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

Morse was not content.  He did not like the laziness and the disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose nature he had no understanding.  So he turned the conversation to Herbert Spencer.  Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher’s name, listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe against Spencer.  From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as much as to say, “There, my boy, you see.”

“Chattering daws,” Martin muttered under his breath, and went on talking with Ruth and Arthur.

But the long day and the “real dirt” of the night before were telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what had made him angry when he read it on the car.

“What is the matter?” Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he was making to contain himself.

“There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its prophet,” Judge Blount was saying at that moment.

Martin turned upon him.

“A cheap judgment,” he remarked quietly.  “I heard it first in the City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better.  I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it nauseates me.  You ought to be ashamed of yourself.  To hear that great and noble man’s name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a cesspool.  You are disgusting.”

It was like a thunderbolt.  Judge Blount glared at him with apoplectic countenance, and silence reigned.  Mr. Morse was secretly pleased.  He could see that his daughter was shocked.  It was what he wanted to do—to bring out the innate ruffianism of this man he did not like.

Ruth’s hand sought Martin’s beseechingly under the table, but his blood was up.  He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and fraud of those who sat in the high places.  A Superior Court Judge!  It was only several years before that he had looked up from the mire at such glorious entities and deemed them gods.

Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter understood was for the benefit of the ladies.  Even this added to his anger.  Was there no honesty in the world?

“You can’t discuss Spencer with me,” he cried.  “You do not know any more about Spencer than do his own countrymen.  But it is no fault of yours, I grant.  It is just a phase of the contemptible ignorance of the times.  I ran across a sample of it on my way here this evening.  I was reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer.  You should read it.  It is accessible to all men.  You can buy it in any book-store or draw it from the public library.  You would feel ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance of that noble man compared with what Saleeby has collected on the subject.  It is a record of shame that would shame your shame.”

“‘The philosopher of the half-educated,’ he was called by an academic Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere he breathed.  I don’t think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but there have been critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who have read no more than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his followers to adduce one single idea from all his writings—from Herbert Spencer’s writings, the man who has impressed the stamp of his genius over the whole field of scientific research and modern thought; the father of psychology; the man who revolutionized pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French peasant is taught the three R’s according to principles laid down by him.  And the little gnats of men sting his memory when they get their very bread and butter from the technical application of his ideas.  What little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to him.  It is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent.”

“And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford—a man who sits in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount—has said that Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker.  Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them!  ‘“First Principles” is not wholly destitute of a certain literary power,’ said one of them.  And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker.  Yappers and blatherskites!  Yappers and blatherskites!”

Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence.  Everybody in Ruth’s family looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement, and they were horrified at Martin’s outbreak.  The remainder of the dinner passed like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining their talk to each other, and the rest of the conversation being extremely desultory.  Then afterward, when Ruth and Martin were alone, there was a scene.

“You are unbearable,” she wept.

But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, “The beasts!  The beasts!”

When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-

“By telling the truth about him?”

“I don’t care whether it was true or not,” she insisted.  “There are certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult anybody.”

“Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?” Martin demanded.  “Surely to assault truth is a more serious misdemeanor than to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge’s.  He did worse than that.  He blackened the name of a great, noble man who is dead.  Oh, the beasts!  The beasts!”

His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him.  Never had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and unreasonable to her comprehension.  And yet, through her very terror ran the fibres of fascination that had drawn and that still drew her to him—that had compelled her to lean towards him, and, in that mad, culminating moment, lay her hands upon his neck.  She was hurt and outraged by what had taken place, and yet she lay in his arms and quivered while he went on muttering, “The beasts!  The beasts!”  And she still lay there when he said: “I’ll not bother your table again, dear.  They do not like me, and it is wrong of me to thrust my objectionable presence upon them.  Besides, they are just as objectionable to me.  Faugh!  They are sickening.  And to think of it, I dreamed in my innocence that the persons who sat in the high places, who lived in fine houses and had educations and bank accounts, were worth while!”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

“Come on, let’s go down to the local.”

So spoke Brissenden, faint from a hemorrhage of half an hour before—the second hemorrhage in three days.  The perennial whiskey glass was in his hands, and he drained it with shaking fingers.

“What do I want with socialism?” Martin demanded.

“Outsiders are allowed five-minute speeches,” the sick man urged.  “Get up and spout.  Tell them why you don’t want socialism.  Tell them what you think about them and their ghetto ethics.  Slam Nietzsche into them and get walloped for your pains.  Make a scrap of it.  It will do them good.  Discussion is what they want, and what you want, too.  You see, I’d like to see you a socialist before I’m gone.  It will give you a sanction for your existence.  It is the one thing that will save you in the time of disappointment that is coming to you.”

“I never can puzzle out why you, of all men, are a socialist,” Martin pondered.  “You detest the crowd so.  Surely there is nothing in the canaille to recommend it to your aesthetic soul.”  He pointed an accusing finger at the whiskey glass which the other was refilling.  “Socialism doesn’t seem to save you.”

“I’m very sick,” was the answer.  “With you it is different.  You have health and much to live for, and you must be handcuffed to life somehow.  As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist.  I’ll tell you.  It is because Socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback.  The slaves won’t stand for it.  They are too many, and willy-nilly they’ll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride.  You can’t get away from them, and you’ll have to swallow the whole slave-morality.  It’s not a nice mess, I’ll allow.  But it’s been a-brewing and swallow it you must.  You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas.  The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar.  Of course I don’t like the crowd, but what’s a poor chap to do?  We can’t have the man on horseback, and anything is preferable to the timid swine that now rule.  But come on, anyway.  I’m loaded to the guards now, and if I sit here any longer, I’ll get drunk.  And you know the doctor says—damn the doctor!  I’ll fool him yet.”

It was Sunday night, and they found the small hall packed by the Oakland socialists, chiefly members of the working class.  The speaker, a clever Jew, won Martin’s admiration at the same time that he aroused his antagonism.  The man’s stooped and narrow shoulders and weazened chest proclaimed him the true child of the crowded ghetto, and strong on Martin was the age-long struggle of the feeble, wretched slaves against the lordly handful of men who had ruled over them and would rule over them to the end of time.  To Martin this withered wisp of a creature was a symbol.  He was the figure that stood forth representative of the whole miserable mass of weaklings and inefficients who perished according to biological law on the ragged confines of life.  They were the unfit.  In spite of their cunning philosophy and of their antlike proclivities for coöperation, Nature rejected them for the exceptional man.  Out of the plentiful spawn of life she flung from her prolific hand she selected only the best.  It was by the same method that men, aping her, bred race-horses and cucumbers.  Doubtless, a creator of a Cosmos could have devised a better method; but creatures of this particular Cosmos must put up with this particular method.  Of course, they could squirm as they perished, as the socialists squirmed, as the speaker on the platform and the perspiring crowd were squirming even now as they counselled together for some new device with which to minimize the penalties of living and outwit the Cosmos.

So Martin thought, and so he spoke when Brissenden urged him to give them hell.  He obeyed the mandate, walking up to the platform, as was the custom, and addressing the chairman.  He began in a low voice, haltingly, forming into order the ideas which had surged in his brain while the Jew was speaking.  In such meetings five minutes was the time allotted to each speaker; but when Martin’s five minutes were up, he was in full stride, his attack upon their doctrines but half completed.  He had caught their interest, and the audience urged the chairman by acclamation to extend Martin’s time.  They appreciated him as a foeman worthy of their intellect, and they listened intently, following every word.  He spoke with fire and conviction, mincing no words in his attack upon the slaves and their morality and tactics and frankly alluding to his hearers as the slaves in question.  He quoted Spencer and Malthus, and enunciated the biological law of development.

“And so,” he concluded, in a swift résumé, “no state composed of the slave-types can endure.  The old law of development still holds.  In the struggle for existence, as I have shown, the strong and the progeny of the strong tend to survive, while the weak and the progeny of the weak are crushed and tend to perish.  The result is that the strong and the progeny of the strong survive, and, so long as the struggle obtains, the strength of each generation increases.  That is development.  But you slaves—it is too bad to be slaves, I grant—but you slaves dream of a society where the law of development will be annulled, where no weaklings and inefficients will perish, where every inefficient will have as much as he wants to eat as many times a day as he desires, and where all will marry and have progeny—the weak as well as the strong.  What will be the result?  No longer will the strength and life-value of each generation increase.  On the contrary, it will diminish.  There is the Nemesis of your slave philosophy.  Your society of slaves—of, by, and for, slaves—must inevitably weaken and go to pieces as the life which composes it weakens and goes to pieces.

“Remember, I am enunciating biology and not sentimental ethics.  No state of slaves can stand—”

“How about the United States?” a man yelled from the audience.

“And how about it?” Martin retorted.  “The thirteen colonies threw off their rulers and formed the Republic so-called.  The slaves were their own masters.  There were no more masters of the sword.  But you couldn’t get along without masters of some sort, and there arose a new set of masters—not the great, virile, noble men, but the shrewd and spidery traders and money-lenders.  And they enslaved you over again—but not frankly, as the true, noble men would do with weight of their own right arms, but secretly, by spidery machinations and by wheedling and cajolery and lies.  They have purchased your slave judges, they have debauched your slave legislatures, and they have forced to worse horrors than chattel slavery your slave boys and girls.  Two million of your children are toiling to-day in this trader-oligarchy of the United States.  Ten millions of you slaves are not properly sheltered nor properly fed.”

“But to return.  I have shown that no society of slaves can endure, because, in its very nature, such society must annul the law of development.  No sooner can a slave society be organized than deterioration sets in.  It is easy for you to talk of annulling the law of development, but where is the new law of development that will maintain your strength?  Formulate it.  Is it already formulated?  Then state it.”

Martin took his seat amidst an uproar of voices.  A score of men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from the chair.  And one by one, encouraged by vociferous applause, speaking with fire and enthusiasm and excited gestures, they replied to the attack.  It was a wild night—but it was wild intellectually, a battle of ideas.  Some strayed from the point, but most of the speakers replied directly to Martin.  They shook him with lines of thought that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws.  They were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the chairman rapped and pounded for order.

It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of journalism for sensation.  He was not a bright cub reporter.  He was merely facile and glib.  He was too dense to follow the discussion.  In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class.  Also, he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and dictated the policies of nations and newspapers.  Further, he had an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect reporter who is able to make something—even a great deal—out of nothing.

He did not know what all the talk was about.  It was not necessary.  Words like revolution gave him his cue.  Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word revolution.  He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism into the most lurid, red-shirt socialist utterance.  The cub reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid on the local color—wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths, yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning’s paper.  It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists.  He ran over the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and, though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he tossed the paper aside with a laugh.

“Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious,” he said that afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived and dropped limply into the one chair.

“But what do you care?” Brissenden asked.  “Surely you don’t desire the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?”

Martin thought for a while, then said:-

“No, I really don’t care for their approval, not a whit.  On the other hand, it’s very likely to make my relations with Ruth’s family a trifle awkward.  Her father always contended I was a socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief.  Not that I care for his opinion—but what’s the odds?  I want to read you what I’ve been doing to-day.  It’s ‘Overdue,’ of course, and I’m just about halfway through.”

He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting the oil-burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze wandered on to Martin.

“Sit down,” Brissenden said.

Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to broach his business.

“I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I’ve come to interview you,” he began.

Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.

“A brother socialist?” the reporter asked, with a quick glance at Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and dying man.

“And he wrote that report,” Martin said softly.  “Why, he is only a boy!”

“Why don’t you poke him?” Brissenden asked.  “I’d give a thousand dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes.”

The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him and around him and at him.  But he had been commended for his brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader of the organized menace to society.

“You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?” he said.  “I’ve a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower.  Then we can have the interview afterward.”

“A photographer,” Brissenden said meditatively.  “Poke him, Martin!  Poke him!”

“I guess I’m getting old,” was the answer.  “I know I ought, but I really haven’t the heart.  It doesn’t seem to matter.”

“For his mother’s sake,” Brissenden urged.

“It’s worth considering,” Martin replied; “but it doesn’t seem worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me.  You see, it does take energy to give a fellow a poking.  Besides, what does it matter?”

“That’s right—that’s the way to take it,” the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door.

“But it wasn’t true, not a word of what he wrote,” Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden.

“It was just in a general way a description, you understand,” the cub ventured, “and besides, it’s good advertising.  That’s what counts.  It was a favor to you.”

“It’s good advertising, Martin, old boy,” Brissenden repeated solemnly.

“And it was a favor to me—think of that!” was Martin’s contribution.

“Let me see—where were you born, Mr. Eden?” the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention.

“He doesn’t take notes,” said Brissenden.  “He remembers it all.”

“That is sufficient for me.”  The cub was trying not to look worried.  “No decent reporter needs to bother with notes.”

“That was sufficient—for last night.”  But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly.  “Martin, if you don’t poke him, I’ll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment.”

“How will a spanking do?” Martin asked.

Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.

The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees.

“Now don’t bite,” Martin warned, “or else I’ll have to punch your face.  It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face.”

His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm.  The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite.  Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, “Here, just let me swat him once.”

“Sorry my hand played out,” Martin said, when at last he desisted.  “It is quite numb.”

He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.

“I’ll have you arrested for this,” he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks.  “I’ll make you sweat for this.  You’ll see.”

“The pretty thing,” Martin remarked.  “He doesn’t realize that he has entered upon the downward path.  It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one’s fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn’t know it.”

“He has to come to us to be told,” Brissenden filled in a pause.

“Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured.  My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now.  The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel.”

“But there is yet time,” quoth Brissenden.  “Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him.  Why didn’t you let me swat him just once?  I’d like to have had a hand in it.”

“I’ll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes,” sobbed the erring soul.

“No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak.”  Martin shook his head lugubriously.  “I’m afraid I’ve numbed my hand in vain.  The young man cannot reform.  He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man.  He has no conscience.  That alone will make him great.”

With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched.

In the next morning’s paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him.  “We are the sworn enemies of society,” he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview.  “No, we are not anarchists but socialists.”  When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation.  His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described.  Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes.

He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches.  The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death’s-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement in some fortress dungeon.

The cub had been industrious.  He had scurried around and nosed out Martin’s family history, and procured a photograph of Higginbotham’s Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself standing out in front.  That gentleman was depicted as an intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his brother-in-law’s socialistic views, and no patience with the brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn’t take a job when it was offered to him and who would go to jail yet.  Hermann Von Schmidt, Marian’s husband, had likewise been interviewed.  He had called Martin the black sheep of the family and repudiated him.  “He tried to sponge off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick,” Von Schmidt had said to the reporter.  “He knows better than to come bumming around here.  A man who won’t work is no good, take that from me.”

This time Martin was genuinely angry.  Brissenden looked upon the affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth.  As for her father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement.  How much he would make of it he was soon to realize.  The afternoon mail brought a letter from Ruth.  Martin opened it with a premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when he had received it from the postman.  As he read, mechanically his hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old cigarette days.  He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a cigarette.

It was not a passionate letter.  There were no touches of anger in it.  But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last, was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment.  She had expected better of him.  She had thought he had got over his youthful wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while to enable him to live seriously and decently.  And now her father and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement be broken.  That they were justified in this she could not but admit.  Their relation could never be a happy one.  It had been unfortunate from the first.  But one regret she voiced in the whole letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin.  “If only you had settled down to some position and attempted to make something of yourself,” she wrote.  “But it was not to be.  Your past life had been too wild and irregular.  I can understand that you are not to be blamed.  You could act only according to your nature and your early training.  So I do not blame you, Martin.  Please remember that.  It was simply a mistake.  As father and mother have contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be happy because it was discovered not too late.” . . “There is no use trying to see me,” she said toward the last.  “It would be an unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother.  I feel, as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry.  I shall have to do much living to atone for it.”

He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat down and replied.  He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth.  Toward the end of the letter he was God’s own lover pleading passionately for love.  “Please answer,” he said, “and in your answer you have to tell me but one thing.  Do you love me?  That is all—the answer to that one question.”

But no answer came the next day, nor the next.  “Overdue” lay untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned manuscripts under the table grew larger.  For the first time Martin’s glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed through long, restless nights.  Three times he called at the Morse home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell.  Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and, though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his troubles.

For Martin’s troubles were many.  The aftermath of the cub reporter’s deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated.  The Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him—carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin’s account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it.  The talk in the neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against Martin ran high.  No one would have anything to do with a socialist traitor.  Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained loyal.  The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe distances they called him “hobo” and “bum.”  The Silva tribe, however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite the order of the day and added to Maria’s perplexities and troubles.

Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and learned what he knew could not be otherwise—that Bernard Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house.

“Why don’t you go away, Martin?” Gertrude had begged.  “Go away and get a job somewhere and steady down.  Afterwards, when this all blows over, you can come back.”

Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations.  How could he explain?  He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people.  He could never cross it and explain to them his position,—the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism.  There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.  Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job.  That was their first word and their last.  It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas.  Get a job!  Go to work!  Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.  Small wonder the world belonged to the strong.  The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery.  A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped.

He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the pawnbroker.

“Don’t come near Bernard now,” she admonished him.  “After a few months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job of drivin’ delivery-wagon for him.  Any time you want me, just send for me an’ I’ll come.  Don’t forget.”

She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait.  As he watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter.  The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family.  And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that slave was his sister Gertrude.  He grinned savagely at the paradox.  A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along—ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what his pity for his sister really was.  The true noble men were above pity and compassion.  Pity and compassion had been generated in the subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings.

CHAPTER XL

“Overdue” still continued to lie forgotten on the table.  Every manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table.  Only one manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden’s “Ephemera.”  His bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people were once more worrying about the rent.  But such things no longer bothered him.  He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was found his life must stand still.

After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened.  He met Ruth on the street.  It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman, and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted to wave him aside.

“If you interfere with my sister, I’ll call an officer,” Norman threatened.  “She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence is insult.”

“If you persist, you’ll have to call that officer, and then you’ll get your name in the papers,” Martin answered grimly.  “And now, get out of my way and get the officer if you want to.  I’m going to talk with Ruth.”

“I want to have it from your own lips,” he said to her.

She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.

“The question I asked in my letter,” he prompted.

Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift look.

She shook her head.

“Is all this of your own free will?” he demanded.

“It is.”  She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation.  “It is of my own free will.  You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet my friends.  They are all talking about me, I know.  That is all I can tell you.  You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you again.”

“Friends!  Gossip!  Newspaper misreports!  Surely such things are not stronger than love!  I can only believe that you never loved me.”

A blush drove the pallor from her face.

“After what has passed?” she said faintly.  “Martin, you do not know what you are saying.  I am not common.”

“You see, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with you,” Norman blurted out, starting on with her.

Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.

It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it.  He found himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an awakened somnambulist.  He noticed “Overdue” lying on the table and drew up his chair and reached for his pen.  There was in his nature a logical compulsion toward completeness.  Here was something undone.  It had been deferred against the completion of something else.  Now that something else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until it was finished.  What he would do next he did not know.  All that he did know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained.  A period had been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion.  He was not curious about the future.  He would soon enough find out what it held in store for him.  Whatever it was, it did not matter.  Nothing seemed to matter.

For five days he toiled on at “Overdue,” going nowhere, seeing nobody, and eating meagrely.  On the morning of the sixth day the postman brought him a thin letter from the editor of The Parthenon.  A glance told him that “Ephemera” was accepted.  “We have submitted the poem to Mr. Cartwright Bruce,” the editor went on to say, “and he has reported so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go.  As an earnest of our pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it for the August number, our July number being already made up.  Kindly extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden.  Please send by return mail his photograph and biographical data.  If our honorarium is unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider a fair price.”

Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph.  Then, too, there was Brissenden’s consent to be gained.  Well, he had been right, after all.  Here was one magazine editor who knew real poetry when he saw it.  And the price was splendid, even though it was for the poem of a century.  As for Cartwright Bruce, Martin knew that he was the one critic for whose opinions Brissenden had any respect.

Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the houses and cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that he was not more elated over his friend’s success and over his own signal victory.  The one critic in the United States had pronounced favorably on the poem, while his own contention that good stuff could find its way into the magazines had proved correct.  But enthusiasm had lost its spring in him, and he found that he was more anxious to see Brissenden than he was to carry the good news.  The acceptance of The Parthenon had recalled to him that during his five days’ devotion to “Overdue” he had not heard from Brissenden nor even thought about him.  For the first time Martin realized the daze he had been in, and he felt shame for having forgotten his friend.  But even the shame did not burn very sharply.  He was numb to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones concerned in the writing of “Overdue.”  So far as other affairs were concerned, he had been in a trance.  For that matter, he was still in a trance.  All this life through which the electric car whirred seemed remote and unreal, and he would have experienced little interest and less shook if the great stone steeple of the church he passed had suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon his head.

At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden’s room, and hurried down again.  The room was empty.  All luggage was gone.

“Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?” he asked the clerk, who looked at him curiously for a moment.

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked.

Martin shook his head.

“Why, the papers were full of it.  He was found dead in bed.  Suicide.  Shot himself through the head.”

“Is he buried yet?” Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one else’s voice, from a long way off, asking the question.

“No.  The body was shipped East after the inquest.  Lawyers engaged by his people saw to the arrangements.”

“They were quick about it, I must say,” Martin commented.

“Oh, I don’t know.  It happened five days ago.”

“Five days ago?”

“Yes, five days ago.”

“Oh,” Martin said as he turned and went out.

At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram to The Parthenon, advising them to proceed with the publication of the poem.  He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare home, so he sent the message collect.

Once in his room, he resumed his writing.  The days and nights came and went, and he sat at his table and wrote on.  He went nowhere, save to the pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when he was hungry and had something to cook, and just as methodically went without when he had nothing to cook.  Composed as the story was, in advance, chapter by chapter, he nevertheless saw and developed an opening that increased the power of it, though it necessitated twenty thousand additional words.  It was not that there was any vital need that the thing should be well done, but that his artistic canons compelled him to do it well.  He worked on in the daze, strangely detached from the world around him, feeling like a familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former life.  He remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the spirit of a man who was dead and who did not have sense enough to know it; and he paused for the moment to wonder if he were really dead did unaware of it.

Came the day when “Overdue” was finished.  The agent of the type-writer firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while Martin, on the one chair, typed the last pages of the final chapter.  “Finis,” he wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it was indeed finis.  He watched the type-writer carried out the door with a feeling of relief, then went over and lay down on the bed.  He was faint from hunger.  Food had not passed his lips in thirty-six hours, but he did not think about it.  He lay on his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or stupor slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness.  Half in delirium, he began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden had been fond of quoting to him.  Maria, listening anxiously outside his door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance.  The words in themselves were not significant to her, but the fact that he was saying them was.  “I have done,” was the burden of the poem.

“‘I have done—
Put by the lute.
Song and singing soon are over
As the airy shades that hover
In among the purple clover.
I have done—
Put by the lute.
Once I sang as early thrushes
Sing among the dewy bushes;
Now I’m mute.
I am like a weary linnet,
For my throat has no song in it;
I have had my singing minute.
I have done.
Put by the lute.’”

Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove, where she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion’s share of chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from the bottom of the pot.  Martin roused himself and sat up and began to eat, between spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been talking in his sleep and that he did not have any fever.

After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the edge of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw nothing until the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the morning’s mail and which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into his darkened brain.  It is The Parthenon, he thought, the August Parthenon, and it must contain “Ephemera.”  If only Brissenden were here to see!

He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.  “Ephemera” had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and Beardsley-like margin decorations.  On one side of the head-piece was Brissenden’s photograph, on the other side was the photograph of Sir John Value, the British Ambassador.  A preliminary editorial note quoted Sir John Value as saying that there were no poets in America, and the publication of “Ephemera” was The Parthenon’s.  “There, take that, Sir John Value!”  Cartwright Bruce was described as the greatest critic in America, and he was quoted as saying that “Ephemera” was the greatest poem ever written in America.  And finally, the editor’s foreword ended with: “We have not yet made up our minds entirely as to the merits of “Ephemera”; perhaps we shall never be able to do so.  But we have read it often, wondering at the words and their arrangement, wondering where Mr. Brissenden got them, and how he could fasten them together.”  Then followed the poem.

“Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man,” Martin murmured, letting the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.

The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted apathetically that he was not nauseated very much.  He wished he could get angry, but did not have energy enough to try.  He was too numb.  His blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal flow of indignation.  After all, what did it matter?  It was on a par with all the rest that Brissenden had condemned in bourgeois society.

“Poor Briss,” Martin communed; “he would never have forgiven me.”

Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which had once contained type-writer paper.  Going through its contents, he drew forth eleven poems which his friend had written.  These he tore lengthwise and crosswise and dropped into the waste basket.  He did it languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of the bed staring blankly before him.

How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white.  It was curious.  But as he watched it grow in definiteness he saw that it was a coral reef smoking in the white Pacific surges.  Next, in the line of breakers he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe.  In the stern he saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth dipping a flashing paddle.  He recognized him.  He was Moti, the youngest son of Tati, the chief, and this was Tahiti, and beyond that smoking reef lay the sweet land of Papara and the chief’s grass house by the river’s mouth.  It was the end of the day, and Moti was coming home from the fishing.  He was waiting for the rush of a big breaker whereon to jump the reef.  Then he saw himself, sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the past, dipping a paddle that waited Moti’s word to dig in like mad when the turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them.  Next, he was no longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out, they were both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the steep face of the flying turquoise.  Under the bow the water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was filled with driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long-echoing roar, and the canoe floated on the placid water of the lagoon.  Moti laughed and shook the salt water from his eyes, and together they paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where Tati’s grass walls through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the setting sun.

The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of his squalid room.  He strove in vain to see Tahiti again.  He knew there was singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing in the moonlight, but he could not see them.  He could see only the littered writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had stood, and the unwashed window-pane.  He closed his eyes with a groan, and slept.

CHAPTER XLI

He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the postman on his morning round.  Martin felt tired and passive, and went through his letters aimlessly.  One thin envelope, from a robber magazine, contained for twenty-two dollars.  He had been dunning for it for a year and a half.  He noted its amount apathetically.  The old-time thrill at receiving a publisher’s check was gone.  Unlike his earlier checks, this one was not pregnant with promise of great things to come.  To him it was a check for twenty-two dollars, that was all, and it would buy him something to eat.

Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in payment for some humorous verse which had been accepted months before.  It was for ten dollars.  An idea came to him, which he calmly considered.  He did not know what he was going to do, and he felt in no hurry to do anything.  In the meantime he must live.  Also he owed numerous debts.  Would it not be a paying investment to put stamps on the huge pile of manuscripts under the table and start them on their travels again?  One or two of them might be accepted.  That would help him to live.  He decided on the investment, and, after he had cashed the checks at the bank down in Oakland, he bought ten dollars’ worth of postage stamps.  The thought of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room was repulsive to him.  For the first time he refused to consider his debts.  He knew that in his room he could manufacture a substantial breakfast at a cost of from fifteen to twenty cents.  But, instead, he went into the Forum Café and ordered a breakfast that cost two dollars.  He tipped the waiter a quarter, and spent fifty cents for a package of Egyptian cigarettes.  It was the first time he had smoked since Ruth had asked him to stop.  But he could see now no reason why he should not, and besides, he wanted to smoke.  And what did the money matter?  For five cents he could have bought a package of Durham and brown papers and rolled forty cigarettes—but what of it?  Money had no meaning to him now except what it would immediately buy.  He was chartless and rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved the least living, and it was living that hurt.

The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every night.  Though now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the Japanese restaurants where meals were served for ten cents, his wasted body filled out, as did the hollows in his cheeks.  He no longer abused himself with short sleep, overwork, and overstudy.  He wrote nothing, and the books were closed.  He walked much, out in the hills, and loafed long hours in the quiet parks.  He had no friends nor acquaintances, nor did he make any.  He had no inclination.  He was waiting for some impulse, from he knew not where, to put his stopped life into motion again.  In the meantime his life remained run down, planless, and empty and idle.

Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the “real dirt.”  But at the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance, he recoiled and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto.  He was frightened at the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and he fled furtively, for fear that some one of the “real dirt” might chance along and recognize him.

Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how “Ephemera” was being maltreated.  It had made a hit.  But what a hit!  Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether or not it was really poetry.  The local papers had taken it up, and daily there appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious editorials, and serious letters from subscribers.  Helen Della Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and rolling of tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the United States) denied Brissenden a seat beside her on Pegasus and wrote voluminous letters to the public, proving that he was no poet.

The Parthenon came out in its next number patting itself on the back for the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and exploiting Brissenden’s death with ruthless commercialism.  A newspaper with a sworn circulation of half a million published an original and spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in which she gibed and sneered at Brissenden.  Also, she was guilty of a second poem, in which she parodied him.

Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead.  He had hated the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of him had been thrown to the crowd.  Daily the vivisection of Beauty went on.  Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print, floating their wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge of Brissenden’s greatness.  Quoth one paper: “We have received a letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just like it, only better, some time ago.”  Another paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving Helen Della Delmar for her parody, said: “But unquestionably Miss Delmar wrote it in a moment of badinage and not quite with the respect that one great poet should show to another and perhaps to the greatest.  However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous or not of the man who invented ‘Ephemera,’ it is certain that she, like thousands of others, is fascinated by his work, and that the day may come when she will try to write lines like his.”

Ministers began to preach sermons against “Ephemera,” and one, who too stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy.  The great poem contributed to the gayety of the world.  The comic verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes were perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of “Ephemera” would drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to the bottom of the river.

Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger.  The effect produced upon him was one of great sadness.  In the crash of his whole world, with love on the pinnacle, the crash of magazinedom and the dear public was a small crash indeed.  Brissenden had been wholly right in his judgment of the magazines, and he, Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find it out for himself.  The magazines were all Brissenden had said they were and more.  Well, he was done, he solaced himself.  He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.  The visions of Tahiti—clean, sweet Tahiti—were coming to him more frequently.  And there were the low Paumotus, and the high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a pig in honor of his coming, and where Tamari’s flower-garlanded daughters would seize his hands and with song and laughter garland him with flowers.  The South Seas were calling, and he knew that sooner or later he would answer the call.

In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long traverse he had made through the realm of knowledge.  When The Parthenon check of three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to him, he turned it over to the local lawyer who had attended to Brissenden’s affairs for his family.  Martin took a receipt for the check, and at the same time gave a note for the hundred dollars Brissenden had let him have.

The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese restaurants.  At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight, the tide turned.  But it had turned too late.  Without a thrill he opened a thick envelope from The Millennium, scanned the face of a check that represented three hundred dollars, and noted that it was the payment on acceptance for “Adventure.”  Every debt he owed in the world, including the pawnshop, with its usurious interest, amounted to less than a hundred dollars.  And when he had paid everything, and lifted the hundred-dollar note with Brissenden’s lawyer, he still had over a hundred dollars in pocket.  He ordered a suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals in the best cafés in town.  He still slept in his little room at Maria’s, but the sight of his new clothes caused the neighborhood children to cease from calling him “hobo” and “tramp” from the roofs of woodsheds and over back fences.

“Wiki-Wiki,” his Hawaiian short story, was bought by Warren’s Monthly for two hundred and fifty dollars.  The Northern Review took his essay, “The Cradle of Beauty,” and Mackintosh’s Magazine took “The Palmist”—the poem he had written to Marian.  The editors and readers were back from their summer vacations, and manuscripts were being handled quickly.  But Martin could not puzzle out what strange whim animated them to this general acceptance of the things they had persistently rejected for two years.  Nothing of his had been published.  He was not known anywhere outside of Oakland, and in Oakland, with the few who thought they knew him, he was notorious as a red-shirt and a socialist.  So there was no explaining this sudden acceptability of his wares.  It was sheer jugglery of fate.

After it had been refused by a number of magazines, he had taken Brissenden’s rejected advice and started, “The Shame of the Sun” on the round of publishers.  After several refusals, Singletree, Darnley & Co. accepted it, promising fall publication.  When Martin asked for an advance on royalties, they wrote that such was not their custom, that books of that nature rarely paid for themselves, and that they doubted if his book would sell a thousand copies.  Martin figured what the book would earn him on such a sale.  Retailed at a dollar, on a royalty of fifteen per cent, it would bring him one hundred and fifty dollars.  He decided that if he had it to do over again he would confine himself to fiction.  “Adventure,” one-fourth as long, had brought him twice as much from The Millennium.  That newspaper paragraph he had read so long ago had been true, after all.  The first-class magazines did not pay on acceptance, and they paid well.  Not two cents a word, but four cents a word, had The Millennium paid him.  And, furthermore, they bought good stuff, too, for were they not buying his?  This last thought he accompanied with a grin.

He wrote to Singletree, Darnley & Co., offering to sell out his rights in “The Shame of the Sun” for a hundred dollars, but they did not care to take the risk.  In the meantime he was not in need of money, for several of his later stories had been accepted and paid for.  He actually opened a bank account, where, without a debt in the world, he had several hundred dollars to his credit.  “Overdue,” after having been declined by a number of magazines, came to rest at the Meredith-Lowell Company.  Martin remembered the five dollars Gertrude had given him, and his resolve to return it to her a hundred times over; so he wrote for an advance on royalties of five hundred dollars.  To his surprise a check for that amount, accompanied by a contract, came by return mail.  He cashed the check into five-dollar gold pieces and telephoned Gertrude that he wanted to see her.

She arrived at the house panting and short of breath from the haste she had made.  Apprehensive of trouble, she had stuffed the few dollars she possessed into her hand-satchel; and so sure was she that disaster had overtaken her brother, that she stumbled forward, sobbing, into his arms, at the same time thrusting the satchel mutely at him.

“I’d have come myself,” he said.  “But I didn’t want a row with Mr. Higginbotham, and that is what would have surely happened.”

“He’ll be all right after a time,” she assured him, while she wondered what the trouble was that Martin was in.  “But you’d best get a job first an’ steady down.  Bernard does like to see a man at honest work.  That stuff in the newspapers broke ’m all up.  I never saw ’m so mad before.”

“I’m not going to get a job,” Martin said with a smile.  “And you can tell him so from me.  I don’t need a job, and there’s the proof of it.”

He emptied the hundred gold pieces into her lap in a glinting, tinkling stream.

“You remember that fiver you gave me the time I didn’t have carfare?  Well, there it is, with ninety-nine brothers of different ages but all of the same size.”

If Gertrude had been frightened when she arrived, she was now in a panic of fear.  Her fear was such that it was certitude.  She was not suspicious.  She was convinced.  She looked at Martin in horror, and her heavy limbs shrank under the golden stream as though it were burning her.

“It’s yours,” he laughed.

She burst into tears, and began to moan, “My poor boy, my poor boy!”

He was puzzled for a moment.  Then he divined the cause of her agitation and handed her the Meredith-Lowell letter which had accompanied the check.  She stumbled through it, pausing now and again to wipe her eyes, and when she had finished, said:-

“An’ does it mean that you come by the money honestly?”

“More honestly than if I’d won it in a lottery.  I earned it.”

Slowly faith came back to her, and she reread the letter carefully.  It took him long to explain to her the nature of the transaction which had put the money into his possession, and longer still to get her to understand that the money was really hers and that he did not need it.

“I’ll put it in the bank for you,” she said finally.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort.  It’s yours, to do with as you please, and if you won’t take it, I’ll give it to Maria.  She’ll know what to do with it.  I’d suggest, though, that you hire a servant and take a good long rest.”

“I’m goin’ to tell Bernard all about it,” she announced, when she was leaving.

Martin winced, then grinned.

“Yes, do,” he said.  “And then, maybe, he’ll invite me to dinner again.”

“Yes, he will—I’m sure he will!” she exclaimed fervently, as she drew him to her and kissed and hugged him.

CHAPTER XLII

One day Martin became aware that he was lonely.  He was healthy and strong, and had nothing to do.  The cessation from writing and studying, the death of Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big hole in his life; and his life refused to be pinned down to good living in cafés and the smoking of Egyptian cigarettes.  It was true the South Seas were calling to him, but he had a feeling that the game was not yet played out in the United States.  Two books were soon to be published, and he had more books that might find publication.  Money could be made out of them, and he would wait and take a sackful of it into the South Seas.  He knew a valley and a bay in the Marquesas that he could buy for a thousand Chili dollars.  The valley ran from the horseshoe, land-locked bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks and contained perhaps ten thousand acres.  It was filled with tropical fruits, wild chickens, and wild pigs, with an occasional herd of wild cattle, while high up among the peaks were herds of wild goats harried by packs of wild dogs.  The whole place was wild.  Not a human lived in it. And he could buy it and the bay for a thousand Chili dollars.

The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with water deep enough to accommodate the largest vessel afloat, and so safe that the South Pacific Directory recommended it to the best careening place for ships for hundreds of miles around.  He would buy a schooner—one of those yacht-like, coppered crafts that sailed like witches—and go trading copra and pearling among the islands.  He would make the valley and the bay his headquarters.  He would build a patriarchal grass house like Tati’s, and have it and the valley and the schooner filled with dark-skinned servitors.  He would entertain there the factor of Taiohae, captains of wandering traders, and all the best of the South Pacific riffraff.  He would keep open house and entertain like a prince.  And he would forget the books he had opened and the world that had proved an illusion.

To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money.  Already it was beginning to flow in.  If one of the books made a strike, it might enable him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts.  Also he could collect the stories and the poems into books, and make sure of the valley and the bay and the schooner.  He would never write again.  Upon that he was resolved.  But in the meantime, awaiting the publication of the books, he must do something more than live dazed and stupid in the sort of uncaring trance into which he had fallen.

He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers’ Picnic took place that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he went.  He had been to the working-class picnics too often in his earlier life not to know what they were like, and as he entered the park he experienced a recrudescence of all the old sensations.  After all, they were his kind, these working people.  He had been born among them, he had lived among them, and though he had strayed for a time, it was well to come back among them.

“If it ain’t Mart!” he heard some one say, and the next moment a hearty hand was on his shoulder.  “Where you ben all the time?  Off to sea?  Come on an’ have a drink.”

It was the old crowd in which he found himself—the old crowd, with here and there a gap, and here and there a new face.  The fellows were not bricklayers, but, as in the old days, they attended all Sunday picnics for the dancing, and the fighting, and the fun.  Martin drank with them, and began to feel really human once more.  He was a fool to have ever left them, he thought; and he was very certain that his sum of happiness would have been greater had he remained with them and let alone the books and the people who sat in the high places.  Yet the beer seemed not so good as of yore.  It didn’t taste as it used to taste.  Brissenden had spoiled him for steam beer, he concluded, and wondered if, after all, the books had spoiled him for companionship with these friends of his youth.  He resolved that he would not be so spoiled, and he went on to the dancing pavilion.  Jimmy, the plumber, he met there, in the company of a tall, blond girl who promptly forsook him for Martin.

“Gee, it’s like old times,” Jimmy explained to the gang that gave him the laugh as Martin and the blonde whirled away in a waltz.  “An’ I don’t give a rap.  I’m too damned glad to see ’m back.  Watch ’m waltz, eh?  It’s like silk.  Who’d blame any girl?”

But Martin restored the blonde to Jimmy, and the three of them, with half a dozen friends, watched the revolving couples and laughed and joked with one another.  Everybody was glad to see Martin back.  No book of his been published; he carried no fictitious value in their eyes.  They liked him for himself.  He felt like a prince returned from excile, and his lonely heart burgeoned in the geniality in which it bathed.  He made a mad day of it, and was at his best.  Also, he had money in his pockets, and, as in the old days when he returned from sea with a pay-day, he made the money fly.

Once, on the dancing-floor, he saw Lizzie Connolly go by in the arms of a young workingman; and, later, when he made the round of the pavilion, he came upon her sitting by a refreshment table.  Surprise and greetings over, he led her away into the grounds, where they could talk without shouting down the music.  From the instant he spoke to her, she was his.  He knew it.  She showed it in the proud humility of her eyes, in every caressing movement of her proudly carried body, and in the way she hung upon his speech.  She was not the young girl as he had known her.  She was a woman, now, and Martin noted that her wild, defiant beauty had improved, losing none of its wildness, while the defiance and the fire seemed more in control.  “A beauty, a perfect beauty,” he murmured admiringly under his breath.  And he knew she was his, that all he had to do was to say “Come,” and she would go with him over the world wherever he led.

Even as the thought flashed through his brain he received a heavy blow on the side of his head that nearly knocked him down.  It was a man’s fist, directed by a man so angry and in such haste that the fist had missed the jaw for which it was aimed.  Martin turned as he staggered, and saw the fist coming at him in a wild swing.  Quite as a matter of course he ducked, and the fist flew harmlessly past, pivoting the man who had driven it.  Martin hooked with his left, landing on the pivoting man with the weight of his body behind the blow.  The man went to the ground sidewise, leaped to his feet, and made a mad rush.  Martin saw his passion-distorted face and wondered what could be the cause of the fellow’s anger.  But while he wondered, he shot in a straight left, the weight of his body behind the blow.  The man went over backward and fell in a crumpled heap.  Jimmy and others of the gang were running toward them.

Martin was thrilling all over.  This was the old days with a vengeance, with their dancing, and their fighting, and their fun.  While he kept a wary eye on his antagonist, he glanced at Lizzie.  Usually the girls screamed when the fellows got to scrapping, but she had not screamed.  She was looking on with bated breath, leaning slightly forward, so keen was her interest, one hand pressed to her breast, her cheek flushed, and in her eyes a great and amazed admiration.

The man had gained his feet and was struggling to escape the restraining arms that were laid on him.

“She was waitin’ for me to come back!” he was proclaiming to all and sundry.  “She was waitin’ for me to come back, an’ then that fresh guy comes buttin’ in.  Let go o’ me, I tell yeh.  I’m goin’ to fix ’m.”

“What’s eatin’ yer?” Jimmy was demanding, as he helped hold the young fellow back.  “That guy’s Mart Eden.  He’s nifty with his mits, lemme tell you that, an’ he’ll eat you alive if you monkey with ’m.”

“He can’t steal her on me that way,” the other interjected.

“He licked the Flyin’ Dutchman, an’ you know him,” Jimmy went on expostulating.  “An’ he did it in five rounds.  You couldn’t last a minute against him.  See?”

This information seemed to have a mollifying effect, and the irate young man favored Martin with a measuring stare.

“He don’t look it,” he sneered; but the sneer was without passion.

“That’s what the Flyin’ Dutchman thought,” Jimmy assured him.  “Come on, now, let’s get outa this.  There’s lots of other girls.  Come on.”

The young fellow allowed himself to be led away toward the pavilion, and the gang followed after him.

“Who is he?” Martin asked Lizzie.  “And what’s it all about, anyway?”

Already the zest of combat, which of old had been so keen and lasting, had died down, and he discovered that he was self-analytical, too much so to live, single heart and single hand, so primitive an existence.

Lizzie tossed her head.

“Oh, he’s nobody,” she said.  “He’s just ben keepin’ company with me.”

“I had to, you see,” she explained after a pause.  “I was gettin’ pretty lonesome.  But I never forgot.”  Her voice sank lower, and she looked straight before her.  “I’d throw ’m down for you any time.”

Martin looking at her averted face, knowing that all he had to do was to reach out his hand and pluck her, fell to pondering whether, after all, there was any real worth in refined, grammatical English, and, so, forgot to reply to her.

“You put it all over him,” she said tentatively, with a laugh.

“He’s a husky young fellow, though,” he admitted generously.  “If they hadn’t taken him away, he might have given me my hands full.”

“Who was that lady friend I seen you with that night?” she asked abruptly.

“Oh, just a lady friend,” was his answer.

“It was a long time ago,” she murmured contemplatively.  “It seems like a thousand years.”

But Martin went no further into the matter.  He led the conversation off into other channels.  They had lunch in the restaurant, where he ordered wine and expensive delicacies and afterward he danced with her and with no one but her, till she was tired.  He was a good dancer, and she whirled around and around with him in a heaven of delight, her head against his shoulder, wishing that it could last forever.  Later in the afternoon they strayed off among the trees, where, in the good old fashion, she sat down while he sprawled on his back, his head in her lap.  He lay and dozed, while she fondled his hair, looked down on his closed eyes, and loved him without reserve.  Looking up suddenly, he read the tender advertisement in her face.  Her eyes fluttered down, then they opened and looked into his with soft defiance.

“I’ve kept straight all these years,” she said, her voice so low that it was almost a whisper.

In his heart Martin knew that it was the miraculous truth.  And at his heart pleaded a great temptation.  It was in his power to make her happy.  Denied happiness himself, why should he deny happiness to her?  He could marry her and take her down with him to dwell in the grass-walled castle in the Marquesas.  The desire to do it was strong, but stronger still was the imperative command of his nature not to do it.  In spite of himself he was still faithful to Love.  The old days of license and easy living were gone.  He could not bring them back, nor could he go back to them.  He was changed—how changed he had not realized until now.

“I am not a marrying man, Lizzie,” he said lightly.

The hand caressing his hair paused perceptibly, then went on with the same gentle stroke.  He noticed her face harden, but it was with the hardness of resolution, for still the soft color was in her cheeks and she was all glowing and melting.

“I did not mean that—” she began, then faltered.  “Or anyway I don’t care.”

“I don’t care,” she repeated.  “I’m proud to be your friend.  I’d do anything for you.  I’m made that way, I guess.”

Martin sat up.  He took her hand in his.  He did it deliberately, with warmth but without passion; and such warmth chilled her.

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said.

“You are a great and noble woman,” he said.  “And it is I who should be proud to know you.  And I am, I am.  You are a ray of light to me in a very dark world, and I’ve got to be straight with you, just as straight as you have been.”

“I don’t care whether you’re straight with me or not.  You could do anything with me.  You could throw me in the dirt an’ walk on me.  An’ you’re the only man in the world that can,” she added with a defiant flash.  “I ain’t taken care of myself ever since I was a kid for nothin’.”

“And it’s just because of that that I’m not going to,” he said gently.  “You are so big and generous that you challenge me to equal generousness.  I’m not marrying, and I’m not—well, loving without marrying, though I’ve done my share of that in the past.  I’m sorry I came here to-day and met you.  But it can’t be helped now, and I never expected it would turn out this way.”

“But look here, Lizzie.  I can’t begin to tell you how much I like you.  I do more than like you.  I admire and respect you.  You are magnificent, and you are magnificently good.  But what’s the use of words?  Yet there’s something I’d like to do.  You’ve had a hard life; let me make it easy for you.”  (A joyous light welled into her eyes, then faded out again.)  “I’m pretty sure of getting hold of some money soon—lots of it.”

In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley and the bay, the grass-walled castle and the trim, white schooner.  After all, what did it matter?  He could go away, as he had done so often, before the mast, on any ship bound anywhere.

“I’d like to turn it over to you.  There must be something you want—to go to school or business college.  You might like to study and be a stenographer.  I could fix it for you.  Or maybe your father and mother are living—I could set them up in a grocery store or something.  Anything you want, just name it, and I can fix it for you.”

She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, dry-eyed and motionless, but with an ache in the throat which Martin divined so strongly that it made his own throat ache.  He regretted that he had spoken.  It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her—mere money—compared with what she offered him.  He offered her an extraneous thing with which he could part without a pang, while she offered him herself, along with disgrace and shame, and sin, and all her hopes of heaven.

“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said with a catch in her voice that she changed to a cough.  She stood up.  “Come on, let’s go home.  I’m all tired out.”

The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly all departed.  But as Martin and Lizzie emerged from the trees they found the gang waiting for them.  Martin knew immediately the meaning of it.  Trouble was brewing.  The gang was his body-guard.  They passed out through the gates of the park with, straggling in the rear, a second gang, the friends that Lizzie’s young man had collected to avenge the loss of his lady.  Several constables and special police officers, anticipating trouble, trailed along to prevent it, and herded the two gangs separately aboard the train for San Francisco.  Martin told Jimmy that he would get off at Sixteenth Street Station and catch the electric car into Oakland.  Lizzie was very quiet and without interest in what was impending.  The train pulled in to Sixteenth Street Station, and the waiting electric car could be seen, the conductor of which was impatiently clanging the gong.

“There she is,” Jimmy counselled.  “Make a run for it, an’ we’ll hold ’em back.  Now you go!  Hit her up!”

The hostile gang was temporarily disconcerted by the manoeuvre, then it dashed from the train in pursuit.  The staid and sober Oakland folk who sat upon the car scarcely noted the young fellow and the girl who ran for it and found a seat in front on the outside.  They did not connect the couple with Jimmy, who sprang on the steps, crying to the motorman:-

“Slam on the juice, old man, and beat it outa here!”

The next moment Jimmy whirled about, and the passengers saw him land his fist on the face of a running man who was trying to board the car.  But fists were landing on faces the whole length of the car.  Thus, Jimmy and his gang, strung out on the long, lower steps, met the attacking gang.  The car started with a great clanging of its gong, and, as Jimmy’s gang drove off the last assailants, they, too, jumped off to finish the job.  The car dashed on, leaving the flurry of combat far behind, and its dumfounded passengers never dreamed that the quiet young man and the pretty working-girl sitting in the corner on the outside seat had been the cause of the row.

Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the old fighting thrills.  But they quickly died away, and he was oppressed by a great sadness.  He felt very old—centuries older than those careless, care-free young companions of his others days.  He had travelled far, too far to go back.  Their mode of life, which had once been his, was now distasteful to him.  He was disappointed in it all.  He had developed into an alien.  As the steam beer had tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw to him.  He was too far removed.  Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him.  He had exiled himself.  He had travelled in the vast realm of intellect until he could no longer return home.  On the other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for companionship remained unsatisfied.  He had found no new home.  As the gang could not understand him, as his own family could not understand him, as the bourgeoisie could not understand him, so this girl beside him, whom he honored high, could not understand him nor the honor he paid her.  His sadness was not untouched with bitterness as he thought it over.

“Make it up with him,” he advised Lizzie, at parting, as they stood in front of the workingman’s shack in which she lived, near Sixth and Market.  He referred to the young fellow whose place he had usurped that day.

“I can’t—now,” she said.

“Oh, go on,” he said jovially.  “All you have to do is whistle and he’ll come running.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she said simply.

And he knew what she had meant.

She leaned toward him as he was about to say good night.  But she leaned not imperatively, not seductively, but wistfully and humbly.  He was touched to the heart.  His large tolerance rose up in him.  He put his arms around her, and kissed her, and knew that upon his own lips rested as true a kiss as man ever received.

“My God!” she sobbed.  “I could die for you.  I could die for you.”

She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps.  He felt a quick moisture in his eyes.

“Martin Eden,” he communed.  “You’re not a brute, and you’re a damn poor Nietzscheman.  You’d marry her if you could and fill her quivering heart full with happiness.  But you can’t, you can’t.  And it’s a damn shame.”

“‘A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers,’” he muttered, remembering his Henly.  “‘Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.’  It is—a blunder and a shame.”

CHAPTER XLIII

“The Shame of the Sun” was published in October.  As Martin cut the cords of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary copies from the publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy sadness fell upon him.  He thought of the wild delight that would have been his had this happened a few short months before, and he contrasted that delight that should have been with his present uncaring coldness.  His book, his first book, and his pulse had not gone up a fraction of a beat, and he was only sad.  It meant little to him now.  The most it meant was that it might bring some money, and little enough did he care for money.

He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.

“I did it,” he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment.  “I wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your vegetable soup went into the making of it.  Keep it.  It’s yours.  Just to remember me by, you know.”

He was not bragging, not showing off.  His sole motive was to make her happy, to make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in him.  She put the book in the front room on top of the family Bible.  A sacred thing was this book her lodger had made, a fetich of friendship.  It softened the blow of his having been a laundryman, and though she could not understand a line of it, she knew that every line of it was great.  She was a simple, practical, hard-working woman, but she possessed faith in large endowment.

Just as emotionlessly as he had received “The Shame of the Sun” did he read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping bureau.  The book was making a hit, that was evident.  It meant more gold in the money sack.  He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all his promises, and still have enough left to build his grass-walled castle.

Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second edition of twice the size through the presses; and ere this was delivered a third edition of five thousand had been ordered.  A London firm made arrangements by cable for an English edition, and hot-footed upon this came the news of French, German, and Scandinavian translations in progress.  The attack upon the Maeterlinck school could not have been made at a more opportune moment.  A fierce controversy was precipitated.  Saleeby and Haeckel indorsed and defended “The Shame of the Sun,” for once finding themselves on the same side of a question.  Crookes and Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge attempted to formulate a compromise that would jibe with his particular cosmic theories.  Maeterlinck’s followers rallied around the standard of mysticism.  Chesterton set the whole world laughing with a series of alleged non-partisan essays on the subject, and the whole affair, controversy and controversialists, was well-nigh swept into the pit by a thundering broadside from George Bernard Shaw.  Needless to say the arena was crowded with hosts of lesser lights, and the dust and sweat and din became terrific.

“It is a most marvellous happening,” Singletree, Darnley & Co. wrote Martin, “a critical philosophic essay selling like a novel.  You could not have chosen your subject better, and all contributory factors have been unwarrantedly propitious.  We need scarcely to assure you that we are making hay while the sun shines.  Over forty thousand copies have already been sold in the United States and Canada, and a new edition of twenty thousand is on the presses.  We are overworked, trying to supply the demand.  Nevertheless we have helped to create that demand.  We have already spent five thousand dollars in advertising.  The book is bound to be a record-breaker.”

“Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book which we have taken the liberty of forwarding to you.  You will please note that we have increased your royalties to twenty per cent, which is about as high as a conservative publishing house dares go.  If our offer is agreeable to you, please fill in the proper blank space with the title of your book.  We make no stipulations concerning its nature.  Any book on any subject.  If you have one already written, so much the better.  Now is the time to strike.  The iron could not be hotter.”

“On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an advance on royalties of five thousand dollars.  You see, we have faith in you, and we are going in on this thing big.  We should like, also, to discuss with you the drawing up of a contract for a term of years, say ten, during which we shall have the exclusive right of publishing in book-form all that you produce.  But more of this anon.”

Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental arithmetic, finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty thousand to be nine thousand dollars.  He signed the new contract, inserting “The Smoke of Joy” in the blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers along with the twenty storiettes he had written in the days before he discovered the formula for the newspaper storiette.  And promptly as the United States mail could deliver and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.’s check for five thousand dollars.

“I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about two o’clock,” Martin said, the morning the check arrived.  “Or, better, meet me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o’clock.  I’ll be looking out for you.”

At the appointed time she was there; but shoes was the only clew to the mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered a distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by a shoe-store and dived into a real estate office.  What happened thereupon resided forever after in her memory as a dream.  Fine gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked with Martin and one another; a type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an imposing document; her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his signature; and when all was over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her, saying, “Well, Maria, you won’t have to pay me no seven dollars and a half this month.”

Maria was too stunned for speech.

“Or next month, or the next, or the next,” her landlord said.

She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor.  And it was not until she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her own kind, and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she really knew that she was the owner of the little house in which she had lived and for which she had paid rent so long.

“Why don’t you trade with me no more?” the Portuguese grocer asked Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the car; and Martin explained that he wasn’t doing his own cooking any more, and then went in and had a drink of wine on the house.  He noted it was the best wine the grocer had in stock.

“Maria,” Martin announced that night, “I’m going to leave you.  And you’re going to leave here yourself soon.  Then you can rent the house and be a landlord yourself.  You’ve a brother in San Leandro or Haywards, and he’s in the milk business.  I want you to send all your washing back unwashed—understand?—unwashed, and to go out to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see that brother of yours.  Tell him to come to see me.  I’ll be stopping at the Metropole down in Oakland.  He’ll know a good milk-ranch when he sees one.”

And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore shoes and went to school.  Few persons ever meet the fairy princes they dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the guise of an ex-laundryman.

In the meantime the world had begun to ask: “Who is this Martin Eden?”  He had declined to give any biographical data to his publishers, but the newspapers were not to be denied.  Oakland was his own town, and the reporters nosed out scores of individuals who could supply information.  All that he was and was not, all that he had done and most of what he had not done, was spread out for the delectation of the public, accompanied by snapshots and photographs—the latter procured from the local photographer who had once taken Martin’s picture and who promptly copyrighted it and put it on the market.  At first, so great was his disgust with the magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought against publicity; but in the end, because it was easier than not to, he surrendered.  He found that he could not refuse himself to the special writers who travelled long distances to see him.  Then again, each day was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was occupied with writing and studying, those hours had to be occupied somehow; so he yielded to what was to him a whim, permitted interviews, gave his opinions on literature and philosophy, and even accepted invitations of the bourgeoisie.  He had settled down into a strange and comfortable state of mind.  He no longer cared.  He forgave everybody, even the cub reporter who had painted him red and to whom he now granted a full page with specially posed photographs.

He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she regretted the greatness that had come to him.  It widened the space between them.  Perhaps it was with the hope of narrowing it that she yielded to his persuasions to go to night school and business college and to have herself gowned by a wonderful dressmaker who charged outrageous prices.  She improved visibly from day to day, until Martin wondered if he was doing right, for he knew that all her compliance and endeavor was for his sake.  She was trying to make herself of worth in his eyes—of the sort of worth he seemed to value.  Yet he gave her no hope, treating her in brotherly fashion and rarely seeing her.

“Overdue” was rushed upon the market by the Meredith-Lowell Company in the height of his popularity, and being fiction, in point of sales it made even a bigger strike than “The Shame of the Sun.”  Week after week his was the credit of the unprecedented performance of having two books at the head of the list of best-sellers.  Not only did the story take with the fiction-readers, but those who read “The Shame of the Sun” with avidity were likewise attracted to the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of mastery with which he had handled it.  First he had attacked the literature of mysticism, and had done it exceeding well; and, next, he had successfully supplied the very literature he had exposited, thus proving himself to be that rare genius, a critic and a creator in one.

Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like, through the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested by the stir he was making.  One thing was puzzling him, a little thing that would have puzzled the world had it known.  But the world would have puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather than over the little thing that to him loomed gigantic.  Judge Blount invited him to dinner.  That was the little thing, or the beginning of the little thing, that was soon to become the big thing.  He had insulted Judge Blount, treated him abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street, invited him to dinner.  Martin bethought himself of the numerous occasions on which he had met Judge Blount at the Morses’ and when Judge Blount had not invited him to dinner.  Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he asked himself.  He had not changed.  He was the same Martin Eden.  What made the difference?  The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared inside the covers of books?  But it was work performed.  It was not something he had done since.  It was achievement accomplished at the very time Judge Blount was sharing this general view and sneering at his Spencer and his intellect.  Therefore it was not for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that Judge Blount invited him to dinner.

Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at his complacence.  And at the dinner, where, with their womankind, were half a dozen of those that sat in high places, and where Martin found himself quite the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded by Judge Hanwell, urged privately that Martin should permit his name to be put up for the Styx—the ultra-select club to which belonged, not the mere men of wealth, but the men of attainment.  And Martin declined, and was more puzzled than ever.

He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts.  He was overwhelmed by requests from editors.  It had been discovered that he was a stylist, with meat under his style.  The Northern Review, after publishing “The Cradle of Beauty,” had written him for half a dozen similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not Burton’s Magazine, in a speculative mood, offered him five hundred dollars each for five essays.  He wrote back that he would supply the demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay.  He remembered that all these manuscripts had been refused by the very magazines that were now clamoring for them.  And their refusals had been cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped.  They had made him sweat, and now he intended to make them sweat.  Burton’s Magazine paid his price for five essays, and the remaining four, at the same rate, were snapped up by Mackintosh’s Monthly, The Northern Review being too poor to stand the pace.  Thus went out to the world “The High Priests of Mystery,” “The Wonder-Dreamers,” “The Yardstick of the Ego,” “Philosophy of Illusion,” “God and Clod,” “Art and Biology,” “Critics and Test-tubes,” “Star-dust,” and “The Dignity of Usury,”—to raise storms and rumblings and mutterings that were many a day in dying down.

Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, which he did, but it was always for work performed.  He refused resolutely to pledge himself to any new thing.  The thought of again setting pen to paper maddened him.  He had seen Brissenden torn to pieces by the crowd, and despite the fact that him the crowd acclaimed, he could not get over the shock nor gather any respect for the crowd.  His very popularity seemed a disgrace and a treason to Brissenden.  It made him wince, but he made up his mind to go on and fill the money-bag.

He received letters from editors like the following: “About a year ago we were unfortunate enough to refuse your collection of love-poems.  We were greatly impressed by them at the time, but certain arrangements already entered into prevented our taking them.  If you still have them, and if you will be kind enough to forward them, we shall be glad to publish the entire collection on your own terms.  We are also prepared to make a most advantageous offer for bringing them out in book-form.”

Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it instead.  He read it over before mailing, and was particularly impressed by its sophomoric amateurishness and general worthlessness.  But he sent it; and it was published, to the everlasting regret of the editor.  The public was indignant and incredulous.  It was too far a cry from Martin Eden’s high standard to that serious bosh.  It was asserted that he had never written it, that the magazine had faked it very clumsily, or that Martin Eden was emulating the elder Dumas and at the height of success was hiring his writing done for him.  But when he explained that the tragedy was an early effort of his literary childhood, and that the magazine had refused to be happy unless it got it, a great laugh went up at the magazine’s expense and a change in the editorship followed.  The tragedy was never brought out in book-form, though Martin pocketed the advance royalties that had been paid.

Coleman’s Weekly sent Martin a lengthy telegram, costing nearly three hundred dollars, offering him a thousand dollars an article for twenty articles.  He was to travel over the United States, with all expenses paid, and select whatever topics interested him.  The body of the telegram was devoted to hypothetical topics in order to show him the freedom of range that was to be his.  The only restriction placed upon him was that he must confine himself to the United States.  Martin sent his inability to accept and his regrets by wire “collect.”

“Wiki-Wiki,” published in Warren’s Monthly, was an instantaneous success.  It was brought out forward in a wide-margined, beautifully decorated volume that struck the holiday trade and sold like wildfire.  The critics were unanimous in the belief that it would take its place with those two classics by two great writers, “The Bottle Imp” and “The Magic Skin.”

The public, however, received the “Smoke of Joy” collection rather dubiously and coldly.  The audacity and unconventionality of the storiettes was a shock to bourgeois morality and prejudice; but when Paris went mad over the immediate translation that was made, the American and English reading public followed suit and bought so many copies that Martin compelled the conservative house of Singletree, Darnley & Co. to pay a flat royalty of twenty-five per cent for a third book, and thirty per cent flat for a fourth.  These two volumes comprised all the short stories he had written and which had received, or were receiving, serial publication.  “The Ring of Bells” and his horror stories constituted one collection; the other collection was composed of “Adventure,” “The Pot,” “The Wine of Life,” “The Whirlpool,” “The Jostling Street,” and four other stories.  The Lowell-Meredith Company captured the collection of all his essays, and the Maxmillian Company got his “Sea Lyrics” and the “Love-cycle,” the latter receiving serial publication in the Ladies’ Home Companion after the payment of an extortionate price.

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of the last manuscript.  The grass-walled castle and the white, coppered schooner were very near to him.  Well, at any rate he had discovered Brissenden’s contention that nothing of merit found its way into the magazines.  His own success demonstrated that Brissenden had been wrong.

And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had been right, after all.  “The Shame of the Sun” had been the cause of his success more than the stuff he had written.  That stuff had been merely incidental.  It had been rejected right and left by the magazines.  The publication of “The Shame of the Sun” had started a controversy and precipitated the landslide in his favor.  Had there been no “Shame of the Sun” there would have been no landslide, and had there been no miracle in the go of “The Shame of the Sun” there would have been no landslide.  Singletree, Darnley & Co. attested that miracle.  They had brought out a first edition of fifteen hundred copies and been dubious of selling it.  They were experienced publishers and no one had been more astounded than they at the success which had followed.  To them it had been in truth a miracle.  They never got over it, and every letter they wrote him reflected their reverent awe of that first mysterious happening.  They did not attempt to explain it.  There was no explaining it.  It had happened.  In the face of all experience to the contrary, it had happened.

So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of his popularity.  It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and poured its gold into his money-sack, and from what little he knew of the bourgeoisie it was not clear to him how it could possibly appreciate or comprehend what he had written.  His intrinsic beauty and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying his books.  He was the fad of the hour, the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while the gods nodded.  The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on Brissenden’s “Ephemera” and torn it to pieces—a wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him.  Fawn or fang, it was all a matter of chance.  One thing he knew with absolute certitude: “Ephemera” was infinitely greater than anything he had done.  It was infinitely greater than anything he had in him.  It was a poem of centuries.  Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry tribute indeed, for that same mob had wallowed “Ephemera” into the mire.  He sighed heavily and with satisfaction.  He was glad the last manuscript was sold and that he would soon be done with it all.

CHAPTER XLIV

Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metropole.  Whether he had happened there just casually, intent on other affairs, or whether he had come there for the direct purpose of inviting him to dinner, Martin never could quite make up his mind, though he inclined toward the second hypothesis.  At any rate, invited to dinner he was by Mr. Morse—Ruth’s father, who had forbidden him the house and broken off the engagement.

Martin was not angry.  He was not even on his dignity.  He tolerated Mr. Morse, wondering the while how it felt to eat such humble pie.  He did not decline the invitation.  Instead, he put it off with vagueness and indefiniteness and inquired after the family, particularly after Mrs. Morse and Ruth.  He spoke her name without hesitancy, naturally, though secretly surprised that he had had no inward quiver, no old, familiar increase of pulse and warm surge of blood.

He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he accepted.  Persons got themselves introduced to him in order to invite him to dinner.  And he went on puzzling over the little thing that was becoming a great thing.  Bernard Higginbotham invited him to dinner.  He puzzled the harder.  He remembered the days of his desperate starvation when no one invited him to dinner.  That was the time he needed dinners, and went weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine.  That was the paradox of it.  When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him, and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners and was losing his appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left.  But why?  There was no justice in it, no merit on his part.  He was no different.  All the work he had done was even at that time work performed.  Mr. and Mrs. Morse had condemned him for an idler and a shirk and through Ruth had urged that he take a clerk’s position in an office.  Furthermore, they had been aware of his work performed.  Manuscript after manuscript of his had been turned over to them by Ruth.  They had read them.  It was the very same work that had put his name in all the papers, and, it was his name being in all the papers that led them to invite him.

One thing was certain: the Morses had not cared to have him for himself or for his work.  Therefore they could not want him now for himself or for his work, but for the fame that was his, because he was somebody amongst men, and—why not?—because he had a hundred thousand dollars or so.  That was the way bourgeois society valued a man, and who was he to expect it otherwise?  But he was proud.  He disdained such valuation.  He desired to be valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all, was an expression of himself.  That was the way Lizzie valued him.  The work, with her, did not even count.  She valued him, himself.  That was the way Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued him.  That had been proved often enough in the days when he ran with them; it had been proved that Sunday at Shell Mound Park.  His work could go hang.  What they liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart Eden, one of the bunch and a pretty good guy.

Then there was Ruth.  She had liked him for himself, that was indisputable.  And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the bourgeois standard of valuation more.  She had opposed his writing, and principally, it seemed to him, because it did not earn money.  That had been her criticism of his “Love-cycle.”  She, too, had urged him to get a job.  It was true, she refined it to “position,” but it meant the same thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature stuck.  He had read her all that he wrote—poems, stories, essays—“Wiki-Wiki,” “The Shame of the Sun,” everything.  And she had always and consistently urged him to get a job, to go to work—good God!—as if he hadn’t been working, robbing sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.

So the little thing grew bigger.  He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession.  Work performed.  The phrase haunted his brain.  He sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over Higginbotham’s Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain himself from shouting out:-

“It was work performed!  And now you feed me, when then you let me starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn’t get a job.  And the work was already done, all done.  And now, when I speak, you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay respectful attention to whatever I choose to say.  I tell you your party is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say.  And why?  Because I’m famous; because I’ve a lot of money.  Not because I’m Martin Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool.  I could tell you the moon is made of green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion, at least you would not repudiate it, because I’ve got dollars, mountains of them.  And it was all done long ago; it was work performed, I tell you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your feet.”

But Martin did not shout out.  The thought gnawed in his brain, an unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant.  As he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking.  He was a success himself, and proud of it.  He was self-made.  No one had helped him.  He owed no man.  He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and bringing up a large family.  And there was Higginbotham’s Cash Store, that monument of his own industry and ability.  He loved Higginbotham’s Cash Store as some men loved their wives.  He opened up his heart to Martin, showed with what keenness and with what enormous planning he had made the store.  And he had plans for it, ambitious plans.  The neighborhood was growing up fast.  The store was really too small.  If he had more room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving and money-saving improvements.  And he would do it yet.  He was straining every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and put up another two-story frame building.  The upstairs he could rent, and the whole ground-floor of both buildings would be Higginbotham’s Cash Store.  His eyes glistened when he spoke of the new sign that would stretch clear across both buildings.

Martin forgot to listen.  The refrain of “Work performed,” in his own brain, was drowning the other’s clatter.  The refrain maddened him, and he tried to escape from it.

“How much did you say it would cost?” he asked suddenly.

His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the business opportunities of the neighborhood.  He hadn’t said how much it would cost.  But he knew.  He had figured it out a score of times.

“At the way lumber is now,” he said, “four thousand could do it.”

“Including the sign?”

“I didn’t count on that.  It’d just have to come, onc’t the buildin’ was there.”

“And the ground?”

“Three thousand more.”

He leaned forward, licking his lips, nervously spreading and closing his fingers, while he watched Martin write a check.  When it was passed over to him, he glanced at the amount-seven thousand dollars.

“I—I can’t afford to pay more than six per cent,” he said huskily.

Martin wanted to laugh, but, instead, demanded:-

“How much would that be?”

“Lemme see.  Six per cent—six times seven—four hundred an’ twenty.”

“That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn’t it?”

Higginbotham nodded.

“Then, if you’ve no objection, well arrange it this way.”  Martin glanced at Gertrude.  “You can have the principal to keep for yourself, if you’ll use the thirty-five dollars a month for cooking and washing and scrubbing.  The seven thousand is yours if you’ll guarantee that Gertrude does no more drudgery.  Is it a go?”

Mr. Higginbotham swallowed hard.  That his wife should do no more housework was an affront to his thrifty soul.  The magnificent present was the coating of a pill, a bitter pill.  That his wife should not work!  It gagged him.

“All right, then,” Martin said.  “I’ll pay the thirty-five a month, and—”

He reached across the table for the check.  But Bernard Higginbotham got his hand on it first, crying:

“I accept!  I accept!”

When Martin got on the electric car, he was very sick and tired.  He looked up at the assertive sign.

“The swine,” he groaned.  “The swine, the swine.”

When Mackintosh’s Magazine published “The Palmist,” featuring it with decorations by Berthier and with two pictures by Wenn, Hermann von Schmidt forgot that he had called the verses obscene.  He announced that his wife had inspired the poem, saw to it that the news reached the ears of a reporter, and submitted to an interview by a staff writer who was accompanied by a staff photographer and a staff artist.  The result was a full page in a Sunday supplement, filled with photographs and idealized drawings of Marian, with many intimate details of Martin Eden and his family, and with the full text of “The Palmist” in large type, and republished by special permission of Mackintosh’s Magazine.  It caused quite a stir in the neighborhood, and good housewives were proud to have the acquaintances of the great writer’s sister, while those who had not made haste to cultivate it.  Hermann von Schmidt chuckled in his little repair shop and decided to order a new lathe.  “Better than advertising,” he told Marian, “and it costs nothing.”

“We’d better have him to dinner,” she suggested.

And to dinner Martin came, making himself agreeable with the fat wholesale butcher and his fatter wife—important folk, they, likely to be of use to a rising young man like Hermann Von Schmidt.  No less a bait, however, had been required to draw them to his house than his great brother-in-law.  Another man at table who had swallowed the same bait was the superintendent of the Pacific Coast agencies for the Asa Bicycle Company.  Him Von Schmidt desired to please and propitiate because from him could be obtained the Oakland agency for the bicycle.  So Hermann von Schmidt found it a goodly asset to have Martin for a brother-in-law, but in his heart of hearts he couldn’t understand where it all came in.  In the silent watches of the night, while his wife slept, he had floundered through Martin’s books and poems, and decided that the world was a fool to buy them.

And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situation only too well, as he leaned back and gloated at Von Schmidt’s head, in fancy punching it well-nigh off of him, sending blow after blow home just right—the chuckle-headed Dutchman!  One thing he did like about him, however.  Poor as he was, and determined to rise as he was, he nevertheless hired one servant to take the heavy work off of Marian’s hands.  Martin talked with the superintendent of the Asa agencies, and after dinner he drew him aside with Hermann, whom he backed financially for the best bicycle store with fittings in Oakland.  He went further, and in a private talk with Hermann told him to keep his eyes open for an automobile agency and garage, for there was no reason that he should not be able to run both establishments successfully.

With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, Marian, at parting, told Martin how much she loved him and always had loved him.  It was true, there was a perceptible halt midway in her assertion, which she glossed over with more tears and kisses and incoherent stammerings, and which Martin inferred to be her appeal for forgiveness for the time she had lacked faith in him and insisted on his getting a job.

“He can’t never keep his money, that’s sure,” Hermann von Schmidt confided to his wife.  “He got mad when I spoke of interest, an’ he said damn the principal and if I mentioned it again, he’d punch my Dutch head off.  That’s what he said—my Dutch head.  But he’s all right, even if he ain’t no business man.  He’s given me my chance, an’ he’s all right.”

Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the more they poured, the more he puzzled.  He sat, the guest of honor, at an Arden Club banquet, with men of note whom he had heard about and read about all his life; and they told him how, when they had read “The Ring of Bells” in the Transcontinental, and “The Peri and the Pearl” in The Hornet, they had immediately picked him for a winner.  My God! and I was hungry and in rags, he thought to himself.  Why didn’t you give me a dinner then?  Then was the time.  It was work performed.  If you are feeding me now for work performed, why did you not feed me then when I needed it?  Not one word in “The Ring of Bells,” nor in “The Peri and the Pearl” has been changed.  No; you’re not feeding me now for work performed.  You are feeding me because everybody else is feeding me and because it is an honor to feed me.  You are feeding me now because you are herd animals; because you are part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic thought in the mob-mind just now is to feed me.  And where does Martin Eden and the work Martin Eden performed come in in all this? he asked himself plaintively, then arose to respond cleverly and wittily to a clever and witty toast.

So it went.  Wherever he happened to be—at the Press Club, at the Redwood Club, at pink teas and literary gatherings—always were remembered “The Ring of Bells” and “The Peri and the Pearl” when they were first published.  And always was Martin’s maddening and unuttered demand: Why didn’t you feed me then?  It was work performed.  “The Ring of Bells” and “The Peri and the Pearl” are not changed one iota.  They were just as artistic, just as worth while, then as now.  But you are not feeding me for their sake, nor for the sake of anything else I have written.  You’re feeding me because it is the style of feeding just now, because the whole mob is crazy with the idea of feeding Martin Eden.

And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch in among the company a young hoodlum in square-cut coat and under a stiff-rim Stetson hat.  It happened to him at the Gallina Society in Oakland one afternoon.  As he rose from his chair and stepped forward across the platform, he saw stalk through the wide door at the rear of the great room the young hoodlum with the square-cut coat and stiff-rim hat.  Five hundred fashionably gowned women turned their heads, so intent and steadfast was Martin’s gaze, to see what he was seeing.  But they saw only the empty centre aisle.  He saw the young tough lurching down that aisle and wondered if he would remove the stiff-rim which never yet had he seen him without.  Straight down the aisle he came, and up the platform.  Martin could have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when he thought of all that lay before him.  Across the platform he swaggered, right up to Martin, and into the foreground of Martin’s consciousness disappeared.  The five hundred women applauded softly with gloved hands, seeking to encourage the bashful great man who was their guest.  And Martin shook the vision from his brain, smiled, and began to speak.

The Superintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Martin on the street and remembered him, recalling seances in his office when Martin was expelled from school for fighting.

“I read your ‘Ring of Bells’ in one of the magazines quite a time ago,” he said.  “It was as good as Poe.  Splendid, I said at the time, splendid!”

Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed me on the street and did not know me, Martin almost said aloud.  Each time I was hungry and heading for the pawnbroker.  Yet it was work performed.  You did not know me then.  Why do you know me now?

“I was remarking to my wife only the other day,” the other was saying, “wouldn’t it be a good idea to have you out to dinner some time?  And she quite agreed with me.  Yes, she quite agreed with me.”

“Dinner?” Martin said so sharply that it was almost a snarl.

“Why, yes, yes, dinner, you know—just pot luck with us, with your old superintendent, you rascal,” he uttered nervously, poking Martin in an attempt at jocular fellowship.

Martin went down the street in a daze.  He stopped at the corner and looked about him vacantly.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” he murmured at last.  “The old fellow was afraid of me.”

CHAPTER XLV

Kreis came to Martin one day—Kreis, of the “real dirt”; and Martin turned to him with relief, to receive the glowing details of a scheme sufficiently wild-catty to interest him as a fictionist rather than an investor.  Kreis paused long enough in the midst of his exposition to tell him that in most of his “Shame of the Sun” he had been a chump.

“But I didn’t come here to spout philosophy,” Kreis went on.  “What I want to know is whether or not you will put a thousand dollars in on this deal?”

“No, I’m not chump enough for that, at any rate,” Martin answered.  “But I’ll tell you what I will do.  You gave me the greatest night of my life.  You gave me what money cannot buy.  Now I’ve got money, and it means nothing to me.  I’d like to turn over to you a thousand dollars of what I don’t value for what you gave me that night and which was beyond price.  You need the money.  I’ve got more than I need.  You want it.  You came for it.  There’s no use scheming it out of me.  Take it.”

Kreis betrayed no surprise.  He folded the check away in his pocket.

“At that rate I’d like the contract of providing you with many such nights,” he said.

“Too late.”  Martin shook his head.  “That night was the one night for me.  I was in paradise.  It’s commonplace with you, I know.  But it wasn’t to me.  I shall never live at such a pitch again.  I’m done with philosophy.  I want never to hear another word of it.”

“The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my philosophy,” Kreis remarked, as he paused in the doorway.  “And then the market broke.”

Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and smiled and nodded.  He smiled back and lifted his hat.  The episode did not affect him.  A month before it might have disgusted him, or made him curious and set him to speculating about her state of consciousness at that moment.  But now it was not provocative of a second thought.  He forgot about it the next moment.  He forgot about it as he would have forgotten the Central Bank Building or the City Hall after having walked past them.  Yet his mind was preternaturally active.  His thoughts went ever around and around in a circle.  The centre of that circle was “work performed”; it ate at his brain like a deathless maggot.  He awoke to it in the morning.  It tormented his dreams at night.  Every affair of life around him that penetrated through his senses immediately related itself to “work performed.”  He drove along the path of relentless logic to the conclusion that he was nobody, nothing.  Mart Eden, the hoodlum, and Mart Eden, the sailor, had been real, had been he; but Martin Eden! the famous writer, did not exist.  Martin Eden, the famous writer, was a vapor that had arisen in the mob-mind and by the mob-mind had been thrust into the corporeal being of Mart Eden, the hoodlum and sailor.  But it couldn’t fool him.  He was not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping and sacrificing dinners to.  He knew better.

He read the magazines about himself, and pored over portraits of himself published therein until he was unable to associate his identity with those portraits.  He was the fellow who had lived and thrilled and loved; who had been easy-going and tolerant of the frailties of life; who had served in the forecastle, wandered in strange lands, and led his gang in the old fighting days.  He was the fellow who had been stunned at first by the thousands of books in the free library, and who had afterward learned his way among them and mastered them; he was the fellow who had burned the midnight oil and bedded with a spur and written books himself.  But the one thing he was not was that colossal appetite that all the mob was bent upon feeding.

There were things, however, in the magazines that amused him.  All the magazines were claiming him.  Warren’s Monthly advertised to its subscribers that it was always on the quest after new writers, and that, among others, it had introduced Martin Eden to the reading public.  The White Mouse claimed him; so did The Northern Review and Mackintosh’s Magazine, until silenced by The Globe, which pointed triumphantly to its files where the mangled “Sea Lyrics” lay buried.  Youth and Age, which had come to life again after having escaped paying its bills, put in a prior claim, which nobody but farmers’ children ever read.  The Transcontinental made a dignified and convincing statement of how it first discovered Martin Eden, which was warmly disputed by The Hornet, with the exhibit of “The Peri and the Pearl.”  The modest claim of Singletree, Darnley & Co. was lost in the din.  Besides, that publishing firm did not own a magazine wherewith to make its claim less modest.

The newspapers calculated Martin’s royalties.  In some way the magnificent offers certain magazines had made him leaked out, and Oakland ministers called upon him in a friendly way, while professional begging letters began to clutter his mail.  But worse than all this were the women.  His photographs were published broadcast, and special writers exploited his strong, bronzed face, his scars, his heavy shoulders, his clear, quiet eyes, and the slight hollows in his cheeks like an ascetic’s.  At this last he remembered his wild youth and smiled.  Often, among the women he met, he would see now one, now another, looking at him, appraising him, selecting him.  He laughed to himself.  He remembered Brissenden’s warning and laughed again.  The women would never destroy him, that much was certain.  He had gone past that stage.

Once, walking with Lizzie toward night school, she caught a glance directed toward him by a well-gowned, handsome woman of the bourgeoisie.  The glance was a trifle too long, a shade too considerative.  Lizzie knew it for what it was, and her body tensed angrily.  Martin noticed, noticed the cause of it, told her how used he was becoming to it and that he did not care anyway.

“You ought to care,” she answered with blazing eyes.  “You’re sick.  That’s what’s the matter.”

“Never healthier in my life.  I weigh five pounds more than I ever did.”

“It ain’t your body.  It’s your head.  Something’s wrong with your think-machine.  Even I can see that, an’ I ain’t nobody.”

He walked on beside her, reflecting.

“I’d give anything to see you get over it,” she broke out impulsively.  “You ought to care when women look at you that way, a man like you.  It’s not natural.  It’s all right enough for sissy-boys.  But you ain’t made that way.  So help me, I’d be willing an’ glad if the right woman came along an’ made you care.”

When he left Lizzie at night school, he returned to the Metropole.

Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and sat staring straight before him.  He did not doze.  Nor did he think.  His mind was a blank, save for the intervals when unsummoned memory pictures took form and color and radiance just under his eyelids.  He saw these pictures, but he was scarcely conscious of them—no more so than if they had been dreams.  Yet he was not asleep.  Once, he roused himself and glanced at his watch.  It was just eight o’clock.  He had nothing to do, and it was too early for bed.  Then his mind went blank again, and the pictures began to form and vanish under his eyelids.  There was nothing distinctive about the pictures.  They were always masses of leaves and shrub-like branches shot through with hot sunshine.

A knock at the door aroused him.  He was not asleep, and his mind immediately connected the knock with a telegram, or letter, or perhaps one of the servants bringing back clean clothes from the laundry.  He was thinking about Joe and wondering where he was, as he said, “Come in.”

He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn toward the door.  He heard it close softly.  There was a long silence.  He forgot that there had been a knock at the door, and was still staring blankly before him when he heard a woman’s sob.  It was involuntary, spasmodic, checked, and stifled—he noted that as he turned about.  The next instant he was on his feet.

“Ruth!” he said, amazed and bewildered.

Her face was white and strained.  She stood just inside the door, one hand against it for support, the other pressed to her side.  She extended both hands toward him piteously, and started forward to meet him.  As he caught her hands and led her to the Morris chair he noticed how cold they were.  He drew up another chair and sat down on the broad arm of it.  He was too confused to speak.  In his own mind his affair with Ruth was closed and sealed.  He felt much in the same way that he would have felt had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry suddenly invaded the Hotel Metropole with a whole week’s washing ready for him to pitch into.  Several times he was about to speak, and each time he hesitated.

“No one knows I am here,” Ruth said in a faint voice, with an appealing smile.

“What did you say?”

He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.

She repeated her words.

“Oh,” he said, then wondered what more he could possibly say.

“I saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes.”

“Oh,” he said again.

He had never been so tongue-tied in his life.  Positively he did not have an idea in his head.  He felt stupid and awkward, but for the life of him he could think of nothing to say.  It would have been easier had the intrusion been the Shelly Hot Springs laundry.  He could have rolled up his sleeves and gone to work.

“And then you came in,” he said finally.

She nodded, with a slightly arch expression, and loosened the scarf at her throat.

“I saw you first from across the street when you were with that girl.”

“Oh, yes,” he said simply.  “I took her down to night school.”

“Well, aren’t you glad to see me?” she said at the end of another silence.

“Yes, yes.”  He spoke hastily.  “But wasn’t it rash of you to come here?”

“I slipped in.  Nobody knows I am here.  I wanted to see you.  I came to tell you I have been very foolish.  I came because I could no longer stay away, because my heart compelled me to come, because—because I wanted to come.”

She came forward, out of her chair and over to him.  She rested her hand on his shoulder a moment, breathing quickly, and then slipped into his arms.  And in his large, easy way, desirous of not inflicting hurt, knowing that to repulse this proffer of herself was to inflict the most grievous hurt a woman could receive, he folded his arms around her and held her close.  But there was no warmth in the embrace, no caress in the contact.  She had come into his arms, and he held her, that was all.  She nestled against him, and then, with a change of position, her hands crept up and rested upon his neck.  But his flesh was not fire beneath those hands, and he felt awkward and uncomfortable.

“What makes you tremble so?” he asked.  “Is it a chill?  Shall I light the grate?”

He made a movement to disengage himself, but she clung more closely to him, shivering violently.

“It is merely nervousness,” she said with chattering teeth.  “I’ll control myself in a minute.  There, I am better already.”

Slowly her shivering died away.  He continued to hold her, but he was no longer puzzled.  He knew now for what she had come.

“My mother wanted me to marry Charley Hapgood,” she announced.

“Charley Hapgood, that fellow who speaks always in platitudes?” Martin groaned.  Then he added, “And now, I suppose, your mother wants you to marry me.”

He did not put it in the form of a question.  He stated it as a certitude, and before his eyes began to dance the rows of figures of his royalties.

“She will not object, I know that much,” Ruth said.

“She considers me quite eligible?”

Ruth nodded.

“And yet I am not a bit more eligible now than I was when she broke our engagement,” he meditated.  “I haven’t changed any.  I’m the same Martin Eden, though for that matter I’m a bit worse—I smoke now.  Don’t you smell my breath?”

In reply she pressed her open fingers against his lips, placed them graciously and playfully, and in expectancy of the kiss that of old had always been a consequence.  But there was no caressing answer of Martin’s lips.  He waited until the fingers were removed and then went on.

“I am not changed.  I haven’t got a job.  I’m not looking for a job.  Furthermore, I am not going to look for a job.  And I still believe that Herbert Spencer is a great and noble man and that Judge Blount is an unmitigated ass.  I had dinner with him the other night, so I ought to know.”

“But you didn’t accept father’s invitation,” she chided.

“So you know about that?  Who sent him?  Your mother?”

She remained silent.

“Then she did send him.  I thought so.  And now I suppose she has sent you.”

“No one knows that I am here,” she protested.  “Do you think my mother would permit this?”

“She’d permit you to marry me, that’s certain.”

She gave a sharp cry.  “Oh, Martin, don’t be cruel.  You have not kissed me once.  You are as unresponsive as a stone.  And think what I have dared to do.”  She looked about her with a shiver, though half the look was curiosity.  “Just think of where I am.”

“I could die for you!  I could die for you!”—Lizzie’s words were ringing in his ears.

“Why didn’t you dare it before?” he asked harshly.  “When I hadn’t a job?  When I was starving?  When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden?  That’s the question I’ve been propounding to myself for many a day—not concerning you merely, but concerning everybody.  You see I have not changed, though my sudden apparent appreciation in value compels me constantly to reassure myself on that point.  I’ve got the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and toes.  I am the same.  I have not developed any new strength nor virtue.  My brain is the same old brain.  I haven’t made even one new generalization on literature or philosophy.  I am personally of the same value that I was when nobody wanted me.  And what is puzzling me is why they want me now.  Surely they don’t want me for myself, for myself is the same old self they did not want.  Then they must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I!  Shall I tell you what that something is?  It is for the recognition I have received.  That recognition is not I.  It resides in the minds of others.  Then again for the money I have earned and am earning.  But that money is not I.  It resides in banks and in the pockets of Tom, Dick, and Harry.  And is it for that, for the recognition and the money, that you now want me?”

“You are breaking my heart,” she sobbed.  “You know I love you, that I am here because I love you.”

“I am afraid you don’t see my point,” he said gently.  “What I mean is: if you love me, how does it happen that you love me now so much more than you did when your love was weak enough to deny me?”

“Forget and forgive,” she cried passionately.  “I loved you all the time, remember that, and I am here, now, in your arms.”

“I’m afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying to weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is.”

She withdrew herself from his arms, sat upright, and looked at him long and searchingly.  She was about to speak, then faltered and changed her mind.

“You see, it appears this way to me,” he went on.  “When I was all that I am now, nobody out of my own class seemed to care for me.  When my books were all written, no one who had read the manuscripts seemed to care for them.  In point of fact, because of the stuff I had written they seemed to care even less for me.  In writing the stuff it seemed that I had committed acts that were, to say the least, derogatory.  ‘Get a job,’ everybody said.”

She made a movement of dissent.

“Yes, yes,” he said; “except in your case you told me to get a position.  The homely word job, like much that I have written, offends you.  It is brutal.  But I assure you it was no less brutal to me when everybody I knew recommended it to me as they would recommend right conduct to an immoral creature.  But to return.  The publication of what I had written, and the public notice I received, wrought a change in the fibre of your love.  Martin Eden, with his work all performed, you would not marry.  Your love for him was not strong enough to enable you to marry him.  But your love is now strong enough, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that its strength arises from the publication and the public notice.  In your case I do not mention royalties, though I am certain that they apply to the change wrought in your mother and father.  Of course, all this is not flattering to me.  But worst of all, it makes me question love, sacred love.  Is love so gross a thing that it must feed upon publication and public notice?  It would seem so.  I have sat and thought upon it till my head went around.”

“Poor, dear head.”  She reached up a hand and passed the fingers soothingly through his hair.  “Let it go around no more.  Let us begin anew, now.  I loved you all the time.  I know that I was weak in yielding to my mother’s will.  I should not have done so.  Yet I have heard you speak so often with broad charity of the fallibility and frailty of humankind.  Extend that charity to me.  I acted mistakenly.  Forgive me.”

“Oh, I do forgive,” he said impatiently.  “It is easy to forgive where there is really nothing to forgive.  Nothing that you have done requires forgiveness.  One acts according to one’s lights, and more than that one cannot do.  As well might I ask you to forgive me for my not getting a job.”

“I meant well,” she protested.  “You know that I could not have loved you and not meant well.”

“True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning.”

“Yes, yes,” he shut off her attempted objection.  “You would have destroyed my writing and my career.  Realism is imperative to my nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism.  The bourgeoisie is cowardly.  It is afraid of life.  And all your effort was to make me afraid of life.  You would have formalized me.  You would have compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all life’s values are unreal, and false, and vulgar.”  He felt her stir protestingly.  “Vulgarity—a hearty vulgarity, I’ll admit—is the basis of bourgeois refinement and culture.  As I say, you wanted to formalize me, to make me over into one of your own class, with your class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices.”  He shook his head sadly.  “And you do not understand, even now, what I am saying.  My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them mean.  What I say is so much fantasy to you.  Yet to me it is vital reality.  At the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this raw boy, crawling up out of the mire of the abyss, should pass judgment upon your class and call it vulgar.”

She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body shivered with recurrent nervousness.  He waited for a time for her to speak, and then went on.

“And now you want to renew our love.  You want us to be married.  You want me.  And yet, listen—if my books had not been noticed, I’d nevertheless have been just what I am now.  And you would have stayed away.  It is all those damned books—”

“Don’t swear,” she interrupted.

Her reproof startled him.  He broke into a harsh laugh.

“That’s it,” he said, “at a high moment, when what seems your life’s happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same old way—afraid of life and a healthy oath.”

She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her act, and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was consequently resentful.  They sat in silence for a long time, she thinking desperately and he pondering upon his love which had departed.  He knew, now, that he had not really loved her.  It was an idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems.  The real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind, he had never loved.

She suddenly began to speak.

“I know that much you have said is so.  I have been afraid of life.  I did not love you well enough.  I have learned to love better.  I love you for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by which you have become.  I love you for the ways wherein you differ from what you call my class, for your beliefs which I do not understand but which I know I can come to understand.  I shall devote myself to understanding them.  And even your smoking and your swearing—they are part of you and I will love you for them, too.  I can still learn.  In the last ten minutes I have learned much.  That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have already learned.  Oh, Martin!—”

She was sobbing and nestling close against him.

For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy, and she acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening face.

“It is too late,” he said.  He remembered Lizzie’s words.  “I am a sick man—oh, not my body.  It is my soul, my brain.  I seem to have lost all values.  I care for nothing.  If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different.  It is too late, now.”

“It is not too late,” she cried.  “I will show you.  I will prove to you that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and all that is dearest to me.  All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will flout.  I am no longer afraid of life.  I will leave my father and mother, and let my name become a by-word with my friends.  I will come to you here and now, in free love if you will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you.  If I have been a traitor to love, I will now, for love’s sake, be a traitor to all that made that earlier treason.”

She stood before him, with shining eyes.

“I am waiting, Martin,” she whispered, “waiting for you to accept me.  Look at me.”

It was splendid, he thought, looking at her.  She had redeemed herself for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman, superior to the iron rule of bourgeois convention.  It was splendid, magnificent, desperate.  And yet, what was the matter with him?  He was not thrilled nor stirred by what she had done.  It was splendid and magnificent only intellectually.  In what should have been a moment of fire, he coldly appraised her.  His heart was untouched.  He was unaware of any desire for her.  Again he remembered Lizzie’s words.

“I am sick, very sick,” he said with a despairing gesture.  “How sick I did not know till now.  Something has gone out of me.  I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life.  Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything.  If there were room, I should want you, now.  You see how sick I am.”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child, crying, that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate through the tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses of vegetation, shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and blazed against this background of his eyelids.  It was not restful, that green foliage.  The sunlight was too raw and glaring.  It hurt him to look at it, and yet he looked, he knew not why.

He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob.  Ruth was at the door.

“How shall I get out?” she questioned tearfully.  “I am afraid.”

“Oh, forgive me,” he cried, springing to his feet.  “I’m not myself, you know.  I forgot you were here.”  He put his hand to his head.  “You see, I’m not just right.  I’ll take you home.  We can go out by the servants’ entrance.  No one will see us.  Pull down that veil and everything will be all right.”

She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the narrow stairs.

“I am safe now,” she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at the same time starting to take her hand from his arm.

“No, no, I’ll see you home,” he answered.

“No, please don’t,” she objected.  “It is unnecessary.”

Again she started to remove her hand.  He felt a momentary curiosity.  Now that she was out of danger she was afraid.  She was in almost a panic to be quit of him.  He could see no reason for it and attributed it to her nervousness.  So he restrained her withdrawing hand and started to walk on with her.  Halfway down the block, he saw a man in a long overcoat shrink back into a doorway.  He shot a glance in as he passed by, and, despite the high turned-up collar, he was certain that he recognized Ruth’s brother, Norman.

During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversation.  She was stunned.  He was apathetic.  Once, he mentioned that he was going away, back to the South Seas, and, once, she asked him to forgive her having come to him.  And that was all.  The parting at her door was conventional.  They shook hands, said good night, and he lifted his hat.  The door swung shut, and he lighted a cigarette and turned back for his hotel.  When he came to the doorway into which he had seen Norman shrink, he stopped and looked in in a speculative humor.

“She lied,” he said aloud.  “She made believe to me that she had dared greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought her was waiting to take her back.”  He burst into laughter.  “Oh, these bourgeois!  When I was broke, I was not fit to be seen with his sister.  When I have a bank account, he brings her to me.”

As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same direction, begged him over his shoulder.

“Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?” were the words.

But it was the voice that made Martin turn around.  The next instant he had Joe by the hand.

“D’ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?” the other was saying.  “I said then we’d meet again.  I felt it in my bones.  An’ here we are.”

“You’re looking good,” Martin said admiringly, “and you’ve put on weight.”

“I sure have.”  Joe’s face was beaming.  “I never knew what it was to live till I hit hoboin’.  I’m thirty pounds heavier an’ feel tiptop all the time.  Why, I was worked to skin an’ bone in them old days.  Hoboin’ sure agrees with me.”

“But you’re looking for a bed just the same,” Martin chided, “and it’s a cold night.”

“Huh?  Lookin’ for a bed?”  Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket and brought it out filled with small change.  “That beats hard graft,” he exulted.  “You just looked good; that’s why I battered you.”

Martin laughed and gave in.

“You’ve several full-sized drunks right there,” he insinuated.

Joe slid the money back into his pocket.

“Not in mine,” he announced.  “No gettin’ oryide for me, though there ain’t nothin’ to stop me except I don’t want to.  I’ve ben drunk once since I seen you last, an’ then it was unexpected, bein’ on an empty stomach.  When I work like a beast, I drink like a beast.  When I live like a man, I drink like a man—a jolt now an’ again when I feel like it, an’ that’s all.”

Martin arranged to meet him next day, and went on to the hotel.  He paused in the office to look up steamer sailings.  The Mariposa sailed for Tahiti in five days.

“Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me,” he told the clerk.  “No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the weather-side,—the port-side, remember that, the port-side.  You’d better write it down.”

Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently as a child.  The occurrences of the evening had made no impression on him.  His mind was dead to impressions.  The glow of warmth with which he met Joe had been most fleeting.  The succeeding minute he had been bothered by the ex-laundryman’s presence and by the compulsion of conversation.  That in five more days he sailed for his loved South Seas meant nothing to him.  So he closed his eyes and slept normally and comfortably for eight uninterrupted hours.  He was not restless.  He did not change his position, nor did he dream.  Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each day that he awoke, he awoke with regret.  Life worried and bored him, and time was a vexation.

CHAPTER XLVI

“Say, Joe,” was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next morning, “there’s a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street.  He’s made a pot of money, and he’s going back to France.  It’s a dandy, well-appointed, small steam laundry.  There’s a start for you if you want to settle down.  Here, take this; buy some clothes with it and be at this man’s office by ten o’clock.  He looked up the laundry for me, and he’ll take you out and show you around.  If you like it, and think it is worth the price—twelve thousand—let me know and it is yours.  Now run along.  I’m busy.  I’ll see you later.”

“Now look here, Mart,” the other said slowly, with kindling anger, “I come here this mornin’ to see you.  Savve?  I didn’t come here to get no laundry.  I come a here for a talk for old friends’ sake, and you shove a laundry at me.  I tell you, what you can do.  You can take that laundry an’ go to hell.”

He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him around.

“Now look here, Joe,” he said; “if you act that way, I’ll punch your head.  An for old friends’ sake I’ll punch it hard.  Savve?—you will, will you?”

Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and writhing out of the advantage of the other’s hold.  They reeled about the room, locked in each other’s arms, and came down with a crash across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair.  Joe was underneath, with arms spread out and held and with Martin’s knee on his chest.  He was panting and gasping for breath when Martin released him.

“Now we’ll talk a moment,” Martin said.  “You can’t get fresh with me.  I want that laundry business finished first of all.  Then you can come back and we’ll talk for old sake’s sake.  I told you I was busy.  Look at that.”

A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of letters and magazines.

“How can I wade through that and talk with you?  You go and fix up that laundry, and then we’ll get together.”

“All right,” Joe admitted reluctantly.  “I thought you was turnin’ me down, but I guess I was mistaken.  But you can’t lick me, Mart, in a stand-up fight.  I’ve got the reach on you.”

“We’ll put on the gloves sometime and see,” Martin said with a smile.

“Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going.”  Joe extended his arm.  “You see that reach?  It’ll make you go a few.”

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman.  He was becoming anti-social.  Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people.  Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated him.  They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses to get rid of them.

He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-formed thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.

He roused himself and began glancing through his mail.  There were a dozen requests for autographs—he knew them at sight; there were professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of communist colonization.  There were letters from women seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her good faith and as proof of her respectability.

Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters, the former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their knees for his books—his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept all he possessed in pawn for so many dreary months in order to find them in postage.  There were unexpected checks for English serial rights and for advance payments on foreign translations.  His English agent announced the sale of German translation rights in three of his books, and informed him that Swedish editions, from which he could expect nothing because Sweden was not a party to the Berne Convention, were already on the market.  Then there was a nominal request for his permission for a Russian translation, that country being likewise outside the Berne Convention.

He turned to the huge bundle of clippings which had come in from his press bureau, and read about himself and his vogue, which had become a furore.  All his creative output had been flung to the public in one magnificent sweep.  That seemed to account for it.  He had taken the public off its feet, the way Kipling had, that time when he lay near to death and all the mob, animated by a mob-mind thought, began suddenly to read him.  Martin remembered how that same world-mob, having read him and acclaimed him and not understood him in the least, had, abruptly, a few months later, flung itself upon him and torn him to pieces.  Martin grinned at the thought.  Who was he that he should not be similarly treated in a few more months?  Well, he would fool the mob.  He would be away, in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls and copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and bonitas, hunting wild goats among the cliffs of the valley that lay next to the valley of Taiohae.

In the moment of that thought the desperateness of his situation dawned upon him.  He saw, cleared eyed, that he was in the Valley of the Shadow.  All the life that was in him was fading, fainting, making toward death.

He realized how much he slept, and how much he desired to sleep.  Of old, he had hated sleep.  It had robbed him of precious moments of living.  Four hours of sleep in the twenty-four had meant being robbed of four hours of life.  How he had grudged sleep!  Now it was life he grudged.  Life was not good; its taste in his mouth was without tang, and bitter.  This was his peril.  Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing.  Some remote instinct for preservation stirred in him, and he knew he must get away.  He glanced about the room, and the thought of packing was burdensome.  Perhaps it would be better to leave that to the last.  In the meantime he might be getting an outfit.

He put on his hat and went out, stopping in at a gun-store, where he spent the remainder of the morning buying automatic rifles, ammunition, and fishing tackle.  Fashions changed in trading, and he knew he would have to wait till he reached Tahiti before ordering his trade-goods.  They could come up from Australia, anyway.  This solution was a source of pleasure.  He had avoided doing something, and the doing of anything just now was unpleasant.  He went back to the hotel gladly, with a feeling of satisfaction in that the comfortable Morris chair was waiting for him; and he groaned inwardly, on entering his room, at sight of Joe in the Morris chair.

Joe was delighted with the laundry.  Everything was settled, and he would enter into possession next day.  Martin lay on the bed, with closed eyes, while the other talked on.  Martin’s thoughts were far away—so far away that he was rarely aware that he was thinking.  It was only by an effort that he occasionally responded.  And yet this was Joe, whom he had always liked.  But Joe was too keen with life.  The boisterous impact of it on Martin’s jaded mind was a hurt.  It was an aching probe to his tired sensitiveness.  When Joe reminded him that sometime in the future they were going to put on the gloves together, he could almost have screamed.

“Remember, Joe, you’re to run the laundry according to those old rules you used to lay down at Shelly Hot Springs,” he said.  “No overworking.  No working at night.  And no children at the mangles.  No children anywhere.  And a fair wage.”

Joe nodded and pulled out a note-book.

“Look at here.  I was workin’ out them rules before breakfast this A.M.  What d’ye think of them?”

He read them aloud, and Martin approved, worrying at the same time as to when Joe would take himself off.

It was late afternoon when he awoke.  Slowly the fact of life came back to him.  He glanced about the room.  Joe had evidently stolen away after he had dozed off.  That was considerate of Joe, he thought.  Then he closed his eyes and slept again.

In the days that followed Joe was too busy organizing and taking hold of the laundry to bother him much; and it was not until the day before sailing that the newspapers made the announcement that he had taken passage on the Mariposa.  Once, when the instinct of preservation fluttered, he went to a doctor and underwent a searching physical examination.  Nothing could be found the matter with him.  His heart and lungs were pronounced magnificent.  Every organ, so far as the doctor could know, was normal and was working normally.

“There is nothing the matter with you, Mr. Eden,” he said, “positively nothing the matter with you.  You are in the pink of condition.  Candidly, I envy you your health.  It is superb.  Look at that chest.  There, and in your stomach, lies the secret of your remarkable constitution.  Physically, you are a man in a thousand—in ten thousand.  Barring accidents, you should live to be a hundred.”

And Martin knew that Lizzie’s diagnosis had been correct.  Physically he was all right.  It was his “think-machine” that had gone wrong, and there was no cure for that except to get away to the South Seas.  The trouble was that now, on the verge of departure, he had no desire to go.  The South Seas charmed him no more than did bourgeois civilization.  There was no zest in the thought of departure, while the act of departure appalled him as a weariness of the flesh.  He would have felt better if he were already on board and gone.

The last day was a sore trial.  Having read of his sailing in the morning papers, Bernard Higginbotham, Gertrude, and all the family came to say good-by, as did Hermann von Schmidt and Marian.  Then there was business to be transacted, bills to be paid, and everlasting reporters to be endured.  He said good-by to Lizzie Connolly, abruptly, at the entrance to night school, and hurried away.  At the hotel he found Joe, too busy all day with the laundry to have come to him earlier.  It was the last straw, but Martin gripped the arms of his chair and talked and listened for half an hour.

“You know, Joe,” he said, “that you are not tied down to that laundry.  There are no strings on it.  You can sell it any time and blow the money.  Any time you get sick of it and want to hit the road, just pull out.  Do what will make you the happiest.”

Joe shook his head.

“No more road in mine, thank you kindly.  Hoboin’s all right, exceptin’ for one thing—the girls.  I can’t help it, but I’m a ladies’ man.  I can’t get along without ’em, and you’ve got to get along without ’em when you’re hoboin’.  The times I’ve passed by houses where dances an’ parties was goin’ on, an’ heard the women laugh, an’ saw their white dresses and smiling faces through the windows—Gee!  I tell you them moments was plain hell.  I like dancin’ an’ picnics, an’ walking in the moonlight, an’ all the rest too well.  Me for the laundry, and a good front, with big iron dollars clinkin’ in my jeans.  I seen a girl already, just yesterday, and, d’ye know, I’m feelin’ already I’d just as soon marry her as not.  I’ve ben whistlin’ all day at the thought of it.  She’s a beaut, with the kindest eyes and softest voice you ever heard.  Me for her, you can stack on that.  Say, why don’t you get married with all this money to burn?  You could get the finest girl in the land.”

Martin shook his head with a smile, but in his secret heart he was wondering why any man wanted to marry.  It seemed an amazing and incomprehensible thing.

From the deck of the Mariposa, at the sailing hour, he saw Lizzie Connolly hiding in the skirts of the crowd on the wharf.  Take her with you, came the thought.  It is easy to be kind.  She will be supremely happy.  It was almost a temptation one moment, and the succeeding moment it became a terror.  He was in a panic at the thought of it.  His tired soul cried out in protest.  He turned away from the rail with a groan, muttering, “Man, you are too sick, you are too sick.”

He fled to his stateroom, where he lurked until the steamer was clear of the dock.  In the dining saloon, at luncheon, he found himself in the place of honor, at the captain’s right; and he was not long in discovering that he was the great man on board.  But no more unsatisfactory great man ever sailed on a ship.  He spent the afternoon in a deck-chair, with closed eyes, dozing brokenly most of the time, and in the evening went early to bed.

After the second day, recovered from seasickness, the full passenger list was in evidence, and the more he saw of the passengers the more he disliked them.  Yet he knew that he did them injustice.  They were good and kindly people, he forced himself to acknowledge, and in the moment of acknowledgment he qualified—good and kindly like all the bourgeoisie, with all the psychological cramp and intellectual futility of their kind, they bored him when they talked with him, their little superficial minds were so filled with emptiness; while the boisterous high spirits and the excessive energy of the younger people shocked him.  They were never quiet, ceaselessly playing deck-quoits, tossing rings, promenading, or rushing to the rail with loud cries to watch the leaping porpoises and the first schools of flying fish.

He slept much.  After breakfast he sought his deck-chair with a magazine he never finished.  The printed pages tired him.  He puzzled that men found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair.  When the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he must awaken.  There was no satisfaction in being awake.

Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and went forward into the forecastle with the sailors.  But the breed of sailors seemed to have changed since the days he had lived in the forecastle.  He could find no kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures.  He was in despair.  Up above nobody had wanted Martin Eden for his own sake, and he could not go back to those of his own class who had wanted him in the past.  He did not want them.  He could not stand them any more than he could stand the stupid first-cabin passengers and the riotous young people.

Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a sick person.  During every conscious moment life blazed in a raw glare around him and upon him.  It hurt.  It hurt intolerably.  It was the first time in his life that Martin had travelled first class.  On ships at sea he had always been in the forecastle, the steerage, or in the black depths of the coal-hold, passing coal.  In those days, climbing up the iron ladders out the pit of stifling heat, he had often caught glimpses of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing but enjoy themselves, under awnings spread to keep the sun and wind away from them, with subservient stewards taking care of their every want and whim, and it had seemed to him that the realm in which they moved and had their being was nothing else than paradise.  Well, here he was, the great man on board, in the midmost centre of it, sitting at the captain’s right hand, and yet vainly harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest of the Paradise he had lost.  He had found no new one, and now he could not find the old one.

He strove to stir himself and find something to interest him.  He ventured the petty officers’ mess, and was glad to get away.  He talked with a quartermaster off duty, an intelligent man who promptly prodded him with the socialist propaganda and forced into his hands a bunch of leaflets and pamphlets.  He listened to the man expounding the slave-morality, and as he listened, he thought languidly of his own Nietzsche philosophy.  But what was it worth, after all?  He remembered one of Nietzsche’s mad utterances wherein that madman had doubted truth.  And who was to say?  Perhaps Nietzsche had been right.  Perhaps there was no truth in anything, no truth in truth—no such thing as truth.  But his mind wearied quickly, and he was content to go back to his chair and doze.

Miserable as he was on the steamer, a new misery came upon him.  What when the steamer reached Tahiti?  He would have to go ashore.  He would have to order his trade-goods, to find a passage on a schooner to the Marquesas, to do a thousand and one things that were awful to contemplate.  Whenever he steeled himself deliberately to think, he could see the desperate peril in which he stood.  In all truth, he was in the Valley of the Shadow, and his danger lay in that he was not afraid.  If he were only afraid, he would make toward life.  Being unafraid, he was drifting deeper into the shadow.  He found no delight in the old familiar things of life.  The Mariposa was now in the northeast trades, and this wine of wind, surging against him, irritated him.  He had his chair moved to escape the embrace of this lusty comrade of old days and nights.

The day the Mariposa entered the doldrums, Martin was more miserable than ever.  He could no longer sleep.  He was soaked with sleep, and perforce he must now stay awake and endure the white glare of life.  He moved about restlessly.  The air was sticky and humid, and the rain-squalls were unrefreshing.  He ached with life.  He walked around the deck until that hurt too much, then sat in his chair until he was compelled to walk again.  He forced himself at last to finish the magazine, and from the steamer library he culled several volumes of poetry.  But they could not hold him, and once more he took to walking.

He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him, for when he went below, he could not sleep.  This surcease from life had failed him.  It was too much.  He turned on the electric light and tried to read.  One of the volumes was a Swinburne.  He lay in bed, glancing through its pages, until suddenly he became aware that he was reading with interest.  He finished the stanza, attempted to read on, then came back to it.  He rested the book face downward on his breast and fell to thinking.  That was it.  The very thing.  Strange that it had never come to him before.  That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting that way all the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the happy way out.  He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him.  He glanced at the open port-hole.  Yes, it was large enough.  For the first time in weeks he felt happy.  At last he had discovered the cure of his ill.  He picked up the book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-

“‘From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.’”

He looked again at the open port.  Swinburne had furnished the key.  Life was ill, or, rather, it had become ill—an unbearable thing.  “That dead men rise up never!”  That line stirred him with a profound feeling of gratitude.  It was the one beneficent thing in the universe.  When life became an aching weariness, death was ready to soothe away to everlasting sleep.  But what was he waiting for?  It was time to go.

He arose and thrust his head out the port-hole, looking down into the milky wash.  The Mariposa was deeply loaded, and, hanging by his hands, his feet would be in the water.  He could slip in noiselessly.  No one would hear.  A smother of spray dashed up, wetting his face.  It tasted salt on his lips, and the taste was good.  He wondered if he ought to write a swan-song, but laughed the thought away.  There was no time.  He was too impatient to be gone.

Turning off the light in his room so that it might not betray him, he went out the port-hole feet first.  His shoulders stuck, and he forced himself back so as to try it with one arm down by his side.  A roll of the steamer aided him, and he was through, hanging by his hands.  When his feet touched the sea, he let go.  He was in a milky froth of water.  The side of the Mariposa rushed past him like a dark wall, broken here and there by lighted ports.  She was certainly making time.  Almost before he knew it, he was astern, swimming gently on the foam-crackling surface.

A bonita struck at his white body, and he laughed aloud.  It had taken a piece out, and the sting of it reminded him of why he was there.  In the work to do he had forgotten the purpose of it.  The lights of the Mariposa were growing dim in the distance, and there he was, swimming confidently, as though it were his intention to make for the nearest land a thousand miles or so away.

It was the automatic instinct to live.  He ceased swimming, but the moment he felt the water rising above his mouth the hands struck out sharply with a lifting movement.  The will to live, was his thought, and the thought was accompanied by a sneer.  Well, he had will,—ay, will strong enough that with one last exertion it could destroy itself and cease to be.

He changed his position to a vertical one.  He glanced up at the quiet stars, at the same time emptying his lungs of air.  With swift, vigorous propulsion of hands and feet, he lifted his shoulders and half his chest out of water.  This was to gain impetus for the descent.  Then he let himself go and sank without movement, a white statue, into the sea.  He breathed in the water deeply, deliberately, after the manner of a man taking an anaesthetic.  When he strangled, quite involuntarily his arms and legs clawed the water and drove him up to the surface and into the clear sight of the stars.

The will to live, he thought disdainfully, vainly endeavoring not to breathe the air into his bursting lungs.  Well, he would have to try a new way.  He filled his lungs with air, filled them full.  This supply would take him far down.  He turned over and went down head first, swimming with all his strength and all his will.  Deeper and deeper he went.  His eyes were open, and he watched the ghostly, phosphorescent trails of the darting bonita.  As he swam, he hoped that they would not strike at him, for it might snap the tension of his will.  But they did not strike, and he found time to be grateful for this last kindness of life.

Down, down, he swam till his arms and leg grew tired and hardly moved.  He knew that he was deep.  The pressure on his ear-drums was a pain, and there was a buzzing in his head.  His endurance was faltering, but he compelled his arms and legs to drive him deeper until his will snapped and the air drove from his lungs in a great explosive rush.  The bubbles rubbed and bounded like tiny balloons against his cheeks and eyes as they took their upward flight.  Then came pain and strangulation.  This hurt was not death, was the thought that oscillated through his reeling consciousness.  Death did not hurt.  It was life, the pangs of life, this awful, suffocating feeling; it was the last blow life could deal him.

His wilful hands and feet began to beat and churn about, spasmodically and feebly.  But he had fooled them and the will to live that made them beat and churn.  He was too deep down.  They could never bring him to the surface.  He seemed floating languidly in a sea of dreamy vision.  Colors and radiances surrounded him and bathed him and pervaded him.  What was that?  It seemed a lighthouse; but it was inside his brain—a flashing, bright white light.  It flashed swifter and swifter.  There was a long rumble of sound, and it seemed to him that he was falling down a vast and interminable stairway.  And somewhere at the bottom he fell into darkness.  That much he knew.  He had fallen into darkness.  And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.