her eyes, then faded out again.) “I’m pretty sure of getting hold
of some money soon – lots of it.”
In that moment he abandoned the idea of the valley and the bay, the
grass-walled castle and the trim, white schooner. After all, what
did it matter? He could go away, as he had done so often, before
the mast, on any ship bound anywhere.
“I’d like to turn it over to you. There must be something you want
– to go to school or business college. You might like to study and
be a stenographer. I could fix it for you. Or maybe your father
and mother are living – I could set them up in a grocery store or
something. Anything you want, just name it, and I can fix it for
you.”
She made no reply, but sat, gazing straight before her, dry-eyed
and motionless, but with an ache in the throat which Martin divined
so strongly that it made his own throat ache. He regretted that he
had spoken. It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her – mere
money – compared with what she offered him. He offered her an
extraneous thing with which he could part without a pang, while she
offered him herself, along with disgrace and shame, and sin, and
all her hopes of heaven.
“Don’t let’s talk about it,” she said with a catch in her voice
that she changed to a cough. She stood up. “Come on, let’s go
home. I’m all tired out.”
The day was done, and the merrymakers had nearly all departed. But
as Martin and Lizzie emerged from the trees they found the gang
waiting for them. Martin knew immediately the meaning of it.
Trouble was brewing. The gang was his body-guard. They passed out
through the gates of the park with, straggling in the rear, a
second gang, the friends that Lizzie’s young man had collected to
avenge the loss of his lady. Several constables and special police
officers, anticipating trouble, trailed along to prevent it, and
herded the two gangs separately aboard the train for San Francisco.
Martin told Jimmy that he would get off at Sixteenth Street Station
and catch the electric car into Oakland. Lizzie was very quiet and
without interest in what was impending. The train pulled in to
Sixteenth Street Station, and the waiting electric car could be
seen, the conductor of which was impatiently clanging the gong.
“There she is,” Jimmy counselled. “Make a run for it, an’ we’ll
hold ’em back. Now you go! Hit her up!”
The hostile gang was temporarily disconcerted by the manoeuvre,
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then it dashed from the train in pursuit. The staid and sober
Oakland folk who sat upon the car scarcely noted the young fellow
and the girl who ran for it and found a seat in front on the
outside. They did not connect the couple with Jimmy, who sprang on
the steps, crying to the motorman:-
“Slam on the juice, old man, and beat it outa here!”
The next moment Jimmy whirled about, and the passengers saw him
land his fist on the face of a running man who was trying to board
the car. But fists were landing on faces the whole length of the
car. Thus, Jimmy and his gang, strung out on the long, lower
steps, met the attacking gang. The car started with a great
clanging of its gong, and, as Jimmy’s gang drove off the last
assailants, they, too, jumped off to finish the job. The car
dashed on, leaving the flurry of combat far behind, and its
dumfounded passengers never dreamed that the quiet young man and
the pretty working-girl sitting in the corner on the outside seat
had been the cause of the row.
Martin had enjoyed the fight, with a recrudescence of the old
fighting thrills. But they quickly died away, and he was oppressed
by a great sadness. He felt very old – centuries older than those
careless, care-free young companions of his others days. He had
travelled far, too far to go back. Their mode of life, which had
once been his, was now distasteful to him. He was disappointed in
it all. He had developed into an alien. As the steam beer had
tasted raw, so their companionship seemed raw to him. He was too
far removed. Too many thousands of opened books yawned between
them and him. He had exiled himself. He had travelled in the vast
realm of intellect until he could no longer return home. On the
other hand, he was human, and his gregarious need for companionship
remained unsatisfied. He had found no new home. As the gang could
not understand him, as his own family could not understand him, as
the bourgeoisie could not understand him, so this girl beside him,
whom he honored high, could not understand him nor the honor he
paid her. His sadness was not untouched with bitterness as he
thought it over.
“Make it up with him,” he advised Lizzie, at parting, as they stood
in front of the workingman’s shack in which she lived, near Sixth
and Market. He referred to the young fellow whose place he had
usurped that day.
“I can’t – now,” she said.
“Oh, go on,” he said jovially. “All you have to do is whistle and
he’ll come running.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said simply.
And he knew what she had meant.
She leaned toward him as he was about to say good night. But she
leaned not imperatively, not seductively, but wistfully and humbly.
He was touched to the heart. His large tolerance rose up in him.
He put his arms around her, and kissed her, and knew that upon his
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own lips rested as true a kiss as man ever received.
“My God!” she sobbed. “I could die for you. I could die for you.”
She tore herself from him suddenly and ran up the steps. He felt a
quick moisture in his eyes.
“Martin Eden,” he communed. “You’re not a brute, and you’re a damn
poor Nietzscheman. You’d marry her if you could and fill her
quivering heart full with happiness. But you can’t, you can’t.
And it’s a damn shame.”
“‘A poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers,'” he muttered,
remembering his Henly. “‘Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame.’
It is – a blunder and a shame.”
CHAPTER XLIII
“The Shame of the Sun” was published in October. As Martin cut the
cords of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary
copies from the publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy
sadness fell upon him. He thought of the wild delight that would
have been his had this happened a few short months before, and he
contrasted that delight that should have been with his present
uncaring coldness. His book, his first book, and his pulse had not
gone up a fraction of a beat, and he was only sad. It meant little
to him now. The most it meant was that it might bring some money,
and little enough did he care for money.
He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.
“I did it,” he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment.
“I wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your
vegetable soup went into the making of it. Keep it. It’s yours.
Just to remember me by, you know.”
He was not bragging, not showing off. His sole motive was to make
her happy, to make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in
him. She put the book in the front room on top of the family
Bible. A sacred thing was this book her lodger had made, a fetich
of friendship. It softened the blow of his having been a
laundryman, and though she could not understand a line of it, she
knew that every line of it was great. She was a simple, practical,
hard-working woman, but she possessed faith in large endowment.
Just as emotionlessly as he had received “The Shame of the Sun” did
he read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping
bureau. The book was making a hit, that was evident. It meant
more gold in the money sack. He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all
his promises, and still have enough left to build his grass-walled
castle.
Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of
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fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second
edition of twice the size through the presses; and ere this was
delivered a third edition of five thousand had been ordered. A
London firm made arrangements by cable for an English edition, and
hot-footed upon this came the news of French, German, and
Scandinavian translations in progress. The attack upon the
Maeterlinck school could not have been made at a more opportune