Chapter XXXI


Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway -
as it proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance.  Waiting
on the corner for a car, she had seen him first, and noted the
eager, hungry lines of his face and the desperate, worried look of
his eyes.  In truth, he was desperate and worried.  He had just
come from a fruitless interview with the pawnbroker, from whom he
had tried to wring an additional loan on his wheel.  The muddy fall
weather having come on, Martin had pledged his wheel some time
since and retained his black suit.

"There's the black suit," the pawnbroker, who knew his every asset,
had answered.  "You needn't tell me you've gone and pledged it with
that Jew, Lipka.  Because if you have - "

The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-

"No, no; I've got it.  But I want to wear it on a matter of
business."

"All right," the mollified usurer had replied.  "And I want it on a
matter of business before I can let you have any more money.  You
don't think I'm in it for my health?"

"But it's a forty-dollar wheel, in good condition," Martin had
argued.  "And you've only let me have seven dollars on it.  No, not
even seven.  Six and a quarter; you took the interest in advance."

"If you want some more, bring the suit," had been the reply that
sent Martin out of the stuffy little den, so desperate at heart as
to reflect it in his face and touch his sister to pity.

Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car came along and
stopped to take on a crowd of afternoon shoppers.  Mrs.
Higginbotham divined from the grip on her arm as he helped her on,
that he was not going to follow her.  She turned on the step and
looked down upon him.  His haggard face smote her to the heart
again.

"Ain't you comin'?" she asked

The next moment she had descended to his side.

"I'm walking - exercise, you know," he explained.

"Then I'll go along for a few blocks," she announced.  "Mebbe it'll
do me good.  I ain't ben feelin' any too spry these last few days."

Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her general
slovenly appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the drooping
shoulders, the tired face with the sagging lines, and in the heavy
fall of her feet, without elasticity - a very caricature of the
walk that belongs to a free and happy body.

"You'd better stop here," he said, though she had already come to a
halt at the first corner, "and take the next car."

"My goodness! - if I ain't all tired a'ready!" she panted.  "But
I'm just as able to walk as you in them soles.  They're that thin
they'll bu'st long before you git out to North Oakland."

"I've a better pair at home," was the answer.

"Come out to dinner to-morrow," she invited irrelevantly.  "Mr.
Higginbotham won't be there.  He's goin' to San Leandro on
business."

Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back the wolfish,
hungry look that leapt into his eyes at the suggestion of dinner.

"You haven't a penny, Mart, and that's why you're walkin'.
Exercise!"  She tried to sniff contemptuously, but succeeded in
producing only a sniffle.  "Here, lemme see."

And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar piece into
his hand.  "I guess I forgot your last birthday, Mart," she mumbled
lamely.

Martin's hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold.  In the
same instant he knew he ought not to accept, and found himself
struggling in the throes of indecision.  That bit of gold meant
food, life, and light in his body and brain, power to go on
writing, and - who was to say? - maybe to write something that
would bring in many pieces of gold.  Clear on his vision burned the
manuscripts of two essays he had just completed.  He saw them under
the table on top of the heap of returned manuscripts for which he
had no stamps, and he saw their titles, just as he had typed them -
"The High Priests of Mystery," and "The Cradle of Beauty."  He had
never submitted them anywhere.  They were as good as anything he
had done in that line.  If only he had stamps for them!  Then the
certitude of his ultimate success rose up in him, an able ally of
hunger, and with a quick movement he slipped the coin into his
pocket.

"I'll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over," he gulped out,
his throat painfully contracted and in his eyes a swift hint of
moisture.

"Mark my words!" he cried with abrupt positiveness.  "Before the
year is out I'll put an even hundred of those little yellow-boys
into your hand.  I don't ask you to believe me.  All you have to do
is wait and see."

Nor did she believe.  Her incredulity made her uncomfortable, and
failing of other expedient, she said:-

"I know you're hungry, Mart.  It's sticking out all over you.  Come
in to meals any time.  I'll send one of the children to tell you
when Mr. Higginbotham ain't to be there.  An' Mart - "

He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she was about to
say, so visible was her thought process to him.

"Don't you think it's about time you got a job?"

"You don't think I'll win out?" he asked.

She shook her head.

"Nobody has faith in me, Gertrude, except myself."  His voice was
passionately rebellious.  "I've done good work already, plenty of
it, and sooner or later it will sell."

"How do you know it is good?"

"Because - "  He faltered as the whole vast field of literature and
the history of literature stirred in his brain and pointed the
futility of his attempting to convey to her the reasons for his
faith.  "Well, because it's better than ninety-nine per cent of
what is published in the magazines."

"I wish't you'd listen to reason," she answered feebly, but with
unwavering belief in the correctness of her diagnosis of what was
ailing him.  "I wish't you'd listen to reason," she repeated, "an'
come to dinner to-morrow."

After Martin had helped her on the car, he hurried to the post-
office and invested three of the five dollars in stamps; and when,
later in the day, on the way to the Morse home, he stopped in at
the post-office to weigh a large number of long, bulky envelopes,
he affixed to them all the stamps save three of the two-cent
denomination.

It proved a momentous night for Martin, for after dinner he met
Russ Brissenden.  How he chanced to come there, whose friend he was
or what acquaintance brought him, Martin did not know.  Nor had he
the curiosity to inquire about him of Ruth.  In short, Brissenden
struck Martin as anaemic and feather-brained, and was promptly
dismissed from his mind.  An hour later he decided that Brissenden
was a boor as well, what of the way he prowled about from one room
to another, staring at the pictures or poking his nose into books
and magazines he picked up from the table or drew from the shelves.
Though a stranger in the house he finally isolated himself in the
midst of the company, huddling into a capacious Morris chair and
reading steadily from a thin volume he had drawn from his pocket.
As he read, he abstractedly ran his fingers, with a caressing
movement, through his hair.  Martin noticed him no more that
evening, except once when he observed him chaffing with great
apparent success with several of the young women.

It chanced that when Martin was leaving, he overtook Brissenden
already half down the walk to the street.

"Hello, is that you?" Martin said.

The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung alongside.
Martin made no further attempt at conversation, and for several
blocks unbroken silence lay upon them.

"Pompous old ass!"

The suddenness and the virulence of the exclamation startled
Martin.  He felt amused, and at the same time was aware of a
growing dislike for the other.

"What do you go to such a place for?" was abruptly flung at him
after another block of silence.

"Why do you?" Martin countered.

"Bless me, I don't know," came back.  "At least this is my first
indiscretion.  There are twenty-four hours in each day, and I must
spend them somehow.  Come and have a drink."

"All right," Martin answered.

The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of his
acceptance.  At home was several hours' hack-work waiting for him
before he went to bed, and after he went to bed there was a volume
of Weismann waiting for him, to say nothing of Herbert Spencer's
Autobiography, which was as replete for him with romance as any
thrilling novel.  Why should he waste any time with this man he did
not like? was his thought.  And yet, it was not so much the man nor
the drink as was it what was associated with the drink - the bright
lights, the mirrors and dazzling array of glasses, the warm and
glowing faces and the resonant hum of the voices of men.  That was
it, it was the voices of men, optimistic men, men who breathed
success and spent their money for drinks like men.  He was lonely,
that was what was the matter with him; that was why he had snapped
at the invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook.
Not since with Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception
of the wine he took with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a
drink at a public bar.  Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving
for liquor such as physical exhaustion did, and he had felt no need
for it.  But just now he felt desire for the drink, or, rather, for
the atmosphere wherein drinks were dispensed and disposed of.  Such
a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden and he lounged in
capacious leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.

They talked.  They talked about many things, and now Brissenden and
now Martin took turn in ordering Scotch and soda.  Martin, who was
extremely strong-headed, marvelled at the other's capacity for
liquor, and ever and anon broke off to marvel at the other's
conversation.  He was not long in assuming that Brissenden knew
everything, and in deciding that here was the second intellectual
man he had met.  But he noted that Brissenden had what Professor
Caldwell lacked - namely, fire, the flashing insight and
perception, the flaming uncontrol of genius.  Living language
flowed from him.  His thin lips, like the dies of a machine,
stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again, pursing
caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin
lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and
glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery and
inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a
bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife,
phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry
spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said
something more - the poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive
and without words which could express, and which none the less
found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations
of common words.  He, by some wonder of vision, saw beyond the
farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language for
narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing
known words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin's
consciousness messages that were incommunicable to ordinary souls.

Martin forgot his first impression of dislike.  Here was the best
the books had to offer coming true.  Here was an intelligence, a
living man for him to look up to.  "I am down in the dirt at your
feet," Martin repeated to himself again and again.

"You've studied biology," he said aloud, in significant allusion.

To his surprise Brissenden shook his head.

"But you are stating truths that are substantiated only by
biology," Martin insisted, and was rewarded by a blank stare.
"Your conclusions are in line with the books which you must have
read."

"I am glad to hear it," was the answer.  "That my smattering of
knowledge should enable me to short-cut my way to truth is most
reassuring.  As for myself, I never bother to find out if I am
right or not.  It is all valueless anyway.  Man can never know the
ultimate verities."

"You are a disciple of Spencer!" Martin cried triumphantly.

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

"I wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly," Martin broke out
half an hour later.  He had been closely analyzing Brissenden's
mental equipment.  "You are a sheer dogmatist, and that's what
makes it so marvellous.  You state dogmatically the latest facts
which science has been able to establish only by E POSTERIORI
reasoning.  You jump at correct conclusions.  You certainly short-
cut with a vengeance.  You feel your way with the speed of light,
by some hyperrational process, to truth."

"Yes, that was what used to bother Father Joseph, and Brother
Dutton," Brissenden replied.  "Oh, no," he added; "I am not
anything.  It was a lucky trick of fate that sent me to a Catholic
college for my education.  Where did you pick up what you know?"

And while Martin told him, he was busy studying Brissenden, ranging
from a long, lean, aristocratic face and drooping shoulders to the
overcoat on a neighboring chair, its pockets sagged and bulged by
the freightage of many books.  Brissenden's face and long, slender
hands were browned by the sun - excessively browned, Martin
thought.  This sunburn bothered Martin.  It was patent that
Brissenden was no outdoor man.  Then how had he been ravaged by the
sun?  Something morbid and significant attached to that sunburn,
was Martin's thought as he returned to a study of the face, narrow,
with high cheek-bones and cavernous hollows, and graced with as
delicate and fine an aquiline nose as Martin had ever seen.  There
was nothing remarkable about the size of the eyes.  They were
neither large nor small, while their color was a nondescript brown;
but in them smouldered a fire, or, rather, lurked an expression
dual and strangely contradictory.  Defiant, indomitable, even harsh
to excess, they at the same time aroused pity.  Martin found
himself pitying him he knew not why, though he was soon to learn.

"Oh, I'm a lunger," Brissenden announced, offhand, a little later,
having already stated that he came from Arizona.  "I've been down
there a couple of years living on the climate."

"Aren't you afraid to venture it up in this climate?"

"Afraid?"

There was no special emphasis of his repetition of Martin's word.
But Martin saw in that ascetic face the advertisement that there
was nothing of which it was afraid.  The eyes had narrowed till
they were eagle-like, and Martin almost caught his breath as he
noted the eagle beak with its dilated nostrils, defiant, assertive,
aggressive.  Magnificent, was what he commented to himself, his
blood thrilling at the sight.  Aloud, he quoted:-


"'Under the bludgeoning of Chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.'"


"You like Henley," Brissenden said, his expression changing swiftly
to large graciousness and tenderness.  "Of course, I couldn't have
expected anything else of you.  Ah, Henley!  A brave soul.  He
stands out among contemporary rhymesters - magazine rhymesters - as
a gladiator stands out in the midst of a band of eunuchs."

"You don't like the magazines," Martin softly impeached.

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

"I - I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines," Martin
faltered.

"That's better," was the mollified rejoinder.  "You try to write,
but you don't succeed.  I respect and admire your failure.  I know
what you write.  I can see it with half an eye, and there's one
ingredient in it that shuts it out of the magazines.  It's guts,
and magazines have no use for that particular commodity.  What they
want is wish-wash and slush, and God knows they get it, but not
from you."

"I'm not above hack-work," Martin contended.

"On the contrary - "  Brissenden paused and ran an insolent eye
over Martin's objective poverty, passing from the well-worn tie and
the saw-edged collar to the shiny sleeves of the coat and on to the
slight fray of one cuff, winding up and dwelling upon Martin's
sunken cheeks.  "On the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far
above you that you can never hope to rise to it.  Why, man, I could
insult you by asking you to have something to eat."

Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and
Brissenden laughed triumphantly.

"A full man is not insulted by such an invitation," he concluded.

"You are a devil," Martin cried irritably.

"Anyway, I didn't ask you."

"You didn't dare."

"Oh, I don't know about that.  I invite you now."

Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if with the
intention of departing to the restaurant forthwith.

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

"Bosco!  He eats 'em alive!  Eats 'em alive!"  Brissenden
exclaimed, imitating the SPIELER of a locally famous snake-eater.

"I could certainly eat you alive," Martin said, in turn running
insolent eyes over the other's disease-ravaged frame.

"Only I'm not worthy of it?"

"On the contrary," Martin considered, "because the incident is not
worthy."  He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome.  "I confess
you made a fool of me, Brissenden.  That I am hungry and you are
aware of it are only ordinary phenomena, and there's no disgrace.
You see, I laugh at the conventional little moralities of the herd;
then you drift by, say a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the
slave of the same little moralities."

"You were insulted," Brissenden affirmed.

"I certainly was, a moment ago.  The prejudice of early youth, you
know.  I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have
since learned.  They are the skeletons in my particular closet."

"But you've got the door shut on them now?"

"I certainly have."

"Sure?"

"Sure."

"Then let's go and get something to eat."

"I'll go you," Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current
Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and
seeing the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change
back on the table.

Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly
weight of Brissenden's hand upon his shoulder.

Chapter XXXII


Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin's second
visitor.  But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated
Brissenden in her parlor's grandeur of respectability.

"Hope you don't mind my coming?" Brissenden began.

"No, no, not at all," Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him
to the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed.  "But how did you
know where I lived?"

"Called up the Morses.  Miss Morse answered the 'phone.  And here I
am."  He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the
table.  "There's a book, by a poet.  Read it and keep it."  And
then, in reply to Martin's protest:  "What have I to do with books?
I had another hemorrhage this morning.  Got any whiskey?  No, of
course not.  Wait a minute."

He was off and away.  Martin watched his long figure go down the
outside steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang
the shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over, the
collapsed ruin of the chest.  Martin got two tumblers, and fell to
reading the book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow's latest collection.

"No Scotch," Brissenden announced on his return.  "The beggar sells
nothing but American whiskey.  But here's a quart of it."

"I'll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we'll make a
toddy," Martin offered.

"I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?" he went on,
holding up the volume in question.

"Possibly fifty dollars," came the answer.  "Though he's lucky if
he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk
bringing it out."

"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?"

Martin's tone and face alike showed his dejection.

"Certainly not.  What fool expects to?  Out of rhyming, yes.
There's Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick.  They do very
nicely.  But poetry - do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his
living? - teaching in a boys' cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania,
and of all private little hells such a billet is the limit.  I
wouldn't trade places with him if he had fifty years of life before
him.  And yet his work stands out from the ruck of the contemporary
versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots.  And the reviews he gets!
Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!"

"Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who
do write," Martin concurred.  "Why, I was appalled at the
quantities of rubbish written about Stevenson and his work."

"Ghouls and harpies!" Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth.
"Yes, I know the spawn - complacently pecking at him for his Father
Damien letter, analyzing him, weighing him - "

"Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos,"
Martin broke in.

"Yes, that's it, a good phrase, - mouthing and besliming the True,
and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and
saying, 'Good dog, Fido.'  Faugh!  'The little chattering daws of
men,' Richard Realf called them the night he died."

"Pecking at star-dust," Martin took up the strain warmly; "at the
meteoric flight of the master-men.  I once wrote a squib on them -
the critics, or the reviewers, rather."

"Let's see it," Brissenden begged eagerly.

So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of "Star-dust," and during the
reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to
sip his toddy.

"Strikes me you're a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world
of cowled gnomes who cannot see," was his comment at the end of it.
"Of course it was snapped up by the first magazine?"

Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book.  "It has been
refused by twenty-seven of them."

Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit
of coughing.

"Say, you needn't tell me you haven't tackled poetry," he gasped.
"Let me see some of it."

"Don't read it now," Martin pleaded.  "I want to talk with you.
I'll make up a bundle and you can take it home."

Brissenden departed with the "Love-cycle," and "The Peri and the
Pearl," returning next day to greet Martin with:-

"I want more."

Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin
learned that Brissenden also was one.  He was swept off his feet by
the other's work, and astounded that no attempt had been made to
publish it.

"A plague on all their houses!" was Brissenden's answer to Martin's
volunteering to market his work for him.  "Love Beauty for its own
sake," was his counsel, "and leave the magazines alone.  Back to
your ships and your sea - that's my advice to you, Martin Eden.
What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men?  You are
cutting your throat every day you waste in them trying to
prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom.  What was it you
quoted me the other day? - Oh, yes, 'Man, the latest of the
ephemera.'  Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want
with fame?  If you got it, it would be poison to you.  You are too
simple, took elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper
on such pap.  I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.
Beauty is the only master to serve.  Serve her and damn the
multitude!  Success!  What in hell's success if it isn't right
there in your Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley's
'Apparition,' in that 'Love-cycle,' in those sea-poems?

"It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but
in the doing of it.  You can't tell me.  I know it.  You know it.
Beauty hurts you.  It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that
does not heal, a knife of flame.  Why should you palter with
magazines?  Let beauty be your end.  Why should you mint beauty
into gold?  Anyway, you can't; so there's no use in my getting
excited over it.  You can read the magazines for a thousand years
and you won't find the value of one line of Keats.  Leave fame and
coin alone, sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to your
sea."

"Not for fame, but for love," Martin laughed.  "Love seems to have
no place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of
Love."

Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly.  "You are so
young, Martin boy, so young.  You will flutter high, but your wings
are of the finest gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments.  Do not
scorch them.  But of course you have scorched them already.  It
required some glorified petticoat to account for that 'Love-cycle,'
and that's the shame of it."

"It glorifies love as well as the petticoat," Martin laughed.

"The philosophy of madness," was the retort.  "So have I assured
myself when wandering in hasheesh dreams.  But beware.  These
bourgeois cities will kill you.  Look at that den of traitors where
I met you.  Dry rot is no name for it.  One can't keep his sanity
in such an atmosphere.  It's degrading.  There's not one of them
who is not degrading, man and woman, all of them animated stomachs
guided by the high intellectual and artistic impulses of clams - "

He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin.  Then, with a flash of
divination, he saw the situation.  The expression on his face
turned to wondering horror.

"And you wrote that tremendous 'Love-cycle' to her - that pale,
shrivelled, female thing!"

The next instant Martin's right hand had shot to a throttling
clutch on his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth
rattled.  But Martin, looking into his eyes, saw no fear there, -
naught but a curious and mocking devil.  Martin remembered himself,
and flung Brissenden, by the neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the
same moment releasing his hold.

Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to
chuckle.

"You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the
flame," he said.

"My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days," Martin apologized.
"Hope I didn't hurt you.  Here, let me mix a fresh toddy."

"Ah, you young Greek!" Brissenden went on.  "I wonder if you take
just pride in that body of yours.  You are devilish strong.  You
are a young panther, a lion cub.  Well, well, it is you who must
pay for that strength."

"What do you mean?" Martin asked curiously, passing aim a glass.
"Here, down this and be good."

"Because - " Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of
it.  "Because of the women.  They will worry you until you die, as
they have already worried you, or else I was born yesterday.  Now
there's no use in your choking me; I'm going to have my say.  This
is undoubtedly your calf love; but for Beauty's sake show better
taste next time.  What under heaven do you want with a daughter of
the bourgeoisie?  Leave them alone.  Pick out some great, wanton
flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves
one while she may.  There are such women, and they will love you
just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois sheltered
life."

"Pusillanimous?" Martin protested.

"Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have
been prattled into them, and afraid to live life.  They will love
you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more.  What
you want is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls,
the blazing butterflies and not the little gray moths.  Oh, you
will grow tired of them, too, of all the female things, if you are
unlucky enough to live.  But you won't live.  You won't go back to
your ships and sea; therefore, you'll hang around these pest-holes
of cities until your bones are rotten, and then you'll die."

"You can lecture me, but you can't make me talk back," Martin said.
"After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the
wisdom of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours."

They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but
they liked each other, and on Martin's part it was no less than a
profound liking.  Day after day they were together, if for no more
than the hour Brissenden spent in Martin's stuffy room.  Brissenden
never arrived without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined
together down-town, he drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal.
He invariably paid the way for both, and it was through him that
Martin learned the refinements of food, drank his first champagne,
and made acquaintance with Rhenish wines.

But Brissenden was always an enigma.  With the face of an ascetic,
he was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary.  He
was unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living;
and yet, dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it.  He was
possessed by a madness to live, to thrill, "to squirm my little
space in the cosmic dust whence I came," as he phrased it once
himself.  He had tampered with drugs and done many strange things
in quest of new thrills, new sensations.  As he told Martin, he had
once gone three days without water, had done so voluntarily, in
order to experience the exquisite delight of such a thirst
assuaged.  Who or what he was, Martin never learned.  He was a man
without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose
present was a bitter fever of living.

Chapter XXXIII


Martin was steadily losing his battle.  Economize as he would, the
earnings from hack-work did not balance expenses.  Thanksgiving
found him with his black suit in pawn and unable to accept the
Morses' invitation to dinner.  Ruth was not made happy by his
reason for not coming, and the corresponding effect on him was one
of desperation.  He told her that he would come, after all; that he
would go over to San Francisco, to the TRANSCONTINENTAL office,
collect the five dollars due him, and with it redeem his suit of
clothes.

In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria.  He would have
borrowed it, by preference, from Brissenden, but that erratic
individual had disappeared.  Two weeks had passed since Martin had
seen him, and he vainly cudgelled his brains for some cause of
offence.  The ten cents carried Martin across the ferry to San
Francisco, and as he walked up Market Street he speculated upon his
predicament in case he failed to collect the money.  There would
then be no way for him to return to Oakland, and he knew no one in
San Francisco from whom to borrow another ten cents.

The door to the TRANSCONTINENTAL office was ajar, and Martin, in
the act of opening it, was brought to a sudden pause by a loud
voice from within, which exclaimed:- "But that is not the question,
Mr. Ford."  (Ford, Martin knew, from his correspondence, to be the
editor's name.)  "The question is, are you prepared to pay? - cash,
and cash down, I mean?  I am not interested in the prospects of the
TRANSCONTINENTAL and what you expect to make it next year.  What I
want is to be paid for what I do.  And I tell you, right now, the
Christmas TRANSCONTINENTAL don't go to press till I have the money
in my hand.  Good day.  When you get the money, come and see me."

The door jerked open, and the man flung past Martin, with an angry
countenance and went down the corridor, muttering curses and
clenching his fists.  Martin decided not to enter immediately, and
lingered in the hallways for a quarter of an hour.  Then he shoved
the door open and walked in.  It was a new experience, the first
time he had been inside an editorial office.  Cards evidently were
not necessary in that office, for the boy carried word to an inner
room that there was a man who wanted to see Mr. Ford.  Returning,
the boy beckoned him from halfway across the room and led him to
the private office, the editorial sanctum.  Martin's first
impression was of the disorder and cluttered confusion of the room.
Next he noticed a bewhiskered, youthful-looking man, sitting at a
roll-top desk, who regarded him curiously.  Martin marvelled at the
calm repose of his face.  It was evident that the squabble with the
printer had not affected his equanimity.

"I - I am Martin Eden," Martin began the conversation.  ("And I
want my five dollars," was what he would have liked to say.)

But this was his first editor, and under the circumstances he did
not desire to scare him too abruptly.  To his surprise, Mr. Ford
leaped into the air with a "You don't say so!" and the next moment,
with both hands, was shaking Martin's hand effusively.

"Can't say how glad I am to see you, Mr. Eden.  Often wondered what
you were like."

Here he held Martin off at arm's length and ran his beaming eyes
over Martin's second-best suit, which was also his worst suit, and
which was ragged and past repair, though the trousers showed the
careful crease he had put in with Maria's flat-irons.

"I confess, though, I conceived you to be a much older man than you
are.  Your story, you know, showed such breadth, and vigor, such
maturity and depth of thought.  A masterpiece, that story - I knew
it when I had read the first half-dozen lines.  Let me tell you how
I first read it.  But no; first let me introduce you to the staff."

Still talking, Mr. Ford led him into the general office, where he
introduced him to the associate editor, Mr. White, a slender, frail
little man whose hand seemed strangely cold, as if he were
suffering from a chill, and whose whiskers were sparse and silky.

"And Mr. Ends, Mr. Eden.  Mr. Ends is our business manager, you
know."

Martin found himself shaking hands with a cranky-eyed, bald-headed
man, whose face looked youthful enough from what little could be
seen of it, for most of it was covered by a snow-white beard,
carefully trimmed - by his wife, who did it on Sundays, at which
times she also shaved the back of his neck.

The three men surrounded Martin, all talking admiringly and at
once, until it seemed to him that they were talking against time
for a wager.

"We often wondered why you didn't call," Mr. White was saying.

"I didn't have the carfare, and I live across the Bay," Martin
answered bluntly, with the idea of showing them his imperative need
for the money.

Surely, he thought to himself, my glad rags in themselves are
eloquent advertisement of my need.  Time and again, whenever
opportunity offered, he hinted about the purpose of his business.
But his admirers' ears were deaf.  They sang his praises, told him
what they had thought of his story at first sight, what they
subsequently thought, what their wives and families thought; but
not one hint did they breathe of intention to pay him for it.

"Did I tell you how I first read your story?" Mr. Ford said.  "Of
course I didn't.  I was coming west from New York, and when the
train stopped at Ogden, the train-boy on the new run brought aboard
the current number of the TRANSCONTINENTAL."

My God! Martin thought; you can travel in a Pullman while I starve
for the paltry five dollars you owe me.  A wave of anger rushed
over him.  The wrong done him by the TRANSCONTINENTAL loomed
colossal, for strong upon him were all the dreary months of vain
yearning, of hunger and privation, and his present hunger awoke and
gnawed at him, reminding him that he had eaten nothing since the
day before, and little enough then.  For the moment he saw red.
These creatures were not even robbers.  They were sneak-thieves.
By lies and broken promises they had tricked him out of his story.
Well, he would show them.  And a great resolve surged into his will
to the effect that he would not leave the office until he got his
money.  He remembered, if he did not get it, that there was no way
for him to go back to Oakland.  He controlled himself with an
effort, but not before the wolfish expression of his face had awed
and perturbed them.

They became more voluble than ever.  Mr. Ford started anew to tell
how he had first read "The Ring of Bells," and Mr. Ends at the same
time was striving to repeat his niece's appreciation of "The Ring
of Bells," said niece being a school-teacher in Alameda.

"I'll tell you what I came for," Martin said finally.  "To be paid
for that story all of you like so well.  Five dollars, I believe,
is what you promised me would be paid on publication."

Mr. Ford, with an expression on his mobile features of mediate and
happy acquiescence, started to reach for his pocket, then turned
suddenly to Mr. Ends, and said that he had left his money home.
That Mr. Ends resented this, was patent; and Martin saw the twitch
of his arm as if to protect his trousers pocket.  Martin knew that
the money was there.

"I am sorry," said Mr. Ends, "but I paid the printer not an hour
ago, and he took my ready change.  It was careless of me to be so
short; but the bill was not yet due, and the printer's request, as
a favor, to make an immediate advance, was quite unexpected."

Both men looked expectantly at Mr. White, but that gentleman
laughed and shrugged his shoulders.  His conscience was clean at
any rate.  He had come into the TRANSCONTINENTAL to learn magazine-
literature, instead of which he had principally learned finance.
The TRANSCONTINENTAL owed him four months' salary, and he knew that
the printer must be appeased before the associate editor.

"It's rather absurd, Mr. Eden, to have caught us in this shape,"
Mr. Ford preambled airily.  "All carelessness, I assure you.  But
I'll tell you what we'll do.  We'll mail you a check the first
thing in the morning.  You have Mr. Eden's address, haven't you,
Mr. Ends?"

Yes, Mr. Ends had the address, and the check would be mailed the
first thing in the morning.  Martin's knowledge of banks and checks
was hazy, but he could see no reason why they should not give him
the check on this day just as well as on the next.

"Then it is understood, Mr. Eden, that we'll mail you the check to-
morrow?" Mr. Ford said.

"I need the money to-day," Martin answered stolidly.

"The unfortunate circumstances - if you had chanced here any other
day," Mr. Ford began suavely, only to be interrupted by Mr. Ends,
whose cranky eyes justified themselves in his shortness of temper.

"Mr. Ford has already explained the situation," he said with
asperity.  "And so have I.  The check will be mailed - "

"I also have explained," Martin broke in, "and I have explained
that I want the money to-day."

He had felt his pulse quicken a trifle at the business manager's
brusqueness, and upon him he kept an alert eye, for it was in that
gentleman's trousers pocket that he divined the TRANSCONTINENTAL'S
ready cash was reposing.

"It is too bad - " Mr. Ford began.

But at that moment, with an impatient movement, Mr. Ends turned as
if about to leave the room.  At the same instant Martin sprang for
him, clutching him by the throat with one hand in such fashion that
Mr. Ends' snow-white beard, still maintaining its immaculate
trimness, pointed ceilingward at an angle of forty-five degrees.
To the horror of Mr. White and Mr. Ford, they saw their business
manager shaken like an Astrakhan rug.

"Dig up, you venerable discourager of rising young talent!" Martin
exhorted.  "Dig up, or I'll shake it out of you, even if it's all
in nickels."  Then, to the two affrighted onlookers:  "Keep away!
If you interfere, somebody's liable to get hurt."

Mr. Ends was choking, and it was not until the grip on his throat
was eased that he was able to signify his acquiescence in the
digging-up programme.  All together, after repeated digs, its
trousers pocket yielded four dollars and fifteen cents.

"Inside out with it," Martin commanded.

An additional ten cents fell out.  Martin counted the result of his
raid a second time to make sure.

"You next!" he shouted at Mr. Ford.  "I want seventy-five cents
more."

Mr. Ford did not wait, but ransacked his pockets, with the result
of sixty cents.

"Sure that is all?" Martin demanded menacingly, possessing himself
of it.  "What have you got in your vest pockets?"

In token of his good faith, Mr. Ford turned two of his pockets
inside out.  A strip of cardboard fell to the floor from one of
them.  He recovered it and was in the act of returning it, when
Martin cried:-

"What's that? - A ferry ticket?  Here, give it to me.  It's worth
ten cents.  I'll credit you with it.  I've now got four dollars and
ninety-five cents, including the ticket.  Five cents is still due
me."

He looked fiercely at Mr. White, and found that fragile creature in
the act of handing him a nickel.

"Thank you," Martin said, addressing them collectively.  "I wish
you a good day."

"Robber!" Mr. Ends snarled after him.

"Sneak-thief!" Martin retorted, slamming the door as he passed out.

Martin was elated - so elated that when he recollected that THE
HORNET owed him fifteen dollars for "The Peri and the Pearl," he
decided forthwith to go and collect it.  But THE HORNET was run by
a set of clean-shaven, strapping young men, frank buccaneers who
robbed everything and everybody, not excepting one another.  After
some breakage of the office furniture, the editor (an ex-college
athlete), ably assisted by the business manager, an advertising
agent, and the porter, succeeded in removing Martin from the office
and in accelerating, by initial impulse, his descent of the first
flight of stairs.

"Come again, Mr. Eden; glad to see you any time," they laughed down
at him from the landing above.

Martin grinned as he picked himself up.

"Phew!" he murmured back.  "The TRANSCONTINENTAL crowd were nanny-
goats, but you fellows are a lot of prize-fighters."

More laughter greeted this.

"I must say, Mr. Eden," the editor of THE HORNET called down, "that
for a poet you can go some yourself.  Where did you learn that
right cross - if I may ask?"

"Where you learned that half-Nelson," Martin answered.  "Anyway,
you're going to have a black eye."

"I hope your neck doesn't stiffen up," the editor wished
solicitously:  "What do you say we all go out and have a drink on
it - not the neck, of course, but the little rough-house?"

"I'll go you if I lose," Martin accepted.

And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably agreeing that the
battle was to the strong, and that the fifteen dollars for "The
Peri and the Pearl" belonged by right to THE HORNET'S editorial
staff.

Chapter XXXIV


Arthur remained at the gate while Ruth climbed Maria's front steps.
She heard the rapid click of the type-writer, and when Martin let
her in, found him on the last page of a manuscript.  She had come
to make certain whether or not he would be at their table for
Thanksgiving dinner; but before she could broach the subject Martin
plunged into the one with which he was full.

"Here, let me read you this," he cried, separating the carbon
copies and running the pages of manuscript into shape.  "It's my
latest, and different from anything I've done.  It is so altogether
different that I am almost afraid of it, and yet I've a sneaking
idea it is good.  You be judge.  It's an Hawaiian story.  I've
called it 'Wiki-wiki.'"

His face was bright with the creative glow, though she shivered in
the cold room and had been struck by the coldness of his hands at
greeting.  She listened closely while he read, and though he from
time to time had seen only disapprobation in her face, at the close
he asked:-

"Frankly, what do you think of it?"

"I - I don't know," she, answered.  "Will it - do you think it will
sell?"

"I'm afraid not," was the confession.  "It's too strong for the
magazines.  But it's true, on my word it's true."

"But why do you persist in writing such things when you know they
won't sell?" she went on inexorably.  "The reason for your writing
is to make a living, isn't it?"

"Yes, that's right; but the miserable story got away with me.  I
couldn't help writing it.  It demanded to be written."

"But that character, that Wiki-Wiki, why do you make him talk so
roughly?  Surely it will offend your readers, and surely that is
why the editors are justified in refusing your work."

"Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way."

"But it is not good taste."

"It is life," he replied bluntly.  "It is real.  It is true.  And I
must write life as I see it."

She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they sat silent.  It
was because he loved her that he did not quite understand her, and
she could not understand him because he was so large that he bulked
beyond her horizon

"Well, I've collected from the TRANSCONTINENTAL," he said in an
effort to shift the conversation to a more comfortable subject.
The picture of the bewhiskered trio, as he had last seen them,
mulcted of four dollars and ninety cents and a ferry ticket, made
him chuckle.

"Then you'll come!" she cried joyously.  "That was what I came to
find out."

"Come?" he muttered absently.  "Where?"

"Why, to dinner to-morrow.  You know you said you'd recover your
suit if you got that money."

"I forgot all about it," he said humbly.  "You see, this morning
the poundman got Maria's two cows and the baby calf, and - well, it
happened that Maria didn't have any money, and so I had to recover
her cows for her.  That's where the TRANSCONTINENTAL fiver went -
'The Ring of Bells' went into the poundman's pocket."

"Then you won't come?"

He looked down at his clothing.

"I can't."

Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her blue eyes,
but she said nothing.

"Next Thanksgiving you'll have dinner with me in Delmonico's," he
said cheerily; "or in London, or Paris, or anywhere you wish.  I
know it."

"I saw in the paper a few days ago," she announced abruptly, "that
there had been several local appointments to the Railway Mail.  You
passed first, didn't you?"

He was compelled to admit that the call had come for him, but that
he had declined it.  "I was so sure - I am so sure - of myself," he
concluded.  "A year from now I'll be earning more than a dozen men
in the Railway Mail.  You wait and see."

"Oh," was all she said, when he finished.  She stood up, pulling at
her gloves.  "I must go, Martin.  Arthur is waiting for me."

He took her in his arms and kissed her, but she proved a passive
sweetheart.  There was no tenseness in her body, her arms did not
go around him, and her lips met his without their wonted pressure.

She was angry with him, he concluded, as he returned from the gate.
But why?  It was unfortunate that the poundman had gobbled Maria's
cows.  But it was only a stroke of fate.  Nobody could be blamed
for it.  Nor did it enter his head that he could have done aught
otherwise than what he had done.  Well, yes, he was to blame a
little, was his next thought, for having refused the call to the
Railway Mail.  And she had not liked "Wiki-Wiki."

He turned at the head of the steps to meet the letter-carrier on
his afternoon round.  The ever recurrent fever of expectancy
assailed Martin as he took the bundle of long envelopes.  One was
not long.  It was short and thin, and outside was printed the
address of THE NEW YORK OUTVIEW.  He paused in the act of tearing
the envelope open.  It could not be an acceptance.  He had no
manuscripts with that publication.  Perhaps - his heart almost
stood still at the - wild thought - perhaps they were ordering an
article from him; but the next instant he dismissed the surmise as
hopelessly impossible.

It was a short, formal letter, signed by the office editor, merely
informing him that an anonymous letter which they had received was
enclosed, and that he could rest assured the OUTVIEW'S staff never
under any circumstances gave consideration to anonymous
correspondence.

The enclosed letter Martin found to be crudely printed by hand.  It
was a hotchpotch of illiterate abuse of Martin, and of assertion
that the "so-called Martin Eden" who was selling stories to
magazines was no writer at all, and that in reality he was stealing
stories from old magazines, typing them, and sending them out as
his own.  The envelope was postmarked "San Leandro."  Martin did
not require a second thought to discover the author.
Higginbotham's grammar, Higginbotham's colloquialisms,
Higginbotham's mental quirks and processes, were apparent
throughout.  Martin saw in every line, not the fine Italian hand,
but the coarse grocer's fist, of his brother-in-law.

But why? he vainly questioned.  What injury had he done Bernard
Higginbotham?  The thing was so unreasonable, so wanton.  There was
no explaining it.  In the course of the week a dozen similar
letters were forwarded to Martin by the editors of various Eastern
magazines.  The editors were behaving handsomely, Martin concluded.
He was wholly unknown to them, yet some of them had even been
sympathetic.  It was evident that they detested anonymity.  He saw
that the malicious attempt to hurt him had failed.  In fact, if
anything came of it, it was bound to be good, for at least his name
had been called to the attention of a number of editors.  Sometime,
perhaps, reading a submitted manuscript of his, they might remember
him as the fellow about whom they had received an anonymous letter.
And who was to say that such a remembrance might not sway the
balance of their judgment just a trifle in his favor?

It was about this time that Martin took a great slump in Maria's
estimation.  He found her in the kitchen one morning groaning with
pain, tears of weakness running down her cheeks, vainly endeavoring
to put through a large ironing.  He promptly diagnosed her
affliction as La Grippe, dosed her with hot whiskey (the remnants
in the bottles for which Brissenden was responsible), and ordered
her to bed.  But Maria was refractory.  The ironing had to be done,
she protested, and delivered that night, or else there would be no
food on the morrow for the seven small and hungry Silvas.

To her astonishment (and it was something that she never ceased
from relating to her dying day), she saw Martin Eden seize an iron
from the stove and throw a fancy shirt-waist on the ironing-board.
It was Kate Flanagan's best Sunday waist, than whom there was no
more exacting and fastidiously dressed woman in Maria's world.
Also, Miss Flanagan had sent special instruction that said waist
must be delivered by that night.  As every one knew, she was
keeping company with John Collins, the blacksmith, and, as Maria
knew privily, Miss Flanagan and Mr. Collins were going next day to
Golden Gate Park.  Vain was Maria's attempt to rescue the garment.
Martin guided her tottering footsteps to a chair, from where she
watched him with bulging eyes.  In a quarter of the time it would
have taken her she saw the shirt-waist safely ironed, and ironed as
well as she could have done it, as Martin made her grant.

"I could work faster," he explained, "if your irons were only
hotter."

To her, the irons he swung were much hotter than she ever dared to
use.

"Your sprinkling is all wrong," he complained next.  "Here, let me
teach you how to sprinkle.  Pressure is what's wanted.  Sprinkle
under pressure if you want to iron fast."

He procured a packing-case from the woodpile in the cellar, fitted
a cover to it, and raided the scrap-iron the Silva tribe was
collecting for the junkman.  With fresh-sprinkled garments in the
box, covered with the board and pressed by the iron, the device was
complete and in operation.

"Now you watch me, Maria," he said, stripping off to his undershirt
and gripping an iron that was what he called "really hot."

"An' when he feenish da iron' he washa da wools," as she described
it afterward.  "He say, 'Maria, you are da greata fool.  I showa
you how to washa da wools,' an' he shows me, too.  Ten minutes he
maka da machine - one barrel, one wheel-hub, two poles, justa like
dat."

Martin had learned the contrivance from Joe at the Shelly Hot
Springs.  The old wheel-hub, fixed on the end of the upright pole,
constituted the plunger.  Making this, in turn, fast to the spring-
pole attached to the kitchen rafters, so that the hub played upon
the woollens in the barrel, he was able, with one hand, thoroughly
to pound them.

"No more Maria washa da wools," her story always ended.  "I maka da
kids worka da pole an' da hub an' da barrel.  Him da smarta man,
Mister Eden."

Nevertheless, by his masterly operation and improvement of her
kitchen-laundry he fell an immense distance in her regard.  The
glamour of romance with which her imagination had invested him
faded away in the cold light of fact that he was an ex-laundryman.
All his books, and his grand friends who visited him in carriages
or with countless bottles of whiskey, went for naught.  He was,
after all, a mere workingman, a member of her own class and caste.
He was more human and approachable, but, he was no longer mystery.

Martin's alienation from his family continued.  Following upon Mr.
Higginbotham's unprovoked attack, Mr. Hermann von Schmidt showed
his hand.  The fortunate sale of several storiettes, some humorous
verse, and a few jokes gave Martin a temporary splurge of
prosperity.  Not only did he partially pay up his bills, but he had
sufficient balance left to redeem his black suit and wheel.  The
latter, by virtue of a twisted crank-hanger, required repairing,
and, as a matter of friendliness with his future brother-in-law, he
sent it to Von Schmidt's shop.

The afternoon of the same day Martin was pleased by the wheel being
delivered by a small boy.  Von Schmidt was also inclined to be
friendly, was Martin's conclusion from this unusual favor.
Repaired wheels usually had to be called for.  But when he examined
the wheel, he discovered no repairs had been made.  A little later
in the day he telephoned his sister's betrothed, and learned that
that person didn't want anything to do with him in "any shape,
manner, or form."

"Hermann von Schmidt," Martin answered cheerfully, "I've a good
mind to come over and punch that Dutch nose of yours."

"You come to my shop," came the reply, "an' I'll send for the
police.  An' I'll put you through, too.  Oh, I know you, but you
can't make no rough-house with me.  I don't want nothin' to do with
the likes of you.  You're a loafer, that's what, an' I ain't
asleep.  You ain't goin' to do no spongin' off me just because I'm
marryin' your sister.  Why don't you go to work an' earn an honest
livin', eh?  Answer me that."

Martin's philosophy asserted itself, dissipating his anger, and he
hung up the receiver with a long whistle of incredulous amusement.
But after the amusement came the reaction, and he was oppressed by
his loneliness.  Nobody understood him, nobody seemed to have any
use for him, except Brissenden, and Brissenden had disappeared, God
alone knew where.

Twilight was falling as Martin left the fruit store and turned
homeward, his marketing on his arm.  At the corner an electric car
had stopped, and at sight of a lean, familiar figure alighting, his
heart leapt with joy.  It was Brissenden, and in the fleeting
glimpse, ere the car started up, Martin noted the overcoat pockets,
one bulging with books, the other bulging with a quart bottle of
whiskey.

Chapter XXXV


Brissenden gave no explanation of his long absence, nor did Martin
pry into it.  He was content to see his friend's cadaverous face
opposite him through the steam rising from a tumbler of toddy.

"I, too, have not been idle," Brissenden proclaimed, after hearing
Martin's account of the work he had accomplished.

He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and passed it to
Martin, who looked at the title and glanced up curiously.

"Yes, that's it," Brissenden laughed.  "Pretty good title, eh?
'Ephemera' - it is the one word.  And you're responsible for it,
what of your MAN, who is always the erected, the vitalized
inorganic, the latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature
strutting his little space on the thermometer.  It got into my head
and I had to write it to get rid of it.  Tell me what you think of
it."

Martin's face, flushed at first, paled as he read on.  It was
perfect art.  Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be
called where the last conceivable atom of substance had found
expression in so perfect construction as to make Martin's head swim
with delight, to put passionate tears into his eyes, and to send
chills creeping up and down his back.  It was a long poem of six or
seven hundred lines, and it was a fantastic, amazing, unearthly
thing.  It was terrific, impossible; and yet there it was, scrawled
in black ink across the sheets of paper.  It dealt with man and his
soul-gropings in their ultimate terms, plumbing the abysses of
space for the testimony of remotest suns and rainbow spectrums.  It
was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of a dying
man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the wild
flutter of fading heart-beats.  The poem swung in majestic rhythm
to the cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry
hosts, to the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebular in
the darkened void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a
silver shuttle, ran the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous
chirp amid the screaming of planets and the crash of systems.

"There is nothing like it in literature," Martin said, when at last
he was able to speak.  "It's wonderful! - wonderful!  It has gone
to my head.  I am drunken with it.  That great, infinitesimal
question - I can't shake it out of my thoughts.  That questing,
eternal, ever recurring, thin little wailing voice of man is still
ringing in my ears.  It is like the dead-march of a gnat amid the
trumpeting of elephants and the roaring of lions.  It is insatiable
with microscopic desire.  I now I'm making a fool of myself, but
the thing has obsessed me.  You are - I don't know what you are -
you are wonderful, that's all.  But how do you do it?  How do you
do it?"

Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.

"I shall never write again.  I am a dauber in clay.  You have shown
me the work of the real artificer-artisan.  Genius!  This is
something more than genius.  It transcends genius.  It is truth
gone mad.  It is true, man, every line of it.  I wonder if you
realize that, you dogmatist.  Science cannot give you the lie.  It
is the truth of the sneer, stamped out from the black iron of the
Cosmos and interwoven with mighty rhythms of sound into a fabric of
splendor and beauty.  And now I won't say another word.  I am
overwhelmed, crushed.  Yes, I will, too.  Let me market it for
you."

Brissenden grinned.  "There's not a magazine in Christendom that
would dare to publish it - you know that."

"I know nothing of the sort.  I know there's not a magazine in
Christendom that wouldn't jump at it.  They don't get things like
that every day.  That's no mere poem of the year.  It's the poem of
the century."

"I'd like to take you up on the proposition."

"Now don't get cynical," Martin exhorted.  "The magazine editors
are not wholly fatuous.  I know that.  And I'll close with you on
the bet.  I'll wager anything you want that 'Ephemera' is accepted
either on the first or second offering."

"There's just one thing that prevents me from taking you."
Brissenden waited a moment.  "The thing is big - the biggest I've
ever done.  I know that.  It's my swan song.  I am almighty proud
of it.  I worship it.  It's better than whiskey.  It is what I
dreamed of - the great and perfect thing - when I was a simple
young man, with sweet illusions and clean ideals.  And I've got it,
now, in my last grasp, and I'll not have it pawed over and soiled
by a lot of swine.  No, I won't take the bet.  It's mine.  I made
it, and I've shared it with you."

"But think of the rest of the world," Martin protested.  "The
function of beauty is joy-making."

"It's my beauty."

"Don't be selfish."

"I'm not selfish."  Brissenden grinned soberly in the way he had
when pleased by the thing his thin lips were about to shape.  "I'm
as unselfish as a famished hog."

In vain Martin strove to shake him from his decision.  Martin told
him that his hatred of the magazines was rabid, fanatical, and that
his conduct was a thousand times more despicable than that of the
youth who burned the temple of Diana at Ephesus.  Under the storm
of denunciation Brissenden complacently sipped his toddy and
affirmed that everything the other said was quite true, with the
exception of the magazine editors.  His hatred of them knew no
bounds, and he excelled Martin in denunciation when he turned upon
them.

"I wish you'd type it for me," he said.  "You know how a thousand
times better than any stenographer.  And now I want to give you
some advice."  He drew a bulky manuscript from his outside coat
pocket.  "Here's your 'Shame of the Sun.'  I've read it not once,
but twice and three times - the highest compliment I can pay you.
After what you've said about 'Ephemera' I must be silent.  But this
I will say:  when 'The Shame of the Sun' is published, it will make
a hit.  It will start a controversy that will be worth thousands to
you just in advertising."

Martin laughed.  "I suppose your next advice will be to submit it
to the magazines."

"By all means no - that is, if you want to see it in print.  Offer
it to the first-class houses.  Some publisher's reader may be mad
enough or drunk enough to report favorably on it.  You've read the
books.  The meat of them has been transmuted in the alembic of
Martin Eden's mind and poured into 'The Shame of the Sun,' and one
day Martin Eden will be famous, and not the least of his fame will
rest upon that work.  So you must get a publisher for it - the
sooner the better."

Brissenden went home late that night; and just as he mounted the
first step of the car, he swung suddenly back on Martin and thrust
into his hand a small, tightly crumpled wad of paper.

"Here, take this," he said.  "I was out to the races to-day, and I
had the right dope."

The bell clanged and the car pulled out, leaving Martin wondering
as to the nature of the crinkly, greasy wad he clutched in his
hand.  Back in his room he unrolled it and found a hundred-dollar
bill.

He did not scruple to use it.  He knew his friend had always plenty
of money, and he knew also, with profound certitude, that his
success would enable him to repay it.  In the morning he paid every
bill, gave Maria three months' advance on the room, and redeemed
every pledge at the pawnshop.  Next he bought Marian's wedding
present, and simpler presents, suitable to Christmas, for Ruth and
Gertrude.  And finally, on the balance remaining to him, he herded
the whole Silva tribe down into Oakland.  He was a winter late in
redeeming his promise, but redeemed it was, for the last, least
Silva got a pair of shoes, as well as Maria herself.  Also, there
were horns, and dolls, and toys of various sorts, and parcels and
bundles of candies and nuts that filled the arms of all the Silvas
to overflowing.

It was with this extraordinary procession trooping at his and
Maria's heels into a confectioner's in quest if the biggest candy-
cane ever made, that he encountered Ruth and her mother.  Mrs.
Morse was shocked.  Even Ruth was hurt, for she had some regard for
appearances, and her lover, cheek by jowl with Maria, at the head
of that army of Portuguese ragamuffins, was not a pretty sight.
But it was not that which hurt so much as what she took to be his
lack of pride and self-respect.  Further, and keenest of all, she
read into the incident the impossibility of his living down his
working-class origin.  There was stigma enough in the fact of it,
but shamelessly to flaunt it in the face of the world - her world -
was going too far.  Though her engagement to Martin had been kept
secret, their long intimacy had not been unproductive of gossip;
and in the shop, glancing covertly at her lover and his following,
had been several of her acquaintances.  She lacked the easy
largeness of Martin and could not rise superior to her environment.
She had been hurt to the quick, and her sensitive nature was
quivering with the shame of it.  So it was, when Martin arrived
later in the day, that he kept her present in his breast-pocket,
deferring the giving of it to a more propitious occasion.  Ruth in
tears - passionate, angry tears - was a revelation to him.  The
spectacle of her suffering convinced him that he had been a brute,
yet in the soul of him he could not see how nor why.  It never
entered his head to be ashamed of those he knew, and to take the
Silvas out to a Christmas treat could in no way, so it seemed to
him, show lack of consideration for Ruth.  On the other hand, he
did see Ruth's point of view, after she had explained it; and he
looked upon it as a feminine weakness, such as afflicted all women
and the best of women.

Chapter XXXVI

"Come on, - I'll show you the real dirt," Brissenden said to him, one evening in January.

They had dined together in San Francisco, and were at the Ferry Building, returning to Oakland, when the whim came to him to show Martin the "real dirt." He turned and fled across the water-front, a meagre shadow in a flapping overcoat, with Martin straining to keep up with him. At a wholesale liquor store he bought two gallon-demijohns of old port, and with one in each hand boarded a Mission Street car, Martin at his heels burdened with several quart-bottles of whiskey.

If Ruth could see me now, was his thought, while he wondered as to what constituted the real dirt.

"Maybe nobody will be there," Brissenden said, when they dismounted and plunged off to the right into the heart of the working-class ghetto, south of Market Street. "In which case you'll miss what you've been looking for so long."

"And what the deuce is that?" Martin asked.

"Men, intelligent men, and not the gibbering nonentities I found you consorting with in that trader's den. You read the books and you found yourself all alone. Well, I'm going to show you to-night some other men who've read the books, so that you won't be lonely any more."

"Not that I bother my head about their everlasting discussions," he said at the end of a block. "I'm not interested in book philosophy. But you'll find these fellows intelligences and not bourgeois swine. But watch out, they'll talk an arm off of you on any subject under the sun."

"Hope Norton's there," he panted a little later, resisting Martin's effort to relieve him of the two demijohns. "Norton's an idealist - a Harvard man. Prodigious memory. Idealism led him to philosophic anarchy, and his family threw him off. Father's a railroad president and many times millionnaire, but the son's starving in 'Frisco, editing an anarchist sheet for twenty-five a month."

Martin was little acquainted in San Francisco, and not at all south of Market; so he had no idea of where he was being led.

"Go ahead," he said; "tell me about them beforehand. What do they do for a living? How do they happen to be here?"

"Hope Hamilton's there." Brissenden paused and rested his hands. "Strawn-Hamilton's his name - hyphenated, you know - comes of old Southern stock. He's a tramp - laziest man I ever knew, though he's clerking, or trying to, in a socialist cooperative store for six dollars a week. But he's a confirmed hobo. Tramped into town. I've seen him sit all day on a bench and never a bite pass his lips, and in the evening, when I invited him to dinner - restaurant two blocks away - have him say, 'Too much trouble, old man. Buy me a package of cigarettes instead.' He was a Spencerian like you till Kreis turned him to materialistic monism. I'll start him on monism if I can. Norton's another monist - only he affirms naught but spirit. He can give Kreis and Hamilton all they want, too."

"Who is Kreis?" Martin asked.

"His rooms we're going to. One time professor - fired from university - usual story. A mind like a steel trap. Makes his living any old way. I know he's been a street fakir when he was down. Unscrupulous. Rob a corpse of a shroud - anything. Difference between him - and the bourgeoisie is that he robs without illusion. He'll talk Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer, or Kant, or anything, but the only thing in this world, not excepting Mary, that he really cares for, is his monism. Haeckel is his little tin god. The only way to insult him is to take a slap at Haeckel."

"Here's the hang-out." Brissenden rested his demijohn at the upstairs entrance, preliminary to the climb. It was the usual two- story corner building, with a saloon and grocery underneath. "The gang lives here - got the whole upstairs to themselves. But Kreis is the only one who has two rooms. Come on."

No lights burned in the upper hall, but Brissenden threaded the utter blackness like a familiar ghost. He stopped to speak to Martin.

"There's one fellow - Stevens - a theosophist. Makes a pretty tangle when he gets going. Just now he's dish-washer in a restaurant. Likes a good cigar. I've seen him eat in a ten-cent hash-house and pay fifty cents for the cigar he smoked afterward. I've got a couple in my pocket for him, if he shows up."

"And there's another fellow - Parry - an Australian, a statistician and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight champion of the United States in '68, and you'll get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot- machine. And there's Andy, a stone-mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; and another fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot socialist and strong union man. By the way, you remember Cooks' and Waiters' strike - Hamilton was the chap who organized that union and precipitated the strike - planned it all out in advance, right here in Kreis's rooms. Did it just for the fun of it, but was too lazy to stay by the union. Yet he could have risen high if he wanted to. There's no end to the possibilities in that man - if he weren't so insuperably lazy."

Brissenden advanced through the darkness till a thread of light marked the threshold of a door. A knock and an answer opened it, and Martin found himself shaking hands with Kreis, a handsome brunette man, with dazzling white teeth, a drooping black mustache, and large, flashing black eyes. Mary, a matronly young blonde, was washing dishes in the little back room that served for kitchen and dining room. The front room served as bedchamber and living room. Overhead was the week's washing, hanging in festoons so low that Martin did not see at first the two men talking in a corner. They hailed Brissenden and his demijohns with acclamation, and, on being introduced, Martin learned they were Andy and Parry. He joined them and listened attentively to the description of a prize-fight Parry had seen the night before; while Brissenden, in his glory, plunged into the manufacture of a toddy and the serving of wine and whiskey-and-sodas. At his command, "Bring in the clan," Andy departed to go the round of the rooms for the lodgers.

"We're lucky that most of them are here," Brissenden whispered to Martin. "There's Norton and Hamilton; come on and meet them. Stevens isn't around, I hear. I'm going to get them started on monism if I can. Wait till they get a few jolts in them and they'll warm up."

At first the conversation was desultory. Nevertheless Martin could not fail to appreciate the keen play of their minds. They were men with opinions, though the opinions often clashed, and, though they were witty and clever, they were not superficial. He swiftly saw, no matter upon what they talked, that each man applied the correlation of knowledge and had also a deep-seated and unified conception of society and the Cosmos. Nobody manufactured their opinions for them; they were all rebels of one variety or another, and their lips were strangers to platitudes. Never had Martin, at the Morses', heard so amazing a range of topics discussed. There seemed no limit save time to the things they were alive to. The talk wandered from Mrs. Humphry Ward's new book to Shaw's latest play, through the future of the drama to reminiscences of Mansfield. They appreciated or sneered at the morning editorials, jumped from labor conditions in New Zealand to Henry James and Brander Matthews, passed on to the German designs in the Far East and the economic aspect of the Yellow Peril, wrangled over the German elections and Bebel's last speech, and settled down to local politics, the latest plans and scandals in the union labor party administration, and the wires that were pulled to bring about the Coast Seamen's strike. Martin was struck by the inside knowledge they possessed. They knew what was never printed in the newspapers - the wires and strings and the hidden hands that made the puppets dance. To Martin's surprise, the girl, Mary, joined in the conversation, displaying an intelligence he had never encountered in the few women he had met. They talked together on Swinburne and Rossetti, after which she led him beyond his depth into the by- paths of French literature. His revenge came when she defended Maeterlinck and he brought into action the carefully-thought-out thesis of "The Shame of the Sun."

Several other men had dropped in, and the air was thick with tobacco smoke, when Brissenden waved the red flag.

"Here's fresh meat for your axe, Kreis," he said; "a rose-white youth with the ardor of a lover for Herbert Spencer. Make a Haeckelite of him - if you can."

Kreis seemed to wake up and flash like some metallic, magnetic thing, while Norton looked at Martin sympathetically, with a sweet, girlish smile, as much as to say that he would be amply protected.

Kreis began directly on Martin, but step by step Norton interfered, until he and Kreis were off and away in a personal battle. Martin listened and fain would have rubbed his eyes. It was impossible that this should be, much less in the labor ghetto south of Market. The books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now and again other men joined in, and all followed the discussion with cigarettes going out in their hands and with alert, intent faces.

Idealism had never attracted Martin, but the exposition it now received at the hands of Norton was a revelation. The logical plausibility of it, that made an appeal to his intellect, seemed missed by Kreis and Hamilton, who sneered at Norton as a metaphysician, and who, in turn, sneered back at them as metaphysicians. Phenomenon and Noumenon were bandied back and forth. They charged him with attempting to explain consciousness by itself. He charged them with word-jugglery, with reasoning from words to theory instead of from facts to theory. At this they were aghast. It was the cardinal tenet of their mode of reasoning to start with facts and to give names to the facts.

When Norton wandered into the intricacies of Kant, Kreis reminded him that all good little German philosophies when they died went to Oxford. A little later Norton reminded them of Hamilton's Law of Parsimony, the application of which they immediately claimed for every reasoning process of theirs. And Martin hugged his knees and exulted in it all. But Norton was no Spencerian, and he, too, strove for Martin's philosophic soul, talking as much at him as to his two opponents.

"You know Berkeley has never been answered," he said, looking directly at Martin. "Herbert Spencer came the nearest, which was not very near. Even the stanchest of Spencer's followers will not go farther. I was reading an essay of Saleeby's the other day, and the best Saleeby could say was that Herbert Spencer nearly succeeded in answering Berkeley."

"You know what Hume said?" Hamilton asked. Norton nodded, but Hamilton gave it for the benefit of the rest. "He said that Berkeley's arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction."

"In his, Hume's, mind," was the reply. "And Hume's mind was the same as yours, with this difference: he was wise enough to admit there was no answering Berkeley."

Norton was sensitive and excitable, though he never lost his head, while Kreis and Hamilton were like a pair of cold-blooded savages, seeking out tender places to prod and poke. As the evening grew late, Norton, smarting under the repeated charges of being a metaphysician, clutching his chair to keep from jumping to his feet, his gray eyes snapping and his girlish face grown harsh and sure, made a grand attack upon their position.

"All right, you Haeckelites, I may reason like a medicine man, but, pray, how do you reason? You have nothing to stand on, you unscientific dogmatists with your positive science which you are always lugging about into places it has no right to be. Long before the school of materialistic monism arose, the ground was removed so that there could be no foundation. Locke was the man, John Locke. Two hundred years ago - more than that, even in his 'Essay concerning the Human Understanding,' he proved the non- existence of innate ideas. The best of it is that that is precisely what you claim. To-night, again and again, you have asserted the non-existence of innate ideas.

"And what does that mean? It means that you can never know ultimate reality. Your brains are empty when you are born. Appearances, or phenomena, are all the content your minds can receive from your five senses. Then noumena, which are not in your minds when you are born, have no way of getting in - "

"I deny - " Kreis started to interrupt.

"You wait till I'm done," Norton shouted. "You can know only that much of the play and interplay of force and matter as impinges in one way or another on our senses. You see, I am willing to admit, for the sake of the argument, that matter exists; and what I am about to do is to efface you by your own argument. I can't do it any other way, for you are both congenitally unable to understand a philosophic abstraction."

"And now, what do you know of matter, according to your own positive science? You know it only by its phenomena, its appearances. You are aware only of its changes, or of such changes in it as cause changes in your consciousness. Positive science deals only with phenomena, yet you are foolish enough to strive to be ontologists and to deal with noumena. Yet, by the very definition of positive science, science is concerned only with appearances. As somebody has said, phenomenal knowledge cannot transcend phenomena."

"You cannot answer Berkeley, even if you have annihilated Kant, and yet, perforce, you assume that Berkeley is wrong when you affirm that science proves the non-existence of God, or, as much to the point, the existence of matter. - You know I granted the reality of matter only in order to make myself intelligible to your understanding. Be positive scientists, if you please; but ontology has no place in positive science, so leave it alone. Spencer is right in his agnosticism, but if Spencer - "

But it was time to catch the last ferry-boat for Oakland, and Brissenden and Martin slipped out, leaving Norton still talking and Kreis and Hamilton waiting to pounce on him like a pair of hounds as soon as he finished.

"You have given me a glimpse of fairyland," Martin said on the ferry-boat. "It makes life worth while to meet people like that. My mind is all worked up. I never appreciated idealism before. Yet I can't accept it. I know that I shall always be a realist. I am so made, I guess. But I'd like to have made a reply to Kreis and Hamilton, and I think I'd have had a word or two for Norton. I didn't see that Spencer was damaged any. I'm as excited as a child on its first visit to the circus. I see I must read up some more. I'm going to get hold of Saleeby. I still think Spencer is unassailable, and next time I'm going to take a hand myself."

But Brissenden, breathing painfully, had dropped off to sleep, his chin buried in a scarf and resting on his sunken chest, his body wrapped in the long overcoat and shaking to the vibration of the propellers.

Chapter XXXVII



The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to
Brissenden's advice and command.  "The Shame of the Sun" he wrapped
and mailed to THE ACROPOLIS.  He believed he could find magazine
publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines
would commend him to the book-publishing houses.  "Ephemera" he
likewise wrapped and mailed to a magazine.  Despite Brissenden's
prejudice against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with
him, Martin decided that the great poem should see print.  He did
not intend, however, to publish it without the other's permission.
His plan was to get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and,
thus armed, again to wrestle with Brissenden for consent.

Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a
number of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him
with its insistent clamor to be created.  Apparently it was to be a
rattling sea story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and
romance, handling real characters, in a real world, under real
conditions.  But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be
something else - something that the superficial reader would never
discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way
the interest and enjoyment for such a reader.  It was this, and not
the mere story, that impelled Martin to write it.  For that matter,
it was always the great, universal motif that suggested plots to
him.  After having found such a motif, he cast about for the
particular persons and particular location in time and space
wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing.  "Overdue" was
the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would
not be more than sixty thousand words - a bagatelle for him with
his splendid vigor of production.  On this first day he took hold
of it with conscious delight in the mastery of his tools.  He no
longer worried for fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip
and mar his work.  The long months of intense application and study
had brought their reward.  He could now devote himself with sure
hand to the larger phases of the thing he shaped; and as he worked,
hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the sure and cosmic
grasp with which he held life and the affairs of life.  "Overdue"
would tell a story that would be true of its particular characters
and its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was
confident, great vital things that would be true of all time, and
all sea, and all life - thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought,
leaning back for a moment from the table.  Ay, thanks to Herbert
Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had
placed in his hands.

He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing.  "It will
go!  It will go!" was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears.
Of course it would go.  At last he was turning out the thing at
which the magazines would jump.  The whole story worked out before
him in lightning flashes.  He broke off from it long enough to
write a paragraph in his note-book.  This would be the last
paragraph in "Overdue"; but so thoroughly was the whole book
already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he
had arrived at the end, the end itself.  He compared the tale, as
yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to
be immeasurably superior.  "There's only one man who could touch
it," he murmured aloud, "and that's Conrad.  And it ought to make
even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, 'Well done,
Martin, my boy.'"

He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was
to have dinner at the Morses'.  Thanks to Brissenden, his black
suit was out of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties.
Down town he stopped off long enough to run into the library and
search for Saleeby's books.  He drew out 'The Cycle of Life," and
on the car turned to the essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer.  As
Martin read, he grew angry.  His face flushed, his jaw set, and
unconsciously his hand clenched, unclenched, and clenched again as
if he were taking fresh grips upon some hateful thing out of which
he was squeezing the life.  When he left the car, he strode along
the sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse
bell with such viciousness that it roused him to consciousness of
his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smiling with
amusement at himself.  No sooner, however, was he inside than a
great depression descended upon him.  He fell from the height where
he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
"Bourgeois," "trader's den" - Brissenden's epithets repeated
themselves in his mind.  But what of that? he demanded angrily.  He
was marrying Ruth, not her family.

It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy.  There
was color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again -
the eyes in which he had first read immortality.  He had forgotten
immortality of late, and the trend of his scientific reading had
been away from it; but here, in Ruth's eyes, he read an argument
without words that transcended all worded arguments.  He saw that
in her eyes before which all discussion fled away, for he saw love
there.  And in his own eyes was love; and love was unanswerable.
Such was his passionate doctrine.

The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left
him supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life.
Nevertheless, at table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion
consequent upon the hard day seized hold of him.  He was aware that
his eyes were tired and that he was irritable.  He remembered it
was at this table, at which he now sneered and was so often bored,
that he had first eaten with civilized beings in what he had
imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and refinement.  He
caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long ago, a
self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony of
apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of eating-
implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap
to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to
be frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did
not possess.

He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a
passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will
strive to locate the life preservers.  Well, that much had come out
of it - love and Ruth.  All the rest had failed to stand the test
of the books.  But Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he
found a biological sanction.  Love was the most exalted expression
of life.  Nature had been busy designing him, as she had been busy
with all normal men, for the purpose of loving.  She had spent ten
thousand centuries - ay, a hundred thousand and a million centuries
- upon the task, and he was the best she could do.  She had made
love the strongest thing in him, increased its power a myriad per
cent with her gift of imagination, and sent him forth into the
ephemera to thrill and melt and mate.  His hand sought Ruth's hand
beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was given and
received.  She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes were
radiant and melting.  So were his in the thrill that pervaded him;
nor did he realize how much that was radiant and melting in her
eyes had been aroused by what she had seen in his.

Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse's right,
sat Judge Blount, a local superior court judge.  Martin had met him
a number of times and had failed to like him.  He and Ruth's father
were discussing labor union politics, the local situation, and
socialism, and Mr. Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the
latter topic.  At last Judge Blount looked across the table with
benignant and fatherly pity.  Martin smiled to himself.

"You'll grow out of it, young man," he said soothingly.  "Time is
the best cure for such youthful distempers."  He turned to Mr.
Morse.  "I do not believe discussion is good in such cases.  It
makes the patient obstinate."

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

Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort.  The day had
been too long, the day's effort too intense, and he was deep in the
throes of the reaction.

"Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors," he said; "but if you
care a whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that
you are poor diagnosticians.  In fact, you are both suffering from
the disease you think you find in me.  As for me, I am immune.  The
socialist philosophy that riots half-baked in your veins has passed
me by."

"Clever, clever," murmured the judge.  "An excellent ruse in
controversy, to reverse positions."

"Out of your mouth."  Martin's eyes were sparkling, but he kept
control of himself.  "You see, Judge, I've heard your campaign
speeches.  By some henidical process - henidical, by the way is a
favorite word of mine which nobody understands - by some henidical
process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive
system and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you
indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear the
strength from the strong."

"My young man - "

"Remember, I've heard your campaign speeches," Martin warned.
"It's on record, your position on interstate commerce regulation,
on regulation of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the
conservation of the forests, on a thousand and one restrictive
measures that are nothing else than socialistic."

"Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
various outrageous exercises of power?"

"That's not the point.  I mean to tell you that you are a poor
diagnostician.  I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the
microbe of socialism.  I mean to tell you that it is you who are
suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe.  As
for me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an
inveterate opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing
else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that
will not stand the test of the dictionary."

"I am a reactionary - so complete a reactionary that my position is
incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social
organization and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil.
You make believe that you believe in the survival of the strong and
the rule of the strong.  I believe.  That is the difference.  When
I was a trifle younger, - a few months younger, - I believed the
same thing.  You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed me.
But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they grunt
and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have
swung back to aristocracy, if you please.  I am the only
individualist in this room.  I look to the state for nothing.  I
look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the
state from its own rotten futility."

"Nietzsche was right.  I won't take the time to tell you who
Nietzsche was, but he was right.  The world belongs to the strong -
to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the
swine-trough of trade and exchange.  The world belongs to the true
nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the
'yes-sayers.'  And they will eat you up, you socialists - who are
afraid of socialism and who think yourselves individualists.  Your
slave-morality of the meek and lowly will never save you. - Oh,
it's all Greek, I know, and I won't bother you any more with it.
But remember one thing.  There aren't half a dozen individualists
in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them."

He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to
Ruth.

"I'm wrought up to-day," he said in an undertone.  "All I want to
do is to love, not talk."

He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-

"I am unconvinced.  All socialists are Jesuits.  That is the way to
tell them."

"We'll make a good Republican out of you yet," said Judge Blount.

"The man on horseback will arrive before that time," Martin
retorted with good humor, and returned to Ruth.

But Mr. Morse was not content.  He did not like the laziness and
the disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective
son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose
nature he had no understanding.  So he turned the conversation to
Herbert Spencer.  Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose
ears had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher's name,
listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe
against Spencer.  From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as
much as to say, "There, my boy, you see."

"Chattering daws," Martin muttered under his breath, and went on
talking with Ruth and Arthur.

But the long day and the "real dirt" of the night before were
telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what
had made him angry when he read it on the car.

"What is the matter?" Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he
was making to contain himself.

"There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its
prophet," Judge Blount was saying at that moment.

Martin turned upon him.

"A cheap judgment," he remarked quietly.  "I heard it first in the
City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known
better.  I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap
of it nauseates me.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  To hear
that great and noble man's name upon your lips is like finding a
dew-drop in a cesspool.  You are disgusting."

It was like a thunderbolt.  Judge Blount glared at him with
apoplectic countenance, and silence reigned.  Mr. Morse was
secretly pleased.  He could see that his daughter was shocked.  It
was what he wanted to do - to bring out the innate ruffianism of
this man he did not like.

Ruth's hand sought Martin's beseechingly under the table, but his
blood was up.  He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and
fraud of those who sat in the high places.  A Superior Court Judge!
It was only several years before that he had looked up from the
mire at such glorious entities and deemed them gods.

Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing
himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter
understood was for the benefit of the ladies.  Even this added to
his anger.  Was there no honesty in the world?

"You can't discuss Spencer with me," he cried.  "You do not know
any more about Spencer than do his own countrymen.  But it is no
fault of yours, I grant.  It is just a phase of the contemptible
ignorance of the times.  I ran across a sample of it on my way here
this evening.  I was reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer.  You
should read it.  It is accessible to all men.  You can buy it in
any book-store or draw it from the public library.  You would feel
ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance of that noble man
compared with what Saleeby has collected on the subject.  It is a
record of shame that would shame your shame."

"'The philosopher of the half-educated,' he was called by an
academic Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere
he breathed.  I don't think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but
there have been critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who
have read no more than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his
followers to adduce one single idea from all his writings - from
Herbert Spencer's writings, the man who has impressed the stamp of
his genius over the whole field of scientific research and modern
thought; the father of psychology; the man who revolutionized
pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French peasant is taught
the three R's according to principles laid down by him.  And the
little gnats of men sting his memory when they get their very bread
and butter from the technical application of his ideas.  What
little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to him.  It
is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in
their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent."

"And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford - a man who sits
in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount - has said that
Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather
than a thinker.  Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of
them!  '"First Principles" is not wholly destitute of a certain
literary power,' said one of them.  And others of them have said
that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker.
Yappers and blatherskites!  Yappers and blatherskites!"

Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence.  Everybody in Ruth's
family looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement,
and they were horrified at Martin's outbreak.  The remainder of the
dinner passed like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining
their talk to each other, and the rest of the conversation being
extremely desultory.  Then afterward, when Ruth and Martin were
alone, there was a scene.

"You are unbearable," she wept.

But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, "The beasts!
The beasts!"

When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-

"By telling the truth about him?"

"I don't care whether it was true or not," she insisted.  "There
are certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult
anybody."

"Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?"
Martin demanded.  "Surely to assault truth is a more serious
misdemeanor than to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge's.
He did worse than that.  He blackened the name of a great, noble
man who is dead.  Oh, the beasts!  The beasts!"

His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him.
Never had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and
unreasonable to her comprehension.  And yet, through her very
terror ran the fibres of fascination that had drawn and that still
drew her to him - that had compelled her to lean towards him, and,
in that mad, culminating moment, lay her hands upon his neck.  She
was hurt and outraged by what had taken place, and yet she lay in
his arms and quivered while he went on muttering, "The beasts!  The
beasts!"  And she still lay there when he said:  "I'll not bother
your table again, dear.  They do not like me, and it is wrong of me
to thrust my objectionable presence upon them.  Besides, they are
just as objectionable to me.  Faugh!  They are sickening.  And to
think of it, I dreamed in my innocence that the persons who sat in
the high places, who lived in fine houses and had educations and
bank accounts, were worth while!

Chapter XXXVIII


"Come on, let's go down to the local."

So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before
- the second hemorrhage in three days.  The perennial whiskey glass
was in his hands, and he drained it with shaking fingers.

"What do I want with socialism?" Martin demanded.

"Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches," the sick man urged.
"Get up and spout.  Tell them why you don't want socialism.  Tell
them what you think about them and their ghetto ethics.  Slam
Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains.  Make a scrap
of it.  It will do them good.  Discussion is what they want, and
what you want, too.  You see, I'd like to see you a socialist
before I'm gone.  It will give you a sanction for your existence.
It is the one thing that will save you in the time of
disappointment that is coming to you."

"I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist,"
Martin pondered.  "You detest the crowd so.  Surely there is
nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul."
He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other
was refilling.  "Socialism doesn't seem to save you."

"I'm very sick," was the answer.  "With you it is different.  You
have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to
life somehow.  As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist.  I'll
tell you.  It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the
present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day
is past for your man on horseback.  The slaves won't stand for it.
They are too many, and willy-nilly they'll drag down the would-be
equestrian before ever he gets astride.  You can't get away from
them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality.  It's
not a nice mess, I'll allow.  But it's been a-brewing and swallow
it you must.  You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche
ideas.  The past is past, and the man who says history repeats
itself is a liar.  Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a
poor chap to do?  We can't have the man on horseback, and anything
is preferable to the timid swine that now rule.  But come on,
anyway.  I'm loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any
longer, I'll get drunk.  And you know the doctor says - damn the
doctor!  I'll fool him yet."

It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the
Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class.  The
speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin's admiration at the same time
that he aroused his antagonism.  The man's stooped and narrow
shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the
crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of
the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who
had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time.
To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol.  He was
the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable
mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to
biological law on the ragged confines of life.  They were the
unfit.  In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike
proclivities for cooperation, Nature rejected them for the
exceptional man.  Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from
her prolific hand she selected only the best.  It was by the same
method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and cucumbers.
Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better
method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with
this particular method.  Of course, they could squirm as they
perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the
platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they
counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the
penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos.

So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to
give them hell.  He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform,
as was the custom, and addressing the chairman.  He began in a low
voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in
his brain while the Jew was speaking.  In such meetings five
minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin's
five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their
doctrines but half completed.  He had caught their interest, and
the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin's
time.  They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect,
and they listened intently, following every word.  He spoke with
fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves
and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers
as the slaves in question.  He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and
enunciated the biological law of development.

"And so," he concluded, in a swift resume, "no state composed of
the slave-types can endure.  The old law of development still
holds.  In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong
and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and
the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish.  The result
is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so
long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation
increases.  That is development.  But you slaves - it is too bad to
be slaves, I grant - but you slaves dream of a society where the
law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and
inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much
as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all
will marry and have progeny - the weak as well as the strong.  What
will be the result?  No longer will the strength and life-value of
each generation increase.  On the contrary, it will diminish.
There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy.  Your society of
slaves - of, by, and for, slaves - must inevitably weaken and go to
pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces.

"Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics.  No
state of slaves can stand - "

"How about the United States?" a man yelled from the audience.

"And how about it?" Martin retorted.  "The thirteen colonies threw
off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called.  The slaves
were their own masters.  There were no more masters of the sword.
But you couldn't get along without masters of some sort, and there
arose a new set of masters - not the great, virile, noble men, but
the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders.  And they
enslaved you over again - but not frankly, as the true, noble men
would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by
spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies.  They
have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave
legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel
slavery your slave boys and girls.  Two million of your children
are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States.
Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly
fed."

"But to return.  I have shown that no society of slaves can endure,
because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of
development.  No sooner can a slave society be organized than
deterioration sets in.  It is easy for you to talk of annulling the
law of development, but where is the new law of development that
will maintain your strength?  Formulate it.  Is it already
formulated?  Then state it."

Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices.  A score of men
were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair.  And
one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire
and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack.
It was a wild night - but it was wild intellectually, a battle of
ideas.  Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers
replied directly to Martin.  They shook him with lines of thought
that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new
biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws.  They
were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the
chairman rapped and pounded for order.

It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there
on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of
journalism for sensation.  He was not a bright cub reporter.  He
was merely facile and glib.  He was too dense to follow the
discussion.  In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was
vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class.  Also,
he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and
dictated the policies of nations and newspapers.  Further, he had
an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect
reporter who is able to make something - even a great deal - out of
nothing.

He did not know what all the talk was about.  It was not necessary.
Words like REVOLUTION gave him his cue.  Like a paleontologist,
able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was
able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word REVOLUTION.
He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made
the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the
arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism
into the most lurid, red-shirt socialist utterance.  The cub
reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid
on the local color - wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and
degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists
raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths,
yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men.

Chapter XXXIX


Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's
paper.  It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on
the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was
the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists.  He ran over
the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and,
though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he
tossed the paper aside with a laugh.

"Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that
afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived
and dropped limply into the one chair.

"But what do you care?" Brissenden asked.  "Surely you don't desire
the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?"

Martin thought for a while, then said:-

"No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit.  On the
other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's
family a trifle awkward.  Her father always contended I was a
socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief.  Not
that I care for his opinion - but what's the odds?  I want to read
you what I've been doing to-day.  It's 'Overdue,' of course, and
I'm just about halfway through."

He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in
a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting
the oil-burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze
wandered on to Martin.

"Sit down," Brissenden said.

Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to
broach his business.

"I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview
you," he began.

Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.

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

"And he wrote that report," Martin said softly.  "Why, he is only a
boy!"

"Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked.  "I'd give a thousand
dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes."

The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him
and around him and at him.  But he had been commended for his
brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been
detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader
of the organized menace to society.

"You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he
said.  "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it
will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower.
Then we can have the interview afterward."

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

"I guess I'm getting old," was the answer.  "I know I ought, but I
really haven't the heart.  It doesn't seem to matter."

"For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged.

"It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem
worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me.  You see, it
does take energy to give a fellow a poking.  Besides, what does it
matter?"

"That's right - that's the way to take it," the cub announced
airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the
door.

"But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on,
confining his attention to Brissenden.

"It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the
cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising.  That's what
counts.  It was a favor to you."

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

"And it was a favor to me - think of that!" was Martin's
contribution.

"Let me see - where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked,
assuming an air of expectant attention.

"He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden.  "He remembers it all."

"That is sufficient for me."  The cub was trying not to look
worried.  "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes."

"That was sufficient - for last night."  But Brissenden was not a
disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly.
"Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead
on the floor the next moment."

"How will a spanking do?" Martin asked.

Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.

The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the
cub face downward across his knees.

"Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your
face.  It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face."

His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a
swift and steady rhythm.  The cub struggled and cursed and
squirmed, but did not offer to bite.  Brissenden looked on gravely,
though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle,
pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once."

"Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted.
"It is quite numb."

He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.

"I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish
indignation running down his flushed cheeks.  "I'll make you sweat
for this.  You'll see."

"The pretty thing," Martin remarked.  "He doesn't realize that he
has entered upon the downward path.  It is not honest, it is not
square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures
the way he has done, and he doesn't know it."

"He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause.

"Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured.  My grocery will
undoubtedly refuse me credit now.  The worst of it is that the poor
boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class
newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel."

"But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden.  "Who knows but what you
may prove the humble instrument to save him.  Why didn't you let me
swat him just once?  I'd like to have had a hand in it."

"I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes,"
sobbed the erring soul.

"No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak."  Martin shook his head
lugubriously.  "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain.  The young
man cannot reform.  He will become eventually a very great and
successful newspaper man.  He has no conscience.  That alone will
make him great."

With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last
for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle
he still clutched.

In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about
himself that was new to him.  "We are the sworn enemies of
society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview.
"No, we are not anarchists but socialists."  When the reporter
pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the
two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent
affirmation.  His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical,
and various other signs of degeneration were described.  Especially
notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-
shot eyes.

He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City
Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there
inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and
made the most revolutionary speeches.  The cub painted a high-light
picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair,
and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked
as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement
in some fortress dungeon.

The cub had been industrious.  He had scurried around and nosed out
Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of
Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself
standing out in front.  That gentleman was depicted as an
intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his
brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the
brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a
lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered
to him and who would go to jail yet.  Hermann Yon Schmidt, Marian's
husband, had likewise been interviewed.  He had called Martin the
black sheep of the family and repudiated him.  "He tried to sponge
off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt
had said to the reporter.  "He knows better than to come bumming
around here.  A man who won't work is no good, take that from me."

This time Martin was genuinely angry.  Brissenden looked upon the
affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew
that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth.  As for her
father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened
and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement.
How much he would make of it he was soon to realize.  The afternoon
mail brought a letter from Ruth.  Martin opened it with a
premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when
he had received it from the postman.  As he read, mechanically his
hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old
cigarette days.  He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that
he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a
cigarette.

It was not a passionate letter.  There were no touches of anger in
it.  But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last,
was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment.  She had expected
better of him.  She had thought he had got over his youthful
wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while
to enable him to live seriously and decently.  And now her father
and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement
be broken.  That they were justified in this she could not but
admit.  Their relation could never be a happy one.  It had been
unfortunate from the first.  But one regret she voiced in the whole
letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin.  "If only you had
settled down to some position and attempted to make something of
yourself," she wrote.  "But it was not to be.  Your past life had
been too wild and irregular.  I can understand that you are not to
be blamed.  You could act only according to your nature and your
early training.  So I do not blame you, Martin.  Please remember
that.  It was simply a mistake.  As father and mother have
contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be
happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use
trying to see me," she said toward the last.  "It would be an
unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother.  I feel,
as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry.  I shall
have to do much living to atone for it."

He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat
down and replied.  He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the
socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the
converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth.  Toward the
end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for
love.  "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to
tell me but one thing.  Do you love me?  That is all - the answer
to that one question."

But no answer came the next day, nor the next.  "Overdue" lay
untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned
manuscripts under the table grew larger.  For the first time
Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed
through long, restless nights.  Three times he called at the Morse
home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell.
Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and,
though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his
troubles.

For Martin's troubles were many.  The aftermath of the cub
reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated.  The
Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the
greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a
traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him -
carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's
account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it.  The talk in the
neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against
Martin ran high.  No one would have anything to do with a socialist
traitor.  Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained
loyal.  The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of
the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe
distances they called him "hobo" and "bum."  The Silva tribe,
however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched
battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite
the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and
troubles.

Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and
learned what he knew could not be otherwise - that Bernard
Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family
into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house.

"Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged.  "Go away and
get a job somewhere and steady down.  Afterwards, when this all
blows over, you can come back."

Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations.  How could he
explain?  He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that
yawned between him and his people.  He could never cross it and
explain to them his position, - the Nietzschean position, in regard
to socialism.  There were not words enough in the English language,
nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible
to them.  Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was
to get a job.  That was their first word and their last.  It
constituted their whole lexicon of ideas.  Get a job!  Go to work!
Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.  Small
wonder the world belonged to the strong.  The slaves were obsessed
by their own slavery.  A job was to them a golden fetich before
which they fell down and worshipped.

He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he
knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the
pawnbroker.

"Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him.  "After a few
months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job
of drivin' delivery-wagon for him.  Any time you want me, just send
for me an' I'll come.  Don't forget."

She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot
through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait.  As he
watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter.
The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not
wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family.
And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that
slave was his sister Gertrude.  He grinned savagely at the paradox.
A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to
be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along -
ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what
his pity for his sister really was.  The true noble men were above
pity and compassion.  Pity and compassion had been generated in the
subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the
agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings.

Chapter XL


"Overdue" still continued to lie forgotten on the table.  Every
manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table.  Only one
manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden's "Ephemera."
His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer
people were once more worrying about the rent.  But such things no
longer bothered him.  He was seeking a new orientation, and until
that was found his life must stand still.

After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened.  He met
Ruth on the street.  It was true, she was accompanied by her
brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and
that Norman attempted to wave him aside.

"If you interfere with my sister, I'll call an officer," Norman
threatened.  "She does not wish to speak with you, and your
insistence is insult."

"If you persist, you'll have to call that officer, and then you'll
get your name in the papers," Martin answered grimly.  "And now,
get out of my way and get the officer if you want to.  I'm going to
talk with Ruth."

"I want to have it from your own lips," he said to her.

She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.

"The question I asked in my letter," he prompted.

Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a
swift look.

She shook her head.

"Is all this of your own free will?" he demanded.

"It is."  She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation.
"It is of my own free will.  You have disgraced me so that I am
ashamed to meet my friends.  They are all talking about me, I know.
That is all I can tell you.  You have made me very unhappy, and I
never wish to see you again."

"Friends!  Gossip!  Newspaper misreports!  Surely such things are
not stronger than love!  I can only believe that you never loved
me."

A blush drove the pallor from her face.

"After what has passed?" she said faintly.  "Martin, you do not
know what you are saying.  I am not common."

"You see, she doesn't want to have anything to do with you," Norman
blurted out, starting on with her.

Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his
coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.

It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went
up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it.
He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about
him like an awakened somnambulist.  He noticed "Overdue" lying on
the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen.  There was
in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness.  Here was
something undone.  It had been deferred against the completion of
something else.  Now that something else had been finished, and he
would apply himself to this task until it was finished.  What he
would do next he did not know.  All that he did know was that a
climacteric in his life had been attained.  A period had been
reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion.  He
was not curious about the future.  He would soon enough find out
what it held in store for him.  Whatever it was, it did not matter.
Nothing seemed to matter.

For five days he toiled on at "Overdue," going nowhere, seeing
nobody, and eating meagrely.  On the morning of the sixth day the
postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of THE PARTHENON.
A glance told him that "Ephemera" was accepted.  "We have submitted
the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce," the editor went on to say, "and
he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go.  As
an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you
that we have set it for the August number, our July number being
already made up.  Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr.
Brissenden.  Please send by return mail his photograph and
biographical data.  If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly
telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price."

Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty
dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph.  Then,
too, there was Brissenden's consent to be gained.  Well, he had
been right, after all.  Here was one magazine editor who knew real
poetry when he saw it.  And the price was splendid, even though it
was for the poem of a century.  As for Cartwright Bruce, Martin
knew that he was the one critic for whose opinions Brissenden had
any respect.

Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the
houses and cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that
he was not more elated over his friend's success and over his own
signal victory.  The one critic in the United States had pronounced
favorably on the poem, while his own contention that good stuff
could find its way into the magazines had proved correct.  But
enthusiasm had lost its spring in him, and he found that he was
more anxious to see Brissenden than he was to carry the good news.
The acceptance of THE PARTHENON had recalled to him that during his
five days' devotion to "Overdue" he had not heard from Brissenden
nor even thought about him.  For the first time Martin realized the
daze he had been in, and he felt shame for having forgotten his
friend.  But even the shame did not burn very sharply.  He was numb
to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones concerned in the
writing of "Overdue."  So far as other affairs were concerned, he
had been in a trance.  For that matter, he was still in a trance.
All this life through which the electric car whirred seemed remote
and unreal, and he would have experienced little interest and less
shook if the great stone steeple of the church he passed had
suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon his head.

At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden's room, and hurried down
again.  The room was empty.  All luggage was gone.

"Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?" he asked the clerk, who
looked at him curiously for a moment.

"Haven't you heard?" he asked.

Martin shook his head.

"Why, the papers were full of it.  He was found dead in bed.
Suicide.  Shot himself through the head."

"Is he buried yet?" Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one
else's voice, from a long way off, asking the question.

"No.  The body was shipped East after the inquest.  Lawyers engaged
by his people saw to the arrangements."

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

"Oh, I don't know.  It happened five days ago."

"Five days ago?"

"Yes, five days ago."

"Oh," Martin said as he turned and went out.

At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram
to THE PARTHENON, advising them to proceed with the publication of
the poem.  He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay
his carfare home, so he sent the message collect.

Once in his room, he resumed his writing.  The days and nights came
and went, and he sat at his table and wrote on.  He went nowhere,
save to the pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when
he was hungry and had something to cook, and just as methodically
went without when he had nothing to cook.  Composed as the story
was, in advance, chapter by chapter, he nevertheless saw and
developed an opening that increased the power of it, though it
necessitated twenty thousand additional words.  It was not that
there was any vital need that the thing should be well done, but
that his artistic canons compelled him to do it well.  He worked on
in the daze, strangely detached from the world around him, feeling
like a familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former
life.  He remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the
spirit of a man who was dead and who did not have sense enough to
know it; and he paused for the moment to wonder if he were really
dead did unaware of it.

Came the day when "Overdue" was finished.  The agent of the type-
writer firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while
Martin, on the one chair, typed the last pages of the final
chapter.  "Finis," he wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it
was indeed finis.  He watched the type-writer carried out the door
with a feeling of relief, then went over and lay down on the bed.
He was faint from hunger.  Food had not passed his lips in thirty-
six hours, but he did not think about it.  He lay on his back, with
closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or stupor
slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness.  Half in delirium,
he began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden
had been fond of quoting to him.  Maria, listening anxiously
outside his door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance.  The
words in themselves were not significant to her, but the fact that
he was saying them was.  "I have done," was the burden of the poem.


"'I have done -
Put by the lute.
Song and singing soon are over
As the airy shades that hover
In among the purple clover.
I have done -
Put by the lute.
Once I sang as early thrushes
Sing among the dewy bushes;
Now I'm mute.
I am like a weary linnet,
For my throat has no song in it;
I have had my singing minute.
I have done.
Put by the lute.'"


Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove,
where she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion's
share of chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from
the bottom of the pot.  Martin roused himself and sat up and began
to eat, between spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been
talking in his sleep and that he did not have any fever.

After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the
edge of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw
nothing until the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the
morning's mail and which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into
his darkened brain.  It is THE PARTHENON, he thought, the August
PARTHENON, and it must contain "Ephemera."  If only Brissenden were
here to see!

He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.
"Ephemera" had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and
Beardsley-like margin decorations.  On one side of the head-piece
was Brissenden's photograph, on the other side was the photograph
of Sir John Value, the British Ambassador.  A preliminary editorial
note quoted Sir John Value as saying that there were no poets in
America, and the publication of "Ephemera" was THE PARTHENON'S.
"There, take that, Sir John Value!"  Cartwright Bruce was described
as the greatest critic in America, and he was quoted as saying that
"Ephemera" was the greatest poem ever written in America.  And
finally, the editor's foreword ended with:  "We have not yet made
up our minds entirely as to the merits of "Ephemera"; perhaps we
shall never be able to do so.  But we have read it often, wondering
at the words and their arrangement, wondering where Mr. Brissenden
got them, and how he could fasten them together."  Then followed
the poem.

"Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man," Martin murmured,
letting the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.

The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted
apathetically that he was not nauseated very much.  He wished he
could get angry, but did not have energy enough to try.  He was too
numb.  His blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal
flow of indignation.  After all, what did it matter?  It was on a
par with all the rest that Brissenden had condemned in bourgeois
society.

"Poor Briss," Martin communed; "he would never have forgiven me."

Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which
had once contained type-writer paper.  Going through its contents,
he drew forth eleven poems which his friend had written.  These he
tore lengthwise and crosswise and dropped into the waste basket.
He did it languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of
the bed staring blankly before him.

How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his
sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white.  It
was curious.  But as he watched it grow in definiteness he saw that
it was a coral reef smoking in the white Pacific surges.  Next, in
the line of breakers he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe.
In the stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth
dipping a flashing paddle.  He recognized him.  He was Moti, the
youngest son of Tati, the chief, and this was Tahiti, and beyond
that smoking reef lay the sweet land of Papara and the chief's
grass house by the river's mouth.  It was the end of the day, and
Moti was coming home from the fishing.  He was waiting for the rush
of a big breaker whereon to jump the reef.  Then he saw himself,
sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the past,
dipping a paddle that waited Moti's word to dig in like mad when
the turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them.  Next, he
was no longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was
crying out, they were both thrusting hard with their paddles,
racing on the steep face of the flying turquoise.  Under the bow
the water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was filled with
driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long-echoing roar,
and the canoe floated on the placid water of the lagoon.  Moti
laughed and shook the salt water from his eyes, and together they
paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where Tati's grass walls
through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the setting sun.

The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of
his squalid room.  He strove in vain to see Tahiti again.  He knew
there was singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing
in the moonlight, but he could not see them.  He could see only the
littered writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had
stood, and the unwashed window-pane.  He closed his eyes with a
groan, and slept.