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Martin Eden - Jack London (bản tiếng Anh)

Chủ đề trong 'Tác phẩm Văn học' bởi EverMan, 23/06/2006.

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  1. EverMan

    EverMan Thành viên mới

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    Mặc dù ttvnol chưa fix xong lỗi cấm post bài tùy tiện, nhưng EverMan đã khắc phục một vài chỗ để post tiếp truyện lên vậy
    Ruth succeeded in veering right and left and right again, and in running the narrow passage between table and bed to Martin''s side; but Arthur veered too wide and fetched up with clatter and bang of pots and pans in the corner where Martin did his cooking. Arthur did not linger long. Ruth occupied the only chair, and having done his duty, he went outside and stood by the gate, the centre of seven marvelling Silvas, who watched him as they would have watched a curiosity in a side-show. All about the carriage were gathered the children from a dozen blocks, waiting and eager for some tragic and terrible denouement. Carriages were seen on their street only for weddings and funerals. Here was neither marriage nor death: therefore, it was something transcending experience and well worth waiting for.
    Martin had been wild to see Ruth. His was essentially a love- nature, and he possessed more than the average man''s need for sympathy. He was starving for sympathy, which, with him, meant intelligent understanding; and he had yet to learn that Ruth''s sympathy was largely sentimental and tactful, and that it proceeded from gentleness of nature rather than from understanding of the o-bjects of her sympathy. So it was while Martin held her hand and gladly talked, that her love for him prompted her to press his hand in return, and that her eyes were moist and luminous at sight of his helplessness and of the marks suffering had stamped upon his face.
    But while he told her of his two acceptances, of his despair when he received the one from the TRANSCONTINENTAL, and of the corresponding delight with which he received the one from the WHITE MOUSE, she did not follow him. She heard the words he uttered and understood their literal import, but she was not with him in his despair and his delight. She could not get out of herself. She was not interested in selling stories to magazines. What was important to her was matrimony. She was not aware of it, however, any more than she was aware that her desire that Martin take a position was the instinctive and preparative impulse of motherhood. She would have blushed had she been told as much in plain, set terms, and next, she might have grown indignant and asserted that her sole interest lay in the man she loved and her desire for him to make the best of himself. So, while Martin poured out his heart to her, elated with the first success his chosen work in the world had received, she paid heed to his bare words only, gazing now and again about the room, shocked by what she saw.
    For the first time Ruth gazed upon the sordid face of poverty. Starving lovers had always seemed romantic to her, - but she had had no idea how starving lovers lived. She had never dreamed it could be like this. Ever her gaze shifted from the room to him and back again. The steamy smell of dirty clothes, which had entered with her from the kitchen, was sickening. Martin must be soaked with it, Ruth concluded, if that awful woman washed frequently. Such was the contagiousness of degradation. When she looked at Martin, she seemed to see the smirch left upon him by his surroundings. She had never seen him unshaven, and the three days'' growth of beard on his face was repulsive to her. Not alone did it give him the same dark and murky aspect of the Silva house, inside and out, but it seemed to emphasize that animal-like strength of his which she detested. And here he was, being confirmed in his madness by the two acceptances he took such pride in telling her about. A little longer and he would have surrendered and gone to work. Now he would continue on in this horrible house, writing and starving for a few more months.
    "What is that smell?" she asked suddenly.
    "Some of Maria''s washing smells, I imagine," was the answer. "I am growing quite accustomed to them."
    "No, no; not that. It is something else. A stale, sickish smell."
    Martin sampled the air before replying.
    "I can''t smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke," he announced.
    "That''s it. It is terrible. Why do you smoke so much, Martin?"
    "I don''t know, except that I smoke more than usual when I am lonely. And then, too, it''s such a long-standing habit. I learned when I was only a youngster."
    "It is not a nice habit, you know," she reproved. "It smells to heaven."
    "That''s the fault of the tobacco. I can afford only the cheapest. But wait until I get that forty-dollar check. I''ll use a brand that is not offensive even to the angels. But that wasn''t so bad, was it, two acceptances in three days? That forty-five dollars will pay about all my debts."
    "For two years'' work?" she queried.
    "No, for less than a week''s work. Please pass me that book over on the far corner of the table, the account book with the gray cover." He opened it and began turning over the pages rapidly. "Yes, I was right. Four days for ''The Ring of Bells,'' two days for ''The Whirlpool.'' That''s forty-five dollars for a week''s work, one hundred and eighty dollars a month. That beats any salary I can command. And, besides, I''m just beginning. A thousand dollars a month is not too much to buy for you all I want you to have. A salary of five hundred a month would be too small. That forty-five dollars is just a starter. Wait till I get my stride. Then watch my smoke."
    Ruth misunderstood his slang, and reverted to cigarettes.
    "You smoke more than enough as it is, and the brand of tobacco will make no difference. It is the smoking itself that is not nice, no matter what the brand may be. You are a chimney, a living volcano, a perambulating smoke-stack, and you are a perfect disgrace, Martin dear, you know you are."
    She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he looked at her delicate face and into her pure, limpid eyes, as of old he was struck with his own unworthiness.
    "I wish you wouldn''t smoke any more," she whispered. "Please, for - my sake."
    "All right, I won''t," he cried. "I''ll do anything you ask, dear love, anything; you know that."
    A great temptation assailed her. In an insistent way she had caught glimpses of the large, easy-going side of his nature, and she felt sure, if she asked him to cease attempting to write, that he would grant her wish. In the swift instant that elapsed, the words trembled on her lips. But she did not utter them. She was not quite brave enough; she did not quite dare. Instead, she leaned toward him to meet him, and in his arms murmured:-
    "You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own. I am sure smoking hurts you; and besides, it is not good to be a slave to anything, to a drug least of all."
    "I shall always be your slave," he smiled.
    "In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands."
    She looked at him mischievously, though deep down she was already regretting that she had not preferred her largest request.
    "I live but to obey, your majesty."
    "Well, then, my first commandment is, Thou shalt not omit to shave every day. Look how you have scratched my cheek."
    And so it ended in caresses and love-laughter. But she had made one point, and she could not expect to make more than one at a time. She felt a woman''s pride in that she had made him stop smoking. Another time she would persuade him to take a position, for had he not said he would do anything she asked?
    She left his side to explore the room, examining the clothes-lines of notes overhead, learning the mystery of the tackle used for suspending his wheel under the ceiling, and being saddened by the heap of manuscripts under the table which represented to her just so much wasted time. The oil-stove won her admiration, but on investigating the food shelves she found them empty.
    "Why, you haven''t anything to eat, you poor dear," she said with tender compassion. "You must be starving."
    "I store my food in Maria''s safe and in her pantry," he lied. "It keeps better there. No danger of my starving. Look at that."
  2. EverMan

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    She had come back to his side, and she saw him double his arm at the elbow, the biceps crawling under his shirt-sleeve and swelling into a knot of muscle, heavy and hard. The sight repelled her. Sentimentally, she disliked it. But her pulse, her blood, every fibre of her, loved it and yearned for it, and, in the old, inexplicable way, she leaned toward him, not away from him. And in the moment that followed, when he crushed her in his arms, the brain of her, concerned with the superficial aspects of life, was in revolt; while the heart of her, the woman of her, concerned with life itself, exulted triumphantly. It was in moments like this that she felt to the uttermost the greatness of her love for Martin, for it was almost a swoon of delight to her to feel his strong arms about her, holding her tightly, hurting her with the grip of their fervor. At such moments she found justification for her treason to her standards, for her violation of her own high ideals, and, most of all, for her tacit disobedience to her mother and father. They did not want her to marry this man. It shocked them that she should love him. It shocked her, too, sometimes, when she was apart from him, a cool and reasoning creature. With him, she loved him - in truth, at times a vexed and worried love; but love it was, a love that was stronger than she.
    "This La Grippe is nothing," he was saying. "It hurts a bit, and gives one a nasty headache, but it doesn''t compare with break-bone fever."
    "Have you had that, too?" she queried absently, intent on the heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms.
    And so, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his words startled her.
    He had had the fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of the Hawaiian Islands.
    "But why did you go there?" she demanded.
    Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal.
    "Because I didn''t know," he answered. "I never dreamed of lepers. When I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed inland for some place of hiding. For three days I lived off guavas, OHIA-apples, and bananas, all of which grew wild in the jungle. On the fourth day I found the trail - a mere foot-trail. It led inland, and it led up. It was the way I wanted to go, and it showed signs of recent travel. At one place it ran along the crest of a ridge that was no more than a knife-edge. The trail wasn''t three feet wide on the crest, and on either side the ridge fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep. One man, with plenty of ammunition, could have held it against a hundred thousand.
    "It was the only way in to the hiding-place. Three hours after I found the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket in the midst of lava peaks. The whole place was terraced for taro- patches, fruit trees grew there, and there were eight or ten grass huts. But as soon as I saw the inhabitants I knew what I''d struck. One sight of them was enough."
    "What did you do?" Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening, like any Desdemona, appalled and fascinated.
    "Nothing for me to do. Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty far gone, but he ruled like a king. He had discovered the little valley and founded the settlement - all of which was against the law. But he had guns, plenty of ammunition, and those Kanakas, trained to the shooting of wild cattle and wild pig, were dead shots. No, there wasn''t any running away for Martin Eden. He stayed - for three months."
    "But how did you escape?"
    "I''d have been there yet, if it hadn''t been for a girl there, a half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian. She was a beauty, poor thing, and well educated. Her mother, in Honolulu, was worth a million or so. Well, this girl got me away at last. Her mother financed the settlement, you see, so the girl wasn''t afraid of being punished for letting me go. But she made me swear, first, never to reveal the hiding-place; and I never have. This is the first time I have even mentioned it. The girl had just the first signs of leprosy. The fingers of her right hand were slightly twisted, and there was a small spot on her arm. That was all. I guess she is dead, now."
    "But weren''t you frightened? And weren''t you glad to get away without catching that dreadful disease?"
    "Well," he confessed, "I was a bit shivery at first; but I got used to it. I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though. That made me forget to be afraid. She was such a beauty, in spirit as well as in appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was doomed to lie there, living the life of a primitive savage and rotting slowly away. Leprosy is far more terrible than you can imagine it."
    "Poor thing," Ruth murmured softly. "It''s a wonder she let you get away."
    "How do you mean?" Martin asked unwittingly.
    "Because she must have loved you," Ruth said, still softly. "Candidly, now, didn''t she?"
    Martin''s sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and by the indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness had made his face even pale; and across this pallor flowed the slow wave of a blush. He was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut him off.
    "Never mind, don''t answer; it''s not necessary," she laughed.
    But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter, and that the light in her eyes was cold. On the spur of the moment it reminded him of a gale he had once experienced in the North Pacific. And for the moment the apparition of the gale rose before his eyes - a gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon, the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight. Next, he saw the girl in the leper refuge and remembered it was for love of him that she had let him go.
    "She was noble," he said simply. "She gave me life."
    That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob in her throat, and noticed that she turned her face away to gaze out of the window. When she turned it back to him, it was composed, and there was no hint of the gale in her eyes.
    "I''m such a silly," she said plaintively. "But I can''t help it. I do so love you, Martin, I do, I do. I shall grow more catholic in time, but at present I can''t help being jealous of those ghosts of the past, and you know your past is full of ghosts."
    "It must be," she silenced his protest. "It could not be otherwise. And there''s poor Arthur motioning me to come. He''s tired waiting. And now good-by, dear."
    "There''s some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that helps men to stop the use of tobacco," she called back from the door, "and I am going to send you some."
    The door closed, but opened again.
    "I do, I do," she whispered to him; and this time she was really gone.
    Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note the texture of Ruth''s garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown that produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the carriage. The crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared from view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who had abruptly become the most important person on the street. But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria''s reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been for her lodger. After that Maria dropped back into her old obscurity and Martin began to notice the respectful manner in which he was regarded by the small fry of the neighborhood. As for Maria, Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per cent, and had the Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would have allowed Martin an ad***ional three-dollars-and-eighty-five- cents'' worth of cre***.
  3. EverMan

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    CHAPTER XXVII
    The sun of Martin''s good fortune rose. The day after Ruth''s visit, he received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in payment for three of his triolets. Two days later a newspaper published in Chicago accepted his "Treasure Hunters," promising to pay ten dollars for it on publication. The price was small, but it was the first article he had written, his very first attempt to express his thought on the printed page. To cap everything, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, was accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile monthly calling itself YOUTH AND AGE. It was true the serial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its clumsy worthlessness.
    But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great strength - the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not taken him long to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith to was his later work. He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.
    He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred, in Martin''s estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, "Adventure," which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his views on the whole general subject.
    But "Adventure," and all that he deemed his best work, still went begging among the e***ors. His early work counted for nothing in his eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work. To him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their power. This investiture of the grotesque and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a trick - a skilful trick at best. Great literature could not reside in such a field. Their artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness of artistry when divorced from humanness. The trick had been to fling over the face of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in the half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written before he emerged upon the high peaks of "Adventure," "Joy," "The Pot," and "The Wine of Life."
    The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a precarious existence against the arrival of the WHITE MOUSE check. He cashed the first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars between the baker and the fruit store. Martin was not yet rich enough to afford meat, and he was on slim allowance when the WHITE MOUSE check arrived. He was divided on the cashing of it. He had never been in a bank in his life, much less been in one on business, and he had a naive and childlike desire to walk into one of the big banks down in Oakland and fling down his indorsed check for forty dollars. On the other hand, practical common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer and thereby make an impression that would later result in an increase of cre***. Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying his bill with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of jingling coin. Also, he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his suit and his bicycle, paid one month''s rent on the type-writer, and paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month in advance. This left him in his pocket, for emergencies, a balance of nearly three dollars.
    In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. Immediately on recovering his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he could not refrain from jingling the little handful of silver in his pocket. He had been so long without money that, like a rescued starving man who cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight, Martin could not keep his hand off the silver. He was not mean, nor avaricious, but the money meant more than so many dollars and cents. It stood for success, and the eagles stamped upon the coins were to him so many winged victories.
    It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world. It certainly appeared more beautiful to him. For weeks it had been a very dull and sombre world; but now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success, the sun shone bright and warm, and even a rain-squall that soaked unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry happening to him. When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were starving the world over; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain. He forgot about them, and, being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the world. Without deliberately thinking about it, MOTIFS for love-lyrics began to agitate his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, he got off the electric car, without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.
    He found a number of persons in the Morse home. Ruth''s two girl- cousins were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young people. The campaign had begun during Martin''s enforced absence, and was already in full swing. She was making a point of having at the house men who were doing things. Thus, in ad***ion to the cousins Dorothy and Florence, Martin encountered two university professors, one of Latin, the other of English; a young army officer just back from the Philippines, one-time school- mate of Ruth''s; a young fellow named Melville, private secretary to Joseph Perkins, head of the San Francisco Trust Company; and finally of the men, a live bank cashier, Charles Hapgood, a youngish man of thirty-five, graduate of Stanford University, member of the Nile Club and the Unity Club, and a conservative speaker for the Republican Party during campaigns - in short, a rising young man in every way. Among the women was one who painted portraits, another who was a professional musician, and still another who possessed the degree of Doctor of Sociology and who was locally famous for her social settlement work in the slums of San Francisco. But the women did not count for much in Mrs. Morse''s plan. At the best, they were necessary accessories. The men who did things must be drawn to the house somehow.
    "Don''t get excited when you talk," Ruth admonished Martin, before the ordeal of introduction began.
    He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his own awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to their old trick of threatening destruction to furniture and ornaments. Also, he was rendered self-conscious by the company. He had never before been in contact with such exalted beings nor with so many of them. Melville, the bank cashier, fascinated him, and he resolved to investigate him at the first opportunity. For underneath Martin''s awe lurked his assertive ego, and he felt the urge to measure himself with these men and women and to find out what they had learned from the books and life which he had not learned.
    Ruth''s eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on, and she was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got acquainted with her cousins. He certainly did not grow excited, while being seated removed from him the worry of his shoulders. Ruth knew them for clever girls, superficially brilliant, and she could scarcely understand their praise of Martin later that night at going to bed. But he, on the other hand, a wit in his own class, a gay quizzer and laughter-maker at dances and Sunday picnics, had found the making of fun and the breaking of good- natured lances simple enough in this environment. And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him on the shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he could afford to laugh and make laughter and remain unabashed.
    Later, Ruth''s anxiety found justification. Martin and Professor Caldwell had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though Martin no longer wove the air with his hands, to Ruth''s critical eye he permitted his own eyes to flash and glitter too frequently, talked too rapidly and warmly, grew too intense, and allowed his aroused blood to redden his cheeks too much. He lacked decorum and control, and was in decided contrast to the young professor of English with whom he talked.
    But Martin was not concerned with appearances! He had been swift to note the other''s trained mind and to appreciate his command of knowledge. Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize Martin''s concept of the average English professor. Martin wanted him to talk shop, and, though he seemed averse at first, succeeded in making him do it. For Martin did not see why a man should not talk shop.
    "It''s absurd and unfair," he had told Ruth weeks before, "this ob/jection to talking shop. For what reason under the sun do men and women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is in them? And the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the thing by which they make their living, the thing they''ve specialized on and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed about. Imagine Mr. Butler living up to social etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul Verlaine or the German drama or the novels of D''Annunzio. We''d be bored to death. I, for one, if I must listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear him talk about his law. It''s the best that is in him, and life is so short that I want the best of every man and woman I meet."
    "But," Ruth had ob/jected, "there are the topics of general interest to all."
    "There, you mistake," he had rushed on. "All persons in society, all cliques in society - or, rather, nearly all persons and cliques - ape their betters. Now, who are the best betters? The idlers, the wealthy idlers. They do not know, as a rule, the things known by the persons who are doing something in the world. To listen to conversation about such things would mean to be bored, wherefore the idlers decree that such things are shop and must not be talked about. Likewise they decree the things that are not shop and which may be talked about, and those things are the latest operas, latest novels, cards, billiards, ****tails, automobiles, horse shows, trout fishing, tuna-fishing, big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and so forth - and mark you, these are the things the idlers know. In all truth, they constitute the shop-talk of the idlers. And the funniest part of it is that many of the clever people, and all the would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to impose upon them. As for me, I want the best a man''s got in him, call it shop vulgarity or anything you please."
    And Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on the established had seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.
    So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness, challenging him to speak his mind. As Ruth paused beside them she heard Martin saying:-
    "You surely don''t pronounce such heresies in the University of California?"
    Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. "The honest taxpayer and the politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our appropriations and therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to the party press, or to the press of both parties."
    "Yes, that''s clear; but how about you?" Martin urged. "You must be a fish out of the water."
    "Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Sometimes I am fairly sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris, in Grub Street, in a hermit''s ****, or in some sadly wild Bohemian crowd, drinking claret, - dago-red they call it in San Francisco, - dining in cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing vociferously radical views upon all creation. Really, I am frequently almost sure that I was cut out to be a radical. But then, there are so many questions on which I am not sure. I grow timid when I am face to face with my human frailty, which ever prevents me from grasping all the factors in any problem - human, vital problems, you know."
    And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had come the "Song of the Trade Wind":-
    "I am strongest at noon, But under the moon I stiffen the bunt of the sail."
    He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and cool, and strong. He was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal there was a certain bafflement about him. Martin had the feeling that he never spoke his full mind, just as he had often had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest but always held reserves of strength that were never used. Martin''s trick of visioning was active as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin''s mind immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living present. Just as Ruth''s face, in a momentary jealousy had called before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new memory- visions rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the screen of his consciousness. These visions came out of the actions and sensations of the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday and last week - a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever thronged his mind.
  4. EverMan

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    0
    So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell''s easy flow of speech - the conversation of a clever, cultured man - that Martin kept seeing himself down all his past. He saw himself when he had been quite the hoodlum, wearing a "stiff-rim" Stetson hat and a square-cut, double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police permitted. He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to palliate it. At one time in his life he had been just a common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the police and terrorized honest, working-class householders. But his ideals had changed. He glanced about him at the well-bred, well-dressed men and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere of culture and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his early youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness, stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he saw merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual university professor.
    For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place. He had fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by his willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command respect. But he had never taken root. He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found books and art and love. And here he was, in the midst of all this, the only one of all the comrades he had adventured with who could have made themselves eligible for the inside of the Morse home.
    But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following Professor Caldwell closely. And as he followed, comprehendingly and critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other''s knowledge. As for himself, from moment to moment the conversation showed him gaps and open stretches, whole subjects with which he was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a matter only of time, when he would fill in the outline. Then watch out, he thought - ''ware shoal, everybody! He felt like sitting at the feet of the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began to discern a weakness in the other''s judgments - a weakness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught it had it not been ever present. And when he did catch it, he leapt to equality at once.
    Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.
    "I''ll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your judgments," he said. "You lack biology. It has no place in your scheme of things. - Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the ground up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic right on up to the widest aesthetic and sociological generalizations."
    Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses under Professor Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all knowledge.
    "I scarcely follow you," he said dubiously.
    Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.
    "Then I''ll try to explain," he said. "I remember reading in Egyptian history something to the effect that understanding could not be had of Egyptian art without first studying the land question."
    "Quite right," the professor nodded.
    "And it seems to me," Martin continued, "that knowledge of the land question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of life. How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and customs, without understanding, not merely the nature of the creatures that made them, but the nature of the stuff out of which the creatures are made? Is literature less human than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt? Is there one thing in the known universe that is not subject to the law of evolution? - Oh, I know there is an elaborate evolution of the various arts laid down, but it seems to me to be too mechanical. The human himself is left out. The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music and song and dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the evolution of the human himself, the development of the basic and intrinsic parts that were in him before he made his first tool or gibbered his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and which I call biology. It is biology in its largest aspects.
    "I know I express myself incoherently, but I''ve tried to hammer out the idea. It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed and ready to deliver it. You spoke yourself of the human frailty that prevented one from taking all the factors into consideration. And you, in turn, - or so it seems to me, - leave out the biological factor, the very stuff out of which has been spun the fabric of all the arts, the warp and the woof of all human actions and achievements."
    To Ruth''s amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that the professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance for Martin''s youth. Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute, silent and fingering his watch chain.
    "Do you know," he said at last, "I''ve had that same criticism passed on me once before - by a very great man, a scientist and evolutionist, Joseph Le Conte. But he is dead, and I thought to remain undetected; and now you come along and expose me. Seriously, though - and this is confession - I think there is something in your contention - a great deal, in fact. I am too classical, not enough up-to-date in the interpretative branches of science, and I can only plead the disadvantages of my education and a temperamental slothfulness that prevents me from doing the work. I wonder if you''ll believe that I''ve never been inside a physics or chemistry laboratory? It is true, nevertheless. Le Conte was right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to an extent - how much I do not know."
    Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him aside, whispering:-
    "You shouldn''t have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way. There may be others who want to talk with him."
    "My mistake," Martin admitted contritely. "But I''d got him stirred up, and he was so interesting that I did not think. Do you know, he is the brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked with. And I''ll tell you something else. I once thought that everybody who went to universities, or who sat in the high places in society, was just as brilliant and intelligent as he."
    "He''s an exception," she answered.
    "I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now? - Oh, say, bring me up against that cashier-fellow."
    Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have wished better behavior on her lover''s part. Not once did his eyes flash nor his cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which he talked surprised her. But in Martin''s estimation the whole tribe of bank cashiers fell a few hundred per cent, and for the rest of the evening he labored under the impression that bank cashiers and talkers of platitudes were synonymous phrases. The army officer he found good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome young fellow, content to occupy the place in life into which birth and luck had flung him. On learning that he had completed two years in the university, Martin was puzzled to know where he had stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the platitudinous bank cashier.
    "I really don''t o/bject to platitudes," he told Ruth later; "but what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it. Why, I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time he took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the Democrats. Do you know, he skins his words as a professional poker-player skins the cards that are dealt out to him. Some day I''ll show you what I mean."
    "I''m sorry you don''t like him," was her reply. "He''s a favorite of Mr. Butler''s. Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest - calls him the Rock, Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can well be built."
    "I don''t doubt it - from the little I saw of him and the less I heard from him; but I don''t think so much of banks as I did. You don''t mind my speaking my mind this way, dear?"
    "No, no; it is most interesting."
    "Yes," Martin went on heartily, "I''m no more than a barbarian getting my first impressions of civilization. Such impressions must be entertainingly novel to the civilized person."
    "What did you think of my cousins?" Ruth queried.
    "I liked them better than the other women. There''s plenty of fun in them along with paucity of pretence."
    "Then you did like the other women?"
    He shook his head.
    "That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll- parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought. As for the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore. She''d make a good wife for the cashier. And the musician woman! I don''t care how nimble her fingers are, how perfect her technique, how wonderful her expression - the fact is, she knows nothing about music."
    "She plays beautifully," Ruth protested.
    "Yes, she''s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but the intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her what music meant to her - you know I''m always curious to know that particular thing; and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it, that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life to her."
    "You were making them talk shop," Ruth charged him.
    "I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used to think that up here, where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed - " He paused for a moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and square-cut, enter the door and swagger across the room. "As I was saying, up here I thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant. But now, from what little I''ve seen of them, they strike me as a pack of ninnies, most of them, and ninety percent of the remainder as bores. Now there''s Professor Caldwell - he''s different. He''s a man, every inch of him and every atom of his gray matter."
    Ruth''s face brightened.
    "Tell me about him," she urged. "Not what is large and brilliant - I know those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am most curious to know."
    "Perhaps I''ll get myself in a pickle." Martin debated humorously for a moment. "Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in him nothing less than the best."
    "I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression."
    "Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine things you think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest specimen of intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame."
    "Oh, no, no!" he hastened to cry. "Nothing paltry nor vulgar. What I mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to himself that he never saw it. Perhaps that''s not the clearest way to express it. Here''s another way. A man who has found the path to the hidden temple but has not followed it; who has, perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and striven afterward to convince himself that it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet another way. A man who could have done things but who placed no value on the doing, and who, all the time, in his innermost heart, is regretting that he has not done them; who has secretly laughed at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned for the rewards and for the joy of doing."
    "I don''t read him that way," she said. "And for that matter, I don''t see just what you mean."
    "It is only a vague feeling on my part," Martin temporized. "I have no reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is wrong. You certainly should know him better than I."
    From the evening at Ruth''s Martin brought away with him strange confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his goal, in the persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was encouraged with his success. The climb had been easier than he expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings among whom he had climbed - with the exception, of course, of Professor Caldwell. About life and the books he knew more than they, and he wondered into what nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations. He did not know that he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did he know that the persons who were given to probing the depths and to thinking ultimate thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of the world''s Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely eagles sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its swarming freight of gregarious life.
  5. GrandeAmore

    GrandeAmore Thành viên mới

    Tham gia ngày:
    09/04/2006
    Bài viết:
    7
    Đã được thích:
    0
    CHAPTER XXVIII
    But success had lost Martin''s address, and her messengers no longer came to his door. For twenty-five days, working Sundays and holidays, he toiled on "The Shame of the Sun," a long essay of some thirty thousand words. It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck school - an attack from the citadel of positive science upon the wonder-dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with ascertained fact. It was a little later that he followed up the attack with two short essays, "The Wonder-Dreamers" and "The Yardstick of the Ego." And on essays, long and short, he began to pay the travelling expenses from magazine to magazine.
    During the twenty-five days spent on "The Shame of the Sun," he sold hack-work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents. A joke had brought in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high- grade comic weekly, had fetched a dollar. Then two humorous poems had earned two dollars and three dollars respectively. As a result, having exhausted his cre*** with the tradesmen (though he had increased his cre*** with the grocer to five dollars), his wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker. The type- writer people were again clamoring for money, insistently pointing out that according to the agreement rent was to be paid strictly in advance.
    Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack- work. Perhaps there was a living in it, after all. Stored away under his table were the twenty storiettes which had been rejected by the newspaper short-story syndicate. He read them over in order to find out how not to write newspaper storiettes, and so doing, reasoned out the perfect formula. He found that the newspaper storiette should never be tragic, should never end unhappily, and should never contain beauty of language, subtlety of thought, nor real delicacy of sentiment. Sentiment it must contain, plenty of it, pure and noble, of the sort that in his own early youth had brought his applause from "nigger heaven" - the "For-God-my- country-and-the-Czar" and "I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest" brand of sentiment.
    Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted "The Duchess" for tone, and proceeded to mix according to formula. The formula consists of three parts: (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart; (2) by some deed or event they are reunited; (3) marriage bells. The third part was an unvarying quantity, but the first and second parts could be varied an infinite number of times. Thus, the pair of lovers could be jarred apart by misunderstood motives, by accident of fate, by jealous rivals, by irate parents, by crafty guardians, by scheming relatives, and so forth and so forth; they could be reunited by a brave deed of the man lover, by a similar deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one lover or the other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming relative, or jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same, by discovery of some unguessed secret, by lover storming girl''s heart, by lover making long and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly. It was very fetching to make the girl propose in the course of being reunited, and Martin discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly piquant and fetching ruses. But marriage bells at the end was the one thing he could take no liberties with; though the heavens rolled up as a scroll and the stars fell, the wedding bells must go on ringing just the same. In quantity, the formula prescribed twelve hundred words minimum dose, fifteen hundred words maximum dose.
    Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin worked out half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when constructing storiettes. These forms were like the cunning tables used by mathematicians, which may be entered from top, bottom, right, and left, which entrances consist of scores of lines and dozens of columns, and from which may be drawn, without reasoning or thinking, thousands of different conclusions, all unchallengably precise and true. Thus, in the course of half an hour with his forms, Martin could frame up a dozen or so storiettes, which he put aside and filled in at his convenience. He found that he could fill one in, after a day of serious work, in the hour before going to bed. As he later confessed to Ruth, he could almost do it in his sleep. The real work was in constructing the frames, and that was merely mechanical.
    He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for once he knew the e***orial mind when he said positively to himself that the first two he sent off would bring checks. And checks they brought, for four dollars each, at the end of twelve days.
    In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries concerning the magazines. Though the TRANSCONTINENTAL had published "The Ring of Bells," no check was forthcoming. Martin needed it, and he wrote for it. An evasive answer and a request for more of his work was all he received. He had gone hungry two days waiting for the reply, and it was then that he put his wheel back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice a week, to the TRANSCONTINENTAL for his five dollars, though it was only semi- occasionally that he elicited a reply. He did not know that the TRANSCONTINENTAL had been staggering along precariously for years, that it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing, with a crazy circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and partly on patriotic appealing, and with advertisements that were scarcely more than charitable donations. Nor did he know that the TRANSCONTINENTAL was the sole livelihood of the e***or and the business manager, and that they could wring their livelihood out of it only by moving to escape paying rent and by never paying any bill they could evade. Nor could he have guessed that the particular five dollars that belonged to him had been appropriated by the business manager for the painting of his house in Alameda, which painting he performed himself, on week-day afternoons, because he could not afford to pay union wages and because the first scab he had employed had had a ladder jerked out from under him and been sent to the hospital with a broken collar-bone.
    The ten dollars for which Martin had sold "Treasure Hunters" to the Chicago newspaper did not come to hand. The article had been published, as he had ascertained at the file in the Central Reading-room, but no word could he get from the e***or. His letters were ignored. To satisfy himself that they had been received, he registered several of them. It was nothing less than robbery, he concluded - a cold-blooded steal; while he starved, he was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale of which was the sole way of getting bread to eat.
    YOUTH AND AGE was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his twenty-one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business. With it went all hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.
    To cap the situation, "The Pot," which he looked upon as one of the best things he had written, was lost to him. In despair, casting about frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to THE BILLOW, a society weekly in San Francisco. His chief reason for submitting it to that publication was that, having only to travel across the bay from Oakland, a quick decision could be reached. Two weeks later he was overjoyed to see, in the latest number on the news-stand, his story printed in full, illustrated, and in the place of honor. He went home with leaping pulse, wondering how much they would pay him for one of the best things he had done. Also, the celerity with which it had been accepted and published was a pleasant thought to him. That the e***or had not informed him of the acceptance made the surprise more complete. After waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation conquered diffidence, and he wrote to the e***or of THE BILLOW, suggesting that possibly through some negligence of the business manager his little account had been overlooked.
    Even if it isn''t more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself, it will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a dozen like it, and possibly as good.
    Back came a cool letter from the e***or that at least elicited Martin''s admiration.
    "We thank you," it ran, "for your excellent contribution. All of us in the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was given the place of honor and immediate publication. We earnestly hope that you liked the illustrations.
    "On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring under the misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts. This is not our custom, and of course yours was unsolicited. We assumed, naturally, when we received your story, that you understood the situation. We can only deeply regret this unfortunate misunderstanding, and assure you of our unfailing regard. Again, thanking you for your kind contribution, and hoping to receive more from you in the near future, we remain, etc."
    There was also a postscript to the effect that though THE BILLOW carried no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a complimentary subscription for the ensuing year.
    After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet of all his manuscripts: "Submitted at your usual rate."
    Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at MY usual rate.
    He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection, under the sway of which he rewrote and polished "The Jostling Street," "The Wine of Life," "Joy," the "Sea Lyrics," and others of his earlier work. As of old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all too little *****it him. He wrote prodigiously, and he read prodigiously, forgetting in his toil the pangs caused by giving up his tobacco. Ruth''s promised cure for the habit, flamboyantly labelled, he stowed away in the most inaccessible corner of his bureau. Especially during his stretches of famine he suffered from lack of the weed; but no matter how often he mastered the craving, it remained with him as strong as ever. He regarded it as the biggest thing he had ever achieved. Ruth''s point of view was that he was doing no more than was right. She brought him the anti- tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, and in a few days forgot all about it.
    His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them, were successful. By means of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid most of his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel. The storiettes at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for ambitious work; while the one thing that upheld him was the forty dollars he had received from THE WHITE MOUSE. He anchored his faith to that, and was confident that the really first-class magazines would pay an unknown writer at least an equal rate, if not a better one. But the thing was, how to get into the first-class magazines. His best stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and yet, each month, he read reams of dull, prosy, inartistic stuff between all their various covers. If only one e***or, he sometimes thought, would descend from his high seat of pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if my work is unusual, no matter if it is unfit, for prudential reasons, for their pages, surely there must be some sparks in it, somewhere, a few, to warm them to some sort of appreciation. And thereupon he would get out one or another of his manuscripts, such as "Adventure," and read it over and over in a vain attempt to vindicate the e***orial silence.
    As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an end. For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the part of the newspaper storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to him through the mail ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes. They were accompanied by a brief letter to the effect that the syndicate was overstocked, and that some months would elapse before it would be in the market again for manuscripts. Martin had even been extravagant m the strength of those on ten storiettes. Toward the last the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for them and accepting every one he sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as sold, and he had lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the bank. So it was that he entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he continued selling his earlier efforts to publications that would not pay and submitting his later work to magazines that would not buy. Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker down in Oakland. A few jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the New York weeklies, made existence barely possible for him. It was at this time that he wrote letters of inquiry to the several great monthly and quarterly reviews, and learned in reply that they rarely considered unsolicited articles, and that most of their contents were written upon order by well-known specialists who were authorities in their various fields.

  6. GrandeAmore

    GrandeAmore Thành viên mới

    Tham gia ngày:
    09/04/2006
    Bài viết:
    7
    Đã được thích:
    0
    CHAPTER XXIX
    It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers and e***ors were away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a decision in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three months or more. The consolation he drew from it was that a saving in postage was effected by the deadlock. Only the robber- publications seemed to remain actively in business, and to them Martin disposed of all his early efforts, such as "Pearl-diving," "The Sea as a Career," "Turtle-catching," and "The Northeast Trades." For these manuscripts he never received a penny. It is true, after six months'' correspondence, he effected a compromise, whereby he received a safety razor for "Turtle-catching," and that THE ACROPOLIS, having agreed to give him five dollars cash and five yearly subscriptions: for "The Northeast Trades," fulfilled the second part of the agreement.
    For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a Boston e***or who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste and a penny-dreadful purse. "The Peri and the Pearl," a clever skit of a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain, won the heart of the e***or of a San Francisco magazine published in the interest of a great railroad. When the e***or wrote, offering him payment in transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the transportation was transferable. It was not, and so, being prevented from peddling it, he asked for the return of the poem. Back it came, with the e***or''s regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again, this time to THE HORNET, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist who founded it. But THE HORNET''S light had begun to dim long before Martin was born. The e***or promised Martin fifteen dollars for the poem, but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it. Several of his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew a reply. It was written by a new e***or, who coolly informed Martin that he declined to be held responsible for the old e***or''s mistakes, and that he did not think much of "The Peri and the Pearl" anyway.
    But THE GLOBE, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel treatment of all. He had refrained from offering his "Sea Lyrics" for publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having been rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in THE GLOBE office. There were thirty poems in the collection, and he was to receive a dollar apiece for them. The first month four were published, and he promptly received a cheek for four dollars; but when he looked over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the titles had been altered: "Finis," for instance, being changed to "The Finish," and "The Song of the Outer Reef" to "The Song of the Coral Reef." In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate title, was substituted. In place of his own, "Medusa Lights," the e***or had printed, "The Backward Track." But the slaughter in the body of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned and sweated and thrust his hands through his hair. Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out, interchanged, or juggled about in the most incomprehensible manner. Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He could not believe that a sane e***or could be guilty of such maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote immediately, begging the e***or to cease publishing the lyrics and to return them to him.
    He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till the thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a check for those which had appeared in the current number.
    Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the WHITE MOUSE forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he found he could easily starve. At his lowest ebb, when his black suit was in pawn, he made a ten-strike - or so it seemed to him - in a prize contest arranged by the County Committee of the Republican Party. There were three branches of the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at himself bitterly the while in that he was driven *****ch straits to live. His poem won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was very gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had gone wrong in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a state senator were members of it, the money was not forthcoming. While this affair was hanging fire, he proved that he understood the principles of the Democratic Party by winning the first prize for his essay in a similar contest. And, moreover, he received the money, twenty-five dollars. But the forty dollars won in the first contest he never received.
    Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long walk from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too much time, he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle. The latter gave him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and enabled him to see Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck trousers and an old sweater made him a presentable wheel costume, so that he could go with Ruth on afternoon rides. Besides, he no longer had opportunity to see much of her in her own home, where Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her campaign of entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and to whom he had looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times, disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly egotistic. He measured the narrowness of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he read. At Ruth''s home he never met a large mind, with the exception of Professor Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the rest, they were numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. It was their ignorance that astounded him. What was the matter with them? What had they done with their educations? They had had access to the same books he had. How did it happen that they had drawn nothing from them?
    He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers, existed. He had his proofs from the books, the books that had educated him beyond the Morse standard. And he knew that higher intellects than those of the Morse circle were to be found in the world. He read English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses of men and women talking politics and philosophy. And he read of salons in great cities, even in the United States, where art and intellect congregated. Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived that all well-groomed persons above the working class were persons with power of intellect and vigor of beauty. Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.
    Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would shine anywhere. As it was clear to him that he had been handicapped by his early environment, so now he perceived that she was similarly handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand. The books on her father''s shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the piano - all was just so much meretricious display. To real literature, real painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead. And bigger than such things was life, of which they were densely, hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the ****-man, and older - the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam''s rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.
    So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known was on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of them was lacking the something more which he found in himself and in the books. The Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce, and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the Morses''; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.
    "You hate and fear the socialists," he remarked to Mr. Morse, one evening at dinner; "but why? You know neither them nor their doctrines."
    The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse, who had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood. The cashier was Martin''s black beast, and his temper was a trifle short where the talker of platitudes was concerned.
    "Yes," he had said, "Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising young man - somebody told me as much. And it is true. He''ll make the Governor''s Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the United States Senate."
    "What makes you think so?" Mrs. Morse had inquired.
    "I''ve heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid and unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the platitudes of the average voter that - oh, well, you know you flatter any man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to him."
    "I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood," Ruth had chimed in.
    "Heaven forbid!"
    The look of horror on Martin''s face stirred Mrs. Morse to belligerence.
    "You surely don''t mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?" she demanded icily.
    "No more than the average Republican," was the retort, "or average Democrat, either. They are all stupid when they are not crafty, and very few of them are crafty. The only wise Republicans are the millionnaires and their conscious henchmen. They know which side their bread is buttered on, and they know why."
    "I am a Republican," Mr. Morse put in lightly. "Pray, how do you classify me?"
    "Oh, you are an unconscious henchman."
    "Henchman?"
    "Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no working-class nor criminal practice. You don''t depend upon wife-beaters and pickpockets for your income. You get your livelihood from the masters of society, and whoever feeds a man is that man''s master. Yes, you are a henchman. You are interested in advancing the interests of the aggregations of capital you serve."
    Mr. Morse''s face was a trifle red.
    "I confess, sir," he said, "that you talk like a scoundrelly socialist."
    Then it was that Martin made his remark:
    "You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You know neither them nor their doctrines."
    "Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism," Mr. Morse replied, while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed happily at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege lord''s antagonism.
    "Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality, and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist," Martin said with a smile. "Because I question Jefferson and the unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I who am its avowed enemy."
    "Now you please to be facetious," was all the other could say.
    "Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in equality, and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the corporations, from day to day, are busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me a socialist because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live up to. The Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight the battle against equality with the very word itself the slogan on their lips. In the name of equality they destroy equality. That was why I called them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Such is the lesson I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned. As I said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the here***ary and eternal foe of socialism."
    "But you frequent socialist meetings," Mr. Morse challenged.
    "Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you to learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings. They are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books. Any one of them knows far more about sociology and all the other ologies than the average captain of industry. Yes, I have been to half a dozen of their meetings, but that doesn''t make me a socialist any more than hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me a Republican."
    "I can''t help it," Mr. Morse said feebly, "but I still believe you incline that way."
    Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn''t know what I was talking about. He hasn''t understood a word of it. What did he do with his education, anyway?
    Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him a grisly monster. Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.
  7. GrandeAmore

    GrandeAmore Thành viên mới

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    09/04/2006
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    A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous. Marian had called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce her engagement, during which visit she had playfully inspected Martin''s palm and told his fortune. On her next visit she brought Hermann von Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and congratulated both of them in language so easy and graceful as to affect disagreeably the peasant-mind of his sister''s lover. This bad impression was further heightened by Martin''s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse with which he had commemorated Marian''s previous visit. It was a bit of society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named "The Palmist." He was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his sister''s face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that worthy''s asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen disapproval. The incident passed over, they made an early departure, and Martin forgot all about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any woman, even of the working class, should not have been flattered and delighted by having poetry written about her.
    Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone. Nor did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for what he had done.
    "Why, Marian," he chided, "you talk as though you were ashamed of your relatives, or of your brother at any rate."
    "And I am, too," she blurted out.
    Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes. The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.
    "But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry about my own sister?"
    "He ain''t jealous," she sobbed. "He says it was indecent, ob - obscene."
    Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to resurrect and read a carbon copy of "The Palmist."
    "I can''t see it," he said finally, proffering the manuscript to her. "Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene - that was the word, wasn''t it?"
    "He says so, and he ought to know," was the answer, with a wave aside of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing. "And he says you''ve got to tear it up. He says he won''t have no wife of his with such things written about her which anybody can read. He says it''s a disgrace, an'' he won''t stand for it."
    "Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense," Martin began; then abruptly changed his mind.
    He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd and preposterous, he resolved *****rrender.
    "All right," he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.
    He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York magazine. Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever were published.
    Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.
    "Can I?" she pleaded.
    He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her jacket - ocular evidence of the success of her mission. She reminded him of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the working class whom he had seen twice. But they were on a par, the pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he smiled with inward amusement at the caprice of his fancy which suggested the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse''s drawing-room. The amusement faded, and he was aware of a great loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were milestones of the road he had travelled. And he had left them behind. He glanced affectionately about him at his few books. They were all the comrades left to him.
    "Hello, what''s that?" he demanded in startled surprise.
    Marian repeated her question.
    "Why don''t I go to work?" He broke into a laugh that was only half-hearted. "That Hermann of yours has been talking to you."
    She shook her head.
    "Don''t lie," he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his charge.
    "Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business; that when I write poetry about the girl he''s keeping company with it''s his business, but that outside of that he''s got no say so. Understand?
    "So you don''t think I''ll succeed as a writer, eh?" he went on. "You think I''m no good? - that I''ve fallen down and am a disgrace to the family?"
    "I think it would be much better if you got a job," she said firmly, and he saw she was sincere. "Hermann says - "
    "Damn Hermann!" he broke out good-naturedly. "What I want to know is when you''re going to get married. Also, you find out from your Hermann if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from me."
    He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her betrothed, all the members of his own class and the members of Ruth''s class, directing their narrow little lives by narrow little formulas - herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives by one another''s opinions, failing of being individuals and of really living life because of the childlike formulas by which they were enslaved. He summoned them before him in apparitional procession: Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he judged them and dismissed them - judged them by the standards of intellect and morality he had learned from the books. Vainly he asked: Where are the great souls, the great men and women? He found them not among the careless, gross, and stupid intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow room. He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her swine. When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had once been he.
    "You were like all the rest, young fellow," Martin sneered. "Your morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did not think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You were **** of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to, - you know you really despised it, - but because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder. You licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn''t give in, and you wouldn''t give in partly because you were an abysmal brute and for the rest because you believed what every one about you believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivorous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow-creatures'' anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won other fellows'' girls away from them, not because you wanted the girls, but because in the marrow of those about you, those who set your moral pace, was the instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well, the years have passed, and what do you think about it now?"
    As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. The stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of the eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from an inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge. The apparition was very like his present self, and, as he regarded it, he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book over which it pored. He glanced at the title and read, "The Science of AEsthetics." Next, he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student-lamp, and himself went on reading "The Science of AEsthetics."

  8. EverMan

    EverMan Thành viên mới

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    CHAPTER XXX
    On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that which had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his "Love-cycle" to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before, they had ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and again she had interrupted his reading with exclamations of pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with its fellows, he waited her judgment.
    She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating to frame in words the harshness of her thought.
    "I think they are beautiful, very beautiful," she said; "but you can''t sell them, can you? You see what I mean," she said, almost pleaded. "This writing of yours is not practical. Something is the matter - maybe it is with the market - that prevents you from earning a living by it. And please, dear, don''t misunderstand me. I am flattered, and made proud, and all that - I could not be a true woman were it otherwise - that you should write these poems to me. But they do not make our marriage possible. Don''t you see, Martin? Don''t think me mercenary. It is love, the thought of our future, with which I am burdened. A whole year has gone by since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no nearer. Don''t think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don''t you try to get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing? Why not become a reporter? - for a while, at least?"
    "It would spoil my style," was his answer, in a low, monotonous voice. "You have no idea how I''ve worked for style."
    "But those storiettes," she argued. "You called them hack-work. You wrote many of them. Didn''t they spoil your style?"
    "No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out, jaded, at the end of a long day of application to style. But a reporter''s work is all hack from morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life. And it is a whirlwind life, the life of the moment, with neither past nor future, and certainly without thought of any style but reportorial style, and that certainly is not literature. To become a reporter now, just as my style is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide. As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty. I tell you it was sickening. I was guilty of sin. And I was secretly glad when the markets failed, even if my clothes did go into pawn. But the joy of writing the ''Love-cycle''! The creative joy in its noblest form! That was compensation for everything."
    Martin did not know that Ruth was unsympathetic concerning the creative joy. She used the phrase - it was on her lips he had first heard it. She had read about it, studied about it, in the university in the course of earning her Bachelorship of Arts; but she was not original, not creative, and all manifestations of culture on her part were but harpings of the harpings of others.
    "May not the e***or have been right in his revision of your ''Sea Lyrics''?" she questioned. "Remember, an e***or must have proved qualifications or else he would not be an e***or."
    "That''s in line with the persistence of the established," he rejoined, his heat against the e***or-folk getting the better of him. "What is, is not only right, but is the best possible. The existence of anything is sufficient vindication of its fitness to exist - to exist, mark you, as the average person unconsciously believes, not merely in present con***ions, but in all con***ions. It is their ignorance, of course, that makes them believe such rot - their ignorance, which is nothing more nor less than the henidical mental process described by Weininger. They think they think, and such thinkless creatures are the arbiters of the lives of the few who really think."
    He paused, overcome by the consciousness that he had been talking over Ruth''s head.
    "I''m sure I don''t know who this Weininger is," she retorted. "And you are so dreadfully general that I fail to follow you. What I was speaking of was the qualification of e***ors - "
    "And I''ll tell you," he interrupted. "The chief qualification of ninety-nine per cent of all e***ors is failure. They have failed as writers. Don''t think they prefer the drudgery of the desk and the slavery to their circulation and to the business manager to the joy of writing. They have tried to write, and they have failed. And right there is the cursed paradox of it. Every portal *****ccess in literature is guarded by those watch-dogs, the failures in literature. The e***ors, sub-e***ors, associate e***ors, most of them, and the manuscript-readers for the magazines and book- publishers, most of them, nearly all of them, are men who wanted to write and who have failed. And yet they, of all creatures under the sun the most unfit, are the very creatures who decide what shall and what shall not find its way into print - they, who have proved themselves not original, who have demonstrated that they lack the divine fire, sit in judgment upon originality and genius. And after them come the reviewers, just so many more failures. Don''t tell me that they have not dreamed the dream and attempted to write poetry or fiction; for they have, and they have failed. Why, the average review is more nauseating than cod-liver oil. But you know my opinion on the reviewers and the alleged critics. There are great critics, but they are as rare as comets. If I fail as a writer, I shall have proved for the career of e***orship. There''s bread and butter and jam, at any rate."
    Ruth''s mind was quick, and her disapproval of her lover''s views was buttressed by the contradiction she found in his contention.
    "But, Martin, if that be so, if all the doors are closed as you have shown so conclusively, how is it possible that any of the great writers ever arrived?"
    "They arrived by achieving the impossible," he answered. "They did such blazing, glorious work as to burn to ashes those that opposed them. They arrived by course of miracle, by winning a thousand-to- one wager against them. They arrived because they were Carlyle''s battle-scarred giants who will not be kept down. And that is what I must do; I must achieve the impossible."
    "But if you fail? You must consider me as well, Martin."
    "If I fail?" He regarded her for a moment as though the thought she had uttered was unthinkable. Then intelligence illumined his eyes. "If I fail, I shall become an e***or, and you will be an e***or''s wife."
    She frowned at his facetiousness - a pretty, adorable frown that made him put his arm around her and kiss it away.
    "There, that''s enough," she urged, by an effort of will withdrawing herself from the fascination of his strength. "I have talked with father and mother. I never before asserted myself so against them. I demanded to be heard. I was very undutiful. They are against you, you know; but I assured them over and over of my abiding love for you, and at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you could begin right away in his office. And then, of his own accord, he said he would pay you enough at the start so that we could get married and have a little cottage somewhere. Which I think was very fine of him - don''t you?"
    Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically reaching for the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to roll a cigarette, muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went on.
    "Frankly, though, and don''t let it hurt you - I tell you, to show you precisely how you stand with him - he doesn''t like your radical views, and he thinks you are lazy. Of course I know you are not. I know you work hard."
    How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin''s mind.
    "Well, then," he said, "how about my views? Do you think they are so radical?"
    He held her eyes and waited the answer.
    "I think them, well, very disconcerting," she replied.
    The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the grayness of life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had made for him to go to work. And she, having gone as far as she dared, was willing to wait the answer till she should bring the question up again.
    She had not long to wait. Martin had a question of his own to propound to her. He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith in him, and within the week each was answered. Martin precipitated it by reading to her his "The Shame of the Sun."
    "Why don''t you become a reporter?" she asked when he had finished. "You love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed. You could rise in journalism and make a name for yourself. There are a number of great special correspondents. Their salaries are large, and their field is the world. They are sent everywhere, to the heart of Africa, like Stanley, or to interview the Pope, or to explore unknown Thibet."
    "Then you don''t like my essay?" he rejoined. "You believe that I have some show in journalism but none in literature?"
    "No, no; I do like it. It reads well. But I am afraid it''s over the heads of your readers. At least it is over mine. It sounds beautiful, but I don''t understand it. Your scientific slang is beyond me. You are an extremist, you know, dear, and what may be intelligible to you may not be intelligible to the rest of us."
  9. EverMan

    EverMan Thành viên mới

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    21/03/2004
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    "I imagine it''s the philosophic slang that bothers you," was all he could say.
    He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had expressed, and her verdict stunned him.
    "No matter how poorly it is done," he persisted, "don''t you see anything in it? - in the thought of it, I mean?"
    She shook her head.
    "No, it is so different from anything I have read. I read Maeterlinck and understand him - "
    "His mysticism, you understand that?" Martin flashed out.
    "Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon him, I don''t understand. Of course, if originality counts - "
    He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by speech. He became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that she had been speaking for some time.
    "After all, your writing has been a toy to you," she was saying. "Surely you have played with it long enough. It is time to take up life seriously - OUR life, Martin. Hitherto you have lived solely your own."
    "You want me to go to work?" he asked.
    "Yes. Father has offered - "
    "I understand all that," he broke in; "but what I want to know is whether or not you have lost faith in me?"
    She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.
    "In your writing, dear," she admitted in a half-whisper.
    "You''ve read lots of my stuff," he went on brutally. "What do you think of it? Is it utterly hopeless? How does it compare with other men''s work?"
    "But they sell theirs, and you - don''t."
    "That doesn''t answer my question. Do you think that literature is not at all my vocation?"
    "Then I will answer." She steeled herself to do it. "I don''t think you were made to write. Forgive me, dear. You compel me to say it; and you know I know more about literature than you do."
    "Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts," he said me***atively; "and you ought to know."
    "But there is more to be said," he continued, after a pause painful to both. "I know what I have in me. No one knows that so well as I. I know I shall succeed. I will not be kept down. I am afire with what I have to say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not ask you to have faith in that, though. I do not ask you to have faith in me, nor in my writing. What I do ask of you is to love me and have faith in love."
    "A year ago I believed for two years. One of those years is yet to run. And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that year is run I shall have succeeded. You remember what you told me long ago, that I must serve my apprenticeship to writing. Well, I have served it. I have crammed it and telescoped it. With you at the end awaiting me, I have never shirked. Do you know, I have forgotten what it is to fall peacefully asleep. A few million years ago I knew what it was to sleep my fill and to awake naturally from very glut of sleep. I am awakened always now by an alarm clock. If I fall asleep early or late, I set the alarm accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my last conscious actions."
    "When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading for a lighter one. And when I doze over that, I beat my head with my knuckles in order to drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a man who was afraid to sleep. Kipling wrote the story. This man arranged a spur so that when unconsciousness came, his naked body pressed against the iron teeth. Well, I''ve done the same. I look at the time, and I resolve that not until midnight, or not until one o''clock, or two o''clock, or three o''clock, shall the spur be removed. And so it rowels me awake until the appointed time. That spur has been my bed-mate for months. I have grown so desperate that five and a half hours of sleep is an extravagance. I sleep four hours now. I am starved for sleep. There are times when I am light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with its rest and sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted by Longfellow''s lines:
    "''The sea is still and deep; All things within its bosom sleep; A single step and all is o''er, A plunge, a bubble, and no more.''
    "Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from nervousness, from an overwrought mind. But the point is: Why have I done this? For you. To shorten my apprenticeship. To compel Success to hasten. And my apprenticeship is now served. I know my equipment. I swear that I learn more each month than the average college man learns in a year. I know it, I tell you. But were my need for you to understand not so desperate I should not tell you. It is not boasting. I measure the results by the books. Your brothers, to- day, are ignorant barbarians compared with me and the knowledge I have wrung from the books in the hours they were sleeping. Long ago I wanted to be famous. I care very little for fame now. What I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or clothing, or recognition. I have a dream of laying my head on your breast and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere another year is gone."
    His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his will opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward him. The strength that had always poured out from him to her was now flowering in his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the vigor of life and intellect surging in him. And in that moment, and for the moment, she was aware of a rift that showed in her certitude - a rift through which she caught sight of the real Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and as animal-trainers have their moments of doubt, so she, for the instant, seemed to doubt her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.
    "And another thing," he swept on. "You love me. But why do you love me? The thing in me that compels me to write is the very thing that draws your love. You love me because I am somehow different from the men you have known and might have loved. I was not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling. Make me do such things, make me like those other men, doing the work they do, breathing the air they breathe, developing the point of view they have developed, and you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed the thing you love. My desire to write is the most vital thing in me. Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to write, nor would you have desired me for a husband."
    "But you forget," she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind glimpsing a parallel. "There have been eccentric inventors, starving their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion. Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered with them and for them, not because of but in spite of their infatuation for perpetual motion."
    "True," was the reply. "But there have been inventors who were not eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical things; and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded. Certainly I do not seek any impossibilities - "
    "You have called it ''achieving the impossible,''" she interpolated.
    "I spoke figuratively. I seek to do what men have done before me - to write and to live by my writing."
    Her silence spurred him on.
    "To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?" he demanded.
    He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his - the pitying mother-hand for the hurt child. And to her, just then, he was the hurt child, the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.
    Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the antagonism of her father and mother.
    "But you love me?" he asked.
    "I do! I do!" she cried.
    "And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me." Triumph sounded in his voice. "For I have faith in your love, not fear of their enmity. All things may go astray in this world, but not love. Love cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints and stumbles by the way."

  10. EverMan

    EverMan Thành viên mới

    Tham gia ngày:
    21/03/2004
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    CHAPTER XXXI
    Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway - as it proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance. Waiting on the corner for a car, she had seen him first, and noted the eager, hungry lines of his face and the desperate, worried look of his eyes. In truth, he was desperate and worried. He had just come from a fruitless interview with the pawnbroker, from whom he had tried to wring an ad***ional loan on his wheel. The muddy fall weather having come on, Martin had pledged his wheel some time since and retained his black suit.
    "There''s the black suit," the pawnbroker, who knew his every asset, had answered. "You needn''t tell me you''ve gone and pledged it with that Jew, Lipka. Because if you have - "
    The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-
    "No, no; I''ve got it. But I want to wear it on a matter of business."
    "All right," the mollified usurer had replied. "And I want it on a matter of business before I can let you have any more money. You don''t think I''m in it for my health?"
    "But it''s a forty-dollar wheel, in good con***ion," Martin had argued. "And you''ve only let me have seven dollars on it. No, not even seven. Six and a quarter; you took the interest in advance."
    "If you want some more, bring the suit," had been the reply that sent Martin out of the stuffy little den, so desperate at heart as to reflect it in his face and touch his sister to pity.
    Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car came along and stopped to take on a crowd of afternoon shoppers. Mrs. Higginbotham divined from the grip on her arm as he helped her on, that he was not going to follow her. She turned on the step and looked down upon him. His haggard face smote her to the heart again.
    "Ain''t you comin''?" she asked
    The next moment she had descended to his side.
    "I''m walking - exercise, you know," he explained.
    "Then I''ll go along for a few blocks," she announced. "Mebbe it''ll do me good. I ain''t ben feelin'' any too spry these last few days."
    Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her general slovenly appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the drooping shoulders, the tired face with the sagging lines, and in the heavy fall of her feet, without elasticity - a very caricature of the walk that belongs to a free and happy body.
    "You''d better stop here," he said, though she had already come to a halt at the first corner, "and take the next car."
    "My goodness! - if I ain''t all tired a''ready!" she panted. "But I''m just as able to walk as you in them soles. They''re that thin they''ll bu''st long before you git out to North Oakland."
    "I''ve a better pair at home," was the answer.
    "Come out to dinner to-morrow," she invited irrelevantly. "Mr. Higginbotham won''t be there. He''s goin'' to San Leandro on business."
    Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back the wolfish, hungry look that leapt into his eyes at the suggestion of dinner.
    "You haven''t a penny, Mart, and that''s why you''re walkin''. Exercise!" She tried to sniff contemptuously, but succeeded in producing only a sniffle. "Here, lemme see."
    And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar piece into his hand. "I guess I forgot your last birthday, Mart," she mumbled lamely.
    Martin''s hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold. In the same instant he knew he ought not to accept, and found himself struggling in the throes of indecision. That bit of gold meant food, life, and light in his body and brain, power to go on writing, and - who was to say? - maybe to write something that would bring in many pieces of gold. Clear on his vision burned the manuscripts of two essays he had just completed. He saw them under the table on top of the heap of returned manuscripts for which he had no stamps, and he saw their titles, just as he had typed them - "The High Priests of Mystery," and "The Cradle of Beauty." He had never submitted them anywhere. They were as good as anything he had done in that line. If only he had stamps for them! Then the certitude of his ultimate success rose up in him, an able ally of hunger, and with a quick movement he slipped the coin into his pocket.
    "I''ll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over," he gulped out, his throat painfully contracted and in his eyes a swift hint of moisture.
    "Mark my words!" he cried with abrupt positiveness. "Before the year is out I''ll put an even hundred of those little yellow-boys into your hand. I don''t ask you to believe me. All you have to do is wait and see."
    Nor did she believe. Her incredulity made her uncomfortable, and failing of other expedient, she said:-
    "I know you''re hungry, Mart. It''s sticking out all over you. Come in to meals any time. I''ll send one of the children to tell you when Mr. Higginbotham ain''t to be there. An'' Mart - "
    He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she was about to say, so visible was her thought process to him.
    "Don''t you think it''s about time you got a job?"
    "You don''t think I''ll win out?" he asked.
    She shook her head.
    "Nobody has faith in me, Gertrude, except myself." His voice was passionately rebellious. "I''ve done good work already, plenty of it, and sooner or later it will sell."
    "How do you know it is good?"
    "Because - " He faltered as the whole vast field of literature and the history of literature stirred in his brain and pointed the futility of his attempting to convey to her the reasons for his faith. "Well, because it''s better than ninety-nine per cent of what is published in the magazines."
    "I wish''t you''d listen to reason," she answered feebly, but with unwavering belief in the correctness of her diagnosis of what was ailing him. "I wish''t you''d listen to reason," she repeated, "an'' come to dinner to-morrow."
    After Martin had helped her on the car, he hurried to the post- office and invested three of the five dollars in stamps; and when, later in the day, on the way to the Morse home, he stopped in at the post-office to weigh a large number of long, bulky envelopes, he affixed to them all the stamps save three of the two-cent denomination.
    It proved a momentous night for Martin, for after dinner he met Russ Brissenden. How he chanced to come there, whose friend he was or what acquaintance brought him, Martin did not know. Nor had he the curiosity to inquire about him of Ruth. In short, Brissenden struck Martin as anaemic and feather-brained, and was promptly dismissed from his mind. An hour later he decided that Brissenden was a boor as well, what of the way he prowled about from one room to another, staring at the pictures or poking his nose into books and magazines he picked up from the table or drew from the shelves. Though a stranger in the house he finally isolated himself in the midst of the company, huddling into a capacious Morris chair and reading steadily from a thin volume he had drawn from his pocket. As he read, he abstractedly ran his fingers, with a caressing movement, through his hair. Martin noticed him no more that evening, except once when he observed him chaffing with great apparent success with several of the young women.
    It chanced that when Martin was leaving, he overtook Brissenden already half down the walk to the street.
    "Hello, is that you?" Martin said.
    The other replied with an ungracious grunt, but swung alongside. Martin made no further attempt at conversation, and for several blocks unbroken silence lay upon them.
    "Pompous old ass!"
    The suddenness and the virulence of the exclamation startled Martin. He felt amused, and at the same time was aware of a growing dislike for the other.
    "What do you go *****ch a place for?" was abruptly flung at him after another block of silence.
    "Why do you?" Martin countered.
    "Bless me, I don''t know," came back. "At least this is my first indiscretion. There are twenty-four hours in each day, and I must spend them somehow. Come and have a drink."
    "All right," Martin answered.
    The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of his acceptance. At home was several hours'' hack-work waiting for him before he went to bed, and after he went to bed there was a volume of Weismann waiting for him, to say nothing of Herbert Spencer''s Autobiography, which was as replete for him with romance as any thrilling novel. Why should he waste any time with this man he did not like? was his thought. And yet, it was not so much the man nor the drink as was it what was associated with the drink - the bright lights, the mirrors and dazzling array of glasses, the warm and glowing faces and the resonant hum of the voices of men. That was it, it was the voices of men, optimistic men, men who breathed success and spent their money for drinks like men. He was lonely, that was what was the matter with him; that was why he had snapped at the invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook. Not since with Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception of the wine he took with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a drink at a public bar. Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving for liquor such as physical exhaustion did, and he had felt no need for it. But just now he felt desire for the drink, or, rather, for the atmosphere wherein drinks were dispensed and disposed of. Such a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden and he lounged in capacious leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.

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