  If one of the books
+made a strike, it might enable him to sell the whole heap of
+manuscripts.  Also he could collect the stories and the poems into
+books, and make sure of the valley and the bay and the schooner.
+He would never write again.  Upon that he was resolved.  But in the
+meantime, awaiting the publication of the books, he must do
+something more than live dazed and stupid in the sort of uncaring
+trance into which he had fallen.
+
+He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers' Picnic took
+place that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he
+went.  He had been to the working-class picnics too often in his
+earlier life not to know what they were like, and as he entered the
+park he experienced a recrudescence of all the old sensations.
+After all, they were his kind, these working people.  He had been
+born among them, he had lived among them, and though he had strayed
+for a time, it was well to come back among them.
+
+"If it ain't Mart!" he heard some one say, and the next moment a
+hearty hand was on his shoulder.  "Where you ben all the time?  Off
+to sea?  Come on an' have a drink."
+
+It was the old crowd in which he found himself - the old crowd,
+with here and there a gap, and here and there a new face.  The
+fellows were not bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they
+attended all Sunday picnics for the dancing, and the fighting, and
+the fun.  Martin drank with them, and began to feel really human
+once more.  He was a fool to have ever left them, he thought; and
+he was very certain that his sum of happiness would have been
+greater had he remained with them and let alone the books and the
+people who sat in the high places.  Yet the beer seemed not so good
+as of yore.  It didn't taste as it used to taste.  Brissenden had
+spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded, and wondered if, after
+all, the books had spoiled him for companionship with these friends
+of his youth.  He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he
+went on to the dancing pavilion.  Jimmy, the plumber, he met there,
+in the company of a tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for
+Martin.
+
+"Gee, it's like old times," Jimmy explained to the gang that gave
+him the laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled away in a waltz.
+"An' I don't give a rap.  I'm too damned glad to see 'm back.
+Watch 'm waltz, eh?  It's like silk.  Who'd blame any girl?"
+
+But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three of them,
+with half a dozen friends, watched the revolving couples and
+laughed and joked with one another.  Everybody was glad to see
+Martin back.  No book of his been published; he carried no
+fictitious value in their eyes.  They liked him for himself.  He
+felt like a prince returned from excile, and his lonely heart
+burgeoned in the geniality in which it bathed.  He made a mad day
+of it, and was at his best.  Also, he had money in his pockets,
+and, as in the old days when he returned from sea with a pay-day,
+he made the money fly.
+
+Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go by in the
+arms of a young workingman; and, later, when he made the round of
+the pavilion, he came upon her sitting by a refreshment table.
+Surprise and greetings over, he led her away into the grounds,
+where they could talk without shouting down the music.  From the
+instant he spoke to her, she was his.  He knew it.  She showed it
+in the proud humility of her eyes, in every caressing movement of
+her proudly carried body, and in the way she hung upon his speech.
+She was not the young girl as he had known her.  She was a woman,
+now, and Martin noted that her wild, defiant beauty had improved,
+losing none of its wildness, while the defiance and the fire seemed
+more in control.  "A beauty, a perfect beauty," he murmured
+admiringly under his breath.  And he knew she was his, that all he
+had to do was to say "Come," and she would go with him over the
+world wherever he led.
+
+Even as the thought flashed through his brain he received a heavy
+blow on the side of his head that nearly knocked him down.  It was
+a man's fist, directed by a man so angry and in such haste that the
+fist had missed the jaw for which it was aimed.  Martin turned as
+he staggered, and saw the fist coming at him in a wild swing.
+Quite as a matter of course he ducked, and the fist flew harmlessly
+past, pivoting the man who had driven it.  Martin hooked with his
+left, landing on the pivoting man with the weight of his body
+behind the blow.  The man went to the ground sidewise, leaped to
+his feet, and made a mad rush.  Martin saw his passion-distorted
+face and wondered what could be the cause of the fellow's anger.
+But while he wondered, he shot in a straight left, the weight of
+his body behind the blow.  The man went over backward and fell in a
+crumpled heap.  Jimmy and others of the gang were running toward
+them.
+
+Martin was thrilling all over.  This was the old days with a
+vengeance, with their dancing, and their fighting, and their fun.
+While he kept a wary eye on his antagonist, he glanced at Lizzie.
+Usually the girls screamed when the fellows got to scrapping, but
+she had not screamed.  She was looking on with bated breath,
+leaning slightly forward, so keen was her interest, one hand
+pressed to her breast, her cheek flushed, and in her eyes a great
+and amazed admiration.
+
+The man had gained his feet and was struggling to escape the
+restraining arms that were laid on him.
+
+"She was waitin' for me to come back!" he was proclaiming to all
+and sundry.  "She was waitin' for me to come back, an' then that
+fresh guy comes buttin' in.  Let go o' me, I tell yeh.  I'm goin'
+to fix 'm."
+
+"What's eatin' yer?" Jimmy was demanding, as he helped hold the
+young fellow back.  "That guy's Mart Eden.  He's nifty with his
+mits, lemme tell you that, an' he'll eat you alive if you monkey
+with 'm."
+
+"He can't steal her on me that way," the other interjected.
+
+"He licked the Flyin' Dutchman, an' you know HIM," Jimmy went on
+expostulating.  "An' he did it in five rounds.  You couldn't last a
+minute against him.  See?"
+
+This information seemed to have a mollifying effect, and the irate
+young man favored Martin with a measuring stare.
+
+"He don't look it," he sneered; but the sneer was without passion.
+
+"That's what the Flyin' Dutchman thought," Jimmy assured him.
+"Come on, now, let's get outa this.  There's lots of other girls.
+Come on."
+
+The young fellow allowed himself to be led away toward the
+pavilion, and the gang followed after him.
+
+"Who is he?" Martin asked Lizzie.  "And what's it all about,
+anyway?"
+
+Already the zest of combat, which of old had been so keen and
+lasting, had died down, and he discovered that he was self-
+analytical, too much so to live, single heart and single hand, so
+primitive an existence.
+
+Lizzie tossed her head.
+
+"Oh, he's nobody," she said.  "He's just ben keepin' company with
+me."
+
+"I had to, you see," she explained after a pause.  "I was gettin'
+pretty lonesome.  But I never forgot."  Her voice sank lower, and
+she looked straight before her.  "I'd throw 'm down for you any
+time."
+
+Martin looking at her averted face, knowing that all he had to do
+was to reach out his hand and pluck her, fell to pondering whether,
+after all, there was any real worth in refined, grammatical
+English, and, so, forgot to reply to her.
+
+"You put it all over him," she said tentatively, with a laugh.
+
+"He's a husky young fellow, though," he admitted generously.  "If
+they hadn't taken him away, he might have given me my hands full."
+
+"Who was that lady friend I seen you with that night?" she asked
+abruptly.
+
+"Oh, just a lady friend," was his answer.
+
+"It was a long time ago," she murmured contemplatively.  "It seems
+like a thousand years."
+
+But Martin went no further into the matter.  He led the
+conversation off into other channels.  They had lunch in the
+restaurant, where he ordered wine and expensive delicacies and
+afterward he danced with her and with no one but her, till she was
+tired.  He was a good dancer, and she whirled around and around
+with him in a heaven of delight, her head against his shoulder,
+wishing that it could last forever.  Later in the afternoon they
+strayed off among the trees, where, in the good old fashion, she
+sat down while he sprawled on his back, his head in her lap.  He
+lay and dozed, while she fondled his hair, looked down on his
+closed eyes, and loved him without reserve.  Looking up suddenly,
+he read the tender advertisement in her face.  Her eyes fluttered
+down, then they opened and looked into his with soft defiance.
+
+"I've kept straight all these years," she said, her voice so low
+that it was almost a whisper.
+
+In his heart Martin knew that it was the miraculous truth.  And at
+his heart pleaded a great temptation.  It was in his power to make
+her happy.  Denied happiness himself, why should he deny happiness
+to her?  He could marry her and take her down with him to dwell in
+the grass-walled castle in the Marquesas.  The desire to do it was
+strong, but stronger still was the imperative command of his nature
+not to do it.  In spite of himself he was still faithful to Love.
+The old days of license and easy living were gone.  He could not
+bring them back, nor could he go back to them.  He was changed -
+how changed he had not realized until now.
+
+"I am not a marrying man, Lizzie," he said lightly.
+
+The hand caressing his hair paused perceptibly, then went on with
+the same gentle stroke.  He noticed her face harden, but it was
+with the hardness of resolution, for still the soft color was in
+her cheeks and she was all glowing and melting.
+
+"I did not mean that - " she began, then faltered.  "Or anyway I
+don't care."
+
+"I don't care," she repeated.  "I'm proud to be your friend.  I'd
+do anything for you.  I'm made that way, I guess."
+
+Martin sat up.  He took her hand in his.  He did it deliberately,
+with warmth but without passion; and such warmth chilled her.
+
+"Don't let's talk about it," she said.
+
+"You are a great and noble woman," he said.  "And it is I who
+should be proud to know you.  And I am, I am.  You are a ray of
+light to me in a very dark world, and I've got to be straight with
+you, just as straight as you have been."
+
+"I don't care whether you're straight with me or not.  You could do
+anything with me.  You could throw me in the dirt an' walk on me.
+An' you're the only man in the world that can," she added with a
+defiant flash.  "I ain't taken care of myself ever since I was a
+kid for nothin'."
+
+"And it's just because of that that I'm not going to," he said
+gently.  "You are so big and generous that you challenge me to
+equal generousness.  I'm not marrying, and I'm not - well, loving
+without marrying, though I've done my share of that in the past.
+I'm sorry I came here to-day and met you.  But it can't be helped
+now, and I never expected it would turn out this way."
+
+"But look here, Lizzie.  I can't begin to tell you how much I like
+you.  I do more than like you.  I admire and respect you.  You are
+magnificent, and you are magnificently good.  But what's the use of
+words?  Yet there's something I'd like to do.  You've had a hard
+life; let me make it easy for you."  (A joyous light welled into
+her eyes, then faded out again.)  "I'm pretty sure of getting hold
+of some money soon - lots of it."
+
+In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley and the bay, the
+grass-walled castle and the trim, white schooner.  After all, what
+did it matter?  He could go away, as he had done so often, before
+the mast, on any ship bound anywhere.
+
+"I'd like to turn it over to you.  There must be something you want
+- to go to school or business college.  You might like to study and
+be a stenographer.  I could fix it for you.  Or maybe your father
+and mother are living - I could set them up in a grocery store or
+something.  Anything you want, just name it, and I can fix it for
+you."
+
+She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, dry-eyed
+and motionless, but with an ache in the throat which Martin divined
+so strongly that it made his own throat ache.  He regretted that he
+had spoken.  It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her - mere
+money - compared with what she offered him.  He offered her an
+extraneous thing with which he could part without a pang, while she
+offered him herself, along with disgrace and shame, and sin, and
+all her hopes of heaven.
+
+"Don't let's talk about it," she said with a catch in her voice
+that she changed to a cough.  She stood up.  "Come on, let's go
+home.  I'm all tired out."
+
+The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly all departed.  But
+as Martin and Lizzie emerged from the trees they found the gang
+waiting for them.  Martin knew immediately the meaning of it.
+Trouble was brewing.  The gang was his body-guard.  They passed out
+through the gates of the park with, straggling in the rear, a
+second gang, the friends that Lizzie's young man had collected to
+avenge the loss of his lady.  Several constables and special police
+officers, anticipating trouble, trailed along to prevent it, and
+herded the two gangs separately aboard the train for San Francisco.
+Martin told Jimmy that he would get off at Sixteenth Street Station
+and catch the electric car into Oakland.  Lizzie was very quiet and
+without interest in what was impending.  The train pulled in to
+Sixteenth Street Station, and the waiting electric car could be
+seen, the conductor of which was impatiently clanging the gong.
+
+"There she is," Jimmy counselled.  "Make a run for it, an' we'll
+hold 'em back.  Now you go!  Hit her up!"
+
+The hostile gang was temporarily disconcerted by the manoeuvre,
+then it dashed from the train in pursuit.  The staid and sober
+Oakland folk who sat upon the car scarcely noted the young fellow
+and the girl who ran for it and found a seat in front on the
+outside.  They did not connect the couple with Jimmy, who sprang on
+the steps, crying to the motorman:-
+
+"Slam on the juice, old man, and beat it outa here!"
+
+The next moment Jimmy whirled about, and the passengers saw him
+land his fist on the face of a running man who was trying to board
+the car.  But fists were landing on faces the whole length of the
+car.  Thus, Jimmy and his gang, strung out on the long, lower
+steps, met the attacking gang.  The car started with a great
+clanging of its gong, and, as Jimmy's gang drove off the last
+assailants, they, too, jumped off to finish the job.  The car
+dashed on, leaving the flurry of combat far behind, and its
+dumfounded passengers never dreamed that the quiet young man and
+the pretty working-girl sitting in the corner on the outside seat
+had been the cause of the row.
+
+Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the old
+fighting thrills.  But they quickly died away, and he was oppressed
+by a great sadness.  He felt very old - centuries older than those
+careless, care-free young companions of his others days.  He had
+travelled far, too far to go back.  Their mode of life, which had
+once been his, was now distasteful to him.  He was disappointed in
+it all.  He had developed into an alien.  As the steam beer had
+tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw to him.  He was too
+far removed.  Too many thousands of opened books yawned between
+them and him.  He had exiled himself.  He had travelled in the vast
+realm of intellect until he could no longer return home.  On the
+other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for companionship
+remained unsatisfied.  He had found no new home.  As the gang could
+not understand him, as his own family could not understand him, as
+the bourgeoisie could not understand him, so this girl beside him,
+whom he honored high, could not understand him nor the honor he
+paid her.  His sadness was not untouched with bitterness as he
+thought it over.
+
+"Make it up with him," he advised Lizzie, at parting, as they stood
+in front of the workingman's shack in which she lived, near Sixth
+and Market.  He referred to the young fellow whose place he had
+usurped that day.
+
+"I can't - now," she said.
+
+"Oh, go on," he said jovially.  "All you have to do is whistle and
+he'll come running."
+
+"I didn't mean that," she said simply.
+
+And he knew what she had meant.
+
+She leaned toward him as he was about to say good night.  But she
+leaned not imperatively, not seductively, but wistfully and humbly.
+He was touched to the heart.  His large tolerance rose up in him.
+He put his arms around her, and kissed her, and knew that upon his
+own lips rested as true a kiss as man ever received.
+
+"My God!" she sobbed.  "I could die for you.  I could die for you."
+
+She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps.  He felt a
+quick moisture in his eyes.
+
+"Martin Eden," he communed.  "You're not a brute, and you're a damn
+poor Nietzscheman.  You'd marry her if you could and fill her
+quivering heart full with happiness.  But you can't, you can't.
+And it's a damn shame."
+
+"'A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers,'" he muttered,
+remembering his Henly.  "'Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.'
+It is - a blunder and a shame."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII
+
+
+
+"The Shame of the Sun" was published in October.  As Martin cut the
+cords of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary
+copies from the publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy
+sadness fell upon him.  He thought of the wild delight that would
+have been his had this happened a few short months before, and he
+contrasted that delight that should have been with his present
+uncaring coldness.  His book, his first book, and his pulse had not
+gone up a fraction of a beat, and he was only sad.  It meant little
+to him now.  The most it meant was that it might bring some money,
+and little enough did he care for money.
+
+He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.
+
+"I did it," he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment.
+"I wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your
+vegetable soup went into the making of it.  Keep it.  It's yours.
+Just to remember me by, you know."
+
+He was not bragging, not showing off.  His sole motive was to make
+her happy, to make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in
+him.  She put the book in the front room on top of the family
+Bible.  A sacred thing was this book her lodger had made, a fetich
+of friendship.  It softened the blow of his having been a
+laundryman, and though she could not understand a line of it, she
+knew that every line of it was great.  She was a simple, practical,
+hard-working woman, but she possessed faith in large endowment.
+
+Just as emotionlessly as he had received "The Shame of the Sun" did
+he read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping
+bureau.  The book was making a hit, that was evident.  It meant
+more gold in the money sack.  He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all
+his promises, and still have enough left to build his grass-walled
+castle.
+
+Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of
+fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second
+edition of twice the size through the presses; and ere this was
+delivered a third edition of five thousand had been ordered.  A
+London firm made arrangements by cable for an English edition, and
+hot-footed upon this came the news of French, German, and
+Scandinavian translations in progress.  The attack upon the
+Maeterlinck school could not have been made at a more opportune
+moment.  A fierce controversy was precipitated.  Saleeby and
+Haeckel indorsed and defended "The Shame of the Sun," for once
+finding themselves on the same side of a question.  Crookes and
+Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge
+attempted to formulate a compromise that would jibe with his
+particular cosmic theories.  Maeterlinck's followers rallied around
+the standard of mysticism.  Chesterton set the whole world laughing
+with a series of alleged non-partisan essays on the subject, and
+the whole affair, controversy and controversialists, was well-nigh
+swept into the pit by a thundering broadside from George Bernard
+Shaw.  Needless to say the arena was crowded with hosts of lesser
+lights, and the dust and sweat and din became terrific.
+
+"It is a most marvellous happening," Singletree, Darnley & Co.
+wrote Martin, "a critical philosophic essay selling like a novel.
+You could not have chosen your subject better, and all contributory
+factors have been unwarrantedly propitious.  We need scarcely to
+assure you that we are making hay while the sun shines.  Over forty
+thousand copies have already been sold in the United States and
+Canada, and a new edition of twenty thousand is on the presses.  We
+are overworked, trying to supply the demand.  Nevertheless we have
+helped to create that demand.  We have already spent five thousand
+dollars in advertising.  The book is bound to be a record-breaker."
+
+"Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book
+which we have taken the liberty of forwarding to you.  You will
+please note that we have increased your royalties to twenty per
+cent, which is about as high as a conservative publishing house
+dares go.  If our offer is agreeable to you, please fill in the
+proper blank space with the title of your book.  We make no
+stipulations concerning its nature.  Any book on any subject.  If
+you have one already written, so much the better.  Now is the time
+to strike.  The iron could not be hotter."
+
+"On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an
+advance on royalties of five thousand dollars.  You see, we have
+faith in you, and we are going in on this thing big.  We should
+like, also, to discuss with you the drawing up of a contract for a
+term of years, say ten, during which we shall have the exclusive
+right of publishing in book-form all that you produce.  But more of
+this anon."
+
+Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental
+arithmetic, finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty
+thousand to be nine thousand dollars.  He signed the new contract,
+inserting "The Smoke of Joy" in the blank space, and mailed it back
+to the publishers along with the twenty storiettes he had written
+in the days before he discovered the formula for the newspaper
+storiette.  And promptly as the United States mail could deliver
+and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.'s check for five
+thousand dollars.
+
+"I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about
+two o'clock," Martin said, the morning the check arrived.  "Or,
+better, meet me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o'clock.  I'll be
+looking out for you."
+
+At the appointed time she was there; but SHOES was the only clew to
+the mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered
+a distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by
+a shoe-store and dived into a real estate office.  What happened
+thereupon resided forever after in her memory as a dream.  Fine
+gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked with Martin and
+one another; a type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an
+imposing document; her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his
+signature; and when all was over and she was outside on the
+sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her, saying, "Well, Maria, you
+won't have to pay me no seven dollars and a half this month."
+
+Maria was too stunned for speech.
+
+"Or next month, or the next, or the next," her landlord said.
+
+She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor.  And it was not
+until she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her
+own kind, and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she
+really knew that she was the owner of the little house in which she
+had lived and for which she had paid rent so long.
+
+"Why don't you trade with me no more?" the Portuguese grocer asked
+Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the
+car; and Martin explained that he wasn't doing his own cooking any
+more, and then went in and had a drink of wine on the house.  He
+noted it was the best wine the grocer had in stock.
+
+"Maria," Martin announced that night, "I'm going to leave you.  And
+you're going to leave here yourself soon.  Then you can rent the
+house and be a landlord yourself.  You've a brother in San Leandro
+or Haywards, and he's in the milk business.  I want you to send all
+your washing back unwashed - understand? - unwashed, and to go out
+to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see
+that brother of yours.  Tell him to come to see me.  I'll be
+stopping at the Metropole down in Oakland.  He'll know a good milk-
+ranch when he sees one."
+
+And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a
+dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account
+that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore
+shoes and went to school.  Few persons ever meet the fairy princes
+they dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was
+hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the
+guise of an ex-laundryman.
+
+In the meantime the world had begun to ask:  "Who is this Martin
+Eden?"  He had declined to give any biographical data to his
+publishers, but the newspapers were not to be denied.  Oakland was
+his own town, and the reporters nosed out scores of individuals who
+could supply information.  All that he was and was not, all that he
+had done and most of what he had not done, was spread out for the
+delectation of the public, accompanied by snapshots and photographs
+- the latter procured from the local photographer who had once
+taken Martin's picture and who promptly copyrighted it and put it
+on the market.  At first, so great was his disgust with the
+magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought against
+publicity; but in the end, because it was easier than not to, he
+surrendered.  He found that he could not refuse himself to the
+special writers who travelled long distances to see him.  Then
+again, each day was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was
+occupied with writing and studying, those hours had to be occupied
+somehow; so he yielded to what was to him a whim, permitted
+interviews, gave his opinions on literature and philosophy, and
+even accepted invitations of the bourgeoisie.  He had settled down
+into a strange and comfortable state of mind.  He no longer cared.
+He forgave everybody, even the cub reporter who had painted him red
+and to whom he now granted a full page with specially posed
+photographs.
+
+He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she regretted
+the greatness that had come to him.  It widened the space between
+them.  Perhaps it was with the hope of narrowing it that she
+yielded to his persuasions to go to night school and business
+college and to have herself gowned by a wonderful dressmaker who
+charged outrageous prices.  She improved visibly from day to day,
+until Martin wondered if he was doing right, for he knew that all
+her compliance and endeavor was for his sake.  She was trying to
+make herself of worth in his eyes - of the sort of worth he seemed
+to value.  Yet he gave her no hope, treating her in brotherly
+fashion and rarely seeing her.
+
+"Overdue" was rushed upon the market by the Meredith-Lowell Company
+in the height of his popularity, and being fiction, in point of
+sales it made even a bigger strike than "The Shame of the Sun."
+Week after week his was the credit of the unprecedented performance
+of having two books at the head of the list of best-sellers.  Not
+only did the story take with the fiction-readers, but those who
+read "The Shame of the Sun" with avidity were likewise attracted to
+the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of mastery with which he had
+handled it.  First he had attacked the literature of mysticism, and
+had done it exceeding well; and, next, he had successfully supplied
+the very literature he had exposited, thus proving himself to be
+that rare genius, a critic and a creator in one.
+
+Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-
+like, through the world of literature, and he was more amused than
+interested by the stir he was making.  One thing was puzzling him,
+a little thing that would have puzzled the world had it known.  But
+the world would have puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather than over
+the little thing that to him loomed gigantic.  Judge Blount invited
+him to dinner.  That was the little thing, or the beginning of the
+little thing, that was soon to become the big thing.  He had
+insulted Judge Blount, treated him abominably, and Judge Blount,
+meeting him on the street, invited him to dinner.  Martin bethought
+himself of the numerous occasions on which he had met Judge Blount
+at the Morses' and when Judge Blount had not invited him to dinner.
+Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he asked himself.  He
+had not changed.  He was the same Martin Eden.  What made the
+difference?  The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared
+inside the covers of books?  But it was work performed.  It was not
+something he had done since.  It was achievement accomplished at
+the very time Judge Blount was sharing this general view and
+sneering at his Spencer and his intellect.  Therefore it was not
+for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that Judge
+Blount invited him to dinner.
+
+Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at
+his complacence.  And at the dinner, where, with their womankind,
+were half a dozen of those that sat in high places, and where
+Martin found himself quite the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded
+by Judge Hanwell, urged privately that Martin should permit his
+name to be put up for the Styx - the ultra-select club to which
+belonged, not the mere men of wealth, but the men of attainment.
+And Martin declined, and was more puzzled than ever.
+
+He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts.  He was
+overwhelmed by requests from editors.  It had been discovered that
+he was a stylist, with meat under his style.  THE NORTHERN REVIEW,
+after publishing "The Cradle of Beauty," had written him for half a
+dozen similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the
+heap, had not BURTON'S MAGAZINE, in a speculative mood, offered him
+five hundred dollars each for five essays.  He wrote back that he
+would supply the demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay.  He
+remembered that all these manuscripts had been refused by the very
+magazines that were now clamoring for them.  And their refusals had
+been cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped.  They had made him
+sweat, and now he intended to make them sweat.  BURTON'S MAGAZINE
+paid his price for five essays, and the remaining four, at the same
+rate, were snapped up by MACKINTOSH'S MONTHLY, THE NORTHERN REVIEW
+being too poor to stand the pace.  Thus went out to the world "The
+High Priests of Mystery," "The Wonder-Dreamers," "The Yardstick of
+the Ego," "Philosophy of Illusion," "God and Clod," "Art and
+Biology," "Critics and Test-tubes," "Star-dust," and "The Dignity
+of Usury," - to raise storms and rumblings and mutterings that were
+many a day in dying down.
+
+Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, which he
+did, but it was always for work performed.  He refused resolutely
+to pledge himself to any new thing.  The thought of again setting
+pen to paper maddened him.  He had seen Brissenden torn to pieces
+by the crowd, and despite the fact that him the crowd acclaimed, he
+could not get over the shock nor gather any respect for the crowd.
+His very popularity seemed a disgrace and a treason to Brissenden.
+It made him wince, but he made up his mind to go on and fill the
+money-bag.
+
+He received letters from editors like the following:  "About a year
+ago we were unfortunate enough to refuse your collection of love-
+poems.  We were greatly impressed by them at the time, but certain
+arrangements already entered into prevented our taking them.  If
+you still have them, and if you will be kind enough to forward
+them, we shall be glad to publish the entire collection on your own
+terms.  We are also prepared to make a most advantageous offer for
+bringing them out in book-form."
+
+Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it instead.
+He read it over before mailing, and was particularly impressed by
+its sophomoric amateurishness and general worthlessness.  But he
+sent it; and it was published, to the everlasting regret of the
+editor.  The public was indignant and incredulous.  It was too far
+a cry from Martin Eden's high standard to that serious bosh.  It
+was asserted that he had never written it, that the magazine had
+faked it very clumsily, or that Martin Eden was emulating the elder
+Dumas and at the height of success was hiring his writing done for
+him.  But when he explained that the tragedy was an early effort of
+his literary childhood, and that the magazine had refused to be
+happy unless it got it, a great laugh went up at the magazine's
+expense and a change in the editorship followed.  The tragedy was
+never brought out in book-form, though Martin pocketed the advance
+royalties that had been paid.
+
+COLEMAN'S WEEKLY sent Martin a lengthy telegram, costing nearly
+three hundred dollars, offering him a thousand dollars an article
+for twenty articles.  He was to travel over the United States, with
+all expenses paid, and select whatever topics interested him.  The
+body of the telegram was devoted to hypothetical topics in order to
+show him the freedom of range that was to be his.  The only
+restriction placed upon him was that he must confine himself to the
+United States.  Martin sent his inability to accept and his regrets
+by wire "collect."
+
+"Wiki-Wiki," published in WARREN'S MONTHLY, was an instantaneous
+success.  It was brought out forward in a wide-margined,
+beautifully decorated volume that struck the holiday trade and sold
+like wildfire.  The critics were unanimous in the belief that it
+would take its place with those two classics by two great writers,
+"The Bottle Imp" and "The Magic Skin."
+
+The public, however, received the "Smoke of Joy" collection rather
+dubiously and coldly.  The audacity and unconventionality of the
+storiettes was a shock to bourgeois morality and prejudice; but
+when Paris went mad over the immediate translation that was made,
+the American and English reading public followed suit and bought so
+many copies that Martin compelled the conservative house of
+Singletree, Darnley & Co. to pay a flat royalty of twenty-five per
+cent for a third book, and thirty per cent flat for a fourth.
+These two volumes comprised all the short stories he had written
+and which had received, or were receiving, serial publication.
+"The Ring of Bells" and his horror stories constituted one
+collection; the other collection was composed of "Adventure," "The
+Pot," "The Wine of Life," "The Whirlpool," "The Jostling Street,"
+and four other stories.  The Lowell-Meredith Company captured the
+collection of all his essays, and the Maxmillian Company got his
+"Sea Lyrics" and the "Love-cycle," the latter receiving serial
+publication in the LADIES' HOME COMPANION after the payment of an
+extortionate price.
+
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of the last
+manuscript.  The grass-walled castle and the white, coppered
+schooner were very near to him.  Well, at any rate he had
+discovered Brissenden's contention that nothing of merit found its
+way into the magazines.  His own success demonstrated that
+Brissenden had been wrong.
+
+And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had been right,
+after all.  "The Shame of the Sun" had been the cause of his
+success more than the stuff he had written.  That stuff had been
+merely incidental.  It had been rejected right and left by the
+magazines.  The publication of "The Shame of the Sun" had started a
+controversy and precipitated the landslide in his favor.  Had there
+been no "Shame of the Sun" there would have been no landslide, and
+had there been no miracle in the go of "The Shame of the Sun" there
+would have been no landslide.  Singletree, Darnley & Co. attested
+that miracle.  They had brought out a first edition of fifteen
+hundred copies and been dubious of selling it.  They were
+experienced publishers and no one had been more astounded than they
+at the success which had followed.  To them it had been in truth a
+miracle.  They never got over it, and every letter they wrote him
+reflected their reverent awe of that first mysterious happening.
+They did not attempt to explain it.  There was no explaining it.
+It had happened.  In the face of all experience to the contrary, it
+had happened.
+
+So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of
+his popularity.  It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and
+poured its gold into his money-sack, and from what little he knew
+of the bourgeoisie it was not clear to him how it could possibly
+appreciate or comprehend what he had written.  His intrinsic beauty
+and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were
+acclaiming him and buying his books.  He was the fad of the hour,
+the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while the gods nodded.
+The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same
+brute non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on
+Brissenden's "Ephemera" and torn it to pieces - a wolf-rabble that
+fawned on him instead of fanging him.  Fawn or fang, it was all a
+matter of chance.  One thing he knew with absolute certitude:
+"Ephemera" was infinitely greater than anything he had done.  It
+was infinitely greater than anything he had in him.  It was a poem
+of centuries.  Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry
+tribute indeed, for that same mob had wallowed "Ephemera" into the
+mire.  He sighed heavily and with satisfaction.  He was glad the
+last manuscript was sold and that he would soon be done with it
+all.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV
+
+
+
+Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metropole.  Whether
+he had happened there just casually, intent on other affairs, or
+whether he had come there for the direct purpose of inviting him to
+dinner, Martin never could quite make up his mind, though he
+inclined toward the second hypothesis.  At any rate, invited to
+dinner he was by Mr. Morse - Ruth's father, who had forbidden him
+the house and broken off the engagement.
+
+Martin was not angry.  He was not even on his dignity.  He
+tolerated Mr. Morse, wondering the while how it felt to eat such
+humble pie.  He did not decline the invitation.  Instead, he put it
+off with vagueness and indefiniteness and inquired after the
+family, particularly after Mrs. Morse and Ruth.  He spoke her name
+without hesitancy, naturally, though secretly surprised that he had
+had no inward quiver, no old, familiar increase of pulse and warm
+surge of blood.
+
+He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he accepted.
+Persons got themselves introduced to him in order to invite him to
+dinner.  And he went on puzzling over the little thing that was
+becoming a great thing.  Bernard Higginbotham invited him to
+dinner.  He puzzled the harder.  He remembered the days of his
+desperate starvation when no one invited him to dinner.  That was
+the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of
+them and lost weight from sheer famine.  That was the paradox of
+it.  When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him, and now that
+he could buy a hundred thousand dinners and was losing his
+appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left.  But why?
+There was no justice in it, no merit on his part.  He was no
+different.  All the work he had done was even at that time work
+performed.  Mr. and Mrs. Morse had condemned him for an idler and a
+shirk and through Ruth had urged that he take a clerk's position in
+an office.  Furthermore, they had been aware of his work performed.
+Manuscript after manuscript of his had been turned over to them by
+Ruth.  They had read them.  It was the very same work that had put
+his name in all the papers, and, it was his name being in all the
+papers that led them to invite him.
+
+One thing was certain:  the Morses had not cared to have him for
+himself or for his work.  Therefore they could not want him now for
+himself or for his work, but for the fame that was his, because he
+was somebody amongst men, and - why not? - because he had a hundred
+thousand dollars or so.  That was the way bourgeois society valued
+a man, and who was he to expect it otherwise?  But he was proud.
+He disdained such valuation.  He desired to be valued for himself,
+or for his work, which, after all, was an expression of himself.
+That was the way Lizzie valued him.  The work, with her, did not
+even count.  She valued him, himself.  That was the way Jimmy, the
+plumber, and all the old gang valued him.  That had been proved
+often enough in the days when he ran with them; it had been proved
+that Sunday at Shell Mound Park.  His work could go hang.  What
+they liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart Eden, one
+of the bunch and a pretty good guy.
+
+Then there was Ruth.  She had liked him for himself, that was
+indisputable.  And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the
+bourgeois standard of valuation more.  She had opposed his writing,
+and principally, it seemed to him, because it did not earn money.
+That had been her criticism of his "Love-cycle."  She, too, had
+urged him to get a job.  It was true, she refined it to "position,"
+but it meant the same thing, and in his own mind the old
+nomenclature stuck.  He had read her all that he wrote - poems,
+stories, essays - "Wiki-Wiki," "The Shame of the Sun," everything.
+And she had always and consistently urged him to get a job, to go
+to work - good God! - as if he hadn't been working, robbing sleep,
+exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.
+
+So the little thing grew bigger.  He was healthy and normal, ate
+regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was
+becoming an obsession.  WORK PERFORMED.  The phrase haunted his
+brain.  He sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday
+dinner over Higginbotham's Cash Store, and it was all he could do
+to restrain himself from shouting out:-
+
+"It was work performed!  And now you feed me, when then you let me
+starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn't get
+a job.  And the work was already done, all done.  And now, when I
+speak, you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my
+lips and pay respectful attention to whatever I choose to say.  I
+tell you your party is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead
+of flying into a rage you hum and haw and admit there is a great
+deal in what I say.  And why?  Because I'm famous; because I've a
+lot of money.  Not because I'm Martin Eden, a pretty good fellow
+and not particularly a fool.  I could tell you the moon is made of
+green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion, at least you
+would not repudiate it, because I've got dollars, mountains of
+them.  And it was all done long ago; it was work performed, I tell
+you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your feet."
+
+But Martin did not shout out.  The thought gnawed in his brain, an
+unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant.
+As he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the
+talking.  He was a success himself, and proud of it.  He was self-
+made.  No one had helped him.  He owed no man.  He was fulfilling
+his duty as a citizen and bringing up a large family.  And there
+was Higginbotham's Cash Store, that monument of his own industry
+and ability.  He loved Higginbotham's Cash Store as some men loved
+their wives.  He opened up his heart to Martin, showed with what
+keenness and with what enormous planning he had made the store.
+And he had plans for it, ambitious plans.  The neighborhood was
+growing up fast.  The store was really too small.  If he had more
+room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving and money-
+saving improvements.  And he would do it yet.  He was straining
+every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and
+put up another two-story frame building.  The upstairs he could
+rent, and the whole ground-floor of both buildings would be
+Higginbotham's Cash Store.  His eyes glistened when he spoke of the
+new sign that would stretch clear across both buildings.
+
+Martin forgot to listen.  The refrain of "Work performed," in his
+own brain, was drowning the other's clatter.  The refrain maddened
+him, and he tried to escape from it.
+
+"How much did you say it would cost?" he asked suddenly.
+
+His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the
+business opportunities of the neighborhood.  He hadn't said how
+much it would cost.  But he knew.  He had figured it out a score of
+times.
+
+"At the way lumber is now," he said, "four thousand could do it."
+
+"Including the sign?"
+
+"I didn't count on that.  It'd just have to come, onc't the
+buildin' was there."
+
+"And the ground?"
+
+"Three thousand more."
+
+He leaned forward, licking his lips, nervously spreading and
+closing his fingers, while he watched Martin write a check.  When
+it was passed over to him, he glanced at the amount-seven thousand
+dollars.
+
+"I - I can't afford to pay more than six per cent," he said
+huskily.
+
+Martin wanted to laugh, but, instead, demanded:-
+
+"How much would that be?"
+
+"Lemme see.  Six per cent - six times seven - four hundred an'
+twenty."
+
+"That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn't it?"
+
+Higginbotham nodded.
+
+"Then, if you've no objection, well arrange it this way."  Martin
+glanced at Gertrude.  "You can have the principal to keep for
+yourself, if you'll use the thirty-five dollars a month for cooking
+and washing and scrubbing.  The seven thousand is yours if you'll
+guarantee that Gertrude does no more drudgery.  Is it a go?"
+
+Mr. Higginbotham swallowed hard.  That his wife should do no more
+housework was an affront to his thrifty soul.  The magnificent
+present was the coating of a pill, a bitter pill.  That his wife
+should not work!  It gagged him.
+
+"All right, then," Martin said.  "I'll pay the thirty-five a month,
+and - "
+
+He reached across the table for the check.  But Bernard
+Higginbotham got his hand on it first, crying:
+
+"I accept!  I accept!"
+
+When Martin got on the electric car, he was very sick and tired.
+He looked up at the assertive sign.
+
+"The swine," he groaned.  "The swine, the swine."
+
+When MACKINTOSH'S MAGAZINE published "The Palmist," featuring it
+with decorations by Berthier and with two pictures by Wenn, Hermann
+von Schmidt forgot that he had called the verses obscene.  He
+announced that his wife had inspired the poem, saw to it that the
+news reached the ears of a reporter, and submitted to an interview
+by a staff writer who was accompanied by a staff photographer and a
+staff artist.  The result was a full page in a Sunday supplement,
+filled with photographs and idealized drawings of Marian, with many
+intimate details of Martin Eden and his family, and with the full
+text of "The Palmist" in large type, and republished by special
+permission of MACKINTOSH'S MAGAZINE.  It caused quite a stir in the
+neighborhood, and good housewives were proud to have the
+acquaintances of the great writer's sister, while those who had not
+made haste to cultivate it.  Hermann von Schmidt chuckled in his
+little repair shop and decided to order a new lathe.  "Better than
+advertising," he told Marian, "and it costs nothing."
+
+"We'd better have him to dinner," she suggested.
+
+And to dinner Martin came, making himself agreeable with the fat
+wholesale butcher and his fatter wife - important folk, they,
+likely to be of use to a rising young man like Hermann Yon Schmidt.
+No less a bait, however, had been required to draw them to his
+house than his great brother-in-law.  Another man at table who had
+swallowed the same bait was the superintendent of the Pacific Coast
+agencies for the Asa Bicycle Company.  Him Von Schmidt desired to
+please and propitiate because from him could be obtained the
+Oakland agency for the bicycle.  So Hermann von Schmidt found it a
+goodly asset to have Martin for a brother-in-law, but in his heart
+of hearts he couldn't understand where it all came in.  In the
+silent watches of the night, while his wife slept, he had
+floundered through Martin's books and poems, and decided that the
+world was a fool to buy them.
+
+And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situation only too
+well, as he leaned back and gloated at Von Schmidt's head, in fancy
+punching it well-nigh off of him, sending blow after blow home just
+right - the chuckle-headed Dutchman!  One thing he did like about
+him, however.  Poor as he was, and determined to rise as he was, he
+nevertheless hired one servant to take the heavy work off of
+Marian's hands.  Martin talked with the superintendent of the Asa
+agencies, and after dinner he drew him aside with Hermann, whom he
+backed financially for the best bicycle store with fittings in
+Oakland.  He went further, and in a private talk with Hermann told
+him to keep his eyes open for an automobile agency and garage, for
+there was no reason that he should not be able to run both
+establishments successfully.
+
+With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, Marian, at
+parting, told Martin how much she loved him and always had loved
+him.  It was true, there was a perceptible halt midway in her
+assertion, which she glossed over with more tears and kisses and
+incoherent stammerings, and which Martin inferred to be her appeal
+for forgiveness for the time she had lacked faith in him and
+insisted on his getting a job.
+
+"He can't never keep his money, that's sure," Hermann von Schmidt
+confided to his wife.  "He got mad when I spoke of interest, an' he
+said damn the principal and if I mentioned it again, he'd punch my
+Dutch head off.  That's what he said - my Dutch head.  But he's all
+right, even if he ain't no business man.  He's given me my chance,
+an' he's all right."
+
+Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the more they
+poured, the more he puzzled.  He sat, the guest of honor, at an
+Arden Club banquet, with men of note whom he had heard about and
+read about all his life; and they told him how, when they had read
+"The Ring of Bells" in the TRANSCONTINENTAL, and "The Peri and the
+Pearl" in THE HORNET, they had immediately picked him for a winner.
+My God! and I was hungry and in rags, he thought to himself.  Why
+didn't you give me a dinner then?  Then was the time.  It was work
+performed.  If you are feeding me now for work performed, why did
+you not feed me then when I needed it?  Not one word in "The Ring
+of Bells," nor in "The Peri and the Pearl" has been changed.  No;
+you're not feeding me now for work performed.  You are feeding me
+because everybody else is feeding me and because it is an honor to
+feed me.  You are feeding me now because you are herd animals;
+because you are part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic
+thought in the mob-mind just now is to feed me.  And where does
+Martin Eden and the work Martin Eden performed come in in all this?
+he asked himself plaintively, then arose to respond cleverly and
+wittily to a clever and witty toast.
+
+So it went.  Wherever he happened to be - at the Press Club, at the
+Redwood Club, at pink teas and literary gatherings - always were
+remembered "The Ring of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" when
+they were first published.  And always was Martin's maddening and
+unuttered demand:  Why didn't you feed me then?  It was work
+performed.  "The Ring of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" are
+not changed one iota.  They were just as artistic, just as worth
+while, then as now.  But you are not feeding me for their sake, nor
+for the sake of anything else I have written.  You're feeding me
+because it is the style of feeding just now, because the whole mob
+is crazy with the idea of feeding Martin Eden.
+
+And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch in among the
+company a young hoodlum in square-cut coat and under a stiff-rim
+Stetson hat.  It happened to him at the Gallina Society in Oakland
+one afternoon.  As he rose from his chair and stepped forward
+across the platform, he saw stalk through the wide door at the rear
+of the great room the young hoodlum with the square-cut coat and
+stiff-rim hat.  Five hundred fashionably gowned women turned their
+heads, so intent and steadfast was Martin's gaze, to see what he
+was seeing.  But they saw only the empty centre aisle.  He saw the
+young tough lurching down that aisle and wondered if he would
+remove the stiff-rim which never yet had he seen him without.
+Straight down the aisle he came, and up the platform.  Martin could
+have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when he thought of
+all that lay before him.  Across the platform he swaggered, right
+up to Martin, and into the foreground of Martin's consciousness
+disappeared.  The five hundred women applauded softly with gloved
+hands, seeking to encourage the bashful great man who was their
+guest.  And Martin shook the vision from his brain, smiled, and
+began to speak.
+
+The Superintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Martin on the
+street and remembered him, recalling seances in his office when
+Martin was expelled from school for fighting.
+
+"I read your 'Ring of Bells' in one of the magazines quite a time
+ago," he said.  "It was as good as Poe.  Splendid, I said at the
+time, splendid!"
+
+Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed me on the
+street and did not know me, Martin almost said aloud.  Each time I
+was hungry and heading for the pawnbroker.  Yet it was work
+performed.  You did not know me then.  Why do you know me now?
+
+"I was remarking to my wife only the other day," the other was
+saying, "wouldn't it be a good idea to have you out to dinner some
+time?  And she quite agreed with me.  Yes, she quite agreed with
+me."
+
+"Dinner?" Martin said so sharply that it was almost a snarl.
+
+"Why, yes, yes, dinner, you know - just pot luck with us, with your
+old superintendent, you rascal," he uttered nervously, poking
+Martin in an attempt at jocular fellowship.
+
+Martin went down the street in a daze.  He stopped at the corner
+and looked about him vacantly.
+
+"Well, I'll be damned!" he murmured at last.  "The old fellow was
+afraid of me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV
+
+
+
+Kreis came to Martin one day - Kreis, of the "real dirt"; and
+Martin turned to him with relief, to receive the glowing details of
+a scheme sufficiently wild-catty to interest him as a fictionist
+rather than an investor.  Kreis paused long enough in the midst of
+his exposition to tell him that in most of his "Shame of the Sun"
+he had been a chump.
+
+"But I didn't come here to spout philosophy," Kreis went on.  "What
+I want to know is whether or not you will put a thousand dollars in
+on this deal?"
+
+"No, I'm not chump enough for that, at any rate," Martin answered.
+"But I'll tell you what I will do.  You gave me the greatest night
+of my life.  You gave me what money cannot buy.  Now I've got
+money, and it means nothing to me.  I'd like to turn over to you a
+thousand dollars of what I don't value for what you gave me that
+night and which was beyond price.  You need the money.  I've got
+more than I need.  You want it.  You came for it.  There's no use
+scheming it out of me.  Take it."
+
+Kreis betrayed no surprise.  He folded the check away in his
+pocket.
+
+"At that rate I'd like the contract of providing you with many such
+nights," he said.
+
+"Too late."  Martin shook his head.  "That night was the one night
+for me.  I was in paradise.  It's commonplace with you, I know.
+But it wasn't to me.  I shall never live at such a pitch again.
+I'm done with philosophy.  I want never to hear another word of
+it."
+
+"The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my philosophy,"
+Kreis remarked, as he paused in the doorway.  "And then the market
+broke."
+
+Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and smiled and
+nodded.  He smiled back and lifted his hat.  The episode did not
+affect him.  A month before it might have disgusted him, or made
+him curious and set him to speculating about her state of
+consciousness at that moment.  But now it was not provocative of a
+second thought.  He forgot about it the next moment.  He forgot
+about it as he would have forgotten the Central Bank Building or
+the City Hall after having walked past them.  Yet his mind was
+preternaturally active.  His thoughts went ever around and around
+in a circle.  The centre of that circle was "work performed"; it
+ate at his brain like a deathless maggot.  He awoke to it in the
+morning.  It tormented his dreams at night.  Every affair of life
+around him that penetrated through his senses immediately related
+itself to "work performed."  He drove along the path of relentless
+logic to the conclusion that he was nobody, nothing.  Mart Eden,
+the hoodlum, and Mart Eden, the sailor, had been real, had been he;
+but Martin Eden! the famous writer, did not exist.  Martin Eden,
+the famous writer, was a vapor that had arisen in the mob-mind and
+by the mob-mind had been thrust into the corporeal being of Mart
+Eden, the hoodlum and sailor.  But it couldn't fool him.  He was
+not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping and sacrificing
+dinners to.  He knew better.
+
+He read the magazines about himself, and pored over portraits of
+himself published therein until he was unable to associate his
+identity with those portraits.  He was the fellow who had lived and
+thrilled and loved; who had been easy-going and tolerant of the
+frailties of life; who had served in the forecastle, wandered in
+strange lands, and led his gang in the old fighting days.  He was
+the fellow who had been stunned at first by the thousands of books
+in the free library, and who had afterward learned his way among
+them and mastered them; he was the fellow who had burned the
+midnight oil and bedded with a spur and written books himself.  But
+the one thing he was not was that colossal appetite that all the
+mob was bent upon feeding.
+
+There were things, however, in the magazines that amused him.  All
+the magazines were claiming him.  WARREN'S MONTHLY advertised to
+its subscribers that it was always on the quest after new writers,
+and that, among others, it had introduced Martin Eden to the
+reading public.  THE WHITE MOUSE claimed him; so did THE NORTHERN
+REVIEW and MACKINTOSH'S MAGAZINE, until silenced by THE GLOBE,
+which pointed triumphantly to its files where the mangled "Sea
+Lyrics" lay buried.  YOUTH AND AGE, which had come to life again
+after having escaped paying its bills, put in a prior claim, which
+nobody but farmers' children ever read.  The TRANSCONTINENTAL made
+a dignified and convincing statement of how it first discovered
+Martin Eden, which was warmly disputed by THE HORNET, with the
+exhibit of "The Peri and the Pearl."  The modest claim of
+Singletree, Darnley & Co. was lost in the din.  Besides, that
+publishing firm did not own a magazine wherewith to make its claim
+less modest.
+
+The newspapers calculated Martin's royalties.  In some way the
+magnificent offers certain magazines had made him leaked out, and
+Oakland ministers called upon him in a friendly way, while
+professional begging letters began to clutter his mail.  But worse
+than all this were the women.  His photographs were published
+broadcast, and special writers exploited his strong, bronzed face,
+his scars, his heavy shoulders, his clear, quiet eyes, and the
+slight hollows in his cheeks like an ascetic's.  At this last he
+remembered his wild youth and smiled.  Often, among the women he
+met, he would see now one, now another, looking at him, appraising
+him, selecting him.  He laughed to himself.  He remembered
+Brissenden's warning and laughed again.  The women would never
+destroy him, that much was certain.  He had gone past that stage.
+
+Once, walking with Lizzie toward night school, she caught a glance
+directed toward him by a well-gowned, handsome woman of the
+bourgeoisie.  The glance was a trifle too long, a shade too
+considerative.  Lizzie knew it for what it was, and her body tensed
+angrily.  Martin noticed, noticed the cause of it, told her how
+used he was becoming to it and that he did not care anyway.
+
+"You ought to care," she answered with blazing eyes.  "You're sick.
+That's what's the matter."
+
+"Never healthier in my life.  I weigh five pounds more than I ever
+did."
+
+"It ain't your body.  It's your head.  Something's wrong with your
+think-machine.  Even I can see that, an' I ain't nobody."
+
+He walked on beside her, reflecting.
+
+"I'd give anything to see you get over it," she broke out
+impulsively.  "You ought to care when women look at you that way, a
+man like you.  It's not natural.  It's all right enough for sissy-
+boys.  But you ain't made that way.  So help me, I'd be willing an'
+glad if the right woman came along an' made you care."
+
+When he left Lizzie at night school, he returned to the Metropole.
+
+Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and sat staring
+straight before him.  He did not doze.  Nor did he think.  His mind
+was a blank, save for the intervals when unsummoned memory pictures
+took form and color and radiance just under his eyelids.  He saw
+these pictures, but he was scarcely conscious of them - no more so
+than if they had been dreams.  Yet he was not asleep.  Once, he
+roused himself and glanced at his watch.  It was just eight
+o'clock.  He had nothing to do, and it was too early for bed.  Then
+his mind went blank again, and the pictures began to form and
+vanish under his eyelids.  There was nothing distinctive about the
+pictures.  They were always masses of leaves and shrub-like
+branches shot through with hot sunshine.
+
+A knock at the door aroused him.  He was not asleep, and his mind
+immediately connected the knock with a telegram, or letter, or
+perhaps one of the servants bringing back clean clothes from the
+laundry.  He was thinking about Joe and wondering where he was, as
+he said, "Come in."
+
+He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn toward the door.
+He heard it close softly.  There was a long silence.  He forgot
+that there had been a knock at the door, and was still staring
+blankly before him when he heard a woman's sob.  It was
+involuntary, spasmodic, checked, and stifled - he noted that as he
+turned about.  The next instant he was on his feet.
+
+"Ruth!" he said, amazed and bewildered.
+
+Her face was white and strained.  She stood just inside the door,
+one hand against it for support, the other pressed to her side.
+She extended both hands toward him piteously, and started forward
+to meet him.  As he caught her hands and led her to the Morris
+chair he noticed how cold they were.  He drew up another chair and
+sat down on the broad arm of it.  He was too confused to speak.  In
+his own mind his affair with Ruth was closed and sealed.  He felt
+much in the same way that he would have felt had the Shelly Hot
+Springs Laundry suddenly invaded the Hotel Metropole with a whole
+week's washing ready for him to pitch into.  Several times he was
+about to speak, and each time he hesitated.
+
+"No one knows I am here," Ruth said in a faint voice, with an
+appealing smile.
+
+"What did you say?"
+
+He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.
+
+She repeated her words.
+
+"Oh," he said, then wondered what more he could possibly say.
+
+"I saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes."
+
+"Oh," he said again.
+
+He had never been so tongue-tied in his life.  Positively he did
+not have an idea in his head.  He felt stupid and awkward, but for
+the life of him he could think of nothing to say.  It would have
+been easier had the intrusion been the Shelly Hot Springs laundry.
+He could have rolled up his sleeves and gone to work.
+
+"And then you came in," he said finally.
+
+She nodded, with a slightly arch expression, and loosened the scarf
+at her throat.
+
+"I saw you first from across the street when you were with that
+girl."
+
+"Oh, yes," he said simply.  "I took her down to night school."
+
+"Well, aren't you glad to see me?" she said at the end of another
+silence.
+
+"Yes, yes."  He spoke hastily.  "But wasn't it rash of you to come
+here?"
+
+"I slipped in.  Nobody knows I am here.  I wanted to see you.  I
+came to tell you I have been very foolish.  I came because I could
+no longer stay away, because my heart compelled me to come, because
+- because I wanted to come."
+
+She came forward, out of her chair and over to him.  She rested her
+hand on his shoulder a moment, breathing quickly, and then slipped
+into his arms.  And in his large, easy way, desirous of not
+inflicting hurt, knowing that to repulse this proffer of herself
+was to inflict the most grievous hurt a woman could receive, he
+folded his arms around her and held her close.  But there was no
+warmth in the embrace, no caress in the contact.  She had come into
+his arms, and he held her, that was all.  She nestled against him,
+and then, with a change of position, her hands crept up and rested
+upon his neck.  But his flesh was not fire beneath those hands, and
+he felt awkward and uncomfortable.
+
+"What makes you tremble so?" he asked.  "Is it a chill?  Shall I
+light the grate?"
+
+He made a movement to disengage himself, but she clung more closely
+to him, shivering violently.
+
+"It is merely nervousness," she said with chattering teeth.  "I'll
+control myself in a minute.  There, I am better already."
+
+Slowly her shivering died away.  He continued to hold her, but he
+was no longer puzzled.  He knew now for what she had come.
+
+"My mother wanted me to marry Charley Hapgood," she announced.
+
+"Charley Hapgood, that fellow who speaks always in platitudes?"
+Martin groaned.  Then he added, "And now, I suppose, your mother
+wants you to marry me."
+
+He did not put it in the form of a question.  He stated it as a
+certitude, and before his eyes began to dance the rows of figures
+of his royalties.
+
+"She will not object, I know that much," Ruth said.
+
+"She considers me quite eligible?"
+
+Ruth nodded.
+
+"And yet I am not a bit more eligible now than I was when she broke
+our engagement," he meditated.  "I haven't changed any.  I'm the
+same Martin Eden, though for that matter I'm a bit worse - I smoke
+now.  Don't you smell my breath?"
+
+In reply she pressed her open fingers against his lips, placed them
+graciously and playfully, and in expectancy of the kiss that of old
+had always been a consequence.  But there was no caressing answer
+of Martin's lips.  He waited until the fingers were removed and
+then went on.
+
+"I am not changed.  I haven't got a job.  I'm not looking for a
+job.  Furthermore, I am not going to look for a job.  And I still
+believe that Herbert Spencer is a great and noble man and that
+Judge Blount is an unmitigated ass.  I had dinner with him the
+other night, so I ought to know."
+
+"But you didn't accept father's invitation," she chided.
+
+"So you know about that?  Who sent him?  Your mother?"
+
+She remained silent.
+
+"Then she did send him.  I thought so.  And now I suppose she has
+sent you."
+
+"No one knows that I am here," she protested.  "Do you think my
+mother would permit this?"
+
+"She'd permit you to marry me, that's certain."
+
+She gave a sharp cry.  "Oh, Martin, don't be cruel.  You have not
+kissed me once.  You are as unresponsive as a stone.  And think
+what I have dared to do."  She looked about her with a shiver,
+though half the look was curiosity.  "Just think of where I am."
+
+"I COULD DIE FOR YOU!  I COULD DIE FOR YOU!" - Lizzie's words were
+ringing in his ears.
+
+"Why didn't you dare it before?" he asked harshly.  "When I hadn't
+a job?  When I was starving?  When I was just as I am now, as a
+man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden?  That's the question I've
+been propounding to myself for many a day - not concerning you
+merely, but concerning everybody.  You see I have not changed,
+though my sudden apparent appreciation in value compels me
+constantly to reassure myself on that point.  I've got the same
+flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and toes.  I am the same.
+I have not developed any new strength nor virtue.  My brain is the
+same old brain.  I haven't made even one new generalization on
+literature or philosophy.  I am personally of the same value that I
+was when nobody wanted me.  And what is puzzling me is why they
+want me now.  Surely they don't want me for myself, for myself is
+the same old self they did not want.  Then they must want me for
+something else, for something that is outside of me, for something
+that is not I!  Shall I tell you what that something is?  It is for
+the recognition I have received.  That recognition is not I.  It
+resides in the minds of others.  Then again for the money I have
+earned and am earning.  But that money is not I.  It resides in
+banks and in the pockets of Tom, Dick, and Harry.  And is it for
+that, for the recognition and the money, that you now want me?"
+
+"You are breaking my heart," she sobbed.  "You know I love you,
+that I am here because I love you."
+
+"I am afraid you don't see my point," he said gently.  "What I mean
+is:  if you love me, how does it happen that you love me now so
+much more than you did when your love was weak enough to deny me?"
+
+"Forget and forgive," she cried passionately.  "I loved you all the
+time, remember that, and I am here, now, in your arms."
+
+"I'm afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying
+to weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is."
+
+She withdrew herself from his arms, sat upright, and looked at him
+long and searchingly.  She was about to speak, then faltered and
+changed her mind.
+
+"You see, it appears this way to me," he went on.  "When I was all
+that I am now, nobody out of my own class seemed to care for me.
+When my books were all written, no one who had read the manuscripts
+seemed to care for them.  In point of fact, because of the stuff I
+had written they seemed to care even less for me.  In writing the
+stuff it seemed that I had committed acts that were, to say the
+least, derogatory.  'Get a job,' everybody said."
+
+She made a movement of dissent.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said; "except in your case you told me to get a
+position.  The homely word JOB, like much that I have written,
+offends you.  It is brutal.  But I assure you it was no less brutal
+to me when everybody I knew recommended it to me as they would
+recommend right conduct to an immoral creature.  But to return.
+The publication of what I had written, and the public notice I
+received, wrought a change in the fibre of your love.  Martin Eden,
+with his work all performed, you would not marry.  Your love for
+him was not strong enough to enable you to marry him.  But your
+love is now strong enough, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that
+its strength arises from the publication and the public notice.  In
+your case I do not mention royalties, though I am certain that they
+apply to the change wrought in your mother and father.  Of course,
+all this is not flattering to me.  But worst of all, it makes me
+question love, sacred love.  Is love so gross a thing that it must
+feed upon publication and public notice?  It would seem so.  I have
+sat and thought upon it till my head went around."
+
+"Poor, dear head."  She reached up a hand and passed the fingers
+soothingly through his hair.  "Let it go around no more.  Let us
+begin anew, now.  I loved you all the time.  I know that I was weak
+in yielding to my mother's will.  I should not have done so.  Yet I
+have heard you speak so often with broad charity of the fallibility
+and frailty of humankind.  Extend that charity to me.  I acted
+mistakenly.  Forgive me."
+
+"Oh, I do forgive," he said impatiently.  "It is easy to forgive
+where there is really nothing to forgive.  Nothing that you have
+done requires forgiveness.  One acts according to one's lights, and
+more than that one cannot do.  As well might I ask you to forgive
+me for my not getting a job."
+
+"I meant well," she protested.  "You know that I could not have
+loved you and not meant well."
+
+"True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning."
+
+"Yes, yes," he shut off her attempted objection.  "You would have
+destroyed my writing and my career.  Realism is imperative to my
+nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism.  The bourgeoisie is
+cowardly.  It is afraid of life.  And all your effort was to make
+me afraid of life.  You would have formalized me.  You would have
+compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all
+life's values are unreal, and false, and vulgar."  He felt her stir
+protestingly.  "Vulgarity - a hearty vulgarity, I'll admit - is the
+basis of bourgeois refinement and culture.  As I say, you wanted to
+formalize me, to make me over into one of your own class, with your
+class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices."  He shook his
+head sadly.  "And you do not understand, even now, what I am
+saying.  My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them
+mean.  What I say is so much fantasy to you.  Yet to me it is vital
+reality.  At the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this
+raw boy, crawling up out of the mire of the abyss, should pass
+judgment upon your class and call it vulgar."
+
+She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body
+shivered with recurrent nervousness.  He waited for a time for her
+to speak, and then went on.
+
+"And now you want to renew our love.  You want us to be married.
+You want me.  And yet, listen - if my books had not been noticed,
+I'd nevertheless have been just what I am now.  And you would have
+stayed away.  It is all those damned books - "
+
+"Don't swear," she interrupted.
+
+Her reproof startled him.  He broke into a harsh laugh.
+
+"That's it," he said, "at a high moment, when what seems your
+life's happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same
+old way - afraid of life and a healthy oath."
+
+She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her
+act, and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was
+consequently resentful.  They sat in silence for a long time, she
+thinking desperately and he pondering upon his love which had
+departed.  He knew, now, that he had not really loved her.  It was
+an idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own
+creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems.  The
+real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the
+hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind, he had
+never loved.
+
+She suddenly began to speak.
+
+"I know that much you have said is so.  I have been afraid of life.
+I did not love you well enough.  I have learned to love better.  I
+love you for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by
+which you have become.  I love you for the ways wherein you differ
+from what you call my class, for your beliefs which I do not
+understand but which I know I can come to understand.  I shall
+devote myself to understanding them.  And even your smoking and
+your swearing - they are part of you and I will love you for them,
+too.  I can still learn.  In the last ten minutes I have learned
+much.  That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have
+already learned.  Oh, Martin! - "
+
+She was sobbing and nestling close against him.
+
+For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy,
+and she acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening
+face.
+
+"It is too late," he said.  He remembered Lizzie's words.  "I am a
+sick man - oh, not my body.  It is my soul, my brain.  I seem to
+have lost all values.  I care for nothing.  If you had been this
+way a few months ago, it would have been different.  It is too
+late, now."
+
+"It is not too late," she cried.  "I will show you.  I will prove
+to you that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my
+class and all that is dearest to me.  All that is dearest to the
+bourgeoisie I will flout.  I am no longer afraid of life.  I will
+leave my father and mother, and let my name become a by-word with
+my friends.  I will come to you here and now, in free love if you
+will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you.  If I have been
+a traitor to love, I will now, for love's sake, be a traitor to all
+that made that earlier treason."
+
+She stood before him, with shining eyes.
+
+"I am waiting, Martin," she whispered, "waiting for you to accept
+me.  Look at me."
+
+It was splendid, he thought, looking at her.  She had redeemed
+herself for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman,
+superior to the iron rule of bourgeois convention.  It was
+splendid, magnificent, desperate.  And yet, what was the matter
+with him?  He was not thrilled nor stirred by what she had done.
+It was splendid and magnificent only intellectually.  In what
+should have been a moment of fire, he coldly appraised her.  His
+heart was untouched.  He was unaware of any desire for her.  Again
+he remembered Lizzie's words.
+
+"I am sick, very sick," he said with a despairing gesture.  "How
+sick I did not know till now.  Something has gone out of me.  I
+have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being
+sated with life.  Life has so filled me that I am empty of any
+desire for anything.  If there were room, I should want you, now.
+You see how sick I am."
+
+He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child,
+crying, that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate
+through the tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his
+sickness, the presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses
+of vegetation, shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and
+blazed against this background of his eyelids.  It was not restful,
+that green foliage.  The sunlight was too raw and glaring.  It hurt
+him to look at it, and yet he looked, he knew not why.
+
+He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob.
+Ruth was at the door.
+
+"How shall I get out?" she questioned tearfully.  "I am afraid."
+
+"Oh, forgive me," he cried, springing to his feet.  "I'm not
+myself, you know.  I forgot you were here."  He put his hand to his
+head.  "You see, I'm not just right.  I'll take you home.  We can
+go out by the servants' entrance.  No one will see us.  Pull down
+that veil and everything will be all right."
+
+She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the
+narrow stairs.
+
+"I am safe now," she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at
+the same time starting to take her hand from his arm.
+
+"No, no, I'll see you home," he answered.
+
+"No, please don't," she objected.  "It is unnecessary."
+
+Again she started to remove her hand.  He felt a momentary
+curiosity.  Now that she was out of danger she was afraid.  She was
+in almost a panic to be quit of him.  He could see no reason for it
+and attributed it to her nervousness.  So he restrained her
+withdrawing hand and started to walk on with her.  Halfway down the
+block, he saw a man in a long overcoat shrink back into a doorway.
+He shot a glance in as he passed by, and, despite the high turned-
+up collar, he was certain that he recognized Ruth's brother,
+Norman.
+
+During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversation.  She was
+stunned.  He was apathetic.  Once, he mentioned that he was going
+away, back to the South Seas, and, once, she asked him to forgive
+her having come to him.  And that was all.  The parting at her door
+was conventional.  They shook hands, said good night, and he lifted
+his hat.  The door swung shut, and he lighted a cigarette and
+turned back for his hotel.  When he came to the doorway into which
+he had seen Norman shrink, he stopped and looked in in a
+speculative humor.
+
+"She lied," he said aloud.  "She made believe to me that she had
+dared greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought
+her was waiting to take her back."  He burst into laughter.  "Oh,
+these bourgeois!  When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with
+his sister.  When I have a bank account, he brings her to me."
+
+As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same
+direction, begged him over his shoulder.
+
+"Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?" were the
+words.
+
+But it was the voice that made Martin turn around.  The next
+instant he had Joe by the hand.
+
+"D'ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?" the other
+was saying.  "I said then we'd meet again.  I felt it in my bones.
+An' here we are."
+
+"You're looking good," Martin said admiringly, "and you've put on
+weight."
+
+"I sure have."  Joe's face was beaming.  "I never knew what it was
+to live till I hit hoboin'.  I'm thirty pounds heavier an' feel
+tiptop all the time.  Why, I was worked to skin an' bone in them
+old days.  Hoboin' sure agrees with me."
+
+"But you're looking for a bed just the same," Martin chided, "and
+it's a cold night."
+
+"Huh?  Lookin' for a bed?"  Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket and
+brought it out filled with small change.  "That beats hard graft,"
+he exulted.  "You just looked good; that's why I battered you."
+
+Martin laughed and gave in.
+
+"You've several full-sized drunks right there," he insinuated.
+
+Joe slid the money back into his pocket.
+
+"Not in mine," he announced.  "No gettin' oryide for me, though
+there ain't nothin' to stop me except I don't want to.  I've ben
+drunk once since I seen you last, an' then it was unexpected, bein'
+on an empty stomach.  When I work like a beast, I drink like a
+beast.  When I live like a man, I drink like a man - a jolt now an'
+again when I feel like it, an' that's all."
+
+Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to the hotel.  He
+paused in the office to look up steamer sailings.  The Mariposa
+sailed for Tahiti in five days.
+
+"Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me," he told
+the clerk.  "No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the weather-
+side, - the port-side, remember that, the port-side.  You'd better
+write it down."
+
+Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently
+as a child.  The occurrences of the evening had made no impression
+on him.  His mind was dead to impressions.  The glow of warmth with
+which he met Joe had been most fleeting.  The succeeding minute he
+had been bothered by the ex-laundryman's presence and by the
+compulsion of conversation.  That in five more days he sailed for
+his loved South Seas meant nothing to him.  So he closed his eyes
+and slept normally and comfortably for eight uninterrupted hours.
+He was not restless.  He did not change his position, nor did he
+dream.  Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each day that he
+awoke, he awoke with regret.  Life worried and bored him, and time
+was a vexation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI
+
+
+
+"Say, Joe," was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next
+morning, "there's a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street.  He's
+made a pot of money, and he's going back to France.  It's a dandy,
+well-appointed, small steam laundry.  There's a start for you if
+you want to settle down.  Here, take this; buy some clothes with it
+and be at this man's office by ten o'clock.  He looked up the
+laundry for me, and he'll take you out and show you around.  If you
+like it, and think it is worth the price - twelve thousand - let me
+know and it is yours.  Now run along.  I'm busy.  I'll see you
+later."
+
+"Now look here, Mart," the other said slowly, with kindling anger,
+"I come here this mornin' to see you.  Savve?  I didn't come here
+to get no laundry.  I come a here for a talk for old friends' sake,
+and you shove a laundry at me.  I tell you, what you can do.  You
+can take that laundry an' go to hell."
+
+He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him
+around.
+
+"Now look here, Joe," he said; "if you act that way, I'll punch
+your head.  An for old friends' sake I'll punch it hard.  Savve? -
+you will, will you?"
+
+Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting
+and writhing out of the advantage of the other's hold.  They reeled
+about the room, locked in each other's arms, and came down with a
+crash across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair.  Joe was
+underneath, with arms spread out and held and with Martin's knee on
+his chest.  He was panting and gasping for breath when Martin
+released him.
+
+"Now we'll talk a moment," Martin said.  "You can't get fresh with
+me.  I want that laundry business finished first of all.  Then you
+can come back and we'll talk for old sake's sake.  I told you I was
+busy.  Look at that."
+
+A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of
+letters and magazines.
+
+"How can I wade through that and talk with you?  You go and fix up
+that laundry, and then we'll get together."
+
+"All right," Joe admitted reluctantly.  "I thought you was turnin'
+me down, but I guess I was mistaken.  But you can't lick me, Mart,
+in a stand-up fight.  I've got the reach on you."
+
+"We'll put on the gloves sometime and see," Martin said with a
+smile.
+
+"Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going."  Joe extended his arm.
+"You see that reach?  It'll make you go a few."
+
+Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the
+laundryman.  He was becoming anti-social.  Daily he found it a
+severer strain to be decent with people.  Their presence perturbed
+him, and the effort of conversation irritated him.  They made him
+restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was
+casting about for excuses to get rid of them.
+
+He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he
+lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-
+formed thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or
+rather, at wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of
+his intelligence.
+
+He roused himself and began glancing through his mail.  There were
+a dozen requests for autographs - he knew them at sight; there were
+professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks,
+ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and
+the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the
+inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to
+purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of
+communist colonization.  There were letters from women seeking to
+know him, and over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt
+for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her good faith and as proof of
+her respectability.
+
+Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters,
+the former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their
+knees for his books - his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept
+all he possessed in pawn for so many dreary months in order to find
+them in postage.  There were unexpected checks for English serial
+rights and for advance payments on foreign translations.  His
+English agent announced the sale of German translation rights in
+three of his books, and informed him that Swedish editions, from
+which he could expect nothing because Sweden was not a party to the
+Berne Convention, were already on the market.  Then there was a
+nominal request for his permission for a Russian translation, that
+country being likewise outside the Berne Convention.
+
+He turned to the huge bundle of clippings which had come in from
+his press bureau, and read about himself and his vogue, which had
+become a furore.  All his creative output had been flung to the
+public in one magnificent sweep.  That seemed to account for it.
+He had taken the public off its feet, the way Kipling had, that
+time when he lay near to death and all the mob, animated by a mob-
+mind thought, began suddenly to read him.  Martin remembered how
+that same world-mob, having read him and acclaimed him and not
+understood him in the least, had, abruptly, a few months later,
+flung itself upon him and torn him to pieces.  Martin grinned at
+the thought.  Who was he that he should not be similarly treated in
+a few more months?  Well, he would fool the mob.  He would be away,
+in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls and
+copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and
+bonitas, hunting wild goats among the cliffs of the valley that lay
+next to the valley of Taiohae.
+
+In the moment of that thought the desperateness of his situation
+dawned upon him.  He saw, cleared eyed, that he was in the Valley
+of the Shadow.  All the life that was in him was fading, fainting,
+making toward death.
+
+He realized how much he slept, and how much he desired to sleep.
+Of old, he had hated sleep.  It had robbed him of precious moments
+of living.  Four hours of sleep in the twenty-four had meant being
+robbed of four hours of life.  How he had grudged sleep!  Now it
+was life he grudged.  Life was not good; its taste in his mouth was
+without tang, and bitter.  This was his peril.  Life that did not
+yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing.  Some remote
+instinct for preservation stirred in him, and he knew he must get
+away.  He glanced about the room, and the thought of packing was
+burdensome.  Perhaps it would be better to leave that to the last.
+In the meantime he might be getting an outfit.
+
+He put on his hat and went out, stopping in at a gun-store, where
+he spent the remainder of the morning buying automatic rifles,
+ammunition, and fishing tackle.  Fashions changed in trading, and
+he knew he would have to wait till he reached Tahiti before
+ordering his trade-goods.  They could come up from Australia,
+anyway.  This solution was a source of pleasure.  He had avoided
+doing something, and the doing of anything just now was unpleasant.
+He went back to the hotel gladly, with a feeling of satisfaction in
+that the comfortable Morris chair was waiting for him; and he
+groaned inwardly, on entering his room, at sight of Joe in the
+Morris chair.
+
+Joe was delighted with the laundry.  Everything was settled, and he
+would enter into possession next day.  Martin lay on the bed, with
+closed eyes, while the other talked on.  Martin's thoughts were far
+away - so far away that he was rarely aware that he was thinking.
+It was only by an effort that he occasionally responded.  And yet
+this was Joe, whom he had always liked.  But Joe was too keen with
+life.  The boisterous impact of it on Martin's jaded mind was a
+hurt.  It was an aching probe to his tired sensitiveness.  When Joe
+reminded him that sometime in the future they were going to put on
+the gloves together, he could almost have screamed.
+
+"Remember, Joe, you're to run the laundry according to those old
+rules you used to lay down at Shelly Hot Springs," he said.  "No
+overworking.  No working at night.  And no children at the mangles.
+No children anywhere.  And a fair wage."
+
+Joe nodded and pulled out a note-book.
+
+"Look at here.  I was workin' out them rules before breakfast this
+A.M.  What d'ye think of them?"
+
+He read them aloud, and Martin approved, worrying at the same time
+as to when Joe would take himself off.
+
+It was late afternoon when he awoke.  Slowly the fact of life came
+back to him.  He glanced about the room.  Joe had evidently stolen
+away after he had dozed off.  That was considerate of Joe, he
+thought.  Then he closed his eyes and slept again.
+
+In the days that followed Joe was too busy organizing and taking
+hold of the laundry to bother him much; and it was not until the
+day before sailing that the newspapers made the announcement that
+he had taken passage on the Mariposa.  Once, when the instinct of
+preservation fluttered, he went to a doctor and underwent a
+searching physical examination.  Nothing could be found the matter
+with him.  His heart and lungs were pronounced magnificent.  Every
+organ, so far as the doctor could know, was normal and was working
+normally.
+
+"There is nothing the matter with you, Mr. Eden," he said,
+"positively nothing the matter with you.  You are in the pink of
+condition.  Candidly, I envy you your health.  It is superb.  Look
+at that chest.  There, and in your stomach, lies the secret of your
+remarkable constitution.  Physically, you are a man in a thousand -
+in ten thousand.  Barring accidents, you should live to be a
+hundred."
+
+And Martin knew that Lizzie's diagnosis had been correct.
+Physically he was all right.  It was his "think-machine" that had
+gone wrong, and there was no cure for that except to get away to
+the South Seas.  The trouble was that now, on the verge of
+departure, he had no desire to go.  The South Seas charmed him no
+more than did bourgeois civilization.  There was no zest in the
+thought of departure, while the act of departure appalled him as a
+weariness of the flesh.  He would have felt better if he were
+already on board and gone.
+
+The last day was a sore trial.  Having read of his sailing in the
+morning papers, Bernard Higginbotham, Gertrude, and all the family
+came to say good-by, as did Hermann von Schmidt and Marian.  Then
+there was business to be transacted, bills to be paid, and
+everlasting reporters to be endured.  He said good-by to Lizzie
+Connolly, abruptly, at the entrance to night school, and hurried
+away.  At the hotel he found Joe, too busy all day with the laundry
+to have come to him earlier.  It was the last straw, but Martin
+gripped the arms of his chair and talked and listened for half an
+hour.
+
+"You know, Joe," he said, "that you are not tied down to that
+laundry.  There are no strings on it.  You can sell it any time and
+blow the money.  Any time you get sick of it and want to hit the
+road, just pull out.  Do what will make you the happiest."
+
+Joe shook his head.
+
+"No more road in mine, thank you kindly.  Hoboin's all right,
+exceptin' for one thing - the girls.  I can't help it, but I'm a
+ladies' man.  I can't get along without 'em, and you've got to get
+along without 'em when you're hoboin'.  The times I've passed by
+houses where dances an' parties was goin' on, an' heard the women
+laugh, an' saw their white dresses and smiling faces through the
+windows - Gee!  I tell you them moments was plain hell.  I like
+dancin' an' picnics, an' walking in the moonlight, an' all the rest
+too well.  Me for the laundry, and a good front, with big iron
+dollars clinkin' in my jeans.  I seen a girl already, just
+yesterday, and, d'ye know, I'm feelin' already I'd just as soon
+marry her as not.  I've ben whistlin' all day at the thought of it.
+She's a beaut, with the kindest eyes and softest voice you ever
+heard.  Me for her, you can stack on that.  Say, why don't you get
+married with all this money to burn?  You could get the finest girl
+in the land."
+
+Martin shook his head with a smile, but in his secret heart he was
+wondering why any man wanted to marry.  It seemed an amazing and
+incomprehensible thing.
+
+From the deck of the Mariposa, at the sailing hour, he saw Lizzie
+Connolly hiding in the skirts of the crowd on the wharf.  Take her
+with you, came the thought.  It is easy to be kind.  She will be
+supremely happy.  It was almost a temptation one moment, and the
+succeeding moment it became a terror.  He was in a panic at the
+thought of it.  His tired soul cried out in protest.  He turned
+away from the rail with a groan, muttering, "Man, you are too sick,
+you are too sick."
+
+He fled to his stateroom, where he lurked until the steamer was
+clear of the dock.  In the dining saloon, at luncheon, he found
+himself in the place of honor, at the captain's right; and he was
+not long in discovering that he was the great man on board.  But no
+more unsatisfactory great man ever sailed on a ship.  He spent the
+afternoon in a deck-chair, with closed eyes, dozing brokenly most
+of the time, and in the evening went early to bed.
+
+After the second day, recovered from seasickness, the full
+passenger list was in evidence, and the more he saw of the
+passengers the more he disliked them.  Yet he knew that he did them
+injustice.  They were good and kindly people, he forced himself to
+acknowledge, and in the moment of acknowledgment he qualified -
+good and kindly like all the bourgeoisie, with all the
+psychological cramp and intellectual futility of their kind, they
+bored him when they talked with him, their little superficial minds
+were so filled with emptiness; while the boisterous high spirits
+and the excessive energy of the younger people shocked him.  They
+were never quiet, ceaselessly playing deck-quoits, tossing rings,
+promenading, or rushing to the rail with loud cries to watch the
+leaping porpoises and the first schools of flying fish.
+
+He slept much.  After breakfast he sought his deck-chair with a
+magazine he never finished.  The printed pages tired him.  He
+puzzled that men found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed
+in his chair.  When the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was
+irritated that he must awaken.  There was no satisfaction in being
+awake.
+
+Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and went
+forward into the forecastle with the sailors.  But the breed of
+sailors seemed to have changed since the days he had lived in the
+forecastle.  He could find no kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-
+minded bestial creatures.  He was in despair.  Up above nobody had
+wanted Martin Eden for his own sake, and he could not go back to
+those of his own class who had wanted him in the past.  He did not
+want them.  He could not stand them any more than he could stand
+the stupid first-cabin passengers and the riotous young people.
+
+Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes
+of a sick person.  During every conscious moment life blazed in a
+raw glare around him and upon him.  It hurt.  It hurt intolerably.
+It was the first time in his life that Martin had travelled first
+class.  On ships at sea he had always been in the forecastle, the
+steerage, or in the black depths of the coal-hold, passing coal.
+In those days, climbing up the iron ladders out the pit of stifling
+heat, he had often caught glimpses of the passengers, in cool
+white, doing nothing but enjoy themselves, under awnings spread to
+keep the sun and wind away from them, with subservient stewards
+taking care of their every want and whim, and it had seemed to him
+that the realm in which they moved and had their being was nothing
+else than paradise.  Well, here he was, the great man on board, in
+the midmost centre of it, sitting at the captain's right hand, and
+yet vainly harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest of
+the Paradise he had lost.  He had found no new one, and now he
+could not find the old one.
+
+He strove to stir himself and find something to interest him.  He
+ventured the petty officers' mess, and was glad to get away.  He
+talked with a quartermaster off duty, an intelligent man who
+promptly prodded him with the socialist propaganda and forced into
+his hands a bunch of leaflets and pamphlets.  He listened to the
+man expounding the slave-morality, and as he listened, he thought
+languidly of his own Nietzsche philosophy.  But what was it worth,
+after all?  He remembered one of Nietzsche's mad utterances wherein
+that madman had doubted truth.  And who was to say?  Perhaps
+Nietzsche had been right.  Perhaps there was no truth in anything,
+no truth in truth - no such thing as truth.  But his mind wearied
+quickly, and he was content to go back to his chair and doze.
+
+Miserable as he was on the steamer, a new misery came upon him.
+What when the steamer reached Tahiti?  He would have to go ashore.
+He would have to order his trade-goods, to find a passage on a
+schooner to the Marquesas, to do a thousand and one things that
+were awful to contemplate.  Whenever he steeled himself
+deliberately to think, he could see the desperate peril in which he
+stood.  In all truth, he was in the Valley of the Shadow, and his
+danger lay in that he was not afraid.  If he were only afraid, he
+would make toward life.  Being unafraid, he was drifting deeper
+into the shadow.  He found no delight in the old familiar things of
+life.  The Mariposa was now in the northeast trades, and this wine
+of wind, surging against him, irritated him.  He had his chair
+moved to escape the embrace of this lusty comrade of old days and
+nights.
+
+The day the Mariposa entered the doldrums, Martin was more
+miserable than ever.  He could no longer sleep.  He was soaked with
+sleep, and perforce he must now stay awake and endure the white
+glare of life.  He moved about restlessly.  The air was sticky and
+humid, and the rain-squalls were unrefreshing.  He ached with life.
+He walked around the deck until that hurt too much, then sat in his
+chair until he was compelled to walk again.  He forced himself at
+last to finish the magazine, and from the steamer library he culled
+several volumes of poetry.  But they could not hold him, and once
+more he took to walking.
+
+He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him,
+for when he went below, he could not sleep.  This surcease from
+life had failed him.  It was too much.  He turned on the electric
+light and tried to read.  One of the volumes was a Swinburne.  He
+lay in bed, glancing through its pages, until suddenly he became
+aware that he was reading with interest.  He finished the stanza,
+attempted to read on, then came back to it.  He rested the book
+face downward on his breast and fell to thinking.  That was it.
+The very thing.  Strange that it had never come to him before.
+That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting that way all
+the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the happy way
+out.  He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him.  He glanced
+at the open port-hole.  Yes, it was large enough.  For the first
+time in weeks he felt happy.  At last he had discovered the cure of
+his ill.  He picked up the book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-
+
+
+"'From too much love of living,
+From hope and fear set free,
+We thank with brief thanksgiving
+Whatever gods may be
+That no life lives forever;
+That dead men rise up never;
+That even the weariest river
+Winds somewhere safe to sea.'"
+
+
+He looked again at the open port.  Swinburne had furnished the key.
+Life was ill, or, rather, it had become ill - an unbearable thing.
+"That dead men rise up never!"  That line stirred him with a
+profound feeling of gratitude.  It was the one beneficent thing in
+the universe.  When life became an aching weariness, death was
+ready to soothe away to everlasting sleep.  But what was he waiting
+for?  It was time to go.
+
+He arose and thrust his head out the port-hole, looking down into
+the milky wash.  The Mariposa was deeply loaded, and, hanging by
+his hands, his feet would be in the water.  He could slip in
+noiselessly.  No one would hear.  A smother of spray dashed up,
+wetting his face.  It tasted salt on his lips, and the taste was
+good.  He wondered if he ought to write a swan-song, but laughed
+the thought away.  There was no time.  He was too impatient to be
+gone.
+
+Turning off the light in his room so that it might not betray him,
+he went out the port-hole feet first.  His shoulders stuck, and he
+forced himself back so as to try it with one arm down by his side.
+A roll of the steamer aided him, and he was through, hanging by his
+hands.  When his feet touched the sea, he let go.  He was in a
+milky froth of water.  The side of the Mariposa rushed past him
+like a dark wall, broken here and there by lighted ports.  She was
+certainly making time.  Almost before he knew it, he was astern,
+swimming gently on the foam-crackling surface.
+
+A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed aloud.  It had
+taken a piece out, and the sting of it reminded him of why he was
+there.  In the work to do he had forgotten the purpose of it.  The
+lights of the Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there
+he was, swimming confidently, as though it were his intention to
+make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away.
+
+It was the automatic instinct to live.  He ceased swimming, but the
+moment he felt the water rising above his mouth the hands struck
+out sharply with a lifting movement.  The will to live, was his
+thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer.  Well, he had
+will, - ay, will strong enough that with one last exertion it could
+destroy itself and cease to be.
+
+He changed his position to a vertical one.  He glanced up at the
+quiet stars, at the same time emptying his lungs of air.  With
+swift, vigorous propulsion of hands and feet, he lifted his
+shoulders and half his chest out of water.  This was to gain
+impetus for the descent.  Then he let himself go and sank without
+movement, a white statue, into the sea.  He breathed in the water
+deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a man taking an
+anaesthetic.  When he strangled, quite involuntarily his arms and
+legs clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and into the
+clear sight of the stars.
+
+The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly endeavoring not
+to breathe the air into his bursting lungs.  Well, he would have to
+try a new way.  He filled his lungs with air, filled them full.
+This supply would take him far down.  He turned over and went down
+head first, swimming with all his strength and all his will.
+Deeper and deeper he went.  His eyes were open, and he watched the
+ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita.  As he swam,
+he hoped that they would not strike at him, for it might snap the
+tension of his will.  But they did not strike, and he found time to
+be grateful for this last kindness of life.
+
+Down, down, he swam till his arms and leg grew tired and hardly
+moved.  He knew that he was deep.  The pressure on his ear-drums
+was a pain, and there was a buzzing in his head.  His endurance was
+faltering, but he compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper
+until his will snapped and the air drove from his lungs in a great
+explosive rush.  The bubbles rubbed and bounded like tiny balloons
+against his cheeks and eyes as they took their upward flight.  Then
+came pain and strangulation.  This hurt was not death, was the
+thought that oscillated through his reeling consciousness.  Death
+did not hurt.  It was life, the pangs of life, this awful,
+suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him.
+
+His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about,
+spasmodically and feebly.  But he had fooled them and the will to
+live that made them beat and churn.  He was too deep down.  They
+could never bring him to the surface.  He seemed floating languidly
+in a sea of dreamy vision.  Colors and radiances surrounded him and
+bathed him and pervaded him.  What was that?  It seemed a
+lighthouse; but it was inside his brain - a flashing, bright white
+light.  It flashed swifter and swifter.  There was a long rumble of
+sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and
+interminable stairway.  And somewhere at the bottom he fell into
+darkness.  That much he knew.  He had fallen into darkness.  And at
+the instant he knew, he ceased to know.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg Etext Martin Eden, by Jack London
+
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