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Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924012550335 
 
' They sat idly and silently gazing 
 with eyes that dreamed and did not see ' 
 
MARTIN EDEN 
 
 BT 
 
 JACK LONDON 
 
 AUTHOK OF " THE CAU. OF THE WIXD," ETC., ETC. 
 
 WITH FRONTISPIECE BT THE EINNE7S 
 
 DRIS LIBRARY 
 
 JUN 2 6 1987 
 
 Wetn got* 
 
 PUBLISHED FOR 
 
 THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY 
 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 London: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 
 1916 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

 CopraiGHT, 1903, 
 By jack LONDON. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published September, xgo9< Reprinted 
 September^ October, November, igog; January, zqio; February, 
 December, 1911. May, 1915. 
 
*• Let me live out my years in heat of blood i 
 
 Let me lie drunken with the dreamer's winei 
 Let me not see this soul-house built of mod 
 Gro toppling to the dust a vacant shrine I " 
 
MARTIIS" EDEK 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Thb 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 
 
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 fighting light. He looked about 
 more unconcernedly, sharply observant, every detail of the 
 pretty interior registering itself on his brain. His eyes 
 were wide apart; nothing in their field of vision escaped; 
 and as they drank in the beauty before them the fighting 
 
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 outjutting rock; lowering 
 storm-clouds covered the sky; and, outside the line of 
 surf, a pilot-schooner, close-hauled, heeled over till every 
 detail of her deck was visible, was surging along against 
 a stormy sunset sky. There was beauty, and it drew him 
 irresistibly. He forgot his awkward walk and came 
 closer to the painting, very close. The beauty faded out 
 of the canvas. His face expressed his bepuzzlement. He 
 stared at what seemed a careless daub of paint, then 
 stepped away. Immediately all the beauty flashed back 
 into the canvas. " A trick picture," was his thought, as 
 he dismissed it, though in the midst of the multitudinous 
 impressions he was receiving he found time to feel a prod 
 of indignation that so much beauty should be sacrificed to 
 make a trick. He did not know painting. He had been 
 brought up on chromos and lithographs that were always 
 definite and sharp, near or far. He had seen oil 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 1 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 
 mind when he painted that girl, Iseult, in the book there 
 on the table. All this plethora of sight, and feeling, and 
 thought occurred on the instant. There was no pause of 
 the realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand 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 1 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, 
 arid swarthy cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. 
 These, in turn, were crowded out by Japanese women, 
 doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by Eurar 
 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 unsesthetic 
 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 bis 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. 
 I " 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 T 
 
 Baldly as lie 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, 
 a.nd from away off somewhere the mellow tinkling of a 
 guitar. Such was the picture, and he thrilled to the 
 memory of it, wondering if the man could paint it who 
 had painted the pilot-schooner on the wall. The white 
 beach, the stars, and the lights of the sugar steamers 
 would look great, he thought, and midway on the sand 
 the dark group of figures that surrounded the fighters. 
 The knife occupied a place in the picture, he decided, and 
 would show well, with a sort of gleam, in the light of the 
 stars. But of all this no hint had crept into his speech. 
 " He tried to bite off my nose," he concluded. 
 
 " Oh," the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed 
 the shock in her sensitive face. 
 
 He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment 
 shone faintly on his sunburned cheeks, though to him it 
 burned as hotly as when his cheeks had been exposed to 
 the open furnace-door in the fire-room. Such sordid 
 things as stabbing affrays were evidently not fit subjects 
 for conversation with a lady. People in the books, in her 
 walk of life, did not talk about such things — perhaps they 
 did not know about them, either. 
 
 There was a brief pause in the conversation they were 
 trying to get started. Then she asked tentatively about 
 the scar on his cheek. Even as she asked, he realized 
 that she was making an effort to talk his talk, and he 
 resolved to get away from it and talk hers. 
 
 " It was just an accident," he said, putting his hand to 
 his cheek. " One night, in a calm, with a heavy sea 
 running, the main-boom-lift carried away, an' next the 
 tackle. The lift was wire, an' it was threshin' around 
 
8 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 like a snake. The whole watch was tryin' to grab it, an' 
 1 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 
 
 itt the world. She was one of them. She lent wings to 
 his Imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread 
 taemselves 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 j\oet 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 o; 
 his poems that should never be read. Every line of th( 
 really great poets is filled with beautiful truth, and calli 
 to all that is high and noble in the human. Not a line o ' 
 the great poets can be spared without impoverishing th( 
 world by that much." ! 
 
 " I thought it was great," he said hesitatingly, " th^ 
 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 oii 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, spUling 
 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 gei 
 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 mUes. 
 
 " 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 higli 
 school? Of course not. But did you finish grammar 
 school ? " 
 
 " I had two years to run, when I left," he answered. 
 "But I was always honorably promoted at school." 
 
 The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he 
 had gripped the arms of the chair so savagely that every 
 finger-end was stinging. At the same moment he became 
 aware that a woman was entering the room. He saw the 
 girl leave her chair and trip swiftly across the floor to the 
 newcomer. They kissed each other, and, with arms 
 around each other's waists, they advanced toward him. 
 That must be her mother, he thought. She was a tall, 
 blond woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful. Her 
 gown was what he might expect in such a house. His 
 eyes delighted in the graceful lines of it. She and her 
 dress together reminded him of women on the stage. 
 Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and 
 gowns entering the London theatres while he stood and 
 
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- 
 uig 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. 
 
 Ha 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 bis 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 process. 
 He had not known that he needed love. Nor did he know 
 it now. He merely saw it in operation, and thrilled to it, 
 and thought it fine, and high, and splendid. 
 
 He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was 
 difficult enough getting acquainted with her, and her 
 mother, and her brother, Norman. Arthur he already 
 knew somewhat. The father would have been too much 
 for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never 
 worked so hard in his life. The severest toil was child's 
 play compared with this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood 
 out on his forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from 
 the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed things at 
 once. He had to eat as he had never eaten before, to 
 handle strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and 
 learn how to accomplish each new thing, to receive the 
 flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him and 
 being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious 
 of a yearning f o " 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 ofE in speculation and vague 
 plans of how to reach to her. Also, wheu 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 vi hat 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. Ii relevantly, insistently, scores of times, he won- 
 dered when they would come on 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 f motion. It was an 
 intellectual function, too. His mind was stirre 1. 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 jooks 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, ra 3S," 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;"r," to her brothers. He felt that it would be inappro- 
 priate and a confession' of inferiority on his part — which 
 would ne /er do if he was to win to her. A^so, 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 I " 
 And the i text 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, adv suturing 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 polj'- 
 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 wiuld 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 
 swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that 
 struggled in birth-throes to reciive 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 ser\ in^ who 
 interrupted and pestered at his shoulder, and he said, 
 shortly and emphatically, " Pow ! " 
 
 On the instant those at the table were ,keyed up and 
 expectant, the servant was smugly pleased, and he was 
 wallowing in mortification. But he recoverea himseL 
 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 fij ed on his 
 hands, and, being -in explanatory nrood, he s^ id : — 
 
 " I just come down the Coa 5t on one of the Pacific mail 
 steamers. She was behind t^^ime, an' around the Puget 
 Sound ports we worked liue niggers, storing cargo — 
 mixed freight, if you kno-v what that means. That's 
 how the skin got knocked off." 
 
 " Oh, it wasn't that," she hastened to explain, in turn. 
 " Your hands seemed too small for your body." 
 
 His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of 
 another of his deficiencies. 
 
 " Yes," he said depreciatingly. " They ain't big enough 
 to stand the strain. I can hit like a mule with my arms 
 and shoulders. They are too strong, an' when I smash a 
 man on the jaw the hands get smashed, too." 
 
 He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled 
 with disgust at himself. He had loosed the guard upon 
 his tongue and talked about things that were not nici. 
 
 " 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 
 'a' missed it for anything. When I seen — " 
 
 He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of 
 his own depravity and utter worthlessness to breathe the 
 same air she did. And while Arthur took up the tale, for 
 the twentieth time, of his adventure with the drunken 
 hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how Martin Eden had 
 rushed in and rescued him, that individual, with frowning 
 brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, 
 and wrestled more determinedly with the problem of how 
 he should conduct himself toward these people. He 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 math ? " was the next question, which, 
 somehow, brought the laugh on Norman. 
 
 " Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer. 
 
 Martin Eden nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the 
 apparently illimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw 
 took on tangibility. His abnormal power of vision made 
 abstractions take on concrete form. In the alchemy of 
 
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 
 conqifer — 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 
 xie saw. He brought the pulsing sea before them, and the 
 men and the ships upon the sea. He communicated his 
 power of vision, tUl 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 
 80 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 
 driuk, firing bim to audacities of feeling, — a drug tbat laid 
 hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring through the 
 sky. It banished sordid fact, fliooded 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 hu'a dancers to the barbaric love-calls of the singers, 
 who canted 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 lou^ 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 t speech. Only for a 
 flashing moment did she see this then she saw the lout 
 returned, and she laughed at the ^ him 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. " To 
 people and houses like this. It's all new to me, and I 
 like it." 
 
 " I hope you'll call again," she said, as he was saying 
 good night to her brothers. 
 
 He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the 
 doorway, and was gone. 
 
 "Well, what do you think of him?" Arthur demanded. 
 , "He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone," she answered. 
 "How old is he?" 
 
 " Twenty — almost twenty-one. I asked him this 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 he ripped out of the shirt and 
 stuffed into his pocket. A cold drizzle was falling, but 
 he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging 
 along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly aware 
 that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming 
 dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past. 
 
 He had met the woman at last — the woman that he had 
 thought little about, not being given to thinking about 
 women, but whom he had expected, in a remote way, 
 he would sometime meet. He had sat next to her at 
 table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into 
 her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit; — but 
 no more beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, 
 nor than the flesh that gave it expression and form. He did 
 not think of her flesh as flesh, — which was new to him; 
 for of the women he had known that was the only way 
 he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He did 
 not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills 
 and frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the 
 garb of her spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, 
 a pure and gracious crystallization of her divine essence. 
 This feeling of the divine startled him. It shocked him 
 from his dreams to sober thought. No word, no clew, 
 no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before. He 
 
 26 
 
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 MAETIN 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 
 c^iid 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. 
 
 " 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. 
 
 " 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 I Him 1 " 
 
 " He said something about a schooner that's gettin' 
 ready to go off to some outlandish place to look for buried 
 treasure, that he'd sail on her if his money held out." 
 
 " If he only wanted to steady down, I'd give him a job 
 drivin' the wagon," her husband said, but with no trace of 
 benevolence in his voice. "Tom's quit." 
 
 His wife looked alarm and interrogation. 
 
 " Quit to-night. Is goin' to work for Carruthers. 
 They paid 'm more'n I could afford." 
 
 " I told you you'd lose 'm," she cried out. " He was 
 worth more'n you was giving him." 
 
 " Now look here, old woman," Higginbotham bullied, 
 " for the thousandth time I've told you to keep your nose 
 out of the business. I won't tell you again." 
 
 " I don't care," she sniffled. " Tom was a good boy." 
 
 Her husband glared at her. This was unqualified 
 defiance. 
 
 " If that brother of j^ours was worth his salt, he could 
 take the wagon," he snorted. 
 
 "He pays his board, just the same," was the retort. 
 "An' he's my brother, an' so long as he don't owe you 
 money you've got no right to be jumping on him all the 
 
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'U 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 
 
 Maktin 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 
 the counter effect of making him beastly. He did not 
 D 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 be men whose ways 
 of life he knew. He did not know her way of life. She 
 was wonder and mystery, and how could he guess one 
 thought of hers ? Well, they were honest eyes, he 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 sijn. 
 
 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 aifected 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 coifin. 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 enormouB 
 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 arins 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 
 waU, 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 I " 
 
 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 iu 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'U take care of itself. If you weren't so busy, I'd 
 kiss you good morning." 
 
 Pie wanted to be affectionate to this sister, who was 
 good, and who, in hti way, he knew, loved him. But, 
 somehow, she grew less herself as the years went by, anJ 
 
 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 sora e 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 h^r 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 
 .yas Maggie." I 
 
 "Never had anything to do with her. Never danced 
 with her except that one night." j 
 
 " 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 againJ 
 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 
 vTorthy 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, tUl 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 knowled^ 
 bulked so big. He was frightened. How could his brai/i 
 ever master it all ? Later, he remembered that theije 
 were other men, many men, who had mastered it ; and re 
 breathed a great oath, passionately, under his breati, 
 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 "Noj- 
 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 ? 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 etiquettp, 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 i^e 
 
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. Higginbotham. 
 
 The many books he read but served to whet his unrest. 
 Every page of every book was a peep-hole into the realm 
 of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and 
 increased. Also, he did not know where to begin, and 
 continually suffered from lack of preparation. The 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" lie un- 
 derstood thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not understand 
 it, lie 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 liis incisive psy- 
 chology. PsyeJiology 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 EDEyi 47 
 
 on wMcli 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 itsuse. 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 Ml". 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 in new and 
 more profound ways — with Ruth, who had fired hiin 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 Ipoked 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 encour- 
 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 ' . o 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 
 moTe 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 wisdonx-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 I "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 oifered all he knew and 
 more than he could guess. They oifered 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 vol- 
 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 of] 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, arid 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 clianting 
 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 " andBulfinch'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 play in' 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 immediatel}' 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-poetry 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 wf.s 
 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 v.'ith its delicious intrusion and com- 
 
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' f o'c's'ls ain't 
 the same you've got in this house, for instance. Well, 
 that's the sort of readin' matter I've ben accustomed to. 
 And yet — an' I ain't just makin' a brag of it — I've ben 
 different from the people I've herded with. Not that I'm 
 any better than the sailors an' cow-punchers I travelled 
 with, — I was cow-punchin' for a short time, you know, — 
 but I always liked books, read everything I could lay hands 
 on, an' — well, I guess I think differently from most of 'em. 
 
 "Now, to come to what I'm drivin' at. I was never 
 inside a house like this. When I come a week ago, an' 
 saw all this, an' you, an' your mother, an' brothers, an' 
 everything — well, I liked it. I'd heard about such things 
 an' read about such things in some of the books, an' when 
 I looked around at your house, why, the books come true. 
 But the thing I'm after is I liked it. I wanted it. I 
 want it now. I want to breathe air like you get in this 
 
MAKTllN KUbjSSt 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 not 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." v 
 
 " But that takes money," he interrupted. 
 
 " Oh I " 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'U 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 doesi 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." 
 
MAK'ilJN iiiUililN 63 
 
 "I'm afraid I didn't explain that," she smiled. "A 
 double negative is — let me see — well, you say, 'never 
 helped nobody.' 'Never' is a negative. 'Nobody' is 
 another negative. It is a rule that two negatives make 
 a positive. ' Never helped nobody ' means that, not 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; "'1 
 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 slar 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 hooze.? 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 
 
 wanted to purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled 
 all his days, and to rise to that sublimated realm where 
 dwelt the upper classes. All his childhood and youth 
 had been troubled by a vague unrest; he had never known 
 what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he 
 had hunted vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his 
 unrest had become sharp and painful, and he knew at last, 
 clearly and definitely, that it was beauty, and intellect, 
 and love that he must have. 
 
 During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen 
 times, and each time was an added inspiration. She 
 helped him with his English, corrected his pronunciation, 
 and started him on arithmetic. But their intercourse 
 was not all devoted to elementary study. He had seen 
 too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be 
 wholly content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and 
 analysis ; and there were times when their conversation 
 turned on other themes — the last poetry he had read, the 
 latest poet she had studied. And when she read aloud to 
 him her favorite passages, he ascended to the topmost 
 heaven of delight. Never, in all the women he had heard 
 speak, had he heard a voice like hers. The least sound of 
 it was a stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed 
 with every word she utteced. 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. Tlien 
 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, he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading 
 its deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the 
 heights of exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided 
 that this was love and that love was the greatest thing 
 in the world. And in review would pass along the 
 corridors of memory all previous thrills and burnings 
 he had known, — the drunkenness of wine, the caresses of 
 women, the rough play and give and take of physical 
 contests, — and they seemed trivial and mean compared 
 with this sublime ardor he now enjoyed. 
 
 The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never 
 had any experiences of the heart. Her only experiences 
 in such matters were of the books, where the facts of 
 ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm 
 of unreality; and she little knew that tliis 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 EDEIC 
 
 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 
 firat 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 pf etty 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 lie 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' studyin' all night, just workin' an' 
 never playin', never havin' a good time, an' never learnin' 
 how to have a good time — of course his thirty thousand 
 came along too late." 
 
 His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner 
 -sight all the thousands of details of the boy's existence 
 and of his narrow spiritual development into a thirty- 
 thousand-doUar-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 
 ut 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 
 la3'in' up would have bought him, when he was a kid, in 
 tlie 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 
 iier 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 alwa3rs 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 
 ai^r^ut it, after all. Thirtj' 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 lesp 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, while 
 he invariably memorized himself to sleep. "Never did 
 anything," "if I were," and "those things," were phrases, 
 with many variations, that he repeated under his breath 
 in order to accustom his tongue to the language spoken 
 
 ' 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 oihcers 
 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 inlays 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 riglit 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 sav/, also, 
 the way to master it. To write I 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 \ oyagu 
 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. Tliere 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 dreaia arose. He was nol 
 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 Franciseo 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. 
 
MAETIN EDEN 79 
 
 He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and 
 addressed it to the editor of the San Franeisoo Exam- 
 iner. He had an idea that anything accepted by a paper 
 was publish jd 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, carefvi, and 
 modest idea. He would write an adventure story for 
 boys and sell it to The Youth's Companion. He went 
 to the free reading-room and looked through the files of 
 The Youth's Companion. Serial stories, he found, were 
 usually published in that weekly in five instalments of 
 about three thousand words each. He discovered several 
 serials that ran to seven instalments, and decided to write 
 one of that length. 
 
 He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once — 
 a voyage that was to have been for three years and which 
 had terminated in shipwreck at the end of six months. 
 While his imagination was fanciful, even fantastic at 
 times, he had a basic love of reality that compelled him 
 to write about the things he knew. He knew whaling, and 
 out of the real materials of his knowledge he proceeded to 
 manufacture the fictitious adventures of the two boys he 
 intended to use as joint heroes. It was easy work, he 
 decided on Saturday evening. He had completed on that 
 day the first instalment of three thousand words — much 
 to the amusement of Jim, and to the open derision of Mr. 
 Higginbotham, who sneered throughout meal-time at the 
 "litery" person they had discovered in the family, 
 
 Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in- 
 law's surprise on Sunday morning when he opened his 
 Examiner and saw the article on the treasure-hunters. 
 Early that morning he was out himself to the front door, 
 nervousl}' 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 noj 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 Eoolc News, in a paragraph 
 on the payment of magazine writers, not that Rudyard 
 Kipling received a dollar per word, but that the minimum 
 rate paid by first-class magazines was two cents a word. 
 The YoutJis 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 Oom- 
 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 t' p 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, f astidiouslj'' 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 1 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 ab6ut 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 
 Jolm 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." 
 
 " You must get a thorough education," was the answer, 
 " whether or not you ultimately become a writer. This 
 education is indispensable for whatever career you select, 
 and it must not be slipshod or sketchy. You should go to 
 high school." 
 
 " Yes — " he began ; but she interrupted with an after- 
 thought : — 
 
 " Of course, you could go on with your writing, too." 
 
 " I would have to," he said grimly. 
 
 " "Why ? " She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did 
 not quite like the persistence with which he clung to his 
 notion. 
 
 " Because, without writing there wouldn't be any 
 high school. I must live and buy books and clothes, you 
 know." 
 
84 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 " I'd forgotten that," she laughed. " Why weren't 3'ou 
 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 
 80 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 
 
 86 
 
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 YoutKs 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. 
 
 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 
 
MAKlliN tUUthlM 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, sketchj-. 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 
 
 I 
 
 " 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 quiel^er 
 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 whic^ 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- 
 
MAKTIJN JiJJJiJN 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 ! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very 
 tiling 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 tliem 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 
 
MAKTIJN b^Ub^ 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 was warming now. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which 
 would have been finished sooner if it had not been broken 
 in upon so frequently by his attempts to write poetry. 
 His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth, but they 
 were never completed. Not in a day could he learn to 
 chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure 
 were serious enough in themselves, but there was, over 
 and beyond them, an intangible and evasive something 
 that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could not 
 catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit 
 of poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could 
 not capture. It seemed a glow to him, a warm and 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 
 ah 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 heurt- 
 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 Oompanion. 
 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 be^an to come back. His 
 jaw seemed to become squarer, his chin more aggressive, 
 and he bundled the manuscripts off to new editors. 
 
 The thought came to him that he was not a good judge 
 of his own work. He tried it out on Gertrude. He read 
 his stories aloud to her. Her eyes glistened, and she 
 looked at him proudly as she said : — 
 
 " Ain't it grand, you writin' those sort of things." 
 
 " Yes, yes," he demanded impatiently. " But the story 
 — how did you like it ? " 
 
 " Just grand," was the reply. " Just grand, an' 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. 
 
 " But if you did sell it, what do you think you'd get 
 for it ? " 
 
 " Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the 
 way prices go." 
 
 " My ! I do hope you'll sell it 1 " 
 
 " 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 wt)nder 
 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 wliich 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 mereh' 
 of another class. His very love elevated her above all 
 classes. She was a being apart, so far apart that he did 
 
^8 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 love that 
 thrust her from him and made her seem impossible for 
 him. Love itself denied him the one thing that it desired. 
 
 And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between 
 them was bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though 
 the gulf remained, it was ever narrower. They had been 
 eating cherries — great, luscious, black cherries with a juice 
 of the color of dark wine. And later, as she read aloud to 
 him from " The Princess," he chanced to notice the stain 
 of the cherries on her lips. For the moment her divinity 
 was shattered. She was clay, after all, mere clay, subject 
 to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or 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 psean, 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 th» man. I will make 
 good." 
 
CHAPTER Xn 
 
 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 
 Rutli'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 o& and faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect 
 tone, crystal-pure. No mere woman had a voice lilie 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. 
 
 1 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, stiU 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 true love that comes to all 
 lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone, in a 
 whirlwind of fire and glory ; and to die for her, he felt, was 
 to have lived and loved well. And he was only twenty- 
 one, and he had never been in love before. 
 
 His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he 
 was weak from the organ which had stirred him. His 
 eyes were shining like an angel's, and his face was 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, which somehow had not penetrated 
 to his brain before. 
 
 As Ruth's front door closed behind them and he came 
 down the steps with her, he found himself greatly 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 
 Bides, 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 aU working-class girls were wearing 
 just then. 
 
 " What a pretty girl ! " Ruth said a moment later. 
 
 Martin could have blessed her, though he said : — 
 
 "I don't know. I guess it's all a matter of personal 
 taste, but she doesn't strike me as being particularly 
 pretty." 
 
 " Why, there isn't one woman in ten thousand with 
 features as regular as hers. They are splendid. Her face 
 is as clear-cut as a cameo. And her eyes are beautiful." 
 
 " Do you think so ? " Martin queried absently, for to 
 him there was only one beautiful woman in the world, and 
 she was beside him, her hand upon his arm. 
 
 " Do I think so ? If that girl had proper opportunity 
 to dress, Mr. Eden, and if she were taught how to carry 
 herself, you would be fairly dazzled by her, and so would 
 all men." 
 
 " She would have to be taught how to speak," he 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- 
 <ngmen 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 
 riow, but I'd be bow-legged. And so with that girl. You 
 ;3oticed 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 ilien he remembered that he loved her and was lost 
 in amai,3ment at his fortune that permitted him to love 
 her ant? 15 take her on his arm to a lecture. 
 
 Who >»vo you, Martin Eden ? he demanded of himself in 
 the lookin^'-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 
 open 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 I 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. AH was law. It was in obedience 
 to law that the bird flew, and it was in obedience to the 
 same law thatl 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 tilings 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 chUdish 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 Avhen you knew nothing 
 of the essential characteristics of Ufe. 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-lDreeders." 
 
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 dareer. 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." 
 
 I 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 mind 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 Rvith, and his expiessionwaa 
 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 sohoolboyish 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 without 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 
 doUar-ehasers, 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 tlie 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 cliilled 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 wh}' 
 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 I — "he threw up his hands with' a despairing gesture 
 
122 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 — " it is impossible 1 It is not understandable ! It is 
 incommunicable ! " 
 
 " But you do talk well," she insisted. " Jiist tbink bow 
 you bave improved in the sbort time I bave known you. 
 Mr. Butler is a noted public speaker. He is always asked 
 by tbe State Committee to go out on stump during cam- 
 paign. Yet you talked just as well as be 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 bave 
 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 tbe founda- 
 tion for any career. She drew her ideal of tbe successful 
 man, and it was largely in her father's image, with a few 
 unmistakable lines and touches of color from tbe 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 be 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 tbe 
 ground. 
 
 At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its 
 height above the horizon, and suggested bis manuscripts 
 by picking them up. 
 
 " I had forgotten," she said quickly. " And I am so 
 anxious to bear." 
 
 He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was 
 among bis 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 iire and passion with wliich 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 I" 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 I 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 eifulgence 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 M^as 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 stuff to write, if he could only find 
 speech. Saints in heaven ! — They were only saints and 
 could not help themselves. But he was a man. 
 
 " You have strength," he could hear her saying, " but 
 it is untutored strength." 
 
 " Like a bull in a china shop," he suggested, and won 
 a smile. 
 
 "And you must develop discrimination. You must 
 consult taste, and fineness, and tone." 
 
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 swekt and 
 stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty and 
 ignoble contacts to royal culminationsi 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 
 j^v^onianhood, 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 inai-ticulate. 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. Bat 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 searohingly, 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 Avliich 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 hiinself 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 mus£ be sure to tell me just what you 
 think of them. What I need, you know, above all things, 
 is criticism. And do, please, be frank with me." 
 
 "I will be perfectly frank," she promised, with an 
 uneasy conviction that she had not been frank with him 
 and with a doubt if she could be quite frank with him the 
 next time. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 " The first battle, fought and finished," Martin said to 
 the looking-glass ten days later. "But there will be a 
 second battle, and a third battle, and battles to the end of 
 time, unless — " 
 
 He had not finished the sentence, but looked about the 
 mean little room and let his eyes dwell sadly upon a heap 
 of returned manuscripts, still in their long envelopes, 
 which lay in a corner on the floor. He had no stamps 
 with which to continue them on their travels, and for a 
 week they had been piling up. More of them would come 
 in on the morrow, and on the next day, and the next, 
 till they were all in. And he would be unable to start 
 them out again. He was a month's rent behind on the 
 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 discovered 
 that he was fond of it. 
 
 "Dear old table," he said, "I've spent some happy 
 houi's 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 itl 
 
 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 
 Miquirer. 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 stiif and lame from 
 the incessant fighting. Hig 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 
 beffinnincr 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 fight went on. 
 
MARTIN EDEN 133 
 
 The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed 
 the afternoon figlit. 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 leg,rned 
 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 
 bullj'ing somebody, and Martin interfered, to be con- 
 fronted by Cheese-Face's blazing eyes. 
 
 "I'll fix you after de show," his ancient enemy hissed. 
 
 Martin nodded. The nigger-heaven bouncer was making 
 his way toward the disturbance. 
 
 " I'll meet you outside, after the last act," Martin whis- 
 pered, the while his face showed undivided interest in the 
 buck-and-vnng 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 naU 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 Bob Gang held Martin's coat, and shirt, 
 and cap, ready to race with them into safety in case the 
 police interfered. Martin watched himself go into the 
 centre, facing Cheese- Face, and he heard himself say, as he 
 held up his hand warningly : — 
 
 " They ain't no hand-shakin' in this. Understand ? 
 They ain't nothin' but scrap. No throwin' up the sponge. 
 This is a grudge-fight an' it's to a finish. Understand ? 
 Somebody's goin' to get licked." 
 
 Cheese-Face wanted to demur, — Martin could see that, 
 — but Cheese-Face's old perilous pride was touched before 
 the two gangs. 
 
 " Aw, come on," he replied. " Wot's the good of chewin' 
 de rag about it? I'm wit' cheh to de finish." 
 
MAHTIN EDEN 135 
 
 Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all 
 the glory of youth, with nakel fists, with hatred, with de- 
 sire to hurt, to maim, to destioy. All the painful, thou- 
 sand years' gains of man in nis upward climb through 
 creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a 
 milestone on the path of tlie 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? 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 , 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 liis 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, whit h he stopped midway, for'he 
 had seen the glint of metal. 
 
 " Hold up yer hand ! " ne screamed. " Them's brass 
 knuckles, an' you hit me with 'em ! " 
 
 Both gangs surged forward, growling and snarling. In 
 a second there would be a free-for-all fight, and he would 
 be robbed of his vengeance. He was beside himself. 
 
 " You guys keep out ! ' he screamed hoarsely. " 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 domiaated 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 hard only, and as he 
 j.iuiohed, doggedl}-, only half-conscious, as from a remote 
 d istance he heard murmurs of fear in the gangs, and one 
 who said with shaking voice : " This ain't a sjcrap, fellows. 
 It's murder, an' we ought to stop it." 
 
 But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on 
 Avearily 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 aeons and enormous lapses of time, until, in a 
 dim way, he became aware that the nameless thing was 
 sinking, slowly sinking down to the rough board-planking 
 of the bridge. And the next moment he was standing 
 over it, staggering and swaying on shaky legs, clutching 
 at the air for support, and saying in a voice he did not 
 recognize : — 
 
 " D'ye want any more ? Say, d'ye want any more ? " 
 
 He was still saying it, over and over, — demanding, 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 trjdng 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 alisolutely 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 ! 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 oa 
 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, unti^ he caught sight of the pile of manu- 
 scripts in the corner. Then tlie 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- 
 ness, 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 live 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 nCw 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 Stm 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- 
 hana, can sit on a horse, willing to do anything and tackle 
 anything," was the answer. 
 
 The other nodded. 
 
 " Sounds good to me. My name's Dawson, Joe Dawson, 
 an' I'm tryin' to scare up a laundryman." 
 
 "Too much for me." Martin caught an amusing glimpse 
 of himself ironing fluffy white things that women wear. 
 But he had taken a liking to the other, and he added : " I 
 might do the plain washing. I learned that much at sea." 
 
 Joe Dawson thought visibly for a moment. 
 
 " Look here, let's get together an' frame it up. Willin' 
 to listen ? " 
 
 Martin nodded. 
 
 " This is a small laundry, up country, belongs to Shelly 
 Hot Springs, — hotel, you know. Two men do the work, 
 boss and assistant. I'm the boss. You don't work for me, 
 but you work under me. Think you'd be willin' to learn ? " 
 
 Martin paused to think. The prospect was alluring. A 
 few months of it, and he would have time to himself foi 
 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 difiiculty 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. jte solved 
 the difficulty of transportation that was too much for the 
 other's aching head. He would send his t^-unk 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 deeding 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 paragra^Dh 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 
 • Bpeed 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 male. He " rubbed out '' 
 collars ..nd 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 waf 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 t\/o 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 
 tlie 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 
 do) 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 tlie 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 raadin' ? " 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 rf p hub from 
 a wagon wheel, mounted on a plunger pole that was 
 attached to a spring-pob overhead. 
 
 "My invention," 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' i 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 hjive right heat, right pressure, nd 
 run 'em through three times. Look at that ! " He held 
 a cuff aloft. " Couldn't do it better by hand or on a 
 tiler." 
 
 Thursday, Joe was in a rage. A bundle of extra "fancy 
 starch " had come in. 
 
 " I'm goin' to quit," he announced. " I won't stand for 
 it. I'm goin' to quit it cold. What's the good of me 
 workin' like a slave all week, a-savin' minutes, an' them 
 a-comin' an' ringin' in fancy-starch extras on me ? This 
 
MARTIN EDEN 147 
 
 is a free country, an' I'm goin' to tell that fat Dutchman 
 what I think of him. An' I won't tell 'm in French. 
 Plain United States is good enough for me. Him 
 ii-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. AU 
 
 148 
 
MARTIN EDEN 149 
 
 jNIartin'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 
 rooin, 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 
 ib 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 laundrying. " 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 olf 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 greiatly 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 drii>k 
 when Saturday night comes around." 
 
 Another week passed, a great battle that continued 
 under the electric lights each night and that culminated 
 on Saturday afternoon at three o'clock, when Joe tasted 
 his moment of wilted triumph and then drifted down to 
 the village to forget. Martin's Sunday was the same as 
 before. He slept in the shade of the trees, toiled aimlessly 
 through the newspaper, and spent long hours lying on 
 his back, doing nothing, thinking nothing. He was too 
 dazed to think, though he was aware that he did not like 
 himself. He was self-repelled, as though he had 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 1.53 
 
 A third week wenb by, and Martin loathed himself, and 
 loathed life. He was oppressed by a sense of failure. 
 There was reason for the editors refusing his stuff. He 
 could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself and the 
 dreams he had dreamed. Ruth returned his "Sea Lyrics" 
 by mail. He read her letter apathetically. She did her 
 best to say how much she liked them and that they were 
 beautiful. But she could not lie, and slie could not 
 disguise tlie truth from herself. She knew they were 
 failures, and he read her disapproval in every perfunctory 
 and unenthusiastic line of her letter. And slie 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 tlie " Sea 
 Lyrics " on the spot, had his will been strong enough. x,o 
 set them aflame. There was the engine-room, but tlie 
 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," lie 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 heU, 
 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 theih. 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 lu7 
 
 a shadow. Joe was right. They were both shadows, 
 and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a 
 dream ? Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he 
 swung the heavy irons back and forth over the white 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 for drinks all 
 around, and while they drank his very good health, he 
 clung to the bar and scribbled. 
 
 "A telegram, Joe," he said. "Read it." 
 
 Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what 
 he read seemed to sober him. He looked at the other 
 reproachfully, tears oozing into his eyes and down his 
 cheeks. 
 
 " You ain't goin' back on me. Mart ? " he queried 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 laundrymen," he said abruptly. 
 " Here, lemme fix it." 
 
 " What are you quitting for ? " Martin demanded. 
 
 " Same reason as you. " 
 
 *' But I'm going to sea. You can't do that." 
 
 " Nope," was the answer, " but I can hobo all right, all 
 right." 
 
 Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then 
 cried : — 
 
 " By God, I think you're right ! Better a hobo than a 
 beast of toil. Why, man, you'll live. And that's more 
 than you ever did before." 
 
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 lauudry- 
 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 ! 
 Take that! an' that! an' that! damn you ! Hold me back, 
 somebody ! Hold me back ! " 
 
 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 — everdid that." 
 
 "Then they never worked in the laundry at Shelly 
 Hot Springs," he laughed bitterly. " Toil is a good 
 thing. It is nedessary 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 — 'The Degradation of 
 Toil ' or the ' Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,' 
 or something like that for a title." 
 
 Never, since the first meeting, had they seemed so far 
 apart as that day. His confession, told in franknes8,"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, 
 idealistiQ thoughts of reform. She would save this raw 
 young man who had come so far. She would save him 
 from the curse of his early environment, and she would 
 save him from himself in spite of himself. And all this 
 affected her as a very noble state of consciousness ; nor 
 did she dream that behind it and underlying it were the 
 jealousy and desire of love. 
 
 They rode on their wheels much in the delightful fall 
 weather, and out in the hills they read poetry aloud, now 
 one and now the other, noble, uplifting poetry that 
 turned one's thoughts to higher things. Renunciation, 
 sacrifice, patience, industry, and high endeavor were the 
 principles she thus indirectly preached — such abstrac- 
 tions being objectified in her mind by her fathe'r, 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. 
 
1G4 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 " I shonld recommend my little girl to be careful," hei 
 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. 
 
 " He interests me, I suppose, like the bulldog. And there 
 is much good in him, too; but there is much in him 
 that I would not like in — in the other way. You see, I 
 have been thinking. He swears, he smokes, he drinks, he 
 
MAHTIN EDEN 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," Kuth 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 tliat 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-faot, businesslike tones. 
 
168 ilARTIN 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 arc Lieeing 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 iiiipact 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 
 
 tlie 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 froiu 
 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 
 tlieir 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 
 
 re,st that resided in him. He was sitting beside her, quite 
 beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward him. 
 Then arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest 
 herself against his strength — a vague, half-formed impulse, 
 which, even as she considered it, mastered her and made 
 her lean toward him. Or was it the heeling of the boat ? 
 She did not know. She never knew. She knew only that 
 she was leaning against him and that the easement and 
 soothing rest were very good. Perhaps it had been the 
 boat's fault, but she made no effort to retrieve it. She 
 leaned lightly against his shoulder, but she leaned, and 
 she continued to lean when he shifted his position to 
 make it more comfortable for^her. 
 
 It was a madness, but she refused to consider the 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 I 
 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 enter,tained 
 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 tliink 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 would make a point of that. But no, she must not 
 let him speak at all. She could stop him, and she had 
 told her mother that she would. All flushed and burning, 
 she regretfully dismissed the conjured situation. Her 
 first proposal would have to be deferred to a more 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 Tamul- 
 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 
 madder. I am maddest, now, dear. I am almost a lunatic, 
 my head is so turned with joy." 
 
 " I am glad I am a woman, Martin — dear," she said, 
 after a long sigh. 
 
 He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then 
 asked : — 
 
 " And you? When did you first know? " 
 
 " Oh, I knew it all the time, almost from the first." 
 
 " And I have been as blind as a bat ! " he cried, a ring 
 of vexation in his voice. " I never dreamed it until just 
 now, 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 oiiered to draw her toward him again, but it was no 
 more than a tentative muscular movement of the girdling 
 aim, 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 plressed 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 otlier." 
 
 " But tliat 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- 
 ors, 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 I " 
 
 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- 
 neVs lady and Judy 0' Q-rady 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 a,nd 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 
 
 Mrs. Morse did not require a mother's intuition to read 
 the advertisement in Ruth's face when she returned home. 
 The flush that would not leave the cheeks told the simple 
 story, and more eloquently did the eyes, large and bright, 
 reflecting an unmistakable inward glory. 
 
 "What has happened?" Mrs. Morse asked, having 
 bided her time till Ruth had gone to bed. 
 
 " You know ? " Ruth queried, with trembling lips. 
 
 For reply, her mother's arm went around her, and a 
 hand was softly caressing her hair. 
 
 " He did not speak," she blurted out. " I did not 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. 
 
MARTIN EDEN 185 
 
 " It is a dreadful accident, I know," Ruth recommenced 
 with a sinking voice. " And I don't know how you will 
 ever forgive me. But I couldn't help it. I did not dream 
 that I loved him until that moment. And you must tell 
 father for me." 
 
 " Would it not be better not to tell your father ? Let 
 me see Martin Eden, and talk with him, and explain. 
 He will understand and release you." 
 
 " JJo ! 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 j'ou 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 j'-ou. 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 Avas 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 I " 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 th.e 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 ray 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 eai'th, 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 him 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. It 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," she insisted. 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 " Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, 
 you can't sell. You have tried, — you know that, — but 
 the editors won't buy it." 
 
 " Give me time, dear," he pleaded. " The hack-work is 
 only makeshift, and I don't take it seriously. Give me 
 two years. I shall succeed in that time, and the editors 
 will be glad to buy my good work. I know what I am 
 saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; 
 I know what literature is, now; I know the average rot that 
 is poured out by a lot of little men; and I know that at 
 the end of two years I shall be on the highroad to success. 
 As for business, I shall never succeed at it. I am not in 
 sympathy with it. It strikes me as dull, and stupid, and 
 mercenary, and tricky. Anyway I am not adapted for it. 
 I'd never get beyond a clerkship, and how could you and I 
 be happy on the paltry earnings of a clerk? I want the 
 best of everything in the world for you, and the only time 
 when I won't want it will be when there is something 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 anywhere between fifty and a hun- 
 dred thousand dollars — sometimes more and sometime* 
 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 v/orld. It was love that had worked 
 the revolution in him, changing him from au 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 ^elf-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, twi .-taring 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 haU 
 retreated with it to his room and slung it aloft. ' \ 
 
 A small closet contained his clothes and the books h^ 
 had accumulated and for which there was no room on thet , 
 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 the sheer and bore off 
 to the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was 
 the»bed, the other the table. When the one chair in the 
 room was at its usual place before the table, the canal was 
 unnavigable. When the chair was not in use, it reposed on 
 top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when 
 cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even 
 becoming skilful enough to manage a paragraph or two 
 while steak was frying. Also, so small was the little 
 corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting 
 down, to reach anything he needed. In fact, it was ex- 
 pedient to cook sitting down ; standing up, he was too 
 often in his own way. 
 
 In conjuiiction 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, cf 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 
 hnal 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' cliecks 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 tradesmeil, 
 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 discoyered that most of the newspapers printed 
 ;i great deal of what was called " plate " stuff, and he got 
 the address of tlie 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 vers* 
 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 faUed 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 loYe, 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 in any number of pigeonholes of human 
 existence, she thought wilful and most obstinate because 
 she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole, which 
 was the only one she knew. She could not follow the 
 flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her, she 
 deemed him erratic. Nobody else's brain ever got beyond 
 her. She could always follow her father and mother, her 
 brothers and Olney ; wherefore, when she could not follow 
 Martin, she believed the fault lay with him. It was the 
 old tragedy of insularity trying to serve as mentor to the 
 universal. 
 
 " You worship at the shrine of the established," he told 
 her once, in a discussion they had over Praps and 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 read his 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 yritten. 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 — jes,,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 aske^l 
 the question. 
 
MABTIN 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<Barillo?" she queried. 
 
 "All of them — the whole kit and crew." 
 
 " But they are great artists," she protested. 
 
 " They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics 
 and unrealities." 
 
 "But don't you like Barillo's voice ? " Ruth asked. " He 
 is next to Caruso, they say." 
 
 " Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even 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 BariUo, 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 — whj'-, I can't 
 accept it, that's aU. 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 
 her 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 montlw 
 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 M^as 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- 
 lieving 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 I 
 Yes, she remembered the sugar steamers, and he had been 
 on them — well, well, it was a small world. And Wailuku ! 
 That place, too I 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 EDEM 
 
 " 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 — tlie grocer, his sister. Rath, and even 
 
MARTIN EDEN 213 
 
 Maria, to wKom he owed a montli'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 yfSLS 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 lie suddenly felt faint, the sinking 
 feeling accompanied by a strange trembling of the knee;^. 
 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 I As he tore the envelope open, 
 every item of all his debts surged in his brain — 13. 85 
 to the grocer; butcher, $4.00 flat; baker, $2.00; fruit store, 
 $5.00 ; total, 114.85. Then there was room rent, $2.50; 
 another month in advance, 12.50; two months' type-writer, 
 $8.00 ; a month in advance, $4.00; total, $31.85. And 
 finally to be added, his pledges, plus interest, with the 
 pawnbroker — watch, $5.50; overcoat, $5.50; wheel, $7.75; 
 suit of clothes, $5.50 (60 % interest, but what did it 
 matter?) — grand total, $56.10. He saw, as if visible in 
 
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 "f3.85." 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 
 "13.85 " 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 "f2.60." 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; nov/ he 
 could rest. But no, the "12.50" faded away, and in its 
 place burned " 18.00," 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 lie fed he noticed figures printed 
 on the cuffs. It was a new way of marking linen, he 
 thought, until, looking closer, he saw " 13.85 " 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 1 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 
 
 Maetdt Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the 
 morning. It was late afternoon before he came out of his 
 delirium and gazed with aching eyes about the room. 
 Mary, one of the tribe of Silva, eight years old, keeping 
 watch, raised a screech at sight of his returning 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. 
 
 " ' 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 weelks 
 
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. AH 
 about the carriage were gatliered 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. Slie 
 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 dqllars 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 mouth would be too small. That forty-five 
 dollars is just a starter. Wait till I get my stride. 
 Then watch my smolsfe." 
 
 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, tben, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not 
 omit to shave every day. Look how you have scratched 
 my cheek." 
 
 And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter. But 
 she had made one point, and she could not expect to make 
 more than one at a time. She felt a woman's pride in that 
 she had made him stop smoking. Another time she would 
 persuade him to take a position, for had he not said he 
 would do anything she asked c 
 
 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 ijnder 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 violas 
 
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 I^a 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, oAz'a-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 ? " 
 
 " WeU," 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 niglit, 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 au effect mysteri- 
 ously beautiful), saw her to the carriage. The crowd of 
 
230 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared 
 from view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who 
 had abruptly become the most important person on the 
 street. But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria's 
 reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been 
 for her lodger. After that Maria dropped back into her 
 old obscurity and Martin began to notice the respectful 
 manner in which he was regarded by the small fry of the 
 neighborhood. As for Maria, Martin rose in her estima- 
 tion a full hundred per cent, and had the Portuguese 
 grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would 
 have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-and- 
 eighty-five-cents' worth of credit. 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 The sun of Martin's good fortune rose. The day after 
 Ruth's, visit, he received a check for three dollars from a 
 New York scandal weekly in payment for three of his 
 triolets. Two days later a newspaper published in Chicago 
 accepted his " Treasure Hunters," promising to pay ten 
 dollars for it on publication. The price was small, but it 
 was the first article he had written, his very first attempt 
 to express his thought on the printed page. To cap 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 dpUars 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 cashing of it. He bad never been in a bank in 
 his life, much less been in one on business, and he had a 
 naive and childlike desire to walk into one of the big 
 banks down in Oakland and fling down his indorsed 
 check for forty dollars. On the other hand, practical 
 common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer 
 and thereby make an impression that would later result in 
 an increase of credit. Reluctantly Martin yielded to the 
 claims of the grocer, paying his bill with him in full, and 
 receiving in change a pocketful of jingling coin. Also, 
 he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his suit and 
 his bicycle, paid one month's rent on the type-writer, and 
 paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month 
 in advance. This left him in his pocket, for emergencies, 
 a balance of nearly three dollars. 
 
 In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. 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, 
 tlie 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 
 ajid 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 bis 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 ! 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, hoi'se 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 wilfulness 
 of opinion. 
 
 So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his 
 own earnestness, challenging him to speak his mind. As 
 Ruth paused beside them she heard Martin saying : — 
 
 " You surely don't pronounce such heresies in the 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 he 
 was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he 
 saw that he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge. 
 It was a matter only of time, when he would fill in the 
 outline. Then watch out, he thought — 'ware shoal, 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 Avhere you are wrong, or, rather, what 
 weakens your judgments," he said. " You lack biology. 
 It has no place in your scheme of things. — Oh, I mean 
 
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 sesthetic and soeiologfical 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 EDE\ 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 tha,t 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 witli 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 ofQcer 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 pompons', 
 smugly complacent, superior certitude with which they 
 are uttered and the time taken to do it. Why, I could 
 give that man the whole history of the Reformation in 
 the time he took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party 
 had fused with the Democrats. Do you know, he skins 
 his words as a professional poker-player skins the cards 
 that are dealt out to him. Some day I'll show you what 
 I mean.'' 
 
 " I'm sorry you don't like him," was her reply. " He's 
 a favorite of Mr. Butler's. Mr. Butler says he is safe 
 and honest — calls him the Rock, Peter, and says that 
 upon him^any banking institution can well be built." 
 
 " I don't doubt it — from the little I saw of him and 
 the less I heard from him ; but I don't think so much of 
 banks as I did. You don't mind my speaking my mind 
 this way, dear ? " 
 
 " No, no; it is most interesting." 
 
 " Yes," Martin went on heartily, " I'm no more than a 
 barbarian getting my first impressions of civilization. 
 Such impressions must be entertainingly novel to the 
 civilized person." 
 
 " What did you think of my cousins ? " Ruth queried. 
 
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! 1 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 oi 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, 
 lie 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, 
 lie 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 
 hira. 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. Rutli'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 tjiat, 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. Jf only one editor, 
 he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat of 
 pride to write me one cheering line 1 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 
 on the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the \&9t 
 
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 accordingh^, 
 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 
 foi' " Turtle-catching," and that The Acropolis, having 
 agreed to give him five doUai-s 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 Grlohe, 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 77ie 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- 
 fei'cnt 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 
 Part}' the first prize of twenty -five dollars. Which was 
 verj' 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 pp^e of history. 
 
 So Martin thought, and he thought further, tiU 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 
 ca" 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 st .'red Mrs. Morse 
 to belligerence. 
 
 "You surely don't mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is 
 stupid ? " she demanded icily. 
 
 " No more than the average Republican," was the retort, 
 " or average Democrat, either. They are all stupid when 
 they are not crafty, and very few of them are crafty. 
 The only wise Republicans are the millionnaires and their 
 conscious henchmen. They know which side their bread 
 is buttered on, and they know why." 
 
 " I am a Republican," Mr. Morse put in lightly. " Pray, 
 how do you classify me ? " 
 
 " Oh, you are an unconscious henchman." 
 
 " Henchman ? " 
 
 " Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no 
 working-class nor criminal practice. You don't depend 
 upon wife-beaters and pickpockets for your income. You 
 get your livelihood from the masters of society, and 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. Moi-se 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 playfiiUy 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. 
 
 ilarian 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 
 he saw his sister and her betrothed, all the members of 
 his own class and the members of Ruth's class, directing 
 their narrow little lives by narrow little formulas — herd- 
 creatures, 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 f.pparitional procession: Bernard Higginbothani 
 arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt cheek 
 by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in 
 pairs he judged them and dismissed them — judged them 
 by the standards of intellect and morality he had learned 
 from the books. Vainly he asked: Where are the great 
 souls, the great men and women? He found them not 
 among the careless, gross, and stupid intelligences that 
 answered the call of vision to his narrow room. He felt 
 a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for 
 her swine. When he had dismissed the last one and 
 thought himself alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected 
 and unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the 
 stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted coat and the 
 swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had 
 once been he. 
 
 " You were like all the rest, young fellow ," Martin 
 sneered. " Your morality and your knowledge were just 
 the same as theirs. You did not think and act for yourself. 
 Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready made; your 
 acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock 
 of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. 
 You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to, 
 — you know you really despised it, — but because the other 
 fellows patted you on the shoulder. You licked Cheese- 
 Face because you wouldn't give in, and you wouldn't 
 give in partly because you were 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 oi 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 mderwent a swift metamor- 
 phosis. The stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being 
 replaced by milder garments; Oie toughness went out 
 of the face, the hardness out of the eyes; and the face, 
 chastened and refined, was irradiated from an inner life 
 of communion with beauty and knowledge. The 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 glancec'. 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 
 -Sisthetics." 
 
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 
 da)'- 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 comitnit literary 
 suicide. As it is, every storiette, every word of every 
 ^storiette, was a violation of myself, of my self-respect, 
 of my respect for beauty. I tell you it was sickening. 
 I was guilty of sin. And I was secretly glad when the 
 markets failed, even if my clothes did go into pawn. 
 But the joy of writing the 'Love-cycle' ! The creative 
 joy in its noblest form ! That was compensation for 
 everything." 
 
 Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic 
 concerning the creative joy. She used the phrase- — it 
 was on her lips he had first heard it. She had read about 
 it, studied about it, in the university in the course of 
 earning her Bachelorship of Arts ; but she was not 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- 
 sation of editors — " 
 
 " And I'll tell you," he interrupted. " The chief quali- 
 fication of ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. 
 Thejr 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- 
 i:>ublishers, 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 the}' 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- 
 -ir s views was outtressed by the contradiction she found 
 A his contention. 
 
268 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 " feut, 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 aswell, Martin." 
 
 " If I fail ? " He regarded her for a moment an 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 y )u 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 
 3'ou 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 head. 
 
270 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 " No, it is so different from anything I have read. 1 
 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 — ow 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 vou 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 sleep ; 
 
 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, frorn 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 bytthe 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 
 leon 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 cod)- 
 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 3^ou 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 p.nd 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 impopsibilities — " 
 
 " You 1 lave 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 ! " 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 
 
 Maetin 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 re^^ained 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, Juipki.. 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 afternoor. 
 shoppers. Mrs. Higginbotham divined from the grip oa 
 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, b\it 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 tijo 
 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 BeautJ^" 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 moYe- 
 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 j'^our 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 list^ 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 anaemic and feather-brained, and was promptly 
 dismissed from his mind. An hour later he decided that 
 Brissenden was a boor as well, what of the way he prowled 
 about from one room to another, staring at the pictures or 
 poking his nose into books and magazines he picked up 
 from the table or drew from the shelves. Though a stran- 
 ger in the house he finally isolated himself in the midst 
 of tlie 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 excla|[iation 
 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. T];iere 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 
 mail 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 lie 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 Brissendeu knew everything, 
 and in deciding that here was the second intellectual man 
 lie had met. But he noted that Brissenden had what 
 Professor Caldwell lacked — namely, iire, 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 thin lips were like a bugle, from 
 which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases 
 that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry 
 spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet 
 said something more — the poet's word, the transcendental 
 truth, elusive and without words which could express, and 
 which none the less found expression in the subtle and 
 all but ungraspable connotations of common words. He, by 
 some wonder of vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost 
 of empiricism, where was no language for narration, and 
 yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing known 
 words with urknown significances, he conveyed to Mar- 
 tin's conscious ^ess 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- 
 phantlj\ 
 
 " 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 Dutton," Brissenden replied. " Oh, no," he 
 added ; " I am not anything. It was a lucky trick of fate 
 that sent me to a Catholic college for my education. 
 Where did you pick "up what you know ? " 
 
 And while Martin told him, he was busy studying 
 Brissenden, ranging from 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 iine an aquiline nose as Martin had 
 ever seen. There was iiothing remarkable about the size 
 of the eyes. They were neither large nor srtiall, 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 harwh 
 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." 
 
 " Oh, I don't know about that. I invite you now." 
 
 Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if 
 with the intention of departing to the restaurant forth- 
 with. 
 
 Martin's fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was 
 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 coiitrary," 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 pocket 
 and flung a thin volume on the table. " There's a book, 
 by a poet. Read it and keep it." And then, in reply to 
 Martin's protest: "What have I to do with books? I 
 had another hemorrhage this morning. Got any whiskey ? 
 No, of course not. Wait a minute." 
 
 He was off and away. Martin watched his long figure 
 go down the outside steps, and, on turning to close the 
 gate, noted with a pang the shoulders, which had once 
 been broad, drawn in now over the collapsed ruin of the 
 chest. Martin got two tumblers, and fell to reading the 
 book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow's latest collection. 
 
 " No Scotch," Brissenden announced on his return. 
 " The beggar sells nothing but American whiskey. But 
 here's a quart of it." 
 
 " I'll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and well 
 make a toddy," Martin offered. 
 
 " I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow ? " 
 he went on, holding up the volume in question. 
 
 " Possibly fifty dollars," came the answer. " Though 
 he's lucky if he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a 
 publisher to risk bringing it out." 
 
 " Then one can't make a living out of poetry ? " 
 
 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 I 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 
 him on the back and saying, ' Good dog, Fido.' Faugh ! 
 ' The little chattering daws of men,' Richard Realf called 
 them the night he died." 
 
 " Pecking at star-dust," Martin took up the strain 
 warmly; " at the meteoric flight of the master-men. I 
 once wrote a squib on them — the critics, or the reviewers, 
 rather." 
 
 " Let's see it," Brissenden begged eagerly. 
 
 So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of " Star-dust," and 
 during the reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his 
 hands, and forgot to sip his toddy. 
 
 " Strikes me you're a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into 
 a world of cowled gnomes who cannot see," was his 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 ! " 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 i-otten 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, 
 ' 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 ! What in hell's suc- 
 cess if it isn't right there in 3'our 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 — " 
 
 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 mt.de 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 whUe 
 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 
 lihenish 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 loN'cd 
 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 gra^'e 
 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 Maj-ia. 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, aud the man flung past Martin 
 with an angry countenance and went down the corridor, 
 muttering curses and clenching his fists. Martin decided 
 no* 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 ofiice. 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 sucli 
 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 Baj''," 
 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 hj 
 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 tliat 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 mone}-. He 
 remembered, if lie 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 King 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 tliat story all of you like so well. Five 
 dollars, 1 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 printei' 
 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 
 
294 , 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 iirst 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 TranseontinentaVs 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 I 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. AH 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 I " 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 iJhe 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 anotlier. 
 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 rolabed 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 
 
 Aethite 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 Transeontinental," 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 — ' 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 EDEa 
 
 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 Idtchen 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. B ut 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 
 knovir you, but you can't make no rough-house vrith 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 
 
 Beissenden 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 nebulse 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, 
 wlien 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 do 
 you do it?" 
 
 Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out 
 afresh. 
 
 " I shall never write again. I am a dauber in clay. 
 You have shown me the work of the real artificer-artisan. 
 Genius! This is something more than genius. It 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 anotber 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 ftot 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-maMng." 
 
 " 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 denunciar 
 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 profounji 
 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 pawnsliop. 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 he encountered 
 Ruth and her mother. Mrs. Morse was shocked. Even 
 Ruth was hurt, for she had some regard for appearances, 
 and her lover, cheek by jowl with Maria, at the head of 
 that army of Portuguese ragamuffins, was not a pretty 
 sight. But it was not that which hurt so much as what 
 she took to be his lack of pride and self-respect. Further, 
 and keenest of all, she read into the incident the 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 
 lack of consideration for Ruth. On the other hand, he 
 did see Ruth's point of view, after she had explained it ; 
 and he looked upon it as a feminine weakness, such as 
 afflicted all women and the best of women. 
 
CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 " Come on, — I'll show you the real dirt," Brissenden 
 said to him, one evening in January. 
 
 They had dined together in San Francisco, and were 
 at the Ferry Building, returning to Oakland, when the 
 whim came to him to show Martin the "real dirt." He 
 turned and fled across the water-front, a meagre shadow 
 in a flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to keep up 
 with him. At a wholesale liquor store he bought two 
 gallon-demijohns of old port, and with one in each hand 
 boarded a Mission Street car, Martin at his heels burdened 
 with several quart-bottles of whiskey. 
 
 If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he 
 wondered as to what constituted the real dirt. 
 
 " Maybe nobody will be there," Brissenden said, when 
 they dismounted and plunged off to the right into the 
 heart of the working-class ghetto, south of Market Street. 
 " In which case you'll miss what you've been looking for 
 so long." 
 
 "And what the deuce is that?" Martin asked. 
 
 " Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonen- 
 tities ^ found you consorting with in that trader's den. 
 You I ^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 anarcliist 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 
 afiirms 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 oil 
 
 " 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 everj'thing, 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 liere 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 tirst 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 ne-ver 
 printed in the newspapers — the wires and strings and the 
 hidden hands that made the puppets danc^. 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 
 flag. 
 
 " Here's fresh meat for your axe, Kreis," he said ; " a 
 rose-white j'outh 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. 
 Tliey 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 aboiit 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 tiU 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 waj' 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 I It will go I " 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 conditio I, 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, vs^ith sudden panic thought of 
 possible shipwreck, will strive to locate the lift -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 knbw, 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 tbose' who sat in the high places. 
 A Superior Court Judge I 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 psj^chology ; 
 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. 
 Tappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them! 
 ' " 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. Tappers and blatherskites I Tappers 
 and blatherskites I " 
 
 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. 
 
 " Tou are unbearable," she wept. 
 
 But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, 
 " The beasts I 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 mutter- 
 ing, " The beasts I The beasts ! " And she still lay there 
 when he said : " I'll not bother your table again, dear. 
 They do not like me, and it is wrong of me to thrust my 
 objectionable presence upon them. Besides, they are just 
 as objectionable to me. Faugh I 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 
 whUe 1 " 
 
CHAPTER XXXVm 
 
 " 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 j'ou 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 foeman worthy of their intelleat, 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 tliat 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 
 
 OvEK the coffee, in his little room, Martiii 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 come 
 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. 
 
 " 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 Ms 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 I Poke him 1 " 
 
 " I guess I'm getting old," was the answer. " I know I 
 ought, but I really haven't the heart. It doesn't seem to 
 matter." 
 
 " For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged. 
 
 " It's worth considering," Martin replied ; " but it 
 doesn't seem worth while enough to rouse sufficieut 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 I " waS Mar- 
 tin's contribution. j 
 
 " Let me see — where were you born, Mr. .Ed^n ? " 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'U 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. Sh< 
 had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, tha' 
 her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to en 
 able him to live seriously and decently. And now he 
 
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 j'ourself," 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 
 of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger. 
 For the first time Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted 
 by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights. 
 Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned 
 away by the servant who answered the bell. Brissenden 
 lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though 
 Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with 
 his troubles. 
 
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 I 
 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 shaken 
 by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for 
 his sister really was. The true noble men were above 
 pity and compassion. Pity and compassion had been 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 
 
 "Oteedtjb" 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 I Gossip 1 Newspaper misreportsl Surely 
 such things are not stronger than love I ^ 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 EDEN 
 
 upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our 
 pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we 
 have set it for the August number, our July number 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. 
 
 " ' 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 gtow 
 in definiteness he saw that it was a coral reef smoking in 
 the white Pacific surges. Next, in the line of breakers, 
 he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe. In the 
 stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth, 
 dipping a flashing paddle. He recognized him. He was 
 Moti, the youngest son of Tati, the chief, and this was 
 Tahiti, and beyond that smoking reef lay the sweet land 
 of Papara and the chief's grass house by the river's mouth. 
 It was the end of the day, and Moti was coming home 
 from the fishing. He was waiting for the rush of a big 
 breaker whereon to jump the reef. Then he saw himself, 
 sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the 
 past, dipping a paddle that waited Moti's word to dig in 
 like mad when the turquoise wall of the great breaker rose 
 behind them. Next, he was no longer an onlooker but 
 was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out, they were 
 both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the 
 steep face of the flying turquoise. Under the bow the 
 water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was filled 
 with driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long- 
 echoing roar, and the canoe floated on the placid water of 
 
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 
 
 fiad 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 
 pai'ks. 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 dt>wn, 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 Jcjhn 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 gaj'^ety 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- 
 velope 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, vidth ninety-nine 
 brothers of different ages but all of the same size." 
 
 If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she 
 was now in a panic of fear. Her fear was such that it was 
 certitude. She was not suspicious. She was convinced. 
 She looked at Martin in horror, and her heavy limbs shrank 
 under the golden stream as though it were burning her. 
 
 " It's yours," he laughed. 
 
 She burst into tears, and began to moan, " My poor boy, 
 my poor boy ! " 
 
 He was puzzled for a moment. Then he divined the 
 cause of her agitation and handed her the Meredith-Lowell 
 letter which had accompanied the check. She stumbled 
 through it, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes, and 
 when she had finished, said: — 
 
 " An' does it mean that you come by the money 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 s6a ? 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 theta 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 I " 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, an' 
 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 Mm" 
 
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, suigle heart 
 and single hand, so primitive an existence. 
 
 Lizzie tossed her head. 
 
 " Oh, he's nobody," she said. " He's just ben keepin' 
 company with me. 
 
 "I had to, you see," she explained after a pause. "I 
 was gettin' pretty lonesome. But I never forgot." Her 
 voice sank lower, and she looked straight before her. " I'd 
 throw 'm down for you any time." 
 
 Martin, looking at her averted face, knowing that all 
 he had to do was to reach out his hand and pluck her, fell 
 to pondering whether, after all, there was any real worth in 
 refined, grammatical English, and, so, forgot to reply to her. 
 
 " You put it all over him," she said tentatively, with a 
 laugh. 
 
 " He's a husky young fellow, though," he admitted 
 generously. " If they hadn't taken him away, he might 
 have given me my hands full." 
 
 " Who was that lady friend I seen you with that night ? " 
 she asked abruptly. 
 
 " Oh, just a lady friend," was his answer. 
 
 " It was a long time ago," she murmured contemplatively. 
 " It seems like a thousand years." 
 
 But Martin went no further into the matter. He led 
 
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 
 
S62 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 living — I could set them up in a grocery store or some- 
 thing. Anything you want, just name it, and I can fix 
 it for you." 
 
 She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, 
 dry-eyed and motionless, but with an ache in the throat 
 which Martin divined so strongly that it made his own 
 throat ache. He regretted that he had spoken. It seemed 
 so tawdry what he had offered her — mere money — 
 compared with what she offered him. He offered her an 
 extraneous thing with which he could part without a 
 pang, while she offered him herself, along with disgrace 
 and shame, and sin, and all her hopes of heaven. 
 
 "Don't let's talk about it," she said with a catch in 
 her voice that she changed to a cough. She stood up. 
 " Come on, let's go home. I'm all tired out." 
 
 The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly 
 all departed. But as Martin and Lizzie emerged from 
 the trees they found the gang waiting for them. Martin 
 knew immediately the meaning of it.- Trouble was 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 ilurry of combat far behind, and 
 its dumfounded passengers never dreamed that the quiet 
 young man and the pretty working-girl sitting in the 
 corner on the outside seat had been the cause of the 
 row. 
 
 Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the 
 old fighting thrills. But they quickly died away, and 
 he was oppressed by a great sadness. He felt very old — 
 centuries older than those careless, care-free young 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 chat day. 
 
 " I can't — now," she said. 
 
 " Oh, go on," he said jovially. " All you have to do is 
 whistle and he'll come running." 
 
 " I didn't mean that," she said simply. 
 
 And he knew what she had meant. 
 
 She leaned toward him as he was about to say good 
 night. But she leaned not imperatively, not seductively, 
 but wistfully and humbly. He was touched to the heart. 
 His large tolerance rose up in him. He put his arms 
 around her, and kissed her, and knew that upon his own lips 
 rested as true a kiss as man ever received. 
 
 " My God! " she sobbed. " I could die for you. I could 
 die for you." 
 
 She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps. 
 He felt a quick moisture in his eyes. 
 
 "Martin Eden," he communed. "You're not a brute, 
 and you're a damn poor Nietzscheman. You'd marry her if 
 you could and fill her quivering heart full with happiness. 
 But you can't, you can't And it's a damn shame. 
 
 "'A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers,'" he 
 muttered, remembering his Henly. " ' Life is, I think, a 
 blunder and a shame.' It is — a blunder and a shame." 
 
CHAPTER XLIII 
 
 " The Shame of the Sun "was published in October. As 
 Martin cut the cords of the express package and the half- 
 dozen complimentary copies from the publishers spilled 
 out on the table, a heavy sadness fell upon him. He 
 thought of the wild delight that would have been his 
 had this happened a few short months before, and he 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. Yie 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 ne-^t, 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 tliis 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 searstory 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. The Northern Review, after publishing " The Cradle 
 of Beauty," had written him for half a dozen similar 
 essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, 
 had not BurtoWs 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, ho'^fi'ever, received the " Smoke of Joy " col- 
 lection rather dubiously and coldly- The audacity and 
 unconventionality of the storiettes was a shock to bourgeois 
 morality and prejudice ; but when Paris went mad over 
 the immedate translation that was made, the American 
 and English reading public followed suit and bought so 
 many copies that Martin compelled the conservative house 
 of Singletree, Darnley & Co. to pay a flat royalty of 
 twenty-five per cent for a third book, and thirty per 
 cent flat for a fourth. These two volumes comprised all 
 the short stories he had written and which had received, 
 or were receiving, serial publication. "The Ring of 
 Bells " and his horror stories constituted one collection; the 
 other collection was composed of "Adventure," "The Pot," 
 "The Wine of Life," "The Whirlpool," "The Jostling 
 Street," and four other stories. The Lowell-Meredith 
 Company captured the collection of all his essays, and the 
 Maxmillian Company got his " Sea Lyrics " and the "Love- 
 cycle," the latter receiving serial publication in the Ladies' 
 Home Companion after the payment of an extortionate price. 
 
 Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of 
 the last manuscript. The grass-walled castle and the white, 
 coppered schooner were very near to him. Well, at any 
 rate he had discovered Brissenden's contention that 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, he had a feeling that Brissenden had 
 been right, after all. "The Shame of the Sun" had been 
 the cause of his success more than the stuff he had 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. Morse 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 
 
378 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 ypu 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 — foui 
 hundred an' twenty." 
 
 " That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn't 
 it?" 
 
 Higginbotham nodded. 
 
 "Then, if you've no objection, we'll arrange it this 
 way." Martin glanced at Gertrude. " You can have the 
 
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 1 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. " Tlie swine, the swine. " 
 
 When Mackintoshes 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 MachintosKs 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 pl-incipal 
 and if I mentioned it again, he'd punch my Dutch head off. 
 That's what he said — my Dutch head. But he's all right, 
 even if he ain't no business man. He's given me my 
 chance, an' he's all right." 
 
 Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin ; and the 
 more they poured, the more he puzzled. He sat, the guest 
 of honor, at an Arden Club banquet, with men of note 
 whom he had heard about and read about all his life ; and 
 they told him how, when they had read " The Ring of 
 Bells" in the Transcontinental, and "The Peri and the 
 Pearl" in The Hornet, they had immediately picked him 
 for a winner. My God ! and I was hungry and in rags, 
 he thought to himself. Why didn't you give me a dinner 
 then ? Then was the time. It was work performed. If 
 you are feeding me How 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, stoppedMar- 
 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 3'our 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 
 
 Kreis came to Martin one day — Kreis, of the " real 
 dirt" ; and Martin turned to him with relief, to receive the 
 glowing details of a scheme sufficiently wild-catty to 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 
 2 c 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 
 
 amused him. All the magazines were claiming him. 
 WarrtiCi 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. lie 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 I " 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 Ruth was closed and sealed. 
 He felt much in the same way that he would have felt 
 had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry suddenly invaded 
 the Hotel Metropole with a whole week's washing ready 
 for him to pitch into. Several times he was about to 
 speak, and each time he hesitated. 
 
 " No one knows I am here," Ruth said in a faint voice, 
 with an appealing smile. 
 
 " What did you say? " he asked. 
 
 He was surprised at the sound of his own voice. 
 
 She repeated her -^ords. 
 
 " 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. Nohody 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 nestlfed 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 tban 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 ^C'l 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." 
 
 '■'■ Icould die for you! I could die for you!" — Lizzie's 
 words were ringing in his ears. 
 
 " Why didn't you dare it before ? " he asked harshly. 
 " When I hadn't a job ? When I was starving ? When 
 I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same 
 Martin Eden ? That's the question I've been propounding 
 to myself for many a day — not concerning you merely, 
 but concerning everybody. You see I have not changed. 
 
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 
 sonduct 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, rtow. 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 not 
 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 ior her to speak, and then went on. 
 
 " And now you want to renew our love. You want us 
 to be married. You want me. And yet, listen — if my 
 books had not been noticed, I'd nevertheless have been 
 just what I am now. And you would have stayed away. 
 It is all those damned books — " 
 
 " Don't swear," she interrupted. 
 
 Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh 
 laugh. 
 
 "That's it," he said, "at a high moment, when what 
 seems your life's happiness is at stake, you are afraid of 
 life in the same old way — afraid of life and a healthy 
 oath," 
 
MAETIN EDEN 395 
 
 She was stung by Ms words into realization of the 
 juerility 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 1 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 witb mj 
 friends. I will come to you here and now, in free love 
 ,if you wiU, and I will be proud and glad to be with ycu. 
 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 
 hag 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," lie 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 
 rigiit. I'll take you home. We can go out by the 
 servants' entrance. No one will see us. PuU 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 ! 
 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 tbe 
 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- 
 
MAETIN 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 XLVI 
 
 " Sat, Joe," was his greeting to his old-4ime 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 whirlc l him around. 
 
 " Now look here, Joe," he said; " if you act that way, I'lJ 
 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 witli me. I want that laundry business finished 
 first of all. Then you can come back and we'll talk for 
 oldsake'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 a dozen requests for autographs — he knew them 
 at sight; there were prof essional 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 
 communist colonization. There were letters from women 
 seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for en- 
 2d 
 
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 daUy 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 
 Taiohse. 
 
 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 ahurt. 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 EDEN 
 
 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- 
 machine " that had gone wrong, and there was no cure for 
 that except to get away to the South Seas. The trouble 
 was that now, on the verge of departure, he had no desire 
 to go. The South Seas charmed him no more than did 
 bourgeois civilization. There was no zest in the thought 
 of departure, while the act of departure appalled him 
 
MARTIN EDEN 405 
 
 aa a weariness of tlie 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 a#ay. 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 jou. 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 i1^ 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, land the more he saw 
 of the passengers the more he disliked them. Yet he 
 knew that he did them injustice. They were good and 
 kindly people, he forced himself to acknowledge, and in 
 the moment of acknowledgment he qualified — good and 
 kindly like all the bourgeoisie, with all the psychological 
 cramp and intellectual futility of their kind. They bored 
 him when they talked with him, their little superficial 
 minds were so filled with emptiness ; while the boisterous 
 high spirits and the excessive energy of the younger people 
 shocked him. They were never quiet, ceaselessly playing 
 deck-quoits, tossing rings, promenading, or rushing to the 
 rail with loud cries to watch the leaping porpoises and the 
 first schools of flying fish. 
 
 He slept much. After breakfast 'he sought his deck- 
 chair with a magazine he never finished. The printed 
 pages tired him. He puzzled that men found so much 
 to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair. When 
 the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he 
 must awaken. There was no satisfaction in being awake. 
 
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 was 
 
408 MARTIN EDEN 
 
 it worth, after all ? He remembered one of Nietzsclie'a 
 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 wme 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 untU 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 hiin. 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 livei forever ; 
 That dead men i . se 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 ther^ 
 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 anaesthetic. 
 When he strangled, quite involuntarily his arms and legs 
 clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and 
 into the clear sight of the stars. 
 
 The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly 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 fuU. 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 wa- 
 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.