Martin Eden
by Jack London
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

by Jack London

1913 Macmillan and Company edition

CHAPTER I

The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in, followed by a
young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap. He wore rough clothes
that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the
spacious hall in which he found himself. He did not know what to
do with his cap, and was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the
other took it from him. The act was done quietly and naturally,
and the awkward young fellow appreciated it. "He understands," was
his thought. "He'll see me through all right."

He walked at the other's heels with a swing to his shoulders, and
his legs spread unwittingly, as if the level floors were tilting up
and sinking down to the heave and lunge of the sea. The wide rooms
seemed too narrow for his rolling gait, and to himself he was in
terror lest his broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or
sweep the bric-a-brac from the low mantel. He recoiled from side
to side between the various objects and multiplied the hazards that
in reality lodged only in his mind. Between a grand piano and a
centre-table piled high with books was space for a half a dozen to
walk abreast, yet he essayed it with trepidation. His heavy arms
hung loosely at his sides. He did not know what to do with those
arms and hands, and when, to his excited vision, one arm seemed
liable to brush against the books on the table, he lurched away
like a frightened horse, barely missing the piano stool. He
watched the easy walk of the other in front of him, and for the
first time realized that his walk was different from that of other
men. He experienced a momentary pang of shame that he should walk
so uncouthly. The sweat burst through the skin of his forehead in
tiny beads, and he paused and mopped his bronzed face with his
handkerchief.

"Hold on, Arthur, my boy," he said, attempting to mask his anxiety
with facetious utterance. "This is too much all at once for yours
truly. Give me a chance to get my nerve. You know I didn't want
to come, an' I guess your fam'ly ain't hankerin' to see me
neither."

"That's all right," was the reassuring answer. "You mustn't be
frightened at us. We're just homely people - Hello, there's a
letter for me."

He stepped back to the table, tore open the envelope, and began to
read, giving the stranger an opportunity to recover himself. And
the stranger understood and appreciated. His was the gift of
sympathy, understanding; and beneath his alarmed exterior that
sympathetic process went on. He mopped his forehead dry and
glanced about him with a controlled face, though in the eyes there
was an expression such as wild animals betray when they fear the
trap. He was surrounded by the unknown, apprehensive of what might
happen, ignorant of what he should do, aware that he walked and
bore himself awkwardly, fearful that every attribute and power of
him was similarly afflicted. He was keenly sensitive, hopelessly
self-conscious, and the amused glance that the other stole privily
at him over the top of the letter burned into him like a dagger-
thrust. He saw the glance, but he gave no sign, for among the
things he had learned was discipline. Also, that dagger-thrust
went to his pride. He cursed himself for having come, and at the
same time resolved that, happen what would, having come, he would
carry it through. The lines of his face hardened, and into his
eyes came a fighting light. He looked about more unconcernedly,
sharply observant, every detail of the pretty interior registering
itself on his brain. His eyes were wide apart; nothing in their
field of vision escaped; and as they drank in the beauty before
them the fighting light died out and a warm glow took its place.
He was responsive to beauty, and here was cause to respond.

An oil painting caught and held him. A heavy surf thundered and
burst over an outjutting rock; lowering storm-clouds covered the
sky; and, outside the line of surf, a pilot-schooner, close-hauled,
heeled over till every detail of her deck was visible, was surging
along against a stormy sunset sky. There was beauty, and it drew
him irresistibly. He forgot his awkward walk and came closer to
the painting, very close. The beauty faded out of the canvas. His
face expressed his bepuzzlement. He stared at what seemed a
careless daub of paint, then stepped away. Immediately all the
beauty flashed back into the canvas. "A trick picture," was his
thought, as he dismissed it, though in the midst of the
multitudinous impressions he was receiving he found time to feel a
prod of indignation that so much beauty should be sacrificed to
make a trick. He did not know painting. He had been brought up on
chromos and lithographs that were always definite and sharp, near
or far. He had seen oil paintings, it was true, in the show
windows of shops, but the glass of the windows had prevented his
eager eyes from approaching too near.

He glanced around at his friend reading the letter and saw the
books on the table. Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a
yearning as promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a
starving man at sight of food. An impulsive stride, with one lurch
to right and left of the shoulders, brought him to the table, where
he began affectionately handling the books. He glanced at the
titles and the authors' names, read fragments of text, caressing
the volumes with his eyes and hands, and, once, recognized a book
he had read. For the rest, they were strange books and strange
authors. He chanced upon a volume of Swinburne and began reading
steadily, forgetful of where he was, his face glowing. Twice he
closed the book on his forefinger to look at the name of the
author. Swinburne! he would remember that name. That fellow had
eyes, and he had certainly seen color and flashing light. But who
was Swinburne? Was he dead a hundred years or so, like most of the
poets? Or was he alive still, and writing? He turned to the
title-page . . . yes, he had written other books; well, he would go
to the free library the first thing in the morning and try to get
hold of some of Swinburne's stuff. He went back to the text and
lost himself. He did not notice that a young woman had entered the
room. The first he knew was when he heard Arthur's voice saying:-

"Ruth, this is Mr. Eden."

The book was closed on his forefinger, and before he turned he was
thrilling to the first new impression, which was not of the girl,
but of her brother's words. Under that muscled body of his he was
a mass of quivering sensibilities. At the slightest impact of the
outside world upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and
emotions leapt and played like lambent flame. He was
extraordinarily receptive and responsive, while his imagination,
pitched high, was ever at work establishing relations of likeness
and difference. "Mr. Eden," was what he had thrilled to - he who
had been called "Eden," or "Martin Eden," or just "Martin," all his
life. And "MISTER!"  It was certainly going some, was his internal
comment. His mind seemed to turn, on the instant, into a vast
camera obscura, and he saw arrayed around his consciousness endless
pictures from his life, of stoke-holes and forecastles, camps and
beaches, jails and boozing-kens, fever-hospitals and slum streets,
wherein the thread of association was the fashion in which he had
been addressed in those various situations.

And then he turned and saw the girl. The phantasmagoria of his
brain vanished at sight of her. She was a pale, ethereal creature,
with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair. He did
not know how she was dressed, except that the dress was as
wonderful as she. He likened her to a pale gold flower upon a
slender stem. No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such
sublimated beauty was not of the earth. Or perhaps the books were
right, and there were many such as she in the upper walks of life.
She might well be sung by that chap, Swinburne. Perhaps he had had
somebody like her in mind when he painted that girl, Iseult, in the
book there on the table. All this plethora of sight, and feeling,
and thought occurred on the instant. There was no pause of the
realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand coming out to his, and
she looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly,
like a man. The women he had known did not shake hands that way.
For that matter, most of them did not shake hands at all. A flood
of associations, visions of various ways he had made the
acquaintance of women, rushed into his mind and threatened to swamp
it. But he shook them aside and looked at her. Never had he seen
such a woman. The women he had known! Immediately, beside her, on
either hand, ranged the women he had known. For an eternal second
he stood in the midst of a portrait gallery, wherein she occupied
the central place, while about her were limned many women, all to
be weighed and measured by a fleeting glance, herself the unit of
weight and measure. He saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls
of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the
south of Market. There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy
cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. These, in turn, were
crowded out by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on
wooden clogs; by Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with
degeneracy; by full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned
and brown-skinned. All these were blotted out by a grotesque and
terrible nightmare brood - frowsy, shuffling creatures from the
pavements of Whitechapel, gin-bloated hags of the stews, and all
the vast hell's following of harpies, vile-mouthed and filthy, that
under the guise of monstrous female form prey upon sailors, the
scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit.

"Won't you sit down, Mr. Eden?" the girl was saying. "I have been
looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us. It was
brave of you - "

He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at
all, what he had done, and that any fellow would have done it. She
noticed that the hand he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in
the process of healing, and a glance at the other loose-hanging
hand showed it to be in the same condition. Also, with quick,
critical eye, she noted a scar on his cheek, another that peeped
out from under the hair of the forehead, and a third that ran down
and disappeared under the starched collar. She repressed a smile
at sight of the red line that marked the chafe of the collar
against the bronzed neck. He was evidently unused to stiff
collars. Likewise her feminine eye took in the clothes he wore,
the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the
shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that
advertised bulging biceps muscles.

While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at
all, he was obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair. He
found time to admire the ease with which she sat down, then lurched
toward a chair facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the
awkward figure he was cutting. This was a new experience for him.
All his life, up to then, he had been unaware of being either
graceful or awkward. Such thoughts of self had never entered his
mind. He sat down gingerly on the edge of the chair, greatly
worried by his hands. They were in the way wherever he put them.
Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his exit with
longing eyes. He felt lost, alone there in the room with that pale
spirit of a woman. There was no bar-keeper upon whom to call for
drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a can of beer
and by means of that social fluid start the amenities of friendship
flowing.

"You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden," the girl was saying.
"How did it happen? I am sure it must have been some adventure."

"A Mexican with a knife, miss," he answered, moistening his parched
lips and clearing hip throat. "It was just a fight. After I got
the knife away, he tried to bite off my nose."

Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision of that
hot, starry night at Salina Cruz, the white strip of beach, the
lights of the sugar steamers in the harbor, the voices of the
drunken sailors in the distance, the jostling stevedores, the
flaming passion in the Mexican's face, the glint of the beast-eyes
in the starlight, the sting of the steel in his neck, and the rush
of blood, the crowd and the cries, the two bodies, his and the
Mexican's, locked together, rolling over and over and tearing up
the sand, and from away off somewhere the mellow tinkling of a
guitar. Such was the picture, and he thrilled to the memory of it,
wondering if the man could paint it who had painted the pilot-
schooner on the wall. The white beach, the stars, and the lights
of the sugar steamers would look great, he thought, and midway on
the sand the dark group of figures that surrounded the fighters.
The knife occupied a place in the picture, he decided, and would
show well, with a sort of gleam, in the light of the stars. But of
all this no hint had crept into his speech. "He tried to bite off
my nose," he concluded.

"Oh," the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed the
shock in her sensitive face.

He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment shone faintly
on his sunburned cheeks, though to him it burned as hotly as when
his cheeks had been exposed to the open furnace-door in the fire-
room. Such sordid things as stabbing affrays were evidently not
fit subjects for conversation with a lady. People in the books, in
her walk of life, did not talk about such things - perhaps they did
not know about them, either.

There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get
started. Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek.
Even as she asked, he realized that she was making an effort to
talk his talk, and he resolved to get away from it and talk hers.

"It was just an accident," he said, putting his hand to his cheek.
"One night, in a calm, with a heavy sea running, the main-boom-lift
carried away, an' next the tackle. The lift was wire, an' it was
threshin' around like a snake. The whole watch was tryin' to grab
it, an' I rushed in an' got swatted."

"Oh," she said, this time with an accent of comprehension, though
secretly his speech had been so much Greek to her and she was
wondering what a LIFT was and what SWATTED meant.

"This man Swineburne," he began, attempting to put his plan into
execution and pronouncing the I long.

"Who?"

"Swineburne," he repeated, with the same mispronunciation. "The
poet."

"Swinburne," she corrected.

"Yes, that's the chap," he stammered, his cheeks hot again. "How
long since he died?"

"Why, I haven't heard that he was dead."  She looked at him
curiously. "Where did you make his acquaintance?"

"I never clapped eyes on him," was the reply. "But I read some of
his poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come
in. How do you like his poetry?"

And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject
he had suggested. He felt better, and settled back slightly from
the edge of the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands,
as if it might get away from him and buck him to the floor. He had
succeeded in making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he
strove to follow her, marvelling at all the knowledge that was
stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale
beauty of her face. Follow her he did, though bothered by
unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by critical
phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but
that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling. Here
was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and
wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself
and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live
for, to win to, to fight for - ay, and die for. The books were
true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them.
She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases
spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures
of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman's sake - for a
pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant
vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman,
sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as
well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of
the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was
shining in his eyes. But she, who knew little of the world of men,
being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes. She had never
had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her. She
stumbled and halted in her utterance. The thread of argument
slipped from her. He frightened her, and at the same time it was
strangely pleasant to be so looked upon. Her training warned her
of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her
instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to
hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another
world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line
of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all
too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence. She
was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she
was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.

"As I was saying - what was I saying?"  She broke off abruptly and
laughed merrily at her predicament.

"You was saying that this man Swinburne failed bein' a great poet
because - an' that was as far as you got, miss," he prompted, while
to himself he seemed suddenly hungry, and delicious little thrills
crawled up and down his spine at the sound of her laughter. Like
silver, he thought to himself, like tinkling silver bells; and on
the instant, and for an instant, he was transported to a far land,
where under pink cherry blossoms, he smoked a cigarette and
listened to the bells of the peaked pagoda calling straw-sandalled
devotees to worship.

"Yes, thank you," she said. "Swinburne fails, when all is said,
because he is, well, indelicate. There are many of his poems that
should never be read. Every line of the really great poets is
filled with beautiful truth, and calls to all that is high and
noble in the human. Not a line of the great poets can be spared
without impoverishing the world by that much."

"I thought it was great," he said hesitatingly, "the little I read.
I had no idea he was such a - a scoundrel. I guess that crops out
in his other books."

"There are many lines that could be spared from the book you were
reading," she said, her voice primly firm and dogmatic.

"I must 'a' missed 'em," he announced. "What I read was the real
goods. It was all lighted up an' shining, an' it shun right into
me an' lighted me up inside, like the sun or a searchlight. That's
the way it landed on me, but I guess I ain't up much on poetry,
miss."

He broke off lamely. He was confused, painfully conscious of his
inarticulateness. He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what
he had read, but his speech was inadequate. He could not express
what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a
strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar
running rigging. Well, he decided, it was up to him to get
acquainted in this new world. He had never seen anything that he
couldn't get the hang of when he wanted to and it was about time
for him to want to learn to talk the things that were inside of him
so that she could understand. SHE was bulking large on his
horizon.

"Now Longfellow - " she was saying.

"Yes, I've read 'm," he broke in impulsively, spurred on to exhibit
and make the most of his little store of book knowledge, desirous
of showing her that he was not wholly a stupid clod. "'The Psalm
of Life,' 'Excelsior,' an' . . . I guess that's all."

She nodded her head and smiled, and he felt, somehow, that her
smile was tolerant, pitifully tolerant. He was a fool to attempt
to make a pretence that way. That Longfellow chap most likely had
written countless books of poetry.

"Excuse me, miss, for buttin' in that way. I guess the real facts
is that I don't know nothin' much about such things. It ain't in
my class. But I'm goin' to make it in my class."

It sounded like a threat. His voice was determined, his eyes were
flashing, the lines of his face had grown harsh. And to her it
seemed that the angle of his jaw had changed; its pitch had become
unpleasantly aggressive. At the same time a wave of intense
virility seemed to surge out from him and impinge upon her.

"I think you could make it in - in your class," she finished with a
laugh. "You are very strong."

Her gaze rested for a moment on the muscular neck, heavy corded,
almost bull-like, bronzed by the sun, spilling over with rugged
health and strength. And though he sat there, blushing and humble,
again she felt drawn to him. She was surprised by a wanton thought
that rushed into her mind. It seemed to her that if she could lay
her two hands upon that neck that all its strength and vigor would
flow out to her. She was shocked by this thought. It seemed to
reveal to her an undreamed depravity in her nature. Besides,
strength to her was a gross and brutish thing. Her ideal of
masculine beauty had always been slender gracefulness. Yet the
thought still persisted. It bewildered her that she should desire
to place her hands on that sunburned neck. In truth, she was far
from robust, and the need of her body and mind was for strength.
But she did not know it. She knew only that no man had ever
affected her before as this one had, who shocked her from moment to
moment with his awful grammar.

"Yes, I ain't no invalid," he said. "When it comes down to hard-
pan, I can digest scrap-iron. But just now I've got dyspepsia.
Most of what you was sayin' I can't digest. Never trained that
way, you see. I like books and poetry, and what time I've had I've
read 'em, but I've never thought about 'em the way you have.
That's why I can't talk about 'em. I'm like a navigator adrift on
a strange sea without chart or compass. Now I want to get my
bearin's. Mebbe you can put me right. How did you learn all this
you've ben talkin'?"

"By going to school, I fancy, and by studying," she answered.

"I went to school when I was a kid," he began to object.

"Yes; but I mean high school, and lectures, and the university."

"You've gone to the university?" he demanded in frank amazement.
He felt that she had become remoter from him by at least a million
miles.

"I'm going there now. I'm taking special courses in English."

He did not know what "English" meant, but he made a mental note of
that item of ignorance and passed on.

"How long would I have to study before I could go to the
university?" he asked.

She beamed encouragement upon his desire for knowledge, and said:
"That depends upon how much studying you have already done. You
have never attended high school? Of course not. But did you
finish grammar school?"

"I had two years to run, when I left," he answered. "But I was
always honorably promoted at school."

The next moment, angry with himself for the boast, he had gripped
the arms of the chair so savagely that every finger-end was
stinging. At the same moment he became aware that a woman was
entering the room. He saw the girl leave her chair and trip
swiftly across the floor to the newcomer. They kissed each other,
and, with arms around each other's waists, they advanced toward
him. That must be her mother, he thought. She was a tall, blond
woman, slender, and stately, and beautiful. Her gown was what he
might expect in such a house. His eyes delighted in the graceful
lines of it. She and her dress together reminded him of women on
the stage. Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and
gowns entering the London theatres while he stood and watched and
the policemen shoved him back into the drizzle beyond the awning.
Next his mind leaped to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too,
from the sidewalk, he had seen grand ladies. Then the city and the
harbor of Yokohama, in a thousand pictures, began flashing before
his eyes. But he swiftly dismissed the kaleidoscope of memory,
oppressed by the urgent need of the present. He knew that he must
stand up to be introduced, and he struggled painfully to his feet,
where he stood with trousers bagging at the knees, his arms loose-
hanging and ludicrous, his face set hard for the impending ordeal.

CHAPTER II

The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.
Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at
times seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and was
seated alongside of Her. The array of knives and forks frightened
him. They bristled with unknown perils, and he gazed at them,
fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across which
moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates
sat eating salt beef with sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping
thick pea-soup out of pannikins by means of battered iron spoons.
The stench of bad beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, to
the accompaniment of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads,
echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He watched them
eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he would be
careful here. He would make no noise. He would keep his mind upon
it all the time.

He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur's
brother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and
his heart warmed toward them. How they loved each other, the
members of this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of
her mother, of the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them
walking toward him with arms entwined. Not in his world were such
displays of affection between parents and children made. It was a
revelation of the heights of existence that were attained in the
world above. It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in this
small glimpse of that world. He was moved deeply by appreciation
of it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness. He
had starved for love all his life. His nature craved love. It was
an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without, and
hardened himself in the process. He had not known that he needed
love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation, and
thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.

He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough
getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother,
Norman. Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would have
been too much for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had
never worked so hard in his life. The severest toil was child's
play compared with this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on his
forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from the exertion of
doing so many unaccustomed things at once. He had to eat as he had
never eaten before, to handle strange tools, to glance
surreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish each new thing,
to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him
and being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a
yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, aching
restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life
whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again straying off
in speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her. Also, when
his secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to any one
else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in any
particular occasion, that person's features were seized upon by his
mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine
what they were - all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to
hear what was said to him and what was said back and forth, and to
answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of
speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to
confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that
appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded
puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was
oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls.
Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they
would come on and what they looked like. He had heard of such
things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next few
minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings who
used them - ay, and he would use them himself. And most important
of all, far down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was
the problem of how he should comport himself toward these persons.
What should his attitude be? He wrestled continually and anxiously
with the problem. There were cowardly suggestions that he should
make believe, assume a part; and there were still more cowardly
suggestions that warned him he would fail in such course, that his
nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that he would make a
fool of himself.

It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide
upon his attitude, that he was very quiet. He did not know that
his quietness was giving the lie to Arthur's words of the day
before, when that brother of hers had announced that he was going
to bring a wild man home to dinner and for them not to be alarmed,
because they would find him an interesting wild man. Martin Eden
could not have found it in him, just then, to believe that her
brother could be guilty of such treachery - especially when he had
been the means of getting this particular brother out of an
unpleasant row. So he sat at table, perturbed by his own unfitness
and at the same time charmed by all that went on about him. For
the first time he realized that eating was something more than a
utilitarian function. He was unaware of what he ate. It was
merely food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this table
where eating was an aesthetic function. It was an intellectual
function, too. His mind was stirred. He heard words spoken that
were meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only in
books and that no man or woman he had known was of large enough
mental caliber to pronounce. When he heard such words dropping
carelessly from the lips of the members of this marvellous family,
her family, he thrilled with delight. The romance, and beauty, and
high vigor of the books were coming true. He was in that rare and
blissful state wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out from the
crannies of fantasy and become fact.

Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept
himself in the background, listening, observing, and pleasuring,
replying in reticent monosyllables, saying, "Yes, miss," and "No,
miss," to her, and "Yes, ma'am," and "No, ma'am," to her mother.
He curbed the impulse, arising out of his sea-training, to say
"Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to her brothers. He felt that it would
be inappropriate and a confession of inferiority on his part -
which would never do if he was to win to her. Also, it was a
dictate of his pride. "By God!" he cried to himself, once; "I'm
just as good as them, and if they do know lots that I don't, I
could learn 'm a few myself, all the same!"  And the next moment,
when she or her mother addressed him as "Mr. Eden," his aggressive
pride was forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with delight. He
was a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, at
dinner, with people he had read about in books. He was in the
books himself, adventuring through the printed pages of bound
volumes.

But while he belied Arthur's description, and appeared a gentle
lamb rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course
of action. He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle
would never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature. He
talked only when he had to, and then his speech was like his walk
to the table, filled with jerks and halts as he groped in his
polyglot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew were fit
but which he feared he could not pronounce, rejecting other words
he knew would not be understood or would be raw and harsh. But all
the time he was oppressed by the consciousness that this
carefulness of diction was making a booby of him, preventing him
from expressing what he had in him. Also, his love of freedom
chafed against the restriction in much the same way his neck chafed
against the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he was confident
that he could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful of thought
and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent.
He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that
struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then
he forgot himself and where he was, and the old words - the tools
of speech he knew - slipped out.

Once, he declined something from the servant who interrupted and
pestered at his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically,
"Pew!"

On the instant those at the table were keyed up and expectant, the
servant was smugly pleased, and he was wallowing in mortification.
But he recovered himself quickly.

"It's the Kanaka for 'finish,'" he explained, "and it just come out
naturally. It's spelt p-a-u."

He caught her curious and speculative eyes fixed on his hands, and,
being in explanatory mood, he said:-

"I just come down the Coast on one of the Pacific mail steamers.
She was behind time, an' around the Puget Sound ports we worked
like niggers, storing cargo-mixed freight, if you know what that
means. That's how the skin got knocked off."

"Oh, it wasn't that," she hastened to explain, in turn. "Your
hands seemed too small for your body."

His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of another of his
deficiencies.

"Yes," he said depreciatingly. "They ain't big enough to stand the
strain. I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders. They
are too strong, an' when I smash a man on the jaw the hands get
smashed, too."

He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled with disgust
at himself. He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked
about things that were not nice.

"It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did - and you a
stranger," she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though not
of the reason for it.

He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warm
surge of gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-worded
tongue.

"It wasn't nothin' at all," he said. "Any guy 'ud do it for
another. That bunch of hoodlums was lookin' for trouble, an'
Arthur wasn't botherin' 'em none. They butted in on 'm, an' then I
butted in on them an' poked a few. That's where some of the skin
off my hands went, along with some of the teeth of the gang. I
wouldn't 'a' missed it for anything. When I seen - "

He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own
depravity and utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did.
And while Arthur took up the tale, for the twentieth time, of his
adventure with the drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how
Martin Eden had rushed in and rescued him, that individual, with
frowning brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, and
wrestled more determinedly with the problem of how he should
conduct himself toward these people. He certainly had not
succeeded so far. He wasn't of their tribe, and he couldn't talk
their lingo, was the way he put it to himself. He couldn't fake
being their kind. The masquerade would fail, and besides,
masquerade was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him for
sham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He couldn't
talk their talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that he
was resolved. But in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be
his own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible to
them and so as not to shook them too much. And furthermore, he
wouldn't claim, not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar with
anything that was unfamiliar. In pursuance of this decision, when
the two brothers, talking university shop, had used "trig" several
times, Martin Eden demanded:-

"What is TRIG?"

"Trignometry," Norman said; "a higher form of math."

"And what is math?" was the next question, which, somehow, brought
the laugh on Norman.

"Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer.

Martin Eden nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the apparently
illimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw took on tangibility.
His abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete
form. In the alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematics
and the whole field of knowledge which they betokened were
transmuted into so much landscape. The vistas he saw were vistas
of green foliage and forest glades, all softly luminous or shot
through with flashing lights. In the distance, detail was veiled
and blurred by a purple haze, but behind this purple haze, he knew,
was the glamour of the unknown, the lure of romance. It was like
wine to him. Here was adventure, something to do with head and
hand, a world to conquer - and straightway from the back of his
consciousness rushed the thought, CONQUERING, TO WIN TO HER, THAT
LILY-PALE SPIRIT SITTING BESIDE HIM.

The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur,
who, all evening, had been trying to draw his wild man out. Martin
Eden remembered his decision. For the first time he became
himself, consciously and deliberately at first, but soon lost in
the joy of creating in making life as he knew it appear before his
listeners' eyes. He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling
schooner Halcyon when she was captured by a revenue cutter. He saw
with wide eyes, and he could tell what he saw. He brought the
pulsing sea before them, and the men and the ships upon the sea.
He communicated his power of vision, till they saw with his eyes
what he had seen. He selected from the vast mass of detail with an
artist's touch, drawing pictures of life that glowed and burned
with light and color, injecting movement so that his listeners
surged along with him on the flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm,
and power. At times he shocked them with the vividness of the
narrative and his terms of speech, but beauty always followed fast
upon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved by humor, by
interpretations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors' minds.

And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes.
His fire warmed her. She wondered if she had been cold all her
days. She wanted to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was
like a volcano spouting forth strength, robustness, and health.
She felt that she must lean toward him, and resisted by an effort.
Then, too, there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him.
She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by toil so that
the very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh itself, by that
red chafe of the collar and those bulging muscles. His roughness
frightened her; each roughness of speech was an insult to her ear,
each rough phase of his life an insult to her soul. And ever and
again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil
to have such power over her. All that was most firmly established
in her mind was rocking. His romance and adventure were battering
at the conventions. Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life
was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy,
to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived
and pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside. "Therefore,
play!" was the cry that rang through her. "Lean toward him, if so
you will, and place your two hands upon his neck!"  She wanted to
cry out at the recklessness of the thought, and in vain she
appraised her own cleanness and culture and balanced all that she
was against what he was not. She glanced about her and saw the
others gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would have
despaired had not she seen horror in her mother's eyes - fascinated
horror, it was true, but none the less horror. This man from outer
darkness was evil. Her mother saw it, and her mother was right.
She would trust her mother's judgment in this as she had always
trusted it in all things. The fire of him was no longer warm, and
the fear of him was no longer poignant.

Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, aggressively,
with the vague intent of emphasizing the impassableness of the gulf
that separated them. Her music was a club that she swung brutally
upon his head; and though it stunned him and crushed him down, it
incited him. He gazed upon her in awe. In his mind, as in her
own, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered his
ambition to win across it. But he was too complicated a plexus of
sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a whole evening, especially
when there was music. He was remarkably susceptible to music. It
was like strong drink, firing him to audacities of feeling, - a
drug that laid hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring
through the sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with
beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He did not
understand the music she played. It was different from the dance-
hall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard. But he
had caught hints of such music from the books, and he accepted her
playing largely on faith, patiently waiting, at first, for the
lifting measures of pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because
those measures were not long continued. Just as he caught the
swing of them and started, his imagination attuned in flight,
always they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was
meaningless to him, and that dropped his imagination, an inert
weight, back to earth.

Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all
this. He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the
message that her hands pronounced upon the keys. Then he dismissed
the thought as unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself more
freely to the music. The old delightful condition began to be
induced. His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh became
spirit; before his eyes and behind his eyes shone a great glory;
and then the scene before him vanished and he was away, rocking
over the world that was to him a very dear world. The known and
the unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged his
vision. He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod
market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen.
The scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had known
it on warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against the
southeast trades through long tropic days, sinking palm-tufted
coral islets in the turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tufted
coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. Swift as thought the
pictures came and went. One instant he was astride a broncho and
flying through the fairy-colored Painted Desert country; the next
instant he was gazing down through shimmering heat into the whited
sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing ocean
where great ice islands towered and glistened in the sun. He lay
on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the mellow-
sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue
fires, in the light of which danced the HULA dancers to the
barbaric love-calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling
UKULELES and rumbling tom-toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night.
In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the
stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern
Cross burned low in the sky.

He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his
consciousness was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind
that poured against those strings and set them vibrating with
memories and dreams. He did not merely feel. Sensation invested
itself in form and color and radiance, and what his imagination
dared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way. Past,
present, and future mingled; and he went on oscillating across the
broad, warm world, through high adventure and noble deeds to Her -
ay, and with her, winning her, his arm about her, and carrying her
on in flight through the empery of his mind.

And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all
this in his face. It was a transfigured face, with great shining
eyes that gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leap
and pulse of life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit. She was
startled. The raw, stumbling lout was gone. The ill-fitting
clothes, battered hands, and sunburned face remained; but these
seemed the prison-bars through which she saw a great soul looking
forth, inarticulate and dumb because of those feeble lips that
would not give it speech. Only for a flashing moment did she see
this, then she saw the lout returned, and she laughed at the whim
of her fancy. But the impression of that fleeting glimpse
lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling
retreat and go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another
of Browning - she was studying Browning in one of her English
courses. He seemed such a boy, as he stood blushing and stammering
his thanks, that a wave of pity, maternal in its prompting, welled
up in her. She did not remember the lout, nor the imprisoned soul,
nor the man who had stared at her in all masculineness and
delighted and frightened her. She saw before her only a boy, who
was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt like a
nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and who was saying jerkily:-

"The greatest time of my life. You see, I ain't used to things. .
. "  He looked about him helplessly. "To people and houses like
this. It's all new to me, and I like it."

"I hope you'll call again," she said, as he was saying good night
to her brothers.

He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and
was gone.

"Well, what do you think of him?" Arthur demanded.

"He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone," she answered. "How old
is he?"

"Twenty - almost twenty-one. I asked him this afternoon. I didn't
think he was that young."

And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she
kissed her brothers goodnight.

CHAPTER III

As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He
drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it
in a long and lingering exhalation. "By God!" he said aloud, in a
voice of awe and wonder. "By God!" he repeated. And yet again he
murmured, "By God!"  Then his hand went to his collar, which he
ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his pocket. A cold
drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his
vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly
aware that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams
and reconstructing the scenes just past.

He had met the woman at last - the woman that he had thought little
about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had
expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next
to her at table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into
her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit; - but no more
beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh
that gave it expression and form. He did not think of her flesh as
flesh, - which was new to him; for of the women he had known that
was the only way he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He
did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills and
frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the garb of her
spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine
startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No
word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before.
He had never believed in the divine. He had always been
irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their
immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had
contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But
what he had seen in her eyes was soul - immortal soul that could
never die. No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him the
message of immortality. But she had. She had whispered it to him
the first moment she looked at him. Her face shimmered before his
eyes as he walked along, - pale and serious, sweet and sensitive,
smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and
pure as he had never dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him
like a blow. It startled him. He had known good and bad; but
purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.
And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of
goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal
life.

And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was
not fit to carry water for her - he knew that; it was a miracle of
luck and a fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be
with her and talk with her that night. It was accidental. There
was no merit in it. He did not deserve such fortune. His mood was
essentially religious. He was humble and meek, filled with self-
disparagement and abasement. In such frame of mind sinners come to
the penitent form. He was convicted of sin. But as the meek and
lowly at the penitent form catch splendid glimpses of their future
lordly existence, so did he catch similar glimpses of the state he
would gain to by possessing her. But this possession of her was
dim and nebulous and totally different from possession as he had
known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw himself
climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her,
pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her. It was a soul-
possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free
comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought.
He did not think it. For that matter, he did not think at all.
Sensation usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with
emotions he had never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of
sensibility where feeling itself was exalted and spiritualized and
carried beyond the summits of life.

He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud:
"By God! By God!"

A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted
his sailor roll.

"Where did you get it?" the policeman demanded.

Martin Eden came back to earth. His was a fluid organism, swiftly
adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks
and crannies. With the policeman's hail he was immediately his
ordinary self, grasping the situation clearly.

"It's a beaut, ain't it?" he laughed back. "I didn't know I was
talkin' out loud."

"You'll be singing next," was the policeman's diagnosis.

"No, I won't. Gimme a match an' I'll catch the next car home."

He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on. "Now
wouldn't that rattle you?" he ejaculated under his breath. "That
copper thought I was drunk."  He smiled to himself and meditated.
"I guess I was," he added; "but I didn't think a woman's face'd do
it."

He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley. It
was crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and
ever and again barking out college yells. He studied them
curiously. They were university boys. They went to the same
university that she did, were in her class socially, could know
her, could see her every day if they wanted to. He wondered that
they did not want to, that they had been out having a good time
instead of being with her that evening, talking with her, sitting
around her in a worshipful and adoring circle. His thoughts
wandered on. He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a loose-
lipped mouth. That fellow was vicious, he decided. On shipboard
he would be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a
better man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed
to draw him nearer to Her. He began comparing himself with the
students. He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body
and felt confident that he was physically their master. But their
heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her
talk, - the thought depressed him. But what was a brain for? he
demanded passionately. What they had done, he could do. They had
been studying about life from the books while he had been busy
living life. His brain was just as full of knowledge as theirs,
though it was a different kind of knowledge. How many of them
could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout? His life
spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and daring,
hardship and toil. He remembered his failures and scrapes in the
process of learning. He was that much to the good, anyway. Later
on they would have to begin living life and going through the mill
as he had gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he
could be learning the other side of life from the books.

As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated
Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story
building along the front of which ran the proud sign,
HIGGINBOTHAM'S CASH STORE. Martin Eden got off at this corner. He
stared up for a moment at the sign. It carried a message to him
beyond its mere wording. A personality of smallness and egotism
and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters
themselves. Bernard Higginbotham had married his sister, and he
knew him well. He let himself in with a latch-key and climbed the
stairs to the second floor. Here lived his brother-in-law. The
grocery was below. There was a smell of stale vegetables in the
air. As he groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-
cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and
brought up against a door with a resounding bang. "The pincher,"
was his thought; "too miserly to burn two cents' worth of gas and
save his boarders' necks."

He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his
sister and Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his
trousers, while his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his
feet dangling in dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the
second chair. He glanced across the top of the paper he was
reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes.
Martin Eden never looked at him without experiencing a sense of
repulsion. What his sister had seen in the man was beyond him.
The other affected him as so much vermin, and always aroused in him
an impulse to crush him under his foot. "Some day I'll beat the
face off of him," was the way he often consoled himself for
enduring the man's existence. The eyes, weasel-like and cruel,
were looking at him complainingly.

"Well," Martin demanded. "Out with it."

"I had that door painted only last week," Mr. Higginbotham half
whined, half bullied; "and you know what union wages are. You
should be more careful."

Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness
of it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a
chromo on the wall. It surprised him. He had always liked it, but
it seemed that now he was seeing it for the first time. It was
cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in this house.
His mind went back to the house he had just left, and he saw,
first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting
sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving. He forgot where he was
and Bernard Higginbotham's existence, till that gentleman
demanded:-

"Seen a ghost?"

Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent,
cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the
same eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below -
subservient eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.

"Yes," Martin answered. "I seen a ghost. Good night. Good night,
Gertrude."

He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the
slatternly carpet.

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

He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and
closed the door softly behind him.

Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.

"He's ben drinkin'," he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper. "I told
you he would."

She nodded her head resignedly.

"His eyes was pretty shiny," she confessed; "and he didn't have no
collar, though he went away with one. But mebbe he didn't have
more'n a couple of glasses."

"He couldn't stand up straight," asserted her husband. "I watched
him. He couldn't walk across the floor without stumblin'. You
heard 'm yourself almost fall down in the hall."

"I think it was over Alice's cart," she said. "He couldn't see it
in the dark."

Mr. Higginbotham's voice and wrath began to rise. All day he
effaced himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his
family, the privilege of being himself.

"I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk."

His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the
enunciation of each word like the die of a machine. His wife
sighed and remained silent. She was a large, stout woman, always
dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh,
her work, and her husband.

"He's got it in him, I tell you, from his father," Mr. Higginbotham
went on accusingly. "An' he'll croak in the gutter the same way.
You know that."

She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were agreed that
Martin had come home drunk. They did not have it in their souls to
know beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and
that glowing face betokened youth's first vision of love.

"Settin' a fine example to the children," Mr. Higginbotham snorted,
suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and
which he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him
more. "If he does it again, he's got to get out. Understand! I
won't put up with his shinanigan - debotchin' innocent children
with his boozing."  Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which was a
new one in his vocabulary, recently gleaned from a newspaper
column. "That's what it is, debotchin' - there ain't no other name
for it."

Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on.
Mr. Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.

"Has he paid last week's board?" he shot across the top of the
newspaper.

She nodded, then added, "He still has some money."

"When is he goin' to sea again?"

"When his pay-day's spent, I guess," she answered. "He was over to
San Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But he's got money,
yet, an' he's particular about the kind of ship he signs for."

"It's not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs," Mr.
Higginbotham snorted. "Particular! Him!"

"He said something about a schooner that's gettin' ready to go off
to some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he'd
sail on her if his money held out."

"If he only wanted to steady down, I'd give him a job drivin' the
wagon," her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his
voice. "Tom's quit."

His wife looked alarm and interrogation.

"Quit to-night. Is goin' to work for Carruthers. They paid 'm
more'n I could afford."

"I told you you'd lose 'm," she cried out. "He was worth more'n
you was giving him."

"Now look here, old woman," Higginbotham bullied, "for the
thousandth time I've told you to keep your nose out of the
business. I won't tell you again."

"I don't care," she sniffled. "Tom was a good boy."  Her husband
glared at her. This was unqualified defiance.

"If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the
wagon," he snorted.

"He pays his board, just the same," was the retort. "An' he's my
brother, an' so long as he don't owe you money you've got no right
to be jumping on him all the time. I've got some feelings, if I
have been married to you for seven years."

"Did you tell 'm you'd charge him for gas if he goes on readin' in
bed?" he demanded.

Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded away, her spirit
wilting down into her tired flesh. Her husband was triumphant. He
had her. His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in
the sniffles she emitted. He extracted great happiness from
squelching her, and she squelched easily these days, though it had
been different in the first years of their married life, before the
brood of children and his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.

"Well, you tell 'm to-morrow, that's all," he said. "An' I just
want to tell you, before I forget it, that you'd better send for
Marian to-morrow to take care of the children. With Tom quit, I'll
have to be out on the wagon, an' you can make up your mind to it to
be down below waitin' on the counter."

"But to-morrow's wash day," she objected weakly.

"Get up early, then, an' do it first. I won't start out till ten
o'clock."

He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.

CHAPTER IV

Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his
brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and
entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-
stand, and one chair. Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a
servant when his wife could do the work. Besides, the servant's
room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one. Martin
placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat,
and sat down on the bed. A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted
the weight of his body, but he did not notice them. He started to
take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall
opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had
leaked through the roof. On this befouled background visions began
to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his
lips began to move and he murmured, "Ruth."

"Ruth."  He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful.
It delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition
of it. "Ruth."  It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with.
Each time he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing
the foul wall with a golden radiance. This radiance did not stop
at the wall. It extended on into infinity, and through its golden
depths his soul went questing after hers. The best that was in him
was out in splendid flood. The very thought of her ennobled and
purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.
This was new to him. He had never known women who had made him
better. They had always had the counter effect of making him
beastly. He did not know that many of them had done their best,
bad as it was. Never having been conscious of himself, he did not
know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and
which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth.
Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about
them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had
been better because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he
lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always
reached out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was not just
to them, nor to himself. But he, who for the first time was
becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he
burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.

He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-
glass over the wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked
again, long and carefully. It was the first time he had ever
really seen himself. His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that
moment they had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the
world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at
himself. He saw the head and face of a young fellow of twenty,
but, being unused to such appraisement, he did not know how to
value it. Above a square-domed forehead he saw a mop of brown
hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that were a
delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and fingers
tingle to pass caresses through it. But he passed it by as without
merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high,
square forehead, - striving to penetrate it and learn the quality
of its content. What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his
insistent interrogation. What was it capable of? How far would it
take him? Would it take him to her?

He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were
often quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs
of the sun-washed deep. He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to
her. He tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of
his, but failed in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself
inside other men's minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life
he knew. He did not know her way of life. She was wonder and
mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers? Well, they
were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness
nor meanness. The brown sunburn of his face surprised him. He had
not dreamed he was so black. He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and
compared the white underside if the arm with his face. Yes, he was
a white man, after all. But the arms were sunburned, too. He
twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and
gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun. It was
very white. He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the
thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor
did he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women
who could boast fairer or smoother skins than he - fairer than
where he had escaped the ravages of the sun.

His might have been a cherub's mouth, had not the full, sensuous
lips a trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth. At
times, so tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh,
even ascetic. They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover.
They could taste the sweetness of life with relish, and they could
put the sweetness aside and command life. The chin and jaw, strong
and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped the lips to
command life. Strength balanced sensuousness and had upon it a
tonic effect, compelling him to love beauty that was healthy and
making him vibrate to sensations that were wholesome. And between
the lips were teeth that had never known nor needed the dentist's
care. They were white and strong and regular, he decided, as he
looked at them. But as he looked, he began to be troubled.
Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and vaguely
remembered, was the impression that there were people who washed
their teeth every day. They were the people from up above - people
in her class. She must wash her teeth every day, too. What would
she think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all
the days of his life? He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form
the habit. He would begin at once, to-morrow. It was not by mere
achievement that he could hope to win to her. He must make a
personal reform in all things, even to tooth-washing and neck-gear,
though a starched collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom.

He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over the
calloused palm and gazing at the dirt that was ingrained in the
flesh itself and which no brush could scrub away. How different
was her palm! He thrilled deliciously at the remembrance. Like a
rose-petal, he thought; cool and soft as a snowflake. He had never
thought that a mere woman's hand could be so sweetly soft. He
caught himself imagining the wonder of a caress from such a hand,
and flushed guiltily. It was too gross a thought for her. In ways
it seemed to impugn her high spirituality. She was a pale, slender
spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but nevertheless the softness
of her palm persisted in his thoughts. He was used to the harsh
callousness of factory girls and working women. Well he knew why
their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was soft
because she had never used it to work with. The gulf yawned
between her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not
have to work for a living. He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the
people who did not labor. It towered before him on the wall, a
figure in brass, arrogant and powerful. He had worked himself; his
first memories seemed connected with work, and all his family had
worked. There was Gertrude. When her hands were not hard from the
endless housework, they were swollen and red like boiled beef, what
of the washing. And there was his sister Marian. She had worked
in the cannery the preceding summer, and her slim, pretty hands
were all scarred with the tomato-knives. Besides, the tips of two
of her fingers had been left in the cutting machine at the paper-
box factory the preceding winter. He remembered the hard palms of
his mother as she lay in her coffin. And his father had worked to
the last fading gasp; the horned growth on his hands must have been
half an inch thick when he died. But Her hands were soft, and her
mother's hands, and her brothers'. This last came to him as a
surprise; it was tremendously indicative of the highness of their
caste, of the enormous distance that stretched between her and him.

He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off
his shoes. He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman's
face and by a woman's soft, white hands. And then, suddenly,
before his eyes, on the foul plaster-wall appeared a vision. He
stood in front of a gloomy tenement house. It was night-time, in
the East End of London, and before him stood Margey, a little
factory girl of fifteen. He had seen her home after the bean-
feast. She lived in that gloomy tenement, a place not fit for
swine. His hand was going out to hers as he said good night. She
had put her lips up to be kissed, but he wasn't going to kiss her.
Somehow he was afraid of her. And then her hand closed on his and
pressed feverishly. He felt her callouses grind and grate on his,
and a great wave of pity welled over him. He saw her yearning,
hungry eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed from
childhood into a frightened and ferocious maturity; then he put his
arms about her in large tolerance and stooped and kissed her on the
lips. Her glad little cry rang in his ears, and he felt her
clinging to him like a cat. Poor little starveling! He continued
to stare at the vision of what had happened in the long ago. His
flesh was crawling as it had crawled that night when she clung to
him, and his heart was warm with pity. It was a gray scene, greasy
gray, and the rain drizzled greasily on the pavement stones. And
then a radiant glory shone on the wall, and up through the other
vision, displacing it, glimmered Her pale face under its crown of
golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a star.

He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed
them. Just the same, she told me to call again, he thought. He
took another look at himself in the glass, and said aloud, with
great solemnity:-

"Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the free library
an' read up on etiquette. Understand!"

He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under his body.

"But you've got to quit cussin', Martin, old boy; you've got to
quit cussin'," he said aloud.

Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and
audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters.

CHAPTER V

He awoke next morning from rosy scenes of dream to a steamy
atmosphere that smelled of soapsuds and dirty clothes, and that was
vibrant with the jar and jangle of tormented life. As he came out
of his room he heard the slosh of water, a sharp exclamation, and a
resounding smack as his sister visited her irritation upon one of
her numerous progeny. The squall of the child went through him
like a knife. He was aware that the whole thing, the very air he
breathed, was repulsive and mean. How different, he thought, from
the atmosphere of beauty and repose of the house wherein Ruth
dwelt. There it was all spiritual. Here it was all material, and
meanly material.

"Come here, Alfred," he called to the crying child, at the same
time thrusting his hand into his trousers pocket, where he carried
his money loose in the same large way that he lived life in
general. He put a quarter in the youngster's hand and held him in
his arms a moment, soothing his sobs. "Now run along and get some
candy, and don't forget to give some to your brothers and sisters.
Be sure and get the kind that lasts longest."

His sister lifted a flushed face from the wash-tub and looked at
him.

"A nickel'd ha' ben enough," she said. "It's just like you, no
idea of the value of money. The child'll eat himself sick."

"That's all right, sis," he answered jovially. "My money'll take
care of itself. If you weren't so busy, I'd kiss you good
morning."

He wanted to be affectionate to this sister, who was good, and who,
in her way, he knew, loved him. But, somehow, she grew less
herself as the years went by, and more and more baffling. It was
the hard work, the many children, and the nagging of her husband,
he decided, that had changed her. It came to him, in a flash of
fancy, that her nature seemed taking on the attributes of stale
vegetables, smelly soapsuds, and of the greasy dimes, nickels, and
quarters she took in over the counter of the store.

"Go along an' get your breakfast," she said roughly, though
secretly pleased. Of all her wandering brood of brothers he had
always been her favorite. "I declare I WILL kiss you," she said,
with a sudden stir at her heart.

With thumb and forefinger she swept the dripping suds first from
one arm and then from the other. He put his arms round her massive
waist and kissed her wet steamy lips. The tears welled into her
eyes - not so much from strength of feeling as from the weakness of
chronic overwork. She shoved him away from her, but not before he
caught a glimpse of her moist eyes.

"You'll find breakfast in the oven," she said hurriedly. "Jim
ought to be up now. I had to get up early for the washing. Now
get along with you and get out of the house early. It won't be
nice to-day, what of Tom quittin' an' nobody but Bernard to drive
the wagon."

Martin went into the kitchen with a sinking heart, the image of her
red face and slatternly form eating its way like acid into his
brain. She might love him if she only had some time, he concluded.
But she was worked to death. Bernard Higginbotham was a brute to
work her so hard. But he could not help but feel, on the other
hand, that there had not been anything beautiful in that kiss. It
was true, it was an unusual kiss. For years she had kissed him
only when he returned from voyages or departed on voyages. But this
kiss had tasted soapsuds, and the lips, he had noticed, were
flabby. There had been no quick, vigorous lip-pressure such as
should accompany any kiss. Hers was the kiss of a tired woman who
had been tired so long that she had forgotten how to kiss. He
remembered her as a girl, before her marriage, when she would dance
with the best, all night, after a hard day's work at the laundry,
and think nothing of leaving the dance to go to another day's hard
work. And then he thought of Ruth and the cool sweetness that must
reside in her lips as it resided in all about her. Her kiss would
be like her hand-shake or the way she looked at one, firm and
frank. In imagination he dared to think of her lips on his, and so
vividly did he imagine that he went dizzy at the thought and seemed
to rift through clouds of rose-petals, filling his brain with their
perfume.

In the kitchen he found Jim, the other boarder, eating mush very
languidly, with a sick, far-away look in his eyes. Jim was a
plumber's apprentice whose weak chin and hedonistic temperament,
coupled with a certain nervous stupidity, promised to take him
nowhere in the race for bread and butter.

"Why don't you eat?" he demanded, as Martin dipped dolefully into
the cold, half-cooked oatmeal mush. "Was you drunk again last
night?"

Martin shook his head. He was oppressed by the utter squalidness
of it all. Ruth Morse seemed farther removed than ever.

"I was," Jim went on with a boastful, nervous giggle. "I was
loaded right to the neck. Oh, she was a daisy. Billy brought me
home."

Martin nodded that he heard, - it was a habit of nature with him to
pay heed to whoever talked to him, - and poured a cup of lukewarm
coffee.

"Goin' to the Lotus Club dance to-night?" Jim demanded. "They're
goin' to have beer, an' if that Temescal bunch comes, there'll be a
rough-house. I don't care, though. I'm takin' my lady friend just
the same. Cripes, but I've got a taste in my mouth!"

He made a wry face and attempted to wash the taste away with
coffee.

"D'ye know Julia?"

Martin shook his head.

"She's my lady friend," Jim explained, "and she's a peach. I'd
introduce you to her, only you'd win her. I don't see what the
girls see in you, honest I don't; but the way you win them away
from the fellers is sickenin'."

"I never got any away from you," Martin answered uninterestedly.
The breakfast had to be got through somehow.

"Yes, you did, too," the other asserted warmly. "There was
Maggie."

"Never had anything to do with her. Never danced with her except
that one night."

"Yes, an' that's just what did it," Jim cried out. "You just
danced with her an' looked at her, an' it was all off. Of course
you didn't mean nothin' by it, but it settled me for keeps.
Wouldn't look at me again. Always askin' about you. She'd have
made fast dates enough with you if you'd wanted to."

"But I didn't want to."

"Wasn't necessary. I was left at the pole."  Jim looked at him
admiringly. "How d'ye do it, anyway, Mart?"

"By not carin' about 'em," was the answer.

"You mean makin' b'lieve you don't care about them?" Jim queried
eagerly.

Martin considered for a moment, then answered, "Perhaps that will
do, but with me I guess it's different. I never have cared - much.
If you can put it on, it's all right, most likely."

"You should 'a' ben up at Riley's barn last night," Jim announced
inconsequently. "A lot of the fellers put on the gloves. There
was a peach from West Oakland. They called 'm 'The Rat.'  Slick as
silk. No one could touch 'm. We was all wishin' you was there.
Where was you anyway?"

"Down in Oakland," Martin replied.

"To the show?"

Martin shoved his plate away and got up.

"Comin' to the dance to-night?" the other called after him.

"No, I think not," he answered.

He went downstairs and out into the street, breathing great breaths
of air. He had been suffocating in that atmosphere, while the
apprentice's chatter had driven him frantic. There had been times
when it was all he could do to refrain from reaching over and
mopping Jim's face in the mush-plate. The more he had chattered,
the more remote had Ruth seemed to him. How could he, herding with
such cattle, ever become worthy of her? He was appalled at the
problem confronting him, weighted down by the incubus of his
working-class station. Everything reached out to hold him down -
his sister, his sister's house and family, Jim the apprentice,
everybody he knew, every tie of life. Existence did not taste good
in his mouth. Up to then he had accepted existence, as he had
lived it with all about him, as a good thing. He had never
questioned it, except when he read books; but then, they were only
books, fairy stories of a fairer and impossible world. But now he
had seen that world, possible and real, with a flower of a woman
called Ruth in the midmost centre of it; and thenceforth he must
know bitter tastes, and longings sharp as pain, and hopelessness
that tantalized because it fed on hope.

He had debated between the Berkeley Free Library and the Oakland
Free Library, and decided upon the latter because Ruth lived in
Oakland. Who could tell? - a library was a most likely place for
her, and he might see her there. He did not know the way of
libraries, and he wandered through endless rows of fiction, till
the delicate-featured French-looking girl who seemed in charge,
told him that the reference department was upstairs. He did not
know enough to ask the man at the desk, and began his adventures in
the philosophy alcove. He had heard of book philosophy, but had
not imagined there had been so much written about it. The high,
bulging shelves of heavy tomes humbled him and at the same time
stimulated him. Here was work for the vigor of his brain. He
found books on trigonometry in the mathematics section, and ran the
pages, and stared at the meaningless formulas and figures. He
could read English, but he saw there an alien speech. Norman and
Arthur knew that speech. He had heard them talking it. And they
were her brothers. He left the alcove in despair. From every side
the books seemed to press upon him and crush him.

He had never dreamed that the fund of human knowledge bulked so
big. He was frightened. How could his brain ever master it all?
Later, he remembered that there were other men, many men, who had
mastered it; and he breathed a great oath, passionately, under his
breath, swearing that his brain could do what theirs had done.

And so he wandered on, alternating between depression and elation
as he stared at the shelves packed with wisdom. In one
miscellaneous section he came upon a "Norrie's Epitome."  He turned
the pages reverently. In a way, it spoke a kindred speech. Both
he and it were of the sea. Then he found a "Bowditch" and books by
Lecky and Marshall. There it was; he would teach himself
navigation. He would quit drinking, work up, and become a captain.
Ruth seemed very near to him in that moment. As a captain, he
could marry her (if she would have him). And if she wouldn't, well
- he would live a good life among men, because of Her, and he would
quit drinking anyway. Then he remembered the underwriters and the
owners, the two masters a captain must serve, either of which could
and would break him and whose interests were diametrically opposed.
He cast his eyes about the room and closed the lids down on a
vision of ten thousand books. No; no more of the sea for him.
There was power in all that wealth of books, and if he would do
great things, he must do them on the land. Besides, captains were
not allowed to take their wives to sea with them.

Noon came, and afternoon. He forgot to eat, and sought on for the
books on etiquette; for, in addition to career, his mind was vexed
by a simple and very concrete problem: WHEN YOU MEET A YOUNG LADY
AND SHE ASKS YOU TO CALL, HOW SOON CAN YOU CALL? was the way he
worded it to himself. But when he found the right shelf, he sought
vainly for the answer. He was appalled at the vast edifice of
etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes of visiting-card conduct
between persons in polite society. He abandoned his search. He
had not found what he wanted, though he had found that it would
take all of a man's time to be polite, and that he would have to
live a preliminary life in which to learn how to be polite.

"Did you find what you wanted?" the man at the desk asked him as he
was leaving.

"Yes, sir," he answered. "You have a fine library here."

The man nodded. "We should be glad to see you here often. Are you
a sailor?"

"Yes, sir," he answered. "And I'll come again."

Now, how did he know that? he asked himself as he went down the
stairs.

And for the first block along the street he walked very stiff and
straight and awkwardly, until he forgot himself in his thoughts,
whereupon his rolling gait gracefully returned to him.

CHAPTER VI

A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin
Eden. He was famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands
had gripped his life with a giant's grasp. He could not steel
himself to call upon her. He was afraid that he might call too
soon, and so be guilty of an awful breach of that awful thing
called etiquette. He spent long hours in the Oakland and Berkeley
libraries, and made out application blanks for membership for
himself, his sisters Gertrude and Marian, and Jim, the latter's
consent being obtained at the expense of several glasses of beer.
With four cards permitting him to draw books, he burned the gas
late in the servant's room, and was charged fifty cents a week for
it by Mr. Higginbotham.

The many books he read but served to whet his unrest. Every page
of every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His
hunger fed upon what he read, and increased. Also, he did not know
where to begin, and continually suffered from lack of preparation.
The commonest references, that he could see plainly every reader
was expected to know, he did not know. And the same was true of
the poetry he read which maddened him with delight. He read more
of Swinburne than was contained in the volume Ruth had lent him;
and "Dolores" he understood thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not
understand it, he concluded. How could she, living the refined
life she did? Then he chanced upon Kipling's poems, and was swept
away by the lilt and swing and glamour with which familiar things
had been invested. He was amazed at the man's sympathy with life
and at his incisive psychology. PSYCHOLOGY was a new word in
Martin's vocabulary. He had bought a dictionary, which deed had
decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day on which
he must sail in search of more. Also, it incensed Mr.
Higginbotham, who would have preferred the money taking the form of
board.

He dared not go near Ruth's neighborhood in the daytime, but night
found him lurking like a thief around the Morse home, stealing
glimpses at the windows and loving the very walls that sheltered
her. Several times he barely escaped being caught by her brothers,
and once he trailed Mr. Morse down town and studied his face in the
lighted streets, longing all the while for some quick danger of
death to threaten so that he might spring in and save her father.
On another night, his vigil was rewarded by a glimpse of Ruth
through a second-story window. He saw only her head and shoulders,
and her arms raised as she fixed her hair before a mirror. It was
only for a moment, but it was a long moment to him, during which
his blood turned to wine and sang through his veins. Then she
pulled down the shade. But it was her room - he had learned that;
and thereafter he strayed there often, hiding under a dark tree on
the opposite side of the street and smoking countless cigarettes.
One afternoon he saw her mother coming out of a bank, and received
another proof of the enormous distance that separated Ruth from
him. She was of the class that dealt with banks. He had never
been inside a bank in his life, and he had an idea that such
institutions were frequented only by the very rich and the very
powerful.

In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution. Her cleanness and
purity had reacted upon him, and he felt in his being a crying need
to be clean. He must be that if he were ever to be worthy of
breathing the same air with her. He washed his teeth, and scrubbed
his hands with a kitchen scrub-brush till he saw a nail-brush in a
drug-store window and divined its use. While purchasing it, the
clerk glanced at his nails, suggested a nail-file, and so he became
possessed of an additional toilet-tool. He ran across a book in
the library on the care of the body, and promptly developed a
penchant for a cold-water bath every morning, much to the amazement
of Jim, and to the bewilderment of Mr. Higginbotham, who was not in
sympathy with such high-fangled notions and who seriously debated
whether or not he should charge Martin extra for the water.
Another stride was in the direction of creased trousers. Now that
Martin was aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the difference
between the baggy knees of the trousers worn by the working class
and the straight line from knee to foot of those worn by the men
above the working class. Also, he learned the reason why, and
invaded his sister's kitchen in search of irons and ironing-board.
He had misadventures at first, hopelessly burning one pair and
buying another, which expenditure again brought nearer the day on
which he must put to sea.

But the reform went deeper than mere outward appearance. He still
smoked, but he drank no more. Up to that time, drinking had seemed
to him the proper thing for men to do, and he had prided himself on
his strong head which enabled him to drink most men under the
table. Whenever he encountered a chance shipmate, and there were
many in San Francisco, he treated them and was treated in turn, as
of old, but he ordered for himself root beer or ginger ale and
good-naturedly endured their chaffing. And as they waxed maudlin
he studied them, watching the beast rise and master them and
thanking God that he was no longer as they. They had their
limitations to forget, and when they were drunk, their dim, stupid
spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his heaven of
intoxicated desire. With Martin the need for strong drink had
vanished. He was drunken in new and more profound ways - with
Ruth, who had fired him with love and with a glimpse of higher and
eternal life; with books, that had set a myriad maggots of desire
gnawing in his brain; and with the sense of personal cleanliness he
was achieving, that gave him even more superb health than what he
had enjoyed and that made his whole body sing with physical well-
being.

One night he went to the theatre, on the blind chance that he might
see her there, and from the second balcony he did see her. He saw
her come down the aisle, with Arthur and a strange young man with a
football mop of hair and eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him
to instant apprehension and jealousy. He saw her take her seat in
the orchestra circle, and little else than her did he see that
night - a pair of slender white shoulders and a mass of pale gold
hair, dim with distance. But there were others who saw, and now
and again, glancing at those about him, he noted two young girls
who looked back from the row in front, a dozen seats along, and who
smiled at him with bold eyes. He had always been easy-going. It
was not in his nature to give rebuff. In the old days he would
have smiled back, and gone further and encouraged smiling. But now
it was different. He did smile back, then looked away, and looked
no more deliberately. But several times, forgetting the existence
of the two girls, his eyes caught their smiles. He could not re-
thumb himself in a day, nor could he violate the intrinsic
kindliness of his nature; so, at such moments, he smiled at the
girls in warm human friendliness. It was nothing new to him. He
knew they were reaching out their woman's hands to him. But it was
different now. Far down there in the orchestra circle was the one
woman in all the world, so different, so terrifically different,
from these two girls of his class, that he could feel for them only
pity and sorrow. He had it in his heart to wish that they could
possess, in some small measure, her goodness and glory. And not
for the world could he hurt them because of their outreaching. He
was not flattered by it; he even felt a slight shame at his
lowliness that permitted it. He knew, did he belong in Ruth's
class, that there would be no overtures from these girls; and with
each glance of theirs he felt the fingers of his own class
clutching at him to hold him down.

He left his seat before the curtain went down on the last act,
intent on seeing Her as she passed out. There were always numbers
of men who stood on the sidewalk outside, and he could pull his cap
down over his eyes and screen himself behind some one's shoulder so
that she should not see him. He emerged from the theatre with the
first of the crowd; but scarcely had he taken his position on the
edge of the sidewalk when the two girls appeared. They were
looking for him, he knew; and for the moment he could have cursed
that in him which drew women. Their casual edging across the
sidewalk to the curb, as they drew near, apprised him of discovery.
They slowed down, and were in the thick of the crown as they came
up with him. One of them brushed against him and apparently for
the first time noticed him. She was a slender, dark girl, with
black, defiant eyes. But they smiled at him, and he smiled back.

"Hello," he said.

It was automatic; he had said it so often before under similar
circumstances of first meetings. Besides, he could do no less.
There was that large tolerance and sympathy in his nature that
would permit him to do no less. The black-eyed girl smiled
gratification and greeting, and showed signs of stopping, while her
companion, arm linked in arm, giggled and likewise showed signs of
halting. He thought quickly. It would never do for Her to come
out and see him talking there with them. Quite naturally, as a
matter of course, he swung in along-side the dark-eyed one and
walked with her. There was no awkwardness on his part, no numb
tongue. He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the
badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the
preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs.
At the corner where the main stream of people flowed onward, he
started to edge out into the cross street. But the girl with the
black eyes caught his arm, following him and dragging her companion
after her, as she cried:

"Hold on, Bill! What's yer rush? You're not goin' to shake us so
sudden as all that?"

He halted with a laugh, and turned, facing them. Across their
shoulders he could see the moving throng passing under the street
lamps. Where he stood it was not so light, and, unseen, he would
be able to see Her as she passed by. She would certainly pass by,
for that way led home.

"What's her name?" he asked of the giggling girl, nodding at the
dark-eyed one.

"You ask her," was the convulsed response.

"Well, what is it?" he demanded, turning squarely on the girl in
question.

"You ain't told me yours, yet," she retorted.

"You never asked it," he smiled. "Besides, you guessed the first
rattle. It's Bill, all right, all right."

"Aw, go 'long with you."  She looked him in the eyes, her own
sharply passionate and inviting. "What is it, honest?"

Again she looked. All the centuries of woman since sex began were
eloquent in her eyes. And he measured her in a careless way, and
knew, bold now, that she would begin to retreat, coyly and
delicately, as he pursued, ever ready to reverse the game should he
turn fainthearted. And, too, he was human, and could feel the draw
of her, while his ego could not but appreciate the flattery of her
kindness. Oh, he knew it all, and knew them well, from A to Z.
Good, as goodness might be measured in their particular class,
hard-working for meagre wages and scorning the sale of self for
easier ways, nervously desirous for some small pinch of happiness
in the desert of existence, and facing a future that was a gamble
between the ugliness of unending toil and the black pit of more
terrible wretchedness, the way whereto being briefer though better
paid.

"Bill," he answered, nodding his head. "Sure, Pete, Bill an' no
other."

"No joshin'?" she queried.

"It ain't Bill at all," the other broke in.

"How do you know?" he demanded. "You never laid eyes on me
before."

"No need to, to know you're lyin'," was the retort.

"Straight, Bill, what is it?" the first girl asked.

"Bill'll do," he confessed.

She reached out to his arm and shook him playfully. "I knew you
was lyin', but you look good to me just the same."

He captured the hand that invited, and felt on the palm familiar
markings and distortions.

"When'd you chuck the cannery?" he asked.

"How'd yeh know?" and, "My, ain't cheh a mind-reader!" the girls
chorussed.

And while he exchanged the stupidities of stupid minds with them,
before his inner sight towered the book-shelves of the library,
filled with the wisdom of the ages. He smiled bitterly at the
incongruity of it, and was assailed by doubts. But between inner
vision and outward pleasantry he found time to watch the theatre
crowd streaming by. And then he saw Her, under the lights, between
her brother and the strange young man with glasses, and his heart
seemed to stand still. He had waited long for this moment. He had
time to note the light, fluffy something that hid her queenly head,
the tasteful lines of her wrapped figure, the gracefulness of her
carriage and of the hand that caught up her skirts; and then she
was gone and he was left staring at the two girls of the cannery,
at their tawdry attempts at prettiness of dress, their tragic
efforts to be clean and trim, the cheap cloth, the cheap ribbons,
and the cheap rings on the fingers. He felt a tug at his arm, and
heard a voice saying:-

"Wake up, Bill! What's the matter with you?"

"What was you sayin'?" he asked.

"Oh, nothin'," the dark girl answered, with a toss of her head. "I
was only remarkin' - "

"What?"

"Well, I was whisperin' it'd be a good idea if you could dig up a
gentleman friend - for her" (indicating her companion), "and then,
we could go off an' have ice-cream soda somewhere, or coffee, or
anything."

He was afflicted by a sudden spiritual nausea. The transition from
Ruth to this had been too abrupt. Ranged side by side with the
bold, defiant eyes of the girl before him, he saw Ruth's clear,
luminous eyes, like a saint's, gazing at him out of unplumbed
depths of purity. And, somehow, he felt within him a stir of
power. He was better than this. Life meant more to him than it
meant to these two girls whose thoughts did not go beyond ice-cream
and a gentleman friend. He remembered that he had led always a
secret life in his thoughts. These thoughts he had tried to share,
but never had he found a woman capable of understanding - nor a
man. He had tried, at times, but had only puzzled his listeners.
And as his thoughts had been beyond them, so, he argued now, he
must be beyond them. He felt power move in him, and clenched his
fists. If life meant more to him, then it was for him to demand
more from life, but he could not demand it from such companionship
as this. Those bold black eyes had nothing to offer. He knew the
thoughts behind them - of ice-cream and of something else. But
those saint's eyes alongside - they offered all he knew and more
than he could guess. They offered books and painting, beauty and
repose, and all the fine elegance of higher existence. Behind
those black eyes he knew every thought process. It was like
clockwork. He could watch every wheel go around. Their bid was
low pleasure, narrow as the grave, that palled, and the grave was
at the end of it. But the bid of the saint's eyes was mystery, and
wonder unthinkable, and eternal life. He had caught glimpses of
the soul in them, and glimpses of his own soul, too.

"There's only one thing wrong with the programme," he said aloud.
"I've got a date already."

The girl's eyes blazed her disappointment.

"To sit up with a sick friend, I suppose?" she sneered.

"No, a real, honest date with - " he faltered, "with a girl."

"You're not stringin' me?" she asked earnestly.

He looked her in the eyes and answered: "It's straight, all right.
But why can't we meet some other time? You ain't told me your name
yet. An' where d'ye live?"

"Lizzie," she replied, softening toward him, her hand pressing his
arm, while her body leaned against his. "Lizzie Connolly. And I
live at Fifth an' Market."

He talked on a few minutes before saying good night. He did not go
home immediately; and under the tree where he kept his vigils he
looked up at a window and murmured: "That date was with you, Ruth.
I kept it for you."

CHAPTER VII

A week of heavy reading had passed since the evening he first met
Ruth Morse, and still he dared not call. Time and again he nerved
himself up to call, but under the doubts that assailed him his
determination died away. He did not know the proper time to call,
nor was there any one to tell him, and he was afraid of committing
himself to an irretrievable blunder. Having shaken himself free
from his old companions and old ways of life, and having no new
companions, nothing remained for him but to read, and the long
hours he devoted to it would have ruined a dozen pairs of ordinary
eyes. But his eyes were strong, and they were backed by a body
superbly strong. Furthermore, his mind was fallow. It had lain
fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the books was
concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing. It had never been jaded
by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp
teeth that would not let go.

It seemed to him, by the end of the week, that he had lived
centuries, so far behind were the old life and outlook. But he was
baffled by lack of preparation. He attempted to read books that
required years of preliminary specialization. One day he would
read a book of antiquated philosophy, and the next day one that was
ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the conflict
and contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the economists.
On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam
Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew
that the ideas of another were obsolete. He was bewildered, and
yet he wanted to know. He had become interested, in a day, in
economics, industry, and politics. Passing through the City Hall
Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre of which were
half a dozen, with flushed faces and raised voices, earnestly
carrying on a discussion. He joined the listeners, and heard a
new, alien tongue in the mouths of the philosophers of the people.
One was a tramp, another was a labor agitator, a third was a law-
school student, and the remainder was composed of wordy workingmen.
For the first time he heard of socialism, anarchism, and single
tax, and learned that there were warring social philosophies. He
heard hundreds of technical words that were new to him, belonging
to fields of thought that his meagre reading had never touched
upon. Because of this he could not follow the arguments closely,
and he could only guess at and surmise the ideas wrapped up in such
strange expressions. Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter
who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old
man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that WHAT
IS IS RIGHT, and another old man who discoursed interminably about
the cosmos and the father-atom and the mother-atom.

Martin Eden's head was in a state of addlement when he went away
after several hours, and he hurried to the library to look up the
definitions of a dozen unusual words. And when he left the
library, he carried under his arm four volumes: Madam Blavatsky's
"Secret Doctrine," "Progress and Poverty," "The Quintessence of
Socialism," and, "Warfare of Religion and Science."  Unfortunately,
he began on the "Secret Doctrine."  Every line bristled with many-
syllabled words he did not understand. He sat up in bed, and the
dictionary was in front of him more often than the book. He looked
up so many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten
their meaning and had to look them up again. He devised the plan
of writing the definitions in a note-book, and filled page after
page with them. And still he could not understand. He read until
three in the morning, and his brain was in a turmoil, but not one
essential thought in the text had he grasped. He looked up, and it
seemed that the room was lifting, heeling, and plunging like a ship
upon the sea. Then he hurled the "Secret Doctrine" and many curses
across the room, turned off the gas, and composed himself to sleep.
Nor did he have much better luck with the other three books. It
was not that his brain was weak or incapable; it could think these
thoughts were it not for lack of training in thinking and lack of
the thought-tools with which to think. He guessed this, and for a
while entertained the idea of reading nothing but the dictionary
until he had mastered every word in it.

Poetry, however, was his solace, and he read much of it, finding
his greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more
understandable. He loved beauty, and there he found beauty.
Poetry, like music, stirred him profoundly, and, though he did not
know it, he was preparing his mind for the heavier work that was to
come. The pages of his mind were blank, and, without effort, much
he read and liked, stanza by stanza, was impressed upon those
pages, so that he was soon able to extract great joy from chanting
aloud or under his breath the music and the beauty of the printed
words he had read. Then he stumbled upon Gayley's "Classic Myths"
and Bulfinch's "Age of Fable," side by side on a library shelf. It
was illumination, a great light in the darkness of his ignorance,
and he read poetry more avidly than ever.

The man at the desk in the library had seen Martin there so often
that he had become quite cordial, always greeting him with a smile
and a nod when he entered. It was because of this that Martin did
a daring thing. Drawing out some books at the desk, and while the
man was stamping the cards, Martin blurted out:-

"Say, there's something I'd like to ask you."

The man smiled and paid attention.

"When you meet a young lady an' she asks you to call, how soon can
you call?"

Martin felt his shirt press and cling to his shoulders, what of the
sweat of the effort.

"Why I'd say any time," the man answered.

"Yes, but this is different," Martin objected. "She - I - well,
you see, it's this way: maybe she won't be there. She goes to the
university."

"Then call again."

"What I said ain't what I meant," Martin confessed falteringly,
while he made up his mind to throw himself wholly upon the other's
mercy. "I'm just a rough sort of a fellow, an' I ain't never seen
anything of society. This girl is all that I ain't, an' I ain't
anything that she is. You don't think I'm playin' the fool, do
you?" he demanded abruptly.

"No, no; not at all, I assure you," the other protested. "Your
request is not exactly in the scope of the reference department,
but I shall be only too pleased to assist you."

Martin looked at him admiringly.

"If I could tear it off that way, I'd be all right," he said.

"I beg pardon?"

"I mean if I could talk easy that way, an' polite, an' all the
rest."

"Oh," said the other, with comprehension.

"What is the best time to call? The afternoon? - not too close to
meal-time? Or the evening? Or Sunday?"

"I'll tell you," the librarian said with a brightening face. "You
call her up on the telephone and find out."

"I'll do it," he said, picking up his books and starting away.

He turned back and asked:-

"When you're speakin' to a young lady - say, for instance, Miss
Lizzie Smith - do you say 'Miss Lizzie'? or 'Miss Smith'?"

"Say 'Miss Smith,'" the librarian stated authoritatively. "Say
'Miss Smith' always - until you come to know her better."

So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.

"Come down any time; I'll be at home all afternoon," was Ruth's
reply over the telephone to his stammered request as to when he
could return the borrowed books.

She met him at the door herself, and her woman's eyes took in
immediately the creased trousers and the certain slight but
indefinable change in him for the better. Also, she was struck by
his face. It was almost violent, this health of his, and it seemed
to rush out of him and at her in waves of force. She felt the urge
again of the desire to lean toward him for warmth, and marvelled
again at the effect his presence produced upon her. And he, in
turn, knew again the swimming sensation of bliss when he felt the
contact of her hand in greeting. The difference between them lay
in that she was cool and self-possessed while his face flushed to
the roots of the hair. He stumbled with his old awkwardness after
her, and his shoulders swung and lurched perilously.

Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on easily
- more easily by far than he had expected. She made it easy for
him; and the gracious spirit with which she did it made him love
her more madly than ever. They talked first of the borrowed books,
of the Swinburne he was devoted to, and of the Browning he did not
understand; and she led the conversation on from subject to
subject, while she pondered the problem of how she could be of help
to him. She had thought of this often since their first meeting.
She wanted to help him. He made a call upon her pity and
tenderness that no one had ever made before, and the pity was not
so much derogatory of him as maternal in her. Her pity could not
be of the common sort, when the man who drew it was so much man as
to shock her with maidenly fears and set her mind and pulse
thrilling with strange thoughts and feelings. The old fascination
of his neck was there, and there was sweetness in the thought of
laying her hands upon it. It seemed still a wanton impulse, but
she had grown more used to it. She did not dream that in such
guise new-born love would epitomize itself. Nor did she dream that
the feeling he excited in her was love. She thought she was merely
interested in him as an unusual type possessing various potential
excellencies, and she even felt philanthropic about it.

She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different.
He knew that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never
before desired anything in his life. He had loved poetry for
beauty's sake; but since he met her the gates to the vast field of
love-poetry had been opened wide. She had given him understanding
even more than Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week
before he would not have favored with a second thought - "God's own
mad lover dying on a kiss"; but now it was ever insistent in his
mind. He marvelled at the wonder of it and the truth; and as he
gazed upon her he knew that he could die gladly upon a kiss. He
felt himself God's own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood
could have given him greater pride. And at last he knew the
meaning of life and why he had been born.

As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring. He
reviewed all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at
the door, and longed for it again. His gaze wandered often toward
her lips, and he yearned for them hungrily. But there was nothing
gross or earthly about this yearning. It gave him exquisite
delight to watch every movement and play of those lips as they
enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were not ordinary lips
such as all men and women had. Their substance was not mere human
clay. They were lips of pure spirit, and his desire for them
seemed absolutely different from the desire that had led him to
other women's lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical
lips upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor
with which one would kiss the robe of God. He was not conscious of
this transvaluation of values that had taken place in him, and was
unaware that the light that shone in his eyes when he looked at her
was quite the same light that shines in all men's eyes when the
desire of love is upon them. He did not dream how ardent and
masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting
the alchemy of her spirit. Her penetrative virginity exalted and
disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool
chastity, and he would have been startled to learn that there was
that shining out of his eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through
her and kindled a kindred warmth. She was subtly perturbed by it,
and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted her train
of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her to grope
for the remainder of ideas partly uttered. Speech was always easy
with her, and these interruptions would have puzzled her had she
not decided that it was because he was a remarkable type. She was
very sensitive to impressions, and it was not strange, after all,
that this aura of a traveller from another world should so affect
her.

The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help
him, and she turned the conversation in that direction; but it was
Martin who came to the point first.

"I wonder if I can get some advice from you," he began, and
received an acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound.
"You remember the other time I was here I said I couldn't talk
about books an' things because I didn't know how? Well, I've ben
doin' a lot of thinkin' ever since. I've ben to the library a
whole lot, but most of the books I've tackled have ben over my
head. Mebbe I'd better begin at the beginnin'. I ain't never had
no advantages. I've worked pretty hard ever since I was a kid, an'
since I've ben to the library, lookin' with new eyes at books - an'
lookin' at new books, too - I've just about concluded that I ain't
ben reading the right kind. You know the books you find in cattle-
camps an' fo'c's'ls ain't the same you've got in this house, for
instance. Well, that's the sort of readin' matter I've ben
accustomed to. And yet - an' I ain't just makin' a brag of it -
I've ben different from the people I've herded with. Not that I'm
any better than the sailors an' cow-punchers I travelled with, - I
was cow-punchin' for a short time, you know, - but I always liked
books, read everything I could lay hands on, an' - well, I guess I
think differently from most of 'em.

"Now, to come to what I'm drivin' at. I was never inside a house
like this. When I come a week ago, an' saw all this, an' you, an'
your mother, an' brothers, an' everything - well, I liked it. I'd
heard about such things an' read about such things in some of the
books, an' when I looked around at your house, why, the books come
true. But the thing I'm after is I liked it. I wanted it. I want
it now. I want to breathe air like you get in this house - air
that is filled with books, and pictures, and beautiful things,
where people talk in low voices an' are clean, an' their thoughts
are clean. The air I always breathed was mixed up with grub an'
house-rent an' scrappin' an booze an' that's all they talked about,
too. Why, when you was crossin' the room to kiss your mother, I
thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen. I've seen a
whole lot of life, an' somehow I've seen a whole lot more of it
than most of them that was with me. I like to see, an' I want to
see more, an' I want to see it different.

"But I ain't got to the point yet. Here it is. I want to make my
way to the kind of life you have in this house. There's more in
life than booze, an' hard work, an' knockin' about. Now, how am I
goin' to get it? Where do I take hold an' begin? I'm willin' to
work my passage, you know, an' I can make most men sick when it
comes to hard work. Once I get started, I'll work night an' day.
Mebbe you think it's funny, me askin' you about all this. I know
you're the last person in the world I ought to ask, but I don't
know anybody else I could ask - unless it's Arthur. Mebbe I ought
to ask him. If I was - "

His voice died away. His firmly planned intention had come to a
halt on the verge of the horrible probability that he should have
asked Arthur and that he had made a fool of himself. Ruth did not
speak immediately. She was too absorbed in striving to reconcile
the stumbling, uncouth speech and its simplicity of thought with
what she saw in his face. She had never looked in eyes that
expressed greater power. Here was a man who could do anything, was
the message she read there, and it accorded ill with the weakness
of his spoken thought. And for that matter so complex and quick
was her own mind that she did not have a just appreciation of
simplicity. And yet she had caught an impression of power in the
very groping of this mind. It had seemed to her like a giant
writhing and straining at the bonds that held him down. Her face
was all sympathy when she did speak.

"What you need, you realize yourself, and it is education. You
should go back and finish grammar school, and then go through to
high school and university."

"But that takes money," he interrupted.

"Oh!" she cried. "I had not thought of that. But then you have
relatives, somebody who could assist you?"

He shook his head.

"My father and mother are dead. I've two sisters, one married, an'
the other'll get married soon, I suppose. Then I've a string of
brothers, - I'm the youngest, - but they never helped nobody.
They've just knocked around over the world, lookin' out for number
one. The oldest died in India. Two are in South Africa now, an'
another's on a whaling voyage, an' one's travellin' with a circus -
he does trapeze work. An' I guess I'm just like them. I've taken
care of myself since I was eleven - that's when my mother died.
I've got to study by myself, I guess, an' what I want to know is
where to begin."

"I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar.
Your grammar is - "  She had intended saying "awful," but she
amended it to "is not particularly good."

He flushed and sweated.

"I know I must talk a lot of slang an' words you don't understand.
But then they're the only words I know - how to speak. I've got
other words in my mind, picked 'em up from books, but I can't
pronounce 'em, so I don't use 'em."

"It isn't what you say, so much as how you say it. You don't mind
my being frank, do you? I don't want to hurt you."

"No, no," he cried, while he secretly blessed her for her kindness.
"Fire away. I've got to know, an' I'd sooner know from you than
anybody else."

"Well, then, you say, 'You was'; it should be, 'You were.'  You say
'I seen' for 'I saw.'  You use the double negative - "

"What's the double negative?" he demanded; then added humbly, "You
see, I don't even understand your explanations."

"I'm afraid I didn't explain that," she smiled. "A double negative
is - let me see - well, you say, 'never helped nobody.'  'Never' is
a negative. 'Nobody' is another negative. It is a rule that two
negatives make a positive. 'Never helped nobody' means that, not
helping nobody, they must have helped somebody."

"That's pretty clear," he said. "I never thought of it before.
But it don't mean they MUST have helped somebody, does it? Seems
to me that 'never helped nobody' just naturally fails to say
whether or not they helped somebody. I never thought of it before,
and I'll never say it again."

She was pleased and surprised with the quickness and surety of his
mind. As soon as he had got the clew he not only understood but
corrected her error.

"You'll find it all in the grammar," she went on. "There's
something else I noticed in your speech. You say 'don't' when you
shouldn't. 'Don't' is a contraction and stands for two words. Do
you know them?"

He thought a moment, then answered, "'Do not.'"

She nodded her head, and said, "And you use 'don't' when you mean
'does not.'"

He was puzzled over this, and did not get it so quickly.

"Give me an illustration," he asked.

"Well - "  She puckered her brows and pursed up her mouth as she
thought, while he looked on and decided that her expression was
most adorable. "'It don't do to be hasty.'  Change 'don't' to 'do
not,' and it reads, 'It do not do to be hasty,' which is perfectly
absurd."

He turned it over in his mind and considered.

"Doesn't it jar on your ear?" she suggested.

"Can't say that it does," he replied judicially.

"Why didn't you say, 'Can't say that it do'?" she queried.

"That sounds wrong," he said slowly. "As for the other I can't
make up my mind. I guess my ear ain't had the trainin' yours has."

"There is no such word as 'ain't,'" she said, prettily emphatic.

Martin flushed again.

"And you say 'ben' for 'been,'" she continued; "'come' for 'came';
and the way you chop your endings is something dreadful."

"How do you mean?"  He leaned forward, feeling that he ought to get
down on his knees before so marvellous a mind. "How do I chop?"

"You don't complete the endings. 'A-n-d' spells 'and.'  You
pronounce it 'an'.'  'I-n-g' spells 'ing.'  Sometimes you pronounce
it 'ing' and sometimes you leave off the 'g.'  And then you slur by
dropping initial letters and diphthongs. 'T-h-e-m' spells 'them.'
You pronounce it - oh, well, it is not necessary to go over all of
them. What you need is the grammar. I'll get one and show you how
to begin."

As she arose, there shot through his mind something that he had
read in the etiquette books, and he stood up awkwardly, worrying as
to whether he was doing the right thing, and fearing that she might
take it as a sign that he was about to go.

"By the way, Mr. Eden," she called back, as she was leaving the
room. "What is BOOZE? You used it several times, you know."

"Oh, booze," he laughed. "It's slang. It means whiskey an' beer -
anything that will make you drunk."

"And another thing," she laughed back. "Don't use 'you' when you
are impersonal. 'You' is very personal, and your use of it just
now was not precisely what you meant."

"I don't just see that."

"Why, you said just now, to me, 'whiskey and beer - anything that
will make you drunk' - make me drunk, don't you see?"

"Well, it would, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, of course," she smiled. "But it would be nicer not to bring
me into it. Substitute 'one' for 'you' and see how much better it
sounds."

When she returned with the grammar, she drew a chair near his - he
wondered if he should have helped her with the chair - and sat down
beside him. She turned the pages of the grammar, and their heads
were inclined toward each other. He could hardly follow her
outlining of the work he must do, so amazed was he by her
delightful propinquity. But when she began to lay down the
importance of conjugation, he forgot all about her. He had never
heard of conjugation, and was fascinated by the glimpse he was
catching into the tie-ribs of language. He leaned closer to the
page, and her hair touched his cheek. He had fainted but once in
his life, and he thought he was going to faint again. He could
scarcely breathe, and his heart was pounding the blood up into his
throat and suffocating him. Never had she seemed so accessible as
now. For the moment the great gulf that separated them was
bridged. But there was no diminution in the loftiness of his
feeling for her. She had not descended to him. It was he who had
been caught up into the clouds and carried to her. His reverence
for her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious awe and
fervor. It seemed to him that he had intruded upon the holy of
holies, and slowly and carefully he moved his head aside from the
contact which thrilled him like an electric shock and of which she
had not been aware.

CHAPTER VIII

Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his
grammar, reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the
books that caught his fancy. Of his own class he saw nothing. The
girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried
Jim with questions, and some of the fellows who put on the glove at
Riley's were glad that Martin came no more. He made another
discovery of treasure-trove in the library. As the grammar had
shown him the tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the
tie-ribs of poetry, and he began to learn metre and construction
and form, beneath the beauty he loved finding the why and wherefore
of that beauty. Another modern book he found treated poetry as a
representative art, treated it exhaustively, with copious
illustrations from the best in literature. Never had he read
fiction with so keen zest as he studied these books. And his fresh
mind, untaxed for twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire,
gripped hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the student
mind.

When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he
had known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and
harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with
this new world and expanded. His mind made for unity, and he was
surprised when at first he began to see points of contact between
the two worlds. And he was ennobled, as well, by the loftiness of
thought and beauty he found in the books. This led him to believe
more firmly than ever that up above him, in society like Ruth and
her family, all men and women thought these thoughts and lived
them. Down below where he lived was the ignoble, and he wanted to
purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled all his days, and to
rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt the upper classes. All
his childhood and youth had been troubled by a vague unrest; he had
never known what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he had
hunted vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his unrest had become
sharp and painful, and he knew at last, clearly and definitely,
that it was beauty, and intellect, and love that he must have.

During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each
time was an added inspiration. She helped him with his English,
corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But
their intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study. He had
seen too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be wholly
content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis; and there
were times when their conversation turned on other themes - the
last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied. And when
she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he ascended to the
topmost heaven of delight. Never, in all the women he had heard
speak, had he heard a voice like hers. The least sound of it was a
stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word
she uttered. It was the quality of it, the repose, and the musical
modulation - the soft, rich, indefinable product of culture and a
gentle soul. As he listened to her, there rang in the ears of his
memory the harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and, in
lesser degrees of harshness, the strident voices of working women
and of the girls of his own class. Then the chemistry of vision
would begin to work, and they would troop in review across his
mind, each, by contrast, multiplying Ruth's glories. Then, too,
his bliss was heightened by the knowledge that her mind was
comprehending what she read and was quivering with appreciation of
the beauty of the written thought. She read to him much from "The
Princess," and often he saw her eyes swimming with tears, so finely
was her aesthetic nature strung. At such moments her own emotions
elevated him till he was as a god, and, as he gazed at her and
listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading its
deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the heights of
exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided that this was love
and that love was the greatest thing in the world. And in review
would pass along the corridors of memory all previous thrills and
burnings he had known, - the drunkenness of wine, the caresses of
women, the rough play and give and take of physical contests, - and
they seemed trivial and mean compared with this sublime ardor he
now enjoyed.

The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never had any
experiences of the heart. Her only experiences in such matters
were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated
by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality; and she little knew that
this rough sailor was creeping into her heart and storing there
pent forces that would some day burst forth and surge through her
in waves of fire. She did not know the actual fire of love. Her
knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she conceived of it
as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew or the ripple of quiet
water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer nights. Her idea of
love was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one
softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of
ethereal calm. She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of
love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes. She
knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the world; and
the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion. The conjugal
affection of her father and mother constituted her ideal of love-
affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging, without
shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence with
a loved one.

So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange
individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the
effects he produced upon her. It was only natural. In similar
ways she had experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild
animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or
shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning. There was something
cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him. He
came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces. The blaze of
tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles
was the primordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by
that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts
of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed, wild, and in
secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so
mildly to her hand. Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse
to tame the wild thing. It was an unconscious impulse, and
farthest from her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay
of him into a likeness of her father's image, which image she
believed to be the finest in the world. Nor was there any way, out
of her inexperience, for her to know that the cosmic feel she
caught of him was that most cosmic of things, love, which with
equal power drew men and women together across the world, compelled
stags to kill each other in the rutting season, and drove even the
elements irresistibly to unite.

His swift development was a source of surprise and interest. She
detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by
day, like flowers in congenial soil. She read Browning aloud to
him, and was often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave
to mooted passages. It was beyond her to realize that, out of his
experience of men and women and life, his interpretations were far
more frequently correct than hers. His conceptions seemed naive to
her, though she was often fired by his daring flights of
comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide among the stars that
she could not follow and could only sit and thrill to the impact of
unguessed power. Then she played to him - no longer at him - and
probed him with music that sank to depths beyond her plumb-line.
His nature opened to music as a flower to the sun, and the
transition was quick from his working-class rag-time and jingles to
her classical display pieces that she knew nearly by heart. Yet he
betrayed a democratic fondness for Wagner, and the "Tannhauser"
overture, when she had given him the clew to it, claimed him as
nothing else she played. In an immediate way it personified his
life. All his past was the VENUSBURG motif, while her he
identified somehow with the PILGRIM'S CHORUS motif; and from the
exalted state this elevated him to, he swept onward and upward into
that vast shadow-realm of spirit-groping, where good and evil war
eternally.

Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind temporary doubts
as to the correctness of her own definitions and conceptions of
music. But her singing he did not question. It was too wholly
her, and he sat always amazed at the divine melody of her pure
soprano voice. And he could not help but contrast it with the weak
pipings and shrill quaverings of factory girls, ill-nourished and
untrained, and with the raucous shriekings from gin-cracked throats
of the women of the seaport towns. She enjoyed singing and playing
to him. In truth, it was the first time she had ever had a human
soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him was a delight to
mould; for she thought she was moulding it, and her intentions were
good. Besides, it was pleasant to be with him. He did not repel
her. That first repulsion had been really a fear of her
undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep. Though she did
not know it, she had a feeling in him of proprietary right. Also,
he had a tonic effect upon her. She was studying hard at the
university, and it seemed to strengthen her to emerge from the
dusty books and have the fresh sea-breeze of his personality blow
upon her. Strength! Strength was what she needed, and he gave it
to her in generous measure. To come into the same room with him,
or to meet him at the door, was to take heart of life. And when he
had gone, she would return to her books with a keener zest and
fresh store of energy.

She knew her Browning, but it had never sunk into her that it was
an awkward thing to play with souls. As her interest in Martin
increased, the remodelling of his life became a passion with her.

"There is Mr. Butler," she said one afternoon, when grammar and
arithmetic and poetry had been put aside.

"He had comparatively no advantages at first. His father had been
a bank cashier, but he lingered for years, dying of consumption in
Arizona, so that when he was dead, Mr. Butler, Charles Butler he
was called, found himself alone in the world. His father had come
from Australia, you know, and so he had no relatives in California.
He went to work in a printing-office, - I have heard him tell of it
many times, - and he got three dollars a week, at first. His
income to-day is at least thirty thousand a year. How did he do
it? He was honest, and faithful, and industrious, and economical.
He denied himself the enjoyments that most boys indulge in. He
made it a point to save so much every week, no matter what he had
to do without in order to save it. Of course, he was soon earning
more than three dollars a week, and as his wages increased he saved
more and more.

"He worked in the daytime, and at night he went to night school.
He had his eyes fixed always on the future. Later on he went to
night high school. When he was only seventeen, he was earning
excellent wages at setting type, but he was ambitious. He wanted a
career, not a livelihood, and he was content to make immediate
sacrifices for his ultimate again. He decided upon the law, and he
entered father's office as an office boy - think of that! - and got
only four dollars a week. But he had learned how to be economical,
and out of that four dollars he went on saving money."

She paused for breath, and to note how Martin was receiving it.
His face was lighted up with interest in the youthful struggles of
Mr. Butler; but there was a frown upon his face as well.

"I'd say they was pretty hard lines for a young fellow," he
remarked. "Four dollars a week! How could he live on it? You can
bet he didn't have any frills. Why, I pay five dollars a week for
board now, an' there's nothin' excitin' about it, you can lay to
that. He must have lived like a dog. The food he ate - "

"He cooked for himself," she interrupted, "on a little kerosene
stove."

"The food he ate must have been worse than what a sailor gets on
the worst-feedin' deep-water ships, than which there ain't much
that can be possibly worse."

"But think of him now!" she cried enthusiastically. "Think of what
his income affords him. His early denials are paid for a thousand-
fold."

Martin looked at her sharply.

"There's one thing I'll bet you," he said, "and it is that Mr.
Butler is nothin' gay-hearted now in his fat days. He fed himself
like that for years an' years, on a boy's stomach, an' I bet his
stomach's none too good now for it."

Her eyes dropped before his searching gaze.

"I'll bet he's got dyspepsia right now!" Martin challenged.

"Yes, he has," she confessed; "but - "

"An' I bet," Martin dashed on, "that he's solemn an' serious as an
old owl, an' doesn't care a rap for a good time, for all his thirty
thousand a year. An' I'll bet he's not particularly joyful at
seein' others have a good time. Ain't I right?"

She nodded her head in agreement, and hastened to explain:-

"But he is not that type of man. By nature he is sober and
serious. He always was that."

"You can bet he was," Martin proclaimed. "Three dollars a week,
an' four dollars a week, an' a young boy cookin' for himself on an
oil-burner an' layin' up money, workin' all day an' studyin' all
night, just workin' an' never playin', never havin' a good time,
an' never learnin' how to have a good time - of course his thirty
thousand came along too late."

His sympathetic imagination was flashing upon his inner sight all
the thousands of details of the boy's existence and of his narrow
spiritual development into a thirty-thousand-dollar-a-year man.
With the swiftness and wide-reaching of multitudinous thought
Charles Butler's whole life was telescoped upon his vision.

"Do you know," he added, "I feel sorry for Mr. Butler. He was too
young to know better, but he robbed himself of life for the sake of
thirty thousand a year that's clean wasted upon him. Why, thirty
thousand, lump sum, wouldn't buy for him right now what ten cents
he was layin' up would have bought him, when he was a kid, in the
way of candy an' peanuts or a seat in nigger heaven."

It was just such uniqueness of points of view that startled Ruth.
Not only were they new to her, and contrary to her own beliefs, but
she always felt in them germs of truth that threatened to unseat or
modify her own convictions. Had she been fourteen instead of
twenty-four, she might have been changed by them; but she was
twenty-four, conservative by nature and upbringing, and already
crystallized into the cranny of life where she had been born and
formed. It was true, his bizarre judgments troubled her in the
moments they were uttered, but she ascribed them to his novelty of
type and strangeness of living, and they were soon forgotten.
Nevertheless, while she disapproved of them, the strength of their
utterance, and the flashing of eyes and earnestness of face that
accompanied them, always thrilled her and drew her toward him. She
would never have guessed that this man who had come from beyond her
horizon, was, in such moments, flashing on beyond her horizon with
wider and deeper concepts. Her own limits were the limits of her
horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in
others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and
that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she
dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon
until it was identified with hers.

"But I have not finished my story," she said. "He worked, so
father says, as no other office boy he ever had. Mr. Butler was
always eager to work. He never was late, and he was usually at the
office a few minutes before his regular time. And yet he saved his
time. Every spare moment was devoted to study. He studied book-
keeping and type-writing, and he paid for lessons in shorthand by
dictating at night to a court reporter who needed practice. He
quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable. Father
appreciated him and saw that he was bound to rise. It was on
father's suggestion that he went to law college. He became a
lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took him
in as junior partner. He is a great man. He refused the United
States Senate several times, and father says he could become a
justice of the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants
to. Such a life is an inspiration to all of us. It shows us that
a man with will may rise superior to his environment."

"He is a great man," Martin said sincerely.

But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred
upon his sense of beauty and life. He could not find an adequate
motive in Mr. Butler's life of pinching and privation. Had he done
it for love of a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would
have understood. God's own mad lover should do anything for the
kiss, but not for thirty thousand dollars a year. He was
dissatisfied with Mr. Butler's career. There was something paltry
about it, after all. Thirty thousand a year was all right, but
dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely
income of all its value.

Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made
it clear that more remodelling was necessary. Hers was that common
insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their
color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human
creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than
they. It was the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew
thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary
god-substituting to the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire
to shape this man from other crannies of life into the likeness of
the men who lived in her particular cranny of life.

CHAPTER IX

Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a
lover's desire. His store of money exhausted, he had shipped
before the mast on the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon
Islands, after eight months of failure to find treasure, had
witnessed the breaking up of the expedition. The men had been paid
off in Australia, and Martin had immediately shipped on a deep-
water vessel for San Francisco. Not alone had those eight months
earned him enough money to stay on land for many weeks, but they
had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and reading.

His was the student's mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth. The grammar he
had taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded
brain had mastered it. He noticed the bad grammar used by his
shipmates, and made a point of mentally correcting and
reconstructing their crudities of speech. To his great joy he
discovered that his ear was becoming sensitive and that he was
developing grammatical nerves. A double negative jarred him like a
discord, and often, from lack of practice, it was from his own lips
that the jar came. His tongue refused to learn new tricks in a
day.

After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the
dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary. He
found that this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he
steadily went over and over his lengthening list of pronunciations
and definitions, while he invariably memorized himself to sleep.
"Never did anything," "if I were," and "those things," were
phrases, with many variations, that he repeated under his breath in
order to accustom his tongue to the language spoken by Ruth. "And"
and "ing," with the "d" and "g" pronounced emphatically, he went
over thousands of times; and to his surprise he noticed that he was
beginning to speak cleaner and more correct English than the
officers themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who
had financed the expedition.

The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into
possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and
Martin had washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted
access to the precious volumes. For a time, so steeped was he in
the plays and in the many favorite passages that impressed
themselves almost without effort on his brain, that all the world
seemed to shape itself into forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy
and his very thoughts were in blank verse. It trained his ear and
gave him a fine appreciation for noble English; withal it
introduced into his mind much that was archaic and obsolete.

The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he
had learned of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned
much of himself. Along with his humbleness because he knew so
little, there arose a conviction of power. He felt a sharp
gradation between himself and his shipmates, and was wise enough to
realize that the difference lay in potentiality rather than
achievement. What he could do, - they could do; but within him he
felt a confused ferment working that told him there was more in him
than he had done. He was tortured by the exquisite beauty of the
world, and wished that Ruth were there to share it with him. He
decided that he would describe to her many of the bits of South Sea
beauty. The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and
urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth.
And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea. He would
write. He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw,
one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through
which it felt. He would write - everything - poetry and prose,
fiction and description, and plays like Shakespeare. There was
career and the way to win to Ruth. The men of literature were the
world's giants, and he conceived them to be far finer than the Mr.
Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and could be Supreme
Court justices if they wanted to.

Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return
voyage to San Francisco was like a dream. He was drunken with
unguessed power and felt that he could do anything. In the midst
of the great and lonely sea he gained perspective. Clearly, and
for the first lime, he saw Ruth and her world. It was all
visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which he could take up
in his two hands and turn around and about and examine. There was
much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as a
whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it.
To write! The thought was fire in him. He would begin as soon as
he got back. The first thing he would do would be to describe the
voyage of the treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San
Francisco newspaper. He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and
she would be surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print.
While he wrote, he could go on studying. There were twenty-four
hours in each day. He was invincible. He knew how to work, and
the citadels would go down before him. He would not have to go to
sea again - as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a vision of
a steam yacht. There were other writers who possessed steam
yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow
succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content to earn
enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying. And
then, after some time, - a very indeterminate time, - when he had
learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and
his name would be on all men's lips. But greater than that,
infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have proved
himself worthy of Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for
Ruth that his splendid dream arose. He was not a fame-monger, but
merely one of God's mad lovers.

Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up
his old room at Bernard Higginbotham's and set to work. He did not
even let Ruth know he was back. He would go and see her when he
finished the article on the treasure-hunters. It was not so
difficult to abstain from seeing her, because of the violent heat
of creative fever that burned in him. Besides, the very article he
was writing would bring her nearer to him. He did not know how
long an article he should write, but he counted the words in a
double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the SAN FRANCISCO
EXAMINER, and guided himself by that. Three days, at white heat,
completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a
large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he
picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs
and quotation marks. He had never thought of such things before;
and he promptly set to work writing the article over, referring
continually to the pages of the rhetoric and learning more in a day
about composition than the average schoolboy in a year. When he
had copied the article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he
read in a newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered
the iron law that manuscripts should never be rolled and that they
should be written on one side of the paper. He had violated the
law on both counts. Also, he learned from the item that first-
class papers paid a minimum of ten dollars a column. So, while he
copied the manuscript a third time, he consoled himself by
multiplying ten columns by ten dollars. The product was always the
same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was better than
seafaring. If it hadn't been for his blunders, he would have
finished the article in three days. One hundred dollars in three
days! It would have taken him three months and longer on the sea
to earn a similar amount. A man was a fool to go to sea when he
could write, he concluded, though the money in itself meant nothing
to him. Its value was in the liberty it would get him, the
presentable garments it would buy him, all of which would bring him
nearer, swiftly nearer, to the slender, pale girl who had turned
his life back upon itself and given him inspiration.

He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to
the editor of the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER. He had an idea that
anything accepted by a paper was published immediately, and as he
had sent the manuscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on
the following Sunday. He conceived that it would be fine to let
that event apprise Ruth of his return. Then, Sunday afternoon, he
would call and see her. In the meantime he was occupied by another
idea, which he prided himself upon as being a particularly sane,
careful, and modest idea. He would write an adventure story for
boys and sell it to THE YOUTH'S COMPANION. He went to the free
reading-room and looked through the files of THE YOUTH'S COMPANION.
Serial stories, he found, were usually published in that weekly in
five instalments of about three thousand words each. He discovered
several serials that ran to seven instalments, and decided to write
one of that length.

He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once - a voyage that
was to have been for three years and which had terminated in
shipwreck at the end of six months. While his imagination was
fanciful, even fantastic at times, he had a basic love of reality
that compelled him to write about the things he knew. He knew
whaling, and out of the real materials of his knowledge he
proceeded to manufacture the fictitious adventures of the two boys
he intended to use as joint heroes. It was easy work, he decided
on Saturday evening. He had completed on that day the first
instalment of three thousand words - much to the amusement of Jim,
and to the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who sneered
throughout meal-time at the "litery" person they had discovered in
the family.

Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in-law's surprise
on Sunday morning when he opened his EXAMINER and saw the article
on the treasure-hunters. Early that morning he was out himself to
the front door, nervously racing through the many-sheeted
newspaper. He went through it a second time, very carefully, then
folded it up and left it where he had found it. He was glad he had
not told any one about his article. On second thought he concluded
that he had been wrong about the speed with which things found
their way into newspaper columns. Besides, there had not been any
news value in his article, and most likely the editor would write
to him about it first.

After breakfast he went on with his serial. The words flowed from
his pen, though he broke off from the writing frequently to look up
definitions in the dictionary or to refer to the rhetoric. He
often read or re-read a chapter at a time, during such pauses; and
he consoled himself that while he was not writing the great things
he felt to be in him, he was learning composition, at any rate, and
training himself to shape up and express his thoughts. He toiled
on till dark, when he went out to the reading-room and explored
magazines and weeklies until the place closed at ten o'clock. This
was his programme for a week. Each day he did three thousand
words, and each evening he puzzled his way through the magazines,
taking note of the stories, articles, and poems that editors saw
fit to publish. One thing was certain: What these multitudinous
writers did he could do, and only give him time and he would do
what they could not do. He was cheered to read in BOOK NEWS, in a
paragraph on the payment of magazine writers, not that Rudyard
Kipling received a dollar per word, but that the minimum rate paid
by first-class magazines was two cents a word. THE YOUTH'S
COMPANION was certainly first class, and at that rate the three
thousand words he had written that day would bring him sixty
dollars - two months' wages on the sea!

On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words
long. At two cents a word, he calculated, that would bring him
four hundred and twenty dollars. Not a bad week's work. It was
more money than he had ever possessed at one time. He did not know
how he could spend it all. He had tapped a gold mine. Where this
came from he could always get more. He planned to buy some more
clothes, to subscribe to many magazines, and to buy dozens of
reference books that at present he was compelled to go to the
library to consult. And still there was a large portion of the
four hundred and twenty dollars unspent. This worried him until
the thought came to him of hiring a servant for Gertrude and of
buying a bicycle for Marion.

He mailed the bulky manuscript to THE YOUTH'S COMPANION, and on
Saturday afternoon, after having planned an article on pearl-
diving, he went to see Ruth. He had telephoned, and she went
herself to greet him at the door. The old familiar blaze of health
rushed out from him and struck her like a blow. It seemed to enter
into her body and course through her veins in a liquid glow, and to
set her quivering with its imparted strength. He flushed warmly as
he took her hand and looked into her blue eyes, but the fresh
bronze of eight months of sun hid the flush, though it did not
protect the neck from the gnawing chafe of the stiff collar. She
noted the red line of it with amusement which quickly vanished as
she glanced at his clothes. They really fitted him, - it was his
first made-to-order suit, - and he seemed slimmer and better
modelled. In addition, his cloth cap had been replaced by a soft
hat, which she commanded him to put on and then complimented him on
his appearance. She did not remember when she had felt so happy.
This change in him was her handiwork, and she was proud of it and
fired with ambition further to help him.

But the most radical change of all, and the one that pleased her
most, was the change in his speech. Not only did he speak more
correctly, but he spoke more easily, and there were many new words
in his vocabulary. When he grew excited or enthusiastic, however,
he dropped back into the old slurring and the dropping of final
consonants. Also, there was an awkward hesitancy, at times, as he
essayed the new words he had learned. On the other hand, along
with his ease of expression, he displayed a lightness and
facetiousness of thought that delighted her. It was his old spirit
of humor and badinage that had made him a favorite in his own
class, but which he had hitherto been unable to use in her presence
through lack of words and training. He was just beginning to
orientate himself and to feel that he was not wholly an intruder.
But he was very tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set the
pace of sprightliness and fancy, keeping up with her but never
daring to go beyond her.

He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan to write for
a livelihood and of going on with his studies. But he was
disappointed at her lack of approval. She did not think much of
his plan.

"You see," she said frankly, "writing must be a trade, like
anything else. Not that I know anything about it, of course. I
only bring common judgment to bear. You couldn't hope to be a
blacksmith without spending three years at learning the trade - or
is it five years! Now writers are so much better paid than
blacksmiths that there must be ever so many more men who would like
to write, who - try to write."

"But then, may not I be peculiarly constituted to write?" he
queried, secretly exulting at the language he had used, his swift
imagination throwing the whole scene and atmosphere upon a vast
screen along with a thousand other scenes from his life - scenes
that were rough and raw, gross and bestial.

The whole composite vision was achieved with the speed of light,
producing no pause in the conversation, nor interrupting his calm
train of thought. On the screen of his imagination he saw himself
and this sweet and beautiful girl, facing each other and conversing
in good English, in a room of books and paintings and tone and
culture, and all illuminated by a bright light of steadfast
brilliance; while ranged about and fading away to the remote edges
of the screen were antithetical scenes, each scene a picture, and
he the onlooker, free to look at will upon what he wished. He saw
these other scenes through drifting vapors and swirls of sullen fog
dissolving before shafts of red and garish light. He saw cowboys
at the bar, drinking fierce whiskey, the air filled with obscenity
and ribald language, and he saw himself with them drinking and
cursing with the wildest, or sitting at table with them, under
smoking kerosene lamps, while the chips clicked and clattered and
the cards were dealt around. He saw himself, stripped to the
waist, with naked fists, fighting his great fight with Liverpool
Red in the forecastle of the Susquehanna; and he saw the bloody
deck of the John Rogers, that gray morning of attempted mutiny, the
mate kicking in death-throes on the main-hatch, the revolver in the
old man's hand spitting fire and smoke, the men with passion-
wrenched faces, of brutes screaming vile blasphemies and falling
about him - and then he returned to the central scene, calm and
clean in the steadfast light, where Ruth sat and talked with him
amid books and paintings; and he saw the grand piano upon which she
would later play to him; and he heard the echoes of his own
selected and correct words, "But then, may I not be peculiarly
constituted to write?"

"But no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for
blacksmithing," she was laughing, "I never heard of one becoming a
blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship."

"What would you advise?" he asked. "And don't forget that I feel
in me this capacity to write - I can't explain it; I just know that
it is in me."

"You must get a thorough education," was the answer, "whether or
not you ultimately become a writer. This education is
indispensable for whatever career you select, and it must not be
slipshod or sketchy. You should go to high school."

"Yes - " he began; but she interrupted with an afterthought:-

"Of course, you could go on with your writing, too."

"I would have to," he said grimly.

"Why?"  She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did not quite
like the persistence with which he clung to his notion.

"Because, without writing there wouldn't be any high school. I
must live and buy books and clothes, you know."

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

"I'd rather have good health and imagination," he answered. "I can
make good on the income, but the other things have to be made good
for - "  He almost said "you," then amended his sentence to, "have
to be made good for one."

"Don't say 'make good,'" she cried, sweetly petulant. "It's slang,
and it's horrid."

He flushed, and stammered, "That's right, and I only wish you'd
correct me every time."

"I - I'd like to," she said haltingly. "You have so much in you
that is good that I want to see you perfect."

He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of
being moulded by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the
image of her ideal of man. And when she pointed out the
opportuneness of the time, that the entrance examinations to high
school began on the following Monday, he promptly volunteered that
he would take them.

Then she played and sang to him, while he gazed with hungry
yearning at her, drinking in her loveliness and marvelling that
there should not be a hundred suitors listening there and longing
for her as he listened and longed.

CHAPTER X

He stopped to dinner that evening, and, much to Ruth's
satisfaction, made a favorable impression on her father. They
talked about the sea as a career, a subject which Martin had at his
finger-ends, and Mr. Morse remarked afterward that he seemed a very
clear-headed young man. In his avoidance of slang and his search
after right words, Martin was compelled to talk slowly, which
enabled him to find the best thoughts that were in him. He was
more at ease than that first night at dinner, nearly a year before,
and his shyness and modesty even commended him to Mrs. Morse, who
was pleased at his manifest improvement.

"He is the first man that ever drew passing notice from Ruth," she
told her husband. "She has been so singularly backward where men
are concerned that I have been worried greatly."

Mr. Morse looked at his wife curiously.

"You mean to use this young sailor to wake her up?" he questioned.

"I mean that she is not to die an old maid if I can help it," was
the answer. "If this young Eden can arouse her interest in mankind
in general, it will be a good thing."

"A very good thing," he commented. "But suppose, - and we must
suppose, sometimes, my dear, - suppose he arouses her interest too
particularly in him?"

"Impossible," Mrs. Morse laughed. "She is three years older than
he, and, besides, it is impossible. Nothing will ever come of it.
Trust that to me."

And so Martin's role was arranged for him, while he, led on by
Arthur and Norman, was meditating an extravagance. They were going
out for a ride into the hills Sunday morning on their wheels, which
did not interest Martin until he learned that Ruth, too, rode a
wheel and was going along. He did not ride, nor own a wheel, but
if Ruth rode, it was up to him to begin, was his decision; and when
he said good night, he stopped in at a cyclery on his way home and
spent forty dollars for a wheel. It was more than a month's hard-
earned wages, and it reduced his stock of money amazingly; but when
he added the hundred dollars he was to receive from the EXAMINER to
the four hundred and twenty dollars that was the least THE YOUTH'S
COMPANION could pay him, he felt that he had reduced the perplexity
the unwonted amount of money had caused him. Nor did he mind, in
the course of learning to ride the wheel home, the fact that he
ruined his suit of clothes. He caught the tailor by telephone that
night from Mr. Higginbotham's store and ordered another suit. Then
he carried the wheel up the narrow stairway that clung like a fire-
escape to the rear wall of the building, and when he had moved his
bed out from the wall, found there was just space enough in the
small room for himself and the wheel.

Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school
examination, but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he
spent the day in the white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and
romance that burned in him. The fact that the EXAMINER of that
morning had failed to publish his treasure-hunting article did not
dash his spirits. He was at too great a height for that, and
having been deaf to a twice-repeated summons, he went without the
heavy Sunday dinner with which Mr. Higginbotham invariably graced
his table. To Mr. Higginbotham such a dinner was advertisement of
his worldly achievement and prosperity, and he honored it by
delivering platitudinous sermonettes upon American institutions and
the opportunity said institutions gave to any hard-working man to
rise - the rise, in his case, which he pointed out unfailingly,
being from a grocer's clerk to the ownership of Higginbotham's Cash
Store.

Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished "Pearl-diving" on
Monday morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high
school. And when, days later, he applied for the results of his
examinations, he learned that he had failed in everything save
grammar.

"Your grammar is excellent," Professor Hilton informed him, staring
at him through heavy spectacles; "but you know nothing, positively
nothing, in the other branches, and your United States history is
abominable - there is no other word for it, abominable. I should
advise you - "

Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and
unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes. He was professor of
physics in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre
salary, and a select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.

"Yes, sir," Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at the
desk in the library was in Professor Hilton's place just then.

"And I should advise you to go back to the grammar school for at
least two years. Good day."

Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though he was
surprised at Ruth's shocked expression when he told her Professor
Hilton's advice. Her disappointment was so evident that he was
sorry he had failed, but chiefly so for her sake.

"You see I was right," she said. "You know far more than any of
the students entering high school, and yet you can't pass the
examinations. It is because what education you have is
fragmentary, sketchy. You need the discipline of study, such as
only skilled teachers can give you. You must be thoroughly
grounded. Professor Hilton is right, and if I were you, I'd go to
night school. A year and a half of it might enable you to catch up
that additional six months. Besides, that would leave you your
days in which to write, or, if you could not make your living by
your pen, you would have your days in which to work in some
position."

But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school,
when am I going to see you? - was Martin's first thought, though he
refrained from uttering it. Instead, he said:-

"It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school. But I
wouldn't mind that if I thought it would pay. But I don't think it
will pay. I can do the work quicker than they can teach me. It
would be a loss of time - " he thought of her and his desire to
have her - "and I can't afford the time. I haven't the time to
spare, in fact."

"There is so much that is necessary."  She looked at him gently,
and he was a brute to oppose her. "Physics and chemistry - you
can't do them without laboratory study; and you'll find algebra and
geometry almost hopeless with instruction. You need the skilled
teachers, the specialists in the art of imparting knowledge."

He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least
vainglorious way in which to express himself.

"Please don't think I'm bragging," he began. "I don't intend it
that way at all. But I have a feeling that I am what I may call a
natural student. I can study by myself. I take to it kindly, like
a duck to water. You see yourself what I did with grammar. And
I've learned much of other things - you would never dream how much.
And I'm only getting started. Wait till I get - "  He hesitated
and assured himself of the pronunciation before he said "momentum.
I'm getting my first real feel of things now. I'm beginning to
size up the situation - "

"Please don't say 'size up,'" she interrupted.

"To get a line on things," he hastily amended.

"That doesn't mean anything in correct English," she objected.

He floundered for a fresh start.

"What I'm driving at is that I'm beginning to get the lay of the
land."

Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.

"Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room. Whenever I go into the
library, I am impressed that way. The part played by teachers is
to teach the student the contents of the chart-room in a systematic
way. The teachers are guides to the chart-room, that's all. It's
not something that they have in their own heads. They don't make
it up, don't create it. It's all in the chart-room and they know
their way about in it, and it's their business to show the place to
strangers who might else get lost. Now I don't get lost easily. I
have the bump of location. I usually know where I'm at - What's
wrong now?"

"Don't say 'where I'm at.'"

"That's right," he said gratefully, "where I am. But where am I at
- I mean, where am I? Oh, yes, in the chart-room. Well, some
people - "

"Persons," she corrected.

"Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get
along without them. I've spent a lot of time in the chart-room
now, and I'm on the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I
want to refer to, what coasts I want to explore. And from the way
I line it up, I'll explore a whole lot more quickly by myself. The
speed of a fleet, you know, is the speed of the slowest ship, and
the speed of the teachers is affected the same way. They can't go
any faster than the ruck of their scholars, and I can set a faster
pace for myself than they set for a whole schoolroom."

"'He travels the fastest who travels alone,'" she quoted at him.

But I'd travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to
blurt out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit
spaces and starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm
around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same
instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If
he could so frame words that she could see what he then saw! And
he felt the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the
desire to paint these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror
of his mind. Ah, that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret.
It was the very thing that the great writers and master-poets did.
That was why they were giants. They knew how to express what they
thought, and felt, and saw. Dogs asleep in the sun often whined
and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made
them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And that
was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun. He saw noble and
beautiful visions, but he could only whine and bark at Ruth. But
he would cease sleeping in the sun. He would stand up, with open
eyes, and he would struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes
unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her his visioned
wealth. Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of
making words obedient servitors, and of making combinations of
words mean more than the sum of their separate meanings. He was
stirred profoundly by the passing glimpse at the secret, and he was
again caught up in the vision of sunlit spaces and starry voids -
until it came to him that it was very quiet, and he saw Ruth
regarding him with an amused expression and a smile in her eyes.

"I have had a great visioning," he said, and at the sound of his
words in his own ears his heart gave a leap. Where had those words
come from? They had adequately expressed the pause his vision had
put in the conversation. It was a miracle. Never had he so
loftily framed a lofty thought. But never had he attempted to
frame lofty thoughts in words. That was it. That explained it.
He had never tried. But Swinburne had, and Tennyson, and Kipling,
and all the other poets. His mind flashed on to his "Pearl-
diving."  He had never dared the big things, the spirit of the
beauty that was a fire in him. That article would be a different
thing when he was done with it. He was appalled by the vastness of
the beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind
flashed and dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not
chant that beauty in noble verse as the great poets did. And there
was all the mysterious delight and spiritual wonder of his love for
Ruth. Why could he not chant that, too, as the poets did? They
had sung of love. So would he. By God! -

And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing.
Carried away, he had breathed it aloud. The blood surged into his
face, wave upon wave, mastering the bronze of it till the blush of
shame flaunted itself from collar-rim to the roots of his hair.

"I - I - beg your pardon," he stammered. "I was thinking."

"It sounded as if you were praying," she said bravely, but she felt
herself inside to be withering and shrinking. It was the first
time she had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she
was shocked, not merely as a matter of principle and training, but
shocked in spirit by this rough blast of life in the garden of her
sheltered maidenhood.

But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.
Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything. He had
not had a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and
succeeding, too. It never entered her head that there could be any
other reason for her being kindly disposed toward him. She was
tenderly disposed toward him, but she did not know it. She had no
way of knowing it. The placid poise of twenty-four years without a
single love affair did not fit her with a keen perception of her
own feelings, and she who had never warmed to actual love was
unaware that she was warming now.

CHAPTER XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But why does she?"

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But that is not what Martin wants."

"How do you know?"

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

Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.

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

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

She nodded her head and looked triumph.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time! Time! Time! was his unending plaint.

CHAPTER XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.

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

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

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

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

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

"I dare too much," he muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

"It is beautiful."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bouncer glared and went away.

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

"Sure."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked more closely at himself and laughed.

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

CHAPTER XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other nodded.

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

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

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

Martin nodded.

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

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

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

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

"But work like hell," the other added.

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

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

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

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

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

"Jump it," Joe advised.

"Can't. Owe it to my sister."

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

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

Martin declined.

"Water-wagon?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Books clean to the bottom?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And you know it well."

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

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

"Doin' much readin'?" Joe asked.

Martin shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Got to," was the answer.

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

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

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

Martin considered it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joe hurried, and they drank together.

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

Martin refused to discuss the matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVIII

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

"I say," he began.

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

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

Tears came into the other's eyes.

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

Martin shook his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you quitting for?" Martin demanded.

"Same reason as you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She stared at him with horror in her eyes.

"Do you mean - ?" she quavered.

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

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

She shivered and drew away from him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ruth nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

"With pitch?"

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

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

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

Again her mother waited.

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

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

"But he does - already," she cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, mother."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That is so good," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXI

Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the
hush of the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with
hazy sun and wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the
slumber of the air. Filmy purple mists, that were not vapors but
fabrics woven of color, hid in the recesses of the hills. San
Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her heights. The
intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing
craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide. Far Tamalpais,
barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by the Golden Gate,
the latter a pale gold pathway under the westering sun. Beyond,
the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line tumbled
cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first
blustering breath of winter.

The erasure of summer was at hand. Yet summer lingered, fading and
fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys,
spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures,
dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well. And
among the hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side
by side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading aloud
from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved Browning as it is
given to few men to be loved.

But the reading languished. The spell of passing beauty all about
them was too strong. The golden year was dying as it had lived, a
beautiful and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and
content freighted heavily the air. It entered into them, dreamy
and languorous, weakening the fibres of resolution, suffusing the
face of morality, or of judgment, with haze and purple mist.
Martin felt tender and melting, and from time to time warm glows
passed over him. His head was very near to hers, and when
wandering phantoms of breeze stirred her hair so that it touched
his face, the printed pages swam before his eyes.

"I don't believe you know a word of what you are reading," she said
once when he had lost his place.

He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of
becoming awkward, when a retort came to his lips.

"I don't believe you know either. What was the last sonnet about?"

"I don't know," she laughed frankly. "I've already forgotten.
Don't let us read any more. The day is too beautiful."

"It will be our last in the hills for some time," he announced
gravely. "There's a storm gathering out there on the sea-rim."

The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and they sat idly
and silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed
and did not see. Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck. She did not
lean toward him. She was drawn by some force outside of herself
and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny. It was only an
inch to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her part.
Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly touches a
flower, and just as lightly was the counter-pressure. She felt his
shoulder press hers, and a tremor run through him. Then was the
time for her to draw back. But she had become an automaton. Her
actions had passed beyond the control of her will - she never
thought of control or will in the delicious madness that was upon
her. His arm began to steal behind her and around her. She waited
its slow progress in a torment of delight. She waited, she knew
not for what, panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and
a fever of expectancy in all her blood. The girdling arm lifted
higher and drew her toward him, drew her slowly and caressingly.
She could wait no longer. With a tired sigh, and with an impulsive
movement all her own, unpremeditated, spasmodic, she rested her
head upon his breast. His head bent over swiftly, and, as his lips
approached, hers flew to meet them.

This must be love, she thought, in the one rational moment that was
vouchsafed her. If it was not love, it was too shameful. It could
be nothing else than love. She loved the man whose arms were
around her and whose lips were pressed to hers. She pressed more,
tightly to him, with a snuggling movement of her body. And a
moment later, tearing herself half out of his embrace, suddenly and
exultantly she reached up and placed both hands upon Martin Eden's
sunburnt neck. So exquisite was the pang of love and desire
fulfilled that she uttered a low moan, relaxed her hands, and lay
half-swooning in his arms.

Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken for a long
time. Twice he bent and kissed her, and each time her lips met his
shyly and her body made its happy, nestling movement. She clung to
him, unable to release herself, and he sat, half supporting her in
his arms, as he gazed with unseeing eyes at the blur of the great
city across the bay. For once there were no visions in his brain.
Only colors and lights and glows pulsed there, warm as the day and
warm as his love. He bent over her. She was speaking.

"When did you love me?" she whispered.

"From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid eye on
you. I was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has
passed since then I have only grown the madder. I am maddest, now,
dear. I am almost a lunatic, my head is so turned with joy."

"I