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
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 of the moment, with neither past nor future, and certainly without thought of any style but reportorial style, and that certainly is not literature.
To become a reporter now, just as my style is taking form, crystallizing, would be to commit literary suicide.
As it is, every storiette, every word of every storiette, was a violation of myself, of my self-respect, of my respect for beauty.