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Home -> Jack London -> Martin Eden -> Chapter 45

Martin Eden - Chapter 45

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







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

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

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

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

"At that rate I'd like the contract of providing you with many such
nights," he said.

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

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

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

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

There were things, however, in the magazines that amused him. All
the magazines were claiming him. WARREN'S MONTHLY advertised to
its subscribers that it was always on the quest after new writers,
and that, among others, it had introduced Martin Eden to the
reading public. THE WHITE MOUSE claimed him; so did THE NORTHERN
REVIEW and MACKINTOSH'S MAGAZINE, until silenced by THE GLOBE,
which pointed triumphantly to its files where the mangled "Sea
Lyrics" lay buried. YOUTH AND AGE, which had come to life again
after having escaped paying its bills, put in a prior claim, which
nobody but farmers' children ever read. The TRANSCONTINENTAL made
a dignified and convincing statement of how it first discovered
Martin Eden, which was warmly disputed by THE HORNET, with the
exhibit of "The Peri and the Pearl." The modest claim of
Singletree, Darnley & Co. was lost in the din. Besides, that
publishing firm did not own a magazine wherewith to make its claim
less modest.

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

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

"You ought to care," she answered with blazing eyes. "You're sick.
That's what's the matter."

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

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

He walked on beside her, reflecting.

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

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

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

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

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

"Ruth!" he said, amazed and bewildered.

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

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

"What did you say?"

He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.

She repeated her words.

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

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

"Oh," he said again.

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

"And then you came in," he said finally.

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

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

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

"Well, aren't you glad to see me?" she said at the end of another
silence.

"Yes, yes." He spoke hastily. "But wasn't it rash of you to come
here?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She considers me quite eligible?"

Ruth nodded.

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

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

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

"But you didn't accept father's invitation," she chided.

"So you know about that? Who sent him? Your mother?"

She remained silent.

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

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

"She'd permit you to marry me, that's certain."

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

"I COULD DIE FOR YOU! I COULD DIE FOR YOU!" - Lizzie's words were
ringing in his ears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She made a movement of dissent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't swear," she interrupted.

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

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

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

She suddenly began to speak.

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

She was sobbing and nestling close against him.

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

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

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

She stood before him, with shining eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No, no, I'll see you home," he answered.

"No, please don't," she objected. "It is unnecessary."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You're looking good," Martin said admiringly, "and you've put on
weight."

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

"But you're looking for a bed just the same," Martin chided, "and
it's a cold night."

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

Martin laughed and gave in.

"You've several full-sized drunks right there," he insinuated.

Joe slid the money back into his pocket.

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

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

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

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




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