A third week went by, and Martin loathed himself, and loathed life. He was oppressed by a sense of failure. There was reason for the editors refusing his stuff. He could see that clearly now, and laugh at himself and the dreams he had dreamed. Ruth returned his "Sea Lyrics" by mail.
He read her letter apathetically. She did her best to say how much she liked them and that they were beautiful. But she could not lie, and she could not disguise the truth from herself. She knew they were failures, and he read her disapproval in every perfunctory and unenthusiastic line of her letter. And she was right. He was firmly convinced of it as he read the poems over. Beauty and wonder had departed from him, and as he read the poems he caught himself puzzling as to what he had had in mind when he wrote them. His audacities of phrase struck him as grotesque, his felicities of expression were monstrosities, and everything was absurd, unreal, and impossible. He would have burned the "Sea Lyrics" on the spot, had his will been strong enough to set them aflame. There was the engine-room, but the exertion of carrying them to the furnace was not worth while. All his exertion was used in washing other persons"
clothes. He did not have any left for private affairs.
He resolved that when Sunday came he would pull himself together and answer Ruth"s letter. But Sat.u.r.day afternoon, after work was finished and he had taken a bath, the desire to forget overpowered him. "I guess I"ll go down and see how Joe"s getting on," was the way he put it to himself; and in the same moment he knew that he lied. But he did not have the energy to consider the lie. If he had had the energy, he would have refused to consider the lie, because he wanted to forget. He started for the village slowly and casually, increasing his pace in spite of himself as he neared the saloon.
"I thought you was on the water-wagon," was Joe"s greeting.
Martin did not deign to offer excuses, but called for whiskey, filling his own gla.s.s br.i.m.m.i.n.g before he pa.s.sed the bottle.
"Don"t take all night about it," he said roughly.
The other was dawdling with the bottle, and Martin refused to wait for him, tossing the gla.s.s off in a gulp and refilling it.
"Now, I can wait for you," he said grimly; "but hurry up."
Joe hurried, and they drank together.
"The work did it, eh?" Joe queried.
Martin refused to discuss the matter.
"It"s fair h.e.l.l, I know," the other went on, "but I kind of hate to see you come off the wagon, Mart. Well, here"s how!"
Martin drank on silently, biting out his orders and invitations and awing the barkeeper, an effeminate country youngster with watery blue eyes and hair parted in the middle.
"It"s something scandalous the way they work us poor devils," Joe was remarking. "If I didn"t bowl up, I"d break loose an" burn down the shebang. My bowlin" up is all that saves "em, I can tell you that."
But Martin made no answer. A few more drinks, and in his brain he felt the maggots of intoxication beginning to crawl. Ah, it was living, the first breath of life he had breathed in three weeks. His dreams came back to him. Fancy came out of the darkened room and lured him on, a thing of flaming brightness. His mirror of vision was silver-clear, a flashing, dazzling palimpsest of imagery. Wonder and beauty walked with him, hand in hand, and all power was his. He tried to tell it to Joe, but Joe had visions of his own, infallible schemes whereby he would escape the slavery of laundry-work and become himself the owner of a great steam laundry.
"I tell yeh, Mart, they won"t be no kids workin" in my laundry--not on yer life. An" they won"t be no workin" a livin" soul after six P.M. You hear me talk! They"ll be machinery enough an" hands enough to do it all in decent workin" hours, an" Mart, s"help me, I"ll make yeh superintendent of the shebang--the whole of it, all of it. Now here"s the scheme. I get on the water-wagon an" save my money for two years--save an" then--"
But Martin turned away, leaving him to tell it to the barkeeper, until that worthy was called away to furnish drinks to two farmers who, coming in, accepted Martin"s invitation. Martin dispensed royal largess, inviting everybody up, farm-hands, a stableman, and the gardener"s a.s.sistant from the hotel, the barkeeper, and the furtive hobo who slid in like a shadow and like a shadow hovered at the end of the bar.
CHAPTER XVIII
Monday morning, Joe groaned over the first truck load of clothes to the washer.
"I say," he began.
"Don"t talk to me," Martin snarled.
"I"m sorry, Joe," he said at noon, when they knocked off for dinner.
Tears came into the other"s eyes.
"That"s all right, old man," he said. "We"re in h.e.l.l, an" we can"t help ourselves. An", you know, I kind of like you a whole lot. That"s what made it--hurt. I cottoned to you from the first."
Martin shook his hand.
"Let"s quit," Joe suggested. "Let"s chuck it, an" go hoboin". I ain"t never tried it, but it must be dead easy. An" nothin" to do. Just think of it, nothin" to do. I was sick once, typhoid, in the hospital, an" it was beautiful. I wish I"d get sick again."
The week dragged on. The hotel was full, and extra "fancy starch" poured in upon them. They performed prodigies of valor. They fought late each night under the electric lights, bolted their meals, and even got in a half hour"s work before breakfast. Martin no longer took his cold baths.
Every moment was drive, drive, drive, and Joe was the masterful shepherd of moments, herding them carefully, never losing one, counting them over like a miser counting gold, working on in a frenzy, toil-mad, a feverish machine, aided ably by that other machine that thought of itself as once having been one Martin Eden, a man.
But it was only at rare moments that Martin was able to think. The house of thought was closed, its windows boarded up, and he was its shadowy caretaker. He was a shadow. Joe was right. They were both shadows, and this was the unending limbo of toil. Or was it a dream? Sometimes, in the steaming, sizzling heat, as he swung the heavy irons back and forth over the white garments, it came to him that it was a dream. In a short while, or maybe after a thousand years or so, he would awake, in his little room with the ink-stained table, and take up his writing where he had left off the day before. Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the awakening would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind blowing through his flesh.
Came Sat.u.r.day and its hollow victory at three o"clock.
"Guess I"ll go down an" get a gla.s.s of beer," Joe said, in the queer, monotonous tones that marked his week-end collapse.
Martin seemed suddenly to wake up. He opened the kit bag and oiled his wheel, putting graphite on the chain and adjusting the bearings. Joe was halfway down to the saloon when Martin pa.s.sed by, bending low over the handle-bars, his legs driving the ninety-six gear with rhythmic strength, his face set for seventy miles of road and grade and dust. He slept in Oakland that night, and on Sunday covered the seventy miles back. And on Monday morning, weary, he began the new week"s work, but he had kept sober.
A fifth week pa.s.sed, and a sixth, during which he lived and toiled as a machine, with just a spark of something more in him, just a glimmering bit of soul, that compelled him, at each week-end, to scorch off the hundred and forty miles. But this was not rest. It was super-machinelike, and it helped to crush out the glimmering bit of soul that was all that was left him from former life. At the end of the seventh week, without intending it, too weak to resist, he drifted down to the village with Joe and drowned life and found life until Monday morning.
Again, at the week-ends, he ground out the one hundred and forty miles, obliterating the numbness of too great exertion by the numbness of still greater exertion. At the end of three months he went down a third time to the village with Joe. He forgot, and lived again, and, living, he saw, in clear illumination, the beast he was making of himself--not by the drink, but by the work. The drink was an effect, not a cause. It followed inevitably upon the work, as the night follows upon the day. Not by becoming a toil-beast could he win to the heights, was the message the whiskey whispered to him, and he nodded approbation. The whiskey was wise. It told secrets on itself.
He called for paper and pencil, and for drinks all around, and while they drank his very good health, he clung to the bar and scribbled.
"A telegram, Joe," he said. "Read it."
Joe read it with a drunken, quizzical leer. But what he read seemed to sober him. He looked at the other reproachfully, tears oozing into his eyes and down his cheeks.
"You ain"t goin" back on me, Mart?" he queried hopelessly.
Martin nodded, and called one of the loungers to him to take the message to the telegraph office.
"Hold on," Joe muttered thickly. "Lemme think."
He held on to the bar, his legs wobbling under him, Martin"s arm around him and supporting him, while he thought.
"Make that two laundrymen," he said abruptly. "Here, lemme fix it."
"What are you quitting for?" Martin demanded.
"Same reason as you."
"But I"m going to sea. You can"t do that."
"Nope," was the answer, "but I can hobo all right, all right."
Martin looked at him searchingly for a moment, then cried:-
"By G.o.d, I think you"re right! Better a hobo than a beast of toil. Why, man, you"ll live. And that"s more than you ever did before."