I must do; I must achieve the impossible.”
“But if you fail? You must consider me as well, Martin.”
“If I fail?” He regarded her for a moment as though the thought
she had uttered was unthinkable. Then intelligence illumined his
eyes. “If I fail, I shall become an editor, and you will be an
editor’s wife.”
She frowned at his facetiousness – a pretty, adorable frown that
made him put his arm around her and kiss it away.
“There, that’s enough,” she urged, by an effort of will withdrawing
herself from the fascination of his strength. “I have talked with
father and mother. I never before asserted myself so against them.
I demanded to be heard. I was very undutiful. They are against
you, you know; but I assured them over and over of my abiding love
for you, and at last father agreed that if you wanted to, you could
begin right away in his office. And then, of his own accord, he
said he would pay you enough at the start so that we could get
married and have a little cottage somewhere. Which I think was
very fine of him – don’t you?”
Martin, with the dull pain of despair at his heart, mechanically
reaching for the tobacco and paper (which he no longer carried) to
roll a cigarette, muttered something inarticulate, and Ruth went
on.
“Frankly, though, and don’t let it hurt you – I tell you, to show
you precisely how you stand with him – he doesn’t like your radical
views, and he thinks you are lazy. Of course I know you are not.
I know you work hard.”
How hard, even she did not know, was the thought in Martin’s mind.
“Well, then,” he said, “how about my views? Do you think they are
so radical?”
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He held her eyes and waited the answer.
“I think them, well, very disconcerting,” she replied.
The question was answered for him, and so oppressed was he by the
grayness of life that he forgot the tentative proposition she had
made for him to go to work. And she, having gone as far as she
dared, was willing to wait the answer till she should bring the
question up again.
She had not long to wait. Martin had a question of his own to
propound to her. He wanted to ascertain the measure of her faith
in him, and within the week each was answered. Martin precipitated
it by reading to her his “The Shame of the Sun.”
“Why don’t you become a reporter?” she asked when he had finished.
“You love writing so, and I am sure you would succeed. You could
rise in journalism and make a name for yourself. There are a
number of great special correspondents. Their salaries are large,
and their field is the world. They are sent everywhere, to the
heart of Africa, like Stanley, or to interview the Pope, or to
explore unknown Thibet.”
“Then you don’t like my essay?” he rejoined. “You believe that I
have some show in journalism but none in literature?”
“No, no; I do like it. It reads well. But I am afraid it’s over
the heads of your readers. At least it is over mine. It sounds
beautiful, but I don’t understand it. Your scientific slang is
beyond me. You are an extremist, you know, dear, and what may be
intelligible to you may not be intelligible to the rest of us.”
“I imagine it’s the philosophic slang that bothers you,” was all he
could say.
He was flaming from the fresh reading of the ripest thought he had
expressed, and her verdict stunned him.
“No matter how poorly it is done,” he persisted, “don’t you see
anything in it? – in the thought of it, I mean?”
She shook her head.
“No, it is so different from anything I have read. I read
Maeterlinck and understand him – ”
“His mysticism, you understand that?” Martin flashed out.
“Yes, but this of yours, which is supposed to be an attack upon
him, I don’t understand. Of course, if originality counts – ”
He stopped her with an impatient gesture that was not followed by
speech. He became suddenly aware that she was speaking and that
she had been speaking for some time.
“After all, your writing has been a toy to you,” she was saying.
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“Surely you have played with it long enough. It is time to take up
life seriously – OUR life, Martin. Hitherto you have lived solely
your own.”
“You want me to go to work?” he asked.
“Yes. Father has offered – ”
“I understand all that,” he broke in; “but what I want to know is
whether or not you have lost faith in me?”
She pressed his hand mutely, her eyes dim.
“In your writing, dear,” she admitted in a half-whisper.
“You’ve read lots of my stuff,” he went on brutally. “What do you
think of it? Is it utterly hopeless? How does it compare with
other men’s work?”
“But they sell theirs, and you – don’t.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Do you think that literature is
not at all my vocation?”
“Then I will answer.” She steeled herself to do it. “I don’t
think you were made to write. Forgive me, dear. You compel me to
say it; and you know I know more about literature than you do.”
“Yes, you are a Bachelor of Arts,” he said meditatively; “and you
ought to know.”
“But there is more to be said,” he continued, after a pause painful
to both. “I know what I have in me. No one knows that so well as
I. I know I shall succeed. I will not be kept down. I am afire
with what I have to say in verse, and fiction, and essay. I do not
ask you to have faith in that, though. I do not ask you to have
faith in me, nor in my writing. What I do ask of you is to love me
and have faith in love.”
“A year ago I believed for two years. One of those years is yet to
run. And I do believe, upon my honor and my soul, that before that
year is run I shall have succeeded. You remember what you told me
long ago, that I must serve my apprenticeship to writing. Well, I
have served it. I have crammed it and telescoped it. With you at
the end awaiting me, I have never shirked. Do you know, I have
forgotten what it is to fall peacefully asleep. A few million
years ago I knew what it was to sleep my fill and to awake
naturally from very glut of sleep. I am awakened always now by an
alarm clock. If I fall asleep early or late, I set the alarm
accordingly; and this, and the putting out of the lamp, are my last
conscious actions.”
“When I begin to feel drowsy, I change the heavy book I am reading
for a lighter one. And when I doze over that, I beat my head with
my knuckles in order to drive sleep away. Somewhere I read of a
man who was afraid to sleep. Kipling wrote the story. This man
arranged a spur so that when unconsciousness came, his naked body
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pressed against the iron teeth. Well, I’ve done the same. I look
at the time, and I resolve that not until midnight, or not until
one o’clock, or two o’clock, or three o’clock, shall the spur be
removed. And so it rowels me awake until the appointed time. That
spur has been my bed-mate for months. I have grown so desperate
that five and a half hours of sleep is an extravagance. I sleep
four hours now. I am starved for sleep. There are times when I am
light-headed from want of sleep, times when death, with its rest
and sleep, is a positive lure to me, times when I am haunted by
Longfellow’s lines:
“‘The sea is still and deep;
All things within its bosom sleep;
A single step and all is o’er,
A plunge, a bubble, and no more.’
“Of course, this is sheer nonsense. It comes from nervousness,
from an overwrought mind. But the point is: Why have I done this?
For you. To shorten my apprenticeship. To compel Success to
hasten. And my apprenticeship is now served. I know my equipment.
I swear that I learn more each month than the average college man
learns in a year. I know it, I tell you. But were my need for you
to understand not so desperate I should not tell you. It is not
boasting. I measure the results by the books. Your brothers, to-
day, are ignorant barbarians compared with me and the knowledge I
have wrung from the books in the hours they were sleeping. Long
ago I wanted to be famous. I care very little for fame now. What