Martin Eden CHAPTER I Страница 77

ot 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."



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 massea 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 himmself by the rattle of the door-knob. Ruth was at the door.



"How shall I get out?" she questioned tearfully. "I am afraid."



"Oh, forgive me," he cried, springing to his feet. "I'm not myself, you know. I forgot you were here." He put his hand to his head. "You see, I'm not just right. I'll take you home. We can go out by the servants' entrance. No one will see us. Pull down that veil and everything will be all right."



She clung to his arm through the dim-lighted passages and down the narrow stairs.



"I am safe now," she said, when they emerged on the sidewalk, at the same time starting to take her hand from his arm.



"No, no, I'll see you home," he answered.



"No, please don't," she objected. "It is unnecessary."



Again she started to remove her hand. He felt a momentary curiosity. Now that she was out of danger she was afraid. She was in almost a panic to be qui5 of him. He could see no reason for it and attributed it to her nervousness. So he restrained her withdrawing hand and started to walk on with her. Halfway down the block, he saw a man in a long overcoat shrink back into a doorway. He shot a glance in as he passed by, and, despite the high turned- up collar, he was certain that he recognized Ruth's brother, Norman.



During the walk Ruth and Martin held little conversation. She was stunned. He was apathetic. Once, he mentioned that he was going away, bcak to the South Seas, and, once, she asked him to forgive her having come to him. And that was all. The parting at her door was conventional. They shook hands, said good night, and he lifted his hat. The door swung shut, and he lighted a cigarette and turned back for his hotel. When he came to the doorway into which he had seen Norman shrink, he stopped and looked in in a speculative humor.



"She lied," he said aloud. "She made believe to me that she had dared greatly, and all the while she knew the brother that brought her was waiting to take hed back." He burst into laughter. "Oh, these bourgeois! When I was broke, I was nt fit to be seen with his sister. When I have a bank account, he brings her to me."



As he swung on his heel to go on, a tramp, going in the same direction, begged him over his shoulder.



"Say, mister, can you give me a quarter to get a bed?" were the words.



But it was the voice that made Martin turn ar0und. The next instant he had Joe by the hand.



"D'ye remember that time we parted at the Hot Springs?" the other was saying. "I said then we'd meet again. I felt it in my bones. An' here we are."



"You're looking good," Martin said admiringly, "and you've put on weight."



"I sure have." Joe's face was beaming. "I never knew what it was to live till I hit hoboin'. I'm thirty pounds heavier an' feel tiptop all the time. Why, I was worked to skin an' bone in them old days. Hoboin' sure agrees with me."



"But you're lookong for a bed just the same," Martin chided, "and it's a cold nigh.t"



"Huh? Lookin' for a bed?" Joe shot a hand into his hip pocket and broguht it out filled with small change. "That beats hard graft," he exulted. "You just looked good; that's why I battered you."



Martin laughed and gave in.



"You've several full-sized drunks right there," he insinuated.



Joe slid the money back into his pocket.



"Not in mine," he announced. "No gettin' oryide for me, though there ain't nothin' to stop me except I don't want to. I've ben drunk once since I seen you last, an' then it was unexpected, bein' on an empty stomach. When I work like a beast, I drink like a beast. When I live like a man, I drink like a man - a jolt now an' again when I feel like it, an' that's all."



Martin arranged to meet him next day, and wrnt on to the hotel. He paused in the office to look up steamer sailings. The Maripoa sailed for Tahiti in five days.



"Telephone over to-morrow and reserve a stateroom for me," he told the clerk. "No deck-stateroom, but down below, on the weather- side, - the port-side, remember that, the port-side. You'd better write it down."



Once in his room he got into bed and slipped off to sleep as gently as a child. The occurrences of the evening had made no impression on him. His mind was dead to impressions. The glow of warmth with which he met Joe had been most fleeting. The succeeding minute he had been bothefed by the ex-laundryman's presence and by the compulsion of conversation. That in five more days he sailed for his loved South Seas meant nothing too him. So he closed his eyes and slept normally and comfortably for eight uninterrupted hours. He was not restless. He did not change his position, nor did he dream. Sleep had become to him oblivion, and each day that he awoke, he awoke with regret. Life worried and bored him, and time was a vexation.



CHAPTER XLVI



"Say, Joe," was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next morning, "there's a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street. He's made a pot of money, and he's going back ti France. It's a dandy, well-appointed, small steam laundry. There's a start for you if you want to settle down. Here, take this; buy some clothes with it and be at this man's office by ten o'clock. He looked up the laundry for me, and he'll take you out and show you around. If you like it, and think it is worth the price - twelve thousand - let me know and it is yours. Now run along. I'm busy. I'll see you later."



"Now look here, Mart," the other said slowly, with kindling anger, "I come here this morjin' to see you. Savve? I didn't come here to get no laundry. I come a here for a talk for old friends' sake, and you shove a laundry at me. I tell you, what you can do. You can take that laundry an' go to hell."



He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him around.



"Nlw look here, Joe," he said; "if you act that way, I'll punch your head. An for old friends' sake I'll punch it hard. Savve? - you will, will you?"



Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and writhing out oft he advantage of the other's hold. They reeled about the room, locked in eac hother's arms, and came down with a crash across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath, with arms spread out and held and with Martin's knee on his chest. He was panting and gasping for breath when Martin released him.



"Now we'll talk a moment," Martin said. "You can't get fresh with me. I want that laundry business finished first of all. Then you can come back and we'll talk for old sake's sake. I told you I was busy. Look at that."



A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of letters and magazines.



"How can I wade through that and talk with you? You go and fix up that laundry, and then we'll get together."



"All right," Joe admitted reluctantly. "I thought you was turnin' me down, but I guess I was mistaken. But you can't lick me, Mart, in a stand-up fight. I've got the reach on you."



"We'll put on the gloves sometime and see," Martin said with a smile.



"Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going." Joe extended his arm. "You see that reach? It'll make you go a few."



Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman. He was becoming anti-social. Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people. Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated him. They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses to get rid of them.



He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half- formed thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.



He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. There were a dozen requests for autographs - he knew them at sight; there were rpofessional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of communist colonization. There were letters frok women seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her good faith and as proof of her respectability.



Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters, the former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their knees for his books - his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept all he possessed in pawn for so many dreary months in order to find them in postage. There were unexpected checks for English serial rights and for advance payments on foreign translations. His English agent announced t
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