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particular persons and particular location in time and space
wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing. “Overdue” was
the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would
not be more than sixty thousand words – a bagatelle for him with
his splendid vigor of production. On this first day he took hold
of it with conscious delight in the mastery of his tools. He no
longer worried for fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip
and mar his work. The long months of intense application and study
had brought their reward. He could now devote himself with sure
hand to the larger phases of the thing he shaped; and as he worked,
hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the sure and cosmic
grasp with which he held life and the affairs of life. “Overdue”
would tell a story that would be true of its particular characters
and its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was
confident, great vital things that would be true of all time, and
all sea, and all life – thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought,
leaning back for a moment from the table. Ay, thanks to Herbert
Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had
placed in his hands.
He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing. “It will
go! It will go!” was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears.
Of course it would go. At last he was turning out the thing at
which the magazines would jump. The whole story worked out before
him in lightning flashes. He broke off from it long enough to
write a paragraph in his note-book. This would be the last
paragraph in “Overdue”; but so thoroughly was the whole book
already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he
had arrived at the end, the end itself. He compared the tale, as
yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to
be immeasurably superior. “There’s only one man who could touch
it,” he murmured aloud, “and that’s Conrad. And it ought to make
even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, ‘Well done,
Martin, my boy.'”
He toiled on all day, recollecting, at the last moment, that he was
to have dinner at the Morses’. Thanks to Brissenden, his black
suit was out of pawn and he was again eligible for dinner parties.
Down town he stopped off long enough to run into the library and
search for Saleeby’s books. He drew out ‘The Cycle of Life,” and
on the car turned to the essay Norton had mentioned on Spencer. As
Martin read, he grew angry. His face flushed, his jaw set, and
unconsciously his hand clenched, unclenched, and clenched again as
if he were taking fresh grips upon some hateful thing out of which
he was squeezing the life. When he left the car, he strode along
the sidewalk as a wrathful man will stride, and he rang the Morse
bell with such viciousness that it roused him to consciousness of
his condition, so that he entered in good nature, smiling with
amusement at himself. No sooner, however, was he inside than a
great depression descended upon him. He fell from the height where
he had been up-borne all day on the wings of inspiration.
“Bourgeois,” “trader’s den” – Brissenden’s epithets repeated
themselves in his mind. But what of that? he demanded angrily. He
was marrying Ruth, not her family.
It seemed to him that he had never seen Ruth more beautiful, more
spiritual and ethereal and at the same time more healthy. There
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was color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again –
the eyes in which he had first read immortality. He had forgotten
immortality of late, and the trend of his scientific reading had
been away from it; but here, in Ruth’s eyes, he read an argument
without words that transcended all worded arguments. He saw that
in her eyes before which all discussion fled away, for he saw love
there. And in his own eyes was love; and love was unanswerable.
Such was his passionate doctrine.
The half hour he had with her, before they went in to dinner, left
him supremely happy and supremely satisfied with life.
Nevertheless, at table, the inevitable reaction and exhaustion
consequent upon the hard day seized hold of him. He was aware that
his eyes were tired and that he was irritable. He remembered it
was at this table, at which he now sneered and was so often bored,
that he had first eaten with civilized beings in what he had
imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and refinement. He
caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long ago, a
self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony of
apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of eating-
implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap
to live at such dizzy social altitude, and deciding in the end to
be frankly himself, pretending no knowledge and no polish he did
not possess.
He glanced at Ruth for reassurance, much in the same manner that a
passenger, with sudden panic thought of possible shipwreck, will
strive to locate the life preservers. Well, that much had come out
of it – love and Ruth. All the rest had failed to stand the test
of the books. But Ruth and love had stood the test; for them he
found a biological sanction. Love was the most exalted expression
of life. Nature had been busy designing him, as she had been busy
with all normal men, for the purpose of loving. She had spent ten
thousand centuries – ay, a hundred thousand and a million centuries
– upon the task, and he was the best she could do. She had made
love the strongest thing in him, increased its power a myriad per
cent with her gift of imagination, and sent him forth into the
ephemera to thrill and melt and mate. His hand sought Ruth’s hand
beside him hidden by the table, and a warm pressure was given and
received. She looked at him a swift instant, and her eyes were
radiant and melting. So were his in the thrill that pervaded him;
nor did he realize how much that was radiant and melting in her
eyes had been aroused by what she had seen in his.
Across the table from him, cater-cornered, at Mr. Morse’s right,
sat Judge Blount, a local superior court judge. Martin had met him
a number of times and had failed to like him. He and Ruth’s father
were discussing labor union politics, the local situation, and
socialism, and Mr. Morse was endeavoring to twit Martin on the
latter topic. At last Judge Blount looked across the table with
benignant and fatherly pity. Martin smiled to himself.
“You’ll grow out of it, young man,” he said soothingly. “Time is
the best cure for such youthful distempers.” He turned to Mr.
Morse. “I do not believe discussion is good in such cases. It
makes the patient obstinate.”
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“That is true,” the other assented gravely. “But it is well to
warn the patient occasionally of his condition.”
Martin laughed merrily, but it was with an effort. The day had
been too long, the day’s effort too intense, and he was deep in the
throes of the reaction.
“Undoubtedly you are both excellent doctors,” he said; “but if you
care a whit for the opinion of the patient, let him tell you that
you are poor diagnosticians. In fact, you are both suffering from
the disease you think you find in me. As for me, I am immune. The
socialist philosophy that riots half-baked in your veins has passed
me by.”
“Clever, clever,” murmured the judge. “An excellent ruse in
controversy, to reverse positions.”
“Out of your mouth.” Martin’s eyes were sparkling, but he kept
control of himself. “You see, Judge, I’ve heard your campaign
speeches. By some henidical process – henidical, by the way is a
favorite word of mine which nobody understands – by some henidical
process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive
system and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you
indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear the
strength from the strong.”
“My young man – ”
“Remember, I’ve heard your campaign speeches,” Martin warned.
“It’s on record, your position on interstate commerce regulation,
on regulation of the railway trust and Standard Oil, on the
conservation of the forests, on a thousand and one restrictive
measures that are nothing else than socialistic.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you do not believe in regulating these
various outrageous exercises of power?”
“That’s not the point. I mean to tell you that you are a poor