Martin Eden, by Jack London

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Title: Martin Eden

Author: Jack London

Release Date: November 25, 2004  [eBook #1056]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARTIN EDEN***




Transcribed from the 1913 Macmillan and Company edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





MARTIN EDEN


CHAPTER I


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ruth, this is Mr. Eden."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who?"

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

"Swinburne," she corrected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Now Longfellow--" she was saying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is _trig_?"

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

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

"Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Seen a ghost?"

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.

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

She nodded her head resignedly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"When is he goin' to sea again?"

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

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

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

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

His wife looked alarm and interrogation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.




CHAPTER IV


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"D'ye know Julia?"

Martin shook his head.

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

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

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

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

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

"But I didn't want to."

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

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

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

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

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

"Down in Oakland," Martin replied.

"To the show?"

Martin shoved his plate away and got up.

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

"No, I think not," he answered.

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

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

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

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

Noon came, and afternoon.  He forgot to eat, and sought on for the books
on etiquette; for, in addition to career, his mind was vexed by a simple
and very concrete problem: _When you meet a young lady and she asks you
to call, how soon can you call_? was the way he worded it to himself.  But
when he found the right shelf, he sought vainly for the answer.  He was
appalled at the vast edifice of etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes
of visiting-card conduct between persons in polite society.  He abandoned
his search.  He had not found what he wanted, though he had found that it
would take all of a man's time to be polite, and that he would have to
live a preliminary life in which to learn how to be polite.

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VI


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello," he said.

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

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

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

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

"You ask her," was the convulsed response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No joshin'?" she queried.

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

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

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

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

"Bill'll do," he confessed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What was you sayin'?" he asked.

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

"What?"

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

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

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

The girl's eyes blazed her disappointment.

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VII


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

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

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

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

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

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

The man smiled and paid attention.

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

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

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

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

"Then call again."

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

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

Martin looked at him admiringly.

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

"I beg pardon?"

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

"Oh," said the other, with comprehension.

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

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

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

He turned back and asked:-

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

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

So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But that takes money," he interrupted.

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

He shook his head.

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

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

He flushed and sweated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Give me an illustration," he asked.

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

He turned it over in his mind and considered.

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

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

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

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

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

Martin flushed again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't just see that."

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER VIII


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

When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he had
known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and
harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with this
new world and expanded.  His mind made for unity, and he was surprised
when at first he began to see points of contact between the two worlds.
And he was ennobled, as well