Martin Eden: Chapters 22–31

The spendthrift years have marked him. It is not his fault, of course, but that does not alter his nature. And have you thought of the years of licentiousness he inevitably has lived?

But the upshot of it all—of my thinking and reading and loving—is that I am going to move to Grub Street.

I want the man I love and honor to be something finer and higher than a perpetrator of jokes and doggerel.

Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined process of the same scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that the human organism achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as the highest guerdon of life.

He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow...

One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous departed babes, was kept strictly for company.

Yet I read his stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of the felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he is no more than a ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess.

Yet I read his stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of the felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he is no more than a ponderous bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess.

In music she thought him unreasonable, and in the matter of opera not only unreasonable but wilfully perverse.

Also, while aware that poverty was anything but delectable, she had a comfortable middle-class feeling that poverty was salutary, that it was a sharp spur that urged on to success all men who were not degraded and hopeless drudges.

It was a staid, respectable magazine, and it had been published continuously since long before he was born.

His face blazed with wrath, and he shouted in stentorian tones that echoed down the universe, “I shall deduct the cost of those cuffs from your wages!”

The next afternoon, accompanied by Arthur, she arrived in the Morse carriage, to the unqualified delight of the Silva tribe and of all the urchins on the street, and to the consternation of Maria.

All about the carriage were gathered the children from a dozen blocks, waiting and eager for some tragic and terrible dénouement. Carriages were seen on their street only for weddings and funerals. Here was neither marriage nor death: therefore, it was something transcending experience and well worth waiting for.

“It is not a nice habit, you know,” she reproved.

She leaned toward him, entreaty in her eyes, and as he looked at her delicate face and into her pure, limpid eyes, as of old he was struck with his own unworthiness.

“But I can’t help it. I do so love you, Martin, I do, I do. I shall grow more catholic in time, but at present I can’t help being jealous of those ghosts of the past, and you know your past is full of ghosts.”

What characterized them was the clumsiness of too great strength—the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes with a war-club.

“The honest taxpayer and the politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our appropriations and therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the Board of Regents, and to the party press, or to the press of both parties.”

He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to palliate it.

To Ruth’s amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that the professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance for Martin’s youth.

“My mistake,” Martin admitted contritely.

“I really don’t object to platitudes,” he told Ruth later; “but what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent, superior certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken to do it."

“I liked them better than the other women. There’s plenty of fun in them along with paucity of pretence.”

That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought.

It was very fetching to make the girl propose in the course of being reunited, and Martin discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly piquant and fetching ruses.

The books on her father’s shelves, the paintings on the walls, the music on the piano—all was just so much meretricious display.

In spite of their Unitarian proclivities and their masks of conservative broadmindedness, they were two generations behind interpretative science: their mental processes were mediaeval, while their thinking on the ultimate data of existence and of the universe struck him as the same metaphysical method that was as young as the youngest race, as old as the cave-man...

...the same that moved the first Pleistocene ape-man to fear the dark; that moved the first hasty Hebrew to incarnate Eve from Adam’s rib; that moved Descartes to build an idealistic system of the universe out of the projections of his own puny ego; and that moved the famous British ecclesiastic to denounce evolution in satire so scathing as to win immediate applause and leave his name a notorious scrawl on the page of history.

The conversation had been swung in that direction by Mrs. Morse, who had been invidiously singing the praises of Mr. Hapgood.

Nor did she waste time in coming to the point, upbraiding him sorrowfully for what he had done.

The stiff-rim and the square-cut vanished, being replaced by milder garments; the toughness went out of the face, the hardness out of the eyes; and, the face, chastened and refined, was irradiated from an inner life of communion with beauty and knowledge.

There have been eccentric inventors, starving their families while they sought such chimeras as perpetual motion.

“All right,” the mollified usurer had replied. “And I want it on a matter of business before I can let you have any more money. You don’t think I’m in it for my health?”

“At least this is my first indiscretion. There are twenty-four hours in each day, and I must spend them somehow....”

The next moment he was nonplussed by the readiness of his acceptance.

He, by some wonder of vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language for narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing known words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin’s consciousness messages that were incommunicable to ordinary souls.

“That my smattering of knowledge should enable me to short-cut my way to truth is most reassuring. As for myself, I never bother to find out if I am right or not. It is all valueless anyway. Man can never know the ultimate verities.”

Something morbid and significant attached to that sunburn, was Martin’s thought as he returned to a study of the face, narrow, with high cheekbones and cavernous hollows, and graced with as delicate and fine an aquiline nose as Martin had ever seen.

“That’s better,” was the mollified rejoinder.