He staggered along like a drunken man, murmuring fervently aloud: By God! By God!
A policeman on a street corner eyed him suspiciously, then noted his sailor roll.
Where did you get it? the policeman demanded.
Martin Eden came back to earth. His was a fluid organism, swiftly adjustable, capable of flowing into and filling all sorts of nooks and crannies. With the policemans hail he was immediately his ordinary self, grasping the situation clearly.
Its a beaut, aint it? he laughed back. I didnt know I was talkin out loud.
Youll be singing next, was the policemans diagnosis.
No, I wont. Gimme a match an Ill catch the next car home.
He lighted his cigarette, said good night, and went on. Now wouldnt that rattle you? he ejaculated under his breath. That copper thought I was drunk. He smiled to himself and meditated. I guess I was, he added; but I didnt think a womans faced do it.
He caught a Telegraph Avenue car that was going to Berkeley. It was crowded with youths and young men who were singing songs and ever and again barking out college yells. He studied them curiously. They were university boys. They went to the same university that she did, were in her class socially, could know her, could see her every day if they wanted to. He wondered that they did not want to, that they had been out having a good time instead of being with her that evening, talking with her, sitting around her in a worshipful and adoring circle. His thoughts wandered on. He noticed one with narrow-slitted eyes and a loose-lipped mouth. That fellow was vicious, he decided. On shipboard he would be a sneak, a whiner, a tattler. He, Martin Eden, was a better man than that fellow. The thought cheered him. It seemed to draw him nearer to Her. He began comparing himself with the students. He grew conscious of the muscled mechanism of his body and felt confident that he was physically their master. But their heads were filled with knowledge that enabled them to talk her talk, the thought depressed him. But what was a brain for? he demanded passionately. What they had done, he could do. They had been studying about life from the books while he had been busy living life. His brain was just as full of knowledge as theirs, though it was a different kind of knowledge. How many of them could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout? His life spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and daring, hardship and toil. He remembered his failures and scrapes in the process of learning. He was that much to the good, anyway. Later on they would have to begin living life and going through the mill as he had gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he could be learning the other side of life from the books.
As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story building along the front of which ran the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAMS CASH STORE. Martin Eden got off at this corner. He stared up for a moment at the sign. It carried a message to him beyond its mere wording. A personality of smallness and egotism and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters themselves. Bernard Higginbotham had married his sister, and he knew him well. He let himself in with a latch-key and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Here lived his brother-in-law. The grocery was below. There was a smell of stale vegetables in the air. As he groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and brought up against a door with a resounding bang. The pincher, was his thought; too miserly to burn two cents worth of gas and save his boarders necks.
He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his sister and Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his trousers, while his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his feet dangling in dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the second chair. He glanced across the top of the paper he was reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes. Martin Eden never looked at him without experiencing a sense of repulsion. What his sister had seen in the man was beyond him. The other affected him as so much vermin, and always aroused in him an impulse to crush him under his foot. Some day Ill beat the face off of him, was the way he often consoled himself for enduring the mans existence. The eyes, weasel-like and cruel, were looking at him complainingly.
Well, Martin demanded. Out with it.
I had that door painted only last week, Mr. Higginbotham half whined, half bullied; and you know what union wages are. You should be more careful.
Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the wall. It surprised him. He had always liked it, but it seemed that now he was seeing it for the first time. It was cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in this house. His mind went back to the house he had just left, and he saw, first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving. He forgot where he was and Bernard Higginbothams existence, till that gentleman demanded:-
Seen a ghost?
Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent, cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below subservient eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.
Yes, Martin answered. I seen a ghost. Good night. Good night, Gertrude.
He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the slatternly carpet.
Dont bang the door, Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.
He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and closed the door softly behind him.
Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.
Hes ben drinkin, he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper. I told you he would.
She nodded her head resignedly.
His eyes was pretty shiny, she confessed; and he didnt have no collar, though he went away with one. But mebbe he didnt have moren a couple of glasses.
He couldnt stand up straight, asserted her husband. I watched him. He couldnt walk across the floor without stumblin. You heard m yourself almost fall down in the hall.
I think it was over Alices cart, she said. He couldnt see it in the dark.
Mr. Higginbothams voice and wrath began to rise. All day he effaced himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the privilege of being himself.
I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk.
His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation of each word like the die of a machine. His wife sighed and remained silent. She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and her husband.
Hes got it in him, I tell you, from his father, Mr. Higginbotham went on accusingly. An hell croak in the gutter the same way. You know that.
She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were agreed that Martin had come home drunk. They did not have it in their souls to know beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and that glowing face betokened youths first vision of love.
Settin a fine example to the children, Mr. Higginbotham snorted, suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and which he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him more. If he does it again, hes got to get out. Understand! I wont put up with his shinanigan debotchin innocent children with his boozing. Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which was a new one in his vocabulary, recently gleaned from a newspaper column. Thats what it is, debotchinthere aint no other name for it.
Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on. Mr. Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.
Has he paid last weeks board? he shot across the top of the newspaper.
She nodded, then added, He still has some money.
When is he goin to sea again?
When his pay-days spent, I guess, she answered. He was over to San Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But hes got money, yet, an hes particular about the kind of ship he signs for.
Its not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs, Mr. Higginbotham snorted. Particular! Him!
He said something about a schooner thats gettin ready to go off to some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that hed sail on her if his money held out.
If he only wanted to steady down, Id give him a job drivin the wagon, her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his voice. Toms quit.
His wife looked alarm and interrogation.
Quit to-night. Is goin to work for Carruthers. They paid m moren I could afford.
I told you youd lose m, she cried out. He was worth moren you was giving him.
Now look here, old woman, Higginbotham bullied, for the thousandth time Ive told you to keep your nose out of the business. I wont tell you again.
I dont care, she sniffled. Tom was a good boy. Her husband glared at her. This was unqualified defiance.
If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the wagon, he snorted.
He pays his board, just the same, was the retort. An hes my brother, an so long as he dont owe you money youve got no right to be jumping on him all the time. Ive got some feelings, if I have been married to you for seven years.
Did you tell m youd charge him for gas if he goes on readin in bed? he demanded.
Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded away, her spirit wilting down into her tired flesh. Her husband was triumphant. He had her. His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in the sniffles she emitted. He extracted great happiness from squelching her, and she squelched easily these days, though it had been different in the first years of their married life, before the brood of children and his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.
Well, you tell m to-morrow, thats all, he said. An I just want to tell you, before I forget it, that youd better send for Marian to-morrow to take care of the children. With Tom quit, Ill have to be out on the wagon, an you can make up your mind to it to be down below waitin on the counter.
But to-morrows wash day, she objected weakly.
Get up early, then, an do it first. I wont start out till ten oclock.
He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.
Chapter IV
Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-stand, and one chair. Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a servant when his wife could do the work. Besides, the servants room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one. Martin placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat, and sat down on the bed. A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted the weight of his body, but he did not notice them. He started to take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had leaked through the roof. On this befouled background visions began to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his lips began to move and he murmured, Ruth.
Ruth. He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful. It delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition of it. Ruth. It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with. Each time he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing the foul wall with a golden radiance. This radiance did not stop at the wall. It extended on into infinity, and through its golden depths his soul went questing after hers. The best that was in him was out in splendid flood. The very thought of her ennobled and purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better. This was new to him. He had never known women who had made him better. They had always had the counter effect of making him beastly. He did not know that many of them had done their best, bad as it was. Never having been conscious of himself, he did not know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth. Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had been better because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always reached out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was not just to them, nor to himself. But he, who for the first time was becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.
He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-glass over the wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked again, long and carefully. It was the first time he had ever really seen himself. His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that moment they had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at himself. He saw the head and face of a young fellow of twenty, but, being unused to such appraisement, he did not know how to value it. Above a square-domed forehead he saw a mop of brown hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that were a delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and fingers tingle to pass caresses through it. But he passed it by as without merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high, square forehead, striving to penetrate it and learn the quality of its content. What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his insistent interrogation. What was it capable of? How far would it take him? Would it take him to her?
He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were often quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs of the sun-washed deep. He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to her. He tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself inside other mens minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life he knew. He did not know her way of life. She was wonder and mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers? Well, they were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness nor meanness. The brown sunburn of his face surprised him. He had not dreamed he was so black. He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and compared the white underside of the arm with his face. Yes, he was a white man, after all. But the arms were sunburned, too. He twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun. It was very white. He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor did he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women who could boast fairer or smoother skins than he fairer than where he had escaped the ravages of the sun.
His might have been a cherubs mouth, had not the full, sensuous lips a trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth. At times, so tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic. They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover. They could taste the sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the sweetness aside and command life. The chin and jaw, strong and just hinting of square aggressiveness, helped the lips to command life. Strength balanced sensuousness and had upon it a tonic effect, compelling him to love beauty that was healthy and making him vibrate to sensations that were wholesome. And between the lips were teeth that had never known nor needed the dentists care. They were white and strong and regular, he decided, as he looked at them. But as he looked, he began to be troubled. Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and vaguely remembered, was the impression that there were people who washed their teeth every day. They were the people from up above people in her class. She must wash her teeth every day, too. What would she think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all the days of his life? He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form the habit. He would begin at once, to-morrow. It was not by mere achievement that he could hope to win to her. He must make a personal reform in all things, even to tooth-washing and neck-gear, though a starched collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom.