Martin Eden: Chapter 23

作者: Jack London

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Author: Jack London

That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter
her nor diminish her in Martin's eyes.  In the breathing spell of
the vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self-
analysis, and thereby learned much of himself.  He had discovered
that he loved beauty more than fame, and that what desire he had
for fame was largely for Ruth's sake.  It was for this reason that
his desire for fame was strong.  He wanted to be great in the
world's eyes; "to make good," as he expressed it, in order that the
woman he loved should be proud of him and deem him worthy.

As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of
serving her was to him sufficient wage.  And more than beauty he
loved Ruth.  He considered love the finest thing in the world.  It
was love that had worked the revolution in him, changing him from
an uncouth sailor to a student and an artist; therefore, to him,
the finest and greatest of the three, greater than learning and
artistry, was love.  Already he had discovered that his brain went
beyond Ruth's, just as it went beyond the brains of her brothers,
or the brain of her father.  In spite of every advantage of
university training, and in the face of her bachelorship of arts,
his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or so of
self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of the
world and art and life that she could never hope to possess.

All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor
her love for him.  Love was too fine and noble, and he was too
loyal a lover for him to besmirch love with criticism.  What did
love have to do with Ruth's divergent views on art, right conduct,
the French Revolution, or equal suffrage?  They were mental
processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational.  He
could not belittle love.  He worshipped it.  Love lay on the
mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason.  It was a
sublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and
it came rarely.  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.  Thus, he considered the lover blessed
over all creatures, and it was a delight to him to think of "God's
own mad lover," rising above the things of earth, above wealth and
judgment, public opinion and applause, rising above life itself and
"dying on a kiss."

Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he
reasoned out later.  In the meantime he worked, taking no
recreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a
Spartan.  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, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at
irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she
bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents.  From
detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admire
her as he observed the brave fight she made.  There were but four
rooms in the little house - three, when Martin's was subtracted.
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.  The blinds were
always down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enter
the sacred precinct save on state occasions.  She cooked, and all
ate, in the kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and
ironed clothes on all days of the week except Sunday; for her
income came largely from taking in washing from her more prosperous
neighbors.  Remained the bedroom, small as the one occupied by
Martin, into which she and her seven little ones crowded and slept.
It was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished,
and from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly every
detail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the soft
chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of birds.  Another
source of income to Maria were her cows, two of them, which she
milked night and morning and which gained a surreptitious
livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either side
the public side walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged
boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping
their eyes out for the poundmen.

In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept
house.  Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch,
was the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type-
writing stand.  The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds
of the total space of the room.  The table was flanked on one side
by a gaudy bureau, manufactured for profit and not for service, the
thin veneer of which was shed day by day.  This bureau stood in the
corner, and in the opposite corner, on the table's other flank, was
the kitchen - the oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which
were dishes and cooking utensils, a shelf on the wall for
provisions, and a bucket of water on the floor.  Martin had to
carry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no tap in his
room.  On days when there was much steam to his cooking, the
harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous.  Over the
bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle.  At first
he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva,
loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him
out.  Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling
southeaster drenched the wheel a night-long.  Then he had retreated
with it to his room and slung it aloft.

A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had
accumulated and for which there was no room on the table or under
the table.  Hand in hand with reading, he had developed the habit
of making notes, and so copiously did he make them that there would
have been no existence for him in the confined quarters had he not
rigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the notes
were hung.  Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was a
difficult task.  He could not open the door without first closing
the closet door, and VICE VERSA.  It was impossible for him
anywhere to traverse the room in a straight line.  To go from the
door to the head of the bed was a zigzag course that he was never
quite able to accomplish in the dark without collisions.  Having
settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to steer
sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen.  Next, he sheered to the
left, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too
generous, brought him against the corner of the table.  With a
sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to
the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the
other the table.  When the one chair in the room was at its usual
place before the table, the canal was unnavigable.  When the chair
was not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he
sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the water
boiled, and even becoming skilful enough to manage a paragraph or
two while steak was frying.  Also, so small was the little corner
that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reach
anything he needed.  In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting
down; standing up, he was too often in his own way.

In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything,
he possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the same
time nutritious and cheap.  Pea-soup was a common article in his
diet, as well as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown and
cooked in Mexican style.  Rice, cooked as American housewives never
cook it and can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin's table
at least once a day.  Dried fruits were less expensive than fresh,
and he had usually a pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, for
they took the place of butter on his bread.  Occasionally he graced
his table with a piece of round-steak, or with a soup-bone.
Coffee, without cream or milk, he had twice a day, in the evening
substituting tea; but both coffee and tea were excellently cooked.

There was need for him to be economical.  His vacation had consumed
nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his
market that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the first
returns from his hack-work.  Except at such times as he saw Ruth,
or dropped in to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in
each day accomplishing at least three days' labor of ordinary men.
He slept a scant five hours, and only one with a constitution of
iron could have held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, to
nineteen consecutive hours of toil.  He never lost a moment.  On
the looking-glass were lists of definitions and pronunciations;
when shaving, or dressing, or combing his hair, he conned these
lists over.  Similar lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and
they were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in
washing the dishes.  New lists continually displaced the old ones.
Every strange or partly familiar word encountered in his reading
was immediately jotted down, and later, when a sufficient number
had been accumulated, were typed and pinned to the wall or looking-
glass.  He even carried them in his pockets, and reviewed them at
odd moments on the street, or while waiting in butcher shop or
grocery to be served.

He went farther in the matter.  Reading the works of men who had
arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the
tricks by which they had been achieved - the tricks of narrative,
of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the
epigrams; and of all these he made lists for study.  He did not
ape.  He sought principles.  He drew up lists of effective and
fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many
writers, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism,
and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of his
own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly.  In
similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of
living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like
flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of
the arid desert of common speech.  He sought always for the
principle that lay behind and beneath.  He wanted to know how the
thing was done; after that he could do it for himself.  He was not
content with the fair face of beauty.  He dissected beauty in his
crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated
with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and
learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create
beauty itself.

He was so made that he could work only with understanding.  He
could not work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was
producing and trusting to chance and the star of his genius that
the effect produced should be right and fine.  He had no patience
with chance effects.  He wanted to know why and how.  His was
deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem,
the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in
sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious
possession.  Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.  On the
other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases
that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood
all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and
incommunicable connotations.  Before such he bowed down and
marvelled, knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of
any man.  And no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of
the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he
was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he
did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated.  He knew
full well, from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimate
knowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty was no less
than that of life - nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life
were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same
nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and
wonder.

In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his
essay entitled "Star-dust," in which he had his fling, not at the
principles of criticism, but at the principal critics.  It was
brilliant, deep, philosophical, and deliciously touched with
laughter.  Also it was promptly rejected by the magazines as often
as it was submitted.  But having cleared his mind of it, he went
serenely on his way.  It was a habit he developed, of incubating
and maturing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing into
the type-writer with it.  That it did not see print was a matter a
small moment with him.  The writing of it was the culminating act
of a long mental process, the drawing together of scattered threads
of thought and the final generalizing upon all the data with which
his mind was burdened.  To write such an article was the conscious
effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh
material and problems.  It was in a way akin to that common habit
of men and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who
periodically and volubly break their long-suffering silence and
"have their say" till the last word is said.