Chapter XII

Early one evening, struggling with a sonnet that twisted all awry
the beauty and thought that trailed in glow and vapor through his
brain, Martin was called to the telephone.

"It's a lady's voice, a fine lady's," Mr. Higginbotham, who had
called him, jeered.

Martin went to the telephone in the corner of the room, and felt a
wave of warmth rush through him as he heard Ruth's voice.  In his
battle with the sonnet he had forgotten her existence, and at the
sound of her voice his love for her smote him like a sudden blow.
And such a voice! - delicate and sweet, like a strain of music
heard far off and faint, or, better, like a bell of silver, a
perfect tone, crystal-pure.  No mere woman had a voice like that.
There was something celestial about it, and it came from other
worlds.  He could scarcely hear what it said, so ravished was he,
though he controlled his face, for he knew that Mr. Higginbotham's
ferret eyes were fixed upon him.

It was not much that Ruth wanted to say - merely that Norman had
been going to take her to a lecture that night, but that he had a
headache, and she was so disappointed, and she had the tickets, and
that if he had no other engagement, would he be good enough to take
her?

Would he!  He fought to suppress the eagerness in his voice.  It
was amazing.  He had always seen her in her own house.  And he had
never dared to ask her to go anywhere with him.  Quite
irrelevantly, still at the telephone and talking with her, he felt
an overpowering desire to die for her, and visions of heroic
sacrifice shaped and dissolved in his whirling brain.  He loved her
so much, so terribly, so hopelessly.  In that moment of mad
happiness that she should go out with him, go to a lecture with him
- with him, Martin Eden - she soared so far above him that there
seemed nothing else for him to do than die for her.  It was the
only fit way in which he could express the tremendous and lofty
emotion he felt for her.  It was the sublime abnegation of true
love that comes to all lovers, and it came to him there, at the
telephone, in a whirlwind of fire and glory; and to die for her, he
felt, was to have lived and loved well.  And he was only twenty-
one, and he had never been in love before.

His hand trembled as he hung up the receiver, and he was weak from
the organ which had stirred him.  His eyes were shining like an
angel's, and his face was transfigured, purged of all earthly
dross, and pure and holy.

"Makin' dates outside, eh?" his brother-in-law sneered.  "You know
what that means.  You'll be in the police court yet."

But Martin could not come down from the height.  Not even the
bestiality of the allusion could bring him back to earth.  Anger
and hurt were beneath him.  He had seen a great vision and was as a
god, and he could feel only profound and awful pity for this maggot
of a man.  He did not look at him, and though his eyes passed over
him, he did not see him; and as in a dream he passed out of the
room to dress.  It was not until he had reached his own room and
was tying his necktie that he became aware of a sound that lingered
unpleasantly in his ears.  On investigating this sound he
identified it as the final snort of Bernard Higginbotham, which
somehow had not penetrated to his brain before.

As Ruth's front door closed behind them and he came down the steps
with her, he found himself greatly perturbed.  It was not unalloyed
bliss, taking her to the lecture.  He did not know what he ought to
do.  He had seen, on the streets, with persons of her class, that
the women took the men's arms.  But then, again, he had seen them
when they didn't; and he wondered if it was only in the evening
that arms were taken, or only between husbands and wives and
relatives.

Just before he reached the sidewalk, he remembered Minnie.  Minnie
had always been a stickler.  She had called him down the second
time she walked out with him, because he had gone along on the
inside, and she had laid the law down to him that a gentleman
always walked on the outside - when he was with a lady.  And Minnie
had made a practice of kicking his heels, whenever they crossed
from one side of the street to the other, to remind him to get over
on the outside.  He wondered where she had got that item of
etiquette, and whether it had filtered down from above and was all
right.

It wouldn't do any harm to try it, he decided, by the time they had
reached the sidewalk; and he swung behind Ruth and took up his
station on the outside.  Then the other problem presented itself.
Should he offer her his arm?  He had never offered anybody his arm
in his life.  The girls he had known never took the fellows' arms.
For the first several times they walked freely, side by side, and
after that it was arms around the waists, and heads against the
fellows' shoulders where the streets were unlighted.  But this was
different.  She wasn't that kind of a girl.  He must do something.

He crooked the arm next to her - crooked it very slightly and with
secret tentativeness, not invitingly, but just casually, as though
he was accustomed to walk that way.  And then the wonderful thing
happened.  He felt her hand upon his arm.  Delicious thrills ran
through him at the contact, and for a few sweet moments it seemed
that he had left the solid earth and was flying with her through
the air.  But he was soon back again, perturbed by a new
complication.  They were crossing the street.  This would put him
on the inside.  He should be on the outside.  Should he therefore
drop her arm and change over?  And if he did so, would he have to
repeat the manoeuvre the next time?  And the next?  There was
something wrong about it, and he resolved not to caper about and
play the fool.  Yet he was not satisfied with his conclusion, and
when he found himself on the inside, he talked quickly and
earnestly, making a show of being carried away by what he was
saying, so that, in case he was wrong in not changing sides, his
enthusiasm would seem the cause for his carelessness.

As they crossed Broadway, he came face to face with a new problem.
In the blaze of the electric lights, he saw Lizzie Connolly and her
giggly friend.  Only for an instant he hesitated, then his hand
went up and his hat came off.  He could not be disloyal to his
kind, and it was to more than Lizzie Connolly that his hat was
lifted.  She nodded and looked at him boldly, not with soft and
gentle eyes like Ruth's, but with eyes that were handsome and hard,
and that swept on past him to Ruth and itemized her face and dress
and station.  And he was aware that Ruth looked, too, with quick
eyes that were timid and mild as a dove's, but which saw, in a look
that was a flutter on and past, the working-class girl in her cheap
finery and under the strange hat that all working-class girls were
wearing just then.

"What a pretty girl!" Ruth said a moment later.

Martin could have blessed her, though he said:-

"I don't know.  I guess it's all a matter of personal taste, but
she doesn't strike me as being particularly pretty."

"Why, there isn't one woman in ten thousand with features as
regular as hers.  They are splendid.  Her face is as clear-cut as a
cameo.  And her eyes are beautiful."

"Do you think so?" Martin queried absently, for to him there was
only one beautiful woman in the world, and she was beside him, her
hand upon his arm.

"Do I think so?  If that girl had proper opportunity to dress, Mr.
Eden, and if she were taught how to carry herself, you would be
fairly dazzled by her, and so would all men."

"She would have to be taught how to speak," he commented, "or else
most of the men wouldn't understand her.  I'm sure you couldn't
understand a quarter of what she said if she just spoke naturally."

"Nonsense!  You are as bad as Arthur when you try to make your
point."

"You forget how I talked when you first met me.  I have learned a
new language since then.  Before that time I talked as that girl
talks.  Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in
your language to explain that you do not know that other girl's
language.  And do you know why she carries herself the way she
does?  I think about such things now, though I never used to think
about them, and I am beginning to understand - much."

"But why does she?"

"She has worked long hours for years at machines.  When one's body
is young, it is very pliable, and hard work will mould it like
putty according to the nature of the work.  I can tell at a glance
the trades of many workingmen I meet on the street.  Look at me.
Why am I rolling all about the shop?  Because of the years I put in
on the sea.  If I'd put in the same years cow-punching, with my
body young and pliable, I wouldn't be rolling now, but I'd be bow-
legged.  And so with that girl.  You noticed that her eyes were
what I might call hard.  She has never been sheltered.  She has had
to take care of herself, and a young girl can't take care of
herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like - like yours, for
example."

"I think you are right," Ruth said in a low voice.  "And it is too
bad.  She is such a pretty girl."

He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity.  And then he
remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his
fortune that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm
to a lecture.

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-
glass, that night when he got back to his room.  He gazed at
himself long and curiously.  Who are you?  What are you?  Where do
you belong?  You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly.
You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and
vulgar, and unbeautiful.  You belong with the oxen and the drudges,
in dirty surroundings among smells and stenches.  There are the
stale vegetables now.  Those potatoes are rotting.  Smell them,
damn you, smell them.  And yet you dare to open the books, to
listen to beautiful music, to learn to love beautiful paintings, to
speak good English, to think thoughts that none of your own kind
thinks, to tear yourself away from the oxen and the Lizzie
Connollys and to love a pale spirit of a woman who is a million
miles beyond you and who lives in the stars!  Who are you? and what
are you? damn you!  And are you going to make good?

He shook his fist at himself in the glass, and sat down on the edge
of the bed to dream for a space with wide eyes.  Then he got out
note-book and algebra and lost himself in quadratic equations,
while the hours slipped by, and the stars dimmed, and the gray of
dawn flooded against his window.