it showed signs of recent travel. At one place it ran along the
crest of a ridge that was no more than a knife-edge. The trail
wasn’t three feet wide on the crest, and on either side the ridge
fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep. One man, with
plenty of ammunition, could have held it against a hundred
thousand.
“It was the only way in to the hiding-place. Three hours after I
found the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket
in the midst of lava peaks. The whole place was terraced for taro-
patches, fruit trees grew there, and there were eight or ten grass
huts. But as soon as I saw the inhabitants I knew what I’d struck.
One sight of them was enough.”
“What did you do?” Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening, like any
Desdemona, appalled and fascinated.
“Nothing for me to do. Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty
far gone, but he ruled like a king. He had discovered the little
valley and founded the settlement – all of which was against the
law. But he had guns, plenty of ammunition, and those Kanakas,
trained to the shooting of wild cattle and wild pig, were dead
shots. No, there wasn’t any running away for Martin Eden. He
stayed – for three months.”
“But how did you escape?”
“I’d have been there yet, if it hadn’t been for a girl there, a
half-Chinese, quarter-white, and quarter-Hawaiian. She was a
beauty, poor thing, and well educated. Her mother, in Honolulu,
was worth a million or so. Well, this girl got me away at last.
Her mother financed the settlement, you see, so the girl wasn’t
afraid of being punished for letting me go. But she made me swear,
first, never to reveal the hiding-place; and I never have. This is
the first time I have even mentioned it. The girl had just the
first signs of leprosy. The fingers of her right hand were
slightly twisted, and there was a small spot on her arm. That was
all. I guess she is dead, now.”
Martin Eden
150
“But weren’t you frightened? And weren’t you glad to get away
without catching that dreadful disease?”
“Well,” he confessed, “I was a bit shivery at first; but I got used
to it. I used to feel sorry for that poor girl, though. That made
me forget to be afraid. She was such a beauty, in spirit as well
as in appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was
doomed to lie there, living the life of a primitive savage and
rotting slowly away. Leprosy is far more terrible than you can
imagine it.”
“Poor thing,” Ruth murmured softly. “It’s a wonder she let you get
away.”
“How do you mean?” Martin asked unwittingly.
”
Because she must have loved you,” Ruth said, still softly.
“Candidly, now, didn’t she?”
Martin’s sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and
by the indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness
had made his face even pale; and across this pallor flowed the slow
wave of a blush. He was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut
him off.
“Never mind, don’t answer; it’s not necessary,” she laughed.
But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter,
and that the light in her eyes was cold. On the spur of the moment
it reminded him of a gale he had once experienced in the North
Pacific. And for the moment the apparition of the gale rose before
his eyes – a gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon,
the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight. Next, he saw the
girl in the leper refuge and remembered it was for love of him that
she had let him go.
“She was noble,” he said simply. “She gave me life.”
That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob in
her throat, and noticed that she turned her face away to gaze out
of the window. When she turned it back to him, it was composed,
and there was no hint of the gale in her eyes.
“I’m such a silly,” she said plaintively. “But I can’t help it. I
do so love you, Martin, I do, I do. I shall grow more catholic in
time, but at present I can’t help being jealous of those ghosts of
the past, and you know your past is full of ghosts.”
“It must be,” she silenced his protest. “It could not be
otherwise. And there’s poor Arthur motioning me to come. He’s
tired waiting. And now good-by, dear.”
“There’s some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that
helps men to stop the use of tobacco,” she called back from the
door, “and I am going to send you some.”
Martin Eden
151
The door closed, but opened again.
“I do, I do,” she whispered to him; and this time she was really
gone.
Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the less were keen to note
the texture of Ruth’s garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown
that produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to the
carriage. The crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the
carriage disappeared from view, then transferred their stare to
Maria, who had abruptly become the most important person on the
street. But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria’s
reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had been for her
lodger. After that Maria dropped back into her old obscurity and
Martin began to notice the respectful manner in which he was
regarded by the small fry of the neighborhood. As for Maria,
Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per cent, and had the
Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would
have allowed Martin an additional three-dollars-and-eighty-five-
cents’ worth of credit.
CHAPTER XXVII
The sun of Martin’s good fortune rose. The day after Ruth’s visit,
he received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal
weekly in payment for three of his triolets. Two days later a
newspaper published in Chicago accepted his “Treasure Hunters,”
promising to pay ten dollars for it on publication. The price was
small, but it was the first article he had written, his very first
attempt to express his thought on the printed page. To cap
everything, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, was
accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile monthly calling
itself YOUTH AND AGE. It was true the serial was twenty-one
thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on
publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand
words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had
attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its
clumsy worthlessness.
But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness
of mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too
great strength – the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he
crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes
with a war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early
efforts for songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not
taken him long to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith
to was his later work. He had striven to be something more than a
mere writer of magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself
with the tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not
sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his
strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he departed from
his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had
endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination.
Martin Eden
152
What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human
aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all
its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.
He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of
fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin;
the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams
and divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred,
in Martin’s estimation, and erred through too great singleness of
sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the
truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it
challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his
story, “Adventure,” which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin
believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was
in an essay, “God and Clod,” that he had expressed his views on the
whole general subject.
But “Adventure,” and all that he deemed his best work, still went
begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in