Martin Eden

" They sat idly and silently gazing
with eyes that dreamed and did not see "

MARTIN EDEN

BY

JACK LONDON

AUTHOR OF " THE CALL OF THE WILD," ETC., ETC.

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY THE KINNEJS

fforfe

PUBLISHED FOR

THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.

1913

All rights reverted

COPYBISHT, 1908,
BY JACK LONDON.

Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1909. Reprinted
September, October, November, 1909; January, 1910; February,
December, ign October, 1913,

44 Let me live out my years in heat of blood!

Let me lie drunken with the dreamer's wine I
Let me not see this soul-house built of mud
Go toppling to the dust a vacant shrine I "

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 multi
plied 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

B 1

2 MARTIN EDEN

was different from that of other men. He experienced a
momentary pang of shame that he should walk so un-
couthly. The sweat burst through the skin of his fore
head 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, understand
ing; 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 righting 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

MARTIN EDEN 3

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 out jutting 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 paint
ings, 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 wist-
fulness 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
bocks 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 flash-

4 MARTIN EDEN

ing 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 imagi
nation, pitched high, was ever at work establishing re
lations 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 in
ternal 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 ad
dressed in those various situations.

And then he turned and saw the girl. The phantas
magoria 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 subli
mated beauty was not of the earth. Or perhaps the
books were right, and there were many such as she in the

MARTIN EDEN 5

upper walks of life. She might well be sung by that chap
Swinburne. Perhaps he had had somebody like her in
rnind 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 com
ing 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 threat
ened 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 fleet
ing glance, herself the unit of weight and measure. He
saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls of the fac
tories, 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 Eura
sians, delicate featured, stamped with degeneracy; by
full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and
brown-skinned. All these were blotted out by a gro
tesque 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

6 MARTIN EDEN

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 umesthetic
cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the shoulders, and
the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that advertised bulg
ing 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 awk
ward 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, moisten
ing 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."

MARTIN EDEN 7

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 jos
tling 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 wir«. an' it was threshin' around

8 MARTIN EDEN

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 comprehen
sion, 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 mispronun
ciation. " 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 acquaint
ance ? "

" 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 drink
ing 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 in
tellectual 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

MARTIN EDEN 9

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, im
pelling 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 cig
arette and listened to the bells of the peaked pagoda call
ing straw-sandalled devotees to worship.

10 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 con
scious of his inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and
glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inade
quate. 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

MARTIN EDEN 11

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

12 MARTIN EDEN

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 knowl
edge, 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 tUe 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

MARTIN EDEN 13

watched and the policemen shoved him back into the driz
zle beyond the awning. Next his mind leaped to the
Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too, from the side
walk, he had seen grand ladies. Then the city and the
harbor of Yokohama, in a thousand pictures, began flash
ing before his eyes. But he swiftly dismissed the kaleido
scope of memory, oppressed by the urgent need of the
present. He knew that he must stand up to be intro
duced, 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 impend
ing ordeal.

CHAPTER n

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, fas
cinated, 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 accom
paniment 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 tow
ard 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

14

MARTIN EDEN 15

had gone without, and hardened himself in the proceos.
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 shoul
der, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and co
nundrums d manding instantaneous solution. He was
oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-
bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he won
dered when they would come OH and what they looked

16 MARTIN EDEN

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 him
self 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, per
turbed 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 utilita
rian 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 drop
ping carelessly from the lips of the membe s of this mar
vellous 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

MARTIN EDEN 17

wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out from the cran
nies 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, m ss," 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-ti aining, to say " Yes, sir," and " No,
S;T," to her brothers. He felt that it would be inappro
priate and a confession of inferiority on his part — which
would ne ver do if he was to win to her. Also, it was a dic
tate 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 w irm 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 poly
glot 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 wculd 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 free
dom 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,

18 MARTIN EDEN

and the creative spirit was restive and urgent. He was
swiftiy 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 serv mi wh<»
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 himseb
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 fh ed on his
hands, and, being in explanatory irood, he & id : —

" I just come down the Coa ?t 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. 1 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 nica.

" 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

MARTIN EDEN 19

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
V 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 cer
tainly 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 mas
querade would fail, and besides, masquerade was foreign
to his nature. There was no room in him for sham or arti
fice. 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 mat h ? " 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

20 MARTIN EDEN

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 pur
ple haze, he knew, was the glamour of the unknown, the
lure of romance. It was like wine to him. Here was ad
venture, something to do with head and hand, a world to
conquer — and straightway from the back of his conscious
ness 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 de
liberately 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 interpre
tations 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 burn
ing, 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,

MARTIN EDEN 21

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 es
tablished 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 pleas
ured 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 in
cited 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

22 MARTIN EDEN

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 pro
nounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because those meas
ures 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 un
worthy and impossible, and yielded himself more freely to
the music. The old delightful condition began to be in
duced. 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

MARTIN EDEN 23

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 cLanted to tinkling ukuleles and rumbling tom-toms.
It was a sensuous, tropic night. In the background a
volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars. Over
head 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 some
thing 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 vhim 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

24 MARTIN EDEN

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 .t 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. " T@
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 after
noon. 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 good night.

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 lie 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

25

26 MARTIN EDEN

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 dif
ferent 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-posses
sion 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

MARTIN EDEN 27

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 fer
vently 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 or
ganism, swiftly adjustable, capable of flowing into and
filling all sorts of nooks and crannies. With the police
man'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

28 MARTIN EDEN

better man than that fellow. The thought cheered him.
It seemed to draw him nearer to Her. He began com
paring 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 differ
ent 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 fail
ures 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,

MARTIN EDEN 29

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 experi
encing 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 endur
ing 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. Higgin
botham 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 sordid-
ness 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, sneer
ing, truculent, cowardly, and there leaped into his vision,
as on a screen, the same eyes when their owner was mak
ing 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.

30 MARTIN EDEN

"Don't bang the door," Mr. Higginbotham cautioned
him.

He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled him
self 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 with
out 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 even
ing, 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.

44 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 be
tokened youth's first vision of love.

41 Settin' a fine example to the children," Mr. Higgin
botham snorted, suddenly, in the silence for which his wife
was responsible and which he resented. Sometimes he al
most wished she would oppose him more. " If he does it
again, he's got to get out. Understand ! I won't put up

MARTIN EDEN 31

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 oft 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 rijsht to be jumping on him all the

32 MARTIN EDEN

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 dif
ferent 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. Hig-
ginbotham was too thrifty to keep a servant when his
wife could do the work. Besides, the servant's room en
abled them to take in two boarders instead of one. Mar
tin 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 in
toxicated 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 pouring 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
ik& counter effect of making him beastly. He did not
» 33

34 MARTIN EDEN

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 al
ways 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, mak
ing 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 won
dered, also, how his eyes looked to her. He tried to im
agine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed

MARTIN EDEN 35

in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself inside
other men's minds, but they had to IDG 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 con
cluded, 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 sensuous-
ness 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 de
cided, 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

36 MARTIN EDEN

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 him
self 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 fac
tory 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 ma
chine 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

MARTIN EDEN 37

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 in
dicative 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 fac
tory 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, hun
gry 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, glim
mered Her pale face under its crown of golden hair, re
mote 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 : —

38 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 dif
ferent, 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 him
self 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,

39

40 MARTIN EDEN

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 vege
tables, 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 over
work. 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 quit-
tin' 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 re
membered her as a girl, before hAr 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

MARTIN EDEN 41

dance to go to another day's hard work, And then he
thought of Ruth and the cool sweetness that must re
side 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 ner
vous 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 de
manded. " They're goin' to have beer, an' if that Tem-
escal bunch comes, there'll be a rough-house. I don't
care, though. I'm takin' my lady friend just the same.
Gripes, 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'."

42 MARTIN EDEN

" I never got any away from you," Martin answered unin-
terestedly. 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, " Per
haps 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 mop-

MARTIN EDEN 43

ping 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 con
fronting him, weighted down by the incubus of his work
ing-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. Exist
ence 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 stimu
lated him. Here was work for the vigor of his brain.
He found books on trigonometry in the mathematics sec
tion, 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.

44 MARTIN EDEN

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 wis
dom. In one miscellaneous section he came upon a "Nor-
rie'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 him
self 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 in
terests 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. Be
sides, 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 f 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

MARTIN EDEN 45

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 him
self 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 him
self, 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. Higgmbotham.

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 com
monest 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 un
derstood 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 psy
chology. Psychology was a new word in Martin's vo
cabulary. He had bought a dictionary, which deed had
decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day

46

MARTIN EDEN 47

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 day
time, 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

48 MARTIN EDEN

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 buy
ing another, which expenditure again brought nearer the
day on which he must put to sea.

But the reform went deeper than mere outward appear
ance. 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 limi
tations 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 iii 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

MARTIN EDEN 49

Arthur and a strange young man with a football mop of
hair and eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him to in
stant 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 encouiv
aged 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 fwo girls,
his eyes caught their smiles. He could not re-thumb him
self 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 sor
row. He had it in his heart to wish that they could pos
sess, in some small measure, her goodness and glory. And
not for the world could he hurt them because of their out-
reaching. 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 over
tures 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

50 MARTIN EDEN

the first of the crowd ; but scarcely had he taken his posi
tion on the edge of the sidewalk when the two girls ap
peared. 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 slen
der, 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.

MARTIN EDEN 51

" 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 faint-hearted.
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 de
sirous for some small pinch of happiness in the desert
of existence, and facing a future that was a gamble be
tween 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.

52 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 pleas
antry 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 com
panion), " 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

MARTIN EDEN 53

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 paint
ing, 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. " Liz
zie 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. Further
more, 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 speciali
zation. 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 econo
mists. 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

54

MARTIN EDEN 55

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 philoso
phies. 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 rol-
umes : Madam Blavatsky's " Secret Doctrine," " Progress
and Poverty,"" The Quintessence of Socialism," and" War
fare 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 ofj writing the defi
nitions 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, heel
ing, and plunging like a ship upon the sea. Then he
hurled the "Secret Doctrine" and many curses across the

56 MARTIN EDEN

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 train
ing 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 Bulfmch'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."

MARTIN EDEN 57

"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 in
stance, Miss Lizzie Smith — do you say ' Miss Lizzie ' ? or
'Miss Smith'?"

" Say ' Miss Smith,' " the librarian stated authorita
tively. " 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

58 MARTIN EDEN

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 be
tween them lay in that she was cool and self-possessed
while his face flushed to the roots of the hair. He stum
bled 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 under
stand ; 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 possess
ing various potential excellencies, and she even felt phil
anthropic 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-poe bry had been opened

MARTIN EDEN 59

wide. She had given him understanding even more than
Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week be
fore 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 ordi
nary lips such as all men and women had. Their sub
stance 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 vir
ginity 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 kin
dled 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 coin-

60 MARTIN EDEN

pelled 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 snch 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

MARTIN EDEN 61

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, un
couth speech and its simplicity of thought with what she
saw in his face. She had never looked in eyes that ex
pressed 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 riot have a just appreciation of simplicity. And yet
she had caught an impression of power in the very grop
ing of this mind. It had seemed to her like a giant writh
ing 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 educa-

62 MARTIN EDEN

tion. You should go back and finish grammar school, and
then go through the 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 particu
larly 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."

MARTIN EDEN 63

"I'm afraid I didn't explain that," she smiled. "A
double negative is — let me see — well, you say, 'neve**
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 help
ing 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.

64 MARTIN EDEN

Martin flushed again.

"And you say 'ben' for 'been,' "she continued; "'I
come ' for ' I 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 f You used it several
times, you know."

" Oh, booze," he laughed. " It's slang. It means whis
key 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

MARTIN EDEN 65

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 outlin
ing 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 lan
guage. 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 diminu
tion 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

66

MARTIN EDEN 67

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 work
ing 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 con
trast, multiplying Ruth's glories. Then, too, his bliss
was heightened by the knowledge that her mind was com
prehending what she read and was quivering with appre
ciation 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

68 MARTIN EDEN

listened, lie 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 at
mosphere, 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 consti
tuted 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

MARTIN EDEN 69

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 pri
mordial 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

70 MARTIN EDEN

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 defini
tions 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 pip
ings 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.

MARTIN EDEN 71

"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 Cali
fornia. 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 sacri
fices 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 re
ceiving 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."

72 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 chal
lenged.

" 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 ex
plain : —

"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' study in' 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,

MARTIN EDEN 73

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 crys
tallized 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 dis
approved 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 be
yond 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.

74 MARTIN EDEN

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 environ
ment."

" 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 dissatis
fied 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 hu
man creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics
are best and right and that other human creatures scat
tered 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 mod
ern 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 de
veloping 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 re
fused 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, vrhile
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

75

76 MARTIN EDEN

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 think
ing, he had learned much of himself. Along with his
humbleness because he knew so little, there arose a con
viction 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 achiev-
ment. 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 Shake-

MARTIN EDEN 77

speare. 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,

78 MARTIN EDEN

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 supple
ment 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.

MARTIN EDEN 79

He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and
addressed it to the editor of the San Francisco Exam
iner. He had an idea that anything accepted by a paper
was publishjd immediately, and as he had sent the man
uscript 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, Sun
day afternoon, he would call and see her. In the mean
time 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 Youths 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

80 MARTIN EDEN

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 no* 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 pro
gramme for a week. Each day he did three thousand words,
and each evening he puzzled his way through the maga
zines, 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, riot 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 thou
sand 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,

MARTIN EDEN 81

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 Com
panion, and on Saturday afternoon, after having planned
an article on pearl-diving, he went to see Ruth. He had
telephoned, and she went herself fr > 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 gnaw
ing 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 es
sayed 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

82 MARTIN EDEN

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 atmos
phere 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 in
terrupting his calm train of thought. On the screen of
his imagination he saw himself and this sweet and beauti
ful 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 va
pors and swirls of sullen fog dissolving before shafts of
red and garish light. He saw cowboys at the bar, drink
ing fierce whiskey, the air filled with obscenity and ribald
language, and he saw himself with them, drinking and

MARTIN EDEN 83

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 re
turned 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 ap
prenticeship."

" What would you advise ? " he asked. " And don't for
get that I feel in me this capacity to write — I can't ex
plain it ; I just know that it is in me."

44 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."

u Yes — "he began ; but she interrupted with an after
thought : —

MOf 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."

84 MARTIN EDEN

" I'd forgotten that," she laughed. " Why weren't you
born with an income ? "

"I'd rather have good health and imagination," he an
swered. " 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 per
fect."

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 fol
lowing 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 lis
tening 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 en
abled 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 com
mended 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 singu
larly 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. Noth
ing 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 ex
travagance. 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

85

86 MARTIN EDEN

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 hav
ing been deaf to a twice-repeated summons, he went
without the heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr. Hig-
ginbotham invariably graced his table. To Mr. Higgin-
botham such a dinner was advertisement of his worldly
achievement and prosperity, and he honored it by de
livering platitudinous sermonettes upon American insti
tutions 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. v

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

MARTIN EDEN 87

applied for the results of his examinations, he learned
that he had failed in everything save grammar.

"Your grammar is excellent," Professor Hilton in
formed 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, unsympa
thetic 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 edu
cation 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 Hil
ton 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. In
stead, he said : —

88 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 felt that 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. When
ever I go into the library, I am impressed that way. The
part played by teachers is to teach the student the con
tents 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-

MARTIN EDEN 89

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 yearn
ing pain, of the desire to paint these visions that flashed
unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah, that was
it I 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.

90 MARTIN EDEN

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 combina
tions 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 re
garding 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

MARTIN EDEN 91

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 vras 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 trail
ing 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 un
seen 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 experi
ment, 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 morn
ing till night, and late at night, except when he broke off

92

MARTIN EDEN 93

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 suc
ceeded 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

94 MARTIN EDEN

him. A week later he wrote again. At the end of the
month, he went over to San Franscisco 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 : —

u 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' thrill
ing, too. I was all worked up."

He could see that her mind was not clear. The per
plexity 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 ? "

MARTIN EDEN 95

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 appre
hensively. " 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.

44 But if you did sell it, what do you think you'd get
for it?"

44 Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the
way prices go."

"My I I do hope you'll sell it ! "

44 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 adven
ture lured him more strongly than on this amazing ex
ploration 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 under-
standingly 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

96 MARTIN EDEN

of it, the play and interplay of force and matter. Spon
taneous explanations of old matters were continually aris
ing 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 en
abled the ships to travel unerringly their courses over
the pathless ocean, was made clear to him. The mys
teries 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 suc
cessful 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 inar
ticulate 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

MARTIN EDEN 97

impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some glori
ous, 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 ac
cording 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 ap
proach 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

98 MARTIN EDEN

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 lo\ e 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 any
body'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 pol
luted.

Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart be
gan 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 sing
ing, 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.

MARTIN EDEN 99

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 bach
elorships. 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 for
gotten 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 en
gagement, 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 tele
phone 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

100

MARTIN EDEN 101

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 tru« lore 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 trans
figured, 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 investi
gating this sound he identified it as the final snort of Ber
nard Higginbotham, whieh 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 per
turbed. It was not unalloyed bliss, taking her to the lec
ture. 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.

102 MARTIN EDEN

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 ear
nestly, making a show of being carried away by what he

MARTIN EDEN 103

was saying, so that, in case he was wrong in not changing
sides, his enthusiasm would seem the cause for his careless
ness.

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."

44 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.

u 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 com
mented, " 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."

104 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 work-
ingmen 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 her
self, 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 un-
beautiful. 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
<apen the books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love

MARTIN EDEN 105

beautiful paintings, to speak good English, to think
thoughts that none of your own kind thinks, to tear your
self away from the oxen and the Lizzie Connollys and to
love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles be
yond 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 phi
losophers 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 Her
bert 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

106

MARTIN EDEN 107

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 learn
ing 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, accumu
lating fragments of facts, making superficial little general
izations — 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

108 MARTIN EDEN

been fruitless. The mediaeval metaphysics of Kant had
given him the key to nothing, and had served the sole pur
pose 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 vocab
ularies- 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 differ
ences 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

MARTIN EDEN 109

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 ac
quired he had filed away in separate memory compart
ments 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 un
related. Between the two memory compartments there
had been no connection. That, in the fabric of knowl
edge, 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 per
petual amazement to Martin, and he found himself en
gaged 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, earth
quake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems, mon
strosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas,
cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and to
bacco. 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.

110 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 igno
rance. 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 happen
ings not only that Olney did not care for Ruth, but that

MARTIN EDEN 111

he had a positive dislike for her. Martin could not under
stand this. It was a bit of phenomena that he could not
correlate with all the rest of the phenomena in the uni
verse. But nevertheless he felt sorry for the young fel
low 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 ob
serve 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 be
cause 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 edu
cation, 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 any
thing 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 ac
cepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up.
As it was, he found Spencer's explanation of things con-

112 MARTIN EDEN

vincing ; 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 cor
roborative 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 com
plaint 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 knowl
edge. 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 en
joy 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 right-
ness of his position.

" All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in
the world, in fact, rely on the specialists. Herbert Spen
cer did that. He generalized upon the findings of thou
sands 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."

MARTIN EDEN 113

" 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 mat
ter 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, be
came 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, turn
ing 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.

114 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 con
ception 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 ex
ulted. " He's trying to get somewhere, to do something."

MARTIN EDEN 115

"Oh, but it's mental training. It's nrind discipline.
It's what makes disciplined minds." Ruth looked ex
pectantly 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 some
thing."

"It's clever all right," was the retort, "but it's fair,
too. The only men who know their Latin are the apothe
caries, 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. Spen
cer 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."

Olney got up to go, but turned at the door and deliv
ered 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 chival
rously. " She is responsible for what little I have learned."

116 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 knowl
edge, 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, bar
baric 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 clam
ored 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 maga
zines. 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, com
paring 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 withou-t vitality or reality. Life was so
strange and wonderful, filled with an immensity of prob
lems, 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.

117

118 MARTIN EDEN

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 at
tempted 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 in
trusted 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 en
closed. 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.

MARTIN EDEN 119

He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and
he would have been content to continue feeding the ma
chine 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 fas
tidious 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 some
thing 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. Per
haps 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

120 MARTIN EDEN

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 after
noon 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 the 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 them
selves, 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, scat
tered its seeds, squared itself with its duty and the world,
and — "

" Why do you always look at things with such dread
fully 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 signifi
cance before. I just accepted beauty as something mean-

MARTIN EDEN 121

ingless, 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 adven
ture, 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. Some
times 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

122 MARTIN EDEN

— "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 cam
paign. Yet you talked just as well as he the other night
at dinner. Only he was more controlled. You get too ex
cited ; 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 suc
ceed 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 edu
cation and to the advantages of Latin as part of the founda
tion 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 move
ment 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 disappoint
ment and of a sharper ache of love for her. In all she
said there was no mention of his writing, and the manu
scripts 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,"

MARTIN EDEN 123

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 re
born 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-struc
ture 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 disa
greement.

" This next thing I've called ' The Pot'," he said, unfold
ing 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 some-

124 MARTIN EDEN

thing 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 suc
ceeded. 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 some
thing 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 say
ing. " 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 inno
cent, that its purity seemed always to enter into him,
driving out of him all dross and bathing him in some ethe
real 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

MARTIN EDEN 125

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 foul
ness 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-drip
ping eyes ; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and vicious-
ness, 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 amaz
ing 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 stun0 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."

126 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 apolo
getically. " 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 " Adven
ture," and it was the apotheosis of adventure — not of
the adventure of the story-books, but of real adventure,
the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of
reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible pa
tience 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 achieve
ments.

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

MARTIN EDEN 127

when she seemed most carried away by what he had writ
ten, 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 ar
dor 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 Tenny-
sonian 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 im
peratively 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 mo
tif? " 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

128 MARTIN EDEN

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 beau
tiful, 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, ponder
ing 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 con
vinced. 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 inter
est 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

MARTIN EDEN 129

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, bat 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
type-writer, 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 discorered
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

130

MARTIN EDEN 131

at last, writhing in the throes of nausea, the blood stream
ing 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 fight
ing, 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 thir
teen, 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 prom
ise; 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-

132 MARTIN EDEN

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 min
utes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other accord
ing 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, spit
ting out a mouthful of blood so that he could speak, cry
ing 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 nprht went on.

MARTIN EDEN 133

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 burn
ing, 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 con
fronted by Cheese-Face's blazing eyes.

"I'll fix you after cle 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 whis
pered, 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."

134 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 An
tonio 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 Mar
tin's eyelids. He saw the two gangs, aggressive and sul
len, 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 : —

M They ain't no hand-shakin' in this. Understand ?
They ain't nothin' but scrap. No thro win' 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."

MARTIN EDEN 135

Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all
the glory of youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with de
sire to hurt, to maim, to destroy. All the painful, thouv
sand 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 th/3 muddy abyss, back into the dregs
of the raw beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemi
cally, as atoms strive, as the star-dust of the heavens strives,
colliding, recoiling, and colliding again and eternally
again.

" God ! We are animals J 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 conscious
ness 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 wit
nessed 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 any
body'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

136 MARTIN EDEN

foul vileness of his kind. lie 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 I "

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. " Un
derstand ? 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 be
hind 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 ex
haustion 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 mon
ster 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.

MARTIN EDEN 137

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 cen
turies and seons 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, en
treating, 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 be
fore 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 I 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

138 MARTIN EDEN

where he was, until he caught sight of the pile of manu
scripts 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 look
ing-glass.

" And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden," he said
Solemnly. " And you cleanse your eyes in a great bright-
pess, 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 wash-basin 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 demand
ing 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 appro
bation.

" 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. Every
thing they publish is worse — nearly everything, any
way."

139

140 MARTIN EDEN

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 short
hand, 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 j^ou 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.

MARTIN EDEN 141

" 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 signifi
cantly. " 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

142 MARTIN EDEN

lived all his life in the working-class world, and the cama
raderie 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. Higgin-
botham 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

MARTIN EDEN 143

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 conversa
tion, 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 stock
ings. 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.

144 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 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
two days before, and began to read. But he found trouble
with the first paragraph 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

MARTIN EDEN 145

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 thore would be no
blisters when it came to the ironing, ard doing it at a
pace that elicited Joe's praise.

There war 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 gather
ing movement seizing a shirt so that the wristbands,
neckband, yoke, and bosom protruded beyond the cir
cling 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 he t that, in order to wring it
out, their hands had to be thrust, and thrust continu
ally, into a bucket of cold water. And that night they
worked till half -past ten, dipping "fancy starch" — all
the fri led and airy, delicate wear of ladies.

" Me for the tropics and no clothes," Ma_tin laughed.

"And me out of a job," Joe answered seriously. "I
doj 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

146 MARTIN EDEN

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 cf a hub from
a wagon wheel, mounted on a plunger-pole that was
attached to a spring-pola overhead.

"My invention,1' Joe said proudly. "Beats a wash
board 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 th's one.
An' I got to do it if I'm goin' to get done Saturday after
noon at three o'clock. But I know how, an' that's the
difference. Got to have right heat, right pressure, md
run 'em through three times. Look at that! " He held
a cuff aloft. "Couldn't do it better by har.d x 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

MARTIN EDEN 147

is a free country, an' I'm goitT1 to tell that fat Dutchman
what I think of him. Ans I woa'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 fur
nished 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 be
tween 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 accu
racy, founded upon criteria that were machine-like and
unerring.

But there was little time in which to marvel. All

148

MARTIN EDEN 149

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 him
self. 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 state*
ment had been obvious and unnecessary. They did not
talk while they worked. Conversation threw them out

150 MARTIN EDEN

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 laundry ing. " Fancy starch" was Martin's night
mare, 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 Oak
land 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.

MARTIN EDEN 151

" 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 puffed his cigarette
spiritlessly, and his voice was peculiarly dead and monoto
nous. 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 ex
press, 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 the glass of beer, Martin decided, but the half-mile
walk down to the village to find out seemed a long jour
ney 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 think
ing, 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

152 MARTIN EDEN

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 run
ning 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, whe Joe tasted
his moment of wilted triumph and then drilled 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 under
gone 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.

MARTIN EDEN 153

A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and
loathed life. He was oppressed by a sense of failure.
Tl^ere 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 audac
ities 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 per
sons' clothes. He did not have any left for private affairs.

He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull him
self 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.

154 MARTIN EDEN

" 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

MARTIN EDEN 155

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 Mar
tin'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 cot
toned 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 beauti
ful. 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

156

MARTIN EDEN 157

a shadow. JOG 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 gar
ments, 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 hun
dred and forty miles, obliterating the numbness of too

158 MARTIN EDEN

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 inevi
tably 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 f 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 hope
lessly.

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 laundryrnen," 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."

MARTIN EDEN 159

" I was in hospital, once," Joe corrected. " It was
beautiful. Typhoid — did I tell you ? "

While Martin changed the telegram to " two laundry-
men," 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 1
Take that ! an' that! an' that! damn you ! Hold me back,
somebody ! Hold me back 1 "

Martin laughed and held him to his work. On Tues
day 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

160 MARTIN EDEN

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 part
ing 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, re
turned 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 think
ing and doing nothing. He was like one recovering from
some terrible bout of hardship. The first signs of re
awakening 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 an.
nounced 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.
M 161

162 MARTIN EDEN

** 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 under
stand what he had been through.

" Some day I shall write it up — 4 The Degradation of
Toil ' or the 4 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 ^ere 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 abstrac
tions being objectified in her mind by her father, and

MARTIN EDEN 163

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.

164 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 ex
perience, 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.

" lie 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

MARTIN EDEX 165

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 suc
ceeded. 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 wom
anhood.

" His hand trembles," Ruth was confessing, her face, for
shame's sake, still buried. " It is most amusing and ridic
ulous, 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

166 MARTIN EDEN

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. Mar
tin 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."

MARTIN EDEN 167

"I — have thought about them," Ruth confessed, re
membering 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 im
possible," 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 under
stand."

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 ex
ultantly, 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.

168 MARTIN EDEN

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 pros
pered. He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each
day he saw Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experi
enced 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 her
self, 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 East
ern 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 ex
perience 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, care
less 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

169

170 MARTIN EDEN

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 con
tact, made its way directly to her instinct. Her judg
ment 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 con
sciously delighted in beholding his love-manifestations —

MARTIN EDEN • 171

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 won
dered 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

172 MARTIN EDEN

him and closer to him, while he, sensing the growing close-
ness, 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 Mar
tin'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 con
templation 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 com
pletely, 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 " Sociol
ogy" lying open on the bed. But he could not read.
Love tormented him and overrode his will, so that, de-

MARTIN EDEN 173

spite 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 com
pleted 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 mad
dening 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 re
membered the headache he had cured and the soothing

174 MARTIN EDEN

rest that resided in him. He was sitting beside her, quite
beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward liim.
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 mad
ness. 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 any
thing but a delirium. He conquered a mad desire to let
go sheet and tiller and to clasp her in his arms. His intui
tion 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 deli
cately, 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 forgiv
ing his hardest voyages in that they had made this marvel
lous 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.

MARTIN EDEN 175

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 mys
tery 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 her
self but a strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment
and scornful of self -analysis, refusing to peer into the fu
ture or to think about herself and whither she was drifting.
She was in a fever of tingling mystery, alternately fright
ened and charmed, and in constant bewilderment. She
had one idea firmly fixed, however, which insured her se
curity. 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

176 MARTIN EDEN

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 man
hood. And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes.
She wou^d 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 pro
pitious 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 Tamal-
pais, 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 lan
guorous, 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
N 177

178 MARTIN EDEN

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 read
ing," 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 an
nounced 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-press
ure. 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, burn
ing 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

MARTIN EDEN 179

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 mo
ment 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, sud
denly 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
eyes 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
5nadder. 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 und 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 1 " he cried, a ring
of vexation in his voice. " I never dreamed it until just
BOW, when I — when I kissed you."

180 MARTIN EDEN

" I didn't mean that." She drew herself partly away
and looked at him. "I meant I knew you loved me
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
of not winning your mother to our marriage. She loves
you too well."

MARTIN EDEN 181

" 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. Remem-
member, 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 her
self from his arms with a swift, passionate movement.
" Impossible for you. You have been a sailor, and sail
ers, 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 re
plied. " 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

182 MARTIN EDEN

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 Colo
nel's lady and Judy G'Grrady 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 pro
posals 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 effica
cious 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 remem
bered 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 fundamen
tally human, just like Lizzie Connolly and all Lizzie Con
nollys. 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.

MARTIN EDEN 183

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 philoso
phy 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 re
turned 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

MBS. 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 in
tend 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 hap
pened, 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.

184

MARTIN EDEN 185

" It is a dre'adfnl 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 any
thing 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 accom
plish 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 irrespon
sible. And why should he not be ? It is the way of
sailors. He has never learned to be economical or tem
perate. The spendthrift years have marked him. It is

186 MARTIN EDEN

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 in
directly 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.

MARTIN EDEN 187

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 ac
cepted that Ruth and Martin were engaged, but no an
nouncement was made. The family did not think it
would ever be necessary. Also, it was tacitly under
stood 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 de
signs, 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 manu
scripts 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 I 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 proposi
tion. 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 perspec
tive. I haven't been working the life out of my body, and I

188 MARTIN EDEN

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 pub
lished 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 master
pieces, 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 pic
tures. 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 ;

MARTIN EDEN 189

but I shall do it in my spare time. My feet are on the
solid earth, now. Hack-work and income first, master
pieces 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 sor
did 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 master
pieces?" 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 dol
lar, the fee of a clown. Don't you see, Martin, the whole

190 MARTIN EDEN

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 Mm to be like — say Mr. Butler ?" he sug
gested.

"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. Tt is all a means to an end. Your theory is for
me to begin with keeping books in order to become a suc
cessful lawyer or man of business. Mine is to begin with
hack-work and develop into an able author."

" There is a difference," vshe 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 bet
ter. 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 any Hiere between fifty and a hun
dred thousand dollars — sometimes more and sometimes
less; but, as a rule, pretty close to those figures."

MARTIN EDEN 191

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 ar
tistry, 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 Revolu
tion, or equal suffrage ? They were mental processes, but
love was beyond reason; it was superrational. He could

192

MARTIN EDEN 193

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 scien
tific 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 com
pany. 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

194 MARTIN EDEN

her seven little ones crowded and slept. It was an ever
lasting 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, t watering 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 gener
ous. 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 south
easter 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

MARTIN EDEN 195

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 es
cape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too generous,
brought him against the corner of the table. With a sud
den twitch and lurch, he terminated vhe 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 ex
pedient 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

196 MARTIN EDEN

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 be
fore 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 accom
plishing 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 defini
tions 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 simi
larly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in wash
ing 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 fetch
ing 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

MARTIN EDEN 197

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 bed
room 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 under
standing. He could not work blindly, in the dark, igno
rant 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 connota
tions. Before such he bowed down and marvelled, know
ing 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

198 MARTIN EDEN

fling, not at the principles of criticism, but at the princi
pal 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 ma
turing 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 fan
cied 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 pub
lishers' 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 started to realize on
his credit. The Portuguese grocer, to whom he had hith
erto 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

199

200 MARTIN EDEN

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

MARTIN EDEN 201

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 re
peatedly 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. Manag
ing 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 con
cluded 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 after
ward 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.

202 MARTIN EDEN

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 resent
ment 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 ill 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 Vander-
water. "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 reau. ^lis stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of the
felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he is no more

MARTIN EDEN 203

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 Eng
land.

"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 brew
ery 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 refine-

204 MARTIN EDEN

ment, 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 ex
cited 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 reason
able 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 fear
fully 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 " Excel
sior " and the " Psalm of Life."

Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she wor
shipped 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 mat
ter 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 wait
ing for him to speak about it, herself still tremulous and
stirred by what she had just seen and heard, she had asked
the question.

MARTIN EDEN 205

" I liked the overture," was his answer. " It was splen
did."

" 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 Barillp?" 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 ?" Ruthasked. "He
is next to Caruso, they say."

" Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even bet
ter. Her voice is exquisite — or at least I think so."

" But, but — " Ruth stammered. " I dcn'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, at
titudinizing, 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.

206 MARTIN EDEN

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 conven
tions of the arts.) "In painting there are only two di
mensions 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 au
thor'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

MARTIN EDEN 207

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 estab
lished. 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 revolution
ary 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 judg
ment on the world's music ? She was vexed with him, and
as she walked beside him she had a vague feeling of out
rage. 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
tier in his arms at the door and kissed her good night in

208 MARTIN EDEN

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

MAKIA SILVA was poor, and all the ways of poverty
were clear to her. Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signi
fying 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 com
fortable 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, be-
jlieving that sooner or later it would arouse him and com
pel 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
p ' 209

210 MARTIN EDEN

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 tod
dlers 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 carpen
ter 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 amaze
ment 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

MARTIN EDEN 211

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, remem
bered 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 alia 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.

" Alia right," she answered. " I thinka da hard. I lika
da house, dis house — all mine, no paya da rent, seven dol
lar 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."

212 MARTIN EDEN

"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 any
thing to do but take care of the children. For that mat
ter, 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

MARTIN EDEN 213

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 under
standing to him how people suddenly fall dead upon
receipt of extraordinarily good news.

Of course this was good news. There was no manu
script in that thin envelope, therefore it was an acceptance.
He knew the story in the hands of the Transconti
nental. 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 °/0 interest, but what did it
matter?) — grand total, $56.10. He saw, as if visible in

214 MARTIN EDEN

the air before him, in illuminated figures, the whole sum,
and the subtraction that followed and that gave a re
mainder 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 pub
lished. 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

MARTIN EDEN" 215

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 Transconti
nental 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 responsi
bilities 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
"f3.85" confronted him again.

216 MARTIN EDEN

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, open
ing 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 dark
ness 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 revolv
ing 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

MARTIN EDEN 217

starched cuffs. But as he fed he noticed figures printed
on 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 cratty 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 uni
verse, " 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

218 MARTIN EDEN

dollars. " Ha ! Ha ! " laughed the editor across the man
gle. " 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 denomina
tion, 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 manu
scripts. Now and again he reached out and added a bun
dle 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 manu
scripts, 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 sing
ing : " 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 Game 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 conscious
ness. 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 alia 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 reeling brain and eyes
that ached so that he could not keep them open, he man
aged to get out of bed, only to be left stranded by his
senses upon the table. Half an hour later he managed to re
gain 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

219

220 MARTIN EDEN

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.

" 4 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 offer
ing 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.

MARTIN EDEN 221

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, Mar
tin 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 I It was evi
dent 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 mat
ter, 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 hand
writing, 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

222 MARTIN EDEN

(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, accom
panied 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 bed
room-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 hav
ing 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 mar
riage 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,

MARTIN EDEN 223

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 gentle
ness 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 Transcon
tinental, 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 under
stood 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 in
stinctive 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 deg
radation. When she looked at Martin, she seemed to

224 MARTIN EDEN

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-stand
ing 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,

MARTIN EDEN 225

one hundred and eighty dollars a month. That beats
any salary I can command. And, besides, I'm just begin
ning. 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 ciga
rettes.

" 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 be
sides, 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.

226 MARTIN EDEN

" I live but to obey, your majesty.**

" Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not
©mit 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 starv
ing. 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 utter-
most 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 viola-

MARTIN EDEN 227

tion 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 com
pare 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 sud
denly 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 moun
tain 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."

228 MARTIN EDEN

"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 pun
ished 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

MARTIN EDEN 229

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 mo
ment 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 drug
gists, 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 mysteri
ously beautiful), saw her to the carriage. The crowd of

230 MARTIN EDEN

disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeaied
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 estima
tion a full hundred per cent, and had the Portuguese
grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he wouUi
have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-awl-
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 every
thing, 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 se
rial 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 maga
zine 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

231

232 MARTIN EDEN

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 impas
sioned 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 es
timation, 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 sub
ject.

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 fan
tastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real,
wherein lay their power. This investiture of the gro
tesque 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 de
nied 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 " Ad
venture," "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

MARTIN EDEN 233

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 cas1 ing of it. He had never been in a bank in
his life, mnoh 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. Immedi
ately 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 hap-

234 MARTIN EDEN

pening 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, re
membered 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 en
forced absence, and was already in full swing. She was
making a point of having at the house men who were do
ing things. Thus, in addition to the cousins Dorothy
and Florence, Martin encountered two university pro
fessors, 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 some
how.

" Don't get excited when you talk," Ruth admonished
Martin, before the ordeal of introduction began.

MARTIN EDEN 235

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 re
moved 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 I He
had been swift to note the other's trained mind and to
appreciate his command of knowledge. Furthermore,

236 MARTIN EDEN

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 con
versation 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

MARTIN EDEN 237

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 wilf ulness
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 Uni
versity of California ? "

Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. "The
honest taxpayer and the politician, you know. Sacra
mento 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. Some
times 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 restau
rants 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

238 MARTIN EDEN

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 them
selves 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 count
less 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 per
mitted. 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

MARTIN EDEN 239

stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness,
stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hood
lum, 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 abil
ity 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 un
broken 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 hte
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, every
body! 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 weak
ness 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 meaa

240 MARTIN EDEN

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 gen
eralizations."

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 knowl
edge 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 un
derstand laws and institutions, religions and customs,
without understanding, not merely the nature of the crea
tures 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 talk
ing, 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,

MARTIN EDEN 241

in turn, — or so it seems to me, — leave out the biological
factor, the very stuff out of which has been spun the fab
ric 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. Pro
fessor 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.'*

242 MARTIN EDEN

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 learn
ing 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 platitudi
nous 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'a
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.

MARTIN EDEN 243

•* 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 sub
jects. 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 per cent 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."

244 MARTIN EDEN

" 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, per
haps, 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 tem
porized. " 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.

MARTIN EDEN 245

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 messen
gers 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 at
tack 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 Yard
stick 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 news-

246

MARTIN EDEN 247

paper storiette should never be tragic, should never end
unhappily, and should never contain beauty of language,
subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy of sentiment. Sen
timent 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 con
fession 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 pre
scribed 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 mathemati
cians, which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and

248 MARTIN EDEN

left, which entrances consist of scores of lines and dozens
of columns, and from which may be drawn, without reason
ing 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 re
ply. He did not know that the Transcontinental had
been staggering along precariously for years, that it
was a fourth-rater, or a 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

MARTIN EDEN 249

his house in Alameda, which painting he performed him
self, 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 ascer
tained 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 get
ting 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, des
peration 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.

250 MARTIN EDEN

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 contribu
tion. 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 illus
trations.

" On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are
laboring under the misapprehension that we pay for unso
licited 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 misunder
standing, 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 ensu
ing 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 pol
ished " 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

MARTIN EDEN 251

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 re
deemed 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 I 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 ap
preciation. And thereupon he would get out one or an
other 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 stori
ettes. 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
OD. the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last

252 MARTIN EDEN

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 ex
istence 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 con
tents 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 sub
scriptions 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 pub
lished 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 Hor
net's light had begun to dim long before Martin was

253

254 MARTIN EDEN

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 G-lobe, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the
most cruel treatment of all. He had refrained from offer
ing 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 dif
ferent 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 mal
treatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems
must have been doctored by the office boy or the stenog
rapher. 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 slaugh
ter 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

MARTIN EDEN 255

the White Mouse forty-dollar check sustained him, though
he was driven more and more to hack-work. He discov
ered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural week
lies and trade journals, though among the religious week
lies 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. Some
thing 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 exer
cise, 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, disap
pointments, and close application to work, and the conver
sation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly

256 MARTIN EDEN

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, super
ficial, 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 ac
cess 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 col
lege 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 big
ger than such things was life, of which they were densely,
hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian procliv
ities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness,
they were two generations behind interpretative science :
their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking

MARTIN EDEN 257

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 incar
nate 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 mem
bers 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 plati
tudes was concerned.

"Yes," he had said, "Charley Hapgood is what they
cal1 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.

258 MARTIN EDEN

"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 3- ou 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 who
ever 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 scoun
drelly 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

MARTIN EDEN 259

the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed happily at the oppor
tunity 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. " Be
cause 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 cor
porations, 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 Hap-
good orate made me a Republican."

•- " I can't help it," Mr. Morse said feebly, « but I still
believe you incline that way."

260 MARTIN EDEN

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 eco
nomic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.

A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered
nearer home. His sister Marian had been keeping com
pany 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 height
ened 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

MARTIN EDEN 261

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 in
decent, 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 manu
script 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 re
solved 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 typewritten 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.

262 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 work
ing 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 out
side 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."

MARTIN EDEN 263

He mused over the incident after she had gone, and
once or twice broke out into laughter that was bitter as
lie 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, flockirg 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 j°wl 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 abysmal brute and for
the rest because you believed what every one about you
believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivo
rous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow-

264 MARTIN EDEN

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 in
stinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well, the
years have passed, and what dc you think about it
now?"

As if in reply, the vision i nderwent a swift metamor
phosis. The stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being
replaced by milder garments; the toughness -.vent 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 appari
tion 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 ^Esthetics." Next,
he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student-
lamp, and himself went on reading "The Science of
Esthetics."

CHAPTER XXX

ON a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian sum
mer 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."

265

266 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 appli
cation 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 4 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 origi
nal, 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 edi
tor 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 vindica
tion of its fitness to exist — to exist, mark you, as the
average person unconsciously believes, not merely in pres
ent conditions, but in all conditions. It is their ignorance,
of course, that makes them believe such rot — their igno-

MARTIN EDEN 267

ranee, 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 qualifi
cation of editors — "

" And I'll tell you," he interrupted. " The chief quali
fication 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 nau
seating 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 lov
er's views was buttressed by the contradiction she found
in his contention.

268 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 an
swered. "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 in
telligence illumined his eyes. " If I fail, I shall become
an editor, and you will be an editor's wife."

She frowned at his f acetiousness — 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, me
chanically 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.

MARTIN EDEN 269

" Well, then," lie 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 ex
tremist, 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 hea<3>

270 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 medita
tively; "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

MARTIN EDEN 271

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 peace
fully 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 ac
cordingly; 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 ar
ranged 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 des
perate that five and a half hours of sleep is an extrava
gance. 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 posi
tive lure to me, times when I am haunted by Longfellow's
lines: —

" ' The sea is still and deep ;

All things within its bosom sleepy

A single step and all is o'er,

A plunge, a bubble, and no more/

/

272 MARTIN EDEN

" Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from ner
vousness, from an overwrought mind. But the point is:
Why have I done this ? For you. To shorten my ap
prenticeship. 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 com
pels 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

MARTIN EDEN 273

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 ec
centric 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 per
petual motion."

"True," was the reply. "But there have been in
ventors 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 f guratively. I seek to do what men have done
before me — to write and to live by my writing."

Her f ilence spurred him on.

" To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as per
petual 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 I " 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 discon
certing 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 regained 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, Lipki. Be
cause 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 des
perate at heart as to reflect it in his face and touch his
sister to pity.

Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car

274

MARTIN EDEN 275

•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 al
ready come to a halt at the first corner, " and take the
next car."

" My goodness ! — if I ain't all tired a'ready I " 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 ir
relevantly. " 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.

276 MARTIN EDEN

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 any
thing 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 move
ment 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 uncom
fortable, 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."

MARTIN EDEN 277

" How do you know it is good ? "

" Because — " He faltered as the whole vast field of lit
erature 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 maga
zines."

" I wish't you'd listen to reason," she answered feebly,
but with unwavering belief in the correctness of her diag
nosis 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 din
ner 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 ansemic 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 stran
ger 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.

278 MARTIN EDEN

The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung
alongside. Martin made no further attempt at conversa
tion, 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 Portu
guese 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 dis
posed of. Such a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden

MARTIN EDEN 279

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, mar
velled 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 in
sight 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 vel
vety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of haunt
ing beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness
of life; and yet again the tbin 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 Mar
tin's conscious aess 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.

280 MARTIN EDEN

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 trium
phantly.

" I haven't read him since adolescence, and all I read
then was his ' Education.' "

" I wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly," Mar
tin 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 Button," 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 his long, lean, a istocratic face
and drooping shoulders to the overcoat on a neigh
boring 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 Mar-

MARTIN EDEN 281

tin'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 tine 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 smoul
dered 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 im
peached.

" Do you ? " was snarled back at him so savagely as to
startle him.

282 MARTIN EDEN

"I — I write, or, rather, try to write, for the maga
zines," 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."

*4Oh, 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 forth
with.

Martin's fists were tight-clenched, and his blood wa&
drumming in his temples.

" Bosco ! He eats 'em alive ! Eats 'em alive ! " Bris
senden 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.

MARTIN EDEN 283

" 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, Bris-
senden. 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 im
mediately 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 Brissen
den 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 pockejt
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 Mario w ? "
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 ? n

284

MARTIN EDEN 285

Martin's tone and face alike showed his dejection.

" Certainly not. What fool expects to ? Out of rhym
ing, yes. There's Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedg-
wick. 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 Ste
venson 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 miser
able egos," Martin broke in.

" Yes, that's it, a good phrase, — mouthing and beslim-
ing the True, and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting
Mm on the back and saying, 'Good dog, Fido.' Faugh !
4 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."

"^et'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 com
ment at the end of it. " Of course it was snapped up by
the first magazine ? "

286 MARTIN EDEN

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 I " 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 try
ing to prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom.
What was it you quoted me the other day ? — Oh, yes,
4 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 maga
zines. Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her
and damn the multitude ! Success I What in hell's suc
cess 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

MARTIN EDEN 287

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 — V

He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin. Then,
with a flash of divination, he saw the situation. The ex
pression 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 Brissen-

288 MARTIN EDEN

den, 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, pass
ing nim 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

MARTIN EDEN 289

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 with
out 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 mad
ness to live, to thrill, " to squirm my little space in the
cosmic dust whence I came," as he phrased it once him
self. 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 experi
ence 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 ex
penses. Thankgiving found him with his black suit in
pawn and unable to accept the Morses' invitation to din
ner. 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 Transcon
tinental 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 cud
gelled 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 pre
dicament 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, Mar
tin 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."

290

MARTIN EDEN 291

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
no4" 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 in
ner 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 mar
velled at the calm repose of his face. It was evident that
the squabble with the printer had not affected his equa
nimity.

"I — I am Martin Eden," Martin began the conversa
tion. ("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 sur
prise, 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."

292 MARTIN EDEN

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 whisk
ers 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 them
selves 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

MARTIN EDEN 293

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
immediate 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 im
mediate advance, was quite unexpected."

Both men looked expectantly at Mr. "White, but that
gentleman laughed and shrugged his shoulders. His con
science was clean at any rate. He had come into the
Transcontinental to learn magazine-literature, instead
of which he had principally learned finance. The Trans
continental owed him four months' salary, and he knew

MARTIN EDEN

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 careless
ness, 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 knowl
edge 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 them
selves 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' 8 ready cash was repos
ing.

"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 hor
ror of Mr. White and Mr. Ford, they saw their business
manager shaken like an Astrakhan rug.

"Dig up, you venerable discourager of rising young

MARTIN EDEN 295

talent !" Martin exhorted. "Dig up, or I'll shake it out
of you, even if it's all in nickels." Then, to the two af
frighted onlookers : " Keep away ! If you interfere, some
body'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 ac
quiescence in the digging-up programme. All together,
after repeated digs, his trousers pocket yielded four dol
lars 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 sev
enty-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

296 MARTIN EDEN

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 man
ager, 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 an
swered. "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

AETHUB 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 Thanks
giving 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,

297

298 MARTIN EDEN

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 hori
zon.

"Well, I've collected from the Transcontinental" he
said in an effort to shift the conversation to a more com
fortable 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 — 4 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? "

MARTIN EDEN 299

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 with
out 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 other
wise 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 in
stant 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 circum
stances 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 "

300 MARTIN EDEtt

who was selling stories to magazines was no writer at all%
and that in reality he was stealing stories from old maga
zines, 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 ap
parent 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 unreason
able, 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 re
member 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 judg
ment 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

MARTIN EDEN 301

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 Flan
agan'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 oper
ation.

" 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
showa 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

302 MARTIN EDEN

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 improve
ment 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. Follow
ing 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 lat
ter, by virtue of a twisted crank-hanger, required repair
ing, 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 discov
ered 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,,

MARTIN EDEN 303

" 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 sis
ter. 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 incred
ulous amusement. But after the amusement came the re
action, 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 Brissen
den, 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 ac
complished.

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 lid 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

304

MARTIN EDEN 305

swung in majestic rhythm to the cool tumult of interstel
lar conflict, to the onset of starry hosts, to the impact
of cold suns and the flaming up of nebulae in the dark
ened 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 know
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 de
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 tran
scends genius. It is truth gone mad. It is true, man,
every line of it. I wonder if you realize that, you dog
matist. 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 Chris
tendom 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."

306 MARTIN EDEN

"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 pro
tested. " 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 denuncia
tion 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.

MARTIN EDEN 307

After what you've said about ' Ephemera ' I must be silent.
But this I will say : when ' The Shame of the Sun ' is pub
lished, 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 pub
lisher 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 pres
ent, 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.

308 MARTIN EDEN

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 ho 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 impossi
bility 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 supe
rior 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, defer
ring 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 Christ
mas treat could in no way, so it seemed to him, show
Jack 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 nonen
tities \ found you consorting with in that trader's den.
You r ^,d 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 dis
cussions," he said at the end of a block. " I'm not inter
ested 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, resist
ing Martin's effort to relieve him of the two demijohns.

309

310 MARTIN EDEN

\

** 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 — hy
phenated, 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 dol
lars 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 Hamil
ton 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 any
thing, 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.

MARTIN EDEN 311

"Here's the hang-out." Brissenden rested his demi
john 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 impor
tation 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 the 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 possibil
ities 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

312 MARTIN EDEN

room. The front room served as bedchamber and living
room. Overhead was the week's washing, hanging in fes
toons so low that Martin did not see at first the two men
talking in a corner. They hailed Brissenden and his demi
johns 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 concep
tion 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 ad-

MARTIN EDEN 313

ministration, 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, dis
playing an intelligence he had never encountered in the
few women he had met. They talked together on Swin
burne 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

"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 sympatheti
cally, 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 per
sonal 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 dis
cussion with cigarettes going out in their hands and with
alert, intent faces.

Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition

314 MARTIN EDEN

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. Phe
nomenon and noumenon were bandied back and forth.
They charged him with attempting to explain conscious
ness 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 philoso
phies 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 Spen-
cerian, 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 stanch-
est of Spencer's followers will not go farther. I was read
ing an essay of Saleeby's the other day, and the best
Saleeby could say was that Herbert Spencer nearly suc
ceeded in answering Berkeley."

" You know what Hume said? " Hamilton asked. Nor
ton 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

MARTIN EDEN 315

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 medi
cine man, but, pray, how do you reason ? You have noth
ing 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 Understand
ing,' 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 your
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 phe
nomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to be on-
tologists and to deal with noumena. Yet, by the very

316 MARTIN EDEN

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 anni
hilated 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 under
standing. Be positive scientists, if you please; but on
tology 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 Oak
land, 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 Acrop
olis. 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. " Ephem
era" 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 maga
zines, 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, han
dling real characters, in a real world, under real conditions.
But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be some
thing 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 where
with and wherein to utter the universal thing. " Over
due " was the title he had decided for it, and its length he
believed would not be more than sixty thousand words •*-

317

318 MARTIN EDEN

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 con
fident, 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 1 " 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

MARTIN EDEN 319

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 vicic asness that it roused him to consciousness
of his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smil
ing 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 im
mortality 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

320 MARTIN EDEN

pore in an agony of apprehension, puzzled by the be
wildering minutiae of eating-implements, tortured by the
ogre of a servant, striving at a leap to live at such dizzy so
cial 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 ex
pression 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, eater-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."

MARTIN EDEN 321

"That is true," the other assented gravely. "But
it is well to warn the patient occasionally of his condi
tion."

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 per
suade 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 inter
state 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 noth
ing else than socialistic."

" Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in reg
ulating 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 in
veterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate
opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing

322 MARTIN EDEN

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 noblemen,
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 in
dividualists. 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 Oak
land, 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.

MARTIN EDEN 323

" 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 burning in his
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,

324 MARTIN EDEN

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 en
tities 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 ig
norance 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 Her
bert Spencer's writings, the man who has impressed the
stamp of his genius over the whole field of scientific re
search 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 accord
ing 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

MARTIN EDEN 325

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 pos
terity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker.
Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them!
4 "First Principles" is not wholly destitute of a certain lit
erary 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 Mar
tin'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 ex
tremely 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 re
torted : —

" 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 as
sault 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 ter
ror 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 fascina-

326 MARTIN EDEN

tion 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 mutterc
ing, " The beasts ! The beasts ! " And she still lay thero
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 liyed in fine
houses and had educations and bank accounts, were worth
while 1 "

CHAPTER XXXVIH

" 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 so
cialist," 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. " Social
ism doesn't seem to save you."

" I'm very sick," was the answer. " With you it is dif
ferent. You have health and much to live for, and you
must be handcuffed to life somehow. As for me, you won
der why I am a socialist. I'll tell you. It is because
socialism is inevitable ; because the present rotten and ir
rational 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

327

328 MARTIN EDEN

slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's
been a-brewing and swallow it you must. You are antedi
luvian 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 doc
tor 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 repre
sentative 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 cu
cumbers. Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have de
vised 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 social
ists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the per
spiring 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,

MARTIN EDEN 329

walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and ad
dressing 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 at
tack upon their doctrines but half completed. He had
caught their interest, and the audience urged the chair
man by acclamation to extend Martin's time. They ap
preciated him as a f oeman 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 al
luding 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 genera
tion 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 con
trary, 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 senti
mental ethics. No state of slaves can stand — "

330 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 whee
dling 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 shel
tered 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 vocifer
ous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and ex
cited 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.

MARTIN EDEN 331

It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, de
tailed 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 degene
rate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched
fists raised on high, and all projected against a back
ground 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 him
self head-lined, on the first page at that ; and he was sur
prised 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 Bris-
senden 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 como
to interview you," he began.

Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.

332

MARTIN EDEN 333

" A brother socialist ? " the reporter asked, with a quick
glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that
cadaverous and dying man. 9

" 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 inter
view afterward."

"A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively.
" Poke him, Martin! Poke himl "

" 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 ; <f but it
doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient en
ergy 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 an
nounced 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 under
stand," the cub ventured, " and besides, it's good advertis
ing. That's what counts. It was a favor to you."

"It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden
repeated solemnly.

334 MARTIN EDEN

" And it was a favor to me — think of that ! " was Mar-
tin'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 re
members 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 Bris
senden 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. Brissen
den 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

MARTIN EDEN 335

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 news
paper 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. Es
pecially 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.

336 MARTIN EDEN

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 gen
tleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified business
man who had no patience with his brother-in-law's social
istic 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 re
porter. " 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 en
able him to live seriously and decently. And now her

MARTIN EDEN 337

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 under
stand 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 re
marks 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. " Over
due " lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap
ef 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.

338 MARTIN EDEN

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 patriot
ism 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 in
dignation 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, fight
ing 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 Oak
land, 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 intellec
tual 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

MARTIN EDEN 339

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 sen
timent or emotion that strayed along — ay, to be shakea
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 gen
erated 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 delib
eration. "It is of my own free will. You have dis
graced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends.
They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can

340

MARTIN EDEN 341

tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never
wish to see you again."

"Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreportsl 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 uncon
sciously 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 com
pleteness. Here was something undone. It had been de
ferred against the completion of something else. Now that
something else had been finished, and he would apply him
self 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 no
where, 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

342 MARTIN EDE1N

upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our
pleasure in publishing the poem, let rne tell you that we
have set it for the August number, our July number be
ing 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 hono
rarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and
state what you consider a fair price."

Since the honorarium they had offered was three hun
dred 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 opin
ions 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 Parthe
non had recalled to him that during his five days' devo
tion 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

MARTIN EDEN 343

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 lug
gage 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 arrange
ments."

" They were quick about it, I must say," Martin com
mented.

" 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

344 MARTIN EDEN

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.

a ' 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.' "

MARTIN EDEN 345

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, be
tween 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 dark
ened 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 sud
denly 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

346 MARTIN EDEN

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 breaker^
he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe. In tbf
stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-clot]f
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

MARTIN EDEN 347

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 moon
light, 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 preg
nant 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 fif
teen 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

348

MARTIN EDEN 349

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 rudder
less, 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 regu
larly 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 him
self 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 news
papers 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
Delia 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

350 MARTIN EDEN

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 Delia 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 Delia 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

MARTIN EDEN 351

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 fre
quently. 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
Taiohse, 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 hun
dred 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 thin en-
~7elope 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 hun-

352 MARTIN EDEN

dred 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 dol
lars. 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 ani
mated 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 out
side 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 hun
dred and fifty dollars. He decided that if he had it to do
over again he would confine himself to fiction. " Adven
ture," 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-

MARTIN EDEN 353

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 hun
dred 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 tele
phoned 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."

2A

354 MARTIN EDEN

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 boj,
my poor boy 1 "

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 hon
estly?"

"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 pos
session, 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 win ^d, 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 fer
vently, 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 ces
sation 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 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 Taiohse,

355

356 MARTIN EDEN

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

MARTIN EDEN 357

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. Every
body was glad to see Martin back. No book of his had
been published ; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes.
They liked him for himself. He felt like a prince returned
from exile, 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 sit
ting 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 move
ment 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 mur
mured 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.

358 MARTIN EDEN

Even as the thought flashed through his brain he re
ceived 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 stag
gered, 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 won
dered 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 antag
onist, 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, lean
ing 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 pro
claiming 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, an1
he'll eat you alive if you monkey with 'm."

" He can't steal her on me that way," the other inter
jected.

" He licked the Flyin' Dutchman, an' you know him"

MARTIN EDEN 359

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 with
out 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 e; 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

360 MARTIN EDEN

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 EDEN 361

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 some
thing 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

362 MARTIN EDEN

living — I could set them up in a grocery store or some
thing. Anything you want, just name it, and I can fir
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 brew
ing. 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 con
stables 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 impend
ing. 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

MARTIN EDEN 363

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 pas
sengers saw him land his fist on the face of a running
man who was trying to board the car. But fists were land
ing 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 clang
ing 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 dunifounded 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 com
panions 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 in
tellect 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 bour
geoisie 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

364 MARTIN EDEN

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.

"4A 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 con
trasted 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 be
wilderment. " 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 jus
tify 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, practi
cal, 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

365

366 MARTIN EDEN

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 op
posing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge attempted to formulate
a compromise that would jibe with his particular cosmic
theories. Maeterlinck's followers rallied around the stand
ard 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 controver
sialists, 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, Darn-
ley & 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 un-
warrantedly 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.

MARTIN EDEN 367

" 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 pub
lishing 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 disappoint
ment 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

368 MARTIN EDEN

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 Portu
guese 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 your'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 wash
ing 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

MARTIN EDEN 369

head was hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, enter
tained 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 bio
graphical 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, per
mitted interviews, gave his opinions on literature and
philosophy, and even accepted invitations of the bour
geoisie. He had settled down into a strange and com
fortable 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 out
rageous 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

2B

370 MARTIN EDEN

the sort of worth he seemed to value. Yet he gave her
no hope, treating her in brotherly fashion and rarely see
ing her.

" Overdue " was rushed upon the market by the Mere
dith-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 hav
ing 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 at
tacked the literature of mysticism, and had done it exceed
ing 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 mak
ing. 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 dif
ference ? ^ 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

MARTIN EDEN 371

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 womenkind, 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. TJie 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 manu
scripts 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

372 MARTIN EDEN

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 re
fuse your collection of love-poems. We were greatly im
pressed 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 par
ticularly 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 fol
lowed. 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, cost
ing 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

MARTIN EDEN 373

whatever topics interested him. The body of the tele
gram 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 " col
lection rather dubiously and coldly. The audacity and
unconventionally of the storiettes was a shock to bourgeois
morality and prejudice ; but when Paris went mad over
the immedate translation that was made, the American
and English reading public followed suit and bought so
many copies that Martin competed 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 noth
ing of merit found its way into the magazines. His own
success demonstrated that Brissenden had been wrong.

374 MARTIN EDEN

And yet, somehow, lie 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 writ
ten. That stuff had been merely incidental. It had been
rejected right and left by the magazines. The publica
tion 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 ex
plain it. There was no explaining it. It had happened.
In the face of all experience to the contrary, it had hap
pened.

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 compre
hend what he had written. His intrinsic beauty and power
meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were ac
claiming 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 Brissen den'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 ab
solute certitude: "Ephemera" was infinitely greater than
anything he had done. It was infinitely greater than any
thing he had in him. It was a poem of centuries. Then

MARTIN EDEN 375

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. MOESB met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metro-
pole. Whether he had happened there just casually, in
tent 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 puz
zled 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 per
formed. Mr. and Mrs. Morse had condemned him for an
idler and a shirk and through Ruth had urged that he take

376

MARTIN EDEN 377

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 hun
dred thousand dollars or so. That was the way bourgeois
society valued a man, and who was he to expect it other
wise ? 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 crit
icism 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

S78 MARTIN EDEN

normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the grow
ing little thing was becoming an obsession. Work per
formed. 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 graft
ers, 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

MARTIN EDEN 379

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 per
formed, " 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 expatia-
tion 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 spread
ing 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

380 MARTIN EDEN

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 Ger
trude 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 I 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 Palm
ist," 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 draw
ings 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 per
mission of Mackintosh's Magazine. It caused quite a
stir in the neighborhood, and good housewives were proud
to have the acquaintance 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 — im-

MARTIN EDEN 381

portant 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 Her
mann 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 situa
tion 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 finan
cially 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 per
ceptible halt midway in her assertion, which she glossed
over with more tears and kisses and incoherent stammer
ings, and which Martin inferred to be her appeal for for
giveness 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," Her
mann von Schmidt confided to his wife. "He got mad

382 MARTIN EDEN

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 I 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 per
formed. 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 per
formed 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 gather
ings — 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 de
mand : Why didn't you feed me then ? It was work per
formed. "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

MARTIN EDEN 383

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 en
courage 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 Mar
tin 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."

384 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 fellow
ship.

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

KBBIS 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 in
terest 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 common
place with you, I know. But it wasn't to me. I shall
never live at such a pitch again. I'm done with philos
ophy. I want never to hear another word of it."

" The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my phi
losophy," Kreis remarked, as he paused in the doorway.
"And then the market broke."

Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and
2o 385

386 MARTIN EDEN

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 mo
ment. 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 relent
less 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

MARTIN EDEN 387

amuses 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 pub
lic. 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 Mar
tin 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.

388 MARTIN EDEN

" 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 inter
vals 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 bring
ing back clean clothes from the laundry. He was think
ing about Joe and wondering where he was, as he said,
"Come in."

He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn tow
ard 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

MARTIN EDEN 389

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 pite-
ously, 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 Rath 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 asked.

He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.

She repeated her iTTords.

" Oh," he said, then wondered what more he could pos
sibly 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. Posi
tively 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 in
trusion 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."

390 MARTIN EDEN

"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 griev
ous 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 be
neath 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?"

MARTIN EDEN 391

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 unmiti
gated 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 yc1! 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,
concerning everybody. You see I have not changed,

392 MARTIN EDEN

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 phi
losophy. 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 re
sides 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 man
ner 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

MARTIN EDEN 393

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 falli
bility 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. Noth
ing 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 uot
getting a job."

394 MARTIN EDEN

" 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. Real
ism 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 refine
ment 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 gf
life in the same old way — afraid of life and a healthy
oath."

MARTIN EDEN 395

She was stung by his words into realization of the
puerility of her act, and yet she felt that he had magni
fied 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 move
ment 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

396 MARTIN EDEN

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 ges
ture. " 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 sun
light 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 the 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."

MARTIN EDEN 397

"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 conversa
tion. 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 I
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."

398 MARTIN EDEN

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, re-

MARTIN EDEN 399

member 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 com
fortably for eight uninterrupted hours. He was not rest
less. 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 XL VI

" SAT, Joe," was his greeting to his aid-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 laun
dry at me. I tell you what you can do. You can take
that laundry an' go to hell."

He was starting to fling out of the room when Martin
caught him by the shoulder and whirle I 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 splin
tered 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

400

MARTIN EDEN 401

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 to
gether."

" 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 ex
tended 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 ex
cuses 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, them
selves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.

He roused himself and began glancing through his mail.
There were adozen 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 pur
chase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of
eommunist colonization. There were letters from women
seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for en-

402 MARTIN EDEN

closed 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 Swed
ish 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 re
membered 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, trad
ing 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.

MARTIN EDEN 403

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 mean
time 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 buy
ing 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 enter
ing 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

404 MARTIN

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 news
papers made the announcement that he had taken passage
on the Mariposa. Once, when the instinct of preserva
tion 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 pro
nounced 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 con
stitution. 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 cor
rect. Physically he was all right. It was his "think-
machme " 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

MARTIN EDEN 405

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 sail
ing in the morning papers, Bernard Higginbotham, Ger
trude, 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.

406 MARTIN EDEN

From the deck of the Mariposa, at the sailing hour,
he saw Lizzie Connolly hiding on 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 unsatis
factory 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
t© 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.

MARTIN EDEN 407

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 crea
tures. 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 from
out the pit of stifling heat, he had often caught glimpses
of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing but en
joy 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 expound
ing the slave-morality, and as he listened, he thought lan
guidly of his own Nietzsche philosophy. But what waa

408 MARTIN EDEN

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 Mar
quesas, 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

MARTIN EDEN 409

through its pages, until suddenly he became aware that he
was reading with interest. He finished the stanza, at
tempted 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 Swin
burne 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 dis
covered 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 live,1 forever ;
That dead men r jse up never ;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.' '*

He looked again at the open port. Swinburne had fur
nished the key. Life was ill, or, rather, it had become ill
— an unbearable thing. " That dead men rise up never I "
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 won
dered if he ought to write a swan-song, but laughed the
thought away. There was no time. He was too impa
tient to be gone.

Turning off the light in his room so that it might not

410 MARTIN EDEN

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 in
tention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or
so away.

It was the automatic instinct to live. He ceased swim
ming, but the moment he felt the water rising above his
mouth the hands struck out sharply with a lifting move
ment. 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, deliber
ately, after the manner of a man taking an anesthetic.
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 en
deavoring not to breathe the air into his bursting lungs.
Well, he would have to try a new way. He filled his

MARTIN EDEN 411

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 dart
ing 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 feel
ing; 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 way
falling down a vast and interminable stairway. And some
where 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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