owners, the two masters a captain must serve, either of which could
and would break him and whose interests were diametrically opposed.
He cast his eyes about the room and closed the lids down on a
vision of ten thousand books. No; no more of the sea for him.
There was power in all that wealth of books, and if he would do
great things, he must do them on the land. Besides, captains were
not allowed to take their wives to sea with them.
Noon came, and afternoon. He forgot to eat, and sought on for the
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books on etiquette; for, in addition to career, his mind was vexed
by a simple and very concrete problem: WHEN YOU MEET A YOUNG LADY
AND SHE ASKS YOU TO CALL, HOW SOON CAN YOU CALL? was the way he
worded it to himself. But when he found the right shelf, he sought
vainly for the answer. He was appalled at the vast edifice of
etiquette, and lost himself in the mazes of visiting-card conduct
between persons in polite society. He abandoned his search. He
had not found what he wanted, though he had found that it would
take all of a man’s time to be polite, and that he would have to
live a preliminary life in which to learn how to be polite.
“Did you find what you wanted?” the man at the desk asked him as he
was leaving.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “You have a fine library here.”
The man nodded. “We should be glad to see you here often. Are you
a sailor?”
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “And I’ll come again.”
Now, how did he know that? he asked himself as he went down the
stairs.
And for the first block along the street he walked very stiff and
straight and awkwardly, until he forgot himself in his thoughts,
whereupon his rolling gait gracefully returned to him.
CHAPTER VI
A terrible restlessness that was akin to hunger afflicted Martin
Eden. He was famished for a sight of the girl whose slender hands
had gripped his life with a giant’s grasp. He could not steel
himself to call upon her. He was afraid that he might call too
soon, and so be guilty of an awful breach of that awful thing
called etiquette. He spent long hours in the Oakland and Berkeley
libraries, and made out application blanks for membership for
himself, his sisters Gertrude and Marian, and Jim, the latter’s
consent being obtained at the expense of several glasses of beer.
With four cards permitting him to draw books, he burned the gas
late in the servant’s room, and was charged fifty cents a week for
it by Mr. Higginbotham.
The many books he read but served to whet his unrest. Every page
of every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His
hunger fed upon what he read, and increased. Also, he did not know
where to begin, and continually suffered from lack of preparation.
The commonest references, that he could see plainly every reader
was expected to know, he did not know. And the same was true of
the poetry he read which maddened him with delight. He read more
of Swinburne than was contained in the volume Ruth had lent him;
and “Dolores” he understood thoroughly. But surely Ruth did not
understand it, he concluded. How could she, living the refined
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life she did? Then he chanced upon Kipling’s poems, and was swept
away by the lilt and swing and glamour with which familiar things
had been invested. He was amazed at the man’s sympathy with life
and at his incisive psychology. PSYCHOLOGY was a new word in
Martin’s vocabulary. He had bought a dictionary, which deed had
decreased his supply of money and brought nearer the day on which
he must sail in search of more. Also, it incensed Mr.
Higginbotham, who would have preferred the money taking the form of
board.
He dared not go near Ruth’s neighborhood in the daytime, but night
found him lurking like a thief around the Morse home, stealing
glimpses at the windows and loving the very walls that sheltered
her. Several times he barely escaped being caught by her brothers,
and once he trailed Mr. Morse down town and studied his face in the
lighted streets, longing all the while for some quick danger of
death to threaten so that he might spring in and save her father.
On another night, his vigil was rewarded by a glimpse of Ruth
through a second-story window. He saw only her head and shoulders,
and her arms raised as she fixed her hair before a mirror. It was
only for a moment, but it was a long moment to him, during which
his blood turned to wine and sang through his veins. Then she
pulled down the shade. But it was her room – he had learned that;
and thereafter he strayed there often, hiding under a dark tree on
the opposite side of the street and smoking countless cigarettes.
One afternoon he saw her mother coming out of a bank, and received
another proof of the enormous distance that separated Ruth from
him. She was of the class that dealt with banks. He had never
been inside a bank in his life, and he had an idea that such
institutions were frequented only by the very rich and the very
powerful.
In one way, he had undergone a moral revolution. Her cleanness and
purity had reacted upon him, and he felt in his being a crying need
to be clean. He must be that if he were ever to be worthy of
breathing the same air with her. He washed his teeth, and scrubbed
his hands with a kitchen scrub-brush till he saw a nail-brush in a
drug-store window and divined its use. While purchasing it, the
clerk glanced at his nails, suggested a nail-file, and so he became
possessed of an additional toilet-tool. He ran across a book in
the library on the care of the body, and promptly developed a
penchant for a cold-water bath every morning, much to the amazement
of Jim, and to the bewilderment of Mr. Higginbotham, who was not in
sympathy with such high-fangled notions and who seriously debated
whether or not he should charge Martin extra for the water.
Another stride was in the direction of creased trousers. Now that
Martin was aroused in such matters, he swiftly noted the difference
between the baggy knees of the trousers worn by the working class
and the straight line from knee to foot of those worn by the men
above the working class. Also, he learned the reason why, and
invaded his sister’s kitchen in search of irons and ironing-board.
He had misadventures at first, hopelessly burning one pair and
buying another, which expenditure again brought nearer the day on
which he must put to sea.
But the reform went deeper than mere outward appearance. He still
smoked, but he drank no more. Up to that time, drinking had seemed
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to him the proper thing for men to do, and he had prided himself on
his strong head which enabled him to drink most men under the
table. Whenever he encountered a chance shipmate, and there were
many in San Francisco, he treated them and was treated in turn, as
of old, but he ordered for himself root beer or ginger ale and
good-naturedly endured their chaffing. And as they waxed maudlin
he studied them, watching the beast rise and master them and
thanking God that he was no longer as they. They had their
limitations to forget, and when they were drunk, their dim, stupid
spirits were even as gods, and each ruled in his heaven of
intoxicated desire. With Martin the need for strong drink had
vanished. He was drunken in new and more profound ways – with
Ruth, who had fired him with love and with a glimpse of higher and
eternal life; with books, that had set a myriad maggots of desire
gnawing in his brain; and with the sense of personal cleanliness he
was achieving, that gave him even more superb health than what he
had enjoyed and that made his whole body sing with physical well-
being.
One night he went to the theatre, on the blind chance that he might
see her there, and from the second balcony he did see her. He saw
her come down the aisle, with Arthur and a strange young man with a
football mop of hair and eyeglasses, the sight of whom spurred him
to instant apprehension and jealousy. He saw her take her seat in
the orchestra circle, and little else than her did he see that
night – a pair of slender white shoulders and a mass of pale gold
hair, dim with distance. But there were others who saw, and now
and again, glancing at those about him, he noted two young girls