MARTIN EDEN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14062, 17 May 1909, Page 3

MARTIN EDEN.

PUBLISHED BT SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT.

wq> I BY JACK LONDON, Author of " The Sea Wolf." The Call of the Wild," " Before .Adam," "White Fang." etc., etc. [COPYRIGHT.] CHAPTER XXVl.—(Continued.) A great temptation assailed Ruth. Iu an insistent way site had caught glimpses of the large, easy-going side of bis nature, and i she felt sure, if she asked him to cease attempting to write, that he would grant her wish. In tho swift instant that elapsed the wards trembled on her lips. But she did not utter them. She was not quite bravo enough, she did not quite dare. Instead, she leaned toward him to meet him, and in his arms murmured: " You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own. lam sure smoking hurts you ; and besides, it is not good to be a slave to anything, to a drug least of all." " I shall always be jour slave," he smiled. '"In which case, I shall begin issuing my commands." Slit) looked at him mischievously, though deep down she was already regretting that she had not preferred her largest request. "1 live but to obey, your majesty." '"Well, then, my first commandment is, THou shall not omit to shave every day. Look how you have scratched my cheek." And so it ended in caresses and lovelaughter. But she made one point, and she could not expect to make more than one at a time. She felt a woman's pride in that she had made him stop smoking. Another time _ she would persuade him to take a position, for had lie not said ho would do anything she asked? She left his side to explore the room, examining the clothes-line of notes over- • head, learning the mystery of. the tackle ] used for suspending his wheel under the | ceiling, and being saddened by the heap of manuscripts under the table which represented to her just so much wasted time. The oil-stove won her admiration, but on investigating the food shelves she found them empty. . " Why, you haven't .anything to cat, you poor dear," she said with tender compassion. "You must be starving." " I store my food in Maria's safe and in her pantry," he lied. "It keeps better, there. No danger of my starving. Look at that."

She had come back to his side, and she saw him double his arm at the elbow, the biceps crawling under shirt-sleeve and swelling into a knot of muscle, heavy and hard. The sight repelled her. Sentimentally, she disliked it. But her pulse, her blood, every fibre of her, loved it and yearned for it, and, in the old inexplicable way, she leaned toward him, not away from him. And in the moment that followed, when he crushed her in his arms, the brain of her, concerned with the superficial aspects of life, was in revolt; while the heart of her, the woman of her, concerned with life itself, - exulted triumphantly. It was in moments like this that she felt to the uttermost the greatness of her love for Martin, for it was almost a swoon of delight to her to feel his strong arms about her, holding her tightly, hurting her with the grip of their fervour. At " such moments she found justification for her treason to her standards for her violation of her own high ideals, and, most of all, for her tacit disobedience to her mother and father. They did not want her to marry this man. It shocked them that she should love him. It shocked her, too, sometimes, when she was apart from him, a cool and reasoning creature. With him, she loved him— truth, at times a vexed and worried love; but love it was, a love that was stronger than'she. -- '

" This La Grippe Is nothing," he was saying. "It hurts a bit. and gives one a nasty headache, but it. ■ doesn't compare with break-bone fever." . -; >,

i "Have you had that, too?"-she queried absently, intent on the Heaven-sent justification she was finding in his arms; And 60, with absent queries, she led him on, till suddenly his words startled her.

He had had fever in a secret colony of thirty lepers on one of the Hawaiian Islands.

"But why did you go there?" he.demanded. '

Such royal carelessness of body seemed criminal. 1

"Because I didn't know," he answered. "I never dreamed of lepers. When I deserted the schooner and landed on the beach, I headed inland for some place of hiding. For three days I lived off guavas, ohia-apples, and bananas, all of which grew wild in the jungle. On the fourth day I found the trail— mere foot-trail. It "led inland, and it led up. It was the way I wanted to go, and it showed signs of recent travel. At one place it ran along the crest of a ridge that, was no more than a knife-edge. The trail wasn't three feet 1 -wide on the crest, and on either side' the ridge fell away in precipices hundreds of feet deep. One man, with plenty of ammunition, - could have held it against l a hundred thousand. "It was the only way in to the hiding place. Three hours after I found the trail I was there, in a little mountain valley, a pocket in the ' midst of lava peaks. The whole place was terraced for taro-palches, fruit trees grew there, and there were eight or ten grass huts.' But as soon as I saw the inhabitants I knew what I'd struck. One sight of them was enough." " "What did yon do?" Ruth demanded breathlessly, listening,' like any Desdemona, appalled and fascinated. "Nothing for me to do. Their leader was a kind old fellow, pretty far gone, but lie ruled like a king. He had discovered the little valley and founded the settlement of which was against the law. But he had guns, plenty of ammunition, and those kanakas, trained to the shooting of wild cattle and wild pig, were dead shots. No, there wasn't any running away for Martin Eden. He stayedfor three months." X •

" But how did you escape?" " He'd have been there yet, if it hadn't been for a . girl there, a half-Chinese, quarter-white and quarter-Hawaiian. She was a beauty, poor thing, and well-edu-cated. Her mother in Honolulu was worth , a million or 60. Well, this girl got me away at, last. Her mother financed the settlement, you see, so the girl wasn't afraid of being punished for letting mo go. But she made-me swear, first, never to reveal the hiding-place; and I never have. This is the first time 1 have even mentioned it. The girl just had the first signs of leprosy. The fingers of her right hand were slightly, twisted, and there was a email spot on her arm. That was all. I guess she is dead now." " But wasn't yc.u frightened? And weren't you glad* to get away without catching that dreadful disease?' "Well," he confessed, "I was a bit shivery at first; but I got used to it. _ I used 'to feel sorry for that poor girl, though. , That made me forget_ to be afraid. She was such a beauty, in spirit as well as in appearance, and she was only slightly touched; yet she was doomed to lie there, living the life of a primitive savage and rotting slowly away. Leprosy is far more terrible .than you can imagine it." .

"Poor thing," Ruth murmured softly. "It's a wonder she let you get away." "How do you ncan'r" Martin asked unwittingly. ' - ■ - , " ."Because she must have loved you," Ruth said, still .softly. "Candidly, now, didn't she?" Martin's sunburn had been bleached by his work in the laundry and by the indoor life he was living, while the hunger and the sickness had made his , face even pale; and across this pallor flowed the soft wave of a blush. He was opening his mouth to speak, but Ruth shut him -off.

"Never mind, don't answer; it's not necessary," she laughed. But it seemed to him there was something metallic in her laughter, and that the light in her eyes was cold. On the spur of the moment it . reminded him of v, * gale lie had onco experienced in tho

North Pacific. And for the moment the apparition of tho gale rose before his eyes —a gale at night, with a clear sky and under a full moon, the huge seas glinting coldly in the moonlight. Next, he saw the girl in the leper refuge and remembered it was for love of him that she had let him go. "She was noble," he said simply. "She gave me life." , That was all of the incident, but he heard Ruth muffle a dry sob ill her throat, and noticed that she turned her f<ico away to gaze out of the window. When she turned it back to him it was composed, and there was no hint of the gale in her eyes. " I'm such a silly," she said plaintively. " But, I can't help' it. 1 do so love you, Martin, .1 do, I do. I shall grow more catholic in time, but at present I can't help being jealous of thoso ghosts of the past, and you know your past is full of ghosts. ( " It must be," .she silenced, hie protest. "It could not be otherwise. And there's poor Arthur motioning mo to come. He's tired waiting. And now good-bye, dear." There's some kind of a mixture, put up in the druggists, that helps men to stop the use of tobacco," she called back from the door, " and I am going to send you some." The door closed, but opened again. _ " 1 do, I do," she whispered to lum; and this time she was really gone. Maria, with worshipful eyes that none the loss were keen to note the texture of Ruth's garments and the cut of them (a cut unknown that produced an effect mysteriously beautiful), saw her to w.o carriage. The crowd of disappointed urchins stared till the carriage disappeared from view, then transferred their stare to Maria, who had abruptly become the most, important person on the street, • But it was one of her progeny who blasted Maria's reputation by announcing that the grand visitors had "been for her lodgei. After that Maria dropped back into her old obscurity, and Martin began to notice the respectful manner in which ho was regarded by the small fry of the neighbourhood. As for Maria, Martin rose in her estimation a full hundred per cent , am held the Portuguese grocer witnessed that afternoon carriage-call he would lowed Martin an additional thrce-dollais-and-eighty-five-cents' worth of credit. CHAPTER XXVII. The sun of Martin's good fortune rose. The day after Ruth's visit, he received a cheque'for three dollars from a.New* ork •scandal weekly in payment of tnree ot hi triolets. Two days later a, ik lished La Chicago, accepted his iie^ r3 Hunters, promising to pay J- 0 . for it on publication. The price was s • but it was the first article he had written his very first attempt to express his thought'on the printed page To cap „..„hinc the adventure serial for b °> s > his second attempt was accepted be ore the end of the week by a juvenile monthly call in itself 4 Youth and Age. J*., SSX serial was 21,000 wordj and" they offered to pay him eixteen *;%' n S-nL lication, which was something like is cents ■ThSnd ™rd Sl but it -s cqun lytnto that it was the second thin" he had at tempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of ite clu*wy wor

l€ BuT even his earliest methods "° fc marked with the clumsiness of med tj. What characterised them was the nets 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, bo it was that Martin was glad to sell his earl} efforts for songs. He knew them for what thev were, and it had not.taken him lo „ to acnuire this knowledge. W hat. he pinned his faith to was his later work. He had striven to be something more than a mere writer of magazine fiction, tie had sought to equip himself with tools of artistrv. On the other hand he had not sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his strength, by avoiding excessive strength. Nor had he departed from his love of reality. His work was realism, though, he had endeavoured to fuse with it the fancies and beauties ot imagination. What he sought, was an impassioned realism, shot .through with human aspiration and faith. hat he wanted was life as it was, with all its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left, in. He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated i of man as a god, ignoring hie earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams and divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred, in great singleness of eight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the truth, though it flattered* not the school of god, while it challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his story, " Adventure," which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was in an essay, "God and Clod, that lie had expressed his 'views on the whole general subject. But "Adventure." and all that he deemed his best work, still went begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in his eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories, two of which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his best work. To him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic, though invested with all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their power. This investiture of the grotesque ana impossible with reality , he looked upon as a trick—a skilful trick at best- Great literature could not reside in such a field. Their artistry was high, but he denied the worthwhileness of artistry when divorced from humanness. The trick had been to fling over the face of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in the halfdozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written before he. emerged upon the high peaks of "Adventure," "Joy," "The Plot," and "Wine of Life." The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a precarious existehce against the arrival of .the "White Mouse" cheque. He cashed the first cheque with the suspicious Portuguese grocer, paying a dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars between the baker and the fruit store. Martin was not yet rich enough to afford meat, and he was on slim allowance when the '.'White Mouse" cheque arrived. He was divided on the cashing of it. He had never been in a bank in his life, much less been in one on business, and he had a, naive and childlike desire to walk into one of the big banks down in Oakland and fling down his endorsed cheque for forty dollars. On the other hand,, practical common sense ruled that he should cash it with his grocer, and thereby make an impression that would later result in an increase of credit. Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying his bill with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of jingling coin. Also, he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his suit and his bicycle, paid one month's rent on the typewriter, and paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month in advance. This left him in his pocket, for emergencies, a balance of nearly three dollars.

In itself, this small eum seemed a fortune. Immediately on recovering his clothes ho had gone to see Ruth, and on. the way he could not refrain from jingling the little handful of silver in his pocket. He had been eo long without money that, like a rescued starving man who cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight, Martin could not keep hie. hand off the silver. He was not mean, nor avaricious, but the money meant more than so many dollars and cents. It .stood for success, and the eagles stamped upon the coins were to him so many winged victories.

It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world. It certainly appeared more beautiful to him. For weeks it had been a very dull and sombre world ; but, now, with nearly all debts paid, three dollars jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the consciousness of success, the sun shone bright and warm, and even a rainsquall that soaked unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry happening to him. When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often upon the thousands he knew were starving the world over ; but now that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands starving was no longer pregnant in his brain. He forgot about (hem, and, being in love, remembered the countless lovers in the world. Without deliberately thinking about it, motifs for love-lyrics began to agitato his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, he got off the electric car, without veyation, two blocks beyond his crossing. To be continued daily.)