Bab Bab 29 · Chapter XXIX

. Chapter XXIX

It was a hard summer for Martin. Manuscript readers and editors were

away on vacation, and publications that ordinarily returned a decision

in three weeks now retained his manuscript for three months or more.

The consolation he drew from it was that a saving in postage was

effected by the deadlock. Only the robber-publications seemed to remain

actively in business, and to them Martin disposed of all his early

efforts, such as “Pearl-diving,” “The Sea as a Career,”

“Turtle-catching,” and “The Northeast Trades.” For these manuscripts he

never received a penny. It is true, after six months’ correspondence,

he effected a compromise, whereby he received a safety razor for

“Turtle-catching,” and that _The Acropolis_, having agreed to give him

five dollars cash and five yearly subscriptions: for “The Northeast

Trades,” fulfilled the second part of the agreement.

For a sonnet on Stevenson he managed to wring two dollars out of a

Boston editor who was running a magazine with a Matthew Arnold taste

and a penny-dreadful purse. “The Peri and the Pearl,” a clever skit of

a poem of two hundred lines, just finished, white hot from his brain,

won the heart of the editor of a San Francisco magazine published in

the interest of a great railroad. When the editor wrote, offering him

payment in transportation, Martin wrote back to inquire if the

transportation was transferable. It was not, and so, being prevented

from peddling it, he asked for the return of the poem. Back it came,

with the editor’s regrets, and Martin sent it to San Francisco again,

this time to _The Hornet_, a pretentious monthly that had been fanned

into a constellation of the first magnitude by the brilliant journalist

who founded it. But _The Hornet’s_ light had begun to dim long before

Martin was born. The editor promised Martin fifteen dollars for the

poem, but, when it was published, seemed to forget about it. Several of

his letters being ignored, Martin indicted an angry one which drew a

reply. It was written by a new editor, who coolly informed Martin that

he declined to be held responsible for the old editor’s mistakes, and

that he did not think much of “The Peri and the Pearl” anyway.

But _The Globe_, a Chicago magazine, gave Martin the most cruel

treatment of all. He had refrained from offering his “Sea Lyrics” for

publication, until driven to it by starvation. After having been

rejected by a dozen magazines, they had come to rest in _The Globe_

office. There were thirty poems in the collection, and he was to

receive a dollar apiece for them. The first month four were published,

and he promptly received a check for four dollars; but when he looked

over the magazine, he was appalled at the slaughter. In some cases the

titles had been altered: “Finis,” for instance, being changed to “The

Finish,” and “The Song of the Outer Reef” to “The Song of the Coral

Reef.” In one case, an absolutely different title, a misappropriate

title, was substituted. In place of his own, “Medusa Lights,” the

editor had printed, “The Backward Track.” But the slaughter in the body

of the poems was terrifying. Martin groaned and sweated and thrust his

hands through his hair. Phrases, lines, and stanzas were cut out,

interchanged, or juggled about in the most incomprehensible manner.

Sometimes lines and stanzas not his own were substituted for his. He

could not believe that a sane editor could be guilty of such

maltreatment, and his favorite hypothesis was that his poems must have

been doctored by the office boy or the stenographer. Martin wrote

immediately, begging the editor to cease publishing the lyrics and to

return them to him.

He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his

letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till the

thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a check for

those which had appeared in the current number.

Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the _White Mouse_

forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and more to

hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the agricultural

weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he

found he could easily starve. At his lowest ebb, when his black suit

was in pawn, he made a ten-strike—or so it seemed to him—in a prize

contest arranged by the County Committee of the Republican Party. There

were three branches of the contest, and he entered them all, laughing

at himself bitterly the while in that he was driven to such straits to

live. His poem won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song

the second prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the

Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was very

gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had gone wrong

in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a state senator

were members of it, the money was not forthcoming. While this affair

was hanging fire, he proved that he understood the principles of the

Democratic Party by winning the first prize for his essay in a similar

contest. And, moreover, he received the money, twenty-five dollars. But

the forty dollars won in the first contest he never received.

Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long walk

from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too much time,

he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle. The latter gave

him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and enabled him to see

Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck trousers and an old sweater

made him a presentable wheel costume, so that he could go with Ruth on

afternoon rides. Besides, he no longer had opportunity to see much of

her in her own home, where Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her

campaign of entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and to whom

he had looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no

longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times,

disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of

such people was maddening. He was not unduly egotistic. He measured the

narrowness of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he

read. At Ruth’s home he never met a large mind, with the exception of

Professor Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the

rest, they were numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and

ignorant. It was their ignorance that astounded him. What was the

matter with them? What had they done with their educations? They had

had access to the same books he had. How did it happen that they had

drawn nothing from them?

He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers, existed.

He had his proofs from the books, the books that had educated him

beyond the Morse standard. And he knew that higher intellects than

those of the Morse circle were to be found in the world. He read

English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses of men and women

talking politics and philosophy. And he read of salons in great cities,

even in the United States, where art and intellect congregated.

Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived that all well-groomed persons

above the working class were persons with power of intellect and vigor

of beauty. Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had

been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were

the same things.

Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth

with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she would

shine anywhere. As it was clear to him that he had been handicapped by

his early environment, so now he perceived that she was similarly

handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand. The books on her

father’s shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the

piano—all was just so much meretricious display. To real literature,

real painting, real music, the Morses and their kind, were dead. And

bigger than such things was life, of which they were densely,

hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their

masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind

interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while

their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe

struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the

youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older—the same that moved

the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first

hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam’s rib; that moved

Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the

projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British

ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win

immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of

history.

So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that

the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank

cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known

was on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they

wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of them was

lacking the something more which he found in himself and in the books.

The Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce,

and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a slave to the

money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the

Morses’; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he

moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin

to what a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.

“You hate and fear the socialists,” he remarked to Mr. Morse, one

evening at dinner; “but why? You know neither them nor their

doctrines.”

The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse, who

had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood. The cashier

was Martin’s black beast, and his temper was a trifle short where the

talker of platitudes was concerned.

“Yes,” he had said, “Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising young

man—somebody told me as much. And it is true. He’ll make the Governor’s

Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the United States Senate.”

“What makes you think so?” Mrs. Morse had inquired.

“I’ve heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid and

unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot help but

regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so much like the

platitudes of the average voter that—oh, well, you know you flatter any

man by dressing up his own thoughts for him and presenting them to

him.”

“I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood,” Ruth had chimed in.

“Heaven forbid!”

The look of horror on Martin’s face stirred Mrs. Morse to belligerence.

“You surely don’t mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?” she demanded

icily.

“No more than the average Republican,” was the retort, “or average

Democrat, either. They are all stupid when they are not crafty, and

very few of them are crafty. The only wise Republicans are the

millionnaires and their conscious henchmen. They know which side their

bread is buttered on, and they know why.”

“I am a Republican,” Mr. Morse put in lightly. “Pray, how do you

classify me?”

“Oh, you are an unconscious henchman.”

“Henchman?”

“Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no working-class nor

criminal practice. You don’t depend upon wife-beaters and pickpockets

for your income. You get your livelihood from the masters of society,

and whoever feeds a man is that man’s master. Yes, you are a henchman.

You are interested in advancing the interests of the aggregations of

capital you serve.”

Mr. Morse’s face was a trifle red.

“I confess, sir,” he said, “that you talk like a scoundrelly

socialist.”

Then it was that Martin made his remark:

“You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You know neither them nor

their doctrines.”

“Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism,” Mr. Morse replied,

while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse beamed

happily at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege lord’s

antagonism.

“Because I say Republicans are stupid, and hold that liberty, equality,

and fraternity are exploded bubbles, does not make me a socialist,”

Martin said with a smile. “Because I question Jefferson and the

unscientific Frenchmen who informed his mind, does not make me a

socialist. Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I

who am its avowed enemy.”

“Now you please to be facetious,” was all the other could say.

“Not at all. I speak in all seriousness. You still believe in equality,

and yet you do the work of the corporations, and the corporations, from

day to day, are busily engaged in burying equality. And you call me a

socialist because I deny equality, because I affirm just what you live

up to. The Republicans are foes to equality, though most of them fight

the battle against equality with the very word itself the slogan on

their lips. In the name of equality they destroy equality. That was why

I called them stupid. As for myself, I am an individualist. I believe

the race is to the swift, the battle to the strong. Such is the lesson

I have learned from biology, or at least think I have learned. As I

said, I am an individualist, and individualism is the hereditary and

eternal foe of socialism.”

“But you frequent socialist meetings,” Mr. Morse challenged.

“Certainly, just as spies frequent hostile camps. How else are you to

learn about the enemy? Besides, I enjoy myself at their meetings. They

are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books. Any

one of them knows far more about sociology and all the other ologies

than the average captain of industry. Yes, I have been to half a dozen

of their meetings, but that doesn’t make me a socialist any more than

hearing Charley Hapgood orate made me a Republican.”

“I can’t help it,” Mr. Morse said feebly, “but I still believe you

incline that way.”

Bless me, Martin thought to himself, he doesn’t know what I was talking

about. He hasn’t understood a word of it. What did he do with his

education, anyway?

Thus, in his development, Martin found himself face to face with

economic morality, or the morality of class; and soon it became to him

a grisly monster. Personally, he was an intellectual moralist, and more

offending to him than platitudinous pomposity was the morality of those

about him, which was a curious hotchpotch of the economic, the

metaphysical, the sentimental, and the imitative.

A sample of this curious messy mixture he encountered nearer home. His

sister Marian had been keeping company with an industrious young

mechanic, of German extraction, who, after thoroughly learning the

trade, had set up for himself in a bicycle-repair shop. Also, having

got the agency for a low-grade make of wheel, he was prosperous. Marian

had called on Martin in his room a short time before to announce her

engagement, during which visit she had playfully inspected Martin’s

palm and told his fortune. On her next visit she brought Hermann von

Schmidt along with her. Martin did the honors and congratulated both of

them in language so easy and graceful as to affect disagreeably the

peasant-mind of his sister’s lover. This bad impression was further

heightened by Martin’s reading aloud the half-dozen stanzas of verse

with which he had commemorated Marian’s previous visit. It was a bit of

society verse, airy and delicate, which he had named “The Palmist.” He

was surprised, when he finished reading it, to note no enjoyment in his

sister’s face. Instead, her eyes were fixed anxiously upon her

betrothed, and Martin, following her gaze, saw spread on that worthy’s

asymmetrical features nothing but black and sullen disapproval. The

incident passed over, they made an early departure, and Martin forgot

all about it, though for the moment he had been puzzled that any woman,

even of the working class, should not have been flattered and delighted

by having poetry written about her.

Several evenings later Marian again visited him, this time alone. Nor

did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully

for what he had done.

“Why, Marian,” he chided, “you talk as though you were ashamed of your

relatives, or of your brother at any rate.”

“And I am, too,” she blurted out.

Martin was bewildered by the tears of mortification he saw in her eyes.

The mood, whatever it was, was genuine.

“But, Marian, why should your Hermann be jealous of my writing poetry

about my own sister?”

“He ain’t jealous,” she sobbed. “He says it was indecent, ob—obscene.”

Martin emitted a long, low whistle of incredulity, then proceeded to

resurrect and read a carbon copy of “The Palmist.”

“I can’t see it,” he said finally, proffering the manuscript to her.

“Read it yourself and show me whatever strikes you as obscene—that was

the word, wasn’t it?”

“He says so, and he ought to know,” was the answer, with a wave aside

of the manuscript, accompanied by a look of loathing. “And he says

you’ve got to tear it up. He says he won’t have no wife of his with

such things written about her which anybody can read. He says it’s a

disgrace, an’ he won’t stand for it.”

“Now, look here, Marian, this is nothing but nonsense,” Martin began;

then abruptly changed his mind.

He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to

convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd

and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.

“All right,” he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen

pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.

He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original

type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York

magazine. Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself

nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever

were published.

Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.

“Can I?” she pleaded.

He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn

pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her

jacket—ocular evidence of the success of her mission. She reminded him

of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous

flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the working class whom

he had seen twice. But they were on a par, the pair of them, in dress

and carriage, and he smiled with inward amusement at the caprice of his

fancy which suggested the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse’s

drawing-room. The amusement faded, and he was aware of a great

loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were

milestones of the road he had travelled. And he had left them behind.

He glanced affectionately about him at his few books. They were all the

comrades left to him.

“Hello, what’s that?” he demanded in startled surprise.

Marian repeated her question.

“Why don’t I go to work?” He broke into a laugh that was only

half-hearted. “That Hermann of yours has been talking to you.”

She shook her head.

“Don’t lie,” he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his charge.

“Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business; that

when I write poetry about the girl he’s keeping company with it’s his

business, but that outside of that he’s got no say so. Understand?

“So you don’t think I’ll succeed as a writer, eh?” he went on. “You

think I’m no good?—that I’ve fallen down and am a disgrace to the

family?”

“I think it would be much better if you got a job,” she said firmly,

and he saw she was sincere. “Hermann says—”

“Damn Hermann!” he broke out good-naturedly. “What I want to know is

when you’re going to get married. Also, you find out from your Hermann

if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from me.”

He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke

out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her

betrothed, all the members of his own class and the members of Ruth’s

class, directing their narrow little lives by narrow little

formulas—herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives

by one another’s opinions, failing of being individuals and of really

living life because of the childlike formulas by which they were

enslaved. He summoned them before him in apparitional procession:

Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt

cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he

judged them and dismissed them—judged them by the standards of

intellect and morality he had learned from the books. Vainly he asked:

Where are the great souls, the great men and women? He found them not

among the careless, gross, and stupid intelligences that answered the

call of vision to his narrow room. He felt a loathing for them such as

Circe must have felt for her swine. When he had dismissed the last one

and thought himself alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and

unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut,

double-breasted coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful

hoodlum who had once been he.

“You were like all the rest, young fellow,” Martin sneered. “Your

morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did not

think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes, were

ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock of

your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and

ruled the gang, not because you liked to,—you know you really despised

it,—but because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder. You

licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn’t give in, and you wouldn’t give

in partly because you were an abysmal brute and for the rest because

you believed what every one about you believed, that the measure of

manhood was the carnivorous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring

fellow-creatures’ anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won other

fellows’ girls away from them, not because you wanted the girls, but

because in the marrow of those about you, those who set your moral

pace, was the instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well,

the years have passed, and what do you think about it now?”

As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. The

stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder

garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of the

eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from an

inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge. The apparition was

very like his present self, and, as he regarded it, he noted the

student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book over which it

pored. He glanced at the title and read, “The Science of Æsthetics.”

Next, he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student-lamp, and

himself went on reading “The Science of Æsthetics.”