them to him.
He wrote again and again, begging, entreating, threatening, but his
letters were ignored. Month by month the slaughter went on till
the thirty poems were published, and month by month he received a
check for those which had appeared in the current number.
Despite these various misadventures, the memory of the WHITE MOUSE
forty-dollar check sustained him, though he was driven more and
more to hack-work. He discovered a bread-and-butter field in the
agricultural weeklies and trade journals, though among the
religious weeklies he found he could easily starve. At his lowest
ebb, when his black suit was in pawn, he made a ten-strike – or so
it seemed to him – in a prize contest arranged by the County
Committee of the Republican Party. There were three branches of
the contest, and he entered them all, laughing at himself bitterly
the while in that he was driven to such straits to live. His poem
won the first prize of ten dollars, his campaign song the second
prize of five dollars, his essay on the principles of the
Republican Party the first prize of twenty-five dollars. Which was
very gratifying to him until he tried to collect. Something had
gone wrong in the County Committee, and, though a rich banker and a
state senator were members of it, the money was not forthcoming.
While this affair was hanging fire, he proved that he understood
the principles of the Democratic Party by winning the first prize
for his essay in a similar contest. And, moreover, he received the
money, twenty-five dollars. But the forty dollars won in the first
contest he never received.
Driven to shifts in order to see Ruth, and deciding that the long
walk from north Oakland to her house and back again consumed too
much time, he kept his black suit in pawn in place of his bicycle.
The latter gave him exercise, saved him hours of time for work, and
enabled him to see Ruth just the same. A pair of knee duck
trousers and an old sweater made him a presentable wheel costume,
so that he could go with Ruth on afternoon rides. Besides, he no
longer had opportunity to see much of her in her own home, where
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Mrs. Morse was thoroughly prosecuting her campaign of
entertainment. The exalted beings he met there, and to whom he had
looked up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no
longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard
times, disappointments, and close application to work, and the
conversation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly
egotistic. He measured the narrowness of their minds by the minds
of the thinkers in the books he read. At Ruth’s home he never met
a large mind, with the exception of Professor Caldwell, and
Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the rest, they were
numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. It was
their ignorance that astounded him. What was the matter with them?
What had they done with their educations? They had had access to
the same books he had. How did it happen that they had drawn
nothing from them?
He knew that the great minds, the deep and rational thinkers,
existed. He had his proofs from the books, the books that had
educated him beyond the Morse standard. And he knew that higher
intellects than those of the Morse circle were to be found in the
world. He read English society novels, wherein he caught glimpses
of men and women talking politics and philosophy. And he read of
salons in great cities, even in the United States, where art and
intellect congregated. Foolishly, in the past, he had conceived
that all well-groomed persons above the working class were persons
with power of intellect and vigor of beauty. Culture and collars
had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing
that college educations and mastery were the same things.
Well, he would fight his way on and up higher. And he would take
Ruth with him. Her he dearly loved, and he was confident that she
would shine anywhere. As it was clear to him that he had been
handicapped by his early environment, so now he perceived that she
was similarly handicapped. She had not had a chance to expand.
The books on her father’s shelves, the paintings on the walls, the
music on the piano – all was just so much meretricious display. To
real literature, real painting, real music, the Morses and their
kind, were dead. And bigger than such things was life, of which
they were densely, hopelessly ignorant. In spite of their
Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative
broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative
science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their
thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe
struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the
youngest race, as old as the cave-man, and older – the same that
moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved
the first hasty Hebrew savage to incarnate Eve from Adam’s rib;
that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe
out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the
famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so
scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a
notorious scrawl on the page of history.
So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him
that the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men,
and bank cashiers he had met and the members of the working class
he had known was on a par with the difference in the food they ate,
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168
clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly,
in all of them was lacking the something more which he found in
himself and in the books. The Morses had shown him the best their
social position could produce, and he was not impressed by it. A
pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the
superior of those he met at the Morses’; and, when his one decent
suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of
life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would
suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.
“You hate and fear the socialists,” he remarked to Mr. Morse, one
evening at dinner; “but why? You know neither them nor their
doctrines.”
The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse,
who had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood. The
cashier was Martin’s black beast, and his temper was a trifle short
where the talker of platitudes was concerned.
“Yes,” he had said, “Charley Hapgood is what they call a rising
young man – somebody told me as much. And it is true. He’ll make
the Governor’s Chair before he dies, and, who knows? maybe the
United States Senate.”
“What makes you think so?” Mrs. Morse had inquired.
“I’ve heard him make a campaign speech. It was so cleverly stupid
and unoriginal, and also so convincing, that the leaders cannot
help but regard him as safe and sure, while his platitudes are so
much like the platitudes of the average voter that – oh, well, you
know you flatter any man by dressing up his own thoughts for him
and presenting them to him.”
“I actually think you are jealous of Mr. Hapgood,” Ruth had chimed
in.
“Heaven forbid!”
The look of horror on Martin’s face stirred Mrs. Morse to
belligerence.
“You surely don’t mean to say that Mr. Hapgood is stupid?” she
demanded icily.
“No more than the average Republican,” was the retort, “or average
Democrat, either. They are all stupid when they are not crafty,
and very few of them are crafty. The only wise Republicans are the
millionnaires and their conscious henchmen. They know which side
their bread is buttered on, and they know why.”
“I am a Republican,” Mr. Morse put in lightly. “Pray, how do you
classify me?”
“Oh, you are an unconscious henchman.”
“Henchman?”
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“Why, yes. You do corporation work. You have no working-class nor
criminal practice. You don’t depend upon wife-beaters and
pickpockets for your income. You get your livelihood from the
masters of society, and whoever feeds a man is that man’s master.
Yes, you are a henchman. You are interested in advancing the
interests of the aggregations of capital you serve.”
Mr. Morse’s face was a trifle red.
“I confess, sir,” he said, “that you talk like a scoundrelly
socialist.”
Then it was that Martin made his remark:
“You hate and fear the socialists; but why? You know neither them
nor their doctrines.”
“Your doctrine certainly sounds like socialism,” Mr. Morse replied,
while Ruth gazed anxiously from one to the other, and Mrs. Morse
beamed happily at the opportunity afforded of rousing her liege