I want is you; I am more hungry for you than for food, or clothing,
or recognition. I have a dream of laying my head on your breast
and sleeping an aeon or so, and the dream will come true ere
another year is gone.”
His power beat against her, wave upon wave; and in the moment his
will opposed hers most she felt herself most strongly drawn toward
him. The strength that had always poured out from him to her was
now flowering in his impassioned voice, his flashing eyes, and the
vigor of life and intellect surging in him. And in that moment,
and for the moment, she was aware of a rift that showed in her
certitude – a rift through which she caught sight of the real
Martin Eden, splendid and invincible; and as animal-trainers have
their moments of doubt, so she, for the instant, seemed to doubt
her power to tame this wild spirit of a man.
“And another thing,” he swept on. “You love me. But why do you
love me? The thing in me that compels me to write is the very
thing that draws your love. You love me because I am somehow
different from the men you have known and might have loved. I was
not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business
squabbling, and legal jangling. Make me do such things, make me
like those other men, doing the work they do, breathing the air
they breathe, developing the point of view they have developed, and
you have destroyed the difference, destroyed me, destroyed the
thing you love. My desire to write is the most vital thing in me.
Had I been a mere clod, neither would I have desired to write, nor
would you have desired me for a husband.”
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“But you forget,” she interrupted, the quick surface of her mind
glimpsing a parallel. “There have been eccentric inventors,
starving their families while they sought such chimeras as
perpetual motion. Doubtless their wives loved them, and suffered
with them and for them, not because of but in spite of their
infatuation for perpetual motion.”
“True,” was the reply. “But there have been inventors who were not
eccentric and who starved while they sought to invent practical
things; and sometimes, it is recorded, they succeeded. Certainly I
do not seek any impossibilities – ”
“You have called it ‘achieving the impossible,'” she interpolated.
“I spoke figuratively. I seek to do what men have done before me –
to write and to live by my writing.”
Her silence spurred him on.
“To you, then, my goal is as much a chimera as perpetual motion?”
he demanded.
He read her answer in the pressure of her hand on his – the pitying
mother-hand for the hurt child. And to her, just then, he was the
hurt child, the infatuated man striving to achieve the impossible.
Toward the close of their talk she warned him again of the
antagonism of her father and mother.
“But you love me?” he asked.
“I do! I do!” she cried.
“And I love you, not them, and nothing they do can hurt me.”
Triumph sounded in his voice. “For I have faith in your love, not
fear of their enmity. All things may go astray in this world, but
not love. Love cannot go wrong unless it be a weakling that faints
and stumbles by the way.”
CHAPTER XXXI
Martin had encountered his sister Gertrude by chance on Broadway –
as it proved, a most propitious yet disconcerting chance. Waiting
on the corner for a car, she had seen him first, and noted the
eager, hungry lines of his face and the desperate, worried look of
his eyes. In truth, he was desperate and worried. He had just
come from a fruitless interview with the pawnbroker, from whom he
had tried to wring an additional loan on his wheel. The muddy fall
weather having come on, Martin had pledged his wheel some time
since and retained his black suit.
“There’s the black suit,” the pawnbroker, who knew his every asset,
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180
had answered. “You needn’t tell me you’ve gone and pledged it with
that Jew, Lipka. Because if you have – ”
The man had looked the threat, and Martin hastened to cry:-
“No, no; I’ve got it. But I want to wear it on a matter of
business.”
“All right,” the mollified usurer had replied. “And I want it on a
matter of business before I can let you have any more money. You
don’t think I’m in it for my health?”
“But it’s a forty-dollar wheel, in good condition,” Martin had
argued. “And you’ve only let me have seven dollars on it. No, not
even seven. Six and a quarter; you took the interest in advance.”
“If you want some more, bring the suit,” had been the reply that
sent Martin out of the stuffy little den, so desperate at heart as
to reflect it in his face and touch his sister to pity.
Scarcely had they met when the Telegraph Avenue car came along and
stopped to take on a crowd of afternoon shoppers. Mrs.
Higginbotham divined from the grip on her arm as he helped her on,
that he was not going to follow her. She turned on the step and
looked down upon him. His haggard face smote her to the heart
again.
“Ain’t you comin’?” she asked
The next moment she had descended to his side.
“I’m walking – exercise, you know,” he explained.
“Then I’ll go along for a few blocks,” she announced. “Mebbe it’ll
do me good. I ain’t ben feelin’ any too spry these last few days.”
Martin glanced at her and verified her statement in her general
slovenly appearance, in the unhealthy fat, in the drooping
shoulders, the tired face with the sagging lines, and in the heavy
fall of her feet, without elasticity – a very caricature of the
walk that belongs to a free and happy body.
“You’d better stop here,” he said, though she had already come to a
halt at the first corner, “and take the next car.”
“My goodness! – if I ain’t all tired a’ready!” she panted. “But
I’m just as able to walk as you in them soles. They’re that thin
they’ll bu’st long before you git out to North Oakland.”
“I’ve a better pair at home,” was the answer.
“Come out to dinner to-morrow,” she invited irrelevantly. “Mr.
Higginbotham won’t be there. He’s goin’ to San Leandro on
business.”
Martin shook his head, but he had failed to keep back the wolfish,
hungry look that leapt into his eyes at the suggestion of dinner.
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”
You haven’t a penny, Mart, and that’s why you’re walkin’.
Exercise!” She tried to sniff contemptuously, but succeeded in
producing only a sniffle. “Here, lemme see.”
And, fumbling in her satchel, she pressed a five-dollar piece into
his hand. “I guess I forgot your last birthday, Mart,” she mumbled
lamely.
Martin’s hand instinctively closed on the piece of gold. In the
same instant he knew he ought not to accept, and found himself
struggling in the throes of indecision. That bit of gold meant
food, life, and light in his body and brain, power to go on
writing, and – who was to say? – maybe to write something that
would bring in many pieces of gold. Clear on his vision burned the
manuscripts of two essays he had just completed. He saw them under
the table on top of the heap of returned manuscripts for which he
had no stamps, and he saw their titles, just as he had typed them –
“The High Priests of Mystery,” and “The Cradle of Beauty.” He had
never submitted them anywhere. They were as good as anything he
had done in that line. If only he had stamps for them! Then the
certitude of his ultimate success rose up in him, an able ally of
hunger, and with a quick movement he slipped the coin into his
pocket.
“I’ll pay you back, Gertrude, a hundred times over,” he gulped out,
his throat painfully contracted and in his eyes a swift hint of
moisture.
“Mark my words!” he cried with abrupt positiveness. “Before the
year is out I’ll put an even hundred of those little yellow-boys
into your hand. I don’t ask you to believe me. All you have to do
is wait and see.”
Nor did she believe. Her incredulity made her uncomfortable, and
failing of other expedient, she said:-
“I know you’re hungry, Mart. It’s sticking out all over you. Come
in to meals any time. I’ll send one of the children to tell you
when Mr. Higginbotham ain’t to be there. An’ Mart – ”
He waited, though he knew in his secret heart what she was about to
say, so visible was her thought process to him.
“Don’t you think it’s about time you got a job?”