The Man behind the Legend: Memoirs, Autobiographical Novels & Essays of Jack London. Jack London

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СКАЧАТЬ began; then abruptly changed his mind.

      He saw before him an unhappy girl, knew the futility of attempting to convince her husband or her, and, though the whole situation was absurd and preposterous, he resolved to surrender.

      “All right,” he announced, tearing the manuscript into half a dozen pieces and throwing it into the waste-basket.

      He contented himself with the knowledge that even then the original type-written manuscript was reposing in the office of a New York magazine. Marian and her husband would never know, and neither himself nor they nor the world would lose if the pretty, harmless poem ever were published.

      Marian, starting to reach into the waste-basket, refrained.

      “Can I?” she pleaded.

      He nodded his head, regarding her thoughtfully as she gathered the torn pieces of manuscript and tucked them into the pocket of her jacket—ocular evidence of the success of her mission. She reminded him of Lizzie Connolly, though there was less of fire and gorgeous flaunting life in her than in that other girl of the working class whom he had seen twice. But they were on a par, the pair of them, in dress and carriage, and he smiled with inward amusement at the caprice of his fancy which suggested the appearance of either of them in Mrs. Morse’s drawing-room. The amusement faded, and he was aware of a great loneliness. This sister of his and the Morse drawing-room were milestones of the road he had travelled. And he had left them behind. He glanced affectionately about him at his few books. They were all the comrades left to him.

      “Hello, what’s that?” he demanded in startled surprise.

      Marian repeated her question.

      “Why don’t I go to work?” He broke into a laugh that was only half-hearted. “That Hermann of yours has been talking to you.”

      She shook her head.

      “Don’t lie,” he commanded, and the nod of her head affirmed his charge.

      “Well, you tell that Hermann of yours to mind his own business; that when I write poetry about the girl he’s keeping company with it’s his business, but that outside of that he’s got no say so. Understand?

      “So you don’t think I’ll succeed as a writer, eh?” he went on. “You think I’m no good?—that I’ve fallen down and am a disgrace to the family?”

      “I think it would be much better if you got a job,” she said firmly, and he saw she was sincere. “Hermann says—”

      “Damn Hermann!” he broke out good-naturedly. “What I want to know is when you’re going to get married. Also, you find out from your Hermann if he will deign to permit you to accept a wedding present from me.”

      He mused over the incident after she had gone, and once or twice broke out into laughter that was bitter as he saw his sister and her betrothed, all the members of his own class and the members of Ruth’s class, directing their narrow little lives by narrow little formulas—herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives by one another’s opinions, failing of being individuals and of really living life because of the childlike formulas by which they were enslaved. He summoned them before him in apparitional procession: Bernard Higginbotham arm in arm with Mr. Butler, Hermann von Schmidt cheek by jowl with Charley Hapgood, and one by one and in pairs he judged them and dismissed them—judged them by the standards of intellect and morality he had learned from the books. Vainly he asked: Where are the great souls, the great men and women? He found them not among the careless, gross, and stupid intelligences that answered the call of vision to his narrow room. He felt a loathing for them such as Circe must have felt for her swine. When he had dismissed the last one and thought himself alone, a late-comer entered, unexpected and unsummoned. Martin watched him and saw the stiff-rim, the square-cut, double-breasted coat and the swaggering shoulders, of the youthful hoodlum who had once been he.

      “You were like all the rest, young fellow,” Martin sneered. “Your morality and your knowledge were just the same as theirs. You did not think and act for yourself. Your opinions, like your clothes, were ready made; your acts were shaped by popular approval. You were cock of your gang because others acclaimed you the real thing. You fought and ruled the gang, not because you liked to,—you know you really despised it,—but because the other fellows patted you on the shoulder. You licked Cheese-Face because you wouldn’t give in, and you wouldn’t give in partly because you were an abysmal brute and for the rest because you believed what every one about you believed, that the measure of manhood was the carnivorous ferocity displayed in injuring and marring fellow-creatures’ anatomies. Why, you whelp, you even won other fellows’ girls away from them, not because you wanted the girls, but because in the marrow of those about you, those who set your moral pace, was the instinct of the wild stallion and the bull-seal. Well, the years have passed, and what do you think about it now?”

      As if in reply, the vision underwent a swift metamorphosis. 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. The apparition was very like his present self, and, as he regarded it, he noted the student-lamp by which it was illuminated, and the book over which it pored. He glanced at the title and read, “The Science of AEsthetics.” Next, he entered into the apparition, trimmed the student-lamp, and himself went on reading “The Science of AEsthetics.”

      Chapter XXX

       Table of Contents

      On a beautiful fall day, a day of similar Indian summer to that which had seen their love declared the year before, Martin read his “Love-cycle” to Ruth. It was in the afternoon, and, as before, they had ridden out to their favorite knoll in the hills. Now and again she had interrupted his reading with exclamations of pleasure, and now, as he laid the last sheet of manuscript with its fellows, he waited her judgment.

      She delayed to speak, and at last she spoke haltingly, hesitating to frame in words the harshness of her thought.

      “I think they are beautiful, very beautiful,” she said; “but you can’t sell them, can you? You see what I mean,” she said, almost pleaded. “This writing of yours is not practical. Something is the matter—maybe it is with the market—that prevents you from earning a living by it. And please, dear, don’t misunderstand me. I am flattered, and made proud, and all that—I could not be a true woman were it otherwise—that you should write these poems to me. But they do not make our marriage possible. Don’t you see, Martin? Don’t think me mercenary. It is love, the thought of our future, with which I am burdened. A whole year has gone by since we learned we loved each other, and our wedding day is no nearer. Don’t think me immodest in thus talking about our wedding, for really I have my heart, all that I am, at stake. Why don’t you try to get work on a newspaper, if you are so bound up in your writing? Why not become a reporter?—for a while, at least?”

      “It would spoil my style,” was his answer, in a low, monotonous voice. “You have no idea how I’ve worked for style.”

      “But those storiettes,” she argued. “You called them hack-work. You wrote many of them. Didn’t they spoil your style?”

      “No, the cases are different. The storiettes were ground out, jaded, at the end of a long day of application to style. But a reporter’s work is all hack from morning till night, is the one paramount thing of life. And it is a whirlwind life, the life СКАЧАТЬ