Martin Eden CHAPTER I Страница 76

think my mother would permit this?"



"She'd permit you to marry me, that's certain."



She gave a sharp cry. "Oh, Martin, don't be cruel. You have not kissed me once. You are as unresponsive as a stone. And think what I have dared to do." She looked about her with a shiver, though half the look was curiosity. "Just think of where I am."



"I COULD DIE FOR YOU! I COULD DIE FOR YOU!" - Lizzie's words were ringing in his ears..



"Why didn't you dare it before?" he asked harshly. "When I hadn't a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden? That's the question I've been propounding to myself for many a day - not concerning you merely, but concerning everybody. You see I have not changed, though my sudden apparent appreciation in value compels me constantly to reassure myself on that point. I've got the same flesh on my bones, the same ten fingers and toes. I am the same. I have not developed any new strength nor virtue. My brain is the same old brain. I haven't made even one new generalization on literature or philosophy. I am personally of the same value that I was when nobody wanted me. And what is puzzling me is why they want me now. Surely they don't want me for myself, for myself is the same old self they did not want. Then they must want me for something else, for something that is outside of me, for something that is not I! Shall I tell you what that something is? It is for the recognition I have received. That reohnition is not I. It resides in the minds of others. Then again for the money I have earned and am earning. But that money is not I. It resides in banks and in the pockets of Tom, Dick, and Harry. And is it for that, for the recognition and the money, that you now want me?"



"You are breaking my heart," she sobbed. "You know I love you, that I am here because I love you."



"I am afraid you don't see my point," he said gently. "What I mean is: if you love me, how does it happen that you love me now so much more than you did when your love was weak enough to deny me?"



"Forget and forgive," she cried passionately. "I loved you all the time, remember that, and I am here, now, in your arms."



"I'm afraid I am a shrewd merchant, peering into the scales, trying to weigh your love and find out what manner of thing it is."



She withdrew herself from his arms, sat uprigut, and looked at him long and searchingly. She was about to speak, then faltered and changed her mind.



"You see, it appears this way to me," he went on. "When I was all that I am now, nobody out of my own class seemed to care for me. When my books were all written, no one who had read the manuscripts seemed to care for them. In point of fact, because of the stuff I had writtent hey seemed to care even less for me. In writing the stuff it seemed that I had comitted 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 eveyrbody 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 soothingl6 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 wipl. 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 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 desttoyed 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 ipgeonhole 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, clss-values, and class-prejudices." He shook his head sadly. "And you do not understand, even now, what I am sating. 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 monent, when what seems your life's happiness is at stake, you are afraid of life in the same old way - afraid o flife 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. Tye 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.



"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 th 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 learnec much. That I have dared to come here is a token of what I have already learbed. 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 witj 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 dea5est 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 tk 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 hwr. She had redeemed herself for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman, superior to the iron rule of bourgeois cpnvention. 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 wha5 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 n
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