forehead with a red, steamy hand; “but it makes me sad. I want to
cry. There is too many sad things in the world anyway. It makes
me happy to think about happy things. Now if he’d married her, and
– You don’t mind, Mart?” she queried apprehensively. “I just
happen to feel that way, because I’m tired, I guess. But the story
was grand just the same, perfectly grand. Where are you goin’ to
sell it?”
“That’s a horse of another color,” he laughed.
“But if you DID sell it, what do you think you’d get for it?”
“Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the way prices
go.”
“My! I do hope you’ll sell it!”
“Easy money, eh?” Then he added proudly: “I wrote it in two days.
That’s fifty dollars a day.”
He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare. He would
wait till some were published, he decided, then she would
understand what he had been working for. In the meantime he toiled
on. Never had the spirit of adventure lured him more strongly than
on this amazing exploration of the realm of mind. He bought the
text-books on physics and chemistry, and, along with his algebra,
worked out problems and demonstrations. He took the laboratory
proofs on faith, and his intense power of vision enabled him to see
the reactions of chemicals more understandingly than the average
student saw them in the laboratory. Martin wandered on through the
heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he was getting to the nature
of things. He had accepted the world as the world, but now he was
comprehending the organization of it, the play and interplay of
force and matter. Spontaneous explanations of old matters were
continually arising in his mind. Levers and purchases fascinated
him, and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks and
tackles at sea. The theory of navigation, which enabled the ships
to travel unerringly their courses over the pathless ocean, was
made clear to him. The mysteries of storm, and rain, and tide were
revealed, and the reason for the existence of trade-winds made him
wonder whether he had written his article on the northeast trade
too soon. At any rate he knew he could write it better now. One
afternoon he went out with Arthur to the University of California,
and, with bated breath and a feeling of religious awe, went through
the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics
professor lecturing to his classes.
But he did not neglect his writing. A stream of short stories
flowed from his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of
verse – the kind he saw printed in the magazines – though he lost
his head and wasted two weeks on a tragedy in blank verse, the
swift rejection of which, by half a dozen magazines, dumfounded
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him. Then he discovered Henley and wrote a series of sea-poems on
the model of “Hospital Sketches.” They were simple poems, of light
and color, and romance and adventure. “Sea Lyrics,” he called
them, and he judged them to be the best work he had yet done.
There were thirty, and he completed them in a month, doing one a
day after having done his regular day’s work on fiction, which
day’s work was the equivalent to a week’s work of the average
successful writer. The toil meant nothing to him. It was not
toil. He was finding speech, and all the beauty and wonder that
had been pent for years behind his inarticulate lips was now
pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.
He showed the “Sea Lyrics” to no one, not even to the editors. He
had become distrustful of editors. But it was not distrust that
prevented him from submitting the “Lyrics.” They were so beautiful
to him that he was impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some
glorious, far-off time when he would dare to read to her what he
had written. Against that time he kept them with him, reading them
aloud, going over them until he knew them by heart.
He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his
sleep, his subjective mind rioting through his five hours of
surcease and combining the thoughts and events of the day into
grotesque and impossible marvels. In reality, he never rested, and
a weaker body or a less firmly poised brain would have been
prostrated in a general break-down. His late afternoon calls on
Ruth were rarer now, for June was approaching, when she would take
her degree and finish with the university. Bachelor of Arts! –
when he thought of her degree, it seemed she fled beyond him faster
than he could pursue.
One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually
stayed for dinner and for music afterward. Those were his red-
letter days. The atmosphere of the house, in such contrast with
that in which he lived, and the mere nearness to her, sent him
forth each time with a firmer grip on his resolve to climb the
heights. In spite of the beauty in him, and the aching desire to
create, it was for her that he struggled. He was a lover first and
always. All other things he subordinated to love.
Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his love-
adventure. The world itself was not so amazing because of the
atoms and molecules that composed it according to the propulsions
of irresistible force; what made it amazing was the fact that Ruth
lived in it. She was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or
dreamed, or guessed.
But he was oppressed always by her remoteness. She was so far from
him, and he did not know how to approach her. He had been a
success with girls and women in his own class; but he had never
loved any of them, while he did love her, and besides, she was not
merely of another class. His very love elevated her above all
classes. She was a being apart, so far apart that he did not know
how to draw near to her as a lover should draw near. It was true,
as he acquired knowledge and language, that he was drawing nearer,
talking her speech, discovering ideas and delights in common; but
this did not satisfy his lover’s yearning. His lover’s imagination
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65
had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any kinship
with him in the flesh. It was his own love that thrust her from
him and made her seem impossible for him. Love itself denied him
the one thing that it desired.
And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was
bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it
was ever narrower. They had been eating cherries – great,
luscious, black cherries with a juice of the color of dark wine.
And later, as she read aloud to him from “The Princess,” he chanced
to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips. For the moment
her divinity was shattered. She was clay, after all, mere clay,
subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or
anybody’s clay. Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed
them as cherries dyed his. And if so with her lips, then was it so
with all of her. She was woman, all woman, just like any woman.
It came upon him abruptly. It was a revelation that stunned him.
It was as if he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen
worshipped purity polluted.
Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began
pounding and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who
was not a spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a
cherry could stain. He trembled at the audacity of his thought;
but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean,
assured him he was right. Something of this change in him must
have reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at
him, and smiled. His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to her lips,
and the sight of the stain maddened him. His arms all but flashed
out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless life.
She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will fought to
hold him back.
“You were not following a word,” she pouted.
Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he
looked into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of
what he felt, he became abashed. He had indeed in thought dared
too far. Of all the women he had known there was no woman who
would not have guessed – save her. And she had not guessed. There