Kabanata Kabanata 10 · Chapter X

. Chapter X

He stopped to dinner that evening, and, much to Ruth’s satisfaction,

made a favorable impression on her father. They talked about the sea as

a career, a subject which Martin had at his finger-ends, and Mr. Morse

remarked afterward that he seemed a very clear-headed young man. In his

avoidance of slang and his search after right words, Martin was

compelled to talk slowly, which enabled him to find the best thoughts

that were in him. He was more at ease than that first night at dinner,

nearly a year before, and his shyness and modesty even commended him to

Mrs. Morse, who was pleased at his manifest improvement.

“He is the first man that ever drew passing notice from Ruth,” she told

her husband. “She has been so singularly backward where men are

concerned that I have been worried greatly.”

Mr. Morse looked at his wife curiously.

“You mean to use this young sailor to wake her up?” he questioned.

“I mean that she is not to die an old maid if I can help it,” was the

answer. “If this young Eden can arouse her interest in mankind in

general, it will be a good thing.”

“A very good thing,” he commented. “But suppose,—and we must suppose,

sometimes, my dear,—suppose he arouses her interest too particularly in

him?”

“Impossible,” Mrs. Morse laughed. “She is three years older than he,

and, besides, it is impossible. Nothing will ever come of it. Trust

that to me.”

And so Martin’s rôle was arranged for him, while he, led on by Arthur

and Norman, was meditating an extravagance. They were going out for a

ride into the hills Sunday morning on their wheels, which did not

interest Martin until he learned that Ruth, too, rode a wheel and was

going along. He did not ride, nor own a wheel, but if Ruth rode, it was

up to him to begin, was his decision; and when he said good night, he

stopped in at a cyclery on his way home and spent forty dollars for a

wheel. It was more than a month’s hard-earned wages, and it reduced his

stock of money amazingly; but when he added the hundred dollars he was

to receive from the _Examiner_ to the four hundred and twenty dollars

that was the least _The Youth’s Companion_ could pay him, he felt that

he had reduced the perplexity the unwonted amount of money had caused

him. Nor did he mind, in the course of learning to ride the wheel home,

the fact that he ruined his suit of clothes. He caught the tailor by

telephone that night from Mr. Higginbotham’s store and ordered another

suit. Then he carried the wheel up the narrow stairway that clung like

a fire-escape to the rear wall of the building, and when he had moved

his bed out from the wall, found there was just space enough in the

small room for himself and the wheel.

Sunday he had intended to devote to studying for the high school

examination, but the pearl-diving article lured him away, and he spent

the day in the white-hot fever of re-creating the beauty and romance

that burned in him. The fact that the _Examiner_ of that morning had

failed to publish his treasure-hunting article did not dash his

spirits. He was at too great a height for that, and having been deaf to

a twice-repeated summons, he went without the heavy Sunday dinner with

which Mr. Higginbotham invariably graced his table. To Mr. Higginbotham

such a dinner was advertisement of his worldly achievement and

prosperity, and he honored it by delivering platitudinous sermonettes

upon American institutions and the opportunity said institutions gave

to any hard-working man to rise—the rise, in his case, which he pointed

out unfailingly, being from a grocer’s clerk to the ownership of

Higginbotham’s Cash Store.

Martin Eden looked with a sigh at his unfinished “Pearl-diving” on

Monday morning, and took the car down to Oakland to the high school.

And when, days later, he applied for the results of his examinations,

he learned that he had failed in everything save grammar.

“Your grammar is excellent,” Professor Hilton informed him, staring at

him through heavy spectacles; “but you know nothing, positively

nothing, in the other branches, and your United States history is

abominable—there is no other word for it, abominable. I should advise

you—”

Professor Hilton paused and glared at him, unsympathetic and

unimaginative as one of his own test-tubes. He was professor of physics

in the high school, possessor of a large family, a meagre salary, and a

select fund of parrot-learned knowledge.

“Yes, sir,” Martin said humbly, wishing somehow that the man at the

desk in the library was in Professor Hilton’s place just then.

“And I should advise you to go back to the grammar school for at least

two years. Good day.”

Martin was not deeply affected by his failure, though he was surprised

at Ruth’s shocked expression when he told her Professor Hilton’s

advice. Her disappointment was so evident that he was sorry he had

failed, but chiefly so for her sake.

“You see I was right,” she said. “You know far more than any of the

students entering high school, and yet you can’t pass the examinations.

It is because what education you have is fragmentary, sketchy. You need

the discipline of study, such as only skilled teachers can give you.

You must be thoroughly grounded. Professor Hilton is right, and if I

were you, I’d go to night school. A year and a half of it might enable

you to catch up that additional six months. Besides, that would leave

you your days in which to write, or, if you could not make your living

by your pen, you would have your days in which to work in some

position.”

But if my days are taken up with work and my nights with school, when

am I going to see you?—was Martin’s first thought, though he refrained

from uttering it. Instead, he said:-

“It seems so babyish for me to be going to night school. But I wouldn’t

mind that if I thought it would pay. But I don’t think it will pay. I

can do the work quicker than they can teach me. It would be a loss of

time—” he thought of her and his desire to have her—“and I can’t afford

the time. I haven’t the time to spare, in fact.”

“There is so much that is necessary.” She looked at him gently, and he

was a brute to oppose her. “Physics and chemistry—you can’t do them

without laboratory study; and you’ll find algebra and geometry almost

hopeless without instruction. You need the skilled teachers, the

specialists in the art of imparting knowledge.”

He was silent for a minute, casting about for the least vainglorious

way in which to express himself.

“Please don’t think I’m bragging,” he began. “I don’t intend it that

way at all. But I have a feeling that I am what I may call a natural

student. I can study by myself. I take to it kindly, like a duck to

water. You see yourself what I did with grammar. And I’ve learned much

of other things—you would never dream how much. And I’m only getting

started. Wait till I get—” He hesitated and assured himself of the

pronunciation before he said “momentum. I’m getting my first real feel

of things now. I’m beginning to size up the situation—”

“Please don’t say ‘size up,’” she interrupted.

“To get a line on things,” he hastily amended.

“That doesn’t mean anything in correct English,” she objected.

He floundered for a fresh start.

“What I’m driving at is that I’m beginning to get the lay of the land.”

Out of pity she forebore, and he went on.

“Knowledge seems to me like a chart-room. Whenever I go into the

library, I am impressed that way. The part played by teachers is to

teach the student the contents of the chart-room in a systematic way.

The teachers are guides to the chart-room, that’s all. It’s not

something that they have in their own heads. They don’t make it up,

don’t create it. It’s all in the chart-room and they know their way

about in it, and it’s their business to show the place to strangers who

might else get lost. Now I don’t get lost easily. I have the bump of

location. I usually know where I’m at—What’s wrong now?”

“Don’t say ‘where I’m at.’”

“That’s right,” he said gratefully, “where I am. But where am I at—I

mean, where am I? Oh, yes, in the chart-room. Well, some people—”

“Persons,” she corrected.

“Some persons need guides, most persons do; but I think I can get along

without them. I’ve spent a lot of time in the chart-room now, and I’m

on the edge of knowing my way about, what charts I want to refer to,

what coasts I want to explore. And from the way I line it up, I’ll

explore a whole lot more quickly by myself. The speed of a fleet, you

know, is the speed of the slowest ship, and the speed of the teachers

is affected the same way. They can’t go any faster than the ruck of

their scholars, and I can set a faster pace for myself than they set

for a whole schoolroom.”

“‘He travels the fastest who travels alone,’” she quoted at him.

But I’d travel faster with you just the same, was what he wanted to

blurt out, as he caught a vision of a world without end of sunlit

spaces and starry voids through which he drifted with her, his arm

around her, her pale gold hair blowing about his face. In the same

instant he was aware of the pitiful inadequacy of speech. God! If he

could so frame words that she could see what he then saw! And he felt

the stir in him, like a throe of yearning pain, of the desire to paint

these visions that flashed unsummoned on the mirror of his mind. Ah,

that was it! He caught at the hem of the secret. It was the very thing

that the great writers and master-poets did. That was why they were

giants. They knew how to express what they thought, and felt, and saw.

Dogs asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to

tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered

what it was. And that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun. He saw

noble and beautiful visions, but he could only whine and bark at Ruth.

But he would cease sleeping in the sun. He would stand up, with open

eyes, and he would struggle and toil and learn until, with eyes

unblinded and tongue untied, he could share with her his visioned

wealth. Other men had discovered the trick of expression, of making

words obedient servitors, and of making combinations of words mean more

than the sum of their separate meanings. He was stirred profoundly by

the passing glimpse at the secret, and he was again caught up in the

vision of sunlit spaces and starry voids—until it came to him that it

was very quiet, and he saw Ruth regarding him with an amused expression

and a smile in her eyes.

“I have had a great visioning,” he said, and at the sound of his words

in his own ears his heart gave a leap. Where had those words come from?

They had adequately expressed the pause his vision had put in the

conversation. It was a miracle. Never had he so loftily framed a lofty

thought. But never had he attempted to frame lofty thoughts in words.

That was it. That explained it. He had never tried. But Swinburne had,

and Tennyson, and Kipling, and all the other poets. His mind flashed on

to his “Pearl-diving.” He had never dared the big things, the spirit of

the beauty that was a fire in him. That article would be a different

thing when he was done with it. He was appalled by the vastness of the

beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind flashed and

dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not chant that beauty in

noble verse as the great poets did. And there was all the mysterious

delight and spiritual wonder of his love for Ruth. Why could he not

chant that, too, as the poets did? They had sung of love. So would he.

By God!—

And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing. Carried

away, he had breathed it aloud. The blood surged into his face, wave

upon wave, mastering the bronze of it till the blush of shame flaunted

itself from collar-rim to the roots of his hair.

“I—I—beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I was thinking.”

“It sounded as if you were praying,” she said bravely, but she felt

herself inside to be withering and shrinking. It was the first time she

had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she was shocked,

not merely as a matter of principle and training, but shocked in spirit

by this rough blast of life in the garden of her sheltered maidenhood.

But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.

Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything. He had not had

a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and succeeding,

too. It never entered her head that there could be any other reason for

her being kindly disposed toward him. She was tenderly disposed toward

him, but she did not know it. She had no way of knowing it. The placid

poise of twenty-four years without a single love affair did not fit her

with a keen perception of her own feelings, and she who had never

warmed to actual love was unaware that she was warming now.