Martin Eden: Chapters 7–13

Furthermore, his mind was fallow. It had lain fallow all his life so far as the abstract thought of the books was concerned, and it was ripe for the sowing.

It had never been jaded by study, and it bit hold of the knowledge in the books with sharp teeth that would not let go.

On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were obsolete.

Then there was a black-eyed restaurant waiter who was a theosophist, a union baker who was an agnostic, an old man who baffled all of them with the strange philosophy that what is is right, and another old man who discoursed interminably about the cosmos and the father-atom and the mother-atom.

He did not dream how ardent and masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting the alchemy of her spirit.

And then you slur by dropping initial letters and diphthongs.

He could hardly follow her outlining of the work he must do, so amazed was he by her delightful propinquity.

He had seen too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be wholly content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis; and there were times when their conversation turned on other themes—the last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied.

In similar ways she had experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning.

She read Browning aloud to him, and was often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave to mooted passages.

Though she did not know it, she had a feeling in him of proprietary right.

He could not find an adequate motive in Mr. Butler’s life of pinching and privation.

What he could do,—they could do; but within him he felt a confused ferment working that told him there was more in him than he had done.

Three days, at white heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation marks.

He had completed on that day the first instalment of three thousand words—much to the amusement of Jim, and to the open derision of Mr. Higginbotham, who sneered throughout meal-time at the “litery” person they had discovered in the family.

But he was very tentative, fastidiously so, letting Ruth set the pace of sprightliness and fancy, keeping up with her but never daring to go beyond her.

On the screen of his imagination he saw himself and this sweet and beautiful girl, facing each other and conversing in good English, in a room of books and paintings and tone and culture, and all illuminated by a bright light of steadfast brilliance; while ranged about and fading away to the remote edges of the screen were antithetical scenes, each scene a picture, and he the onlooker, free to look at will upon what he wished.

He saw these other scenes through drifting vapors and swirls of sullen fog dissolving before shafts of red and garish light.

It was more than a month’s hard-earned wages, and it reduced his stock of money amazingly; but when he added the hundred dollars he was to receive from the Examiner to the four hundred and twenty dollars that was the least The Youth’s Companion could pay him, he felt that he had reduced the perplexity the unwonted amount of money had caused him.

To Mr. Higginbotham such a dinner was advertisement of his worldly achievement and prosperity, and he honored it by delivering platitudinous sermonettes upon American institutions and the opportunity said institutions gave to any hard-working man to rise—the rise, in his case, which he pointed out unfailingly, being from a grocer’s clerk to the ownership of Higginbotham’s Cash Store.

He ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as everybody gibbered.

In reality, he never rested, and a weaker body or a less firmly poised brain would have been prostrated in a general break-down.

He trembled at the audacity of his thought; but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean, assured him he was right.

She was subject to the laws of the universe just as inexorably as he was.

His eyes were shining like an angel’s, and his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly dross, and pure and holy.

Their logomachy was far more stimulating to his intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse.

These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and fought one another’s ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to be more alive than Mr. Morse and his crony, Mr. Butler.

Once before he had tried Spencer, and choosing the “Principles of Psychology” to begin with, he had failed as abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There had been no understanding the book, and he had returned it unread.

He had merely skimmed over the surface of things, observing detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making superficial little generalizations—and all and everything quite unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance.

His ignorant and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless. The medieval metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served the sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers.

Arthur and Norman, he found, believed in evolution and had read Spencer, though it did not seem to have made any vital impression upon them, while the young fellow with the glasses and the mop of hair, Will Olney, sneered disagreeably at Spencer and repeated the epigram, “There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet.”

Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned the English philosopher’s agnosticism, but confessed that he had not read “First Principles”; while Mr. Butler stated that he had no patience with Spencer, had never read a line of him, and had managed to get along quite well without him.

Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.
“Yes, what do you want?” Ruth asked.

Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced that Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he accorded Ruth.

It was about studies and lessons, dealing with the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted with the big things that were stirring in him—with the grip upon life that was even then crooking his fingers like eagle’s talons, with the cosmic thrills that made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness of mastery of it all.