Kabanata Kabanata 3 · Chapter III

. Chapter III

As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat

pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican

tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He drew

the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long

and lingering exhalation. “By God!” he said aloud, in a voice of awe

and wonder. “By God!” he repeated. And yet again he murmured, “By God!”

Then his hand went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and

stuffed into his pocket. A cold drizzle was falling, but he bared his

head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging along in splendid

unconcern. He was only dimly aware that it was raining. He was in an

ecstasy, dreaming dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past.

He had met the woman at last—the woman that he had thought little

about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had

expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next to

her at table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into her eyes

and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit;—but no more beautiful than

the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh that gave it

expression and form. He did not think of her flesh as flesh,—which was

new to him; for of the women he had known that was the only way he

thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He did not conceive of her

body as a body, subject to the ills and frailties of bodies. Her body

was more than the garb of her spirit. It was an emanation of her

spirit, a pure and gracious crystallization of her divine essence. This

feeling of the divine startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to

sober thought. No word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever

reached him before. He had never believed in the divine. He had always

been irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their

immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had contended; it

was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But what he had seen in

her eyes was soul—immortal soul that could never die. No man he had

known, nor any woman, had given him the message of immortality. But she

had. She had whispered it to him the first moment she looked at him.

Her face shimmered before his eyes as he walked along,—pale and

serious, sweet and sensitive, smiling with pity and tenderness as only

a spirit could smile, and pure as he had never dreamed purity could be.

Her purity smote him like a blow. It startled him. He had known good

and bad; but purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered

his mind. And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of

goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal life.

And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was not

fit to carry water for her—he knew that; it was a miracle of luck and a

fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be with her and

talk with her that night. It was accidental. There was no merit in it.

He did not deserve such fortune. His mood was essentially religious. He

was humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement and abasement. In

such frame of mind sinners come to the penitent form. He was convicted

of sin. But as the meek and lowly at the penitent form catch splendid

glimpses of their future lordly existence, so did he catch similar

glimpses of the state he would gain to by possessing her. But this

possession of her was dim and nebulous and totally different from

possession as he had known it. Ambition soared on mad wings, and he saw

himself climbing the heights with her, sharing thoughts with her,

pleasuring in beautiful and noble things with her. It was a

soul-possession he dreamed, refined beyond any grossness, a free

comradeship of spirit that he could not put into definite thought. He

did not think it. For that matter, he did not think at all. Sensation

usurped reason, and he was quivering and palpitant with emotions he had

never known, drifting deliciously on a sea of sensibility where feeling

itself was exalted and spiritualized and carried beyond the summits of

life.

He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud: “By

God! By God!”

A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted his

sailor roll.

“Where did you get it?” the policeman demanded.

Martin Eden came back to earth. His was a fluid organism, swiftly

adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and

crannies. With the policeman’s hail he was immediately his ordinary

self, grasping the situation clearly.

“It’s a beaut, ain’t it?” he laughed back. “I didn’t know I was talkin’

out loud.”

“You’ll be singing next,” was the policeman’s diagnosis.

“No, I won’t. Gimme a match an’ I’ll catch the next car home.”

He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on. “Now wouldn’t

that rattle you?” he ejaculated under his breath. “That copper thought

I was drunk.” He smiled to himself and meditated. “I guess I was,” he

added; “but I didn’t think a woman’s face’d do it.”

He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley. It was

crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and ever and

again barking out college yells. He studied them curiously. They were

university boys. They went to the same university that she did, were in

her class socially, could know her, could see her every day if they

wanted to. He wondered that they did not want to, that they had been

out having a good time instead of being with her that evening, talking

with her, sitting around her in a worshipful and adoring circle. His

thoughts wandered on. He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a

loose-lipped mouth. That fellow was vicious, he decided. On shipboard

he would be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a better

man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed to draw him

nearer to Her. He began comparing himself with the students. He grew

conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident that

he was physically their master. But their heads were filled with

knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk,—the thought depressed

him. But what was a brain for? he demanded passionately. What they had

done, he could do. They had been studying about life from the books

while he had been busy living life. His brain was just as full of

knowledge as theirs, though it was a different kind of knowledge. How

many of them could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout?

His life spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and

daring, hardship and toil. He remembered his failures and scrapes in

the process of learning. He was that much to the good, anyway. Later on

they would have to begin living life and going through the mill as he

had gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he could be

learning the other side of life from the books.

As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated

Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story

building along the front of which ran the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAM’S

CASH STORE. Martin Eden got off at this corner. He stared up for a

moment at the sign. It carried a message to him beyond its mere

wording. A personality of smallness and egotism and petty

underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters themselves. Bernard

Higginbotham had married his sister, and he knew him well. He let

himself in with a latch-key and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Here lived his brother-in-law. The grocery was below. There was a smell

of stale vegetables in the air. As he groped his way across the hall he

stumbled over a toy-cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and

nieces, and brought up against a door with a resounding bang. “The

pincher,” was his thought; “too miserly to burn two cents’ worth of gas

and save his boarders’ necks.”

He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his

sister and Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his

trousers, while his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his feet

dangling in dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the second

chair. He glanced across the top of the paper he was reading, showing a

pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes. Martin Eden never looked

at him without experiencing a sense of repulsion. What his sister had

seen in the man was beyond him. The other affected him as so much

vermin, and always aroused in him an impulse to crush him under his

foot. “Some day I’ll beat the face off of him,” was the way he often

consoled himself for enduring the man’s existence. The eyes,

weasel-like and cruel, were looking at him complainingly.

“Well,” Martin demanded. “Out with it.”

“I had that door painted only last week,” Mr. Higginbotham half whined,

half bullied; “and you know what union wages are. You should be more

careful.”

Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of

it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the

wall. It surprised him. He had always liked it, but it seemed that now

he was seeing it for the first time. It was cheap, that was what it

was, like everything else in this house. His mind went back to the

house he had just left, and he saw, first, the paintings, and next,

Her, looking at him with melting sweetness as she shook his hand at

leaving. He forgot where he was and Bernard Higginbotham’s existence,

till that gentleman demanded:-

“Seen a ghost?”

Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent,

cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same

eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below—subservient

eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.

“Yes,” Martin answered. “I seen a ghost. Good night. Good night,

Gertrude.”

He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the

slatternly carpet.

“Don’t bang the door,” Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.

He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and closed

the door softly behind him.

Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.

“He’s ben drinkin’,” he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper. “I told you he

would.”

She nodded her head resignedly.

“His eyes was pretty shiny,” she confessed; “and he didn’t have no

collar, though he went away with one. But mebbe he didn’t have more’n a

couple of glasses.”

“He couldn’t stand up straight,” asserted her husband. “I watched him.

He couldn’t walk across the floor without stumblin’. You heard ’m

yourself almost fall down in the hall.”

“I think it was over Alice’s cart,” she said. “He couldn’t see it in

the dark.”

Mr. Higginbotham’s voice and wrath began to rise. All day he effaced

himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the

privilege of being himself.

“I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk.”

His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation

of each word like the die of a machine. His wife sighed and remained

silent. She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and

always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and her husband.

“He’s got it in him, I tell you, from his father,” Mr. Higginbotham

went on accusingly. “An’ he’ll croak in the gutter the same way. You

know that.”

She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were agreed that Martin

had come home drunk. They did not have it in their souls to know

beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and that

glowing face betokened youth’s first vision of love.

“Settin’ a fine example to the children,” Mr. Higginbotham snorted,

suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and which

he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him more. “If

he does it again, he’s got to get out. Understand! I won’t put up with

his shinanigan—debotchin’ innocent children with his boozing.” Mr.

Higginbotham liked the word, which was a new one in his vocabulary,

recently gleaned from a newspaper column. “That’s what it is,

debotchin’—there ain’t no other name for it.”

Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on. Mr.

Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.

“Has he paid last week’s board?” he shot across the top of the

newspaper.

She nodded, then added, “He still has some money.”

“When is he goin’ to sea again?”

“When his pay-day’s spent, I guess,” she answered. “He was over to San

Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But he’s got money, yet, an’

he’s particular about the kind of ship he signs for.”

“It’s not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs,” Mr. Higginbotham

snorted. “Particular! Him!”

“He said something about a schooner that’s gettin’ ready to go off to

some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he’d sail on

her if his money held out.”

“If he only wanted to steady down, I’d give him a job drivin’ the

wagon,” her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his

voice. “Tom’s quit.”

His wife looked alarm and interrogation.

“Quit to-night. Is goin’ to work for Carruthers. They paid ’m more’n I

could afford.”

“I told you you’d lose ’m,” she cried out. “He was worth more’n you was

giving him.”

“Now look here, old woman,” Higginbotham bullied, “for the thousandth

time I’ve told you to keep your nose out of the business. I won’t tell

you again.”

“I don’t care,” she sniffled. “Tom was a good boy.” Her husband glared

at her. This was unqualified defiance.

“If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the wagon,”

he snorted.

“He pays his board, just the same,” was the retort. “An’ he’s my

brother, an’ so long as he don’t owe you money you’ve got no right to

be jumping on him all the time. I’ve got some feelings, if I have been

married to you for seven years.”

“Did you tell ’m you’d charge him for gas if he goes on readin’ in

bed?” he demanded.

Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded away, her spirit

wilting down into her tired flesh. Her husband was triumphant. He had

her. His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in the

sniffles she emitted. He extracted great happiness from squelching her,

and she squelched easily these days, though it had been different in

the first years of their married life, before the brood of children and

his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.

“Well, you tell ’m to-morrow, that’s all,” he said. “An’ I just want to

tell you, before I forget it, that you’d better send for Marian

to-morrow to take care of the children. With Tom quit, I’ll have to be

out on the wagon, an’ you can make up your mind to it to be down below

waitin’ on the counter.”

“But to-morrow’s wash day,” she objected weakly.

“Get up early, then, an’ do it first. I won’t start out till ten

o’clock.”

He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.