Call of The Wind, White Fang & Martin Eden Read Online

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 “Tannhäuser” 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 rôle 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.