Bab Bab 14 · Chapter XIV

. Chapter XIV

It was not because of Olney, but in spite of Ruth, and his love for

Ruth, that he finally decided not to take up Latin. His money meant

time. There was so much that was more important than Latin, so many

studies that clamored with imperious voices. And he must write. He must

earn money. He had had no acceptances. Twoscore of manuscripts were

travelling the endless round of the magazines. How did the others do

it? He spent long hours in the free reading-room, going over what

others had written, studying their work eagerly and critically,

comparing it with his own, and wondering, wondering, about the secret

trick they had discovered which enabled them to sell their work.

He was amazed at the immense amount of printed stuff that was dead. No

light, no life, no color, was shot through it. There was no breath of

life in it, and yet it sold, at two cents a word, twenty dollars a

thousand—the newspaper clipping had said so. He was puzzled by

countless short stories, written lightly and cleverly he confessed, but

without vitality or reality. Life was so strange and wonderful, filled

with an immensity of problems, of dreams, and of heroic toils, and yet

these stories dealt only with the commonplaces of life. He felt the

stress and strain of life, its fevers and sweats and wild

insurgences—surely this was the stuff to write about! He wanted to

glorify the leaders of forlorn hopes, the mad lovers, the giants that

fought under stress and strain, amid terror and tragedy, making life

crackle with the strength of their endeavor. And yet the magazine short

stories seemed intent on glorifying the Mr. Butlers, the sordid

dollar-chasers, and the commonplace little love affairs of commonplace

little men and women. Was it because the editors of the magazines were

commonplace? he demanded. Or were they afraid of life, these writers

and editors and readers?

But his chief trouble was that he did not know any editors or writers.

And not merely did he not know any writers, but he did not know anybody

who had ever attempted to write. There was nobody to tell him, to hint

to him, to give him the least word of advice. He began to doubt that

editors were real men. They seemed cogs in a machine. That was what it

was, a machine. He poured his soul into stories, articles, and poems,

and intrusted them to the machine. He folded them just so, put the

proper stamps inside the long envelope along with the manuscript,

sealed the envelope, put more stamps outside, and dropped it into the

mail-box. It travelled across the continent, and after a certain lapse

of time the postman returned him the manuscript in another long

envelope, on the outside of which were the stamps he had enclosed.

There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning

arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to

another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein

one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had

delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It

depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got

chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought

checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only

the latter slot.

It was the rejection slips that completed the horrible machinelikeness

of the process. These slips were printed in stereotyped forms and he

had received hundreds of them—as many as a dozen or more on each of his

earlier manuscripts. If he had received one line, one personal line,

along with one rejection of all his rejections, he would have been

cheered. But not one editor had given that proof of existence. And he

could conclude only that there were no warm human men at the other end,

only mere cogs, well oiled and running beautifully in the machine.

He was a good fighter, whole-souled and stubborn, and he would have

been content to continue feeding the machine for years; but he was

bleeding to death, and not years but weeks would determine the fight.

Each week his board bill brought him nearer destruction, while the

postage on forty manuscripts bled him almost as severely. He no longer

bought books, and he economized in petty ways and sought to delay the

inevitable end; though he did not know how to economize, and brought

the end nearer by a week when he gave his sister Marian five dollars

for a dress.

He struggled in the dark, without advice, without encouragement, and in

the teeth of discouragement. Even Gertrude was beginning to look

askance. At first she had tolerated with sisterly fondness what she

conceived to be his foolishness; but now, out of sisterly solicitude,

she grew anxious. To her it seemed that his foolishness was becoming a

madness. Martin knew this and suffered more keenly from it than from

the open and nagging contempt of Bernard Higginbotham. Martin had faith

in himself, but he was alone in this faith. Not even Ruth had faith.

She had wanted him to devote himself to study, and, though she had not

openly disapproved of his writing, she had never approved.

He had never offered to show her his work. A fastidious delicacy had

prevented him. Besides, she had been studying heavily at the

university, and he felt averse to robbing her of her time. But when she

had taken her degree, she asked him herself to let her see something of

what he had been doing. Martin was elated and diffident. Here was a

judge. She was a bachelor of arts. She had studied literature under

skilled instructors. Perhaps the editors were capable judges, too. But

she would be different from them. She would not hand him a stereotyped

rejection slip, nor would she inform him that lack of preference for

his work did not necessarily imply lack of merit in his work. She would

talk, a warm human being, in her quick, bright way, and, most important

of all, she would catch glimpses of the real Martin Eden. In his work

she would discern what his heart and soul were like, and she would come

to understand something, a little something, of the stuff of his dreams

and the strength of his power.

Martin gathered together a number of carbon copies of his short

stories, hesitated a moment, then added his “Sea Lyrics.” They mounted

their wheels on a late June afternoon and rode for the hills. It was

the second time he had been out with her alone, and as they rode along

through the balmy warmth, just chilled by she sea-breeze to refreshing

coolness, he was profoundly impressed by the fact that it was a very

beautiful and well-ordered world and that it was good to be alive and

to love. They left their wheels by the roadside and climbed to the

brown top of an open knoll where the sunburnt grass breathed a harvest

breath of dry sweetness and content.

“Its work is done,” Martin said, as they seated themselves, she upon

his coat, and he sprawling close to the warm earth. He sniffed the

sweetness of the tawny grass, which entered his brain and set his

thoughts whirling on from the particular to the universal. “It has

achieved its reason for existence,” he went on, patting the dry grass

affectionately. “It quickened with ambition under the dreary downpour

of last winter, fought the violent early spring, flowered, and lured

the insects and the bees, scattered its seeds, squared itself with its

duty and the world, and—”

“Why do you always look at things with such dreadfully practical eyes?”

she interrupted.

“Because I’ve been studying evolution, I guess. It’s only recently that

I got my eyesight, if the truth were told.”

“But it seems to me you lose sight of beauty by being so practical,

that you destroy beauty like the boys who catch butterflies and rub the

down off their beautiful wings.”

He shook his head.

“Beauty has significance, but I never knew its significance before. I

just accepted beauty as something meaningless, as something that was

just beautiful without rhyme or reason. I did not know anything about

beauty. But now I know, or, rather, am just beginning to know. This

grass is more beautiful to me now that I know why it is grass, and all

the hidden chemistry of sun and rain and earth that makes it become

grass. Why, there is romance in the life-history of any grass, yes, and

adventure, too. The very thought of it stirs me. When I think of the

play of force and matter, and all the tremendous struggle of it, I feel

as if I could write an epic on the grass.

“How well you talk,” she said absently, and he noted that she was

looking at him in a searching way.

He was all confusion and embarrassment on the instant, the blood

flushing red on his neck and brow.

“I hope I am learning to talk,” he stammered. “There seems to be so

much in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can’t find ways to

say what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world,

all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was

clamoring for me to be the spokesman. I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I

feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a little child.

It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech,

written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens,

transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a

lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in

through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and

fancies. It is a breath of the universe I have breathed. I know song

and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see

visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass,

and I would like to tell them to you, to the world. But how can I? My

tongue is tied. I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe

to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass. But I have not

succeeded. I have no more than hinted in awkward speech. My words seem

gibberish to me. And yet I am stifled with desire to tell. Oh!—” he

threw up his hands with a despairing gesture—“it is impossible! It is

not understandable! It is incommunicable!”

“But you do talk well,” she insisted. “Just think how you have improved

in the short time I have known you. Mr. Butler is a noted public

speaker. He is always asked by the State Committee to go out on stump

during campaign. Yet you talked just as well as he the other night at

dinner. Only he was more controlled. You get too excited; but you will

get over that with practice. Why, you would make a good public speaker.

You can go far—if you want to. You are masterly. You can lead men, I am

sure, and there is no reason why you should not succeed at anything you

set your hand to, just as you have succeeded with grammar. You would

make a good lawyer. You should shine in politics. There is nothing to

prevent you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made. And

minus the dyspepsia,” she added with a smile.

They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always to

the need of thorough grounding in education and to the advantages of

Latin as part of the foundation for any career. She drew her ideal of

the successful man, and it was largely in her father’s image, with a

few unmistakable lines and touches of color from the image of Mr.

Butler. He listened eagerly, with receptive ears, lying on his back and

looking up and joying in each movement of her lips as she talked. But

his brain was not receptive. There was nothing alluring in the pictures

she drew, and he was aware of a dull pain of disappointment and of a

sharper ache of love for her. In all she said there was no mention of

his writing, and the manuscripts he had brought to read lay neglected

on the ground.

At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height above

the horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them up.

“I had forgotten,” she said quickly. “And I am so anxious to hear.”

He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his

very best. He called it “The Wine of Life,” and the wine of it, that

had stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his brain now as

he read it. There was a certain magic in the original conception, and

he had adorned it with more magic of phrase and touch. All the old fire

and passion with which he had written it were reborn in him, and he was

swayed and swept away so that he was blind and deaf to the faults of

it. But it was not so with Ruth. Her trained ear detected the

weaknesses and exaggerations, the overemphasis of the tyro, and she was

instantly aware each time the sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered. She

scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous,

at which moments she was disagreeably impressed with its

amateurishness. That was her final judgment on the story as a

whole—amateurish, though she did not tell him so. Instead, when he had

done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the

story.

But he was disappointed. Her criticism was just. He acknowledged that,

but he had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with her for the

purpose of schoolroom correction. The details did not matter. They

could take care of themselves. He could mend them, he could learn to

mend them. Out of life he had captured something big and attempted to

imprison it in the story. It was the big thing out of life he had read

to her, not sentence-structure and semicolons. He wanted her to feel

with him this big thing that was his, that he had seen with his own

eyes, grappled with his own brain, and placed there on the page with

his own hands in printed words. Well, he had failed, was his secret

decision. Perhaps the editors were right. He had felt the big thing,

but he had failed to transmute it. He concealed his disappointment, and

joined so easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize

that deep down in him was running a strong undercurrent of

disagreement.

“This next thing I’ve called ‘The Pot’,” he said, unfolding the

manuscript. “It has been refused by four or five magazines now, but

still I think it is good. In fact, I don’t know what to think of it,

except that I’ve caught something there. Maybe it won’t affect you as

it does me. It’s a short thing—only two thousand words.”

“How dreadful!” she cried, when he had finished. “It is horrible,

unutterably horrible!”

He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched

hands, with secret satisfaction. He had succeeded. He had communicated

the stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain. It had struck

home. No matter whether she liked it or not, it had gripped her and

mastered her, made her sit there and listen and forget details.

“It is life,” he said, “and life is not always beautiful. And yet,

perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful there.

It seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because it is

there—”

“But why couldn’t the poor woman—” she broke in disconnectedly. Then

she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out: “Oh! It is

degrading! It is not nice! It is nasty!”

For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. _Nasty_! He

had never dreamed it. He had not meant it. The whole sketch stood

before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he

sought vainly for nastiness. Then his heart began to beat again. He was

not guilty.

“Why didn’t you select a nice subject?” she was saying. “We know there

are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason—”

She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following her. He

was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal face, so

innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity seemed always to

enter into him, driving out of him all dross and bathing him in some

ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft and velvety as starshine.

_We know there are nasty things in the world_! He cuddled to him the

notion of her knowing, and chuckled over it as a love joke. The next

moment, in a flashing vision of multitudinous detail, he sighted the

whole sea of life’s nastiness that he had known and voyaged over and

through, and he forgave her for not understanding the story. It was

through no fault of hers that she could not understand. He thanked God

that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew

life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of

the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on

it to the world. Saints in heaven—how could they be anything but fair

and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime—ah, that was the

everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral

grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first

glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of

weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness,

arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment—

He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.

“The tone of it all is low. And there is so much that is high. Take ‘In

Memoriam.’”

He was impelled to suggest “Locksley Hall,” and would have done so, had

not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her, the

female of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment, creeping and

crawling up the vast ladder of life for a thousand thousand centuries,

had emerged on the topmost rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and

fair, and divine, and with power to make him know love, and to aspire

toward purity, and to desire to taste divinity—him, Martin Eden, who,

too, had come up in some amazing fashion from out of the ruck and the

mire and the countless mistakes and abortions of unending creation.

There was the romance, and the wonder, and the glory. There was the

stuff to write, if he could only find speech. Saints in heaven!—They

were only saints and could not help themselves. But he was a man.

“You have strength,” he could hear her saying, “but it is untutored

strength.”

“Like a bull in a china shop,” he suggested, and won a smile.

“And you must develop discrimination. You must consult taste, and

fineness, and tone.”

“I dare too much,” he muttered.

She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another story.

“I don’t know what you’ll make of this,” he said apologetically. “It’s

a funny thing. I’m afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but my

intentions were good. Don’t bother about the little features of it.

Just see if you catch the feel of the big thing in it. It is big, and

it is true, though the chance is large that I have failed to make it

intelligible.”

He read, and as he read he watched her. At last he had reached her, he

thought. She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon him,

scarcely breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought, by the

witchery of the thing he had created. He had entitled the story

“Adventure,” and it was the apotheosis of adventure—not of the

adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage

taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and

whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and

nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death at

the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous delirium

of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging insects leading

up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to royal culminations

and lordly achievements.

It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story, and

it was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and listened. Her

eyes were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and before he finished it

seemed to him that she was almost panting. Truly, she was warmed; but

she was warmed, not by the story, but by him. She did not think much of

the story; it was Martin’s intensity of power, the old excess of

strength that seemed to pour from his body and on and over her. The

paradox of it was that it was the story itself that was freighted with

his power, that was the channel, for the time being, through which his

strength poured out to her. She was aware only of the strength, and not

of the medium, and when she seemed most carried away by what he had

written, in reality she had been carried away by something quite

foreign to it—by a thought, terrible and perilous, that had formed

itself unsummoned in her brain. She had caught herself wondering what

marriage was like, and the becoming conscious of the waywardness and

ardor of the thought had terrified her. It was unmaidenly. It was not

like her. She had never been tormented by womanhood, and she had lived

in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy, dense even to the full

significance of that delicate master’s delicate allusions to the

grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens and knights. She

had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering imperatively at

all her doors. Mentally she was in a panic to shoot the bolts and drop

the bars into place, while wanton instincts urged her to throw wide her

portals and bid the deliciously strange visitor to enter in.

Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict. He had no doubt of

what it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:

“It is beautiful.”

“It is beautiful,” she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.

Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere

beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty

its handmaiden. He sprawled silently on the ground, watching the grisly

form of a great doubt rising before him. He had failed. He was

inarticulate. He had seen one of the greatest things in the world, and

he had not expressed it.

“What did you think of the—” He hesitated, abashed at his first attempt

to use a strange word. “Of the _motif_?” he asked.

“It was confused,” she answered. “That is my only criticism in the

large way. I followed the story, but there seemed so much else. It is

too wordy. You clog the action by introducing so much extraneous

material.”

“That was the major _motif_,” he hurriedly explained, “the big

underrunning _motif_, the cosmic and universal thing. I tried to make

it keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial after

all. I was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly. I did not

succeed in suggesting what I was driving at. But I’ll learn in time.”

She did not follow him. She was a bachelor of arts, but he had gone

beyond her limitations. This she did not comprehend, attributing her

incomprehension to his incoherence.

“You were too voluble,” she said. “But it was beautiful, in places.”

He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he

would read her the “Sea Lyrics.” He lay in dull despair, while she

watched him searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and wayward

thoughts of marriage.

“You want to be famous?” she asked abruptly.

“Yes, a little bit,” he confessed. “That is part of the adventure. It

is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that counts.

And after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means to something

else. I want to be famous very much, for that matter, and for that

reason.”

“For your sake,” he wanted to add, and might have added had she proved

enthusiastic over what he had read to her.

But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that

would at least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was

which he had hinted at. There was no career for him in literature. Of

that she was convinced. He had proved it to-day, with his amateurish

and sophomoric productions. He could talk well, but he was incapable of

expressing himself in a literary way. She compared Tennyson, and

Browning, and her favorite prose masters with him, and to his hopeless

discredit. Yet she did not tell him her whole mind. Her strange

interest in him led her to temporize. His desire to write was, after

all, a little weakness which he would grow out of in time. Then he

would devote himself to the more serious affairs of life. And he would

succeed, too. She knew that. He was so strong that he could not fail—if

only he would drop writing.

“I wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden,” she said.

He flushed with pleasure. She was interested, that much was sure. And

at least she had not given him a rejection slip. She had called certain

portions of his work beautiful, and that was the first encouragement he

had ever received from any one.

“I will,” he said passionately. “And I promise you, Miss Morse, that I

will make good. I have come far, I know that; and I have far to go, and

I will cover it if I have to do it on my hands and knees.” He held up a

bunch of manuscript. “Here are the ‘Sea Lyrics.’ When you get home,

I’ll turn them over to you to read at your leisure. And you must be

sure to tell me just what you think of them. What I need, you know,

above all things, is criticism. And do, please, be frank with me.”

“I will be perfectly frank,” she promised, with an uneasy conviction

that she had not been frank with him and with a doubt if she could be

quite frank with him the next time.