home | authors | books | about

Home -> Jack London -> Martin Eden -> Chapter 24

Martin Eden - Chapter 24

1. Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2

3. Chapter 3

4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5

6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

8. Chapter 8

9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10

11. Chapter 11

12. Chapter 12

13. Chapter 13

14. Chapter 14

15. Chapter 15

16. Chapter 16

17. Chapter 17

18. Chapter 18

19. Chapter 19

20. Chapter 20

21. Chapter 21

22. Chapter 22

23. Chapter 23

24. Chapter 24

25. Chapter 25

26. Chapter 26

27. Chapter 27

28. Chapter 28

29. Chapter 29

30. Chapter 30

31. Chapter 31

32. Chapter 32

33. Chapter 33

34. Chapter 34

35. Chapter 35

36. Chapter 36

37. Chapter 37

38. Chapter 38

39. Chapter 39

40. Chapter 40

41. Chapter 41

42. Chapter 42

43. Chapter 43

44. Chapter 44

45. Chapter 45

46. Chapter 46







The weeks passed. Martin ran out of money, and publishers' checks
were far away as ever. All his important manuscripts had come back
and been started out again, and his hack-work fared no better. His
little kitchen was no longer graced with a variety of foods.
Caught in the pinch with a part sack of rice and a few pounds of
dried apricots, rice and apricots was his menu three times a day
for five days hand-running. Then he startled to realize on his
credit. The Portuguese grocer, to whom he had hitherto paid cash,
called a halt when Martin's bill reached the magnificent total of
three dollars and eighty-five cents.

"For you see," said the grocer, "you no catcha da work, I losa da
mon'."

And Martin could reply nothing. There was no way of explaining.
It was not true business principle to allow credit to a strong-
bodied young fellow of the working-class who was too lazy to work.

"You catcha da job, I let you have mora da grub," the grocer
assured Martin. "No job, no grub. Thata da business." And then,
to show that it was purely business foresight and not prejudice,
"Hava da drink on da house - good friends justa da same."

So Martin drank, in his easy way, to show that he was good friends
with the house, and then went supperless to bed.

The fruit store, where Martin had bought his vegetables, was run by
an American whose business principles were so weak that he let
Martin run a bill of five dollars before stopping his credit. The
baker stopped at two dollars, and the butcher at four dollars.
Martin added his debts and found that he was possessed of a total
credit in all the world of fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents.
He was up with his type-writer rent, but he estimated that he could
get two months' credit on that, which would be eight dollars. When
that occurred, he would have exhausted all possible credit.

The last purchase from the fruit store had been a sack of potatoes,
and for a week he had potatoes, and nothing but potatoes, three
times a day. An occasional dinner at Ruth's helped to keep
strength in his body, though he found it tantalizing enough to
refuse further helping when his appetite was raging at sight of so
much food spread before it. Now and again, though afflicted with
secret shame, he dropped in at his sister's at meal-time and ate as
much as he dared - more than he dared at the Morse table.

Day by day he worked on, and day by day the postman delivered to
him rejected manuscripts. He had no money for stamps, so the
manuscripts accumulated in a heap under the table. Came a day when
for forty hours he had not tasted food. He could not hope for a
meal at Ruth's, for she was away to San Rafael on a two weeks'
visit; and for very shame's sake he could not go to his sister's.
To cap misfortune, the postman, in his afternoon round, brought him
five returned manuscripts. Then it was that Martin wore his
overcoat down into Oakland, and came back without it, but with five
dollars tinkling in his pocket. He paid a dollar each on account
to the four tradesmen, and in his kitchen fried steak and onions,
made coffee, and stewed a large pot of prunes. And having dined,
he sat down at his table-desk and completed before midnight an
essay which he entitled "The Dignity of Usury." Having typed it
out, he flung it under the table, for there had been nothing left
from the five dollars with which to buy stamps.

Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, reducing
the amount available for food by putting stamps on all his
manuscripts and sending them out. He was disappointed with his
hack-work. Nobody cared to buy. He compared it with what he found
in the newspapers, weeklies, and cheap magazines, and decided that
his was better, far better, than the average; yet it would not
sell. Then he discovered that most of the newspapers printed a
great deal of what was called "plate" stuff, and he got the address
of the association that furnished it. His own work that he sent in
was returned, along with a stereotyped slip informing him that the
staff supplied all the copy that was needed.

In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of
incident and anecdote. Here was a chance. His paragraphs were
returned, and though he tried repeatedly he never succeeded in
placing one. Later on, when it no longer mattered, he learned that
the associate editors and sub-editors augmented their salaries by
supplying those paragraphs themselves. The comic weeklies returned
his jokes and humorous verse, and the light society verse he wrote
for the large magazines found no abiding-place. Then there was the
newspaper storiette. He knew that he could write better ones than
were published. Managing to obtain the addresses of two newspaper
syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes. When he had written
twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased. And yet, from
day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and weeklies, scores
and scores of storiettes, not one of which would compare with his.
In his despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever,
that he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-
deluded pretender.

The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever. He folded the
stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and
from three weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps
and handed him the manuscript. Surely there were no live, warm
editors at the other end. It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups
- a clever mechanism operated by automatons. He reached stages of
despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at all. He had never
received a sign of the existence of one, and from absence of
judgment in rejecting all he wrote it seemed plausible that editors
were myths, manufactured and maintained by office boys,
typesetters, and pressmen.

The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and
they were not all happy. He was afflicted always with a gnawing
restlessness, more tantalizing than in the old days before he
possessed her love; for now that he did possess her love, the
possession of her was far away as ever. He had asked for two
years; time was flying, and he was achieving nothing. Again, he
was always conscious of the fact that she did not approve what he
was doing. She did not say so directly. Yet indirectly she let
him understand it as clearly and definitely as she could have
spoken it. It was not resentment with her, but disapproval; though
less sweet-natured women might have resented where she was no more
than disappointed. Her disappointment lay in that this man she had
taken to mould, refused to be moulded. To a certain extent she had
found his clay plastic, then it had developed stubbornness,
declining to be shaped in the image of her father or of Mr. Butler.

What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse yet,
misunderstood. This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could
live in any number of pigeonholes of human existence, she thought
wilful and most obstinate because she could not shape him to live
in her pigeonhole, which was the only one she knew. She could not
follow the flights of his mind, and when his brain got beyond her,
she deemed him erratic. Nobody else's brain ever got beyond her.
She could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and
Olney; wherefore, when she could not follow Martin, she believed
the fault lay with him. It was the old tragedy of insularity
trying to serve as mentor to the universal.

"You worship at the shrine of the established," he told her once,
in a discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater. "I grant that
as authorities to quote they are most excellent - the two foremost
literary critics in the United States. Every school teacher in the
land looks up to Vanderwater as the Dean of American criticism.
Yet I read his stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of the
felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he is no more than a
ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess. And Praps is no
better. His 'Hemlock Mosses,' for instance is beautifully written.
Not a comma is out of place; and the tone - ah! - is lofty, so
lofty. He is the best-paid critic in the United States. Though,
Heaven forbid! he's not a critic at all. They do criticism better
in England.

"But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it
so beautifully and morally and contentedly. Their reviews remind
me of a British Sunday. They are the popular mouthpieces. They
back up your professors of English, and your professors of English
back them up. And there isn't an original idea in any of their
skulls. They know only the established, - in fact, they are the
established. They are weak minded, and the established impresses
itself upon them as easily as the name of the brewery is impressed
on a beer bottle. And their function is to catch all the young
fellows attending the university, to drive out of their minds any
glimmering originality that may chance to be there, and to put upon
them the stamp of the established."

"I think I am nearer the truth," she replied, "when I stand by the
established, than you are, raging around like an iconoclastic South
Sea Islander."

"It was the missionary who did the image breaking," he laughed.
"And unfortunately, all the missionaries are off among the heathen,
so there are none left at home to break those old images, Mr.
Vanderwater and Mr. Praps."

"And the college professors, as well," she added.

He shook his head emphatically. "No; the science professors should
live. They're really great. But it would be a good deed to break
the heads of nine-tenths of the English professors - little,
microscopic-minded parrots!"

Which was rather severe on the professors, but which to Ruth was
blasphemy. She could not help but measure the professors, neat,
scholarly, in fitting clothes, speaking in well-modulated voices,
breathing of culture and refinement, with this almost indescribable
young fellow whom somehow she loved, whose clothes never would fit
him, whose heavy muscles told of damning toil, who grew excited
when he talked, substituting abuse for calm statement and
passionate utterance for cool self-possession. They at least
earned good salaries and were - yes, she compelled herself to face
it - were gentlemen; while he could not earn a penny, and he was
not as they.

She did not weigh Martin's words nor judge his argument by them.
Her conclusion that his argument was wrong was reached -
unconsciously, it is true - by a comparison of externals. They,
the professors, were right in their literary judgments because they
were successes. Martin's literary judgments were wrong because he
could not sell his wares. To use his own phrase, they made good,
and he did not make good. And besides, it did not seem reasonable
that he should be right - he who had stood, so short a time before,
in that same living room, blushing and awkward, acknowledging his
introduction, looking fearfully about him at the bric-a-brac his
swinging shoulders threatened to break, asking how long since
Swinburne died, and boastfully announcing that he had read
"Excelsior" and the "Psalm of Life."

Unwittingly, Ruth herself proved his point that she worshipped the
established. Martin followed the processes of her thoughts, but
forbore to go farther. He did not love her for what she thought of
Praps and Vanderwater and English professors, and he was coming to
realize, with increasing conviction, that he possessed brain-areas
and stretches of knowledge which she could never comprehend nor
know existed.

In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera
not only unreasonable but wilfully perverse.

"How did you like it?" she asked him one night, on the way home
from the opera.

It was a night when he had taken her at the expense of a month's
rigid economizing on food. After vainly waiting for him to speak
about it, herself still tremulous and stirred by what she had just
seen and heard, she had asked the question.

"I liked the overture," was his answer. "It was splendid."

"Yes, but the opera itself?"

"That was splendid too; that is, the orchestra was, though I'd have
enjoyed it more if those jumping-jacks had kept quiet or gone off
the stage."

Ruth was aghast.

"You don't mean Tetralani or Barillo?" she queried.

"All of them - the whole kit and crew."

"But they are great artists," she protested.

"They spoiled the music just the same, with their antics and
unrealities."

"But don't you like Barillo's voice?" Ruth asked. "He is next to
Caruso, they say."

"Of course I liked him, and I liked Tetralani even better. Her
voice is exquisite - or at least I think so."

"But, but - " Ruth stammered. "I don't know what you mean, then.
You admire their voices, yet say they spoiled the music."

"Precisely that. I'd give anything to hear them in concert, and
I'd give even a bit more not to hear them when the orchestra is
playing. I'm afraid I am a hopeless realist. Great singers are
not great actors. To hear Barillo sing a love passage with the
voice of an angel, and to hear Tetralani reply like another angel,
and to hear it all accompanied by a perfect orgy of glowing and
colorful music - is ravishing, most ravishing. I do not admit it.
I assert it. But the whole effect is spoiled when I look at them -
at Tetralani, five feet ten in her stocking feet and weighing a
hundred and ninety pounds, and at Barillo, a scant five feet four,
greasy-featured, with the chest of a squat, undersized blacksmith,
and at the pair of them, attitudinizing, clasping their breasts,
flinging their arms in the air like demented creatures in an
asylum; and when I am expected to accept all this as the faithful
illusion of a love-scene between a slender and beautiful princess
and a handsome, romantic, young prince - why, I can't accept it,
that's all. It's rot; it's absurd; it's unreal. That's what's the
matter with it. It's not real. Don't tell me that anybody in this
world ever made love that way. Why, if I'd made love to you in
such fashion, you'd have boxed my ears."

"But you misunderstand," Ruth protested. "Every form of art has
its limitations." (She was busy recalling a lecture she had heard
at the university on the conventions of the arts.) "In painting
there are only two dimensions to the canvas, yet you accept the
illusion of three dimensions which the art of a painter enables him
to throw into the canvas. In writing, again, the author must be
omnipotent. You accept as perfectly legitimate the author's
account of the secret thoughts of the heroine, and yet all the time
you know that the heroine was alone when thinking these thoughts,
and that neither the author nor any one else was capable of hearing
them. And so with the stage, with sculpture, with opera, with
every art form. Certain irreconcilable things must be accepted."

"Yes, I understood that," Martin answered. "All the arts have
their conventions." (Ruth was surprised at his use of the word.
It was as if he had studied at the university himself, instead of
being ill-equipped from browsing at haphazard through the books in
the library.) "But even the conventions must be real. Trees,
painted on flat cardboard and stuck up on each side of the stage,
we accept as a forest. It is a real enough convention. But, on
the other hand, we would not accept a sea scene as a forest. We
can't do it. It violates our senses. Nor would you, or, rather,
should you, accept the ravings and writhings and agonized
contortions of those two lunatics to-night as a convincing
portrayal of love."

"But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?"
she protested.

"No, no, not for a moment. I merely maintain my right as an
individual. I have just been telling you what I think, in order to
explain why the elephantine gambols of Madame Tetralani spoil the
orchestra for me. The world's judges of music may all be right.
But I am I, and I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous
judgment of mankind. If I don't like a thing, I don't like it,
that's all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a
liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like
it, or make believe they like it. I can't follow the fashions in
the things I like or dislike."

"But music, you know, is a matter of training," Ruth argued; "and
opera is even more a matter of training. May it not be - "

"That I am not trained in opera?" he dashed in.

She nodded.

"The very thing," he agreed. "And I consider I am fortunate in not
having been caught when I was young. If I had, I could have wept
sentimental tears to-night, and the clownish antics of that
precious pair would have but enhanced the beauty of their voices
and the beauty of the accompanying orchestra. You are right. It's
mostly a matter of training. And I am too old, now. I must have
the real or nothing. An illusion that won't convince is a palpable
lie, and that's what grand opera is to me when little Barillo
throws a fit, clutches mighty Tetralani in his arms (also in a
fit), and tells her how passionately he adores her."

Again Ruth measured his thoughts by comparison of externals and in
accordance with her belief in the established. Who was he that he
should be right and all the cultured world wrong? His words and
thoughts made no impression upon her. She was too firmly
intrenched in the established to have any sympathy with
revolutionary ideas. She had always been used to music, and she
had enjoyed opera ever since she was a child, and all her world had
enjoyed it, too. Then by what right did Martin Eden emerge, as he
had so recently emerged, from his rag-time and working-class songs,
and pass judgment on the world's music? She was vexed with him,
and as she walked beside him she had a vague feeling of outrage.
At the best, in her most charitable frame of mind, she considered
the statement of his views to be a caprice, an erratic and
uncalled-for prank. But when he took her in his arms at the door
and kissed her good night in tender lover-fashion, she forgot
everything in the outrush of her own love to him. And later, on a
sleepless pillow, she puzzled, as she had often puzzled of late, as
to how it was that she loved so strange a man, and loved him
despite the disapproval of her people.

And next day Martin Eden cast hack-work aside, and at white heat
hammered out an essay to which he gave the title, "The Philosophy
of Illusion." A stamp started it on its travels, but it was
destined to receive many stamps and to be started on many travels
in the months that followed.




© Art Branch Inc. | English Dictionary