Bab Bab 37 · Chapter XXXVII

. Chapter XXXVII

The first thing Martin did next morning was to go counter both to

Brissenden’s advice and command. “The Shame of the Sun” he wrapped and

mailed to _The Acropolis_. He believed he could find magazine

publication for it, and he felt that recognition by the magazines would

commend him to the book-publishing houses. “Ephemera” he likewise

wrapped and mailed to a magazine. Despite Brissenden’s prejudice

against the magazines, which was a pronounced mania with him, Martin

decided that the great poem should see print. He did not intend,

however, to publish it without the other’s permission. His plan was to

get it accepted by one of the high magazines, and, thus armed, again to

wrestle with Brissenden for consent.

Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a number

of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him with its

insistent clamor to be created. Apparently it was to be a rattling sea

story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and romance, handling real

characters, in a real world, under real conditions. But beneath the

swing and go of the story was to be something else—something that the

superficial reader would never discern and which, on the other hand,

would not diminish in any way the interest and enjoyment for such a

reader. It was this, and not the mere story, that impelled Martin to

write it. For that matter, it was always the great, universal motif

that suggested plots to him. After having found such a motif, he cast

about for the particular persons and particular location in time and

space wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing. “Overdue” was

the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not

be more than sixty thousand words—a bagatelle for him with his splendid

vigor of production. On this first day he took hold of it with

conscious delight in the mastery of his tools. He no longer worried for

fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip and mar his work. The

long months of intense application and study had brought their reward.

He could now devote himself with sure hand to the larger phases of the

thing he shaped; and as he worked, hour after hour, he felt, as never

before, the sure and cosmic grasp with which he held life and the

affairs of life. “Overdue” would tell a story that would be true of its

particular characters and its particular events; but it would tell,

too, he was confident, great vital things that would be true of all

time, and all sea, and all life—thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought,

leaning back for a moment from the table. Ay, thanks to Herbert Spencer

and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had placed in

his hands.

He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing. “It will go!

It will go!” was the refrain that kept sounding in his ears. Of course

it would go. At last he was turning out the thing at which the

magazines would jump. The whole story worked out before him in

lightning flashes. He broke off from it long enough to write a

paragraph in his note-book. This would be the last paragraph in

“Overdue”; but so thoroughly was the whole book already composed in his

brain that he could write, weeks before he had arrived at the end, the

end itself. He compared the tale, as yet unwritten, with the tales of

the sea-writers, and he felt it to be immeasurably superior. “There’s

only one man who could touch it,” he murmured aloud, “and that’s

Conrad. And it ought to make even him sit up and shake hands with me,

and say, ‘Well done, Martin, my boy.’”

He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was to

have dinner at the Morses’. Thanks to Brissenden, his black suit was

out of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties. Down town he

stopped off long enough to run into the library and search for

Saleeby’s books. He drew out “The Cycle of Life,” and on the car turned

to the essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer. As Martin read, he grew

angry. His face flushed, his jaw set, and unconsciously his hand

clenched, unclenched, and clenched again as if he were taking fresh

grips upon some hateful thing out of which he was squeezing the life.

When he left the car, he strode along the sidewalk as a wrathful man

will stride, and he rang the Morse bell with such viciousness that it

roused him to consciousness of his condition, so that he entered in

good nature, smiling with amusement at himself. No sooner, however, was

he inside than a great depression descended upon him. He fell from the

height where he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.

“Bourgeois,” “trader’s den”—Brissenden’s epithets repeated themselves

in his mind. But what of that? he demanded angrily. He was marrying

Ruth, not her family.

It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more

spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy. There was

color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again—the eyes in

which he had first read immortality. He had forgotten immortality of

late, and the trend of his scientific reading had been away from it;

but here, in Ruth’s eyes, he read an argument without words that

transcended all worded arguments. He saw that in her eyes before which

all discussion fled away, for he saw love there. And in his own eyes

was love; and love was unanswerable. Such was his passionate doctrine.

The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left him

supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life. Nevertheless, at

table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion consequent upon the hard

day seized hold of him. He was aware that his eyes were tired and that

he was irritable. He remembered it was at this table, at which he now

sneered and was so often bored, that he had first eaten with civilized

beings in what he had imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and

refinement. He caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long

ago, a self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony

of apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of

eating-implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a

leap to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to

be frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did not

possess.

He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a

passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will strive

to locate the life preservers. Well, that much had come out of it—love

and Ruth. All the rest had failed to stand the test of the books. But

Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he found a biological

sanction. Love was the most exalted expression of life. Nature had been

busy designing him, as she had been busy with all normal men, for the

purpose of loving. She had spent ten thousand centuries—ay, a hundred

thousand and a million centuries—upon the task, and he was the best she

could do. She had made love the strongest thing in him, increased its

power a myriad per cent with her gift of imagination, and sent him

forth into the ephemera to thrill and melt and mate. His hand sought

Ruth’s hand beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was

given and received. She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes

were radiant and melting. So were his in the thrill that pervaded him;

nor did he realize how much that was radiant and melting in her eyes

had been aroused by what she had seen in his.

Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse’s right, sat

Judge Blount, a local superior court judge. Martin had met him a number

of times and had failed to like him. He and Ruth’s father were

discussing labor union politics, the local situation, and socialism,

and Mr. Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the latter topic. At

last Judge Blount looked across the table with benignant and fatherly

pity. Martin smiled to himself.

“You’ll grow out of it, young man,” he said soothingly. “Time is the

best cure for such youthful distempers.” He turned to Mr. Morse. “I do

not believe discussion is good in such cases. It makes the patient

obstinate.”

“That is true,” the other assented gravely. “But it is well to warn the

patient occasionally of his condition.”

Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort. The day had been too

long, the day’s effort too intense, and he was deep in the throes of

the reaction.

“Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors,” he said; “but if you care

a whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that you are

poor diagnosticians. In fact, you are both suffering from the disease

you think you find in me. As for me, I am immune. The socialist

philosophy that riots half-baked in your veins has passed me by.”

“Clever, clever,” murmured the judge. “An excellent ruse in

controversy, to reverse positions.”

“Out of your mouth.” Martin’s eyes were sparkling, but he kept control

of himself. “You see, Judge, I’ve heard your campaign speeches. By some

henidical process—henidical, by the way is a favorite word of mine

which nobody understands—by some henidical process you persuade

yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival of

the strong, and at the same time you indorse with might and main all

sorts of measures to shear the strength from the strong.”

“My young man—”

“Remember, I’ve heard your campaign speeches,” Martin warned. “It’s on

record, your position on interstate commerce regulation, on regulation

of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the conservation of the

forests, on a thousand and one restrictive measures that are nothing

else than socialistic.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these

various outrageous exercises of power?”

“That’s not the point. I mean to tell you that you are a poor

diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the

microbe of socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are

suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As for

me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate

opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing else than

pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that will not stand

the test of the dictionary.”

“I am a reactionary—so complete a reactionary that my position is

incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social organization

and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil. You make believe

that you believe in the survival of the strong and the rule of the

strong. I believe. That is the difference. When I was a trifle

younger,—a few months younger,—I believed the same thing. You see, the

ideas of you and yours had impressed me. But merchants and traders are

cowardly rulers at best; they grunt and grub all their days in the

trough of money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if you

please. I am the only individualist in this room. I look to the state

for nothing. I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to

save the state from its own rotten futility.”

“Nietzsche was right. I won’t take the time to tell you who Nietzsche

was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong—to the strong

who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of

trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the

great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the ‘yes-sayers.’ And

they will eat you up, you socialists—who are afraid of socialism and

who think yourselves individualists. Your slave-morality of the meek

and lowly will never save you.—Oh, it’s all Greek, I know, and I won’t

bother you any more with it. But remember one thing. There aren’t half

a dozen individualists in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them.”

He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to Ruth.

“I’m wrought up to-day,” he said in an undertone. “All I want to do is

to love, not talk.”

He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-

“I am unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That is the way to tell

them.”

“We’ll make a good Republican out of you yet,” said Judge Blount.

“The man on horseback will arrive before that time,” Martin retorted

with good humor, and returned to Ruth.

But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the laziness and the

disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective

son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose

nature he had no understanding. So he turned the conversation to

Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose ears

had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher’s name, listened to

the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe against Spencer.

From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as much as to say,

“There, my boy, you see.”

“Chattering daws,” Martin muttered under his breath, and went on

talking with Ruth and Arthur.

But the long day and the “real dirt” of the night before were telling

upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what had made him

angry when he read it on the car.

“What is the matter?” Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he was

making to contain himself.

“There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its

prophet,” Judge Blount was saying at that moment.

Martin turned upon him.

“A cheap judgment,” he remarked quietly. “I heard it first in the City

Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known better.

I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap of it

nauseates me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear that great

and noble man’s name upon your lips is like finding a dew-drop in a

cesspool. You are disgusting.”

It was like a thunderbolt. Judge Blount glared at him with apoplectic

countenance, and silence reigned. Mr. Morse was secretly pleased. He

could see that his daughter was shocked. It was what he wanted to do—to

bring out the innate ruffianism of this man he did not like.

Ruth’s hand sought Martin’s beseechingly under the table, but his blood

was up. He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and fraud of those

who sat in the high places. A Superior Court Judge! It was only several

years before that he had looked up from the mire at such glorious

entities and deemed them gods.

Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing

himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter

understood was for the benefit of the ladies. Even this added to his

anger. Was there no honesty in the world?

“You can’t discuss Spencer with me,” he cried. “You do not know any

more about Spencer than do his own countrymen. But it is no fault of

yours, I grant. It is just a phase of the contemptible ignorance of the

times. I ran across a sample of it on my way here this evening. I was

reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer. You should read it. It is

accessible to all men. You can buy it in any book-store or draw it from

the public library. You would feel ashamed of your paucity of abuse and

ignorance of that noble man compared with what Saleeby has collected on

the subject. It is a record of shame that would shame your shame.

“‘The philosopher of the half-educated,’ he was called by an academic

Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere he breathed. I

don’t think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but there have been

critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who have read no more

than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his followers to adduce

one single idea from all his writings—from Herbert Spencer’s writings,

the man who has impressed the stamp of his genius over the whole field

of scientific research and modern thought; the father of psychology;

the man who revolutionized pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the

French peasant is taught the three R’s according to principles laid

down by him. And the little gnats of men sting his memory when they get

their very bread and butter from the technical application of his

ideas. What little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to

him. It is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in

their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent.

“And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford—a man who sits in an

even higher place than you, Judge Blount—has said that Spencer will be

dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather than a thinker.

Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of them! ‘“First Principles”

is not wholly destitute of a certain literary power,’ said one of them.

And others of them have said that he was an industrious plodder rather

than an original thinker. Yappers and blatherskites! Yappers and

blatherskites!”

Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence. Everybody in Ruth’s family

looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement, and they

were horrified at Martin’s outbreak. The remainder of the dinner passed

like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining their talk to each

other, and the rest of the conversation being extremely desultory. Then

afterward, when Ruth and Martin were alone, there was a scene.

“You are unbearable,” she wept.

But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, “The beasts! The

beasts!”

When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-

“By telling the truth about him?”

“I don’t care whether it was true or not,” she insisted. “There are

certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult anybody.”

“Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?” Martin

demanded. “Surely to assault truth is a more serious misdemeanor than

to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge’s. He did worse than

that. He blackened the name of a great, noble man who is dead. Oh, the

beasts! The beasts!”

His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him. Never

had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and unreasonable to

her comprehension. And yet, through her very terror ran the fibres of

fascination that had drawn and that still drew her to him—that had

compelled her to lean towards him, and, in that mad, culminating

moment, lay her hands upon his neck. She was hurt and outraged by what

had taken place, and yet she lay in his arms and quivered while he went

on muttering, “The beasts! The beasts!” And she still lay there when he

said: “I’ll not bother your table again, dear. They do not like me, and

it is wrong of me to thrust my objectionable presence upon them.

Besides, they are just as objectionable to me. Faugh! They are

sickening. And to think of it, I dreamed in my innocence that the

persons who sat in the high places, who lived in fine houses and had

educations and bank accounts, were worth while!”