beauty that was a fire in him. That article would be a different
thing when he was done with it. He was appalled by the vastness of
the beauty that rightfully belonged in it, and again his mind
flashed and dared, and he demanded of himself why he could not
chant that beauty in noble verse as the great poets did. And there
was all the mysterious delight and spiritual wonder of his love for
Ruth. Why could he not chant that, too, as the poets did? They
had sung of love. So would he. By God! –
And in his frightened ears he heard his exclamation echoing.
Carried away, he had breathed it aloud. The blood surged into his
face, wave upon wave, mastering the bronze of it till the blush of
shame flaunted itself from collar-rim to the roots of his hair.
“I – I – beg your pardon,” he stammered. “I was thinking.”
“It sounded as if you were praying,” she said bravely, but she felt
herself inside to be withering and shrinking. It was the first
time she had heard an oath from the lips of a man she knew, and she
was shocked, not merely as a matter of principle and training, but
shocked in spirit by this rough blast of life in the garden of her
sheltered maidenhood.
But she forgave, and with surprise at the ease of her forgiveness.
Somehow it was not so difficult to forgive him anything. He had
not had a chance to be as other men, and he was trying so hard, and
succeeding, too. It never entered her head that there could be any
other reason for her being kindly disposed toward him. She was
tenderly disposed toward him, but she did not know it. She had no
way of knowing it. The placid poise of twenty-four years without a
single love affair did not fit her with a keen perception of her
own feelings, and she who had never warmed to actual love was
unaware that she was warming now.
CHAPTER XI
Martin Eden
61
Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been
finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by
his attempts to write poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired
by Ruth, but they were never completed. Not in a day could he
learn to chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure were
serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them,
an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great
poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own. It
was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought
after but could not capture. It seemed a glow to him, a warm and
trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching, though sometimes he was
rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving them into phrases
that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted across his
vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty. It was baffling. He
ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as
everybody gibbered. He read his fragments aloud. The metre
marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and
equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he
felt within were lacking. He could not understand, and time and
again, in despair, defeated and depressed, he returned to his
article. Prose was certainly an easier medium.
Following the “Pearl-diving,” he wrote an article on the sea as a
career, another on turtle-catching, and a third on the northeast
trades. Then he tried, as an experiment, a short story, and before
he broke his stride he had finished six short stories and
despatched them to various magazines. He wrote prolifically,
intensely, from morning till night, and late at night, except when
he broke off to go to the reading-room, draw books from the
library, or to call on Ruth. He was profoundly happy. Life was
pitched high. He was in a fever that never broke. The joy of
creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his. All the
life about him – the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the
slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr.
Higginbotham – was a dream. The real world was in his mind, and
the stories he wrote were so many pieces of reality out of his
mind.
The days were too short. There was so much he wanted to study. He
cut his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along
upon it. He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back
to five. He could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon
any one of his pursuits. It was with regret that he ceased from
writing to study, that he ceased from study to go to the library,
that he tore himself away from that chart-room of knowledge or from
the magazines in the reading-room that were filled with the secrets
of writers who succeeded in selling their wares. It was like
severing heart strings, when he was with Ruth, to stand up and go;
and he scorched through the dark streets so as to get home to his
books at the least possible expense of time. And hardest of all
was it to shut up the algebra or physics, put note-book and pencil
aside, and close his tired eyes in sleep. He hated the thought of
ceasing to live, even for so short a time, and his sole consolation
was that the alarm clock was set five hours ahead. He would lose
only five hours anyway, and then the jangling bell would jerk him
out of unconsciousness and he would have before him another
glorious day of nineteen hours.
Martin Eden
62
In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was ebbing low,
and there was no money coming in. A month after he had mailed it,
the adventure serial for boys was returned to him by THE YOUTH’S
COMPANION. The rejection slip was so tactfully worded that he felt
kindly toward the editor. But he did not feel so kindly toward the
editor of the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER. After waiting two whole
weeks, Martin had written to him. A week later he wrote again. At
the end of the month, he went over to San Francisco and personally
called upon the editor. But he did not meet that exalted
personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of tender years
and red hair, who guarded the portals. At the end of the fifth
week the manuscript came back to him, by mail, without comment.
There was no rejection slip, no explanation, nothing. In the same
way his other articles were tied up with the other leading San
Francisco papers. When he recovered them, he sent them to the
magazines in the East, from which they were returned more promptly,
accompanied always by the printed rejection slips.
The short stories were returned in similar fashion. He read them
over and over, and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out
the cause of their rejection, until, one day, he read in a
newspaper that manuscripts should always be typewritten. That
explained it. Of course editors were so busy that they could not
afford the time and strain of reading handwriting. Martin rented a
typewriter and spent a day mastering the machine. Each day he
typed what he composed, and he typed his earlier manuscripts as
fast as they were returned him. He was surprised when the typed
ones began to come back. His jaw seemed to become squarer, his
chin more aggressive, and he bundled the manuscripts off to new
editors.
The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own
work. He tried it out on Gertrude. He read his stories aloud to
her. Her eyes glistened, and she looked at him proudly as she
said:-
“Ain’t it grand, you writin’ those sort of things.”
“Yes, yes,” he demanded impatiently. “But the story – how did you
like it?”
“Just grand,” was the reply. “Just grand, an’ thrilling, too. I
was all worked up.”
He could see that her mind was not clear. The perplexity was
strong in her good-natured face. So he waited.
“But, say, Mart,” after a long pause, “how did it end? Did that
young man who spoke so highfalutin’ get her?”
And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made
artistically obvious, she would say:-
“That’s what I wanted to know. Why didn’t you write that way in
the story?”
Martin Eden
63
One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories,
namely, that she liked happy endings.
“That story was perfectly grand,” she announced, straightening up
from the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her