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

Eden’s address, haven’t you, Mr. Ends?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is too bad—” Mr. Ford began.

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

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

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

“Inside out with it,” Martin commanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Robber!” Mr. Ends snarled after him.

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

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

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

Martin grinned as he picked himself up.

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

More laughter greeted this.

“I must say, Mr. Eden,” the editor of The Hornet called down, “that for a poet you can go some yourself.  Where did you learn that right cross—if I may ask?”

“Where you learned that half-Nelson,” Martin answered.  “Anyway, you’re going to have a black eye.”

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

“I’ll go you if I lose,” Martin accepted.

And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably agreeing that the battle was to the strong, and that the fifteen dollars for “The Peri and the Pearl” belonged by right to The Hornet’s editorial staff.

CHAPTER XXXIV

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

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

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

“Frankly, what do you think of it?”

“I—I don’t know,” she, answered.  “Will it—do you think it will sell?”

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

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

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

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

“Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way.”

“But it is not good taste.”

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

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

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

“Then you’ll come!” she cried joyously.  “That was what I came to find out.”

“Come?” he muttered absently.  “Where?”

“Why, to dinner to-morrow.  You know you said you’d recover your suit if you got that money.”

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

“Then you won’t come?”

He looked down at his clothing.

“I can’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXXV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brissenden grinned.  “There’s not a magazine in Christendom that would dare to publish it—you know that.”

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

“I’d like to take you up on the proposition.”

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

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

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

“It’s my beauty.”

“Don’t be selfish.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXXVI

“Come on,—I’ll show you the real dirt,” Brissenden said to him, one evening in January.

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

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

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

“And what the deuce is that?” Martin asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who is Kreis?” Martin asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I deny—” Kreis started to interrupt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XXXVII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My young man—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-

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

“We’ll make a good Republican out of you yet,” said Judge Blount.

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

But Mr.