Chapter Chapter 9 · Chapter IX

. Chapter IX

Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a lover’s

desire. His store of money exhausted, he had shipped before the mast on

the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon Islands, after eight

months of failure to find treasure, had witnessed the breaking up of

the expedition. The men had been paid off in Australia, and Martin had

immediately shipped on a deep-water vessel for San Francisco. Not alone

had those eight months earned him enough money to stay on land for many

weeks, but they had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and

reading.

His was the student’s mind, and behind his ability to learn was the

indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth. The grammar he had

taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded brain had

mastered it. He noticed the bad grammar used by his shipmates, and made

a point of mentally correcting and reconstructing their crudities of

speech. To his great joy he discovered that his ear was becoming

sensitive and that he was developing grammatical nerves. A double

negative jarred him like a discord, and often, from lack of practice,

it was from his own lips that the jar came. His tongue refused to learn

new tricks in a day.

After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the

dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary. He found

that this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he steadily went

over and over his lengthening list of pronunciations and definitions,

while he invariably memorized himself to sleep. “Never did anything,”

“if I were,” and “those things,” were phrases, with many variations,

that he repeated under his breath in order to accustom his tongue to

the language spoken by Ruth. “And” and “ing,” with the “d” and “g”

pronounced emphatically, he went over thousands of times; and to his

surprise he noticed that he was beginning to speak cleaner and more

correct English than the officers themselves and the

gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who had financed the expedition.

The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into

possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and Martin

had washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted access to

the precious volumes. For a time, so steeped was he in the plays and in

the many favorite passages that impressed themselves almost without

effort on his brain, that all the world seemed to shape itself into

forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy and his very thoughts were in

blank verse. It trained his ear and gave him a fine appreciation for

noble English; withal it introduced into his mind much that was archaic

and obsolete.

The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he had

learned of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned much of

himself. Along with his humbleness because he knew so little, there

arose a conviction of power. He felt a sharp gradation between himself

and his shipmates, and was wise enough to realize that the difference

lay in potentiality rather than achievement. What he could do,—they

could do; but within him he felt a confused ferment working that told

him there was more in him than he had done. He was tortured by the

exquisite beauty of the world, and wished that Ruth were there to share

it with him. He decided that he would describe to her many of the bits

of South Sea beauty. The creative spirit in him flamed up at the

thought and urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience

than Ruth. And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea. He

would write. He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw,

one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through which

it felt. He would write—everything—poetry and prose, fiction and

description, and plays like Shakespeare. There was career and the way

to win to Ruth. The men of literature were the world’s giants, and he

conceived them to be far finer than the Mr. Butlers who earned thirty

thousand a year and could be Supreme Court justices if they wanted to.

Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to

San Francisco was like a dream. He was drunken with unguessed power and

felt that he could do anything. In the midst of the great and lonely

sea he gained perspective. Clearly, and for the first time, he saw Ruth

and her world. It was all visualized in his mind as a concrete thing

which he could take up in his two hands and turn around and about and

examine. There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he

saw it as a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to

master it. To write! The thought was fire in him. He would begin as

soon as he got back. The first thing he would do would be to describe

the voyage of the treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San

Francisco newspaper. He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she

would be surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print. While he

wrote, he could go on studying. There were twenty-four hours in each

day. He was invincible. He knew how to work, and the citadels would go

down before him. He would not have to go to sea again—as a sailor; and

for the instant he caught a vision of a steam yacht. There were other

writers who possessed steam yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, it

would be slow succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content

to earn enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying.

And then, after some time,—a very indeterminate time,—when he had

learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and his

name would be on all men’s lips. But greater than that, infinitely

greater and greatest of all, he would have proved himself worthy of

Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for Ruth that his splendid

dream arose. He was not a fame-monger, but merely one of God’s mad

lovers.

Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up his

old room at Bernard Higginbotham’s and set to work. He did not even let

Ruth know he was back. He would go and see her when he finished the

article on the treasure-hunters. It was not so difficult to abstain

from seeing her, because of the violent heat of creative fever that

burned in him. Besides, the very article he was writing would bring her

nearer to him. He did not know how long an article he should write, but

he counted the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement

of the _San Francisco Examiner_, and guided himself by that. Three

days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it

carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a

rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as

paragraphs and quotation marks. He had never thought of such things

before; and he promptly set to work writing the article over, referring

continually to the pages of the rhetoric and learning more in a day

about composition than the average schoolboy in a year. When he had

copied the article a second time and rolled it up carefully, he read in

a newspaper an item on hints to beginners, and discovered the iron law

that manuscripts should never be rolled and that they should be written

on one side of the paper. He had violated the law on both counts. Also,

he learned from the item that first-class papers paid a minimum of ten

dollars a column. So, while he copied the manuscript a third time, he

consoled himself by multiplying ten columns by ten dollars. The product

was always the same, one hundred dollars, and he decided that that was

better than seafaring. If it hadn’t been for his blunders, he would

have finished the article in three days. One hundred dollars in three

days! It would have taken him three months and longer on the sea to

earn a similar amount. A man was a fool to go to sea when he could

write, he concluded, though the money in itself meant nothing to him.

Its value was in the liberty it would get him, the presentable garments

it would buy him, all of which would bring him nearer, swiftly nearer,

to the slender, pale girl who had turned his life back upon itself and

given him inspiration.

He mailed the manuscript in a flat envelope, and addressed it to the

editor of the _San Francisco Examiner_. He had an idea that anything

accepted by a paper was published immediately, and as he had sent the

manuscript in on Friday he expected it to come out on the following

Sunday. He conceived that it would be fine to let that event apprise

Ruth of his return. Then, Sunday afternoon, he would call and see her.

In the meantime he was occupied by another idea, which he prided

himself upon as being a particularly sane, careful, and modest idea. He

would write an adventure story for boys and sell it to _The Youth’s

Companion_. He went to the free reading-room and looked through the

files of _The Youth’s Companion_. Serial stories, he found, were

usually published in that weekly in five instalments of about three

thousand words each. He discovered several serials that ran to seven

instalments, and decided to write one of that length.

He had been on a whaling voyage in the Arctic, once—a voyage that was

to have been for three years and which had terminated in shipwreck at

the end of six months. While his imagination was fanciful, even

fantastic at times, he had a basic love of reality that compelled him

to write about the things he knew. He knew whaling, and out of the real

materials of his knowledge he proceeded to manufacture the fictitious

adventures of the two boys he intended to use as joint heroes. It was

easy work, he decided on Saturday evening. He had completed on that day

the first instalment of three thousand words—much to the amusement of

Jim, and to the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who sneered

throughout meal-time at the “litery” person they had discovered in the

family.

Martin contented himself by picturing his brother-in-law’s surprise on

Sunday morning when he opened his _Examiner_ and saw the article on the

treasure-hunters. Early that morning he was out himself to the front

door, nervously racing through the many-sheeted newspaper. He went

through it a second time, very carefully, then folded it up and left it

where he had found it. He was glad he had not told any one about his

article. On second thought he concluded that he had been wrong about

the speed with which things found their way into newspaper columns.

Besides, there had not been any news value in his article, and most

likely the editor would write to him about it first.

After breakfast he went on with his serial. The words flowed from his

pen, though he broke off from the writing frequently to look up

definitions in the dictionary or to refer to the rhetoric. He often

read or re-read a chapter at a time, during such pauses; and he

consoled himself that while he was not writing the great things he felt

to be in him, he was learning composition, at any rate, and training

himself to shape up and express his thoughts. He toiled on till dark,

when he went out to the reading-room and explored magazines and

weeklies until the place closed at ten o’clock. This was his programme

for a week. Each day he did three thousand words, and each evening he

puzzled his way through the magazines, taking note of the stories,

articles, and poems that editors saw fit to publish. One thing was

certain: What these multitudinous writers did he could do, and only

give him time and he would do what they could not do. He was cheered to

read in _Book News_, in a paragraph on the payment of magazine writers,

not that Rudyard Kipling received a dollar per word, but that the

minimum rate paid by first-class magazines was two cents a word. _The

Youth’s Companion_ was certainly first class, and at that rate the

three thousand words he had written that day would bring him sixty

dollars—two months’ wages on the sea!

On Friday night he finished the serial, twenty-one thousand words long.

At two cents a word, he calculated, that would bring him four hundred

and twenty dollars. Not a bad week’s work. It was more money than he

had ever possessed at one time. He did not know how he could spend it

all. He had tapped a gold mine. Where this came from he could always

get more. He planned to buy some more clothes, to subscribe to many

magazines, and to buy dozens of reference books that at present he was

compelled to go to the library to consult. And still there was a large

portion of the four hundred and twenty dollars unspent. This worried

him until the thought came to him of hiring a servant for Gertrude and

of buying a bicycle for Marian.

He mailed the bulky manuscript to _The Youth’s Companion_, and on

Saturday afternoon, after having planned an article on pearl-diving, he

went to see Ruth. He had telephoned, and she went herself to greet him

at the door. The old familiar blaze of health rushed out from him and

struck her like a blow. It seemed to enter into her body and course

through her veins in a liquid glow, and to set her quivering with its

imparted strength. He flushed warmly as he took her hand and looked

into her blue eyes, but the fresh bronze of eight months of sun hid the

flush, though it did not protect the neck from the gnawing chafe of the

stiff collar. She noted the red line of it with amusement which quickly

vanished as she glanced at his clothes. They really fitted him,—it was

his first made-to-order suit,—and he seemed slimmer and better

modelled. In addition, his cloth cap had been replaced by a soft hat,

which she commanded him to put on and then complimented him on his

appearance. She did not remember when she had felt so happy. This

change in him was her handiwork, and she was proud of it and fired with

ambition further to help him.

But the most radical change of all, and the one that pleased her most,

was the change in his speech. Not only did he speak more correctly, but

he spoke more easily, and there were many new words in his vocabulary.

When he grew excited or enthusiastic, however, he dropped back into the

old slurring and the dropping of final consonants. Also, there was an

awkward hesitancy, at times, as he essayed the new words he had

learned. On the other hand, along with his ease of expression, he

displayed a lightness and facetiousness of thought that delighted her.

It was his old spirit of humor and badinage that had made him a

favorite in his own class, but which he had hitherto been unable to use

in her presence through lack of words and training. He was just

beginning to orientate himself and to feel that he was not wholly an

intruder. But he was very tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set

the pace of sprightliness and fancy, keeping up with her but never

daring to go beyond her.

He told her of what he had been doing, and of his plan to write for a

livelihood and of going on with his studies. But he was disappointed at

her lack of approval. She did not think much of his plan.

“You see,” she said frankly, “writing must be a trade, like anything

else. Not that I know anything about it, of course. I only bring common

judgment to bear. You couldn’t hope to be a blacksmith without spending

three years at learning the trade—or is it five years! Now writers are

so much better paid than blacksmiths that there must be ever so many

more men who would like to write, who—try to write.”

“But then, may not I be peculiarly constituted to write?” he queried,

secretly exulting at the language he had used, his swift imagination

throwing the whole scene and atmosphere upon a vast screen along with a

thousand other scenes from his life—scenes that were rough and raw,

gross and bestial.

The whole composite vision was achieved with the speed of light,

producing no pause in the conversation, nor interrupting his calm train

of thought. On the screen of his imagination he saw himself and this

sweet and beautiful girl, facing each other and conversing in good

English, in a room of books and paintings and tone and culture, and all

illuminated by a bright light of steadfast brilliance; while ranged

about and fading away to the remote edges of the screen were

antithetical scenes, each scene a picture, and he the onlooker, free to

look at will upon what he wished. He saw these other scenes through

drifting vapors and swirls of sullen fog dissolving before shafts of

red and garish light. He saw cowboys at the bar, drinking fierce

whiskey, the air filled with obscenity and ribald language, and he saw

himself with them drinking and cursing with the wildest, or sitting at

table with them, under smoking kerosene lamps, while the chips clicked

and clattered and the cards were dealt around. He saw himself, stripped

to the waist, with naked fists, fighting his great fight with Liverpool

Red in the forecastle of the _Susquehanna_; and he saw the bloody deck

of the _John Rogers_, that gray morning of attempted mutiny, the mate

kicking in death-throes on the main-hatch, the revolver in the old

man’s hand spitting fire and smoke, the men with passion-wrenched

faces, of brutes screaming vile blasphemies and falling about him—and

then he returned to the central scene, calm and clean in the steadfast

light, where Ruth sat and talked with him amid books and paintings; and

he saw the grand piano upon which she would later play to him; and he

heard the echoes of his own selected and correct words, “But then, may

I not be peculiarly constituted to write?”

“But no matter how peculiarly constituted a man may be for

blacksmithing,” she was laughing, “I never heard of one becoming a

blacksmith without first serving his apprenticeship.”

“What would you advise?” he asked. “And don’t forget that I feel in me

this capacity to write—I can’t explain it; I just know that it is in

me.”

“You must get a thorough education,” was the answer, “whether or not

you ultimately become a writer. This education is indispensable for

whatever career you select, and it must not be slipshod or sketchy. You

should go to high school.”

“Yes—” he began; but she interrupted with an afterthought:-

“Of course, you could go on with your writing, too.”

“I would have to,” he said grimly.

“Why?” She looked at him, prettily puzzled, for she did not quite like

the persistence with which he clung to his notion.

“Because, without writing there wouldn’t be any high school. I must

live and buy books and clothes, you know.”

“I’d forgotten that,” she laughed. “Why weren’t you born with an

income?”

“I’d rather have good health and imagination,” he answered. “I can make

good on the income, but the other things have to be made good for—” He

almost said “you,” then amended his sentence to, “have to be made good

for one.”

“Don’t say ‘make good,’” she cried, sweetly petulant. “It’s slang, and

it’s horrid.”

He flushed, and stammered, “That’s right, and I only wish you’d correct

me every time.”

“I—I’d like to,” she said haltingly. “You have so much in you that is

good that I want to see you perfect.”

He was clay in her hands immediately, as passionately desirous of being

moulded by her as she was desirous of shaping him into the image of her

ideal of man. And when she pointed out the opportuneness of the time,

that the entrance examinations to high school began on the following

Monday, he promptly volunteered that he would take them.

Then she played and sang to him, while he gazed with hungry yearning at

her, drinking in her loveliness and marvelling that there should not be

a hundred suitors listening there and longing for her as he listened

and longed.