office a few minutes before his regular time. And yet he saved his
time. Every spare moment was devoted to study. He studied book-
keeping and type-writing, and he paid for lessons in shorthand by
dictating at night to a court reporter who needed practice. He
quickly became a clerk, and he made himself invaluable. Father
appreciated him and saw that he was bound to rise. It was on
father’s suggestion that he went to law college. He became a
lawyer, and hardly was he back in the office when father took him
in as junior partner. He is a great man. He refused the United
States Senate several times, and father says he could become a
justice of the Supreme Court any time a vacancy occurs, if he wants
to. Such a life is an inspiration to all of us. It shows us that
a man with will may rise superior to his environment.”
“He is a great man,” Martin said sincerely.
But it seemed to him there was something in the recital that jarred
upon his sense of beauty and life. He could not find an adequate
motive in Mr. Butler’s life of pinching and privation. Had he done
it for love of a woman, or for attainment of beauty, Martin would
have understood. God’s own mad lover should do anything for the
kiss, but not for thirty thousand dollars a year. He was
dissatisfied with Mr. Butler’s career. There was something paltry
about it, after all. Thirty thousand a year was all right, but
dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely
income of all its value.
Much of this he strove to express to Ruth, and shocked her and made
it clear that more remodelling was necessary. Hers was that common
insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their
color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human
creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than
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they. It was the same insularity of mind that made the ancient Jew
thank God he was not born a woman, and sent the modern missionary
god-substituting to the ends of the earth; and it made Ruth desire
to shape this man from other crannies of life into the likeness of
the men who lived in her particular cranny of life.
CHAPTER IX
Back from sea Martin Eden came, homing for California with a
lover’s desire. His store of money exhausted, he had shipped
before the mast on the treasure-hunting schooner; and the Solomon
Islands, after eight months of failure to find treasure, had
witnessed the breaking up of the expedition. The men had been paid
off in Australia, and Martin had immediately shipped on a deep-
water vessel for San Francisco. Not alone had those eight months
earned him enough money to stay on land for many weeks, but they
had enabled him to do a great deal of studying and reading.
His was the student’s mind, and behind his ability to learn was the
indomitability of his nature and his love for Ruth. The grammar he
had taken along he went through again and again until his unjaded
brain had mastered it. He noticed the bad grammar used by his
shipmates, and made a point of mentally correcting and
reconstructing their crudities of speech. To his great joy he
discovered that his ear was becoming sensitive and that he was
developing grammatical nerves. A double negative jarred him like a
discord, and often, from lack of practice, it was from his own lips
that the jar came. His tongue refused to learn new tricks in a
day.
After he had been through the grammar repeatedly, he took up the
dictionary and added twenty words a day to his vocabulary. He
found that this was no light task, and at wheel or lookout he
steadily went over and over his lengthening list of pronunciations
and definitions, while he invariably memorized himself to sleep.
“Never did anything,” “if I were,” and “those things,” were
phrases, with many variations, that he repeated under his breath in
order to accustom his tongue to the language spoken by Ruth. “And”
and “ing,” with the “d” and “g” pronounced emphatically, he went
over thousands of times; and to his surprise he noticed that he was
beginning to speak cleaner and more correct English than the
officers themselves and the gentleman-adventurers in the cabin who
had financed the expedition.
The captain was a fishy-eyed Norwegian who somehow had fallen into
possession of a complete Shakespeare, which he never read, and
Martin had washed his clothes for him and in return been permitted
access to the precious volumes. For a time, so steeped was he in
the plays and in the many favorite passages that impressed
themselves almost without effort on his brain, that all the world
seemed to shape itself into forms of Elizabethan tragedy or comedy
and his very thoughts were in blank verse. It trained his ear and
gave him a fine appreciation for noble English; withal it
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introduced into his mind much that was archaic and obsolete.
The eight months had been well spent, and, in addition to what he
had learned of right speaking and high thinking, he had learned
much of himself. Along with his humbleness because he knew so
little, there arose a conviction of power. He felt a sharp
gradation between himself and his shipmates, and was wise enough to
realize that the difference lay in potentiality rather than
achievement. What he could do, – they could do; but within him he
felt a confused ferment working that told him there was more in him
than he had done. He was tortured by the exquisite beauty of the
world, and wished that Ruth were there to share it with him. He
decided that he would describe to her many of the bits of South Sea
beauty. The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and
urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth.
And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea. He would
write. He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw,
one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through
which it felt. He would write – everything – poetry and prose,
fiction and description, and plays like Shakespeare. There was
career and the way to win to Ruth. The men of literature were the
world’s giants, and he conceived them to be far finer than the Mr.
Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and could be Supreme
Court justices if they wanted to.
Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return
voyage to San Francisco was like a dream. He was drunken with
unguessed power and felt that he could do anything. In the midst
of the great and lonely sea he gained perspective. Clearly, and
for the first lime, he saw Ruth and her world. It was all
visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which he could take up
in his two hands and turn around and about and examine. There was
much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as a
whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it.
To write! The thought was fire in him. He would begin as soon as
he got back. The first thing he would do would be to describe the
voyage of the treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San
Francisco newspaper. He would not tell Ruth anything about it, and
she would be surprised and pleased when she saw his name in print.
While he wrote, he could go on studying. There were twenty-four
hours in each day. He was invincible. He knew how to work, and
the citadels would go down before him. He would not have to go to
sea again – as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a vision of
a steam yacht. There were other writers who possessed steam
yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow
succeeding at first, and for a time he would be content to earn
enough money by his writing to enable him to go on studying. And
then, after some time, – a very indeterminate time, – when he had
learned and prepared himself, he would write the great things and
his name would be on all men’s lips. But greater than that,
infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have proved
himself worthy of Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for
Ruth that his splendid dream arose. He was not a fame-monger, but
merely one of God’s mad lovers.
Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up
his old room at Bernard Higginbotham’s and set to work. He did not
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