Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-
“I don’t know. I guess it’s all a matter of personal taste, but
she doesn’t strike me as being particularly pretty.”
“Why, there isn’t one woman in ten thousand with features as
regular as hers. They are splendid. Her face is as clear-cut as a
cameo. And her eyes are beautiful.”
“Do you think so?” Martin queried absently, for to him there was
only one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her
hand upon his arm.
“Do I think so? If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr.
Eden, and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be
fairly dazzled by her, and so would all men.”
“She would have to be taught how to speak,” he commented, “or else
most of the men wouldn’t understand her. I’m sure you couldn’t
understand a quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally.”
“Nonsense! You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your
point.”
”
You forget how I talked when you first met me. I have learned a
new language since then. Before that time I talked as that girl
talks. Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in
your language to explain that you do not know that other girl’s
language. And do you know why she carries herself the way she
does? I think about such things now, though I never used to think
about them, and I am beginning to understand – much.”
“But why does she?”
“She has worked long hours for years at machines. When one’s body
is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like
putty according to the nature of the work. I can tell at a glance
the trades of many workingmen I meet on the street. Look at me.
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69
Why am I rolling all about the shop? Because of the years I put in
on the sea. If I’d put in the same years cow-punching, with my
body young and pliable, I wouldn’t be rolling now, but I’d be bow-
legged. And so with that girl. You noticed that her eyes were
what I might call hard. She has never been sheltered. She has had
to take care of herself, and a young girl can’t take care of
herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like – like yours, for
example.”
“I think you are right,” Ruth said in a low voice. “And it is too
bad. She is such a pretty girl.”
He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity. And then he
remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his
fortune that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm
to a lecture.
Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-
glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at
himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do
you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
vulgar, and unbeautiful. You belong with the oxen and the drudges,
in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches. There are the
stale vegetables now. Those potatoes are rotting. Smell them,
damn you, smell them. And yet you dare to open the books, to
listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to
speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million
miles beyond you and who lives in the stars! Who are you? and what
are you? damn you! And are you going to make good?
He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge
of the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes. Then he got out
note-book and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations,
while the hours slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of
dawn flooded against his window.
CHAPTER XIII
It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers
that held forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was
responsible for the great discovery. Once or twice in the month,
while riding through the park on his way to the library, Martin
dismounted from his wheel and listened to the arguments, and each
time he tore himself away reluctantly. The tone of discussion was
much lower than at Mr. Morse’s table. The men were not grave and
dignified. They lost their tempers easily and called one another
names, while oaths and obscene allusions were frequent on their
lips. Once or twice he had seen them come to blows. And yet, he
knew not why, there seemed something vital about the stuff of these
men’s thoughts. Their logomachy was far more stimulating to his
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70
intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse.
These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and
fought one another’s ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to
be more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.
Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park,
but one afternoon a disciple of Spencer’s appeared, a seedy tramp
with a dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the
absence of a shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of
many cigarettes and the expectoration of much tobacco-juice,
wherein the tramp successfully held his own, even when a socialist
workman sneered, “There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert
Spencer is his prophet.” Martin was puzzled as to what the
discussion was about, but when he rode on to the library he carried
with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and because of the
frequency with which the tramp had mentioned “First Principles,”
Martin drew out that volume.
So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried Spencer,
and choosing the “Principles of Psychology” to begin with, he had
failed as abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There
had been no understanding the book, and he had returned it unread.
But this night, after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a
sonnet, he got into bed and opened “First Principles.” Morning
found him still reading. It was impossible for him to sleep. Nor
did he write that day. He lay on the bed till his body grew tired,
when he tried the hard floor, reading on his back, the book held in
the air above him, or changing from side to side. He slept that
night, and did his writing next morning, and then the book tempted
him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to everything and
oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth gave to him.
His first consciousness of the immediate world about him was when
Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know if
he thought they were running a restaurant.
Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. He wanted
to know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over
the world. But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had
known, and that he never could have known had he continued his
sailing and wandering forever. He had merely skimmed over the
surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating
fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations – and
all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly
world of whim and chance. The mechanism of the flight of birds he
had watched and reasoned about with understanding; but it had never
entered his head to try to explain the process whereby birds, as
organic flying mechanisms, had been developed. He had never
dreamed there was such a process. That birds should have come to
be, was unguessed. They always had been. They just happened.
And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything. His
ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless.
The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing,
and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own
intellectual powers. In similar manner his attempt to study
evolution had been confined to a hopelessly technical volume by
Romanes. He had understood nothing, and the only idea he had
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71
gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust theory, of a lot of
little men possessed of huge and unintelligible vocabularies. And
now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but an accepted
process of development; that scientists no longer disagreed about
it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.
And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him,
reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and