Chapter Chapter 22 · Chapter XXII

. Chapter XXII

Mrs. Morse did not require a mother’s intuition to read the

advertisement in Ruth’s face when she returned home. The flush that

would not leave the cheeks told the simple story, and more eloquently

did the eyes, large and bright, reflecting an unmistakable inward

glory.

“What has happened?” Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till Ruth

had gone to bed.

“You know?” Ruth queried, with trembling lips.

For reply, her mother’s arm went around her, and a hand was softly

caressing her hair.

“He did not speak,” she blurted out. “I did not intend that it should

happen, and I would never have let him speak—only he didn’t speak.”

“But if he did not speak, then nothing could have happened, could it?”

“But it did, just the same.”

“In the name of goodness, child, what are you babbling about?” Mrs.

Morse was bewildered. “I don’t think I know what happened, after all.

What did happen?”

Ruth looked at her mother in surprise.

“I thought you knew. Why, we’re engaged, Martin and I.”

Mrs. Morse laughed with incredulous vexation.

“No, he didn’t speak,” Ruth explained. “He just loved me, that was all.

I was as surprised as you are. He didn’t say a word. He just put his

arm around me. And—and I was not myself. And he kissed me, and I kissed

him. I couldn’t help it. I just had to. And then I knew I loved him.”

She paused, waiting with expectancy the benediction of her mother’s

kiss, but Mrs. Morse was coldly silent.

“It is a dreadful accident, I know,” Ruth recommenced with a sinking

voice. “And I don’t know how you will ever forgive me. But I couldn’t

help it. I did not dream that I loved him until that moment. And you

must tell father for me.”

“Would it not be better not to tell your father? Let me see Martin

Eden, and talk with him, and explain. He will understand and release

you.”

“No! no!” Ruth cried, starting up. “I do not want to be released. I

love him, and love is very sweet. I am going to marry him—of course, if

you will let me.”

“We have other plans for you, Ruth, dear, your father and I—oh, no, no;

no man picked out for you, or anything like that. Our plans go no

farther than your marrying some man in your own station in life, a good

and honorable gentleman, whom you will select yourself, when you love

him.”

“But I love Martin already,” was the plaintive protest.

“We would not influence your choice in any way; but you are our

daughter, and we could not bear to see you make a marriage such as

this. He has nothing but roughness and coarseness to offer you in

exchange for all that is refined and delicate in you. He is no match

for you in any way. He could not support you. We have no foolish ideas

about wealth, but comfort is another matter, and our daughter should at

least marry a man who can give her that—and not a penniless adventurer,

a sailor, a cowboy, a smuggler, and Heaven knows what else, who, in

addition to everything, is hare-brained and irresponsible.”

Ruth was silent. Every word she recognized as true.

“He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what

geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish. A

man thinking of marriage should be preparing for marriage. But not he.

As I have said, and I know you agree with me, he is irresponsible. And

why should he not be? It is the way of sailors. He has never learned to

be economical or temperate. The spendthrift years have marked him. It

is not his fault, of course, but that does not alter his nature. And

have you thought of the years of licentiousness he inevitably has

lived? Have you thought of that, daughter? You know what marriage

means.”

Ruth shuddered and clung close to her mother.

“I have thought.” Ruth waited a long time for the thought to frame

itself. “And it is terrible. It sickens me to think of it. I told you

it was a dreadful accident, my loving him; but I can’t help myself.

Could you help loving father? Then it is the same with me. There is

something in me, in him—I never knew it was there until to-day—but it

is there, and it makes me love him. I never thought to love him, but,

you see, I do,” she concluded, a certain faint triumph in her voice.

They talked long, and to little purpose, in conclusion agreeing to wait

an indeterminate time without doing anything.

The same conclusion was reached, a little later that night, between

Mrs. Morse and her husband, after she had made due confession of the

miscarriage of her plans.

“It could hardly have come otherwise,” was Mr. Morse’s judgment. “This

sailor-fellow has been the only man she was in touch with. Sooner or

later she was going to awaken anyway; and she did awaken, and lo! here

was this sailor-fellow, the only accessible man at the moment, and of

course she promptly loved him, or thought she did, which amounts to the

same thing.”

Mrs. Morse took it upon herself to work slowly and indirectly upon

Ruth, rather than to combat her. There would be plenty of time for

this, for Martin was not in position to marry.

“Let her see all she wants of him,” was Mr. Morse’s advice. “The more

she knows him, the less she’ll love him, I wager. And give her plenty

of contrast. Make a point of having young people at the house. Young

women and young men, all sorts of young men, clever men, men who have

done something or who are doing things, men of her own class,

gentlemen. She can gauge him by them. They will show him up for what he

is. And after all, he is a mere boy of twenty-one. Ruth is no more than

a child. It is calf love with the pair of them, and they will grow out

of it.”

So the matter rested. Within the family it was accepted that Ruth and

Martin were engaged, but no announcement was made. The family did not

think it would ever be necessary. Also, it was tacitly understood that

it was to be a long engagement. They did not ask Martin to go to work,

nor to cease writing. They did not intend to encourage him to mend

himself. And he aided and abetted them in their unfriendly designs, for

going to work was farthest from his thoughts.

“I wonder if you’ll like what I have done!” he said to Ruth several

days later. “I’ve decided that boarding with my sister is too

expensive, and I am going to board myself. I’ve rented a little room

out in North Oakland, retired neighborhood and all the rest, you know,

and I’ve bought an oil-burner on which to cook.”

Ruth was overjoyed. The oil-burner especially pleased her.

“That was the way Mr. Butler began his start,” she said.

Martin frowned inwardly at the citation of that worthy gentleman, and

went on: “I put stamps on all my manuscripts and started them off to

the editors again. Then to-day I moved in, and to-morrow I start to

work.”

“A position!” she cried, betraying the gladness of her surprise in all

her body, nestling closer to him, pressing his hand, smiling. “And you

never told me! What is it?”

He shook his head.

“I meant that I was going to work at my writing.” Her face fell, and he

went on hastily. “Don’t misjudge me. I am not going in this time with

any iridescent ideas. It is to be a cold, prosaic, matter-of-fact

business proposition. It is better than going to sea again, and I shall

earn more money than any position in Oakland can bring an unskilled

man.”

“You see, this vacation I have taken has given me perspective. I

haven’t been working the life out of my body, and I haven’t been

writing, at least not for publication. All I’ve done has been to love

you and to think. I’ve read some, too, but it has been part of my

thinking, and I have read principally magazines. I have generalized

about myself, and the world, my place in it, and my chance to win to a

place that will be fit for you. Also, I’ve been reading Spencer’s

‘Philosophy of Style,’ and found out a lot of what was the matter with

me—or my writing, rather; and for that matter with most of the writing

that is published every month in the magazines.”

“But the upshot of it all—of my thinking and reading and loving—is that

I am going to move to Grub Street. I shall leave masterpieces alone and

do hack-work—jokes, paragraphs, feature articles, humorous verse, and

society verse—all the rot for which there seems so much demand. Then

there are the newspaper syndicates, and the newspaper short-story

syndicates, and the syndicates for the Sunday supplements. I can go

ahead and hammer out the stuff they want, and earn the equivalent of a

good salary by it. There are free-lances, you know, who earn as much as

four or five hundred a month. I don’t care to become as they; but I’ll

earn a good living, and have plenty of time to myself, which I wouldn’t

have in any position.”

“Then, I’ll have my spare time for study and for real work. In between

the grind I’ll try my hand at masterpieces, and I’ll study and prepare

myself for the writing of masterpieces. Why, I am amazed at the

distance I have come already. When I first tried to write, I had

nothing to write about except a few paltry experiences which I neither

understood nor appreciated. But I had no thoughts. I really didn’t. I

didn’t even have the words with which to think. My experiences were so

many meaningless pictures. But as I began to add to my knowledge, and

to my vocabulary, I saw something more in my experiences than mere

pictures. I retained the pictures and I found their interpretation.

That was when I began to do good work, when I wrote ‘Adventure,’ ‘Joy,’

‘The Pot,’ ‘The Wine of Life,’ ‘The Jostling Street,’ the ‘Love-cycle,’

and the ‘Sea Lyrics.’ I shall write more like them, and better; but I

shall do it in my spare time. My feet are on the solid earth, now.

Hack-work and income first, masterpieces afterward. Just to show you, I

wrote half a dozen jokes last night for the comic weeklies; and just as

I was going to bed, the thought struck me to try my hand at a triolet—a

humorous one; and inside an hour I had written four. They ought to be

worth a dollar apiece. Four dollars right there for a few afterthoughts

on the way to bed.”

“Of course it’s all valueless, just so much dull and sordid plodding;

but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at sixty dollars a

month, adding up endless columns of meaningless figures until one dies.

And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in touch with things literary

and gives me time to try bigger things.”

“But what good are these bigger things, these masterpieces?” Ruth

demanded. “You can’t sell them.”

“Oh, yes, I can,” he began; but she interrupted.

“All those you named, and which you say yourself are good—you have not

sold any of them. We can’t get married on masterpieces that won’t

sell.”

“Then we’ll get married on triolets that will sell,” he asserted

stoutly, putting his arm around her and drawing a very unresponsive

sweetheart toward him.

“Listen to this,” he went on in attempted gayety. “It’s not art, but

it’s a dollar.

“He came in

When I was out,

To borrow some tin

Was why he came in,

And he went without;

So I was in

And he was out.”

The merry lilt with which he had invested the jingle was at variance

with the dejection that came into his face as he finished. He had drawn

no smile from Ruth. She was looking at him in an earnest and troubled

way.

“It may be a dollar,” she said, “but it is a jester’s dollar, the fee

of a clown. Don’t you see, Martin, the whole thing is lowering. I want

the man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than a

perpetrator of jokes and doggerel.”

“You want him to be like—say Mr. Butler?” he suggested.

“I know you don’t like Mr. Butler,” she began.

“Mr. Butler’s all right,” he interrupted. “It’s only his indigestion I

find fault with. But to save me I can’t see any difference between

writing jokes or comic verse and running a type-writer, taking

dictation, or keeping sets of books. It is all a means to an end. Your

theory is for me to begin with keeping books in order to become a

successful lawyer or man of business. Mine is to begin with hack-work

and develop into an able author.”

“There is a difference,” she insisted.

“What is it?”

“Why, your good work, what you yourself call good, you can’t sell. You

have tried, you know that,—but the editors won’t buy it.”

“Give me time, dear,” he pleaded. “The hack-work is only makeshift, and

I don’t take it seriously. Give me two years. I shall succeed in that

time, and the editors will be glad to buy my good work. I know what I

am saying; I have faith in myself. I know what I have in me; I know

what literature is, now; I know the average rot that is poured out by a

lot of little men; and I know that at the end of two years I shall be

on the highroad to success. As for business, I shall never succeed at

it. I am not in sympathy with it. It strikes me as dull, and stupid,

and mercenary, and tricky. Anyway I am not adapted for it. I’d never

get beyond a clerkship, and how could you and I be happy on the paltry

earnings of a clerk? I want the best of everything in the world for

you, and the only time when I won’t want it will be when there is

something better. And I’m going to get it, going to get all of it. The

income of a successful author makes Mr. Butler look cheap. A

‘best-seller’ will earn anywhere between fifty and a hundred thousand

dollars—sometimes more and sometimes less; but, as a rule, pretty close

to those figures.”

She remained silent; her disappointment was apparent.

“Well?” he asked.

“I had hoped and planned otherwise. I had thought, and I still think,

that the best thing for you would be to study shorthand—you already

know type-writing—and go into father’s office. You have a good mind,

and I am confident you would succeed as a lawyer.”