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

Higginbotham’s ferret eyes were fixed upon him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What a pretty girl!” Ruth said a moment later.

Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But why does she?”

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s far-fetched, I am afraid.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But that is not what Martin wants.”

“How do you know?”

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

Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.

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

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

She nodded her head and looked triumph.

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

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

“And pray what would you do?” she asked.

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

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

“What’s that?” he replied to a question from Olney that broke in upon his train of thought.

“I was saying that I hoped you wouldn’t be fool enough to tackle Latin.”

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

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

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

“I am afraid I won’t have time,” he said finally.  “I’d like to, but I won’t have time.”

“You see, Martin’s not seeking culture,” Olney exulted.  “He’s trying to get somewhere, to do something.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Give me time,” he said aloud.  “Only give me time.”

Time!  Time!  Time! was his unending plaint.

CHAPTER XIV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.

“The tone of it all is low.  And there is so much that is high.  Take ‘In Memoriam.’”

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

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

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

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

“I dare too much,” he muttered.

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

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

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

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

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

“It is beautiful.”

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

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

“What did you think of the—”  He hesitated, abashed at his first attempt to use a strange word.  “Of the motif?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“You want to be famous?” she asked abruptly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll fix you after de show,” his ancient enemy hissed.

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

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

The bouncer glared and went away.

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

“Sure.”

“Then I got to get one,” Martin announced.

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

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

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

“That’s agreeable to me,” Martin said, after consulting with the leaders of his own gang.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hold up yer hand!” he screamed.  “Them’s brass knuckles, an’ you hit me with ’em!”

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

“You guys keep out!” he screamed hoarsely.  “Understand?  Say, d’ye understand?”

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

“This is my scrap, an’ they ain’t goin’ to be no buttin’ in.  Gimme them knuckles.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“D’ye want any more?  Say, d’ye want any more?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked more closely at himself and laughed.

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

CHAPTER XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Nothin’ doin’ eh?” said the other.  “Well, I got to get somebody to-day.”

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

“Lookin’ for a job?” the other queried.  “What can you do?”

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

The other nodded.

“Sounds good to me.  My name’s Dawson, Joe Dawson, an’ I’m tryin’ to scare up a laundryman.”

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

“Look here, let’s get together an’ frame it up.  Willin’ to listen?”

Martin nodded.

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

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

“Good grub an’ a room to yourself,” Joe said.

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

“But work like hell,” the other added.

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

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

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

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

“And I’m broke—when I pay my board.”

“Jump it,” Joe advised.

“Can’t.  Owe it to my sister.”

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

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

Martin declined.

“Water-wagon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Books clean to the bottom?” he asked.

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

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

“Say, you don’t care for the girls—much?” he queried.

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

“And there won’t be any time here.  All you can do is work an’ sleep.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Me for the tropics and no clothes,” Martin laughed.

“And me out of a job,” Joe answered seriously.  “I don’t know nothin’ but laundrying.”

“And you know it well.”

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

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

“Doin’ much readin’?” Joe asked.

Martin shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVII

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

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

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

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

“This is hell, ain’t it?” Joe remarked once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Got to,” was the answer.

“What are you goin’ for?—a girl?”

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

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

Martin considered it.

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

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

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

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

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

“It was beautiful,” he repeated dreamily, a minute later.

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

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

“I simply can’t help it,” he explained.  “I got to drink when Saturday night comes around.”

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

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

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

“I thought you was on the water-wagon,” was Joe’s greeting.

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

“Don’t take all night about it,” he said roughly.

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

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

Joe hurried, and they drank together.

“The work did it, eh?” Joe queried.

Martin refused to discuss the matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XVIII

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

“I say,” he began.

“Don’t talk to me,” Martin snarled.

“I’m sorry, Joe,” he said at noon, when they knocked off for dinner.

Tears came into the other’s eyes.

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

Martin shook his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A telegram, Joe,” he said.  “Read it.”

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

“You ain’t goin’ back on me, Mart?” he queried hopelessly.

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

“Hold on,” Joe muttered thickly.  “Lemme think.”

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

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

“What are you quitting for?” Martin demanded.

“Same reason as you.”

“But I’m going to sea.  You can’t do that.”

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

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

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

“I was in hospital, once,” Joe corrected.  “It was beautiful.  Typhoid—did I tell you?”

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

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

“I’ll shake you for it,” Martin offered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s a good Indian, that boy,” he muttered.  “A good Indian.”

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

CHAPTER XIX

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

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

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

“Why do you want to do that?” she asked.

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

“But if all you wanted was money, why didn’t you stay in the laundry?”

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

She stared at him with horror in her eyes.

“Do you mean—?” she quavered.

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

“Yes,” he answered.  “Just that.  Several times.”

She shivered and drew away from him.

“No man that I have ever known did that—ever did that.”

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

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

“Some day I shall write it up—‘The Degradation of Toil’ or the ‘Psychology of Drink in the Working-class,’ or something like that for a title.”

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

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

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

“I know what you mean.  But it is impossible.  He if; not—”

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

“Your kind.”  Her mother finished the sentence for her.

Ruth nodded.

“I did not want to say it, but he is not.  He is rough, brutal, strong—too strong.  He has not—”

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

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

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

“It is just that,” she said.  “It has not been his fault, but he has played much with—”

“With pitch?”

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

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

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

Again her mother waited.

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

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

“But he does—already,” she cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, mother.”

Mrs. Morse’s voice was low and sweet as she said, “And that is the children.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That is so good,” she said.

She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, “Aren’t you tired?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXI

Came a beautiful fall day, warm and languid, palpitant with the hush of the changing season, a California Indian summer day, with hazy sun and wandering wisps of breeze that did not stir the slumber of the air.  Filmy purple mists, that were not vapors but fabrics woven of color, hid in the recesses of the hills.  San Francisco lay like a blur of smoke upon her heights.  The intervening bay was a dull sheen of molten metal, whereon sailing craft lay motionless or drifted with the lazy tide.  Far Tamalpais, barely seen in the silver haze, bulked hugely by the Golden Gate, the latter a pale gold pathway under the westering sun.  Beyond, the Pacific, dim and vast, was raising on its sky-line tumbled cloud-masses that swept landward, giving warning of the first blustering breath of winter.

The erasure of summer was at hand.  Yet summer lingered, fading and fainting among her hills, deepening the purple of her valleys, spinning a shroud of haze from waning powers and sated raptures, dying with the calm content of having lived and lived well.  And among the hills, on their favorite knoll, Martin and Ruth sat side by side, their heads bent over the same pages, he reading aloud from the love-sonnets of the woman who had loved Browning as it is given to few men to be loved.

But the reading languished.  The spell of passing beauty all about them was too strong.  The golden year was dying as it had lived, a beautiful and unrepentant voluptuary, and reminiscent rapture and content freighted heavily the air.  It entered into them, dreamy and languorous, weakening the fibres of resolution, suffusing the face of morality, or of judgment, with haze and purple mist.  Martin felt tender and melting, and from time to time warm glows passed over him.  His head was very near to hers, and when wandering phantoms of breeze stirred her hair so that it touched his face, the printed pages swam before his eyes.

“I don’t believe you know a word of what you are reading,” she said once when he had lost his place.

He looked at her with burning eyes, and was on the verge of becoming awkward, when a retort came to his lips.

“I don’t believe you know either.  What was the last sonnet about?”

“I don’t know,” she laughed frankly.  “I’ve already forgotten.  Don’t let us read any more.  The day is too beautiful.”

“It will be our last in the hills for some time,” he announced gravely.  “There’s a storm gathering out there on the sea-rim.”

The book slipped from his hands to the ground, and they sat idly and silently, gazing out over the dreamy bay with eyes that dreamed and did not see.  Ruth glanced sidewise at his neck.  She did not lean toward him.  She was drawn by some force outside of herself and stronger than gravitation, strong as destiny.  It was only an inch to lean, and it was accomplished without volition on her part.  Her shoulder touched his as lightly as a butterfly touches a flower, and just as lightly was the counter-pressure.  She felt his shoulder press hers, and a tremor run through him.  Then was the time for her to draw back.  But she had become an automaton.  Her actions had passed beyond the control of her will—she never thought of control or will in the delicious madness that was upon her.  His arm began to steal behind her and around her.  She waited its slow progress in a torment of delight.  She waited, she knew not for what, panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and a fever of expectancy in all her blood.  The girdling arm lifted higher and drew her toward him, drew her slowly and caressingly.  She could wait no longer.  With a tired sigh, and with an impulsive movement all her own, unpremeditated, spasmodic, she rested her head upon his breast.  His head bent over swiftly, and, as his lips approached, hers flew to meet them.

This must be love, she thought, in the one rational moment that was vouchsafed her.  If it was not love, it was too shameful.  It could be nothing else than love.  She loved the man whose arms were around her and whose lips were pressed to hers.  She pressed more, tightly to him, with a snuggling movement of her body.  And a moment later, tearing herself half out of his embrace, suddenly and exultantly she reached up and placed both hands upon Martin Eden’s sunburnt neck.  So exquisite was the pang of love and desire fulfilled that she uttered a low moan, relaxed her hands, and lay half-swooning in his arms.

Not a word had been spoken, and not a word was spoken for a long time.  Twice he bent and kissed her, and each time her lips met his shyly and her body made its happy, nestling movement.  She clung to him, unable to release herself, and he sat, half supporting her in his arms, as he gazed with unseeing eyes at the blur of the great city across the bay.  For once there were no visions in his brain.  Only colors and lights and glows pulsed there, warm as the day and warm as his love.  He bent over her.  She was speaking.

“When did you love me?” she whispered.

“From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid eye on you.  I was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has passed since then I have only grown the madder.  I am maddest, now, dear.  I am almost a lunatic, my head is so turned with joy.”

“I am glad I am a woman, Martin—dear,” she said, after a long sigh.

He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then asked:-

“And you?  When did you first know?”

“Oh, I knew it all the time, almost, from the first.”

“And I have been as blind as a bat!” he cried, a ring of vexation in his voice.  “I never dreamed it until just how, when I—when I kissed you.”

“I didn’t mean that.”  She drew herself partly away and looked at him.  “I meant I knew you loved almost from the first.”

“And you?” he demanded.

“It came to me suddenly.”  She was speaking very slowly, her eyes warm and fluttery and melting, a soft flush on her cheeks that did not go away.  “I never knew until just now when—you put your arms around me.  And I never expected to marry you, Martin, not until just now.  How did you make me love you?”

“I don’t know,” he laughed, “unless just by loving you, for I loved you hard enough to melt the heart of a stone, much less the heart of the living, breathing woman you are.”

“This is so different from what I thought love would be,” she announced irrelevantly.

“What did you think it would be like?”

“I didn’t think it would be like this.”  She was looking into his eyes at the moment, but her own dropped as she continued, “You see, I didn’t know what this was like.”

He offered to draw her toward him again, but it was no more than a tentative muscular movement of the girdling arm, for he feared that he might be greedy.  Then he felt her body yielding, and once again she was close in his arms and lips were pressed on lips.

“What will my people say?” she queried, with sudden apprehension, in one of the pauses.

“I don’t know.  We can find out very easily any time we are so minded.”

“But if mamma objects?  I am sure I am afraid to tell her.”

“Let me tell her,” he volunteered valiantly.  “I think your mother does not like me, but I can win her around.  A fellow who can win you can win anything.  And if we don’t—”

“Yes?”

“Why, we’ll have each other.  But there’s no danger not winning your mother to our marriage.  She loves you too well.”

“I should not like to break her heart,” Ruth said pensively.

He felt like assuring her that mothers’ hearts were not so easily broken, but instead he said, “And love is the greatest thing in the world.”

“Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me.  I am frightened now, when I think of you and of what you have been.  You must be very, very good to me.  Remember, after all, that I am only a child.  I never loved before.”

“Nor I.  We are both children together.  And we are fortunate above most, for we have found our first love in each other.”

“But that is impossible!” she cried, withdrawing herself from his arms with a swift, passionate movement.  “Impossible for you.  You have been a sailor, and sailors, I have heard, are—are—”

Her voice faltered and died away.

“Are addicted to having a wife in every port?” he suggested.  “Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” she answered in a low voice.

“But that is not love.”  He spoke authoritatively.  “I have been in many ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw you that first night.  Do you know, when I said good night and went away, I was almost arrested.”

“Arrested?”

“Yes.  The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too—with love for you.”

“But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for you, and we have strayed away from the point.”

“I said that I never loved anybody but you,” he replied.  “You are my first, my very first.”

“And yet you have been a sailor,” she objected.

“But that doesn’t prevent me from loving you the first.”

“And there have been women—other women—oh!”

And to Martin Eden’s supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of tears that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive away.  And all the while there was running through his head Kipling’s line: “And the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins.”  It was true, he decided; though the novels he had read had led him to believe otherwise.  His idea, for which the novels were responsible, had been that only formal proposals obtained in the upper classes.  It was all right enough, down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each other by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable.  Yet the novels were wrong.  Here was a proof of it.  The same pressures and caresses, unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious with the girls of the working-class, were equally efficacious with the girls above the working-class.  They were all of the same flesh, after all, sisters under their skins; and he might have known as much himself had he remembered his Spencer.  As he held Ruth in his arms and soothed her, he took great consolation in the thought that the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were pretty much alike under their skins.  It brought Ruth closer to him, made her possible.  Her dear flesh was as anybody’s flesh, as his flesh.  There was no bar to their marriage.  Class difference was the only difference, and class was extrinsic.  It could be shaken off.  A slave, he had read, had risen to the Roman purple.  That being so, then he could rise to Ruth.  Under her purity, and saintliness, and culture, and ethereal beauty of soul, she was, in things fundamentally human, just like Lizzie Connolly and all Lizzie Connollys.  All that was possible of them was possible of her.  She could love, and hate, maybe have hysterics; and she could certainly be jealous, as she was jealous now, uttering her last sobs in his arms.

“Besides, I am older than you,” she remarked suddenly, opening her eyes and looking up at him, “three years older.”

“Hush, you are only a child, and I am forty years older than you, in experience,” was his answer.

In truth, they were children together, so far as love was concerned, and they were as naive and immature in the expression of their love as a pair of children, and this despite the fact that she was crammed with a university education and that his head was full of scientific philosophy and the hard facts of life.

They sat on through the passing glory of the day, talking as lovers are prone to talk, marvelling at the wonder of love and at destiny that had flung them so strangely together, and dogmatically believing that they loved to a degree never attained by lovers before.  And they returned insistently, again and again, to a rehearsal of their first impressions of each other and to hopeless attempts to analyze just precisely what they felt for each other and how much there was of it.

The cloud-masses on the western horizon received the descending sun, and the circle of the sky turned to rose, while the zenith glowed with the same warm color.  The rosy light was all about them, flooding over them, as she sang, “Good-by, Sweet Day.”  She sang softly, leaning in the cradle of his arm, her hands in his, their hearts in each other’s hands.

CHAPTER XXII

Mrs. Morse did not require a mother’s intuition to read the advertisement in Ruth’s face when she returned home.  The flush that would not leave the cheeks told the simple story, and more eloquently did the eyes, large and bright, reflecting an unmistakable inward glory.

“What has happened?” Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till Ruth had gone to bed.

“You know?” Ruth queried, with trembling lips.

For reply, her mother’s arm went around her, and a hand was softly caressing her hair.

“He did not speak,” she blurted out.  “I did not intend that it should happen, and I would never have let him speak—only he didn’t speak.”

“But if he did not speak, then nothing could have happened, could it?”

“But it did, just the same.”

“In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling about?” Mrs. Morse was bewildered.  “I don’t think I know what happened, after all.  What did happen?”

Ruth looked at her mother in surprise.

“I thought you knew.  Why, we’re engaged, Martin and I.”

Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation.

“No, he didn’t speak,” Ruth explained.  “He just loved me, that was all.  I was as surprised as you are.  He didn’t say a word.  He just put his arm around me.  And—and I was not myself.  And he kissed me, and I kissed him.  I couldn’t help it.  I just had to.  And then I knew I loved him.”

She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of her mother’s kiss, but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent.

“It is a dreadful accident, I know,” Ruth recommenced with a sinking voice.  “And I don’t know how you will ever forgive me.  But I couldn’t help it.  I did not dream that I loved him until that moment.  And you must tell father for me.”

“Would it not be better not to tell your father?  Let me see Martin Eden, and talk with him, and explain.  He will understand and release you.”

“No! no!” Ruth cried, starting up.  “I do not want to be released.  I love him, and love is very sweet.  I am going to marry him—of course, if you will let me.”

“We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father and I—oh, no, no; no man picked out for you, or anything like that.  Our plans go no farther than your marrying some man in your own station in life, a good and honorable gentleman, whom you will select yourself, when you love him.”

“But I love Martin already,” was the plaintive protest.

“We would not influence your choice in any way; but you are our daughter, and we could not bear to see you make a marriage such as this.  He has nothing but roughness and coarseness to offer you in exchange for all that is refined and delicate in you.  He is no match for you in any way.  He could not support you.  We have no foolish ideas about wealth, but comfort is another matter, and our daughter should at least marry a man who can give her that—and not a penniless adventurer, a sailor, a cowboy, a smuggler, and Heaven knows what else, who, in addition to everything, is hare-brained and irresponsible.”

Ruth was silent.  Every word she recognized as true.

“He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.  A man thinking of marriage should be preparing for marriage.  But not he.  As I have said, and I know you agree with me, he is irresponsible.  And why should he not be?  It is the way of sailors.  He has never learned to be economical or temperate.  The spendthrift years have marked him.  It is not his fault, of course, but that does not alter his nature.  And have you thought of the years of licentiousness he inevitably has lived?  Have you thought of that, daughter?  You know what marriage means.”

Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother.

“I have thought.”  Ruth waited a long time for the thought to frame itself.  “And it is terrible.  It sickens me to think of it.  I told you it was a dreadful accident, my loving him; but I can’t help myself.  Could you help loving father?  Then it is the same with me.  There is something in me, in him—I never knew it was there until to-day—but it is there, and it makes me love him.  I never thought to love him, but, you see, I do,” she concluded, a certain faint triumph in her voice.

They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion agreeing to wait an indeterminate time without doing anything.

The same conclusion was reached, a little later that night, between Mrs.