Bab Bab 12 · Chapter XII

. Chapter XII

Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry the

beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his brain,

Martin was called to the telephone.

“It’s a lady’s voice, a fine lady’s,” Mr. Higginbotham, who had called

him, jeered.

Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a wave

of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth’s voice. In his battle with

the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the sound of her

voice his love for her smote him like a sudden blow. And such a

voice!—delicate and sweet, like a strain of music heard far off and

faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a perfect tone, crystal-pure.

No mere woman had a voice like that. There was something celestial

about it, and it came from other worlds. He could scarcely hear what it

said, so ravished was he, though he controlled his face, for he knew

that Mr. Higginbotham’s ferret eyes were fixed upon him.

It was not much that Ruth wanted to say—merely that Norman had been

going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a headache,

and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and that if he

had no other engagement, would he be good enough to take her?

Would he! He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice. It was

amazing. He had always seen her in her own house. And he had never

dared to ask her to go anywhere with him. Quite irrelevantly, still at

the telephone and talking with her, he felt an overpowering desire to

die for her, and visions of heroic sacrifice shaped and dissolved in

his whirling brain. He loved her so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.

In that moment of mad happiness that she should go out with him, go to

a lecture with him—with him, Martin Eden—she soared so far above him

that there seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her. It was

the only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty

emotion he felt for her. It was the sublime abnegation of true love

that comes to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the telephone,

in a whirlwind of fire and glory; and to die for her, he felt, was to

have lived and loved well. And he was only twenty-one, and he had never

been in love before.

His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from the

organ which had stirred him. His eyes were shining like an angel’s, and

his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and

holy.

“Makin’ dates outside, eh?” his brother-in-law sneered. “You know what

that means. You’ll be in the police court yet.”

But Martin could not come down from the height. Not even the bestiality

of the allusion could bring him back to earth. Anger and hurt were

beneath him. He had seen a great vision and was as a god, and he could

feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot of a man. He did not

look at him, and though his eyes passed over him, he did not see him;

and as in a dream he passed out of the room to dress. It was not until

he had reached his own room and was tying his necktie that he became

aware of a sound that lingered unpleasantly in his ears. On

investigating this sound he identified it as the final snort of Bernard

Higginbotham, which somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.

As Ruth’s front door closed behind them and he came down the steps with

her, he found himself greatly perturbed. It was not unalloyed bliss,

taking her to the lecture. He did not know what he ought to do. He had

seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that the women took

the men’s arms. But then, again, he had seen them when they didn’t; and

he wondered if it was only in the evening that arms were taken, or only

between husbands and wives and relatives.

Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie. Minnie had

always been a stickler. She had called him down the second time she

walked out with him, because he had gone along on the inside, and she

had laid the law down to him that a gentleman always walked on the

outside—when he was with a lady. And Minnie had made a practice of

kicking his heels, whenever they crossed from one side of the street to

the other, to remind him to get over on the outside. He wondered where

she had got that item of etiquette, and whether it had filtered down

from above and was all right.

It wouldn’t do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had

reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind Ruth and took up his station

on the outside. Then the other problem presented itself. Should he

offer her his arm? He had never offered anybody his arm in his life.

The girls he had known never took the fellows’ arms. For the first

several times they walked freely, side by side, and after that it was

arms around the waists, and heads against the fellows’ shoulders where

the streets were unlighted. But this was different. She wasn’t that

kind of a girl. He must do something.

He crooked the arm next to her—crooked it very slightly and with secret

tentativeness, not invitingly, but just casually, as though he was

accustomed to walk that way. And then the wonderful thing happened. He

felt her hand upon his arm. Delicious thrills ran through him at the

contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed that he had left the

solid earth and was flying with her through the air. But he was soon

back again, perturbed by a new complication. They were crossing the

street. This would put him on the inside. He should be on the outside.

Should he therefore drop her arm and change over? And if he did so,

would he have to repeat the manoeuvre the next time? And the next?

There was something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about

and play the fool. Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and

when he found himself on the inside, he talked quickly and earnestly,

making a show of being carried away by what he was saying, so that, in

case he was wrong in not changing sides, his enthusiasm would seem the

cause for his carelessness.

As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem. In

the blaze of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her giggly

friend. Only for an instant he hesitated, then his hand went up and his

hat came off. He could not be disloyal to his kind, and it was to more

than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was lifted. She nodded and looked at

him boldly, not with soft and gentle eyes like Ruth’s, but with eyes

that were handsome and hard, and that swept on past him to Ruth and

itemized her face and dress and station. And he was aware that Ruth

looked, too, with quick eyes that were timid and mild as a dove’s, but

which saw, in a look that was a flutter on and past, the working-class

girl in her cheap finery and under the strange hat that all

working-class girls were wearing just then.

“What a pretty girl!” Ruth said a moment later.

Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-

“I don’t know. I guess it’s all a matter of personal taste, but she

doesn’t strike me as being particularly pretty.”

“Why, there isn’t one woman in ten thousand with features as regular as

hers. They are splendid. Her face is as clear-cut as a cameo. And her

eyes are beautiful.”

“Do you think so?” Martin queried absently, for to him there was only

one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her hand upon

his arm.

“Do I think so? If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr. Eden,

and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be fairly

dazzled by her, and so would all men.”

“She would have to be taught how to speak,” he commented, “or else most

of the men wouldn’t understand her. I’m sure you couldn’t understand a

quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally.”

“Nonsense! You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your point.”

“You forget how I talked when you first met me. I have learned a new

language since then. Before that time I talked as that girl talks. Now

I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to

explain that you do not know that other girl’s language. And do you

know why she carries herself the way she does? I think about such

things now, though I never used to think about them, and I am beginning

to understand—much.”

“But why does she?”

“She has worked long hours for years at machines. When one’s body is

young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like putty

according to the nature of the work. I can tell at a glance the trades

of many workingmen I meet on the street. Look at me. Why am I rolling

all about the shop? Because of the years I put in on the sea. If I’d

put in the same years cow-punching, with my body young and pliable, I

wouldn’t be rolling now, but I’d be bow-legged. And so with that girl.

You noticed that her eyes were what I might call hard. She has never

been sheltered. She has had to take care of herself, and a young girl

can’t take care of herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like—like

yours, for example.”

“I think you are right,” Ruth said in a low voice. “And it is too bad.

She is such a pretty girl.”

He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity. And then he

remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his fortune

that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm to a lecture.

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass,

that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and

curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong

by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of

toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong

with the oxen and the drudges, in dirty surroundings among smells and

stenches. There are the stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are

rotting. Smell them, damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the

books, to listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful

paintings, to speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your

own kind thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie

Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million miles

beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what are you?

damn you! And are you going to make good?

He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge of

the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes. Then he got out note-book

and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations, while the hours

slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of dawn flooded against

his window.