by the persons who are doing something in the world. To listen to
conversation about such things would mean to be bored, wherefore
the idlers decree that such things are shop and must not be talked
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about. Likewise they decree the things that are not shop and which
may be talked about, and those things are the latest operas, latest
novels, cards, billiards, cocktails, automobiles, horse shows,
trout fishing, tuna-fishing, big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and
so forth – and mark you, these are the things the idlers know. In
all truth, they constitute the shop-talk of the idlers. And the
funniest part of it is that many of the clever people, and all the
would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to impose upon them.
As for me, I want the best a man’s got in him, call it shop
vulgarity or anything you please.”
A
nd Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on the established
had seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.
So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness,
challenging him to speak his mind. As Ruth paused beside them she
heard Martin saying:-
“You surely don’t pronounce such heresies in the University of
California?”
Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. “The honest taxpayer
and the politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our
appropriations and therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the
Board of Regents, and to the party press, or to the press of both
parties.”
“Yes, that’s clear; but how about you?” Martin urged. “You must be
a fish out of the water.”
“Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Sometimes I am
fairly sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris,
in Grub Street, in a hermit’s cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian
crowd, drinking claret, – dago-red they call it in San Francisco, –
dining in cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing
vociferously radical views upon all creation. Really, I am
frequently almost sure that I was cut out to be a radical. But
then, there are so many questions on which I am not sure. I grow
timid when I am face to face with my human frailty, which ever
prevents me from grasping all the factors in any problem – human,
vital problems, you know.”
And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had
come the “Song of the Trade Wind”:-
“I am strongest at noon,
But under the moon
I stiffen the bunt of the sail.”
He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the
other reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade,
steady, and cool, and strong. He was equable, he was to be relied
upon, and withal there was a certain bafflement about him. Martin
had the feeling that he never spoke his full mind, just as he had
often had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest
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but always held reserves of strength that were never used.
Martin’s trick of visioning was active as ever. His brain was a
most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its
contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection.
Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind immediately
presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily
expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic,
and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living
present. Just as Ruth’s face, in a momentary jealousy had called
before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor
Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white
billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not
disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new memory-
visions rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were
thrown upon the screen of his consciousness. These visions came
out of the actions and sensations of the past, out of things and
events and books of yesterday and last week – a countless host of
apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever thronged his mind.
So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell’s easy flow of
speech – the conversation of a clever, cultured man – that Martin
kept seeing himself down all his past. He saw himself when he had
been quite the hoodlum, wearing a “stiff-rim” Stetson hat and a
square-cut, double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the
shoulders and possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police
permitted. He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to
palliate it. At one time in his life he had been just a common
hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the police and
terrorized honest, working-class householders. But his ideals had
changed. He glanced about him at the well-bred, well-dressed men
and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere of culture
and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his early
youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness,
stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he
saw merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual
university professor.
For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place. He
had fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and
everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by
his willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command
respect. But he had never taken root. He had fitted in
sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He
had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always
the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on through life
seeking it until he found books and art and love. And here he was,
in the midst of all this, the only one of all the comrades he had
adventured with who could have made themselves eligible for the
inside of the Morse home.
But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following
Professor Caldwell closely. And as he followed, comprehendingly
and critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other’s
knowledge. As for himself, from moment to moment the conversation
showed him gaps and open stretches, whole subjects with which he
was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that
he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a
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matter only of time, when he would fill in the outline. Then watch
out, he thought – ‘ware shoal, everybody! He felt like sitting at
the feet of the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but, as he
listened, he began to discern a weakness in the other’s judgments –
a weakness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught it
had it not been ever present. And when he did catch it, he leapt
to equality at once.
Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.
“I’ll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your
judgments,” he said. “You lack biology. It has no place in your
scheme of things. – Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology,
from the ground up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the
vitalized inorganic right on up to the widest aesthetic and
sociological generalizations.”
Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses under Professor
Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all
knowledge.
“I scarcely follow you,” he said dubiously.
Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.
“Then I’ll try to explain,” he said. “I remember reading in
Egyptian history something to the effect that understanding could
not be had of Egyptian art without first studying the land
question.”
“Quite right,” the professor nodded.
“And it seems to me,” Martin continued, “that knowledge of the land
question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had
without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of
life. How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and
customs, without understanding, not merely the nature of the
creatures that made them, but the nature of the stuff out of which
the creatures are made? Is literature less human than the
architecture and sculpture of Egypt? Is there one thing in the
known universe that is not subject to the law of evolution? – Oh, I
know there is an elaborate evolution of the various arts laid down,
but it seems to me to be too mechanical. The human himself is left
out. The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music and song and
dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the evolution
of the human himself, the development of the basic and intrinsic
parts that were in him before he made his first tool or gibbered
his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and which I