Chapter XI


Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been
finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by
his attempts to write poetry.  His poems were love poems, inspired
by Ruth, but they were never completed.  Not in a day could he
learn to chant in noble verse.  Rhyme and metre and structure were
serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them,
an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great
poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own.  It
was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought
after but could not capture.  It seemed a glow to him, a warm and
trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching, though sometimes he was
rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving them into phrases
that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted across his
vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty.  It was baffling.  He
ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as
everybody gibbered.  He read his fragments aloud.  The metre
marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and
equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he
felt within were lacking.  He could not understand, and time and
again, in despair, defeated and depressed, he returned to his
article.  Prose was certainly an easier medium.

Following the "Pearl-diving," he wrote an article on the sea as a
career, another on turtle-catching, and a third on the northeast
trades.  Then he tried, as an experiment, a short story, and before
he broke his stride he had finished six short stories and
despatched them to various magazines.  He wrote prolifically,
intensely, from morning till night, and late at night, except when
he broke off to go to the reading-room, draw books from the
library, or to call on Ruth.  He was profoundly happy.  Life was
pitched high.  He was in a fever that never broke.  The joy of
creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his.  All the
life about him - the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the
slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr.
Higginbotham - was a dream.  The real world was in his mind, and
the stories he wrote were so many pieces of reality out of his
mind.

The days were too short.  There was so much he wanted to study.  He
cut his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along
upon it.  He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back
to five.  He could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon
any one of his pursuits.  It was with regret that he ceased from
writing to study, that he ceased from study to go to the library,
that he tore himself away from that chart-room of knowledge or from
the magazines in the reading-room that were filled with the secrets
of writers who succeeded in selling their wares.  It was like
severing heart strings, when he was with Ruth, to stand up and go;
and he scorched through the dark streets so as to get home to his
books at the least possible expense of time.  And hardest of all
was it to shut up the algebra or physics, put note-book and pencil
aside, and close his tired eyes in sleep.  He hated the thought of
ceasing to live, even for so short a time, and his sole consolation
was that the alarm clock was set five hours ahead.  He would lose
only five hours anyway, and then the jangling bell would jerk him
out of unconsciousness and he would have before him another
glorious day of nineteen hours.

In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was ebbing low,
and there was no money coming in.  A month after he had mailed it,
the adventure serial for boys was returned to him by THE YOUTH'S
COMPANION.  The rejection slip was so tactfully worded that he felt
kindly toward the editor.  But he did not feel so kindly toward the
editor of the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER.  After waiting two whole
weeks, Martin had written to him.  A week later he wrote again.  At
the end of the month, he went over to San Francisco and personally
called upon the editor.  But he did not meet that exalted
personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of tender years
and red hair, who guarded the portals.  At the end of the fifth
week the manuscript came back to him, by mail, without comment.
There was no rejection slip, no explanation, nothing.  In the same
way his other articles were tied up with the other leading San
Francisco papers.  When he recovered them, he sent them to the
magazines in the East, from which they were returned more promptly,
accompanied always by the printed rejection slips.

The short stories were returned in similar fashion.  He read them
over and over, and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out
the cause of their rejection, until, one day, he read in a
newspaper that manuscripts should always be typewritten.  That
explained it.  Of course editors were so busy that they could not
afford the time and strain of reading handwriting.  Martin rented a
typewriter and spent a day mastering the machine.  Each day he
typed what he composed, and he typed his earlier manuscripts as
fast as they were returned him.  He was surprised when the typed
ones began to come back.  His jaw seemed to become squarer, his
chin more aggressive, and he bundled the manuscripts off to new
editors.

The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own
work.  He tried it out on Gertrude.  He read his stories aloud to
her.  Her eyes glistened, and she looked at him proudly as she
said:-

"Ain't it grand, you writin' those sort of things."

"Yes, yes," he demanded impatiently.  "But the story - how did you
like it?"

"Just grand," was the reply.  "Just grand, an' thrilling, too.  I
was all worked up."

He could see that her mind was not clear.  The perplexity was
strong in her good-natured face.  So he waited.

"But, say, Mart," after a long pause, "how did it end?  Did that
young man who spoke so highfalutin' get her?"

And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made
artistically obvious, she would say:-

"That's what I wanted to know.  Why didn't you write that way in
the story?"

One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories,
namely, that she liked happy endings.

"That story was perfectly grand," she announced, straightening up
from the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her
forehead with a red, steamy hand; "but it makes me sad.  I want to
cry.  There is too many sad things in the world anyway.  It makes
me happy to think about happy things.  Now if he'd married her, and
- You don't mind, Mart?" she queried apprehensively.  "I just
happen to feel that way, because I'm tired, I guess.  But the story
was grand just the same, perfectly grand.  Where are you goin' to
sell it?"

"That's a horse of another color," he laughed.

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

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

"My!  I do hope you'll sell it!"

"Easy money, eh?"  Then he added proudly:  "I wrote it in two days.
That's fifty dollars a day."

He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare.  He would
wait till some were published, he decided, then she would
understand what he had been working for.  In the meantime he toiled
on.  Never had the spirit of adventure lured him more strongly than
on this amazing exploration of the realm of mind.  He bought the
text-books on physics and chemistry, and, along with his algebra,
worked out problems and demonstrations.  He took the laboratory
proofs on faith, and his intense power of vision enabled him to see
the reactions of chemicals more understandingly than the average
student saw them in the laboratory.  Martin wandered on through the
heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he was getting to the nature
of things.  He had accepted the world as the world, but now he was
comprehending the organization of it, the play and interplay of
force and matter.  Spontaneous explanations of old matters were
continually arising in his mind.  Levers and purchases fascinated
him, and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks and
tackles at sea.  The theory of navigation, which enabled the ships
to travel unerringly their courses over the pathless ocean, was
made clear to him.  The mysteries of storm, and rain, and tide were
revealed, and the reason for the existence of trade-winds made him
wonder whether he had written his article on the northeast trade
too soon.  At any rate he knew he could write it better now.  One
afternoon he went out with Arthur to the University of California,
and, with bated breath and a feeling of religious awe, went through
the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics
professor lecturing to his classes.

But he did not neglect his writing.  A stream of short stories
flowed from his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of
verse - the kind he saw printed in the magazines - though he lost
his head and wasted two weeks on a tragedy in blank verse, the
swift rejection of which, by half a dozen magazines, dumfounded
him.  Then he discovered Henley and wrote a series of sea-poems on
the model of "Hospital Sketches."  They were simple poems, of light
and color, and romance and adventure.  "Sea Lyrics," he called
them, and he judged them to be the best work he had yet done.
There were thirty, and he completed them in a month, doing one a
day after having done his regular day's work on fiction, which
day's work was the equivalent to a week's work of the average
successful writer.  The toil meant nothing to him.  It was not
toil.  He was finding speech, and all the beauty and wonder that
had been pent for years behind his inarticulate lips was now
pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.

He showed the "Sea Lyrics" to no one, not even to the editors.  He
had become distrustful of editors.  But it was not distrust that
prevented him from submitting the "Lyrics."  They were so beautiful
to him that he was impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some
glorious, far-off time when he would dare to read to her what he
had written.  Against that time he kept them with him, reading them
aloud, going over them until he knew them by heart.

He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his
sleep, his subjective mind rioting through his five hours of
surcease and combining the thoughts and events of the day into
grotesque and impossible marvels.  In reality, he never rested, and
a weaker body or a less firmly poised brain would have been
prostrated in a general break-down.  His late afternoon calls on
Ruth were rarer now, for June was approaching, when she would take
her degree and finish with the university.  Bachelor of Arts! -
when he thought of her degree, it seemed she fled beyond him faster
than he could pursue.

One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually
stayed for dinner and for music afterward.  Those were his red-
letter days.  The atmosphere of the house, in such contrast with
that in which he lived, and the mere nearness to her, sent him
forth each time with a firmer grip on his resolve to climb the
heights.  In spite of the beauty in him, and the aching desire to
create, it was for her that he struggled.  He was a lover first and
always.  All other things he subordinated to love.

Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his love-
adventure.  The world itself was not so amazing because of the
atoms and molecules that composed it according to the propulsions
of irresistible force; what made it amazing was the fact that Ruth
lived in it.  She was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or
dreamed, or guessed.

But he was oppressed always by her remoteness.  She was so far from
him, and he did not know how to approach her.  He had been a
success with girls and women in his own class; but he had never
loved any of them, while he did love her, and besides, she was not
merely of another class.  His very love elevated her above all
classes.  She was a being apart, so far apart that he did not know
how to draw near to her as a lover should draw near.  It was true,
as he acquired knowledge and language, that he was drawing nearer,
talking her speech, discovering ideas and delights in common; but
this did not satisfy his lover's yearning.  His lover's imagination
had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any kinship
with him in the flesh.  It was his own love that thrust her from
him and made her seem impossible for him.  Love itself denied him
the one thing that it desired.

And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was
bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it
was ever narrower.  They had been eating cherries - great,
luscious, black cherries with a juice of the color of dark wine.
And later, as she read aloud to him from "The Princess," he chanced
to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips.  For the moment
her divinity was shattered.  She was clay, after all, mere clay,
subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or
anybody's clay.  Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed
them as cherries dyed his.  And if so with her lips, then was it so
with all of her.  She was woman, all woman, just like any woman.
It came upon him abruptly.  It was a revelation that stunned him.
It was as if he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen
worshipped purity polluted.

Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began
pounding and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who
was not a spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a
cherry could stain.  He trembled at the audacity of his thought;
but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean,
assured him he was right.  Something of this change in him must
have reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at
him, and smiled.  His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to her lips,
and the sight of the stain maddened him.  His arms all but flashed
out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless life.
She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will fought to
hold him back.

"You were not following a word," she pouted.

Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he
looked into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of
what he felt, he became abashed.  He had indeed in thought dared
too far.  Of all the women he had known there was no woman who
would not have guessed - save her.  And she had not guessed.  There
was the difference.  She was different.  He was appalled by his own
grossness, awed by her clear innocence, and he gazed again at her
across the gulf.  The bridge had broken down.

But still the incident had brought him nearer.  The memory of it
persisted, and in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt
upon it eagerly.  The gulf was never again so wide.  He had
accomplished a distance vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts,
or a dozen bachelorships.  She was pure, it was true, as he had
never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips.  She was
subject to the laws of the universe just as inexorably as he was.
She had to eat to live, and when she got her feet wet, she caught
cold.  But that was not the point.  If she could feel hunger and
thirst, and heat and cold, then could she feel love - and love for
a man.  Well, he was a man.  And why could he not be the man?
"It's up to me to make good," he would murmur fervently.  "I will
be THE man.  I will make myself THE man.  I will make good."

Chapter XII


Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry
the beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his
brain, Martin was called to the telephone.

"It's a lady's voice, a fine lady's," Mr. Higginbotham, who had
called him, jeered.

Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a
wave of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth's voice.  In his
battle with the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the
sound of her voice his love for her smote him like a sudden blow.
And such a voice! - delicate and sweet, like a strain of music
heard far off and faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a
perfect tone, crystal-pure.  No mere woman had a voice like that.
There was something celestial about it, and it came from other
worlds.  He could scarcely hear what it said, so ravished was he,
though he controlled his face, for he knew that Mr. Higginbotham's
ferret eyes were fixed upon him.

It was not much that Ruth wanted to say - merely that Norman had
been going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a
headache, and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and
that if he had no other engagement, would he be good enough to take
her?

Would he!  He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice.  It
was amazing.  He had always seen her in her own house.  And he had
never dared to ask her to go anywhere with him.  Quite
irrelevantly, still at the telephone and talking with her, he felt
an overpowering desire to die for her, and visions of heroic
sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his whirling brain.  He loved her
so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.  In that moment of mad
happiness that she should go out with him, go to a lecture with him
- with him, Martin Eden - she soared so far above him that there
seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her.  It was the
only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty
emotion he felt for her.  It was the sublime abnegation of true
love that comes to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the
telephone, in a whirlwind of fire and glory; and to die for her, he
felt, was to have lived and loved well.  And he was only twenty-
one, and he had never been in love before.

His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from
the organ which had stirred him.  His eyes were shining like an
angel's, and his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly
dross, and pure and holy.

"Makin' dates outside, eh?" his brother-in-law sneered.  "You know
what that means.  You'll be in the police court yet."

But Martin could not come down from the height.  Not even the
bestiality of the allusion could bring him back to earth.  Anger
and hurt were beneath him.  He had seen a great vision and was as a
god, and he could feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot
of a man.  He did not look at him, and though his eyes passed over
him, he did not see him; and as in a dream he passed out of the
room to dress.  It was not until he had reached his own room and
was tying his necktie that he became aware of a sound that lingered
unpleasantly in his ears.  On investigating this sound he
identified it as the final snort of Bernard Higginbotham, which
somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.

As Ruth's front door closed behind them and he came down the steps
with her, he found himself greatly perturbed.  It was not unalloyed
bliss, taking her to the lecture.  He did not know what he ought to
do.  He had seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that
the women took the men's arms.  But then, again, he had seen them
when they didn't; and he wondered if it was only in the evening
that arms were taken, or only between husbands and wives and
relatives.

Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie.  Minnie
had always been a stickler.  She had called him down the second
time she walked out with him, because he had gone along on the
inside, and she had laid the law down to him that a gentleman
always walked on the outside - when he was with a lady.  And Minnie
had made a practice of kicking his heels, whenever they crossed
from one side of the street to the other, to remind him to get over
on the outside.  He wondered where she had got that item of
etiquette, and whether it had filtered down from above and was all
right.

It wouldn't do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had
reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind Ruth and took up his
station on the outside.  Then the other problem presented itself.
Should he offer her his arm?  He had never offered anybody his arm
in his life.  The girls he had known never took the fellows' arms.
For the first several times they walked freely, side by side, and
after that it was arms around the waists, and heads against the
fellows' shoulders where the streets were unlighted.  But this was
different.  She wasn't that kind of a girl.  He must do something.

He crooked the arm next to her - crooked it very slightly and with
secret tentativeness, not invitingly, but just casually, as though
he was accustomed to walk that way.  And then the wonderful thing
happened.  He felt her hand upon his arm.  Delicious thrills ran
through him at the contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed
that he had left the solid earth and was flying with her through
the air.  But he was soon back again, perturbed by a new
complication.  They were crossing the street.  This would put him
on the inside.  He should be on the outside.  Should he therefore
drop her arm and change over?  And if he did so, would he have to
repeat the manoeuvre the next time?  And the next?  There was
something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about and
play the fool.  Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and
when he found himself on the inside, he talked quickly and
earnestly, making a show of being carried away by what he was
saying, so that, in case he was wrong in not changing sides, his
enthusiasm would seem the cause for his carelessness.

As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem.
In the blaze of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her
giggly friend.  Only for an instant he hesitated, then his hand
went up and his hat came off.  He could not be disloyal to his
kind, and it was to more than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was
lifted.  She nodded and looked at him boldly, not with soft and
gentle eyes like Ruth's, but with eyes that were handsome and hard,
and that swept on past him to Ruth and itemized her face and dress
and station.  And he was aware that Ruth looked, too, with quick
eyes that were timid and mild as a dove's, but which saw, in a look
that was a flutter on and past, the working-class girl in her cheap
finery and under the strange hat that all working-class girls were
wearing just then.

"What a pretty girl!" Ruth said a moment later.

Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-

"I don't know.  I guess it's all a matter of personal taste, but
she doesn't strike me as being particularly pretty."

"Why, there isn't one woman in ten thousand with features as
regular as hers.  They are splendid.  Her face is as clear-cut as a
cameo.  And her eyes are beautiful."

"Do you think so?" Martin queried absently, for to him there was
only one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her
hand upon his arm.

"Do I think so?  If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr.
Eden, and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be
fairly dazzled by her, and so would all men."

"She would have to be taught how to speak," he commented, "or else
most of the men wouldn't understand her.  I'm sure you couldn't
understand a quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally."

"Nonsense!  You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your
point."

"You forget how I talked when you first met me.  I have learned a
new language since then.  Before that time I talked as that girl
talks.  Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in
your language to explain that you do not know that other girl's
language.  And do you know why she carries herself the way she
does?  I think about such things now, though I never used to think
about them, and I am beginning to understand - much."

"But why does she?"

"She has worked long hours for years at machines.  When one's body
is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like
putty according to the nature of the work.  I can tell at a glance
the trades of many workingmen I meet on the street.  Look at me.
Why am I rolling all about the shop?  Because of the years I put in
on the sea.  If I'd put in the same years cow-punching, with my
body young and pliable, I wouldn't be rolling now, but I'd be bow-
legged.  And so with that girl.  You noticed that her eyes were
what I might call hard.  She has never been sheltered.  She has had
to take care of herself, and a young girl can't take care of
herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like - like yours, for
example."

"I think you are right," Ruth said in a low voice.  "And it is too
bad.  She is such a pretty girl."

He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity.  And then he
remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his
fortune that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm
to a lecture.

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-
glass, that night when he got back to his room.  He gazed at
himself long and curiously.  Who are you?  What are you?  Where do
you belong?  You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
vulgar, and unbeautiful.  You belong with the oxen and the drudges,
in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches.  There are the
stale vegetables now.  Those potatoes are rotting.  Smell them,
damn you, smell them.  And yet you dare to open the books, to
listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to
speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million
miles beyond you and who lives in the stars!  Who are you? and what
are you? damn you!  And are you going to make good?

He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge
of the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes.  Then he got out
note-book and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations,
while the hours slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of
dawn flooded against his window.

Chapter XIII


It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers
that held forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was
responsible for the great discovery.  Once or twice in the month,
while riding through the park on his way to the library, Martin
dismounted from his wheel and listened to the arguments, and each
time he tore himself away reluctantly.  The tone of discussion was
much lower than at Mr. Morse's table.  The men were not grave and
dignified.  They lost their tempers easily and called one another
names, while oaths and obscene allusions were frequent on their
lips.  Once or twice he had seen them come to blows.  And yet, he
knew not why, there seemed something vital about the stuff of these
men's thoughts.  Their logomachy was far more stimulating to his
intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse.
These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and
fought one another's ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to
be more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.

Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park,
but one afternoon a disciple of Spencer's appeared, a seedy tramp
with a dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the
absence of a shirt.  Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of
many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice,
wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist
workman sneered, "There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert
Spencer is his prophet."  Martin was puzzled as to what the
discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried
with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the
frequency with which the tramp had mentioned "First Principles,"
Martin drew out that volume.

So the great discovery began.  Once before he had tried Spencer,
and choosing the "Principles of Psychology" to begin with, he had
failed as abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky.  There
had been no understanding the book, and he had returned it unread.
But this night, after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a
sonnet, he got into bed and opened "First Principles."  Morning
found him still reading.  It was impossible for him to sleep.  Nor
did he write that day.  He lay on the bed till his body grew tired,
when he tried the hard floor, reading on his back, the book held in
the air above him, or changing from side to side.  He slept that
night, and did his writing next morning, and then the book tempted
him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to everything and
oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth gave to him.
His first consciousness of the immediate world about him was when
Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know if
he thought they were running a restaurant.

Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days.  He wanted
to know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over
the world.  But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had
known, and that he never could have known had he continued his
sailing and wandering forever.  He had merely skimmed over the
surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating
fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations - and
all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly
world of whim and chance.  The mechanism of the flight of birds he
had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but it had never
entered his head to try to explain the process whereby birds, as
organic flying mechanisms, had been developed.  He had never
dreamed there was such a process.  That birds should have come to
be, was unguessed.  They always had been.  They just happened.

And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything.  His
ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless.
The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing,
and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own
intellectual powers.  In similar manner his attempt to study
evolution had been confined to a hopelessly technical volume by
Romanes.  He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had
gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a lot of
little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies.  And
now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but an accepted
process of development; that scientists no longer disagreed about
it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.

And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him,
reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and
presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of
realization that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors
make and put into glass bottles.  There was no caprice, no chance.
All was law.  It was in obedience to law that the bird flew, and it
was in obedience to the same law that fermenting slime had writhed
and squirmed and put out legs and wings and become a bird.

Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and
here he was at a higher pitch than ever.  All the hidden things
were laying their secrets bare.  He was drunken with comprehension.
At night, asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and
awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent
stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered.  At table he
failed to hear the conversation about petty and ignoble things, his
eager mind seeking out and following cause and effect in everything
before him.  In the meat on the platter he saw the shining sun and
traced its energy back through all its transformations to its
source a hundred million miles away, or traced its energy ahead to
the moving muscles in his arms that enabled him to cut the meat,
and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to cut the
meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his
brain.  He was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the
"Bughouse," whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister's
face, nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham's
finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in
his brother-in-law's head.

What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the
correlation of knowledge - of all knowledge.  He had been curious
to know things, and whatever he acquired he had filed away in
separate memory compartments in his brain.  Thus, on the subject of
sailing he had an immense store.  On the subject of woman he had a
fairly large store.  But these two subjects had been unrelated.
Between the two memory compartments there had been no connection.
That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any connection
whatever between a woman with hysterics and a schooner carrying a
weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as
ridiculous and impossible.  But Herbert Spencer had shown him not
only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for
there to be no connection.  All things were related to all other
things from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the
myriads of atoms in the grain of sand under one's foot.  This new
concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself
engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things
under the sun and on the other side of the sun.  He drew up lists
of the most incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded
in establishing kinship between them all - kinship between love,
poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems,
monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas,
cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco.  Thus,
he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it, or
wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a
terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown
goal, but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all
there was to know.  And the more he knew, the more passionately he
admired the universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it
all.

"You fool!" he cried at his image in the looking-glass.  "You
wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you
to write about.  What did you have in you? - some childish notions,
a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great
black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and
an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.
And you wanted to write!  Why, you're just on the edge of beginning
to get something in you to write about.  You wanted to create
beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of
beauty?  You wanted to write about life when you knew nothing of
the essential characteristics of life.  You wanted to write about
the world and the scheme of existence when the world was a Chinese
puzzle to you and all that you could have written would have been
about what you did not know of the scheme of existence.  But cheer
up, Martin, my boy.  You'll write yet.  You know a little, a very
little, and you're on the right road now to know more.  Some day,
if you're lucky, you may come pretty close to knowing all that may
be known.  Then you will write."

He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his
joy and wonder in it.  But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic
over it.  She tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it
from her own studies.  It did not stir her deeply, as it did him,
and he would have been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it
was not new and fresh to her as it was to him.  Arthur and Norman,
he found, believed in evolution and had read Spencer, though it did
not seem to have made any vital impression upon them, while the
young fellow with the glasses and the mop of hair, Will Olney,
sneered disagreeably at Spencer and repeated the epigram, "There is
no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet."

But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that
Olney was not in love with Ruth.  Later, he was dumfounded to learn
from various little happenings not only that Olney did not care for
Ruth, but that he had a positive dislike for her.  Martin could not
understand this.  It was a bit of phenomena that he could not
correlate with all the rest of the phenomena in the universe.  But
nevertheless he felt sorry for the young fellow because of the
great lack in his nature that prevented him from a proper
appreciation of Ruth's fineness and beauty.  They rode out into the
hills several Sundays on their wheels, and Martin had ample
opportunity to observe the armed truce that existed between Ruth
and Olney.  The latter chummed with Norman, throwing Arthur and
Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.

Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was
with Ruth, and great, also, because they were putting him more on a
par with the young men of her class.  In spite of their long years
of disciplined education, he was finding himself their intellectual
equal, and the hours spent with them in conversation was so much
practice for him in the use of the grammar he had studied so hard.
He had abandoned the etiquette books, falling back upon observation
to show him the right things to do.  Except when carried away by
his enthusiasm, he was always on guard, keenly watchful of their
actions and learning their little courtesies and refinements of
conduct.

The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a
source of surprise to Martin.  "Herbert Spencer," said the man at
the desk in the library, "oh, yes, a great mind."  But the man did
not seem to know anything of the content of that great mind.  One
evening, at dinner, when Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the
conversation upon Spencer.  Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned the
English philosopher's agnosticism, but confessed that he had not
read "First Principles"; while Mr. Butler stated that he had no
patience with Spencer, had never read a line of him, and had
managed to get along quite well without him.  Doubts arose in
Martin's mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would
have accepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up.  As
it was, he found Spencer's explanation of things convincing; and,
as he phrased it to himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent
to a navigator throwing the compass and chronometer overboard.  So
Martin went on into a thorough study of evolution, mastering more
and more the subject himself, and being convinced by the
corroborative testimony of a thousand independent writers.  The
more he studied, the more vistas he caught of fields of knowledge
yet unexplored, and the regret that days were only twenty-four
hours long became a chronic complaint with him.

One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up
algebra and geometry.  Trigonometry he had not even attempted.
Then he cut chemistry from his study-list, retaining only physics.

"I am not a specialist," he said, in defence, to Ruth.  "Nor am I
going to try to be a specialist.  There are too many special fields
for any one man, in a whole lifetime, to master a tithe of them.  I
must pursue general knowledge.  When I need the work of
specialists, I shall refer to their books."

"But that is not like having the knowledge yourself," she
protested.

"But it is unnecessary to have it.  We profit from the work of the
specialists.  That's what they are for.  When I came in, I noticed
the chimney-sweeps at work.  They're specialists, and when they get
done, you will enjoy clean chimneys without knowing anything about
the construction of chimneys."

"That's far-fetched, I am afraid."

She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in her gaze and
manner.  But he was convinced of the rightness of his position.

"All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in the world,
in fact, rely on the specialists.  Herbert Spencer did that.  He
generalized upon the findings of thousands of investigators.  He
would have had to live a thousand lives in order to do it all
himself.  And so with Darwin.  He took advantage of all that had
been learned by the florists and cattle-breeders."

"You're right, Martin," Olney said.  "You know what you're after,
and Ruth doesn't.  She doesn't know what she is after for herself
even."

" - Oh, yes," Olney rushed on, heading off her objection, "I know
you call it general culture.  But it doesn't matter what you study
if you want general culture.  You can study French, or you can
study German, or cut them both out and study Esperanto, you'll get
the culture tone just the same.  You can study Greek or Latin, too,
for the same purpose, though it will never be any use to you.  It
will be culture, though.  Why, Ruth studied Saxon, became clever in
it, - that was two years ago, - and all that she remembers of it
now is 'Whan that sweet Aprile with his schowers soote' - isn't
that the way it goes?"

"But it's given you the culture tone just the same," he laughed,
again heading her off.  "I know.  We were in the same classes."

"But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to something,"
Ruth cried out.  Her eyes were flashing, and in her cheeks were two
spots of color.  "Culture is the end in itself."

"But that is not what Martin wants."

"How do you know?"

"What do you want, Martin?" Olney demanded, turning squarely upon
him.

Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.

"Yes, what do you want?" Ruth asked.  "That will settle it."

"Yes, of course, I want culture," Martin faltered.  "I love beauty,
and culture will give me a finer and keener appreciation of
beauty."

She nodded her head and looked triumph.

"Rot, and you know it," was Olney's comment.  "Martin's after
career, not culture.  It just happens that culture, in his case, is
incidental to career.  If he wanted to be a chemist, culture would
be unnecessary.  Martin wants to write, but he's afraid to say so
because it will put you in the wrong."

"And why does Martin want to write?" he went on.  "Because he isn't
rolling in wealth.  Why do you fill your head with Saxon and
general culture?  Because you don't have to make your way in the
world.  Your father sees to that.  He buys your clothes for you,
and all the rest.  What rotten good is our education, yours and
mine and Arthur's and Norman's?  We're soaked in general culture,
and if our daddies went broke to-day, we'd be falling down to-
morrow on teachers' examinations.  The best job you could get,
Ruth, would be a country school or music teacher in a girls'
boarding-school."

"And pray what would you do?" she asked.

"Not a blessed thing.  I could earn a dollar and a half a day,
common labor, and I might get in as instructor in Hanley's cramming
joint - I say might, mind you, and I might be chucked out at the
end of the week for sheer inability."

Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced
that Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he
accorded Ruth.  A new conception of love formed in his mind as he
listened.  Reason had nothing to do with love.  It mattered not
whether the woman he loved reasoned correctly or incorrectly.  Love
was above reason.  If it just happened that she did not fully
appreciate his necessity for a career, that did not make her a bit
less lovable.  She was all lovable, and what she thought had
nothing to do with her lovableness.

"What's that?" he replied to a question from Olney that broke in
upon his train of thought.

"I was saying that I hoped you wouldn't be fool enough to tackle
Latin."

"But Latin is more than culture," Ruth broke in.  "It is
equipment."

"Well, are you going to tackle it?" Olney persisted.

Martin was sore beset.  He could see that Ruth was hanging eagerly
upon his answer.

"I am afraid I won't have time," he said finally.  "I'd like to,
but I won't have time."

"You see, Martin's not seeking culture," Olney exulted.  "He's
trying to get somewhere, to do something."

"Oh, but it's mental training.  It's mind discipline.  It's what
makes disciplined minds."  Ruth looked expectantly at Martin, as if
waiting for him to change his judgment.  "You know, the foot-ball
players have to train before the big game.  And that is what Latin
does for the thinker.  It trains."

"Rot and bosh!  That's what they told us when we were kids.  But
there is one thing they didn't tell us then.  They let us find it
out for ourselves afterwards."  Olney paused for effect, then
added, "And what they didn't tell us was that every gentleman
should have studied Latin, but that no gentleman should know
Latin."

"Now that's unfair," Ruth cried.  "I knew you were turning the
conversation just in order to get off something."

"It's clever all right," was the retort, "but it's fair, too.  The
only men who know their Latin are the apothecaries, the lawyers,
and the Latin professors.  And if Martin wants to be one of them, I
miss my guess.  But what's all that got to do with Herbert Spencer
anyway?  Martin's just discovered Spencer, and he's wild over him.
Why?  Because Spencer is taking him somewhere.  Spencer couldn't
take me anywhere, nor you.  We haven't got anywhere to go.  You'll
get married some day, and I'll have nothing to do but keep track of
the lawyers and business agents who will take care of the money my
father's going to leave me."

Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting
shot.

"You leave Martin alone, Ruth.  He knows what's best for himself.
Look at what he's done already.  He makes me sick sometimes, sick
and ashamed of myself.  He knows more now about the world, and
life, and man's place, and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or
I, or you, too, for that matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and
French, and Saxon, and culture."

"But Ruth is my teacher," Martin answered chivalrously.  "She is
responsible for what little I have learned."

"Rats!"  Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious.
"I suppose you'll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her
recommendation - only you didn't.  And she doesn't know anything
more about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon's
mines.  What's that jawbreaker definition about something or other,
of Spencer's, that you sprang on us the other day - that
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity thing?  Spring it on her, and
see if she understands a word of it.  That isn't culture, you see.
Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, Martin, I won't have any
respect for you."

And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been
aware of an irk in it as well.  It was about studies and lessons,
dealing with the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone
of it conflicted with the big things that were stirring in him -
with the grip upon life that was even then crooking his fingers
like eagle's talons, with the cosmic thrills that made him ache,
and with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all.  He
likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the shores of a strange land,
filled with power of beauty, stumbling and stammering and vainly
trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of his brethren in the
new land.  And so with him.  He was alive, painfully alive, to the
great universal things, and yet he was compelled to potter and
grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he should
study Latin.

"What in hell has Latin to do with it?" he demanded before his
mirror that night.  "I wish dead people would stay dead.  Why
should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead?  Beauty is
alive and everlasting.  Languages come and go.  They are the dust
of the dead."

And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very
well, and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar
fashion when he was with Ruth.  He was only a schoolboy, with a
schoolboy's tongue, when he was in her presence.

"Give me time," he said aloud.  "Only give me time."

Time!  Time!  Time! was his unending plaint.

Chapter XIV


It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and his love for
Ruth, that he finally decided not to take up Latin.  His money
meant time.  There was so much that was more important than Latin,
so many studies that clamored with imperious voices.  And he must
write.  He must earn money.  He had had no acceptances.  Twoscore
of manuscripts were travelling the endless round of the magazines.
How did the others do it?  He spent long hours in the free reading-
room, going over what others had written, studying their work
eagerly and critically, comparing it with his own, and wondering,
wondering, about the secret trick they had discovered which enabled
them to sell their work.

He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead.
No light, no life, no color, was shot through it.  There was no
breath of life in it, and yet it sold, at two cents a word, twenty
dollars a thousand - the newspaper clipping had said so.  He was
puzzled by countless short stories, written lightly and cleverly he
confessed, but without vitality or reality.  Life was so strange
and wonderful, filled with an immensity of problems, of dreams, and
of heroic toils, and yet these stories dealt only with the
commonplaces of life.  He felt the stress and strain of life, its
fevers and sweats and wild insurgences - surely this was the stuff
to write about!  He wanted to glorify the leaders of forlorn hopes,
the mad lovers, the giants that fought under stress and strain,
amid terror and tragedy, making life crackle with the strength of
their endeavor.  And yet the magazine short stories seemed intent
on glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sordid dollar-chasers, and the
commonplace little love affairs of commonplace little men and
women.  Was it because the editors of the magazines were
commonplace? he demanded.  Or were they afraid of life, these
writers and editors and readers?

But his chief trouble was that he did not know any editors or
writers.  And not merely did he not know any writers, but he did
not know anybody who had ever attempted to write.  There was nobody
to tell him, to hint to him, to give him the least word of advice.
He began to doubt that editors were real men.  They seemed cogs in
a machine.  That was what it was, a machine.  He poured his soul
into stories, articles, and poems, and intrusted them to the
machine.  He folded them just so, put the proper stamps inside the
long envelope along with the manuscript, sealed the envelope, put
more stamps outside, and dropped it into the mail-box.  It
travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse of time
the postman returned him the manuscript in another long envelope,
on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed.  There was
no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of
cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and
stuck on the stamps.  It was like the slot machines wherein one
dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had
delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate.
It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he
got chocolate or gum.  And so with the editorial machine.  One slot
brought checks and the other brought rejection slips.  So far he
had found only the latter slot.

It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible
machinelikeness of the process.  These slips were printed in
stereotyped forms and he had received hundreds of them - as many as
a dozen or more on each of his earlier manuscripts.  If he had
received one line, one personal line, along with one rejection of
all his rejections, he would have been cheered.  But not one editor
had given that proof of existence.  And he could conclude only that
there were no warm human men at the other end, only mere cogs, well
oiled and running beautifully in the machine.

He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and he would have
been content to continue feeding the machine for years; but he was
bleeding to death, and not years but weeks would determine the
fight.  Each week his board bill brought him nearer destruction,
while the postage on forty manuscripts bled him almost as severely.
He no longer bought books, and he economized in petty ways and
sought to delay the inevitable end; though he did not know how to
economize, and brought the end nearer by a week when he gave his
sister Marian five dollars for a dress.

He struggled in the dark, without advice, without encouragement,
and in the teeth of discouragement.  Even Gertrude was beginning to
look askance.  At first she had tolerated with sisterly fondness
what she conceived to be his foolishness; but now, out of sisterly
solicitude, she grew anxious.  To her it seemed that his
foolishness was becoming a madness.  Martin knew this and suffered
more keenly from it than from the open and nagging contempt of
Bernard Higginbotham.  Martin had faith in himself, but he was
alone in this faith.  Not even Ruth had faith.  She had wanted him
to devote himself to study, and, though she had not openly
disapproved of his writing, she had never approved.

He had never offered to show her his work.  A fastidious delicacy
had prevented him.  Besides, she had been studying heavily at the
university, and he felt averse to robbing her of her time.  But
when she had taken her degree, she asked him herself to let her see
something of what he had been doing.  Martin was elated and
diffident.  Here was a judge.  She was a bachelor of arts.  She had
studied literature under skilled instructors.  Perhaps the editors
were capable judges, too.  But she would be different from them.
She would not hand him a stereotyped rejection slip, nor would she
inform him that lack of preference for his work did not necessarily
imply lack of merit in his work.  She would talk, a warm human
being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important of all, she
would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden.  In his work she
would discern what his heart and soul were like, and she would come
to understand something, a little something, of the stuff of his
dreams and the strength of his power.

Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of his short
stories, hesitated a moment, then added his "Sea Lyrics."  They
mounted their wheels on a late June afternoon and rode for the
hills.  It was the second time he had been out with her alone, and
as they rode along through the balmy warmth, just chilled by she
sea-breeze to refreshing coolness, he was profoundly impressed by
the fact that it was a very beautiful and well-ordered world and
that it was good to be alive and to love.  They left their wheels
by the roadside and climbed to the brown top of an open knoll where
the sunburnt grass breathed a harvest breath of dry sweetness and
content.

"Its work is done," Martin said, as they seated themselves, she
upon his coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth.  He
sniffed the sweetness of the tawny grass, which entered his brain
and set his thoughts whirling on from the particular to the
universal.  "It has achieved its reason for existence," he went on,
patting the dry grass affectionately.  "It quickened with ambition
under the dreary downpour of last winter, fought the violent early
spring, flowered, and lured the insects and the bees, scattered its
seeds, squared itself with its duty and the world, and - "

"Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical
eyes?" she interrupted.

"Because I've been studying evolution, I guess.  It's only recently
that I got my eyesight, if the truth were told."

"But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical,
that you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub
the down off their beautiful wings."

He shook his head.

"Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before.
I just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that
was just beautiful without rhyme or reason.  I did not know
anything about beauty.  But now I know, or, rather, am just
beginning to know.  This grass is more beautiful to me now that I
know why it is grass, and all the hidden chemistry of sun and rain
and earth that makes it become grass.  Why, there is romance in the
life-history of any grass, yes, and adventure, too.  The very
thought of it stirs me.  When I think of the play of force and
matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel as if I could
write an epic on the grass.

"How well you talk," she said absently, and he noted that she was
looking at him in a searching way.

He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood
flushing red on his neck and brow.

"I hope I am learning to talk," he stammered.  "There seems to be
so much in me I want to say.  But it is all so big.  I can't find
ways to say what is really in me.  Sometimes it seems to me that
all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside
of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman.  I feel - oh, I
can't describe it - I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I
babble like a little child.  It is a great task to transmute
feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in
turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the
selfsame feeling and sensation.  It is a lordly task.  See, I bury
my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils
sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies.  It is a
breath of the universe I have breathed.  I know song and laughter,
and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions
that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I
would like to tell them to you, to the world.  But how can I?  My
tongue is tied.  I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to
describe to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass.  But I
have not succeeded.  I have no more than hinted in awkward speech.
My words seem gibberish to me.  And yet I am stifled with desire to
tell.  Oh! - " he threw up his hands with a despairing gesture -
"it is impossible!  It is not understandable!  It is
incommunicable!"

"But you do talk well," she insisted.  "Just think how you have
improved in the short time I have known you.  Mr. Butler is a noted
public speaker.  He is always asked by the State Committee to go
out on stump during campaign.  Yet you talked just as well as he
the other night at dinner.  Only he was more controlled.  You get
too excited; but you will get over that with practice.  Why, you
would make a good public speaker.  You can go far - if you want to.
You are masterly.  You can lead men, I am sure, and there is no
reason why you should not succeed at anything you set your hand to,
just as you have succeeded with grammar.  You would make a good
lawyer.  You should shine in politics.  There is nothing to prevent
you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made.  And
minus the dyspepsia," she added with a smile.

They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always
to the need of thorough grounding in education and to the
advantages of Latin as part of the foundation for any career.  She
drew her ideal of the successful man, and it was largely in her
father's image, with a few unmistakable lines and touches of color
from the image of Mr. Butler.  He listened eagerly, with receptive
ears, lying on his back and looking up and joying in each movement
of her lips as she talked.  But his brain was not receptive.  There
was nothing alluring in the pictures she drew, and he was aware of
a dull pain of disappointment and of a sharper ache of love for
her.  In all she said there was no mention of his writing, and the
manuscripts he had brought to read lay neglected on the ground.

At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height
above the horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them
up.

"I had forgotten," she said quickly.  "And I am so anxious to
hear."

He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his
very best.  He called it "The Wine of Life," and the wine of it,
that had stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his
brain now as he read it.  There was a certain magic in the original
conception, and he had adorned it with more magic of phrase and
touch.  All the old fire and passion with which he had written it
were reborn in him, and he was swayed and swept away so that he was
blind and deaf to the faults of it.  But it was not so with Ruth.
Her trained ear detected the weaknesses and exaggerations, the
overemphasis of the tyro, and she was instantly aware each time the
sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered.  She scarcely noted the
rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous, at which
moments she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness.
That was her final judgment on the story as a whole - amateurish,
though she did not tell him so.  Instead, when he had done, she
pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the story.

But he was disappointed.  Her criticism was just.  He acknowledged
that, but he had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with
her for the purpose of schoolroom correction.  The details did not
matter.  They could take care of themselves.  He could mend them,
he could learn to mend them.  Out of life he had captured something
big and attempted to imprison it in the story.  It was the big
thing out of life he had read to her, not sentence-structure and
semicolons.  He wanted her to feel with him this big thing that was
his, that he had seen with his own eyes, grappled with his own
brain, and placed there on the page with his own hands in printed
words.  Well, he had failed, was his secret decision.  Perhaps the
editors were right.  He had felt the big thing, but he had failed
to transmute it.  He concealed his disappointment, and joined so
easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize that deep
down in him was running a strong undercurrent of disagreement.

"This next thing I've called 'The Pot'," he said, unfolding the
manuscript.  "It has been refused by four or five magazines now,
but still I think it is good.  In fact, I don't know what to think
of it, except that I've caught something there.  Maybe it won't
affect you as it does me.  It's a short thing - only two thousand
words."

"How dreadful!" she cried, when he had finished.  "It is horrible,
unutterably horrible!"

He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched
hands, with secret satisfaction.  He had succeeded.  He had
communicated the stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain.
It had struck home.  No matter whether she liked it or not, it had
gripped her and mastered her, made her sit there and listen and
forget details.

"It is life," he said, "and life is not always beautiful.  And yet,
perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful
there.  It seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because
it is there - "

"But why couldn't the poor woman - " she broke in disconnectedly.
Then she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out:
"Oh!  It is degrading!  It is not nice!  It is nasty!"

For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still.  NASTY!
He had never dreamed it.  He had not meant it.  The whole sketch
stood before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of
illumination he sought vainly for nastiness.  Then his heart began
to beat again.  He was not guilty.

"Why didn't you select a nice subject?" she was saying.  "We know
there are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason - "

She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following
her.  He was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal
face, so innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity
seemed always to enter into him, driving out of him all dross and
bathing him in some ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft
and velvety as starshine.  WE KNOW THERE ARE NASTY THINGS IN THE
WORLD!  He cuddled to him the notion of her knowing, and chuckled
over it as a love joke.  The next moment, in a flashing vision of
multitudinous detail, he sighted the whole sea of life's nastiness
that he had known and voyaged over and through, and he forgave her
for not understanding the story.  It was through no fault of hers
that she could not understand.  He thanked God that she had been
born and sheltered to such innocence.  But he knew life, its
foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the
slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on
it to the world.  Saints in heaven - how could they be anything but
fair and pure?  No praise to them.  But saints in slime - ah, that
was the everlasting wonder!  That was what made life worth while.
To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise
himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-
dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and
viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and
truth, and high spiritual endowment -

He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.

"The tone of it all is low.  And there is so much that is high.
Take 'In Memoriam.'"

He was impelled to suggest "Locksley Hall," and would have done so,
had not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her,
the female of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment,
creeping and crawling up the vast ladder of life for a thousand
thousand centuries, had emerged on the topmost rung, having become
one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and with power to make him
know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to desire to taste
divinity - him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some amazing
fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless
mistakes and abortions of unending creation.  There was the
romance, and the wonder, and the glory.  There was the stuff to
write, if he could only find speech.  Saints in heaven! - They were
only saints and could not help themselves.  But he was a man.

"You have strength," he could hear her saying, "but it is untutored
strength."

"Like a bull in a china shop," he suggested, and won a smile.

"And you must develop discrimination.  You must consult taste, and
fineness, and tone."

"I dare too much," he muttered.

She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another
story.

"I don't know what you'll make of this," he said apologetically.
"It's a funny thing.  I'm afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but
my intentions were good.  Don't bother about the little features of
it.  Just see if you catch the feel of the big thing in it.  It is
big, and it is true, though the chance is large that I have failed
to make it intelligible."

He read, and as he read he watched her.  At last he had reached
her, he thought.  She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon
him, scarcely breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought,
by the witchery of the thing he had created.  He had entitled the
story "Adventure," and it was the apotheosis of adventure - not of
the adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage
taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and
whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and
nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death
at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous
delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging
insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to
royal culminations and lordly achievements.

It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story,
and it was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and
listened.  Her eyes were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and
before he finished it seemed to him that she was almost panting.
Truly, she was warmed; but she was warmed, not by the story, but by
him.  She did not think much of the story; it was Martin's
intensity of power, the old excess of strength that seemed to pour
from his body and on and over her.  The paradox of it was that it
was the story itself that was freighted with his power, that was
the channel, for the time being, through which his strength poured
out to her.  She was aware only of the strength, and not of the
medium, and when she seemed most carried away by what he had
written, in reality she had been carried away by something quite
foreign to it - by a thought, terrible and perilous, that had
formed itself unsummoned in her brain.  She had caught herself
wondering what marriage was like, and the becoming conscious of the
waywardness and ardor of the thought had terrified her.  It was
unmaidenly.  It was not like her.  She had never been tormented by
womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy,
dense even to the full significance of that delicate master's
delicate allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the
relations of queens and knights.  She had been asleep, always, and
now life was thundering imperatively at all her doors.  Mentally
she was in a panic to shoot the bolts and drop the bars into place,
while wanton instincts urged her to throw wide her portals and bid
the deliciously strange visitor to enter in.

Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict.  He had no doubt
of what it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:

"It is beautiful."

"It is beautiful," she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.

Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere
beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made
beauty its handmaiden.  He sprawled silently on the ground,
watching the grisly form of a great doubt rising before him.  He
had failed.  He was inarticulate.  He had seen one of the greatest
things in the world, and he had not expressed it.

"What did you think of the - "  He hesitated, abashed at his first
attempt to use a strange word.  "Of the MOTIF?" he asked.

"It was confused," she answered.  "That is my only criticism in the
large way.  I followed the story, but there seemed so much else.
It is too wordy.  You clog the action by introducing so much
extraneous material."

"That was the major MOTIF," he hurriedly explained, "the big
underrunning MOTIF, the cosmic and universal thing.  I tried to
make it keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial
after all.  I was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly.
I did not succeed in suggesting what I was driving at.  But I'll
learn in time."

She did not follow him.  She was a bachelor of arts, but he had
gone beyond her limitations.  This she did not comprehend,
attributing her incomprehension to his incoherence.

"You were too voluble," she said.  "But it was beautiful, in
places."

He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he
would read her the "Sea Lyrics."  He lay in dull despair, while she
watched him searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and
wayward thoughts of marriage.

"You want to be famous?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes, a little bit," he confessed.  "That is part of the adventure.
It is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that
counts.  And after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means
to something else.  I want to be famous very much, for that matter,
and for that reason."

"For your sake," he wanted to add, and might have added had she
proved enthusiastic over what he had read to her.

But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that
would at least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was
which he had hinted at.  There was no career for him in literature.
Of that she was convinced.  He had proved it to-day, with his
amateurish and sophomoric productions.  He could talk well, but he
was incapable of expressing himself in a literary way.  She
compared Tennyson, and Browning, and her favorite prose masters
with him, and to his hopeless discredit.  Yet she did not tell him
her whole mind.  Her strange interest in him led her to temporize.
His desire to write was, after all, a little weakness which he
would grow out of in time.  Then he would devote himself to the
more serious affairs of life.  And he would succeed, too.  She knew
that.  He was so strong that he could not fail - if only he would
drop writing.

"I wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden," she said.

He flushed with pleasure.  She was interested, that much was sure.
And at least she had not given him a rejection slip.  She had
called certain portions of his work beautiful, and that was the
first encouragement he had ever received from any one.

"I will," he said passionately.  "And I promise you, Miss Morse,
that I will make good.  I have come far, I know that; and I have
far to go, and I will cover it if I have to do it on my hands and
knees."  He held up a bunch of manuscript.  "Here are the 'Sea
Lyrics.'  When you get home, I'll turn them over to you to read at
your leisure.  And you must be sure to tell me just what you think
of them.  What I need, you know, above all things, is criticism.
And do, please, be frank with me."

"I will be perfectly frank," she promised, with an uneasy
conviction that she had not been frank with him and with a doubt if
she could be quite frank with him the next time.

Chapter XV


"The first battle, fought and finished," Martin said to the
looking-glass ten days later.  "But there will be a second battle,
and a third battle, and battles to the end of time, unless - "

He had not finished the sentence, but looked about the mean little
room and let his eyes dwell sadly upon a heap of returned
manuscripts, still in their long envelopes, which lay in a corner
on the floor.  He had no stamps with which to continue them on
their travels, and for a week they had been piling up.  More of
them would come in on the morrow, and on the next day, and the
next, till they were all in.  And he would be unable to start them
out again.  He was a month's rent behind on the typewriter, which
he could not pay, having barely enough for the week's board which
was due and for the employment office fees.

He sat down and regarded the table thoughtfully.  There were ink
stains upon it, and he suddenly discovered that he was fond of it.

"Dear old table," he said, "I've spent some happy hours with you,
and you've been a pretty good friend when all is said and done.
You never turned me down, never passed me out a reward-of-unmerit
rejection slip, never complained about working overtime."

He dropped his arms upon the table and buried his face in them.
His throat was aching, and he wanted to cry.  It reminded him of
his first fight, when he was six years old, when he punched away
with the tears running down his cheeks while the other boy, two
years his elder, had beaten and pounded him into exhaustion.  He
saw the ring of boys, howling like barbarians as he went down at
last, writhing in the throes of nausea, the blood streaming from
his nose and the tears from his bruised eyes.

"Poor little shaver," he murmured.  "And you're just as badly
licked now.  You're beaten to a pulp.  You're down and out."

But the vision of that first fight still lingered under his
eyelids, and as he watched he saw it dissolve and reshape into the
series of fights which had followed.  Six months later Cheese-Face
(that was the boy) had whipped him again.  But he had blacked
Cheese-Face's eye that time.  That was going some.  He saw them
all, fight after fight, himself always whipped and Cheese-Face
exulting over him.  But he had never run away.  He felt
strengthened by the memory of that.  He had always stayed and taken
his medicine.  Cheese-Face had been a little fiend at fighting, and
had never once shown mercy to him.  But he had stayed!  He had
stayed with it!

Next, he saw a narrow alley, between ramshackle frame buildings.
The end of the alley was blocked by a one-story brick building, out
of which issued the rhythmic thunder of the presses, running off
the first edition of the ENQUIRER.  He was eleven, and Cheese-Face
was thirteen, and they both carried the ENQUIRER.  That was why
they were there, waiting for their papers.  And, of course, Cheese-
Face had picked on him again, and there was another fight that was
indeterminate, because at quarter to four the door of the press-
room was thrown open and the gang of boys crowded in to fold their
papers.

"I'll lick you to-morrow," he heard Cheese-Face promise; and he
heard his own voice, piping and trembling with unshed tears,
agreeing to be there on the morrow.

And he had come there the next day, hurrying from school to be
there first, and beating Cheese-Face by two minutes.  The other
boys said he was all right, and gave him advice, pointing out his
faults as a scrapper and promising him victory if he carried out
their instructions.  The same boys gave Cheese-Face advice, too.
How they had enjoyed the fight!  He paused in his recollections
long enough to envy them the spectacle he and Cheese-Face had put
up.  Then the fight was on, and it went on, without rounds, for
thirty minutes, until the press-room door was opened.

He watched the youthful apparition of himself, day after day,
hurrying from school to the ENQUIRER alley.  He could not walk very
fast.  He was stiff and lame from the incessant fighting.  His
forearms were black and blue from wrist to elbow, what of the
countless blows he had warded off, and here and there the tortured
flesh was beginning to fester.  His head and arms and shoulders
ached, the small of his back ached, - he ached all over, and his
brain was heavy and dazed.  He did not play at school.  Nor did he
study.  Even to sit still all day at his desk, as he did, was a
torment.  It seemed centuries since he had begun the round of daily
fights, and time stretched away into a nightmare and infinite
future of daily fights.  Why couldn't Cheese-Face be licked? he
often thought; that would put him, Martin, out of his misery.  It
never entered his head to cease fighting, to allow Cheese-Face to
whip him.

And so he dragged himself to the ENQUIRER alley, sick in body and
soul, but learning the long patience, to confront his eternal
enemy, Cheese-Face, who was just as sick as he, and just a bit
willing to quit if it were not for the gang of newsboys that looked
on and made pride painful and necessary.  One afternoon, after
twenty minutes of desperate efforts to annihilate each other
according to set rules that did not permit kicking, striking below
the belt, nor hitting when one was down, Cheese-Face, panting for
breath and reeling, offered to call it quits.  And Martin, head on
arms, thrilled at the picture he caught of himself, at that moment
in the afternoon of long ago, when he reeled and panted and choked
with the blood that ran into his mouth and down his throat from his
cut lips; when he tottered toward Cheese-Face, spitting out a
mouthful of blood so that he could speak, crying out that he would
never quit, though Cheese-Face could give in if he wanted to.  And
Cheese-Face did not give in, and the fight went on.

The next day and the next, days without end, witnessed the
afternoon fight.  When he put up his arms, each day, to begin, they
pained exquisitely, and the first few blows, struck and received,
racked his soul; after that things grew numb, and he fought on
blindly, seeing as in a dream, dancing and wavering, the large
features and burning, animal-like eyes of Cheese-Face.  He
concentrated upon that face; all else about him was a whirling
void.  There was nothing else in the world but that face, and he
would never know rest, blessed rest, until he had beaten that face
into a pulp with his bleeding knuckles, or until the bleeding
knuckles that somehow belonged to that face had beaten him into a
pulp.  And then, one way or the other, he would have rest.  But to
quit, - for him, Martin, to quit, - that was impossible!

Came the day when he dragged himself into the ENQUIRER alley, and
there was no Cheese-Face.  Nor did Cheese-Face come.  The boys
congratulated him, and told him that he had licked Cheese-Face.
But Martin was not satisfied.  He had not licked Cheese-Face, nor
had Cheese-Face licked him.  The problem had not been solved.  It
was not until afterward that they learned that Cheese-Face's father
had died suddenly that very day.

Martin skipped on through the years to the night in the nigger
heaven at the Auditorium.  He was seventeen and just back from sea.
A row started.  Somebody was bullying somebody, and Martin
interfered, to be confronted by Cheese-Face's blazing eyes.

"I'll fix you after de show," his ancient enemy hissed.

Martin nodded.  The nigger-heaven bouncer was making his way toward
the disturbance.

"I'll meet you outside, after the last act," Martin whispered, the
while his face showed undivided interest in the buck-and-wing
dancing on the stage.

The bouncer glared and went away.

"Got a gang?" he asked Cheese-Face, at the end of the act.

"Sure."

"Then I got to get one," Martin announced.

Between the acts he mustered his following - three fellows he knew
from the nail works, a railroad fireman, and half a dozen of the
Boo Gang, along with as many more from the dread Eighteen-and-
Market Gang.

When the theatre let out, the two gangs strung along
inconspicuously on opposite sides of the street.  When they came to
a quiet corner, they united and held a council of war.

"Eighth Street Bridge is the place," said a red-headed fellow
belonging to Cheese-Face's Gang.  "You kin fight in the middle,
under the electric light, an' whichever way the bulls come in we
kin sneak the other way."

"That's agreeable to me," Martin said, after consulting with the
leaders of his own gang.

The Eighth Street Bridge, crossing an arm of San Antonio Estuary,
was the length of three city blocks.  In the middle of the bridge,
and at each end, were electric lights.  No policeman could pass
those end-lights unseen.  It was the safe place for the battle that
revived itself under Martin's eyelids.  He saw the two gangs,
aggressive and sullen, rigidly keeping apart from each other and
backing their respective champions; and he saw himself and Cheese-
Face stripping.  A short distance away lookouts were set, their
task being to watch the lighted ends of the bridge.  A member of
the Boo Gang held Martin's coat, and shirt, and cap, ready to race
with them into safety in case the police interfered.  Martin
watched himself go into the centre, facing Cheese-Face, and he
heard himself say, as he held up his hand warningly:-

"They ain't no hand-shakin' in this.  Understand?  They ain't
nothin' but scrap.  No throwin' up the sponge.  This is a grudge-
fight an' it's to a finish.  Understand?  Somebody's goin' to get
licked."

Cheese-Face wanted to demur, - Martin could see that, - but Cheese-
Face's old perilous pride was touched before the two gangs.

"Aw, come on," he replied.  "Wot's the good of chewin' de rag about
it?  I'm wit' cheh to de finish."

Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory
of youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to
maim, to destroy.  All the painful, thousand years' gains of man in
his upward climb through creation were lost.  Only the electric
light remained, a milestone on the path of the great human
adventure.  Martin and Cheese-Face were two savages, of the stone
age, of the squatting place and the tree refuge.  They sank lower
and lower into the muddy abyss, back into the dregs of the raw
beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemically, as atoms
strive, as the star-dust if the heavens strives, colliding,
recoiling, and colliding again and eternally again.

"God!  We are animals!  Brute-beasts!"  Martin muttered aloud, as
he watched the progress of the fight.  It was to him, with his
splendid power of vision, like gazing into a kinetoscope.  He was
both onlooker and participant.  His long months of culture and
refinement shuddered at the sight; then the present was blotted out
of his consciousness and the ghosts of the past possessed him, and
he was Martin Eden, just returned from sea and fighting Cheese-Face
on the Eighth Street Bridge.  He suffered and toiled and sweated
and bled, and exulted when his naked knuckles smashed home.

They were twin whirlwinds of hatred, revolving about each other
monstrously.  The time passed, and the two hostile gangs became
very quiet.  They had never witnessed such intensity of ferocity,
and they were awed by it.  The two fighters were greater brutes
than they.  The first splendid velvet edge of youth and condition
wore off, and they fought more cautiously and deliberately.  There
had been no advantage gained either way.  "It's anybody's fight,"
Martin heard some one saying.  Then he followed up a feint, right
and left, was fiercely countered, and felt his cheek laid open to
the bone.  No bare knuckle had done that.  He heard mutters of
amazement at the ghastly damage wrought, and was drenched with his
own blood.  But he gave no sign.  He became immensely wary, for he
was wise with knowledge of the low cunning and foul vileness of his
kind.  He watched and waited, until he feigned a wild rush, which
he stopped midway, for he had seen the glint of metal.

"Hold up yer hand!" he screamed.  "Them's brass knuckles, an' you
hit me with 'em!"

Both gangs surged forward, growling and snarling.  In a second
there would be a free-for-all fight, and he would be robbed of his
vengeance.  He was beside himself.

"You guys keep out!" he screamed hoarsely.  "Understand?   Say,
d'ye understand?"

They shrank away from him.  They were brutes, but he was the arch-
brute, a thing of terror that towered over them and dominated them.

"This is my scrap, an' they ain't  goin' to be no buttin' in.
Gimme them knuckles."

Cheese-Face, sobered and a bit frightened, surrendered the foul
weapon.

"You passed 'em to him, you red-head sneakin' in behind the push
there," Martin went on, as he tossed the knuckles into the water.
"I seen you, an' I was wonderin' what you was up to.  If you try
anything like that again, I'll beat cheh to death.  Understand?"

They fought on, through exhaustion and beyond, to exhaustion
immeasurable and inconceivable, until the crowd of brutes, its
blood-lust sated, terrified by what it saw, begged them impartially
to cease.  And Cheese-Face, ready to drop and die, or to stay on
his legs and die, a grisly monster out of whose features all
likeness to Cheese-Face had been beaten, wavered and hesitated; but
Martin sprang in and smashed him again and again.

Next, after a seeming century or so, with Cheese-Face weakening
fast, in a mix-up of blows there was a loud snap, and Martin's
right arm dropped to his side.  It was a broken bone.  Everybody
heard it and knew; and Cheese-Face knew, rushing like a tiger in
the other's extremity and raining blow on blow.  Martin's gang
surged forward to interfere.  Dazed by the rapid succession of
blows, Martin warned them back with vile and earnest curses sobbed
out and groaned in ultimate desolation and despair.

He punched on, with his left hand only, and as he punched,
doggedly, only half-conscious, as from a remote distance he heard
murmurs of fear in the gangs, and one who said with shaking voice:
"This ain't a scrap, fellows.  It's murder, an' we ought to stop
it."

But no one stopped it, and he was glad, punching on wearily and
endlessly with his one arm, battering away at a bloody something
before him that was not a face but a horror, an oscillating,
hideous, gibbering, nameless thing that persisted before his
wavering vision and would not go away.  And he punched on and on,
slower and slower, as the last shreds of vitality oozed from him,
through centuries and aeons and enormous lapses of time, until, in
a dim way, he became aware that the nameless thing was sinking,
slowly sinking down to the rough board-planking of the bridge.  And
the next moment he was standing over it, staggering and swaying on
shaky legs, clutching at the air for support, and saying in a voice
he did not recognize:-

"D'ye want any more?  Say, d'ye want any more?"

He was still saying it, over and over, - demanding, entreating,
threatening, to know if it wanted any more, - when he felt the
fellows of his gang laying hands on him, patting him on the back
and trying to put his coat on him.  And then came a sudden rush of
blackness and oblivion.

The tin alarm-clock on the table ticked on, but Martin Eden, his
face buried on his arms, did not hear it.  He heard nothing.  He
did not think.  So absolutely had he relived life that he had
fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street
Bridge.  For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured.
Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming,
sweat pouring down his face, shouting:-

"I licked you, Cheese-Face!  It took me eleven years, but I licked
you!"

His knees were trembling under him, he felt faint, and he staggered
back to the bed, sinking down and sitting on the edge of it.  He
was still in the clutch of the past.  He looked about the room,
perplexed, alarmed, wondering where he was, until he caught sight
of the pile of manuscripts in the corner.  Then the wheels of
memory slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware
of the present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had
won from their pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love
for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal,
who would die of horror did she witness but one moment of what he
had just lived through - one moment of all the muck of life through
which he had waded.

He arose to his feet and confronted himself in the looking-glass.

"And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden," he said solemnly.
"And you cleanse your eyes in a great brightness, and thrust your
shoulders among the stars, doing what all life has done, letting
the 'ape and tiger die' and wresting highest heritage from all
powers that be."

He looked more closely at himself and laughed.

"A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?" he queried.  "Well, never
mind.  You licked Cheese-Face, and you'll lick the editors if it
takes twice eleven years to do it in.  You can't stop here.  You've
got to go on.  It's to a finish, you know."

Chapter XVI


The alarm-clock went off, jerking Martin out of sleep with a
suddenness that would have given headache to one with less splendid
constitution.  Though he slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a
cat, and he awoke eagerly, glad that the five hours of
unconsciousness were gone.  He hated the oblivion of sleep.  There
was too much to do, too much of life to live.  He grudged every
moment of life sleep robbed him of, and before the clock had ceased
its clattering he was head and ears in the washbasin and thrilling
to the cold bite of the water.

But he did not follow his regular programme.  There was no
unfinished story waiting his hand, no new story demanding
articulation.  He had studied late, and it was nearly time for
breakfast.  He tried to read a chapter in Fiske, but his brain was
restless and he closed the book.  To-day witnessed the beginning of
the new battle, wherein for some time there would be no writing.
He was aware of a sadness akin to that with which one leaves home
and family.  He looked at the manuscripts in the corner.  That was
it.  He was going away from them, his pitiful, dishonored children
that were welcome nowhere.  He went over and began to rummage among
them, reading snatches here and there, his favorite portions.  "The
Pot" he honored with reading aloud, as he did "Adventure."  "Joy,"
his latest-born, completed the day before and tossed into the
corner for lack of stamps, won his keenest approbation.

"I can't understand," he murmured.  "Or maybe it's the editors who
can't understand.  There's nothing wrong with that.  They publish
worse every month.  Everything they publish is worse - nearly
everything, anyway."

After breakfast he put the type-writer in its case and carried it
down into Oakland.

"I owe a month on it," he told the clerk in the store.  "But you
tell the manager I'm going to work and that I'll be in in a month
or so and straighten up."

He crossed on the ferry to San Francisco and made his way to an
employment office.  "Any kind of work, no trade," he told the
agent; and was interrupted by a new-comer, dressed rather
foppishly, as some workingmen dress who have instincts for finer
things.  The agent shook his head despondently.

"Nothin' doin' eh?" said the other.  "Well, I got to get somebody
to-day."

He turned and stared at Martin, and Martin, staring back, noted the
puffed and discolored face, handsome and weak, and knew that he had
been making a night of it.

"Lookin' for a job?" the other queried.  "What can you do?"

"Hard labor, sailorizing, run a type-writer, no shorthand, can sit
on a horse, willing to do anything and tackle anything," was the
answer.

The other nodded.

"Sounds good to me.  My name's Dawson, Joe Dawson, an' I'm tryin'
to scare up a laundryman."

"Too much for me."  Martin caught an amusing glimpse of himself
ironing fluffy white things that women wear.  But he had taken a
liking to the other, and he added:  "I might do the plain washing.
I learned that much at sea."  Joe Dawson thought visibly for a
moment.

"Look here, let's get together an' frame it up.  Willin' to
listen?"

Martin nodded.

"This is a small laundry, up country, belongs to Shelly Hot
Springs, - hotel, you know.  Two men do the work, boss and
assistant.  I'm the boss.  You don't work for me, but you work
under me.  Think you'd be willin' to learn?"

Martin paused to think.  The prospect was alluring.  A few months
of it, and he would have time to himself for study.  He could work
hard and study hard.

"Good grub an' a room to yourself," Joe said.

That settled it.  A room to himself where he could burn the
midnight oil unmolested.

"But work like hell," the other added.

Martin caressed his swelling shoulder-muscles significantly.  "That
came from hard work."

"Then let's get to it."  Joe held his hand to his head for a
moment.  "Gee, but it's a stem-winder.  Can hardly see.  I went
down the line last night - everything - everything.  Here's the
frame-up.  The wages for two is a hundred and board.  I've ben
drawin' down sixty, the second man forty.  But he knew the biz.
You're green.  If I break you in, I'll be doing plenty of your work
at first.  Suppose you begin at thirty, an' work up to the forty.
I'll play fair.  Just as soon as you can do your share you get the
forty."

"I'll go you," Martin announced, stretching out his hand, which the
other shook.  "Any advance? - for rail-road ticket and extras?"

"I blew it in," was Joe's sad answer, with another reach at his
aching head.  "All I got is a return ticket."

"And I'm broke - when I pay my board."

"Jump it," Joe advised.

"Can't.  Owe it to my sister."

Joe whistled a long, perplexed whistle, and racked his brains to
little purpose.

"I've got the price of the drinks," he said desperately.  "Come on,
an' mebbe we'll cook up something."

Martin declined.

"Water-wagon?"

This time Martin nodded, and Joe lamented, "Wish I was."

"But I somehow just can't," he said in extenuation.  "After I've
ben workin' like hell all week I just got to booze up.  If I
didn't, I'd cut my throat or burn up the premises.  But I'm glad
you're on the wagon.  Stay with it."

Martin knew of the enormous gulf between him and this man - the
gulf the books had made; but he found no difficulty in crossing
back over that gulf.  He had lived all his life in the working-
class world, and the CAMARADERIE of labor was second nature with
him.  He solved the difficulty of transportation that was too much
for the other's aching head.  He would send his trunk up to Shelly
Hot Springs on Joe's ticket.  As for himself, there was his wheel.
It was seventy miles, and he could ride it on Sunday and be ready
for work Monday morning.  In the meantime he would go home and pack
up.  There was no one to say good-by to.  Ruth and her whole family
were spending the long summer in the Sierras, at Lake Tahoe.

He arrived at Shelly Hot Springs, tired and dusty, on Sunday night.
Joe greeted him exuberantly.  With a wet towel bound about his
aching brow, he had been at work all day.

"Part of last week's washin' mounted up, me bein' away to get you,"
he explained.  "Your box arrived all right.  It's in your room.
But it's a hell of a thing to call a trunk.  An' what's in it?
Gold bricks?"

Joe sat on the bed while Martin unpacked.  The box was a packing-
case for breakfast food, and Mr. Higginbotham had charged him half
a dollar for it.  Two rope handles, nailed on by Martin, had
technically transformed it into a trunk eligible for the baggage-
car.  Joe watched, with bulging eyes, a few shirts and several
changes of underclothes come out of the box, followed by books, and
more books.

"Books clean to the bottom?" he asked.

Martin nodded, and went on arranging the books on a kitchen table
which served in the room in place of a wash-stand.

"Gee!" Joe exploded, then waited in silence for the deduction to
arise in his brain.  At last it came.

"Say, you don't care for the girls - much?" he queried.

"No," was the answer.  "I used to chase a lot before I tackled the
books.  But since then there's no time."

"And there won't be any time here.  All you can do is work an'
sleep."

Martin thought of his five hours' sleep a night, and smiled.  The
room was situated over the laundry and was in the same building
with the engine that pumped water, made electricity, and ran the
laundry machinery.  The engineer, who occupied the adjoining room,
dropped in to meet the new hand and helped Martin rig up an
electric bulb, on an extension wire, so that it travelled along a
stretched cord from over the table to the bed.

The next morning, at quarter-past six, Martin was routed out for a
quarter-to-seven breakfast.  There happened to be a bath-tub for
the servants in the laundry building, and he electrified Joe by
taking a cold bath.

"Gee, but you're a hummer!" Joe announced, as they sat down to
breakfast in a corner of the hotel kitchen.

With them was the engineer, the gardener, and the assistant
gardener, and two or three men from the stable.  They ate hurriedly
and gloomily, with but little conversation, and as Martin ate and
listened he realized how far he had travelled from their status.
Their small mental caliber was depressing to him, and he was
anxious to get away from them.  So he bolted his breakfast, a
sickly, sloppy affair, as rapidly as they, and heaved a sigh of
relief when he passed out through the kitchen door.

It was a perfectly appointed, small steam laundry, wherein the most
modern machinery did everything that was possible for machinery to
do.  Martin, after a few instructions, sorted the great heaps of
soiled clothes, while Joe started the masher and made up fresh
supplies of soft-soap, compounded of biting chemicals that
compelled him to swathe his mouth and nostrils and eyes in bath-
towels till he resembled a mummy.  Finished the sorting, Martin
lent a hand in wringing the clothes.  This was done by dumping them
into a spinning receptacle that went at a rate of a few thousand
revolutions a minute, tearing the matter from the clothes by
centrifugal force.  Then Martin began to alternate between the
dryer and the wringer, between times "shaking out" socks and
stockings.  By the afternoon, one feeding and one, stacking up,
they were running socks and stockings through the mangle while the
irons were heating.  Then it was hot irons and underclothes till
six o'clock, at which time Joe shook his head dubiously.

"Way behind," he said.  "Got to work after supper."  And after
supper they worked until ten o'clock, under the blazing electric
lights, until the last piece of under-clothing was ironed and
folded away in the distributing room.  It was a hot California
night, and though the windows were thrown wide, the room, with its
red-hot ironing-stove, was a furnace.  Martin and Joe, down to
undershirts, bare armed, sweated and panted for air.

"Like trimming cargo in the tropics," Martin said, when they went
upstairs.

"You'll do," Joe answered.  "You take hold like a good fellow.  If
you keep up the pace, you'll be on thirty dollars only one month.
The second month you'll be gettin' your forty.  But don't tell me
you never ironed before.  I know better."

"Never ironed a rag in my life, honestly, until to-day," Martin
protested.

He was surprised at his weariness when he act into his room,
forgetful of the fact that he had been on his feet and working
without let up for fourteen hours.  He set the alarm clock at six,
and measured back five hours to one o'clock.  He could read until
then.  Slipping off his shoes, to ease his swollen feet, he sat
down at the table with his books.  He opened Fiske, where he had
left off to read.  But he found trouble began to read it through a
second time.  Then he awoke, in pain from his stiffened muscles and
chilled by the mountain wind that had begun to blow in through the
window.  He looked at the clock.  It marked two.  He had been
asleep four hours.  He pulled off his clothes and crawled into bed,
where he was asleep the moment after his head touched the pillow.

Tuesday was a day of similar unremitting toil.  The speed with
which Joe worked won Martin's admiration.  Joe was a dozen of
demons for work.  He was keyed up to concert pitch, and there was
never a moment in the long day when he was not fighting for
moments.  He concentrated himself upon his work and upon how to
save time, pointing out to Martin where he did in five motions what
could be done in three, or in three motions what could be done in
two.  "Elimination of waste motion," Martin phrased it as he
watched and patterned after.  He was a good workman himself, quick
and deft, and it had always been a point of pride with him that no
man should do any of his work for him or outwork him.  As a result,
he concentrated with a similar singleness of purpose, greedily
snapping up the hints and suggestions thrown out by his working
mate.  He "rubbed out' collars and cuffs, rubbing the starch out
from between the double thicknesses of linen so that there would be
no blisters when it came to the ironing, and doing it at a pace
that elicited Joe's praise.

There was never an interval when something was not at hand to be
done.  Joe waited for nothing, waited on nothing, and went on the
jump from task to task.  They starched two hundred white shirts,
with a single gathering movement seizing a shirt so that the
wristbands, neckband, yoke, and bosom protruded beyond the circling
right hand.  At the same moment the left hand held up the body of
the shirt so that it would not enter the starch, and at the moment
the right hand dipped into the starch - starch so hot that, in
order to wring it out, their hands had to thrust, and thrust
continually, into a bucket of cold water.  And that night they
worked till half-past ten, dipping "fancy starch" -  all the
frilled and airy, delicate wear of ladies.

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

"And me out of a job," Joe answered seriously.  "I don't know
nothin' but laundrying."

"And you know it well."

"I ought to.  Began in the Contra Costa in Oakland when I was
eleven, shakin' out for the mangle.  That was eighteen years ago,
an' I've never done a tap of anything else.  But this job is the
fiercest I ever had.  Ought to be one more man on it at least.  We
work to-morrow night.  Always run the mangle Wednesday nights -
collars an' cuffs."

Martin set his alarm, drew up to the table, and opened Fiske.  He
did not finish the first paragraph.  The lines blurred and ran
together and his head nodded.  He walked up and down, batting his
head savagely with his fists, but he could not conquer the numbness
of sleep.  He propped the book before him, and propped his eyelids
with his fingers, and fell asleep with his eyes wide open.  Then he
surrendered, and, scarcely conscious of what he did, got off his
clothes and into bed.  He slept seven hours of heavy, animal-like
sleep, and awoke by the alarm, feeling that he had not had enough.

"Doin' much readin'?" Joe asked.

Martin shook his head.

"Never mind.  We got to run the mangle to-night, but Thursday we'll
knock off at six.  That'll give you a chance."

Martin washed woollens that day, by hand, in a large barrel, with
strong soft-soap, by means of a hub from a wagon wheel, mounted on
a plunger-pole that was attached to a spring-pole overhead.

"My invention," Joe said proudly.  "Beats a washboard an' your
knuckles, and, besides, it saves at least fifteen minutes in the
week, an' fifteen minutes ain't to be sneezed at in this shebang."

Running the collars and cuffs through the mangle was also Joe's
idea.  That night, while they toiled on under the electric lights,
he explained it.

"Something no laundry ever does, except this one.  An' I got to do
it if I'm goin' to get done Saturday afternoon at three o'clock.
But I know how, an' that's the difference.  Got to have right heat,
right pressure, and run 'em through three times.  Look at that!"
He held a cuff aloft.  "Couldn't do it better by hand or on a
tiler."

Thursday, Joe was in a rage.  A bundle of extra "fancy starch" had
come in.

"I'm goin' to quit," he announced.  "I won't stand for it.  I'm
goin' to quit it cold.  What's the good of me workin' like a slave
all week, a-savin' minutes, an' them a-comin' an' ringin' in fancy-
starch extras on me?  This is a free country, an' I'm to tell that
fat Dutchman what I think of him.  An' I won't tell 'm in French.
Plain United States is good enough for me.  Him a-ringin' in fancy
starch extras!"

"We got to work to-night," he said the next moment, reversing his
judgment and surrendering to fate.

And Martin did no reading that night.  He had seen no daily paper
all week, and, strangely to him, felt no desire to see one.  He was
not interested in the news.  He was too tired and jaded to be
interested in anything, though he planned to leave Saturday
afternoon, if they finished at three, and ride on his wheel to
Oakland.  It was seventy miles, and the same distance back on
Sunday afternoon would leave him anything but rested for the second
week's work.  It would have been easier to go on the train, but the
round trip was two dollars and a half, and he was intent on saving
money.

Chapter XVII


Martin learned to do many things.  In the course of the first week,
in one afternoon, he and Joe accounted for the two hundred white
shirts.  Joe ran the tiler, a machine wherein a hot iron was hooked
on a steel string which furnished the pressure.  By this means he
ironed the yoke, wristbands, and neckband, setting the latter at
right angles to the shirt, and put the glossy finish on the bosom.
As fast as he finished them, he flung the shirts on a rack between
him and Martin, who caught them up and "backed" them.  This task
consisted of ironing all the unstarched portions of the shirts.

It was exhausting work, carried on, hour after hour, at top speed.
Out on the broad verandas of the hotel, men and women, in cool
white, sipped iced drinks and kept their circulation down.  But in
the laundry the air was sizzling.  The huge stove roared red hot
and white hot, while the irons, moving over the damp cloth, sent up
clouds of steam.  The heat of these irons was different from that
used by housewives.  An iron that stood the ordinary test of a wet
finger was too cold for Joe and Martin, and such test was useless.
They went wholly by holding the irons close to their cheeks,
gauging the heat by some secret mental process that Martin admired
but could not understand.  When the fresh irons proved too hot,
they hooked them on iron rods and dipped them into cold water.
This again required a precise and subtle judgment.  A fraction of a
second too long in the water and the fine and silken edge of the
proper heat was lost, and Martin found time to marvel at the
accuracy he developed - an automatic accuracy, founded upon
criteria that were machine-like and unerring.

But there was little time in which to marvel.  All Martin's
consciousness was concentrated in the work.  Ceaselessly active,
head and hand, an intelligent machine, all that constituted him a
man was devoted to furnishing that intelligence.  There was no room
in his brain for the universe and its mighty problems.  All the
broad and spacious corridors of his mind were closed and
hermetically sealed.  The echoing chamber of his soul was a narrow
room, a conning tower, whence were directed his arm and shoulder
muscles, his ten nimble fingers, and the swift-moving iron along
its steaming path in broad, sweeping strokes, just so many strokes
and no more, just so far with each stroke and not a fraction of an
inch farther, rushing along interminable sleeves, sides, backs, and
tails, and tossing the finished shirts, without rumpling, upon the
receiving frame.  And even as his hurrying soul tossed, it was
reaching for another shirt.  This went on, hour after hour, while
outside all the world swooned under the overhead California sun.
But there was no swooning in that superheated room.  The cool
guests on the verandas needed clean linen.

The sweat poured from Martin.  He drank enormous quantities of
water, but so great was the heat of the day and of his exertions,
that the water sluiced through the interstices of his flesh and out
at all his pores.  Always, at sea, except at rare intervals, the
work he performed had given him ample opportunity to commune with
himself.  The master of the ship had been lord of Martin's time;
but here the manager of the hotel was lord of Martin's thoughts as
well.  He had no thoughts save for the nerve-racking, body-
destroying toil.  Outside of that it was impossible to think.  He
did not know that he loved Ruth.  She did not even exist, for his
driven soul had no time to remember her.  It was only when he
crawled to bed at night, or to breakfast in the morning, that she
asserted herself to him in fleeting memories.

"This is hell, ain't it?" Joe remarked once.

Martin nodded, but felt a rasp of irritation.  The statement had
been obvious and unnecessary.  They did not talk while they worked.
Conversation threw them out of their stride, as it did this time,
compelling Martin to miss a stroke of his iron and to make two
extra motions before he caught his stride again.

On Friday morning the washer ran.  Twice a week they had to put
through hotel linen, - the sheets, pillow-slips, spreads, table-
cloths, and napkins.  This finished, they buckled down to "fancy
starch."  It was slow work, fastidious and delicate, and Martin did
not learn it so readily.  Besides, he could not take chances.
Mistakes were disastrous.

"See that," Joe said, holding up a filmy corset-cover that he could
have crumpled from view in one hand.  "Scorch that an' it's twenty
dollars out of your wages."

So Martin did not scorch that, and eased down on his muscular
tension, though nervous tension rose higher than ever, and he
listened sympathetically to the other's blasphemies as he toiled
and suffered over the beautiful things that women wear when they do
not have to do their own laundrying.  "Fancy starch" was Martin's
nightmare, and it was Joe's, too.  It was "fancy starch" that
robbed them of their hard-won minutes.  They toiled at it all day.
At seven in the evening they broke off to run the hotel linen
through the mangle.  At ten o'clock, while the hotel guests slept,
the two laundrymen sweated on at "fancy starch" till midnight, till
one, till two.  At half-past two they knocked off.

Saturday morning it was "fancy starch," and odds and ends, and at
three in the afternoon the week's work was done.

"You ain't a-goin' to ride them seventy miles into Oakland on top
of this?" Joe demanded, as they sat on the stairs and took a
triumphant smoke.

"Got to," was the answer.

"What are you goin' for? - a girl?"

"No; to save two and a half on the railroad ticket.  I want to
renew some books at the library."

"Why don't you send 'em down an' up by express?  That'll cost only
a quarter each way."

Martin considered it.

"An' take a rest to-morrow," the other urged.  "You need it.  I
know I do.  I'm plumb tuckered out."

He looked it.  Indomitable, never resting, fighting for seconds and
minutes all week, circumventing delays and crushing down obstacles,
a fount of resistless energy, a high-driven human motor, a demon
for work, now that he had accomplished the week's task he was in a
state of collapse.  He was worn and haggard, and his handsome face
drooped in lean exhaustion.  He pulled his cigarette spiritlessly,
and his voice was peculiarly dead and monotonous.  All the snap and
fire had gone out of him.  His triumph seemed a sorry one.

"An' next week we got to do it all over again," he said sadly.
"An' what's the good of it all, hey?  Sometimes I wish I was a
hobo.  They don't work, an' they get their livin'.  Gee!  I wish I
had a glass of beer; but I can't get up the gumption to go down to
the village an' get it.  You'll stay over, an' send your books dawn
by express, or else you're a damn fool."

"But what can I do here all day Sunday?" Martin asked.

"Rest.  You don't know how tired you are.  Why, I'm that tired
Sunday I can't even read the papers.  I was sick once - typhoid.
In the hospital two months an' a half.  Didn't do a tap of work all
that time.  It was beautiful."

"It was beautiful," he repeated dreamily, a minute later.

Martin took a bath, after which he found that the head laundryman
had disappeared.  Most likely he had gone for a glass of beer
Martin decided, but the half-mile walk down to the village to find
out seemed a long journey to him.  He lay on his bed with his shoes
off, trying to make up his mind.  He did not reach out for a book.
He was too tired to feel sleepy, and he lay, scarcely thinking, in
a semi-stupor of weariness, until it was time for supper.  Joe did
not appear for that function, and when Martin heard the gardener
remark that most likely he was ripping the slats off the bar,
Martin understood.  He went to bed immediately afterward, and in
the morning decided that he was greatly rested.  Joe being still
absent, Martin procured a Sunday paper and lay down in a shady nook
under the trees.  The morning passed, he knew not how.  He did not
sleep, nobody disturbed him, and he did not finish the paper.  He
came back to it in the afternoon, after dinner, and fell asleep
over it.

So passed Sunday, and Monday morning he was hard at work, sorting
clothes, while Joe, a towel bound tightly around his head, with
groans and blasphemies, was running the washer and mixing soft-
soap.

"I simply can't help it," he explained.  "I got to drink when
Saturday night comes around."

Another week passed, a great battle that continued under the
electric lights each night and that culminated on Saturday
afternoon at three o'clock, when Joe tasted his moment of wilted
triumph and then drifted down to the village to forget.  Martin's
Sunday was the same as before.  He slept in the shade of the trees,
toiled aimlessly through the newspaper, and spent long hours lying
on his back, doing nothing, thinking nothing.  He was too dazed to
think, though he was aware that he did not like himself.  He was
self-repelled, as though he had undergone some degradation or was
intrinsically foul.  All that was god-like in him was blotted out.
The spur of ambition was blunted; he had no vitality with which to
feel the prod of it.  He was dead.  His soul seemed dead.  He was a
beast, a work-beast.  He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting down
through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky
whisper as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling
to disclosure.  Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste
was bad in his mouth.  A black screen was drawn across his mirror
of inner vision, and fancy lay in a darkened sick-room where
entered no ray of light.  He envied Joe, down in the village,
rampant, tearing the slats off the bar, his brain gnawing with
maggots, exulting in maudlin ways over maudlin things,
fantastically and gloriously drunk and forgetful of Monday morning
and the week of deadening toil to come.

A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life.
He was oppressed by a sense of failure.  There was reason for the
editors refusing his stuff.  He could see that clearly now, and
laugh at himself and the dreams he had dreamed.  Ruth returned his
"Sea Lyrics" by mail.  He read her letter apathetically.  She did
her best to say how much she liked them and that they were
beautiful.  But she could not lie, and she could not disguise the
truth from herself.  She knew they were failures, and he read her
disapproval in every perfunctory and unenthusiastic line of her
letter.  And she was right.  He was firmly convinced of it as he
read the poems over.  Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and
as he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had
had in mind when he wrote them.  His audacities of phrase struck
him as grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities,
and everything was absurd, unreal, and impossible.  He would have
burned the "Sea Lyrics" on the spot, had his will been strong
enough to set them aflame.  There was the engine-room, but the
exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not worth while.  All
his exertion was used in washing other persons' clothes.  He did
not have any left for private affairs.

He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together
and answer Ruth's letter.  But Saturday afternoon, after work was
finished and he had taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered
him.  "I guess I'll go down and see how Joe's getting on," was the
way he put it to himself; and in the same moment he knew that he
lied.  But he did not have the energy to consider the lie.  If he
had had the energy, he would have refused to consider the lie,
because he wanted to forget.  He started for the village slowly and
casually, increasing his pace in spite of himself as he neared the
saloon.

"I thought you was on the water-wagon," was Joe's greeting.

Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey,
filling his own glass brimming before he passed the bottle.

"Don't take all night about it," he said roughly.

The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin refused to wait
for him, tossing the glass off in a gulp and refilling it.

"Now, I can wait for you," he said grimly; "but hurry up."

Joe hurried, and they drank together.

"The work did it, eh?" Joe queried.

Martin refused to discuss the matter.

"It's fair hell, I know," the other went on, "but I kind of hate to
see you come off the wagon, Mart.  Well, here's how!"

Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and
awing the barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery
blue eyes and hair parted in the middle.

"It's something scandalous the way they work us poor devils," Joe
was remarking.  "If I didn't bowl up, I'd break loose an' burn down
the shebang.  My bowlin' up is all that saves 'em, I can tell you
that."

But Martin made no answer.  A few more drinks, and in his brain he
felt the maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl.  Ah, it was
living, the first breath of life he had breathed in three weeks.
His dreams came back to him.  Fancy came out of the darkened room
and lured him on, a thing of flaming brightness.  His mirror of
vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of
imagery.  Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand in hand, and all
power was his.  He tried to tell it to Joe, but Joe had visions of
his own, infallible schemes whereby he would escape the slavery of
laundry-work and become himself the owner of a great steam laundry.

"I tell yeh, Mart, they won't be no kids workin' in my laundry -
not on yer life.  An' they won't be no workin' a livin' soul after
six P.M.  You hear me talk!  They'll be machinery enough an' hands
enough to do it all in decent workin' hours, an' Mart, s'help me,
I'll make yeh superintendent of the shebang - the whole of it, all
of it.  Now here's the scheme.  I get on the water-wagon an' save
my money for two years - save an' then - "

But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper,
until that worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers
who, coming in, accepted Martin's invitation.  Martin dispensed
royal largess, inviting everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and
the gardener's assistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the
furtive hobo who slid in like a shadow and like a shadow hovered at
the end of the bar.

Chapter XVIII


Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to
the washer.

"I say," he began.

"Don't talk to me," Martin snarled.

"I'm sorry, Joe," he said at noon, when they knocked off for
dinner.

Tears came into the other's eyes.

"That's all right, old man," he said.  "We're in hell, an' we can't
help ourselves.  An', you know, I kind of like you a whole lot.
That's what made it - hurt.  I cottoned to you from the first."

Martin shook his hand.

"Let's quit," Joe suggested.  "Let's chuck it, an' go hoboin'.  I
ain't never tried it, but it must be dead easy.  An' nothin' to do.
Just think of it, nothin' to do.  I was sick once, typhoid, in the
hospital, an' it was beautiful.  I wish I'd get sick again."

The week dragged on.  The hotel was full, and extra "fancy starch"
poured in upon them.  They performed prodigies of valor.  They
fought late each night under the electric lights, bolted their
meals, and even got in a half hour's work before breakfast.  Martin
no longer took his cold baths.  Every moment was drive, drive,
drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd of moments, herding them
carefully, never losing one, counting them over like a miser
counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish
machine, aided ably by that other machine that thought of itself as
once having been one Martin Eden, a man.

But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think.  The
house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its
shadowy caretaker.  He was a shadow.  Joe was right.  They were
both shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil.  Or was it a
dream?  Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the
heavy irons back and forth over the white garments, it came to him
that it was a dream.  In a short while, or maybe after a thousand
years or so, he would awake, in his little room with the ink-
stained table, and take up his writing where he had left off the
day before.  Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the awakening
would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down out
of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the
tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind
blowing through his flesh.

Came Saturday and its hollow victory at three o'clock.

"Guess I'll go down an' get a glass of beer," Joe said, in the
queer, monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.

Martin seemed suddenly to wake up.  He opened the kit bag and oiled
his wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the
bearings.  Joe was halfway down to the saloon when Martin passed
by, bending low over the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-
six gear with rhythmic strength, his face set for seventy miles of
road and grade and dust.  He slept in Oakland that night, and on
Sunday covered the seventy miles back.  And on Monday morning,
weary, he began the new week's work, but he had kept sober.

A fifth week passed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled
as a machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a
glimmering bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to
scorch off the hundred and forty miles.  But this was not rest.  It
was super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering
bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life.  At
the end of the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to
resist, he drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life
and found life until Monday morning.

Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty
miles, obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the
numbness of still greater exertion.  At the end of three months he
went down a third time to the village with Joe.  He forgot, and
lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast
he was making of himself - not by the drink, but by the work.  The
drink was an effect, not a cause.  It followed inevitably upon the
work, as the night follows upon the day.  Not by becoming a toil-
beast could he win to the heights, was the message the whiskey
whispered to him, and he nodded approbation.  The whiskey was wise.
It told secrets on itself.

He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and
while they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and
scribbled.

"A telegram, Joe," he said.  "Read it."

Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer.  But what he read
seemed to sober him.  He looked at the other reproachfully, tears
oozing into his eyes and down his cheeks.

"You ain't goin' back on me, Mart?" he queried hopelessly.

Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the
message to the telegraph office.

"Hold on," Joe muttered thickly.  "Lemme think."

He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin's arm
around him and supporting him, while he thought.

"Make that two laundrymen," he said abruptly.  "Here, lemme fix
it."

"What are you quitting for?" Martin demanded.

"Same reason as you."

"But I'm going to sea.  You can't do that."

"Nope," was the answer, "but I can hobo all right, all right."

Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-

"By God, I think you're right!  Better a hobo than a beast of toil.
Why, man, you'll live.  And that's more than you ever did before."

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

While Martin changed the telegram to "two laundrymen," Joe went
on:-

"I never wanted to drink when I was in hospital.  Funny, ain't it?
But when I've ben workin' like a slave all week, I just got to bowl
up.  Ever noticed that cooks drink like hell? - an' bakers, too?
It's the work.  They've sure got to.  Here, lemme pay half of that
telegram."

"I'll shake you for it," Martin offered.

"Come on, everybody drink," Joe called, as they rattled the dice
and rolled them out on the damp bar.

Monday morning Joe was wild with anticipation.  He did not mind his
aching head, nor did he take interest in his work.  Whole herds of
moments stole away and were lost while their careless shepherd
gazed out of the window at the sunshine and the trees.

"Just look at it!" he cried.  "An' it's all mine!  It's free.  I
can lie down under them trees an' sleep for a thousan' years if I
want to.  Aw, come on, Mart, let's chuck it.  What's the good of
waitin' another moment.  That's the land of nothin' to do out
there, an' I got a ticket for it - an' it ain't no return ticket,
b'gosh!"

A few minutes later, filling the truck with soiled clothes for the
washer, Joe spied the hotel manager's shirt.  He knew its mark, and
with a sudden glorious consciousness of freedom he threw it on the
floor and stamped on it.

"I wish you was in it, you pig-headed Dutchman!" he shouted.  "In
it, an' right there where I've got you!  Take that! an' that! an'
that! damn you!  Hold me back, somebody!  Hold me back!"

Martin laughed and held him to his work.  On Tuesday night the new
laundrymen arrived, and the rest of the week was spent breaking
them into the routine.  Joe sat around and explained his system,
but he did no more work.

"Not a tap," he announced.  "Not a tap.  They can fire me if they
want to, but if they do, I'll quit.  No more work in mine, thank
you kindly.  Me for the freight cars an' the shade under the trees.
Go to it, you slaves!  That's right.  Slave an' sweat!  Slave an'
sweat!  An' when you're dead, you'll rot the same as me, an' what's
it matter how you live? - eh?  Tell me that - what's it matter in
the long run?"

On Saturday they drew their pay and came to the parting of the
ways.

"They ain't no use in me askin' you to change your mind an' hit the
road with me?" Joe asked hopelessly:

Martin shook his head.  He was standing by his wheel, ready to
start.  They shook hands, and Joe held on to his for a moment, as
he said:-

"I'm goin' to see you again, Mart, before you an' me die.  That's
straight dope.  I feel it in my bones.  Good-by, Mart, an' be good.
I like you like hell, you know."

He stood, a forlorn figure, in the middle of the road, watching
until Martin turned a bend and was gone from sight.

"He's a good Indian, that boy," he muttered.  "A good Indian."

Then he plodded down the road himself, to the water tank, where
half a dozen empties lay on a side-track waiting for the up
freight.

Chapter XIX


Ruth and her family were home again, and Martin, returned to
Oakland, saw much of her.  Having gained her degree, she was doing
no more studying; and he, having worked all vitality out of his
mind and body, was doing no writing.  This gave them time for each
other that they had never had before, and their intimacy ripened
fast.

At first, Martin had done nothing but rest.  He had slept a great
deal, and spent long hours musing and thinking and doing nothing.
He was like one recovering from some terrible bout if hardship.
The first signs of reawakening came when he discovered more than
languid interest in the daily paper.  Then he began to read again -
light novels, and poetry; and after several days more he was head
over heels in his long-neglected Fiske.  His splendid body and
health made new vitality, and he possessed all the resiliency and
rebound of youth.

Ruth showed her disappointment plainly when he announced that he
was going to sea for another voyage as soon as he was well rested.

"Why do you want to do that?" she asked.

"Money," was the answer.  "I'll have to lay in a supply for my next
attack on the editors.  Money is the sinews of war, in my case -
money and patience."

"But if all you wanted was money, why didn't you stay in the
laundry?"

"Because the laundry was making a beast of me.  Too much work of
that sort drives to drink."

She stared at him with horror in her eyes.

"Do you mean - ?" she quavered.

It would have been easy for him to get out of it; but his natural
impulse was for frankness, and he remembered his old resolve to be
frank, no matter what happened.

"Yes," he answered.  "Just that.  Several times."

She shivered and drew away from him.

"No man that I have ever known did that - ever did that."

"Then they never worked in the laundry at Shelly Hot Springs," he
laughed bitterly.  "Toil is a good thing.  It is necessary for
human health, so all the preachers say, and Heaven knows I've never
been afraid of it.  But there is such a thing as too much of a good
thing, and the laundry up there is one of them.  And that's why I'm
going to sea one more voyage.  It will be my last, I think, for
when I come back, I shall break into the magazines.  I am certain
of it."

She was silent, unsympathetic, and he watched her moodily,
realizing how impossible it was for her to understand what he had
been through.

"Some day I shall write it up - 'The Degradation of Toil' or the
'Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,' or something like that
for a title."

Never, since the first meeting, had they seemed so far apart as
that day.  His confession, told in frankness, with the spirit of
revolt behind, had repelled her.  But she was more shocked by the
repulsion itself than by the cause of it.  It pointed out to her
how near she had drawn to him, and once accepted, it paved the way
for greater intimacy.  Pity, too, was aroused, and innocent,
idealistic thoughts of reform.  She would save this raw young man
who had come so far.  She would save him from the curse of his
early environment, and she would save him from himself in spite of
himself.  And all this affected her as a very noble state of
consciousness; nor did she dream that behind it and underlying it
were the jealousy and desire of love.

They rode on their wheels much in the delightful fall weather, and
out in the hills they read poetry aloud, now one and now the other,
noble, uplifting poetry that turned one's thoughts to higher
things.  Renunciation, sacrifice, patience, industry, and high
endeavor were the principles she thus indirectly preached - such
abstractions being objectified in her mind by her father, and Mr.
Butler, and by Andrew Carnegie, who, from a poor immigrant boy had
arisen to be the book-giver of the world.  All of which was
appreciated and enjoyed by Martin.  He followed her mental
processes more clearly now, and her soul was no longer the sealed
wonder it had been.  He was on terms of intellectual equality with
her.  But the points of disagreement did not affect his love.  His
love was more ardent than ever, for he loved her for what she was,
and even her physical frailty was an added charm in his eyes.  He
read of sickly Elizabeth Barrett, who for years had not placed her
feet upon the ground, until that day of flame when she eloped with
Browning and stood upright, upon the earth, under the open sky; and
what Browning had done for her, Martin decided he could do for
Ruth.  But first, she must love him.  The rest would be easy.  He
would give her strength and health.  And he caught glimpses of
their life, in the years to come, wherein, against a background of
work and comfort and general well-being, he saw himself and Ruth
reading and discussing poetry, she propped amid a multitude of
cushions on the ground while she read aloud to him.  This was the
key to the life they would live.  And always he saw that particular
picture.  Sometimes it was she who leaned against him while he
read, one arm about her, her head upon his shoulder.  Sometimes
they pored together over the printed pages of beauty.  Then, too,
she loved nature, and with generous imagination he changed the
scene of their reading - sometimes they read in closed-in valleys
with precipitous walls, or in high mountain meadows, and, again,
down by the gray sand-dunes with a wreath of billows at their feet,
or afar on some volcanic tropic isle where waterfalls descended and
became mist, reaching the sea in vapor veils that swayed and
shivered to every vagrant wisp of wind.  But always, in the
foreground, lords of beauty and eternally reading and sharing, lay
he and Ruth, and always in the background that was beyond the
background of nature, dim and hazy, were work and success and money
earned that made them free of the world and all its treasures.

"I should recommend my little girl to be careful," her mother
warned her one day.

"I know what you mean.  But it is impossible.  He if; not - "

Ruth was blushing, but it was the blush of maidenhood called upon
for the first time to discuss the sacred things of life with a
mother held equally sacred.

"Your kind."  Her mother finished the sentence for her.

Ruth nodded.

"I did not want to say it, but he is not.  He is rough, brutal,
strong - too strong.  He has not - "

She hesitated and could not go on.  It was a new experience,
talking over such matters with her mother.  And again her mother
completed her thought for her.

"He has not lived a clean life, is what you wanted to say."

Again Ruth nodded, and again a blush mantled her face.

"It is just that," she said.  "It has not been his fault, but he
has played much with - "

"With pitch?"

"Yes, with pitch.  And he frightens me.  Sometimes I am positively
in terror of him, when he talks in that free and easy way of the
things he has done - as if they did not matter.  They do matter,
don't they?"

They sat with their arms twined around each other, and in the pause
her mother patted her hand and waited for her to go on.

"But I am interested in him dreadfully," she continued.  "In a way
he is my protege.  Then, too, he is my first boy friend - but not
exactly friend; rather protege and friend combined.  Sometimes,
too, when he frightens me, it seems that he is a bulldog I have
taken for a plaything, like some of the 'frat' girls, and he is
tugging hard, and showing his teeth, and threatening to break
loose."

Again her mother waited.

"He interests me, I suppose, like the bulldog.  And there is much
good in him, too; but there is much in him that I would not like in
- in the other way.  You see, I have been thinking.  He swears, he
smokes, he drinks, he has fought with his fists (he has told me so,
and he likes it; he says so).  He is all that a man should not be -
a man I would want for my - " her voice sank very low - "husband.
Then he is too strong.  My prince must be tall, and slender, and
dark - a graceful, bewitching prince.  No, there is no danger of my
failing in love with Martin Eden.  It would be the worst fate that
could befall me."

"But it is not that that I spoke about," her mother equivocated.
"Have you thought about him?  He is so ineligible in every way, you
know, and suppose he should come to love you?"

"But he does - already," she cried.

"It was to be expected," Mrs. Morse said gently.  "How could it be
otherwise with any one who knew you?"

"Olney hates me!" she exclaimed passionately.  "And I hate Olney.
I feel always like a cat when he is around.  I feel that I must be
nasty to him, and even when I don't happen to feel that way, why,
he's nasty to me, anyway.  But I am happy with Martin Eden.  No one
ever loved me before - no man, I mean, in that way.  And it is
sweet to be loved - that way.  You know what I mean, mother dear.
It is sweet to feel that you are really and truly a woman."  She
buried her face in her mother's lap, sobbing.  "You think I am
dreadful, I know, but I am honest, and I tell you just how I feel."

Mrs. Morse was strangely sad and happy.  Her child-daughter, who
was a bachelor of arts, was gone; but in her place was a woman-
daughter.  The experiment had succeeded.  The strange void in
Ruth's nature had been filled, and filled without danger or
penalty.  This rough sailor-fellow had been the instrument, and,
though Ruth did not love him, he had made her conscious of her
womanhood.

"His hand trembles," Ruth was confessing, her face, for shame's
sake, still buried.  "It is most amusing and ridiculous, but I feel
sorry for him, too.  And when his hands are too trembly, and his
eyes too shiny, why, I lecture him about his life and the wrong way
he is going about it to mend it.  But he worships me, I know.  His
eyes and his hands do not lie.  And it makes me feel grown-up, the
thought of it, the very thought of it; and I feel that I am
possessed of something that is by rights my own - that makes me
like the other girls - and - and young women.  And, then, too, I
knew that I was not like them before, and I knew that it worried
you.  You thought you did not let me know that dear worry of yours,
but I did, and I wanted to - 'to make good,' as Martin Eden says."

It was a holy hour for mother and daughter, and their eyes were wet
as they talked on in the twilight, Ruth all white innocence and
frankness, her mother sympathetic, receptive, yet calmly explaining
and guiding.

"He is four years younger than you," she said.  "He has no place in
the world.  He has neither position nor salary.  He is impractical.
Loving you, he should, in the name of common sense, be doing
something that would give him the right to marry, instead of
paltering around with those stories of his and with childish
dreams.  Martin Eden, I am afraid, will never grow up.  He does not
take to responsibility and a man's work in the world like your
father did, or like all our friends, Mr. Butler for one.  Martin
Eden, I am afraid, will never be a money-earner.  And this world is
so ordered that money is necessary to happiness - oh, no, not these
swollen fortunes, but enough of money to permit of common comfort
and decency.  He - he has never spoken?"

"He has not breathed a word.  He has not attempted to; but if he
did, I would not let him, because, you see, I do not love him."

"I am glad of that.  I should not care to see my daughter, my one
daughter, who is so clean and pure, love a man like him.  There are
noble men in the world who are clean and true and manly.  Wait for
them.  You will find one some day, and you will love him and be
loved by him, and you will be happy with him as your father and I
have been happy with each other.  And there is one thing you must
always carry in mind - "

"Yes, mother."

Mrs. Morse's voice was low and sweet as she said, "And that is the
children."

"I - have thought about them," Ruth confessed, remembering the
wanton thoughts that had vexed her in the past, her face again red
with maiden shame that she should be telling such things.

"And it is that, the children, that makes Mr. Eden impossible,"
Mrs. Morse went on incisively.  "Their heritage must be clean, and
he is, I am afraid, not clean.  Your father has told me of sailors'
lives, and - and you understand."

Ruth pressed her mother's hand in assent, feeling that she really
did understand, though her conception was of something vague,
remote, and terrible that was beyond the scope of imagination.

"You know I do nothing without telling you," she began.  " - Only,
sometimes you must ask me, like this time.  I wanted to tell you,
but I did not know how.  It is false modesty, I know it is that,
but you can make it easy for me.  Sometimes, like this time, you
must ask me, you must give me a chance."

"Why, mother, you are a woman, too!" she cried exultantly, as they
stood up, catching her mother's hands and standing erect, facing
her in the twilight, conscious of a strangely sweet equality
between them.  "I should never have thought of you in that way if
we had not had this talk.  I had to learn that I was a woman to
know that you were one, too."

"We are women together," her mother said, drawing her to her and
kissing her.  "We are women together," she repeated, as they went
out of the room, their arms around each other's waists, their
hearts swelling with a new sense of companionship.

"Our little girl has become a woman," Mrs. Morse said proudly to
her husband an hour later.

"That means," he said, after a long look at his wife, "that means
she is in love."

"No, but that she is loved," was the smiling rejoinder.  "The
experiment has succeeded.  She is awakened at last."

"Then we'll have to get rid of him."  Mr. Morse spoke briskly, in
matter-of-fact, businesslike tones.

But his wife shook her head.  "It will not be necessary.  Ruth says
he is going to sea in a few days.  When he comes back, she will not
be here.  We will send her to Aunt Clara's.  And, besides, a year
in the East, with the change in climate, people, ideas, and
everything, is just the thing she needs."

Chapter XX


The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more.  Stories and
poems were springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he
made notes of them against the future time when he would give them
expression.  But he did not write.  This was his little vacation;
he had resolved to devote it to rest and love, and in both matters
he prospered.  He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each
day he saw Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experienced the old
shock of his strength and health.

"Be careful," her mother warned her once again.  "I am afraid you
are seeing too much of Martin Eden."

But Ruth laughed from security.  She was sure of herself, and in a
few days he would be off to sea.  Then, by the time he returned,
she would be away on her visit East.  There was a magic, however,
in the strength and health of Martin.  He, too, had been told of
her contemplated Eastern trip, and he felt the need for haste.  Yet
he did not know how to make love to a girl like Ruth.  Then, too,
he was handicapped by the possession of a great fund of experience
with girls and women who had been absolutely different from her.
They had known about love and life and flirtation, while she knew
nothing about such things.  Her prodigious innocence appalled him,
freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and convincing him, in
spite of himself, of his own unworthiness.  Also he was handicapped
in another way.  He had himself never been in love before.  He had
liked women in that turgid past of his, and been fascinated by some
of them, but he had not known what it was to love them.  He had
whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to him.
They had been diversions, incidents, part of the game men play, but
a small part at most.  And now, and for the first time, he was a
suppliant, tender and timid and doubting.  He did not know the way
of love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his loved one's
clear innocence.

In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling
on through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of
conduct which was to the effect that when one played a strange
game, he should let the other fellow play first.  This had stood
him in good stead a thousand times and trained him as an observer
as well.  He knew how to watch the thing that was strange, and to
wait for a weakness, for a place of entrance, to divulge itself.
It was like sparring for an opening in fist-fighting.  And when
such an opening came, he knew by long experience to play for it and
to play hard.

So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but
not daring.  He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of
himself.  Had he but known it, he was following the right course
with her.  Love came into the world before articulate speech, and
in its own early youth it had learned ways and means that it had
never forgotten.  It was in this old, primitive way that Martin
wooed Ruth.  He did not know he was doing it at first, though later
he divined it.  The touch of his hand on hers was vastly more
potent than any word he could utter, the impact of his strength on
her imagination was more alluring than the printed poems and spoken
passions of a thousand generations of lovers.  Whatever his tongue
could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but
the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to
her instinct.  Her judgment was as young as she, but her instincts
were as old as the race and older.  They had been young when love
was young, and they were wiser than convention and opinion and all
the new-born things.  So her judgment did not act.  There was no
call upon it, and she did not realize the strength of the appeal
Martin made from moment to moment to her love-nature.  That he
loved her, on the other hand, was as clear as day, and she
consciously delighted in beholding his love-manifestations - the
glowing eyes with their tender lights, the trembling hands, and the
never failing swarthy flush that flooded darkly under his sunburn.
She even went farther, in a timid way inciting him, but doing it so
delicately that he never suspected, and doing it half-consciously,
so that she scarcely suspected herself.  She thrilled with these
proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and she took an
Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon him.

Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing
unwittingly and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by
contact.  The touch of his hand was pleasant to her, and something
deliciously more than pleasant.  Martin did not know it, but he did
know that it was not distasteful to her.  Not that they touched
hands often, save at meeting and parting; but that in handling the
bicycles, in strapping on the books of verse they carried into the
hills, and in conning the pages of books side by side, there were
opportunities for hand to stray against hand.  And there were
opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his cheek, and for
shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over the beauty
of the books.  She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which
arose from nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he
desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his head in
her lap and dream with closed eyes about the future that was to be
theirs.  On Sunday picnics at Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park,
in the past, he had rested his head on many laps, and, usually, he
had slept soundly and selfishly while the girls shaded his face
from the sun and looked down and loved him and wondered at his
lordly carelessness of their love.  To rest his head in a girl's
lap had been the easiest thing in the world until now, and now he
found Ruth's lap inaccessible and impossible.  Yet it was right
here, in his reticence, that the strength of his wooing lay.  It
was because of this reticence that he never alarmed her.  Herself
fastidious and timid, she never awakened to the perilous trend of
their intercourse.  Subtly and unaware she grew toward him and
closer to him, while he, sensing the growing closeness, longed to
dare but was afraid.

Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened
living room with a blinding headache.

"Nothing can do it any good," she had answered his inquiries.  "And
besides, I don't take headache powders.  Doctor Hall won't permit
me."

"I can cure it, I think, and without drugs," was Martin's answer.
"I am not sure, of course, but I'd like to try.  It's simply
massage.  I learned the trick first from the Japanese.  They are a
race of masseurs, you know.  Then I learned it all over again with
variations from the Hawaiians.  They call it LOMI-LOMI.  It can
accomplish most of the things drugs accomplish and a few things
that drugs can't."

Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.

"That is so good," she said.

She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, "Aren't
you tired?"

The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would
be.  Then she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing
balm of his strength:  Life poured from the ends of his fingers,
driving the pain before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the
easement of pain, she fell asleep and he stole away.

She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.

"I slept until dinner," she said.  "You cured me completely, Mr.
Eden, and I don't know how to thank you."

He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied
to her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone
conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth
Barrett.  What had been done could be done again, and he, Martin
Eden, could do it and would do it for Ruth Morse.  He went back to
his room and to the volume of Spencer's "Sociology" lying open on
the bed.  But he could not read.  Love tormented him and overrode
his will, so that, despite all determination, he found himself at
the little ink-stained table.  The sonnet he composed that night
was the first of a love-cycle of fifty sonnets which was completed
within two months.  He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese"
in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for
great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own
sweet love-madness.

The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the "Love-cycle,"
to reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got
more closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature
of their policy and content.  The hours he spent with Ruth were
maddening alike in promise and in inconclusiveness.  It was a week
after he cured her headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt
was proposed by Norman and seconded by Arthur and Olney.  Martin
was the only one capable of handling a boat, and he was pressed
into service.  Ruth sat near him in the stern, while the three
young fellows lounged amidships, deep in a wordy wrangle over
"frat" affairs.

The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault
of the sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a
sudden feeling of loneliness.  She glanced at him.  A puff of wind
was heeling the boat over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand
on tiller and the other on main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the
same time peering ahead to make out the near-lying north shore.  He
was unaware of her gaze, and she watched him intently, speculating
fancifully about the strange warp of soul that led him, a young man
with signal powers, to fritter away his time on the writing of
stories and poems foredoomed to mediocrity and failure.

Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen in the
starlight, and over the firm-poised head, and the old desire to lay
her hands upon his neck came back to her.  The strength she
abhorred attracted her.  Her feeling of loneliness became more
pronounced, and she felt tired.  Her position on the heeling boat
irked her, and she remembered the headache he had cured and the
soothing rest that resided in him.  He was sitting beside her,
quite beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward him.  Then
arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest herself
against his strength - a vague, half-formed impulse, which, even as
she considered it, mastered her and made her lean toward him.  Or
was it the heeling of the boat?  She did not know.  She never knew.
She knew only that she was leaning against him and that the
easement and soothing rest were very good.  Perhaps it had been the
boat's fault, but she made no effort to retrieve it.  She leaned
lightly against his shoulder, but she leaned, and she continued to
lean when he shifted his position to make it more comfortable for
her.

It was a madness, but she refused to consider the madness.  She was
no longer herself but a woman, with a woman's clinging need; and
though she leaned ever so lightly, the need seemed satisfied.  She
was no longer tired.  Martin did not speak.  Had he, the spell
would have been broken.  But his reticence of love prolonged it.
He was dazed and dizzy.  He could not understand what was
happening.  It was too wonderful to be anything but a delirium.  He
conquered a mad desire to let go sheet and tiller and to clasp her
in his arms.  His intuition told him it was the wrong thing to do,
and he was glad that sheet and tiller kept his hands occupied and
fended off temptation.  But he luffed the boat less delicately,
spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as to prolong the
tack to the north shore.  The shore would compel him to go about,
and the contact would be broken.  He sailed with skill, stopping
way on the boat without exciting the notice of the wranglers, and
mentally forgiving his hardest voyages in that they had made this
marvellous night possible, giving him mastery over sea and boat and
wind so that he could sail with her beside him, her dear weight
against him on his shoulder.

When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail,
illuminating the boat with pearly radiance, Ruth moved away from
him.  And, even as she moved, she felt him move away.  The impulse
to avoid detection was mutual.  The episode was tacitly and
secretly intimate.  She sat apart from him with burning cheeks,
while the full force of it came home to her.  She had been guilty
of something she would not have her brothers see, nor Olney see.
Why had she done it?  She had never done anything like it in her
life, and yet she had been moonlight-sailing with young men before.
She had never desired to do anything like it.  She was overcome
with shame and with the mystery of her own burgeoning womanhood.
She stole a glance at Martin, who was busy putting the boat about
on the other tack, and she could have hated him for having made her
do an immodest and shameful thing.  And he, of all men!  Perhaps
her mother was right, and she was seeing too much of him.  It would
never happen again, she resolved, and she would see less of him in
the future.  She entertained a wild idea of explaining to him the
first time they were alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning
casually the attack of faintness that had overpowered her just
before the moon came up.  Then she remembered how they had drawn
mutually away before the revealing moon, and she knew he would know
it for a lie.

In the days that swiftly followed she was no longer herself but a
strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment and scornful of
self-analysis, refusing to peer into the future or to think about
herself and whither she was drifting.  She was in a fever of
tingling mystery, alternately frightened and charmed, and in
constant bewilderment.  She had one idea firmly fixed, however,
which insured her security.  She would not let Martin speak his
love.  As long as she did this, all would be well.  In a few days
he would be off to sea.  And even if he did speak, all would be
well.  It could not be otherwise, for she did not love him.  Of
course, it would be a painful half hour for him, and an
embarrassing half hour for her, because it would be her first
proposal.  She thrilled deliciously at the thought.  She was really
a woman, with a man ripe to ask for her in marriage.  It was a lure
to all that was fundamental in her sex.  The fabric of her life, of
all that constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous.  The thought
fluttered in her mind like a flame-attracted moth.  She went so far
as to imagine Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his
mouth; and she rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness
and exhorting him to true and noble manhood.  And especially he
must stop smoking cigarettes.  She would make a point of that.  But
no, she must not let him speak at all.  She could stop him, and she
had told her mother that she would.  All flushed and burning, she
regretfully dismissed the conjured situation.  Her first proposal
would have to be deferred to a more propitious time and a more
eligible suitor.