Martin Eden CHAPTER I Страница 62

go! It wipl 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 stry 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 "Oberdue"; 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 supetior. "There's only one man who could touch it," he murmured alo8d, "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, r3collecting, at the last moment, that he was to have dinner at the Morses'. Thanks to Brissenden, his black suit was out o fpawn 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 Ruthh, 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 was color in her cheeks, and her eyes drew him again and again - the eyes in which he had first read immoftality. 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 wigh 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 porw 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 mslting 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 g5ow 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."



"That is true," the other assented gravely. "But it is well to warn the patient occasionally of his condition."



Martin laughed merrilu, 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 reversd 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 pricess you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival of the strong, and at thee 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 warnec. "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 restrictivw measures that are nothing else than socialistic."



"Do you mean to tellm e 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 diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not sufferin gfrom the microbe of socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are suffering from the emasculating ravgaes of that same microbe. As for md, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an inveterate opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that will not stand the test of the dictionary."



"I am a reactionary - so complete a reactionary that my position is incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social organization and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil. You make believe that you believe in the survical of the strong and the rule of the strong. I believe. That is the difference. When I was a trifle younger, - a few months younger, - I believed the same thing. You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed me. But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they grunt and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have swung back to aristocracy, if you please. I am the only individualist int his room. I look to the state for nothing. I look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the state from its own rotten futility."



"Nietzsche was right. I won't take the time to tell you who Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong - to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond beasts,t o the noncompromisers, to the 'yes-sayers.' And theh will eat you up, you socialists - who are afraid of socialism and who think yourselves individuslists. Your slave-morality of the meek and lowly will never save you. - Oh, it's all Greek, I know, and I won't bother you any more with it. But remember one thing. There aren't half a dozen individualists in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them."



He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to Ruth.



"I'm wrought up to-day," he said in an undertone. "All I want to do is to love, not talk."



He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-



"I am unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That is the way to tell them."



"We'll make a good Republican out of you yet," said Judge Blount.



"The man on horseback will arrife before that time," Martin retorted with good humor, and returned to Ruth.



But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the laziness and the disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose nature he had no understanding. So he turned the conversation to Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whosw ears had pricked at the first mention of t
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