Chapter 26

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

Despite various misadventures, the memory of the WHITE MOUSE forty-dollar check sustained him. Martin began to write for the agricultural weeklies and trade journals, though among the religious weeklies he found he could easily starve. At his lowest ebb his black suit was in pawn.

In some days 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. 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 persons he met there now bored him. They were no longer exalted. He was not 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. They were superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. Their ignorance 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 known that from the books, the books that had educated him beyond the Morse standard.

Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take Ruth with him. He dearly loved her, and he was confident that she would shine anywhere. She had not had a chance to expand. To real literature, real painting, real music, the Morses were dead.

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

“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. “Believe me, Mr. Morse, you are far nearer socialism than I who am its avowed enemy.”

“You are joking,” was the reply.

“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.”

“But you come to socialist meetings,” Mr. Morse said.

“Certainly, just as spies visit hostile camps. How else are you to learn about the enemy? Besides, they are good fighters, and, right or wrong, they have read the books.”

Chapter 27

On a beautiful autumn day, Martin read his “Love-cycle” to Ruth. It was in the afternoon. Now and again she had interrupted his reading with exclamations of pleasure, and he waited her judgment.

She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke.

“I think they are beautiful, very beautiful,” she said; “but you can’t sell them, can you? You see what I mean,” she said. “This is not practical. And please, dear, don’t misunderstand me. They do not make our marriage possible. Don’t you see, Martin? Don’t think me mercenary. A whole year has gone by since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no nearer. Why don’t you try to get work on a newspaper? Why not become a reporter? – for a while, at least?”

“It would spoil my style,” was his answer, in a low, monotonous voice. “You have no idea how I’ve worked for style.”

“But those stories,” she argued. “You wrote many of them. Didn’t they spoil your style?”

“No, the cases are different. To become a reporter now, just as my style is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide. The joy of writing the ‘Love-cycle’! The creative joy in its noblest form! That was compensation for everything.”

“But, Martin, if you fail? You must consider me as well, Martin.”

“If I fail? If I fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an editor’s wife.”

“There, that’s enough, I have talked with father and mother. I was very undutiful. They are against you, you know; but at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you could begin right away in his office. Which I think was very fine of him – don’t you?”

“You want me to go to work?” he asked.

“Yes. Father has offered – “

“I understand all that,” he said; “but what I want to know is whether or not you have lost faith in me?”

She pressed his hand.

“You’ve read my stories,” he went on brutally. “What do you think of them? Are they hopeless? How do they compare with other men’s work?”

“But they sell theirs, and you – don’t.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. Do you think that literature is not at all my vocation?”

“Then I will answer. I don’t think you were made to write. Forgive me, dear.”

“Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts,” he said meditatively; “and you know. But I know I shall succeed. What I do ask of you is to love me and have faith in love. I sleep four hours now. I work, and work, and work. Why do I do this? For you. Long ago I wanted to be famous. I don’t care for fame now. What I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or clothing, or recognition.”

“And another thing,” he continued. “You love me. But why do you love me? You love me because I am somehow different from the men you have known. I was not made for the desk and counting-house, and for business. My desire to write is the most vital thing in me.”

Ruth warned him again of the antagonism of her father and mother.

“But you love me?” he asked.

“I do! I do!” she cried.

“And I love you, not them, and they can’t hurt me.” Triumph sounded in his voice.

Chapter 28

One day after dinner Martin met Russ Brissenden. Whose friend he was or what acquaintance brought him, Martin did not know. He almost forgot about Brissenden, but one day saw each other again.

“Let’s have a drink,” offered his new friend, and Martin agreed. Soon Brissenden and he lounged in capacious leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.

They talked. They talked about many things. Martin was excited: here was an intelligence, a living man for him to look up to. “I wish I could gather knowledge as carelessly,” Martin said half an hour later.

“Oh, no,” Brissenden replied. “Fate sent me to a Catholic college for my education”. “But I’m very sick,” Brissenden announced a little later, and stated that he came from Arizona.

“You don’t like magazines?” Martin asked.

“Do you?”

“I–I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines,” Martin faltered.

“That’s better. You try to write, but you don’t succeed. I respect and admire your failure. I know what you write. Why, man, I could insult you by asking you to have something to eat.”

Martin felt the heat in his face of the blood, and Brissenden laughed triumphantly.

“A full man is not insulted by such an invitation,” he concluded.

“You are a devil,” Martin cried irritably.

“Anyway, I didn’t ask you.”

“You didn’t dare.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I invite you now. Then let’s go and get something to eat.”

Chapter 29

Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin’s visitor.

“I hope you are glad to see me?” Brissenden began.

“Yes, yes, sure,” Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him to the solitary chair. “But how did you know where I lived?”

“I called up the Morses. Miss Morse answered the phone. And here I am.” He put a thin volume on the table. “There’s a book, by a poet. Read it and keep it.” And then, in reply to Martin’s protest: “What have I to do with books? I had another hemorrhage this morning. Got any whiskey? No, of course not. Wait a minute.”

He went away. Martin opened the book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow’s latest collection.

“No Scotch,” Brissenden announced on his return. “Only American whiskey.”

“I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?” Martin went on.

“Possibly fifty dollars,” came the answer. Brissenden began to laugh, but terrible cough stopped him.

“Say, you probably write poetry,” he gasped. “Let me see some of it.”

“Don’t read it now,” Martin pleaded. “I want to talk with you. You can take it home.”

Brissenden departed with the “Love-cycle,” and “The Peri and the Pearl,” returning next day to greet Martin with:

“I want more.”

He assured Martin that he was a poet, and Martin learned that Brissenden also wrote poems. But he did not attempt to publish it.

“Leave the magazines alone!” was Brissenden’s answer. “Love beauty for its own sake,” was his counsel, “and go back to your ships and your sea – that’s my advice to you, Martin Eden. What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men? Fame is poison to you. You are too simple, took elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper on here. I hope you never sell a line to the magazines. Beauty is the only master to serve. Leave fame and coin alone, sign away on a ship tomorrow, and go back to your sea.”

“Not for fame, but for love,” Martin laughed. “Beauty is the maiden of Love.”

Brissenden looked at him. “You are so young, Martin boy, so young. Your ‘Love-cycle’ – ”

“It glorifies love,” Martin laughed.

“The philosophy of madness,” was the retort. “But beware. These bourgeois cities will kill you. Look at that den of traitors where I met you. What do you want with a daughter of the bourgeoisie? Leave them alone.”

They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but they liked each other. Day after day they were together. Brissenden never arrived without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined together down-town, he drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal. He paid for both, and Martin learned new food, drank his first champagne, and made acquaintance with new wines.

But Brissenden was always an enigma. With the face of an ascetic, he was unafraid to die, bitter and cynical; and yet, dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it. Who or what he was, Martin never learned. He was a man without a past, whose future was the grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.