spoiled when I look at them—at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking
feet and weighing a hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a scant
five feet four, greasy-featured, with the chest of a squat, undersized
blacksmith, and at the pair of them, attitudinizing, clasping their
breasts, flinging their arms in the air like demented creatures in an
asylum; and when I am expected to accept all this as the faithful
illusion of a love-scene between a slender and beautiful princess and a
handsome, romantic, young prince—why, I can’t accept it, that’s all.
It’s rot; it’s absurd; it’s unreal. That’s what’s the matter with it.
It’s not real. Don’t tell me that anybody in this world ever made love
that way. Why, if I’d made love to you in such fashion, you’d have
boxed my ears.”

“But you misunderstand,” Ruth protested. “Every form of art has its
limitations.” (She was busy recalling a lecture she had heard at the
university on the conventions of the arts.) “In painting there are only
two dimensions to the canvas, yet you accept the illusion of three
dimensions which the art of a painter enables him to throw into the
canvas. In writing, again, the author must be omnipotent. You accept as
perfectly legitimate the author’s account of the secret thoughts of the
heroine, and yet all the time you know that the heroine was alone when
thinking these thoughts, and that neither the author nor any one else
was capable of hearing them. And so with the stage, with sculpture,
with opera, with every art form. Certain irreconcilable things must be
accepted.”

“Yes, I understood that,” Martin answered. “All the arts have their
conventions.” (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word. It was as if
he had studied at the university himself, instead of being ill-equipped
from browsing at haphazard through the books in the library.) “But even
the conventions must be real. Trees, painted on flat cardboard and
stuck up on each side of the stage, we accept as a forest. It is a real
enough convention. But, on the other hand, we would not accept a sea
scene as a forest. We can’t do it. It violates our senses. Nor would
you, or, rather, should you, accept the ravings and writhings and
agonized contortions of those two lunatics to-night as a convincing
portrayal of love.”

“But you don’t hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?” she
protested.

“No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an individual.
I have just been telling you what I think, in order to explain why the
elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the orchestra for me. The
world’s judges of music may all be right. But I am I, and I won’t
subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don’t
like a thing, I don’t like it, that’s all; and there is no reason under
the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of
my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can’t
follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike.”

“But music, you know, is a matter of training,” Ruth argued; “and opera
is even more a matter of training. May it not be—”

“That I am not trained in opera?” he dashed in.

She nodded.

“The very thing,” he agreed. “And I consider I am fortunate in not
having been caught when I was young. If I had, I could have wept
sentimental tears to-night, and the clownish antics of that precious
pair would have but enhanced the beauty of their voices and the beauty
of the accompanying orchestra. You are right. It’s mostly a matter of
training. And I am too old, now. I must have the real or nothing. An
illusion that won’t convince is a palpable lie, and that’s what grand
opera is to me when little Barillo throws a fit, clutches mighty
Tetralani in his arms (also in a fit), and tells her how passionately
he adores her.”

Again Ruth measured his thoughts by comparison of externals and in
accordance with her belief in the established. Who was he that he
should be right and all the cultured world wrong? His words and
thoughts made no impression upon her. She was too firmly intrenched in
the established to have any sympathy with revolutionary ideas. She had
always been used to music, and she had enjoyed opera ever since she was
a child, and all her world had enjoyed it, too. Then by what right did
Martin Eden emerge, as he had so recently emerged, from his rag-time
and working-class songs, and pass judgment on the world’s music? She
was vexed with him, and as she walked beside him she had a vague
feeling of outrage. At the best, in her most charitable frame of mind,
she considered the statement of his views to be a caprice, an erratic
and uncalled-for prank. But when he took her in his arms at the door
and kissed her good night in tender lover-fashion, she forgot
everything in the outrush of her own love to him. And later, on a
sleepless pillow, she puzzled, as she had often puzzled of late, as to
how it was that she loved so strange a man, and loved him despite the
disapproval of her people.

And next day Martin Eden cast hack-work aside, and at white heat
hammered out an essay to which he gave the title, “The Philosophy of
Illusion.” A stamp started it on its travels, but it was destined to
receive many stamps and to be started on many travels in the months
that followed.

CHAPTER XXV.

Maria Silva was poor, and all the ways of poverty were clear to her.
Poverty, to Ruth, was a word signifying a not-nice condition of
existence. That was her total knowledge on the subject. She knew Martin
was poor, and his condition she associated in her mind with the boyhood
of Abraham Lincoln, of Mr. Butler, and of other men who had become
successes. Also, while aware that poverty was anything but delectable,
she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary,
that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men who were not
degraded and hopeless drudges. So that her knowledge that Martin was so
poor that he had pawned his watch and overcoat did not disturb her. She
even considered it the hopeful side of the situation, believing that
sooner or later it would arouse him and compel him to abandon his
writing.

Ruth never read hunger in Martin’s face, which had grown lean and had
enlarged the slight hollows in the cheeks. In fact, she marked the
change in his face with satisfaction. It seemed to refine him, to
remove from him much of the dross of flesh and the too animal-like
vigor that lured her while she detested it. Sometimes, when with her,
she noted an unusual brightness in his eyes, and she admired it, for it
made him appear more the poet and the scholar—the things he would have
liked to be and which she would have liked him to be. But Maria Silva
read a different tale in the hollow cheeks and the burning eyes, and
she noted the changes in them from day to day, by them following the
ebb and flow of his fortunes. She saw him leave the house with his
overcoat and return without it, though the day was chill and raw, and
promptly she saw his cheeks fill out slightly and the fire of hunger
leave his eyes. In the same way she had seen his wheel and watch go,
and after each event she had seen his vigor bloom again.

Likewise she watched his toils, and knew the measure of the midnight
oil he burned. Work! She knew that he outdid her, though his work was
of a different order. And she was surprised to behold that the less
food he had, the harder he worked. On occasion, in a casual sort of
way, when she thought hunger pinched hardest, she would send him in a
loaf of new baking, awkwardly covering the act with banter to the
effect that it was better than he could bake. And again, she would send
one of her toddlers in to him with a great pitcher of hot soup,
debating inwardly the while whether she was justified in taking it from
the mouths of her own flesh and blood. Nor was Martin ungrateful,
knowing as he did the lives of the poor, and that if ever in the world
there was charity, this was it.

On a day when she had filled her brood with what was left in the house,
Maria invested her last fifteen cents in a gallon of cheap wine.
Martin, coming into her kitchen to fetch water, was invited to sit down
and drink. He drank her very-good health, and in return she drank his.
Then she drank to prosperity in his undertakings, and he drank to the
hope that James Grant would show up and pay her for his washing. James
Grant was a journeymen carpenter who did not always pay his bills and
who owed Maria three dollars.

Both Maria and Martin drank the sour new wine on empty stomachs, and it
went swiftly to their heads. Utterly differentiated creatures that they
were, they were lonely in their misery, and though the misery was
tacitly ignored, it was the bond that drew them together. Maria was
amazed to learn that he had been in the Azores, where she had lived
until she was eleven. She was doubly amazed that he had been in the
Hawaiian Islands, whither she had migrated from the Azores with her
people. But her amazement passed all bounds when he told her he had
been on Maui, the particular island whereon she had attained womanhood
and married. Kahului, where she had first met her husband,—he, Martin,
had been there twice! Yes, she remembered the sugar steamers, and he
had been on them—well, well, it was a small world. And Wailuku! That
place, too! Did he know the head-luna of the plantation? Yes, and had
had a couple of drinks with him.

And so they reminiscenced and drowned their hunger in the raw, sour
wine. To Martin the future did not seem so dim. Success trembled just
before him. He was on the verge of clasping it. Then he studied the
deep-lined face of the toil-worn woman before him, remembered her soups
and loaves of new baking, and felt spring up in him the warmest
gratitude and philanthropy.

“Maria,” he exclaimed suddenly. “What would you like to have?”

She looked at him, bepuzzled.

“What would you like to have now, right now, if you could get it?”

“Shoe alla da roun’ for da childs—seven pairs da shoe.”

“You shall have them,” he announced, while she nodded her head gravely.
“But I mean a big wish, something big that you want.”

Her eyes sparkled good-naturedly. He was choosing to make fun with her,
Maria, with whom few made fun these days.

“Think hard,” he cautioned, just as she was opening her mouth to speak.

“Alla right,” she answered. “I thinka da hard. I lika da house, dis
house—all mine, no paya da rent, seven dollar da month.”

“You shall have it,” he granted, “and in a short time. Now wish the
great wish. Make believe I am God, and I say to you anything you want
you can have. Then you wish that thing, and I listen.”

Maria considered solemnly for a space.

“You no ’fraid?” she asked warningly.

“No, no,” he laughed, “I’m not afraid. Go ahead.”

“Most verra big,” she warned again.

“All right. Fire away.”

“Well, den—” She drew a big breath like a child, as she voiced to the
uttermost all she cared to demand of life. “I lika da have one milka
ranch—good milka ranch. Plenty cow, plenty land, plenty grass. I lika
da have near San Le-an; my sister liva dere. I sella da milk in
Oakland. I maka da plentee mon. Joe an’ Nick no runna da cow. Dey go-a
to school. Bimeby maka da good engineer, worka da railroad. Yes, I lika
da milka ranch.”

She paused and regarded Martin with twinkling eyes.

“You shall have it,” he answered promptly.

She nodded her head and touched her lips courteously to the wine-glass
and to the giver of the gift she knew would never be given. His heart
was right, and in her own heart she appreciated his intention as much
as if the gift had gone with it.

“No, Maria,” he went on; “Nick and Joe won’t have to peddle milk, and
all the kids can go to school and wear shoes the whole year round. It
will be a first-class milk ranch—everything complete. There will be a
house to live in and a stable for the horses, and cow-barns, of course.
There will be chickens, pigs, vegetables, fruit trees, and everything
like that; and there will be enough cows to pay for a hired man or two.
Then you won’t have anything to do but take care of the children. For
that matter, if you find a good man, you can marry and take it easy
while he runs the ranch.”

And from such largess, dispensed from his future, Martin turned and
took his one good suit of clothes to the pawnshop. His plight was
desperate for him to do this, for it cut him off from Ruth. He had no
second-best suit that was presentable, and though he could go to the
butcher and the baker, and even on occasion to his sister’s, it was
beyond all daring to dream of entering the Morse home so disreputably
apparelled.

He toiled on, miserable and well-nigh hopeless. It began to appear to
him that the second battle was lost and that he would have to go to
work. In doing this he would satisfy everybody—the grocer, his sister,
Ruth, and even Maria, to whom he owed a month’s room rent. He was two
months behind with his type-writer, and the agency was clamoring for
payment or for the return of the machine. In desperation, all but ready
to surrender, to make a truce with fate until he could get a fresh
start, he took the civil service examinations for the Railway Mail. To
his surprise, he passed first. The job was assured, though when the
call would come to enter upon his duties nobody knew.

It was at this time, at the lowest ebb, that the smooth-running
editorial machine broke down. A cog must have slipped or an oil-cup run
dry, for the postman brought him one morning a short, thin envelope.
Martin glanced at the upper left-hand corner and read the name and
address of the _Transcontinental Monthly_. His heart gave a great leap,
and he suddenly felt faint, the sinking feeling accompanied by a
strange trembling of the knees. He staggered into his room and sat down
on the bed, the envelope still unopened, and in that moment came
understanding to him how people suddenly fall dead upon receipt of
extraordinarily good news.

Of course this was good news. There was no manuscript in that thin
envelope, therefore it was an acceptance. He knew the story in the
hands of the _Transcontinental_. It was “The Ring of Bells,” one of his
horror stories, and it was an even five thousand words. And, since
first-class magazines always paid on acceptance, there was a check
inside. Two cents a word—twenty dollars a thousand; the check must be a
hundred dollars. One hundred dollars! As he tore the envelope open,
every item of all his debts surged in his brain—$3.85 to the grocer;
butcher $4.00 flat; baker, $2.00; fruit store, $5.00; total, $14.85.
Then there was room rent, $2.50; another month in advance, $2.50; two
months’ type-writer, $8.00; a month in advance, $4.00; total, $31.85.
And finally to be added, his pledges, plus interest, with the
pawnbroker—watch, $5.50; overcoat, $5.50; wheel, $7.75; suit of
clothes, $5.50 (60 % interest, but what did it matter?)—grand total,
$56.10. He saw, as if visible in the air before him, in illuminated
figures, the whole sum, and the subtraction that followed and that gave
a remainder of $43.90. When he had squared every debt, redeemed every
pledge, he would still have jingling in his pockets a princely $43.90.
And on top of that he would have a month’s rent paid in advance on the
type-writer and on the room.

By this time he had drawn the single sheet of type-written letter out
and spread it open. There was no check. He peered into the envelope,
held it to the light, but could not trust his eyes, and in trembling
haste tore the envelope apart. There was no check. He read the letter,
skimming it line by line, dashing through the editor’s praise of his
story to the meat of the letter, the statement why the check had not
been sent. He found no such statement, but he did find that which made
him suddenly wilt. The letter slid from his hand. His eyes went
lack-lustre, and he lay back on the pillow, pulling the blanket about
him and up to his chin.

Five dollars for “The Ring of Bells”—five dollars for five thousand
words! Instead of two cents a word, ten words for a cent! And the
editor had praised it, too. And he would receive the check when the
story was published. Then it was all poppycock, two cents a word for
minimum rate and payment upon acceptance. It was a lie, and it had led
him astray. He would never have attempted to write had he known that.
He would have gone to work—to work for Ruth. He went back to the day he
first attempted to write, and was appalled at the enormous waste of
time—and all for ten words for a cent. And the other high rewards of
writers, that he had read about, must be lies, too. His second-hand
ideas of authorship were wrong, for here was the proof of it.

The _Transcontinental_ sold for twenty-five cents, and its dignified
and artistic cover proclaimed it as among the first-class magazines. It
was a staid, respectable magazine, and it had been published
continuously since long before he was born. Why, on the outside cover
were printed every month the words of one of the world’s great writers,
words proclaiming the inspired mission of the _Transcontinental_ by a
star of literature whose first coruscations had appeared inside those
self-same covers. And the high and lofty, heaven-inspired
_Transcontinental_ paid five dollars for five thousand words! The great
writer had recently died in a foreign land—in dire poverty, Martin
remembered, which was not to be wondered at, considering the
magnificent pay authors receive.

Well, he had taken the bait, the newspaper lies about writers and their
pay, and he had wasted two years over it. But he would disgorge the
bait now. Not another line would he ever write. He would do what Ruth
wanted him to do, what everybody wanted him to do—get a job. The
thought of going to work reminded him of Joe—Joe, tramping through the
land of nothing-to-do. Martin heaved a great sigh of envy. The reaction
of nineteen hours a day for many days was strong upon him. But then,
Joe was not in love, had none of the responsibilities of love, and he
could afford to loaf through the land of nothing-to-do. He, Martin, had
something to work for, and go to work he would. He would start out
early next morning to hunt a job. And he would let Ruth know, too, that
he had mended his ways and was willing to go into her father’s office.

Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent, the market
price for art. The disappointment of it, the lie of it, the infamy of
it, were uppermost in his thoughts; and under his closed eyelids, in
fiery figures, burned the “$3.85” he owed the grocer. He shivered, and
was aware of an aching in his bones. The small of his back ached
especially. His head ached, the top of it ached, the back of it ached,
the brains inside of it ached and seemed to be swelling, while the ache
over his brows was intolerable. And beneath the brows, planted under
his lids, was the merciless “$3.85.” He opened his eyes to escape it,
but the white light of the room seemed to sear the balls and forced him
to close his eyes, when the “$3.85” confronted him again.

Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent—that
particular thought took up its residence in his brain, and he could no
more escape it than he could the “$3.85” under his eyelids. A change
seemed to come over the latter, and he watched curiously, till “$2.00”
burned in its stead. Ah, he thought, that was the baker. The next sum
that appeared was “$2.50.” It puzzled him, and he pondered it as if
life and death hung on the solution. He owed somebody two dollars and a
half, that was certain, but who was it? To find it was the task set him
by an imperious and malignant universe, and he wandered through the
endless corridors of his mind, opening all manner of lumber rooms and
chambers stored with odds and ends of memories and knowledge as he
vainly sought the answer. After several centuries it came to him,
easily, without effort, that it was Maria. With a great relief he
turned his soul to the screen of torment under his lids. He had solved
the problem; now he could rest. But no, the “$2.50” faded away, and in
its place burned “$8.00.” Who was that? He must go the dreary round of
his mind again and find out.

How long he was gone on this quest he did not know, but after what
seemed an enormous lapse of time, he was called back to himself by a
knock at the door, and by Maria’s asking if he was sick. He replied in
a muffled voice he did not recognize, saying that he was merely taking
a nap. He was surprised when he noted the darkness of night in the
room. He had received the letter at two in the afternoon, and he
realized that he was sick.

Then the “$8.00” began to smoulder under his lids again, and he
returned himself to servitude. But he grew cunning. There was no need
for him to wander through his mind. He had been a fool. He pulled a
lever and made his mind revolve about him, a monstrous wheel of
fortune, a merry-go-round of memory, a revolving sphere of wisdom.
Faster and faster it revolved, until its vortex sucked him in and he
was flung whirling through black chaos.

Quite naturally he found himself at a mangle, feeding starched cuffs.
But as he fed he noticed figures printed in the cuffs. It was a new way
of marking linen, he thought, until, looking closer, he saw “$3.85” on
one of the cuffs. Then it came to him that it was the grocer’s bill,
and that these were his bills flying around on the drum of the mangle.
A crafty idea came to him. He would throw the bills on the floor and so
escape paying them. No sooner thought than done, and he crumpled the
cuffs spitefully as he flung them upon an unusually dirty floor. Ever
the heap grew, and though each bill was duplicated a thousand times, he
found only one for two dollars and a half, which was what he owed
Maria. That meant that Maria would not press for payment, and he
resolved generously that it would be the only one he would pay; so he
began searching through the cast-out heap for hers. He sought it
desperately, for ages, and was still searching when the manager of the
hotel entered, the fat Dutchman. His face blazed with wrath, and he
shouted in stentorian tones that echoed down the universe, “I shall
deduct the cost of those cuffs from your wages!” The pile of cuffs grew
into a mountain, and Martin knew that he was doomed to toil for a
thousand years to pay for them. Well, there was nothing left to do but
kill the manager and burn down the laundry. But the big Dutchman
frustrated him, seizing him by the nape of the neck and dancing him up
and down. He danced him over the ironing tables, the stove, and the
mangles, and out into the wash-room and over the wringer and washer.
Martin was danced until his teeth rattled and his head ached, and he
marvelled that the Dutchman was so strong.

And then he found himself before the mangle, this time receiving the
cuffs an editor of a magazine was feeding from the other side. Each
cuff was a check, and Martin went over them anxiously, in a fever of
expectation, but they were all blanks. He stood there and received the
blanks for a million years or so, never letting one go by for fear it
might be filled out. At last he found it. With trembling fingers he
held it to the light. It was for five dollars. “Ha! Ha!” laughed the
editor across the mangle. “Well, then, I shall kill you,” Martin said.
He went out into the wash-room to get the axe, and found Joe starching
manuscripts. He tried to make him desist, then swung the axe for him.
But the weapon remained poised in mid-air, for Martin found himself
back in the ironing room in the midst of a snow-storm. No, it was not
snow that was falling, but checks of large denomination, the smallest
not less than a thousand dollars. He began to collect them and sort
them out, in packages of a hundred, tying each package securely with
twine.

He looked up from his task and saw Joe standing before him juggling
flat-irons, starched shirts, and manuscripts. Now and again he reached
out and added a bundle of checks to the flying miscellany that soared
through the roof and out of sight in a tremendous circle. Martin struck
at him, but he seized the axe and added it to the flying circle. Then
he plucked Martin and added him. Martin went up through the roof,
clutching at manuscripts, so that by the time he came down he had a
large armful. But no sooner down than up again, and a second and a
third time and countless times he flew around the circle. From far off
he could hear a childish treble singing: “Waltz me around again,
Willie, around, around, around.”

He recovered the axe in the midst of the Milky Way of checks, starched
shirts, and manuscripts, and prepared, when he came down, to kill Joe.
But he did not come down. Instead, at two in the morning, Maria, having
heard his groans through the thin partition, came into his room, to put
hot flat-irons against his body and damp cloths upon his aching eyes.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Martin Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the morning. It was
late afternoon before he came out of his delirium and gazed with aching
eyes about the room. Mary, one of the tribe of Silva, eight years old,
keeping watch, raised a screech at sight of his returning
consciousness. Maria hurried into the room from the kitchen. She put
her work-calloused hand upon his hot forehead and felt his pulse.

“You lika da eat?” she asked.

He shook his head. Eating was farthest from his desire, and he wondered
that he should ever have been hungry in his life.

“I’m sick, Maria,” he said weakly. “What is it? Do you know?”

“Grip,” she answered. “Two or three days you alla da right. Better you
no eat now. Bimeby plenty can eat, to-morrow can eat maybe.”

Martin was not used to sickness, and when Maria and her little girl
left him, he essayed to get up and dress. By a supreme exertion of
will, with rearing brain and eyes that ached so that he could not keep
them open, he managed to get out of bed, only to be left stranded by
his senses upon the table. Half an hour later he managed to regain the
bed, where he was content to lie with closed eyes and analyze his
various pains and weaknesses. Maria came in several times to change the
cold cloths on his forehead. Otherwise she left him in peace, too wise
to vex him with chatter. This moved him to gratitude, and he murmured
to himself, “Maria, you getta da milka ranch, all righta, all right.”

Then he remembered his long-buried past of yesterday.

It seemed a life-time since he had received that letter from the
_Transcontinental_, a life-time since it was all over and done with and
a new page turned. He had shot his bolt, and shot it hard, and now he
was down on his back. If he hadn’t starved himself, he wouldn’t have
been caught by La Grippe. He had been run down, and he had not had the
strength to throw off the germ of disease which had invaded his system.
This was what resulted.

“What does it profit a man to write a whole library and lose his own
life?” he demanded aloud. “This is no place for me. No more literature
in mine. Me for the counting-house and ledger, the monthly salary, and
the little home with Ruth.”

Two days later, having eaten an egg and two slices of toast and drunk a
cup of tea, he asked for his mail, but found his eyes still hurt too
much to permit him to read.

“You read for me, Maria,” he said. “Never mind the big, long letters.
Throw them under the table. Read me the small letters.”

“No can,” was the answer. “Teresa, she go to school, she can.”

So Teresa Silva, aged nine, opened his letters and read them to him. He
listened absently to a long dun from the type-writer people, his mind
busy with ways and means of finding a job. Suddenly he was shocked back
to himself.

“‘We offer you forty dollars for all serial rights in your story,’”
Teresa slowly spelled out, “‘provided you allow us to make the
alterations suggested.’”

“What magazine is that?” Martin shouted. “Here, give it to me!”

He could see to read, now, and he was unaware of the pain of the
action. It was the _White Mouse_ that was offering him forty dollars,
and the story was “The Whirlpool,” another of his early horror stories.
He read the letter through again and again. The editor told him plainly
that he had not handled the idea properly, but that it was the idea
they were buying because it was original. If they could cut the story
down one-third, they would take it and send him forty dollars on
receipt of his answer.

He called for pen and ink, and told the editor he could cut the story
down three-thirds if he wanted to, and to send the forty dollars right
along.

The letter despatched to the letter-box by Teresa, Martin lay back and
thought. It wasn’t a lie, after all. The _White Mouse_ paid on
acceptance. There were three thousand words in “The Whirlpool.” Cut
down a third, there would be two thousand. At forty dollars that would
be two cents a word. Pay on acceptance and two cents a word—the
newspapers had told the truth. And he had thought the _White Mouse_ a
third-rater! It was evident that he did not know the magazines. He had
deemed the _Transcontinental_ a first-rater, and it paid a cent for ten
words. He had classed the _White Mouse_ as of no account, and it paid
twenty times as much as the_ Transcontinental_ and also had paid on
acceptance.

Well, there was one thing certain: when he got well, he would not go
out looking for a job. There were more stories in his head as good as
“The Whirlpool,” and at forty dollars apiece he could earn far more
than in any job or position. Just when he thought the battle lost, it
was won. He had proved for his career. The way was clear. Beginning
with the _White Mouse_ he would add magazine after magazine to his
growing list of patrons. Hack-work could be put aside. For that matter,
it had been wasted time, for it had not brought him a dollar. He would
devote himself to work, good work, and he would pour out the best that
was in him. He wished Ruth was there to share in his joy, and when he
went over the letters left lying on his bed, he found one from her. It
was sweetly reproachful, wondering what had kept him away for so
dreadful a length of time. He reread the letter adoringly, dwelling
over her handwriting, loving each stroke of her pen, and in the end
kissing her signature.

And when he answered, he told her recklessly that he had not been to
see her because his best clothes were in pawn. He told her that he had
been sick, but was once more nearly well, and that inside ten days or
two weeks (as soon as a letter could travel to New York City and
return) he would redeem his clothes and be with her.

But Ruth did not care to wait ten days or two weeks. Besides, her lover
was sick. The next afternoon, accompanied by Arthur, she arrived in the
Morse carriage, to the unqualified delight of the Silva tribe and of
all the urchins on the street, and to the consternation of Maria. She
boxed the ears of the Silvas who crowded about the visitors on the tiny
front porch, and in more than usual atrocious English tried to
apologize for her appearance. Sleeves rolled up from soap-flecked arms
and a wet gunny-sack around her waist told of the task at which she had
been caught. So flustered was she by two such grand young people asking
for her lodger, that she forgot to invite them to sit down in the
little parlor. To enter Martin’s room, they passed through the kitchen,
warm and moist and steamy from the big washing in progress. Maria, in
her excitement, jammed the bedroom and bedroom-closet doors together,
and for five minutes, through the partly open door, clouds of steam,
smelling of soap-suds and dirt, poured into the sick chamber.

Ruth succeeded in veering right and left and right again, and in
running the narrow passage between table and bed to Martin’s side; but
Arthur veered too wide and fetched up with clatter and bang of pots and
pans in the corner where Martin did his cooking. Arthur did not linger
long. Ruth occupied the only chair, and having done his duty, he went
outside and stood by the gate, the centre of seven marvelling Silvas,
who watched him as they would have watched a curiosity in a side-show.
All about the carriage were gathered the children from a dozen blocks,
waiting and eager for some tragic and terrible dénouement. Carriages
were seen on their street only for weddings and funerals. Here was
neither marriage nor death: therefore, it was something transcending
experience and well worth waiting for.

Martin had been wild to see Ruth. His was essentially a love-nature,
and he possessed more than the average man’s need for sympathy. He was
starving for sympathy, which, with him, meant intelligent
understanding; and he had yet to learn that Ruth’s sympathy was largely
sentimental and tactful, and that it proceeded from gentleness of
nature rather than from understanding of the objects of her sympathy.
So it was while Martin held her hand and gladly talked, that her love
for him prompted her to press his hand in return, and that her eyes
were moist and luminous at sight of his helplessness and of the marks
suffering had stamped upon his face.

But while he told her of his two acceptances, of his despair when he
received the one from the _Transcontinental_, and of the corresponding
delight with which he received the one from the _White Mouse_, she did
not follow him. She heard the words he uttered and understood their
literal import, but she was not with him in his despair and his
delight. She could not get out of herself. She was not interested in
selling stories to magazines. What was important to her was matrimony.
She was not aware of it, however, any more than she was aware that her
desire that Martin take a position was the instinctive and preparative
impulse of motherhood. She would have blushed had she been told as much
in plain, set terms, and next, she might have grown indignant and
asserted that her sole interest lay in the man she loved and her desire
for him to make the best of himself. So, while Martin poured out his
heart to her, elated with the first success his chosen work in the
world had received, she paid heed to his bare words only, gazing now
and again about the room, shocked by what she saw.

For the first time Ruth gazed upon the sordid face of poverty. Starving
lovers had always seemed romantic to her,—but she had had no idea how
starving lovers lived. She had never dreamed it could be like this.
Ever her gaze shifted from the room to him and back again. The steamy
smell of dirty clothes, which had entered with her from the kitchen,
was sickening. Martin must be soaked with it, Ruth concluded, if that
awful woman washed frequently. Such was the contagiousness of
degradation. When she looked at Martin, she seemed to see the smirch
left upon him by his surroundings. She had never seen him unshaven, and
the three days’ growth of beard on his face was repulsive to her. Not
alone did it give him the same dark and murky aspect of the Silva
house, inside and out, but it seemed to emphasize that animal-like
strength of his which she detested. And here he was, being confirmed in
his madness by the two acceptances he took such pride in telling her
about. A little longer and he would have surrendered and gone to work.
Now he would continue on in this horrible house, writing and starving
for a few more months.

“What is that smell?” she asked suddenly.

“Some of Maria’s washing smells, I imagine,” was the answer. “I am
growing quite accustomed to them.”

“No, no; not that. It is something else. A stale, sickish smell.”

Martin sampled the air before replying.

“I can’t smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke,” he
announced.

“That’s it. It is terrible. Why do you smoke so much, Martin?”

“I don’t know, except that I smoke more than usual when I am lonely.
And then, too, it’s such a long-standing habit. I learned when I was
only a youngster.”

“It is not a nice habit, you know,” she reproved. “It smells to
heaven.”

“That’s the fault of the tobacco. I can afford only the cheapest. But
wait until I get that forty-dollar check. I’ll use a brand that is not
offensive even to the angels. But that wasn’t so bad, was it, two
acceptances in three days? That forty-five dollars will pay about all
my debts.”

“For two years’ work?” she queried.

“No, for less than a week’s work. Please pass me that book over on the
far corner of the table, the account book with the gray cover.” He
opened it and began turning over the pages rapidly. “Yes, I was right.
Four days for ‘The Ring of Bells,’ two days for ‘The Whirlpool.’ That’s
forty-five dollars for a week’s work, one hundred and eighty dollars a
month. That beats any salary I can command. And, besides, I’m just
beginning. A thousand dollars a month is not too much to buy for you
all I want you to have. A salary of five hundred a month would be too
small. That forty-five dollars is just a starter. Wait till I get my
stride. Then watch my smoke.”

Ruth misunderstood his slang, and reverted to cigarettes.

“You smoke more than enough as it is, and the brand of tobacco will
make no difference. It is the smoking itself that is not nice, no
matter what the brand may be. You are a chimney, a living volcano, a
perambulating smoke-stack, and you are a perfect disgrace, Martin dear,
you know you are.”

She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he looked at her
delicate face and into her pure, limpid eyes, as of old he was struck
with his own unworthiness.

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke any more,” she whispered. “Please, for—my
sake.”

“All right, I won’t,” he cried. “I’ll do anything you ask, dear love,
anything; you know that.”

A great temptation assailed her. In an insistent way she had caught
glimpses of the large, easy-going side of his nature, and she felt
sure, if she asked him to cease attempting to write, that he would
grant her wish. In the swift instant that elapsed, the words trembled
on her lips. But she did not utter them. She was not quite brave
enough; she did not quite dare. Instead, she leaned toward him to meet
him, and in his arms murmured:-

“You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own. I am
sure smoking hurts you; and besides, it is not good to be a slave to
anything, to a drug least of all.”

“I shall always be your slave,” he smiled.

“In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands.”

She looked at him mischievously, though deep down she was already
regretting that she had not preferred her largest request.

“I live but to obey, your majesty.”

“Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not omit to shave
every day. Look how you have scratched my cheek.”

And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter. But she had made one
point, and she could not expect to make more than one at a time. She
felt a woman’s pride in that she had made him stop smoking. Another
time she would persuade him to take a position, for had he not said he
would do anything she asked?

She left his side to explore the room, examining the clothes-lines of
notes overhead, learning the mystery of the tackle used for suspending
his wheel under the ceiling, and being saddened by the heap of
manuscripts under the table which represented to her just so much
wasted time. The oil-stove won her admiration, but on investigating the
food shelves she found them empty.

“Why, you haven’t anything to eat, you poor dear,” she said with tender
compassion. “You must be starving.”

“I store my food in Maria’s safe and in her pantry,” he lied. “It keeps
better there. No danger of my starving. Look at that.”

She had come back to his side, and she saw him double his arm at the
elbow, the biceps crawling under his shirt-sleeve and swelling into a
knot of muscle, heavy and hard. The sight repelled her. Sentimentally,
she disliked it. But her pulse, her blood, every fibre of her, loved it
and yearned for it, and, in the old, inexplicable way, she leaned
toward him, not away from him. And in the moment that followed, when he
crushed her in his arms, the brain of her, concerned with the
superficial aspects of life, was in revolt; while the heart of her, the
woman of her, concerned with life itself, exulted triumphantly. It was
in moments like this that she felt to the uttermost the greatness of
her love for Martin, for it was almost a swoon of delight to her to
feel his strong arms about her, holding her tightly, hurting her with
the grip of their fervor. At such moments she found justification for
her treason to her standards, for her violation of her own high ideals,
and, most of all, for her tacit disobedience to her mother and father.
They did not want her to marry this man. It shocked them that she
should love him. It shocked her, too, sometimes, when she was apart
from him, a cool and reasoning creature. With him, she loved him—in
truth, at times a vexed and worried love; but love it was, a love that
was stronger than she.

“This La Grippe is nothing,” he was saying. “It hurts a bit, and gives
one a nasty headache, but it doesn’t compare with break-bone fever.”

“Have you had that, too?” she queried absently, intent on the
heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms.

And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his words
startled her.

He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of the
Hawaiian Islands.

“But why did you go there?” she demanded.

Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal.

“Because I didn’t know,” he answered. “I never dreamed of lepers. When
I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed inland for
some place of hiding. For three days I lived off guavas, _ohia_-apples,
and bananas, all of which grew wild in the jungle. On the fourth day I
found the trail—a mere foot-trail. It led inland, and it led up. It was
the way I wanted to go, and it showed signs of recent travel. At one
place it ran along the crest of a ridge that was no more than a
knife-edge. The trail wasn’t three feet wide on the crest, and on
either side the ridge fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep.
One man, with plenty of ammunition, could have held it against a
hundred thousand.

“It was the only way in to the hiding-place. Three hours after I found
the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket in the
midst of lava peaks. The whole place was terraced for taro-patches,
fruit trees grew there, and there were eight or ten grass huts. But as
soon as I saw the inhabitants I knew what I’d struck. One sight of them
was enough.”

“What did you do?” Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening, like any
Desdemona, appalled and fascinated.

“Nothing for me to do. Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty far
gone, but he ruled like a king. He had discovered the little valley and
founded the settlement—all of which was against the law. But he had
guns, plenty of ammunition, and those Kanakas, trained to the shooting
of wild cattle and wild pig, were dead shots. No, there wasn’t any
running away for Martin Eden. He stayed—for three months.”

“But how did you escape?”

“I’d have been there yet, if it hadn’t been for a girl there, a
half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian. She was a beauty,
poor thing, and well educated. Her mother, in Honolulu, was worth a
million or so. Well, this girl got me away at last. Her mother financed
the settlement, you see, so the girl wasn’t afraid of being punished
for letting me go. But she made me swear, first, never to reveal the
hiding-place; and I never have. This is the first time I have even
mentioned it. The girl had just the first signs of leprosy. The fingers
of her right hand were slightly twisted, and there was a small spot on
her arm. That was all. I guess she is dead, now.”

“But weren’t you frightened? And weren’t you glad to get away without
catching that dreadful disease?”

“Well,” he confessed, “I was a bit shivery at first; but I got used to
it. I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though. That made me
forget to be afraid. She was such a beauty, in spirit as well as in
appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was doomed to
lie there, living the life of a primitive savage and rotting slowly
away. Leprosy is far more terrible than you can imagine it.”

“Poor thing,” Ruth murmured softly. “It’s a wonder she let you get
away.”

“How do you mean?” Martin asked unwittingly.

“Because she must have loved you,” Ruth said, still softly. “Candidly,
now, didn’t she?”

Martin’s sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and by
the indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness had
made his face even pale; and across this pallor flowed the slow wave of
a blush. He was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut him off.

“Never mind, don’t answer; it’s not necessary,” she laughed.

But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter, and
that the light in her eyes was cold. On the spur of the moment it
reminded him of a gale he had once experienced in the North Pacific.
And for the moment the apparition of the gale rose before his eyes—a
gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon, the huge seas
glinting coldly in the moonlight. Next, he saw the girl in the leper
refuge and remembered it was for love of him that she had let him go.

“She was noble,” he said simply. “She gave me life.”

That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob in her
throat, and noticed that she turned her face away to gaze out of the
window. When she turned it back to him, it was composed, and there was
no hint of the gale in her eyes.

“I’m such a silly,” she said plaintively. “But I can’t help it. I do so
love you, Martin, I do, I do. I shall grow more catholic in time, but
at present I can’t help being jealous of those ghosts of the past, and
you know your past is full of ghosts.”

“It must be,” she silenced his protest. “It could not be otherwise. And
there’s poor Arthur motioning me to come. He’s tired waiting. And now
good-by, dear.”

“There’s some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that helps
men to stop the use of tobacco,” she called back from the door, “and I
am going to send you some.”

The door closed, but opened again.

“I do, I do,” she whispered to him; and this time she was really gone.

Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note the
texture of Ruth’s garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown that
produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the carriage.
The crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared
from view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who had abruptly
become the most important person on the street. But it was one of her
progeny who blasted Maria’s reputation by announcing that the grand
visitors had been for her lodger. After that Maria dropped back into
her old obscurity and Martin began to notice the respectful manner in
which he was regarded by the small fry of the neighborhood. As for
Maria, Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per cent, and had
the Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would
have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-and-eighty-five-cents’
worth of credit.

CHAPTER XXVII.

The sun of Martin’s good fortune rose. The day after Ruth’s visit, he
received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in
payment for three of his triolets. Two days later a newspaper published
in Chicago accepted his “Treasure Hunters,” promising to pay ten
dollars for it on publication. The price was small, but it was the
first article he had written, his very first attempt to express his
thought on the printed page. To cap everything, the adventure serial
for boys, his second attempt, was accepted before the end of the week
by a juvenile monthly calling itself _Youth and Age_. It was true the
serial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered to pay him
sixteen dollars on publication, which was something like seventy-five
cents a thousand words; but it was equally true that it was the second
thing he had attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly
aware of its clumsy worthlessness.

But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of
mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great
strength—the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes
butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a
war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for
songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not taken him long
to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith to was his later
work. He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of
magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the tools of
artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His
conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of
strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was
realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and
beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism,
shot through with human aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life
as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of
fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the
other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and
divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred, in
Martin’s estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight
and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though
it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the
brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, “Adventure,”
which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his
ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, “God and Clod,”
that he had expressed his views on the whole general subject.

But “Adventure,” and all that he deemed his best work, still went
begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in his
eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of
which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work. To
him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with
all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their power. This investiture
of the grotesque and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a
trick—a skilful trick at best. Great literature could not reside in
such a field. Their artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness
of artistry when divorced from humanness. The trick had been to fling
over the face of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done
in the half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written
before he emerged upon the high peaks of “Adventure,” “Joy,” “The Pot,”
and “The Wine of Life.”

The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a
precarious existence against the arrival of the _White Mouse_ check. He
cashed the first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a
dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars between the
baker and the fruit store. Martin was not yet rich enough to afford
meat, and he was on slim allowance when the _White Mouse_ check
arrived. He was divided on the cashing of it. He had never been in a
bank in his life, much less been in one on business, and he had a naive
and childlike desire to walk into one of the big banks down in Oakland
and fling down his indorsed check for forty dollars. On the other hand,
practical common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer and
thereby make an impression that would later result in an increase of
credit. Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying
his bill with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of
jingling coin. Also, he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his
suit and his bicycle, paid one month’s rent on the type-writer, and
paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month in advance. This
left him in his pocket, for emergencies, a balance of nearly three
dollars.

In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. Immediately on recovering
his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he could not
refrain from jingling the little handful of silver in his pocket. He
had been so long without money that, like a rescued starving man who
cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight, Martin could not keep
his hand off the silver. He was not mean, nor avaricious, but the money
meant more than so many dollars and cents. It stood for success, and
the eagles stamped upon the coins were to him so many winged victories.

It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world. It certainly
appeared more beautiful to him. For weeks it had been a very dull and
sombre world; but now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars
jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success,
the sun shone bright and warm, and even a rain-squall that soaked
unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry happening to him. When he
starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were
starving the world over; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of
the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain. He forgot
about them, and, being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the
world. Without deliberately thinking about it, _motifs_ for love-lyrics
began to agitate his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, he got
off the electric car, without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.

He found a number of persons in the Morse home. Ruth’s two girl-cousins
were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of
entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young
people. The campaign had begun during Martin’s enforced absence, and
was already in full swing. She was making a point of having at the
house men who were doing things. Thus, in addition to the cousins
Dorothy and Florence, Martin encountered two university professors, one
of Latin, the other of English; a young army officer just back from the
Philippines, one-time school-mate of Ruth’s; a young fellow named
Melville, private secretary to Joseph Perkins, head of the San
Francisco Trust Company; and finally of the men, a live bank cashier,
Charles Hapgood, a youngish man of thirty-five, graduate of Stanford
University, member of the Nile Club and the Unity Club, and a
conservative speaker for the Republican Party during campaigns—in
short, a rising young man in every way. Among the women was one who
painted portraits, another who was a professional musician, and still
another who possessed the degree of Doctor of Sociology and who was
locally famous for her social settlement work in the slums of San
Francisco. But the women did not count for much in Mrs. Morse’s plan.
At the best, they were necessary accessories. The men who did things
must be drawn to the house somehow.

“Don’t get excited when you talk,” Ruth admonished Martin, before the
ordeal of introduction began.

He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his own
awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to their old
trick of threatening destruction to furniture and ornaments. Also, he
was rendered self-conscious by the company. He had never before been in
contact with such exalted beings nor with so many of them. Melville,
the bank cashier, fascinated him, and he resolved to investigate him at
the first opportunity. For underneath Martin’s awe lurked his assertive
ego, and he felt the urge to measure himself with these men and women
and to find out what they had learned from the books and life which he
had not learned.

Ruth’s eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on, and
she was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got
acquainted with her cousins. He certainly did not grow excited, while
being seated removed from him the worry of his shoulders. Ruth knew
them for clever girls, superficially brilliant, and she could scarcely
understand their praise of Martin later that night at going to bed. But
he, on the other hand, a wit in his own class, a gay quizzer and
laughter-maker at dances and Sunday picnics, had found the making of
fun and the breaking of good-natured lances simple enough in this
environment. And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him
on the shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he
could afford to laugh and make laughter and remain unabashed.

Later, Ruth’s anxiety found justification. Martin and Professor
Caldwell had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though Martin no
longer wove the air with his hands, to Ruth’s critical eye he permitted
his own eyes to flash and glitter too frequently, talked too rapidly
and warmly, grew too intense, and allowed his aroused blood to redden
his cheeks too much. He lacked decorum and control, and was in decided
contrast to the young professor of English with whom he talked.

But Martin was not concerned with appearances! He had been swift to
note the other’s trained mind and to appreciate his command of
knowledge. Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize Martin’s
concept of the average English professor. Martin wanted him to talk
shop, and, though he seemed averse at first, succeeded in making him do
it. For Martin did not see why a man should not talk shop.

“It’s absurd and unfair,” he had told Ruth weeks before, “this
objection to talking shop. For what reason under the sun do men and
women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is in
them? And the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the
thing by which they make their living, the thing they’ve specialized on
and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed about. Imagine Mr.
Butler living up to social etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul
Verlaine or the German drama or the novels of D’Annunzio. We’d be bored
to death. I, for one, if I must listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear
him talk about his law. It’s the best that is in him, and life is so
short that I want the best of every man and woman I meet.”

“But,” Ruth had objected, “there are the topics of general interest to
all.”

“There, you mistake,” he had rushed on. “All persons in society, all
cliques in society—or, rather, nearly all persons and cliques—ape their
betters. Now, who are the best betters? The idlers, the wealthy idlers.
They do not know, as a rule, the things known by the persons who are
doing something in the world. To listen to conversation about such
things would mean to be bored, wherefore the idlers decree that such
things are shop and must not be talked about. Likewise they decree the
things that are not shop and which may be talked about, and those
things are the latest operas, latest novels, cards, billiards,
cocktails, automobiles, horse shows, trout fishing, tuna-fishing,
big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and so forth—and mark you, these are
the things the idlers know. In all truth, they constitute the shop-talk
of the idlers. And the funniest part of it is that many of the clever
people, and all the would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to
impose upon them. As for me, I want the best a man’s got in him, call
it shop vulgarity or anything you please.”

And Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on the established had
seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.

So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness,
challenging him to speak his mind. As Ruth paused beside them she heard
Martin saying:-

“You surely don’t pronounce such heresies in the University of
California?”

Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. “The honest taxpayer and the
politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our appropriations and
therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to
the party press, or to the press of both parties.”

“Yes, that’s clear; but how about you?” Martin urged. “You must be a
fish out of the water.”

“Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Sometimes I am fairly
sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris, in Grub
Street, in a hermit’s cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian crowd,
drinking claret,—dago-red they call it in San Francisco,—dining in
cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing vociferously
radical views upon all creation. Really, I am frequently almost sure
that I was cut out to be a radical. But then, there are so many
questions on which I am not sure. I grow timid when I am face to face
with my human frailty, which ever prevents me from grasping all the
factors in any problem—human, vital problems, you know.”

And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had come
the “Song of the Trade Wind”:-

“I am strongest at noon,
But under the moon
    I stiffen the bunt of the sail.”

He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other
reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and
cool, and strong. He was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal
there was a certain bafflement about him. Martin had the feeling that
he never spoke his full mind, just as he had often had the feeling that
the trades never blew their strongest but always held reserves of
strength that were never used. Martin’s trick of visioning was active
as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact
and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his
inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind
immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which
ordinarily expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly
automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the
living present. Just as Ruth’s face, in a momentary jealousy had called
before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor Caldwell
made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white billows across
the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather
identifying and classifying, new memory-visions rose before him, or
spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the screen of his
consciousness. These visions came out of the actions and sensations of
the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday and last
week—a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever
thronged his mind.

So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell’s easy flow of
speech—the conversation of a clever, cultured man—that Martin kept
seeing himself down all his past. He saw himself when he had been quite
the hoodlum, wearing a “stiff-rim” Stetson hat and a square-cut,
double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and
possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police permitted. He did
not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to palliate it. At one time in
his life he had been just a common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that
worried the police and terrorized honest, working-class householders.
But his ideals had changed. He glanced about him at the well-bred,
well-dressed men and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere
of culture and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his
early youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness,
stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he saw
merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual university
professor.

For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place. He had
fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and
everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by his
willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command respect.
But he had never taken root. He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy
his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He had been perturbed always by
a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from
beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found
books and art and love. And here he was, in the midst of all this, the
only one of all the comrades he had adventured with who could have made
themselves eligible for the inside of the Morse home.

But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following
Professor Caldwell closely. And as he followed, comprehendingly and
critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other’s knowledge. As
for himself, from moment to moment the conversation showed him gaps and
open stretches, whole subjects with which he was unfamiliar.
Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that he possessed the
outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a matter only of time, when
he would fill in the outline. Then watch out, he thought—’ware shoal,
everybody! He felt like sitting at the feet of the professor,
worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began to discern a
weakness in the other’s judgments—a weakness so stray and elusive that
he might not have caught it had it not been ever present. And when he
did catch it, he leapt to equality at once.

Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.

“I’ll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your
judgments,” he said. “You lack biology. It has no place in your scheme
of things.—Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the ground
up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic
right on up to the widest aesthetic and sociological generalizations.”

Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses under Professor
Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all
knowledge.

“I scarcely follow you,” he said dubiously.

Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.

“Then I’ll try to explain,” he said. “I remember reading in Egyptian
history something to the effect that understanding could not be had of
Egyptian art without first studying the land question.”

“Quite right,” the professor nodded.

“And it seems to me,” Martin continued, “that knowledge of the land
question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had
without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of life.
How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and customs,
without understanding, not merely the nature of the creatures that made
them, but the nature of the stuff out of which the creatures are made?
Is literature less human than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt?
Is there one thing in the known universe that is not subject to the law
of evolution?—Oh, I know there is an elaborate evolution of the various
arts laid down, but it seems to me to be too mechanical. The human
himself is left out. The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music
and song and dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the
evolution of the human himself, the development of the basic and
intrinsic parts that were in him before he made his first tool or
gibbered his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and
which I call biology. It is biology in its largest aspects.

“I know I express myself incoherently, but I’ve tried to hammer out the
idea. It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed and ready
to deliver it. You spoke yourself of the human frailty that prevented
one from taking all the factors into consideration. And you, in
turn,—or so it seems to me,—leave out the biological factor, the very
stuff out of which has been spun the fabric of all the arts, the warp
and the woof of all human actions and achievements.”

To Ruth’s amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that the
professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance for
Martin’s youth. Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute, silent and
fingering his watch chain.

“Do you know,” he said at last, “I’ve had that same criticism passed on
me once before—by a very great man, a scientist and evolutionist,
Joseph Le Conte. But he is dead, and I thought to remain undetected;
and now you come along and expose me. Seriously, though—and this is
confession—I think there is something in your contention—a great deal,
in fact. I am too classical, not enough up-to-date in the
interpretative branches of science, and I can only plead the
disadvantages of my education and a temperamental slothfulness that
prevents me from doing the work. I wonder if you’ll believe that I’ve
never been inside a physics or chemistry laboratory? It is true,
nevertheless. Le Conte was right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to
an extent—how much I do not know.”

Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him
aside, whispering:-

“You shouldn’t have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way. There may
be others who want to talk with him.”

“My mistake,” Martin admitted contritely. “But I’d got him stirred up,
and he was so interesting that I did not think. Do you know, he is the
brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked with. And I’ll
tell you something else. I once thought that everybody who went to
universities, or who sat in the high places in society, was just as
brilliant and intelligent as he.”

“He’s an exception,” she answered.

“I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now?—Oh, say, bring me
up against that cashier-fellow.”

Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have wished
better behavior on her lover’s part. Not once did his eyes flash nor
his cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which he talked
surprised her. But in Martin’s estimation the whole tribe of bank
cashiers fell a few hundred per cent, and for the rest of the evening
he labored under the impression that bank cashiers and talkers of
platitudes were synonymous phrases. The army officer he found
good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome young fellow, content to
occupy the place in life into which birth and luck had flung him. On
learning that he had completed two years in the university, Martin was
puzzled to know where he had stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked
him better than the platitudinous bank cashier.

“I really don’t object to platitudes,” he told Ruth later; “but what
worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior
certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it. Why,
I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time
he took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the
Democrats. Do you know, he skins his words as a professional
poker-player skins the cards that are dealt out to him. Some day I’ll
show you what I mean.”

“I’m sorry you don’t like him,” was her reply. “He’s a favorite of Mr.
Butler’s. Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest—calls him the Rock,
Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can well be
built.”

“I don’t doubt it—from the little I saw of him and the less I heard
from him; but I don’t think so much of banks as I did. You don’t mind
my speaking my mind this way, dear?”

“No, no; it is most interesting.”

“Yes,” Martin went on heartily, “I’m no more than a barbarian getting
my first impressions of civilization. Such impressions must be
entertainingly novel to the civilized person.”

“What did you think of my cousins?” Ruth queried.

“I liked them better than the other women. There’s plenty of fun in
them along with paucity of pretence.”

“Then you did like the other women?”

He shook his head.

“That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological
poll-parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like
Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought. As for
the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore. She’d make a good wife
for the cashier. And the musician woman! I don’t care how nimble her
fingers are, how perfect her technique, how wonderful her
expression—the fact is, she knows nothing about music.”

“She plays beautifully,” Ruth protested.

“Yes, she’s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but the
intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her what music
meant to her—you know I’m always curious to know that particular thing;
and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it,
that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life
to her.”

“You were making them talk shop,” Ruth charged him.

“I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings
if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used to think that up
here, where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed—” He paused for
a moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and
square-cut, enter the door and swagger across the room. “As I was
saying, up here I thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant.
But now, from what little I’ve seen of them, they strike me as a pack
of ninnies, most of them, and ninety percent of the remainder as bores.
Now there’s Professor Caldwell—he’s different. He’s a man, every inch
of him and every atom of his gray matter.”

Ruth’s face brightened.

“Tell me about him,” she urged. “Not what is large and brilliant—I know
those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am most curious to
know.”

“Perhaps I’ll get myself in a pickle.” Martin debated humorously for a
moment. “Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in him nothing
less than the best.”

“I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two
years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression.”

“Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine things
you think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest specimen of
intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame.”

“Oh, no, no!” he hastened to cry. “Nothing paltry nor vulgar. What I
mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of
things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to
himself that he never saw it. Perhaps that’s not the clearest way to
express it. Here’s another way. A man who has found the path to the
hidden temple but has not followed it; who has, perhaps, caught
glimpses of the temple and striven afterward to convince himself that
it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet another way. A man who could have
done things but who placed no value on the doing, and who, all the
time, in his innermost heart, is regretting that he has not done them;
who has secretly laughed at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more
secretly, has yearned for the rewards and for the joy of doing.”

“I don’t read him that way,” she said. “And for that matter, I don’t
see just what you mean.”

“It is only a vague feeling on my part,” Martin temporized. “I have no
reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is wrong. You
certainly should know him better than I.”

From the evening at Ruth’s Martin brought away with him strange
confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his goal,
in the persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was
encouraged with his success. The climb had been easier than he
expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false
modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings among whom
he had climbed—with the exception, of course, of Professor Caldwell.
About life and the books he knew more than they, and he wondered into
what nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations. He did
not know that he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did
he know that the persons who were given to probing the depths and to
thinking ultimate thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of
the world’s Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely
eagles sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its
swarming freight of gregarious life.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

But success had lost Martin’s address, and her messengers no longer
came to his door. For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays,
he toiled on “The Shame of the Sun,” a long essay of some thirty
thousand words. It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the
Maeterlinck school—an attack from the citadel of positive science upon
the wonder-dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of
beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact. It was
a little later that he followed up the attack with two short essays,
“The Wonder-Dreamers” and “The Yardstick of the Ego.” And on essays,
long and short, he began to pay the travelling expenses from magazine
to magazine.

During the twenty-five days spent on “The Shame of the Sun,” he sold
hack-work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents. A joke had
brought in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-grade comic
weekly, had fetched a dollar. Then two humorous poems had earned two
dollars and three dollars respectively. As a result, having exhausted
his credit with the tradesmen (though he had increased his credit with
the grocer to five dollars), his wheel and suit of clothes went back to
the pawnbroker. The type-writer people were again clamoring for money,
insistently pointing out that according to the agreement rent was to be
paid strictly in advance.

Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack-work.
Perhaps there was a living in it, after all. Stored away under his
table were the twenty storiettes which had been rejected by the
newspaper short-story syndicate. He read them over in order to find out
how not to write newspaper storiettes, and so doing, reasoned out the
perfect formula. He found that the newspaper storiette should never be
tragic, should never end unhappily, and should never contain beauty of
language, subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy of sentiment.
Sentiment it must contain, plenty of it, pure and noble, of the sort
that in his own early youth had brought his applause from “nigger
heaven”—the “For-God-my-country-and-the-Czar” and
“I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest” brand of sentiment.

Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted “The Duchess” for
tone, and proceeded to mix according to formula. The formula consists
of three parts: (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart; (2) by some deed
or event they are reunited; (3) marriage bells. The third part was an
unvarying quantity, but the first and second parts could be varied an
infinite number of times. Thus, the pair of lovers could be jarred
apart by misunderstood motives, by accident of fate, by jealous rivals,
by irate parents, by crafty guardians, by scheming relatives, and so
forth and so forth; they could be reunited by a brave deed of the man
lover, by a similar deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one
lover or the other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming
relative, or jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same, by
discovery of some unguessed secret, by lover storming girl’s heart, by
lover making long and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly. It
was very fetching to make the girl propose in the course of being
reunited, and Martin discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly piquant
and fetching ruses. But marriage bells at the end was the one thing he
could take no liberties with; though the heavens rolled up as a scroll
and the stars fell, the wedding bells must go on ringing just the same.
In quantity, the formula prescribed twelve hundred words minimum dose,
fifteen hundred words maximum dose.

Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin worked
out half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when
constructing storiettes. These forms were like the cunning tables used
by mathematicians, which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and
left, which entrances consist of scores of lines and dozens of columns,
and from which may be drawn, without reasoning or thinking, thousands
of different conclusions, all unchallengably precise and true. Thus, in
the course of half an hour with his forms, Martin could frame up a
dozen or so storiettes, which he put aside and filled in at his
convenience. He found that he could fill one in, after a day of serious
work, in the hour before going to bed. As he later confessed to Ruth,
he could almost do it in his sleep. The real work was in constructing
the frames, and that was merely mechanical.

He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for once
he knew the editorial mind when he said positively to himself that the
first two he sent off would bring checks. And checks they brought, for
four dollars each, at the end of twelve days.

In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries concerning
the magazines. Though the _Transcontinental_ had published “The Ring of
Bells,” no check was forthcoming. Martin needed it, and he wrote for
it. An evasive answer and a request for more of his work was all he
received. He had gone hungry two days waiting for the reply, and it was
then that he put his wheel back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice a
week, to the _Transcontinental_ for his five dollars, though it was
only semi-occasionally that he elicited a reply. He did not know that
the _Transcontinental_ had been staggering along precariously for
years, that it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing,
with a crazy circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and
partly on patriotic appealing, and with advertisements that were
scarcely more than charitable donations. Nor did he know that the
_Transcontinental_ was the sole livelihood of the editor and the
business manager, and that they could wring their livelihood out of it
only by moving to escape paying rent and by never paying any bill they
could evade. Nor could he have guessed that the particular five dollars
that belonged to him had been appropriated by the business manager for
the painting of his house in Alameda, which painting he performed
himself, on week-day afternoons, because he could not afford to pay
union wages and because the first scab he had employed had had a ladder
jerked out from under him and been sent to the hospital with a broken
collar-bone.

The ten dollars for which Martin had sold “Treasure Hunters” to the
Chicago newspaper did not come to hand. The article had been published,
as he had ascertained at the file in the Central Reading-room, but no
word could he get from the editor. His letters were ignored. To satisfy
himself that they had been received, he registered several of them. It
was nothing less than robbery, he concluded—a cold-blooded steal; while
he starved, he was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale
of which was the sole way of getting bread to eat.

_Youth and Age_ was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his
twenty-one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business. With it
went all hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.

To cap the situation, “The Pot,” which he looked upon as one of the
best things he had written, was lost to him. In despair, casting about
frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to _The Billow_, a
society weekly in San Francisco. His chief reason for submitting it to
that publication was that, having only to travel across the bay from
Oakland, a quick decision could be reached. Two weeks later he was
overjoyed to see, in the latest number on the news-stand, his story
printed in full, illustrated, and in the place of honor. He went home
with leaping pulse, wondering how much they would pay him for one of
the best things he had done. Also, the celerity with which it had been
accepted and published was a pleasant thought to him. That the editor
had not informed him of the acceptance made the surprise more complete.
After waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation
conquered diffidence, and he wrote to the editor of _The Billow_,
suggesting that possibly through some negligence of the business
manager his little account had been overlooked.

Even if it isn’t more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself, it
will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a dozen
like it, and possibly as good.

Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least elicited Martin’s
admiration.

“We thank you,” it ran, “for your excellent contribution. All of us in
the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was given the
place of honor and immediate publication. We earnestly hope that you
liked the illustrations.

“On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring under
the misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts. This is
not our custom, and of course yours was unsolicited. We assumed,
naturally, when we received your story, that you understood the
situation. We can only deeply regret this unfortunate misunderstanding,
and assure you of our unfailing regard. Again, thanking you for your
kind contribution, and hoping to receive more from you in the near
future, we remain, etc.”

There was also a postscript to the effect that though _The Billow_
carried no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a
complimentary subscription for the ensuing year.

After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet of
all his manuscripts: “Submitted at your usual rate.”

Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at _my_ usual
rate.

He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection,
under the sway of which he rewrote and polished “The Jostling Street,”
“The Wine of Life,” “Joy,” the “Sea Lyrics,” and others of his earlier
work. As of old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all too little to
suit him. He wrote prodigiously, and he read prodigiously, forgetting
in his toil the pangs caused by giving up his tobacco. Ruth’s promised
cure for the habit, flamboyantly labelled, he stowed away in the most
inaccessible corner of his bureau. Especially during his stretches of
famine he suffered from lack of the weed; but no matter how often he
mastered the craving, it remained with him as strong as ever. He
regarded it as the biggest thing he had ever achieved. Ruth’s point of
view was that he was doing no more than was right. She brought him the
anti-tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, and in a few
days forgot all about it.

His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them,
were successful. By means of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid
most of his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel. The
storiettes at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for
ambitious work; while the one thing that upheld him was the forty
dollars he had received from _The White Mouse_. He anchored his faith
to that, and was confident that the really first-class magazines would
pay an unknown writer at least an equal rate, if not a better one. But
the thing was, how to get into the first-class magazines. His best
stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and yet, each
month, he read reams of dull, prosy, inartistic stuff between all their
various covers. If only one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend
from his high seat of pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if
my work is unusual, no matter if it is unfit, for prudential reasons,
for their pages, surely there must be some sparks in it, somewhere, a
few, to warm them to some sort of appreciation. And thereupon he would
get out one or another of his manuscripts, such as “Adventure,” and
read it over and over in a vain attempt to vindicate the editorial
silence.

As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an
end. For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the
part of the newspaper storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to
him through the mail ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes.
They were accompanied by a brief letter to the effect that the
syndicate was overstocked, and that some months would elapse before it
would be in the market again for manuscripts. Martin had even been
extravagant on the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last
the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for them and
accepting every one he sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as
sold, and he had lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the
bank. So it was that he entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he
continued selling his earlier efforts to publications that would not
pay and submitting his later work to magazines that would not buy.
Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker down in Oakland. A few
jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the New York weeklies,
made existence barely possible for him. It was at this time that he
wrote letters of inquiry to the several great monthly and quarterly
reviews, and learned in reply that they rarely considered unsolicited
articles, and that most of their contents were written upon order by
well-known specialists who were authorities in their various fields.

CHAPTER XXIX.

It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers and editors were
away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a decision
in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three months or more.
The consolation he drew from it was that a saving in postage was
effected by the deadlock. Only the robber-publications seemed to remain
actively in business, and to them Martin disposed of all his early
efforts, such as “Pearl-diving,” “The Sea as a Career,”
“Turtle-catching,” and “The Northeast Trades.” For these manuscripts he
never received a penny. It is true, after six months’ correspondence,
he effected a compromise, whereby he received a safety razor for
“Turtle-catching,” and that _The Acropolis_, having agreed to give him
five dollars cash and five yearly subscriptions: for “The Northeast
Trades,” fulfilled the second part of the agreement.

For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a
Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste
and a penny-dreadful purse. “The Peri and the Pearl,” a clever skit of
a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain,
won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in
the interest of a great railroad. When the editor wrote, offering him
payment in transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the
transportation was transferable. It was not, and so, being prevented
from peddling it, he asked for the return of the poem. Back it came,
with the editor’s regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again,
this time to _The Hornet_, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned
into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist
who founded it. But _The Hornet’s_ light had begun to dim long before
Martin was born. The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the
poem, but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it. Several of
his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew a
reply. It was written by a new editor, who coolly informed Martin that
he declined to be held responsible for the old editor’s mistakes, and
that he did not think much of “The Peri and the Pearl” anyway.

But _The Globe_, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel
treatment of all. He had refrained from offering his “Sea Lyrics” for
publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having been
rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in _The Globe_
office. There were thirty poems in the collection, and he was to
receive a dollar apiece for them. The first month four were published,
and he promptly received a check for four dollars; but when he looked
over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the
titles had been altered: “Finis,” for instance, being changed to “The
Finish,” and “The Song of the Outer Reef” to “The Song of the Coral
Reef.” In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate
title, was substituted. In place of his own, “Medusa Lights,” the
editor had printed, “The Backward Track.” But the slaughter in the body
of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned and sweated and thrust his
hands through his hair. Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out,
interchanged, or juggled about in the most incomprehensible manner.
Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He
could not believe that a sane editor could be guilty of such
maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have
been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote
immediately, begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to
return them to him.

He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till the
thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a check for
those which had appeared in the current number.

Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the _White Mouse_
forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to
hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural
weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he
found he could easily starve. At his lowest ebb, when his black suit
was in pawn, he made a ten-strike—or so it seemed to him—in a prize
contest arranged by the County Committee of the Republican Party. There
were three branches of the contest, and he entered them all, laughing
at himself bitterly the while in that he was driven to such straits to
live. His poem won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song
the second prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the
Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was very
gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had gone wrong
in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a state senator
were members of it, the money was not forthcoming. While this affair
was hanging fire, he proved that he understood the principles of the
Democratic Party by winning the first prize for his essay in a similar
contest. And, moreover, he received the money, twenty-five dollars. But
the forty dollars won in the first contest he never received.

Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long walk
from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too much time,
he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle. The latter gave
him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and enabled him to see
Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck trousers and an old sweater
made him a presentable wheel costume, so that he could go with Ruth on
afternoon rides. Besides, he no longer had opportunity to see much of
her in her own home, where Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her
campaign of entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and to whom
he had looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no
longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times,
disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of
such people was maddening. He was not unduly egotistic. He measured the
narrowness of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he
read. At Ruth’s home he never met a large mind, with the exception of
Professor Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the
rest, they were numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and
ignorant. It was their ignorance that astounded him. What was the
matter with them? What had they done with their educations? They had
had access to the same books he had. How did it happen that they had
drawn nothing from them?

He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers, existed.
He had his proofs from the books, the books that had educated him
beyond the Morse standard. And he knew that higher intellects than
those of the Morse circle were to be found in the world. He read
English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses of men and women
talking politics and philosophy. And he read of salons in great cities,
even in the United States, where art and intellect congregated.
Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived that all well-groomed persons
above the working class were persons with power of intellect and vigor
of beauty. Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had
been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were
the same things.

Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth
with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would
shine anywhere. As it was clear to him that he had been handicapped by
his early environment, so now he perceived that she was similarly
handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand. The books on her
father’s shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the
piano—all was just so much meretricious display. To real literature,
real painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead. And
bigger than such things was life, of which they were densely,
hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their
masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind
interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while
their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved
the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first
hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam’s rib; that moved
Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the
projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British
ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win
immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of
history.

So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that
the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank
cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known
was on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they
wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of them was
lacking the something more which he found in himself and in the books.
The Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce,
and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a slave to the
money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the
Morses’; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he
moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin
to what a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.

“You hate and fear the socialists,” he remarked to Mr. Morse, one
evening at dinner; “but why? You know neither them nor their
doctrines.”

The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse, who
had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood. The cashier
was Martin’s black beast, and his temper was a trifle short where the
talker of platitudes was concerned.

“Yes,” he had said, “Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising young
man—somebody told me as much. And it is true. He’ll make the Governor’s
Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the United States Senate.”

“What makes you think so?” Mrs. Morse had inquired.

“I’ve heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid and
unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but
regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the
platitudes of the average voter that—oh, well, you know you flatter any
man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to
him.”

“I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood,” Ruth had chimed in.

“Heaven forbid!”

The look of horror on Martin’s face stirred Mrs. Morse to belligerence.

“You surely don’t mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?” she demanded
icily.

“No more than the average Republican,” was the retort, “or average
Democrat, either. They are all stupid when they are not crafty, and
very few of them are crafty. The only wise Republicans are the
millionnaires and their conscious henchmen. They know which side their
bread is buttered on, and they know why.”

“I am a Republican,” Mr. Morse put in lightly. “Pray, how do you
classify me?”

“Oh, you are an unconscious henchman.”

“Henchman?”

“Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no working-class nor
criminal practice. You don’t depend upon wife-beaters and pickpockets
for your income. You get your livelihood from the masters of society,
and whoever feeds a man is that man’s master. Yes, you are a henchman.
You are interested in advancing the interests of the aggregations of
capital you serve.”

Mr. Morse’s face was a trifle red.

“I confess, sir,” he said, “that you talk like a scoundrelly
socialist.”

Then it was that Martin made his remark:

“You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You know neither them nor
their doctrines.”

“Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism,” Mr. Morse replied,
while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed
happily at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege lord’s
antagonism.

“Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality,
and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist,”
Martin said with a smile. “Because I question Jefferson and the
unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a
socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I
who am its avowed enemy.”

“Now you please to be facetious,” was all the other could say.

“Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in equality,
and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the corporations, from
day to day, are busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me a
socialist because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live
up to. The Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight
the battle against equality with the very word itself the slogan on
their lips. In the name of equality they destroy equality. That was why
I called them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe
the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Such is the lesson
I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned. As I
said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary and
eternal foe of socialism.”

“But you frequent socialist meetings,” Mr. Morse challenged.

“Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you to
learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings. They
are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books. Any
one of them knows far more about sociology and all the other ologies
than the average captain of industry. Yes, I have been to half a dozen
of their meetings, but that doesn’t make me a socialist any more than
hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me a Republican.”

“I can’t help it,” Mr. Morse said feebly, “but I still believe you
incline that way.”

Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn’t know what I was talking
about. He hasn’t understood a word of it. What did he do with his
education, anyway?

Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with
economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him
a grisly monster. Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more
offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those
about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the
metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.

A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His
sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young
mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the
trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having
got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous. Marian
had called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce her
engagement, during which visit she had playfully inspected Martin’s
palm and told his fortune. On her next visit she brought Hermann von
Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and congratulated both of
them in language so easy and graceful as to affect disagreeably the
peasant-mind of his sister’s lover. This bad impression was further
heightened by Martin’s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse
with which he had commemorated Marian’s previous visit. It was a bit of
society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named “The Palmist.” He
was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his
sister’s face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her
betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that worthy’s
asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen disapproval. The
incident passed over, they made an early departure, and Martin forgot
all about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any woman,
even of the working class, should not have been flattered and delighted
by having poetry written about her.

Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone. Nor
did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully
for what he had done.

“Why, Marian,” he chided, “you talk as though you were ashamed of your
relatives, or of your brother at any rate.”

“And I am, too,” she blurted out.

Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes.
The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.

“But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry
about my own sister?”

“He ain’t jealous,” she sobbed. “He says it was indecent, ob—obscene.”

Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to
resurrect and read a carbon copy of “The Palmist.”

“I can’t see it,” he said finally, proffering the manuscript to her.
“Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene—that was
the word, wasn’t it?”

“He says so, and he ought to know,” was the answer, with a wave aside
of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing. “And he says
you’ve got to tear it up. He says he won’t have no wife of his with
such things written about her which anybody can read. He says it’s a
disgrace, an’ he won’t stand for it.”

“Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense,” Martin began;
then abruptly changed his mind.

He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to
convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd
and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.

“All right,” he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen
pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.

He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original
type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York
magazine. Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself
nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever
were published.

Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.

“Can I?” she pleaded.

He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn
pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her
jacket—ocular evidence of the success of her mission. She reminded him
of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous
flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the working class whom
he had seen twice. But they were on a par, the pair of them, in dress
and carriage, and he smiled with inward amusement at the caprice of his
fancy which suggested the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse’s
drawing-room. The amusement faded, and he was aware of a great
loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were
milestones of the road he had travelled. And he had left them behind.
He glanced affectionately about him at his few books. They were all the
comrades left to him.

“Hello, what’s that?” he demanded in startled surprise.

Marian repeated her question.

“Why don’t I go to work?” He broke into a laugh that was only
half-hearted. “That Hermann of yours has been talking to you.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t lie,” he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his charge.

“Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business; that
when I write poetry about the girl he’s keeping company with it’s his
business, but that outside of that he’s got no say so. Understand?

“So you don’t think I’ll succeed as a writer, eh?” he went on. “You
think I’m no good?—that I’ve fallen down and am a disgrace to the
family?”

“I think it would be much better if you got a job,” she said firmly,
and he saw she was sincere. “Hermann says—”

“Damn Hermann!” he broke out good-naturedly. “What I want to know is
when you’re going to get married. Also, you find out from your Hermann
if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from me.”

He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke
out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her
betrothed, all the members of his own class and the members of Ruth’s
class, directing their narrow little lives by narrow little
formulas—herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives
by one another’s opinions, failing of being individuals and of really
living life because of the childlike formulas by which they were
enslaved. He summoned them before him in apparitional procession:
Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt
cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he
judged them and dismissed them—judged them by the standards of
intellect and morality he had learned from the books. Vainly he asked:
Where are the great souls, the great men and women? He found them not
among the careless, gross, and stupid intelligences that answered the
call of vision to his narrow room. He felt a loathing for them such as
Circe must have felt for her swine. When he had dismissed the last one
and thought himself alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and
unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut,
double-breasted coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful
hoodlum who had once been he.

“You were like all the rest, young fellow,” Martin sneered. “Your
morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did not
think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes, were
ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock of
your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and
ruled the gang, not because you liked to,—you know you really despised
it,—but because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder. You
licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn’t give in, and you wouldn’t give
in partly because you were an abysmal brute and for the rest because
you believed what every one about you believed, that the measure of
manhood was the carnivorous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring
fellow-creatures’ anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won other
fellows’ girls away from them, not because you wanted the girls, but
because in the marrow of those about you, those who set your moral
pace, was the instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well,
the years have passed, and what do you think about it now?”

As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. The
stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder
garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of the
eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from an
inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge. The apparition was
very like his present self, and, as he regarded it, he noted the
student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book over which it
pored. He glanced at the title and read, “The Science of Æsthetics.”
Next, he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student-lamp, and
himself went on reading “The Science of Æsthetics.”

CHAPTER XXX.

On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that which
had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his
“Love-cycle” to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before, they had
ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and again she had
interrupted his reading with exclamations of pleasure, and now, as he
laid the last sheet of manuscript with its fellows, he waited her
judgment.

She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating to
frame in words the harshness of her thought.

“I think they are beautiful, very beautiful,” she said; “but you can’t
sell them, can you? You see what I mean,” she said, almost pleaded.
“This writing of yours is not practical. Something is the matter—maybe
it is with the market—that prevents you from earning a living by it.
And please, dear, don’t misunderstand me. I am flattered, and made
proud, and all that—I could not be a true woman were it otherwise—that
you should write these poems to me. But they do not make our marriage
possible. Don’t you see, Martin? Don’t think me mercenary. It is love,
the thought of our future, with which I am burdened. A whole year has
gone by since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no
nearer. Don’t think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for
really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don’t you try to
get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing? Why
not become a reporter?—for a while, at least?”

“It would spoil my style,” was his answer, in a low, monotonous voice.
“You have no idea how I’ve worked for style.”

“But those storiettes,” she argued. “You called them hack-work. You
wrote many of them. Didn’t they spoil your style?”

“No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out, jaded, at
the end of a long day of application to style. But a reporter’s work is
all hack from morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life.
And it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with neither past
nor future, and certainly without thought of any style but reportorial
style, and that certainly is not literature. To become a reporter now,
just as my style is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit
literary suicide. As it is, every storiette, every word of every
storiette, was a violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect
for beauty. I tell you it was sickening. I was guilty of sin. And I was
secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go into
pawn. But the joy of writing the ‘Love-cycle’! The creative joy in its
noblest form! That was compensation for everything.”

Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the creative
joy. She used the phrase—it was on her lips he had first heard it. She
had read about it, studied about it, in the university in the course of
earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but she was not original, not
creative, and all manifestations of culture on her part were but
harpings of the harpings of others.

“May not the editor have been right in his revision of your ‘Sea
Lyrics’?” she questioned. “Remember, an editor must have proved
qualifications or else he would not be an editor.”

“That’s in line with the persistence of the established,” he rejoined,
his heat against the editor-folk getting the better of him. “What is,
is not only right, but is the best possible. The existence of anything
is sufficient vindication of its fitness to exist—to exist, mark you,
as the average person unconsciously believes, not merely in present
conditions, but in all conditions. It is their ignorance, of course,
that makes them believe such rot—their ignorance, which is nothing more
nor less than the henidical mental process described by Weininger. They
think they think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the
lives of the few who really think.”

He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking over
Ruth’s head.

“I’m sure I don’t know who this Weininger is,” she retorted. “And you
are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you. What I was
speaking of was the qualification of editors—”

“And I’ll tell you,” he interrupted. “The chief qualification of
ninety-nine per cent of all editors is failure. They have failed as
writers. Don’t think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and the
slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the joy of
writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed. And right
there is the cursed paradox of it. Every portal to success in
literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures in literature.
The editors, sub-editors, associate editors, most of them, and the
manuscript-readers for the magazines and book-publishers, most of them,
nearly all of them, are men who wanted to write and who have failed.
And yet they, of all creatures under the sun the most unfit, are the
very creatures who decide what shall and what shall not find its way
into print—they, who have proved themselves not original, who have
demonstrated that they lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon
originality and genius. And after them come the reviewers, just so many
more failures. Don’t tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and
attempted to write poetry or fiction; for they have, and they have
failed. Why, the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil.
But you know my opinion on the reviewers and the alleged critics. There
are great critics, but they are as rare as comets. If I fail as a
writer, I shall have proved for the career of editorship. There’s bread
and butter and jam, at any rate.”

Ruth’s mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover’s views was
buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.

“But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you have
shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the great writers
ever arrived?”

“They arrived by achieving the impossible,” he answered. “They did such
blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed them.
They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to-one wager
against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle’s battle-scarred
giants who will not be kept down. And that is what I must do; I must
achieve the impossible.”

“But if you fail? You must consider me as well, Martin.”

“If I fail?” He regarded her for a moment as though the thought she had
uttered was unthinkable. Then intelligence illumined his eyes. “If I
fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an editor’s wife.”

She frowned at his facetiousness—a pretty, adorable frown that made him
put his arm around her and kiss it away.

“There, that’s enough,” she urged, by an effort of will withdrawing
herself from the fascination of his strength. “I have talked with
father and mother. I never before asserted myself so against them. I
demanded to be heard. I was very undutiful. They are against you, you
know; but I assured them over and over of my abiding love for you, and
at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you could begin right away
in his office. And then, of his own accord, he said he would pay you
enough at the start so that we could get married and have a little
cottage somewhere. Which I think was very fine of him—don’t you?”

Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically
reaching for the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to roll
a cigarette, muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went on.

“Frankly, though, and don’t let it hurt you—I tell you, to show you
precisely how you stand with him—he doesn’t like your radical views,
and he thinks you are lazy. Of course I know you are not. I know you
work hard.”

How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin’s mind.

“Well, then,” he said, “how about my views? Do you think they are so
radical?”

He held her eyes and waited the answer.

“I think them, well, very disconcerting,” she replied.

The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the
grayness of life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had made
for him to go to work. And she, having gone as far as she dared, was
willing to wait the answer till she should bring the question up again.

She had not long to wait. Martin had a question of his own to propound
to her. He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith in him, and
within the week each was answered. Martin precipitated it by reading to
her his “The Shame of the Sun.”

“Why don’t you become a reporter?” she asked when he had finished. “You
love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed. You could rise in
journalism and make a name for yourself. There are a number of great
special correspondents. Their salaries are large, and their field is
the world. They are sent everywhere, to the heart of Africa, like
Stanley, or to interview the Pope, or to explore unknown Thibet.”

“Then you don’t like my essay?” he rejoined. “You believe that I have
some show in journalism but none in literature?”

“No, no; I do like it. It reads well. But I am afraid it’s over the
heads of your readers. At least it is over mine. It sounds beautiful,
but I don’t understand it. Your scientific slang is beyond me. You are
an extremist, you know, dear, and what may be intelligible to you may
not be intelligible to the rest of us.”

“I imagine it’s the philosophic slang that bothers you,” was all he
could say.

He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had
expressed, and her verdict stunned him.

“No matter how poorly it is done,” he persisted, “don’t you see
anything in it?—in the thought of it, I mean?”

She shook her head.

“No, it is so different from anything I have read. I read Maeterlinck
and understand him—”

“His mysticism, you understand that?” Martin flashed out.

“Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon him, I
don’t understand. Of course, if originality counts—”

He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by
speech. He became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that she had
been speaking for some time.

“After all, your writing has been a toy to you,” she was saying.
“Surely you have played with it long enough. It is time to take up life
seriously—_our_ life, Martin. Hitherto you have lived solely your own.”

“You want me to go to work?” he asked.

“Yes. Father has offered—”

“I understand all that,” he broke in; “but what I want to know is
whether or not you have lost faith in me?”

She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.

“In your writing, dear,” she admitted in a half-whisper.

“You’ve read lots of my stuff,” he went on brutally. “What do you think
of it? Is it utterly hopeless? How does it compare with other men’s
work?”

“But they sell theirs, and you—don’t.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. Do you think that literature is not
at all my vocation?”

“Then I will answer.” She steeled herself to do it. “I don’t think you
were made to write. Forgive me, dear. You compel me to say it; and you
know I know more about literature than you do.”

“Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts,” he said meditatively; “and you ought
to know.”

“But there is more to be said,” he continued, after a pause painful to
both. “I know what I have in me. No one knows that so well as I. I know
I shall succeed. I will not be kept down. I am afire with what I have
to say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not ask you to have faith
in that, though. I do not ask you to have faith in me, nor in my
writing. What I do ask of you is to love me and have faith in love.

“A year ago I begged for two years. One of those years is yet to run.
And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that year is
run I shall have succeeded. You remember what you told me long ago,
that I must serve my apprenticeship to writing. Well, I have served it.
I have crammed it and telescoped it. With you at the end awaiting me, I
have never shirked. Do you know, I have forgotten what it is to fall
peacefully asleep. A few million years ago I knew what it was to sleep
my fill and to awake naturally from very glut of sleep. I am awakened
always now by an alarm clock. If I fall asleep early or late, I set the
alarm accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my
last conscious actions.

“When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading for
a lighter one. And when I doze over that, I beat my head with my
knuckles in order to drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a man who
was afraid to sleep. Kipling wrote the story. This man arranged a spur
so that when unconsciousness came, his naked body pressed against the
iron teeth. Well, I’ve done the same. I look at the time, and I resolve
that not until midnight, or not until one o’clock, or two o’clock, or
three o’clock, shall the spur be removed. And so it rowels me awake
until the appointed time. That spur has been my bed-mate for months. I
have grown so desperate that five and a half hours of sleep is an
extravagance. I sleep four hours now. I am starved for sleep. There are
times when I am light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with
its rest and sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted
by Longfellow’s lines:

“‘The sea is still and deep;
All things within its bosom sleep;
A single step and all is o’er,
A plunge, a bubble, and no more.’

“Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from nervousness, from an
overwrought mind. But the point is: Why have I done this? For you. To
shorten my apprenticeship. To compel Success to hasten. And my
apprenticeship is now served. I know my equipment. I swear that I learn
more each month than the average college man learns in a year. I know
it, I tell you. But were my need for you to understand not so desperate
I should not tell you. It is not boasting. I measure the results by the
books. Your brothers, to-day, are ignorant barbarians compared with me
and the knowledge I have wrung from the books in the hours they were
sleeping. Long ago I wanted to be famous. I care very little for fame
now. What I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or
clothing, or recognition. I have a dream of laying my head on your
breast and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere
another year is gone.”

His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his will
opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward him. The
strength that had always poured out from him to her was now flowering
in his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the vigor of life and
intellect surging in him. And in that moment, and for the moment, she
was aware of a rift that showed in her certitude—a rift through which
she caught sight of the real Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and
as animal-trainers have their moments of doubt, so she, for the
instant, seemed to doubt her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.

“And another thing,” he swept on. “You love me. But why do you love me?
The thing in me that compels me to write is the very thing that draws
your love. You love me because I am somehow different from the men you
have known and might have loved. I was not made for the desk and
counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling. Make
me do such things, make me like those other men, doing the work they
do, breathing the air they breathe, developing the point of view they
have developed, and you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me,
destroyed the thing you love. My desire to write is the most vital
thing in me. Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to
write, nor would you have desired me for a husband.”

“But you forget,” she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind
glimpsing a parallel. “There have been eccentric inventors, starving
their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.
Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them,
not because of but in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion.”

“True,” was the reply. “But there have been inventors who were not
eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical things;