seemed to care for them. In point of fact, because of the stuff I
had written they seemed to care even less for me. In writing the
stuff it seemed that I had committed acts that were, to say the
least, derogatory. ‘Get a job,’ everybody said.”
She made a movement of dissent.
“Yes, yes,” he said; “except in your case you told me to get a
position. The homely word JOB, like much that I have written,
offends you. It is brutal. But I assure you it was no less brutal
to me when everybody I knew recommended it to me as they would
recommend right conduct to an immoral creature. But to return.
The publication of what I had written, and the public notice I
received, wrought a change in the fibre of your love. Martin Eden,
with his work all performed, you would not marry. Your love for
him was not strong enough to enable you to marry him. But your
love is now strong enough, and I cannot avoid the conclusion that
its strength arises from the publication and the public notice. In
your case I do not mention royalties, though I am certain that they
apply to the change wrought in your mother and father. Of course,
all this is not flattering to me. But worst of all, it makes me
question love, sacred love. Is love so gross a thing that it must
feed upon publication and public notice? It would seem so. I have
sat and thought upon it till my head went around.”
“Poor, dear head.” She reached up a hand and passed the fingers
soothingly through his hair. “Let it go around no more. Let us
begin anew, now. I loved you all the time. I know that I was weak
in yielding to my mother’s will. I should not have done so. Yet I
have heard you speak so often with broad charity of the fallibility
and frailty of humankind. Extend that charity to me. I acted
mistakenly. Forgive me.”
“Oh, I do forgive,” he said impatiently. “It is easy to forgive
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where there is really nothing to forgive. Nothing that you have
done requires forgiveness. One acts according to one’s lights, and
more than that one cannot do. As well might I ask you to forgive
me for my not getting a job.”
“I meant well,” she protested. “You know that I could not have
loved you and not meant well.”
“True; but you would have destroyed me out of your well-meaning.”
“Yes, yes,” he shut off her attempted objection. “You would have
destroyed my writing and my career. Realism is imperative to my
nature, and the bourgeois spirit hates realism. The bourgeoisie is
cowardly. It is afraid of life. And all your effort was to make
me afraid of life. You would have formalized me. You would have
compressed me into a two-by-four pigeonhole of life, where all
life’s values are unreal, and false, and vulgar.” He felt her stir
protestingly. “Vulgarity – a hearty vulgarity, I’ll admit – is the
basis of bourgeois refinement and culture. As I say, you wanted to
formalize me, to make me over into one of your own class, with your
class-ideals, class-values, and class-prejudices.” He shook his
head sadly. “And you do not understand, even now, what I am
saying. My words do not mean to you what I endeavor to make them
mean. What I say is so much fantasy to you. Yet to me it is vital
reality. At the best you are a trifle puzzled and amused that this
raw boy, crawling up out of the mire of the abyss, should pass
judgment upon your class and call it vulgar.”
She leaned her head wearily against his shoulder, and her body
shivered with recurrent nervousness. He waited for a time for her
to speak, and then went on.
“And now you want to renew our love. You want us to be married.
You want me. And yet, listen – if my books had not been noticed,
I’d nevertheless have been just what I am now. And you would have
stayed away. It is all those damned books – ”
“Don’t swear,” she interrupted.
Her reproof startled him. He broke into a harsh laugh.
“That’s it,” he said, “at a high moment, when what seems your
life’s happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same
old way – afraid of life and a healthy oath.”
She was stung by his words into realization of the puerility of her
act, and yet she felt that he had magnified it unduly and was
consequently resentful. They sat in silence for a long time, she
thinking desperately and he pondering upon his love which had
departed. He knew, now, that he had not really loved her. It was
an idealized Ruth he had loved, an ethereal creature of his own
creating, the bright and luminous spirit of his love-poems. The
real bourgeois Ruth, with all the bourgeois failings and with the
hopeless cramp of the bourgeois psychology in her mind, he had
never loved.
She suddenly began to speak.
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“I know that much you have said is so. I have been afraid of life.
I did not love you well enough. I have learned to love better. I
love you for what you are, for what you were, for the ways even by
which you have become. I love you for the ways wherein you differ
from what you call my class, for your beliefs which I do not
understand but which I know I can come to understand. I shall
devote myself to understanding them. And even your smoking and
your swearing – they are part of you and I will love you for them,
too. I can still learn. In the last ten minutes I have learned
much. That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have
already learned. Oh, Martin! – ”
She was sobbing and nestling close against him.
For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy,
and she acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening
face.
“It is too late,” he said. He remembered Lizzie’s words. “I am a
sick man – oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to
have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this
way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too
late, now.”
“It is not too late,” she cried. “I will show you. I will prove
to you that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my
class and all that is dearest to me. All that is dearest to the
bourgeoisie I will flout. I am no longer afraid of life. I will
leave my father and mother, and let my name become a by-word with
my friends. I will come to you here and now, in free love if you
will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you. If I have been
a traitor to love, I will now, for love’s sake, be a traitor to all
that made that earlier treason.”
She stood before him, with shining eyes.
“I am waiting, Martin,” she whispered, “waiting for you to accept
me. Look at me.”
It was splendid, he thought, looking at her. She had redeemed
herself for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman,
superior to the iron rule of bourgeois convention. It was
splendid, magnificent, desperate. And yet, what was the matter
with him? He was not thrilled nor stirred by what she had done.
It was splendid and magnificent only intellectually. In what
should have been a moment of fire, he coldly appraised her. His
heart was untouched. He was unaware of any desire for her. Again
he remembered Lizzie’s words.
“I am sick, very sick,” he said with a despairing gesture. “How
sick I did not know till now. Something has gone out of me. I
have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being
sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any
desire for anything. If there were room, I should want you, now.
You see how sick I am.”
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He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child,
crying, that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate
through the tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his
sickness, the presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses
of vegetation, shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and
blazed against this background of his eyelids. It was not restful,
that green foliage. The sunlight was too raw and glaring. It hurt
him to look at it, and yet he looked, he knew not why.
He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob.