Chương Chương 23 · Chapter XXIII

. Chapter XXIII

That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter her

nor diminish her in Martin’s eyes. In the breathing spell of the

vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self-analysis, and

thereby learned much of himself. He had discovered that he loved beauty

more than fame, and that what desire he had for fame was largely for

Ruth’s sake. It was for this reason that his desire for fame was

strong. He wanted to be great in the world’s eyes; “to make good,” as

he expressed it, in order that the woman he loved should be proud of

him and deem him worthy.

As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of serving

her was to him sufficient wage. And more than beauty he loved Ruth. He

considered love the finest thing in the world. It was love that had

worked the revolution in him, changing him from an uncouth sailor to a

student and an artist; therefore, to him, the finest and greatest of

the three, greater than learning and artistry, was love. Already he had

discovered that his brain went beyond Ruth’s, just as it went beyond

the brains of her brothers, or the brain of her father. In spite of

every advantage of university training, and in the face of her

bachelorship of arts, his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his

year or so of self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the

affairs of the world and art and life that she could never hope to

possess.

All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor her

love for him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was too loyal a lover

for him to besmirch love with criticism. What did love have to do with

Ruth’s divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or

equal suffrage? They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason;

it was superrational. He could not belittle love. He worshipped it.

Love lay on the mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was

a sublimated condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it

came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he

favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined

process of the same scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that

the human organism achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must

not be questioned, but must be accepted as the highest guerdon of life.

Thus, he considered the lover blessed over all creatures, and it was a

delight to him to think of “God’s own mad lover,” rising above the

things of earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and

applause, rising above life itself and “dying on a kiss.”

Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he

reasoned out later. In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation

except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan. He paid two

dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his

Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working

and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and

drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of

the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon

for fifteen cents. From detesting her and her foul tongue at first,

Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made.

There were but four rooms in the little house—three, when Martin’s was

subtracted. One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and

dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous

departed babes, was kept strictly for company. The blinds were always

down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred

precinct save on state occasions. She cooked, and all ate, in the

kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and ironed clothes on all

days of the week except Sunday; for her income came largely from taking

in washing from her more prosperous neighbors. Remained the bedroom,

small as the one occupied by Martin, into which she and her seven

little ones crowded and slept. It was an everlasting miracle to Martin

how it was accomplished, and from her side of the thin partition he

heard nightly every detail of the going to bed, the squalls and

squabbles, the soft chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of

birds. Another source of income to Maria were her cows, two of them,

which she milked night and morning and which gained a surreptitious

livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either side the

public side walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged boys,

whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping their eyes out

for the poundmen.

In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept

house. Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch, was

the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-writing stand.

The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space

of the room. The table was flanked on one side by a gaudy bureau,

manufactured for profit and not for service, the thin veneer of which

was shed day by day. This bureau stood in the corner, and in the

opposite corner, on the table’s other flank, was the kitchen—the

oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and cooking

utensils, a shelf on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of water on

the floor. Martin had to carry his water from the kitchen sink, there

being no tap in his room. On days when there was much steam to his

cooking, the harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous.

Over the bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle. At

first he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva,

loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him out.

Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling southeaster

drenched the wheel a night-long. Then he had retreated with it to his

room and slung it aloft.

A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had accumulated

and for which there was no room on the table or under the table. Hand

in hand with reading, he had developed the habit of making notes, and

so copiously did he make them that there would have been no existence

for him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several

clothes-lines across the room on which the notes were hung. Even so, he

was crowded until navigating the room was a difficult task. He could

not open the door without first closing the closet door, and _vice

versa_. It was impossible for him anywhere to traverse the room in a

straight line. To go from the door to the head of the bed was a zigzag

course that he was never quite able to accomplish in the dark without

collisions. Having settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he

had to steer sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen. Next, he

sheered to the left, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if

too generous, brought him against the corner of the table. With a

sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to the

right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the other

the table. When the one chair in the room was at its usual place before

the table, the canal was unnavigable. When the chair was not in use, it

reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when

cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming

skilful enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying.

Also, so small was the little corner that constituted the kitchen, he

was able, sitting down, to reach anything he needed. In fact, it was

expedient to cook sitting down; standing up, he was too often in his

own way.

In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything, he

possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the same time

nutritious and cheap. Pea-soup was a common article in his diet, as

well as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown and cooked in

Mexican style. Rice, cooked as American housewives never cook it and

can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin’s table at least once a

day. Dried fruits were less expensive than fresh, and he had usually a

pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, for they took the place of

butter on his bread. Occasionally he graced his table with a piece of

round-steak, or with a soup-bone. Coffee, without cream or milk, he had

twice a day, in the evening substituting tea; but both coffee and tea

were excellently cooked.

There was need for him to be economical. His vacation had consumed

nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his

market that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the first

returns from his hack-work. Except at such times as he saw Ruth, or

dropped in to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in each day

accomplishing at least three days’ labor of ordinary men. He slept a

scant five hours, and only one with a constitution of iron could have

held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, to nineteen

consecutive hours of toil. He never lost a moment. On the looking-glass

were lists of definitions and pronunciations; when shaving, or

dressing, or combing his hair, he conned these lists over. Similar

lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and they were similarly

conned while he was engaged in cooking or in washing the dishes. New

lists continually displaced the old ones. Every strange or partly

familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately jotted down,

and later, when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were typed

and pinned to the wall or looking-glass. He even carried them in his

pockets, and reviewed them at odd moments on the street, or while

waiting in butcher shop or grocery to be served.

He went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who had

arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the

tricks by which they had been achieved—the tricks of narrative, of

exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams;

and of all these he made lists for study. He did not ape. He sought

principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till

out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to induce the

general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for

new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise

them properly. In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases,

the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched

like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of

the arid desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle

that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done;

after that he could do it for himself. He was not content with the fair

face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom

laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of

the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of

beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.

He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not

work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and

trusting to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced

should be right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects. He

wanted to know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and,

before he began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in

his brain, with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in

his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.

On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and

phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later

stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and

incommunicable connotations. Before such he bowed down and marvelled,

knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And

no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of the principles that

underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the

innermost mystery of beauty to which he did not penetrate and to which

no man had ever penetrated. He knew full well, from his Spencer, that

man can never attain ultimate knowledge of anything, and that the

mystery of beauty was no less than that of life—nay, more—that the

fibres of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he himself was

but a bit of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and

star-dust and wonder.

In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his essay

entitled “Star-dust,” in which he had his fling, not at the principles

of criticism, but at the principal critics. It was brilliant, deep,

philosophical, and deliciously touched with laughter. Also it was

promptly rejected by the magazines as often as it was submitted. But

having cleared his mind of it, he went serenely on his way. It was a

habit he developed, of incubating and maturing his thought upon a

subject, and of then rushing into the type-writer with it. That it did

not see print was a matter of small moment with him. The writing of it

was the culminating act of a long mental process, the drawing together

of scattered threads of thought and the final generalizing upon all the

data with which his mind was burdened. To write such an article was the

conscious effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh

material and problems. It was in a way akin to that common habit of men

and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who periodically and

volubly break their long-suffering silence and “have their say” till

the last word is said.