know beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and
that glowing face betokened youth’s first vision of love.
“Settin’ a fine example to the children,” Mr. Higginbotham snorted,
suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and
which he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him
more. “If he does it again, he’s got to get out. Understand! I
won’t put up with his shinanigan – debotchin’ innocent children
with his boozing.” Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which was a
new one in his vocabulary, recently gleaned from a newspaper
column. “That’s what it is, debotchin’ – there ain’t no other name
for it.”
Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on.
Mr. Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.
“Has he paid last week’s board?” he shot across the top of the
newspaper.
She nodded, then added, “He still has some money.”
“When is he goin’ to sea again?”
“When his pay-day’s spent, I guess,” she answered. “He was over to
San Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But he’s got money,
yet, an’ he’s particular about the kind of ship he signs for.”
“It’s not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs,” Mr.
Higginbotham snorted. “Particular! Him!”
“He said something about a schooner that’s gettin’ ready to go off
to some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he’d
sail on her if his money held out.”
“If he only wanted to steady down, I’d give him a job drivin’ the
wagon,” her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his
voice. “Tom’s quit.”
His wife looked alarm and interrogation.
“Quit to-night. Is goin’ to work for Carruthers. They paid ‘m
more’n I could afford.”
“I told you you’d lose ‘m,” she cried out. “He was worth more’n
you was giving him.”
Martin Eden
22
“Now look here, old woman,” Higginbotham bullied, “for the
thousandth time I’ve told you to keep your nose out of the
business. I won’t tell you again.”
“I don’t care,” she sniffled. “Tom was a good boy.” Her husband
glared at her. This was unqualified defiance.
“If that brother of yours was worth his salt, he could take the
wagon,” he snorted.
“He pays his board, just the same,” was the retort. “An’ he’s my
brother, an’ so long as he don’t owe you money you’ve got no right
to be jumping on him all the time. I’ve got some feelings, if I
have been married to you for seven years.”
“Did you tell ‘m you’d charge him for gas if he goes on readin’ in
bed?” he demanded.
Mrs. Higginbotham made no reply. Her revolt faded away, her spirit
wilting down into her tired flesh. Her husband was triumphant. He
had her. His eyes snapped vindictively, while his ears joyed in
the sniffles she emitted. He extracted great happiness from
squelching her, and she squelched easily these days, though it had
been different in the first years of their married life, before the
brood of children and his incessant nagging had sapped her energy.
“Well, you tell ‘m to-morrow, that’s all,” he said. “An’ I just
want to tell you, before I forget it, that you’d better send for
Marian to-morrow to take care of the children. With Tom quit, I’ll
have to be out on the wagon, an’ you can make up your mind to it to
be down below waitin’ on the counter.”
“But to-morrow’s wash day,” she objected weakly.
“Get up early, then, an’ do it first. I won’t start out till ten
o’clock.”
He crinkled the paper viciously and resumed his reading.
CHAPTER IV
Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his
brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and
entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-
stand, and one chair. Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a
servant when his wife could do the work. Besides, the servant’s
room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one. Martin
placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat,
and sat down on the bed. A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted
the weight of his body, but he did not notice them. He started to
take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall
opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had
leaked through the roof. On this befouled background visions began
Martin Eden
23
to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his
lips began to move and he murmured, “Ruth.”
“Ruth.” He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful.
It delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition
of it. “Ruth.” It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with.
Each time he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing
the foul wall with a golden radiance. This radiance did not stop
at the wall. It extended on into infinity, and through its golden
depths his soul went questing after hers. The best that was in him
was out in splendid flood. The very thought of her ennobled and
purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.
This was new to him. He had never known women who had made him
better. They had always had the counter effect of making him
beastly. He did not know that many of them had done their best,
bad as it was. Never having been conscious of himself, he did not
know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and
which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth.
Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about
them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had
been better because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he
lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always
reached out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was not just
to them, nor to himself. But he, who for the first time was
becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he
burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.
He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-
glass over the wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked
again, long and carefully. It was the first time he had ever
really seen himself. His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that
moment they had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the
world, at which he had been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at
himself. He saw the head and face of a young fellow of twenty,
but, being unused to such appraisement, he did not know how to
value it. Above a square-domed forehead he saw a mop of brown
hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that were a
delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and fingers
tingle to pass caresses through it. But he passed it by as without
merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the high,
square forehead, – striving to penetrate it and learn the quality
of its content. What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his
insistent interrogation. What was it capable of? How far would it
take him? Would it take him to her?
He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were
often quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs
of the sun-washed deep. He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to
her. He tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of
his, but failed in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself
inside other men’s minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life
he knew. He did not know her way of life. She was wonder and
mystery, and how could he guess one thought of hers? Well, they
were honest eyes, he concluded, and in them was neither smallness
nor meanness. The brown sunburn of his face surprised him. He had
not dreamed he was so black. He rolled up his shirt-sleeve and
compared the white underside if the arm with his face. Yes, he was
Martin Eden
24
a white man, after all. But the arms were sunburned, too. He
twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his other hand, and
gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun. It was
very white. He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the
thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor
did he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women
who could boast fairer or smoother skins than he – fairer than