Martin Eden (54 page)

A knock at the door aroused him. He was not asleep, and his mind immediately connected the knock with a telegram, or letter, or perhaps one of the servants bringing back clean clothes from the laundry. He was thinking about Joe and wondering where he was, as he said, “Come in.”

He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn toward the door. He heard it close softly. There was a long silence. He forgot that there had been a knock at the door, and was still staring blankly before him when he heard a woman's sob. It was involuntary, spasmodic, checked, and stifled—he noted that as he turned about. The next instant he was on his feet.

“Ruth!” he said, amazed and bewildered.

Her face was white and strained. She stood just inside the door, one hand against it for support, the other pressed to her side. She extended both hands toward him piteously, and started forward to meet him. As he caught her hands and led her to the Morris chair he noticed how cold they were. He drew up another chair and sat down on the broad arm of it. He was too confused to speak. In his own mind his affair with Ruth was closed and sealed. He felt much in the same way that he would have felt had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry suddenly invaded the Hotel Metropole with a whole week's washing ready for him to pitch into. Several times he was about to speak, and each time he hesitated.

“No one knows I am here,” Ruth said in a faint voice, with an appealing smile.

“What did you say?” he asked.

He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.

She repeated her words.

“Oh,” he said, then wondered what more he could possibly say.

“I saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes.”

“Oh,” he said again.

He had never been so tongue-tied in his life. Positively he did not have an idea in his head. He felt stupid and awkward, but for the life of him he could think of nothing to say. It would have been easier had the intrusion been the Shelly Hot Springs laundry. He could have rolled up his sleeves and gone to work.

“And then you came in,” he said finally.

She nodded, with a slightly arch expression, and loosened the scarf at her throat.

“I saw you first from across the street when you were with that girl.”

“Oh, yes,” he said simply. “I took her down to night school.”

“Well, aren't you glad to see me?” she said at the end of another silence.

“Yes, yes.” He spoke hastily. “But wasn't it rash of you to come here?”

“I slipped in. Nobody knows I am here. I wanted to see you. I came to tell you I have been very foolish. I came because I could no longer stay away, because my heart compelled me to come, because—because I wanted to come.”

She came forward, out of her chair and over to him. She rested her hand on his shoulder a moment, breathing quickly, and then slipped into his arms. And in his large, easy way, desirous of not inflicting hurt, knowing that to repulse this offer of herself was to inflict the most grievous hurt a woman could receive, he folded his arms around her and held her close. But there was no warmth in the embrace, no caress in the contact. She had come into his arms, and he held her, that was all. She nestled against him, and then, with a change of position, her hands crept up and rested upon his neck. But his flesh was not fire beneath those hands, and he felt awkward and uncomfortable.

“What makes you tremble so?” he asked. “Is it a chill? Shall I light the grate?”

He made a movement to disengage himself, but she clung more closely to him, shivering violently.

“It is merely nervousness,” she said with chattering teeth. “I'll control myself in a minute. There, I am better already.”

Slowly her shivering died away. He continued to hold her, but he was no longer puzzled. He knew now for what she had come.

“My mother wanted me to marry Charley Hapgood,” she announced.

“Charley Hapgood, that fellow who speaks always in platitudes?” Martin groaned. Then he added, “And now, I suppose, your mother wants you to marry me.”

He did not put it in the form of a question. He stated it as a certitude, and before his eyes began to dance the rows of figures of his royalties.

“She will not object, I know that much,” Ruth said.

“She considers me quite eligible?”

Ruth nodded.

“And yet I am not a bit more eligible now than I was when she broke our engagement,” he meditated. “I haven't changed any. I'm the same Martin Eden, though for that matter I'm a bit worse—I smoke now. Don't you smell my breath?”

In reply she pressed her open fingers against his lips, placed them graciously and playfully, and in expectancy of the kiss that of old had always been a consequence. But there was no caressing answer of Martin's lips. He waited until the fingers were removed and then went on.

“I am not changed. I haven't got a job. I'm not looking for a job. Furthermore, I am not going to look for a job. And I still believe that Herbert Spencer is a great and noble man and that Judge Blount is an unmitigated ass. I had dinner with him the other night, so I ought to know.”

“But you didn't accept father's invitation,” she chided.

“So you know about that? Who sent him? Your mother?”

She remained silent.

“Then she did send him. I thought so. And now I suppose she has sent you.”

“No one knows that I am here,” she protested. “Do you 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 recognition 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 upright, 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 scemed 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 fiber 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 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.

“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.”