Kabanata Kabanata 27 · Chapter XXVII

. Chapter XXVII

The sun of Martin’s good fortune rose. The day after Ruth’s visit, he

received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly in

payment for three of his triolets. Two days later a newspaper published

in Chicago accepted his “Treasure Hunters,” promising to pay ten

dollars for it on publication. The price was small, but it was the

first article he had written, his very first attempt to express his

thought on the printed page. To cap everything, the adventure serial

for boys, his second attempt, was accepted before the end of the week

by a juvenile monthly calling itself _Youth and Age_. It was true the

serial was twenty-one thousand words, and they offered to pay him

sixteen dollars on publication, which was something like seventy-five

cents a thousand words; but it was equally true that it was the second

thing he had attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly

aware of its clumsy worthlessness.

But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness of

mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great

strength—the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes

butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a

war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early efforts for

songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not taken him long

to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith to was his later

work. He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of

magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself with the tools of

artistry. On the other hand, he had not sacrificed strength. His

conscious aim had been to increase his strength by avoiding excess of

strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was

realism, though he had endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and

beauties of imagination. What he sought was an impassioned realism,

shot through with human aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life

as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of

fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the

other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and

divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred, in

Martin’s estimation, and erred through too great singleness of sight

and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though

it flattered not the school of god, while it challenged the

brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, “Adventure,”

which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his

ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, “God and Clod,”

that he had expressed his views on the whole general subject.

But “Adventure,” and all that he deemed his best work, still went

begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in his

eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of

which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work. To

him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with

all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their power. This investiture

of the grotesque and impossible with reality, he looked upon as a

trick—a skilful trick at best. Great literature could not reside in

such a field. Their artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness

of artistry when divorced from humanness. The trick had been to fling

over the face of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done

in the half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written

before he emerged upon the high peaks of “Adventure,” “Joy,” “The Pot,”

and “The Wine of Life.”

The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a

precarious existence against the arrival of the _White Mouse_ check. He

cashed the first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a

dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars between the

baker and the fruit store. Martin was not yet rich enough to afford

meat, and he was on slim allowance when the _White Mouse_ check

arrived. He was divided on the cashing of it. He had never been in a

bank in his life, much less been in one on business, and he had a naive

and childlike desire to walk into one of the big banks down in Oakland

and fling down his indorsed check for forty dollars. On the other hand,

practical common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer and

thereby make an impression that would later result in an increase of

credit. Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying

his bill with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of

jingling coin. Also, he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his

suit and his bicycle, paid one month’s rent on the type-writer, and

paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month in advance. This

left him in his pocket, for emergencies, a balance of nearly three

dollars.

In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. Immediately on recovering

his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he could not

refrain from jingling the little handful of silver in his pocket. He

had been so long without money that, like a rescued starving man who

cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight, Martin could not keep

his hand off the silver. He was not mean, nor avaricious, but the money

meant more than so many dollars and cents. It stood for success, and

the eagles stamped upon the coins were to him so many winged victories.

It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world. It certainly

appeared more beautiful to him. For weeks it had been a very dull and

sombre world; but now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars

jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success,

the sun shone bright and warm, and even a rain-squall that soaked

unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry happening to him. When he

starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were

starving the world over; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of

the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain. He forgot

about them, and, being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the

world. Without deliberately thinking about it, _motifs_ for love-lyrics

began to agitate his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, he got

off the electric car, without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.

He found a number of persons in the Morse home. Ruth’s two girl-cousins

were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under pretext of

entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding Ruth with young

people. The campaign had begun during Martin’s enforced absence, and

was already in full swing. She was making a point of having at the

house men who were doing things. Thus, in addition to the cousins

Dorothy and Florence, Martin encountered two university professors, one

of Latin, the other of English; a young army officer just back from the

Philippines, one-time school-mate of Ruth’s; a young fellow named

Melville, private secretary to Joseph Perkins, head of the San

Francisco Trust Company; and finally of the men, a live bank cashier,

Charles Hapgood, a youngish man of thirty-five, graduate of Stanford

University, member of the Nile Club and the Unity Club, and a

conservative speaker for the Republican Party during campaigns—in

short, a rising young man in every way. Among the women was one who

painted portraits, another who was a professional musician, and still

another who possessed the degree of Doctor of Sociology and who was

locally famous for her social settlement work in the slums of San

Francisco. But the women did not count for much in Mrs. Morse’s plan.

At the best, they were necessary accessories. The men who did things

must be drawn to the house somehow.

“Don’t get excited when you talk,” Ruth admonished Martin, before the

ordeal of introduction began.

He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his own

awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to their old

trick of threatening destruction to furniture and ornaments. Also, he

was rendered self-conscious by the company. He had never before been in

contact with such exalted beings nor with so many of them. Melville,

the bank cashier, fascinated him, and he resolved to investigate him at

the first opportunity. For underneath Martin’s awe lurked his assertive

ego, and he felt the urge to measure himself with these men and women

and to find out what they had learned from the books and life which he

had not learned.

Ruth’s eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on, and

she was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got

acquainted with her cousins. He certainly did not grow excited, while

being seated removed from him the worry of his shoulders. Ruth knew

them for clever girls, superficially brilliant, and she could scarcely

understand their praise of Martin later that night at going to bed. But

he, on the other hand, a wit in his own class, a gay quizzer and

laughter-maker at dances and Sunday picnics, had found the making of

fun and the breaking of good-natured lances simple enough in this

environment. And on this evening success stood at his back, patting him

on the shoulder and telling him that he was making good, so that he

could afford to laugh and make laughter and remain unabashed.

Later, Ruth’s anxiety found justification. Martin and Professor

Caldwell had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though Martin no

longer wove the air with his hands, to Ruth’s critical eye he permitted

his own eyes to flash and glitter too frequently, talked too rapidly

and warmly, grew too intense, and allowed his aroused blood to redden

his cheeks too much. He lacked decorum and control, and was in decided

contrast to the young professor of English with whom he talked.

But Martin was not concerned with appearances! He had been swift to

note the other’s trained mind and to appreciate his command of

knowledge. Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize Martin’s

concept of the average English professor. Martin wanted him to talk

shop, and, though he seemed averse at first, succeeded in making him do

it. For Martin did not see why a man should not talk shop.

“It’s absurd and unfair,” he had told Ruth weeks before, “this

objection to talking shop. For what reason under the sun do men and

women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is in

them? And the best that is in them is what they are interested in, the

thing by which they make their living, the thing they’ve specialized on

and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed about. Imagine Mr.

Butler living up to social etiquette and enunciating his views on Paul

Verlaine or the German drama or the novels of D’Annunzio. We’d be bored

to death. I, for one, if I must listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear

him talk about his law. It’s the best that is in him, and life is so

short that I want the best of every man and woman I meet.”

“But,” Ruth had objected, “there are the topics of general interest to

all.”

“There, you mistake,” he had rushed on. “All persons in society, all

cliques in society—or, rather, nearly all persons and cliques—ape their

betters. Now, who are the best betters? The idlers, the wealthy idlers.

They do not know, as a rule, the things known by the persons who are

doing something in the world. To listen to conversation about such

things would mean to be bored, wherefore the idlers decree that such

things are shop and must not be talked about. Likewise they decree the

things that are not shop and which may be talked about, and those

things are the latest operas, latest novels, cards, billiards,

cocktails, automobiles, horse shows, trout fishing, tuna-fishing,

big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and so forth—and mark you, these are

the things the idlers know. In all truth, they constitute the shop-talk

of the idlers. And the funniest part of it is that many of the clever

people, and all the would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to

impose upon them. As for me, I want the best a man’s got in him, call

it shop vulgarity or anything you please.”

And Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on the established had

seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.

So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness,

challenging him to speak his mind. As Ruth paused beside them she heard

Martin saying:-

“You surely don’t pronounce such heresies in the University of

California?”

Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. “The honest taxpayer and the

politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our appropriations and

therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to

the party press, or to the press of both parties.”

“Yes, that’s clear; but how about you?” Martin urged. “You must be a

fish out of the water.”

“Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Sometimes I am fairly

sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris, in Grub

Street, in a hermit’s cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian crowd,

drinking claret,—dago-red they call it in San Francisco,—dining in

cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing vociferously

radical views upon all creation. Really, I am frequently almost sure

that I was cut out to be a radical. But then, there are so many

questions on which I am not sure. I grow timid when I am face to face

with my human frailty, which ever prevents me from grasping all the

factors in any problem—human, vital problems, you know.”

And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had come

the “Song of the Trade Wind”:-

“I am strongest at noon,

But under the moon

I stiffen the bunt of the sail.”

He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other

reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and

cool, and strong. He was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal

there was a certain bafflement about him. Martin had the feeling that

he never spoke his full mind, just as he had often had the feeling that

the trades never blew their strongest but always held reserves of

strength that were never used. Martin’s trick of visioning was active

as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact

and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his

inspection. Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind

immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which

ordinarily expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly

automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the

living present. Just as Ruth’s face, in a momentary jealousy had called

before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor Caldwell

made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white billows across

the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather

identifying and classifying, new memory-visions rose before him, or

spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the screen of his

consciousness. These visions came out of the actions and sensations of

the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday and last

week—a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever

thronged his mind.

So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell’s easy flow of

speech—the conversation of a clever, cultured man—that Martin kept

seeing himself down all his past. He saw himself when he had been quite

the hoodlum, wearing a “stiff-rim” Stetson hat and a square-cut,

double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and

possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police permitted. He did

not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to palliate it. At one time in

his life he had been just a common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that

worried the police and terrorized honest, working-class householders.

But his ideals had changed. He glanced about him at the well-bred,

well-dressed men and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere

of culture and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his

early youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness,

stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he saw

merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual university

professor.

For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place. He had

fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and

everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by his

willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command respect.

But he had never taken root. He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy

his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He had been perturbed always by

a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from

beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found

books and art and love. And here he was, in the midst of all this, the

only one of all the comrades he had adventured with who could have made

themselves eligible for the inside of the Morse home.

But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following

Professor Caldwell closely. And as he followed, comprehendingly and

critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other’s knowledge. As

for himself, from moment to moment the conversation showed him gaps and

open stretches, whole subjects with which he was unfamiliar.

Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that he possessed the

outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a matter only of time, when

he would fill in the outline. Then watch out, he thought—’ware shoal,

everybody! He felt like sitting at the feet of the professor,

worshipful and absorbent; but, as he listened, he began to discern a

weakness in the other’s judgments—a weakness so stray and elusive that

he might not have caught it had it not been ever present. And when he

did catch it, he leapt to equality at once.

Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.

“I’ll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your

judgments,” he said. “You lack biology. It has no place in your scheme

of things.—Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology, from the ground

up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the vitalized inorganic

right on up to the widest aesthetic and sociological generalizations.”

Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses under Professor

Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all

knowledge.

“I scarcely follow you,” he said dubiously.

Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.

“Then I’ll try to explain,” he said. “I remember reading in Egyptian

history something to the effect that understanding could not be had of

Egyptian art without first studying the land question.”

“Quite right,” the professor nodded.

“And it seems to me,” Martin continued, “that knowledge of the land

question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had

without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of life.

How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and customs,

without understanding, not merely the nature of the creatures that made

them, but the nature of the stuff out of which the creatures are made?

Is literature less human than the architecture and sculpture of Egypt?

Is there one thing in the known universe that is not subject to the law

of evolution?—Oh, I know there is an elaborate evolution of the various

arts laid down, but it seems to me to be too mechanical. The human

himself is left out. The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music

and song and dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the

evolution of the human himself, the development of the basic and

intrinsic parts that were in him before he made his first tool or

gibbered his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and

which I call biology. It is biology in its largest aspects.

“I know I express myself incoherently, but I’ve tried to hammer out the

idea. It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed and ready

to deliver it. You spoke yourself of the human frailty that prevented

one from taking all the factors into consideration. And you, in

turn,—or so it seems to me,—leave out the biological factor, the very

stuff out of which has been spun the fabric of all the arts, the warp

and the woof of all human actions and achievements.”

To Ruth’s amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that the

professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance for

Martin’s youth. Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute, silent and

fingering his watch chain.

“Do you know,” he said at last, “I’ve had that same criticism passed on

me once before—by a very great man, a scientist and evolutionist,

Joseph Le Conte. But he is dead, and I thought to remain undetected;

and now you come along and expose me. Seriously, though—and this is

confession—I think there is something in your contention—a great deal,

in fact. I am too classical, not enough up-to-date in the

interpretative branches of science, and I can only plead the

disadvantages of my education and a temperamental slothfulness that

prevents me from doing the work. I wonder if you’ll believe that I’ve

never been inside a physics or chemistry laboratory? It is true,

nevertheless. Le Conte was right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to

an extent—how much I do not know.”

Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him

aside, whispering:-

“You shouldn’t have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way. There may

be others who want to talk with him.”

“My mistake,” Martin admitted contritely. “But I’d got him stirred up,

and he was so interesting that I did not think. Do you know, he is the

brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked with. And I’ll

tell you something else. I once thought that everybody who went to

universities, or who sat in the high places in society, was just as

brilliant and intelligent as he.”

“He’s an exception,” she answered.

“I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now?—Oh, say, bring me

up against that cashier-fellow.”

Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have wished

better behavior on her lover’s part. Not once did his eyes flash nor

his cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which he talked

surprised her. But in Martin’s estimation the whole tribe of bank

cashiers fell a few hundred per cent, and for the rest of the evening

he labored under the impression that bank cashiers and talkers of

platitudes were synonymous phrases. The army officer he found

good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome young fellow, content to

occupy the place in life into which birth and luck had flung him. On

learning that he had completed two years in the university, Martin was

puzzled to know where he had stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked

him better than the platitudinous bank cashier.

“I really don’t object to platitudes,” he told Ruth later; “but what

worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior

certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it. Why,

I could give that man the whole history of the Reformation in the time

he took to tell me that the Union-Labor Party had fused with the

Democrats. Do you know, he skins his words as a professional

poker-player skins the cards that are dealt out to him. Some day I’ll

show you what I mean.”

“I’m sorry you don’t like him,” was her reply. “He’s a favorite of Mr.

Butler’s. Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest—calls him the Rock,

Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can well be

built.”

“I don’t doubt it—from the little I saw of him and the less I heard

from him; but I don’t think so much of banks as I did. You don’t mind

my speaking my mind this way, dear?”

“No, no; it is most interesting.”

“Yes,” Martin went on heartily, “I’m no more than a barbarian getting

my first impressions of civilization. Such impressions must be

entertainingly novel to the civilized person.”

“What did you think of my cousins?” Ruth queried.

“I liked them better than the other women. There’s plenty of fun in

them along with paucity of pretence.”

“Then you did like the other women?”

He shook his head.

“That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological

poll-parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like

Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought. As for

the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore. She’d make a good wife

for the cashier. And the musician woman! I don’t care how nimble her

fingers are, how perfect her technique, how wonderful her

expression—the fact is, she knows nothing about music.”

“She plays beautifully,” Ruth protested.

“Yes, she’s undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but the

intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her what music

meant to her—you know I’m always curious to know that particular thing;

and she did not know what it meant to her, except that she adored it,

that it was the greatest of the arts, and that it meant more than life

to her.”

“You were making them talk shop,” Ruth charged him.

“I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my sufferings

if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used to think that up

here, where all the advantages of culture were enjoyed—” He paused for

a moment, and watched the youthful shade of himself, in stiff-rim and

square-cut, enter the door and swagger across the room. “As I was

saying, up here I thought all men and women were brilliant and radiant.

But now, from what little I’ve seen of them, they strike me as a pack

of ninnies, most of them, and ninety percent of the remainder as bores.

Now there’s Professor Caldwell—he’s different. He’s a man, every inch

of him and every atom of his gray matter.”

Ruth’s face brightened.

“Tell me about him,” she urged. “Not what is large and brilliant—I know

those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am most curious to

know.”

“Perhaps I’ll get myself in a pickle.” Martin debated humorously for a

moment. “Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in him nothing

less than the best.”

“I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for two

years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression.”

“Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine things

you think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest specimen of

intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a secret shame.”

“Oh, no, no!” he hastened to cry. “Nothing paltry nor vulgar. What I

mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the bottom of

things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes believe to

himself that he never saw it. Perhaps that’s not the clearest way to

express it. Here’s another way. A man who has found the path to the

hidden temple but has not followed it; who has, perhaps, caught

glimpses of the temple and striven afterward to convince himself that

it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet another way. A man who could have

done things but who placed no value on the doing, and who, all the

time, in his innermost heart, is regretting that he has not done them;

who has secretly laughed at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more

secretly, has yearned for the rewards and for the joy of doing.”

“I don’t read him that way,” she said. “And for that matter, I don’t

see just what you mean.”

“It is only a vague feeling on my part,” Martin temporized. “I have no

reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is wrong. You

certainly should know him better than I.”

From the evening at Ruth’s Martin brought away with him strange

confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his goal,

in the persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was

encouraged with his success. The climb had been easier than he

expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false

modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the beings among whom

he had climbed—with the exception, of course, of Professor Caldwell.

About life and the books he knew more than they, and he wondered into

what nooks and crannies they had cast aside their educations. He did

not know that he was himself possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did

he know that the persons who were given to probing the depths and to

thinking ultimate thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of

the world’s Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely

eagles sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its

swarming freight of gregarious life.