Kabanata Kabanata 24 · Chapter XXIV

. Chapter XXIV

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.