Chapter IV

CHAPTER IV

Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his
brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and
entered his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-
stand, and one chair. Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a
servant when his wife could do the work. Besides, the servant's
room enabled them to take in two boarders instead of one. Martin
placed the Swinburne and Browning on the chair, took off his coat,
and sat down on the bed. A screeching of asthmatic springs greeted
the weight of his body, but he did not notice them. He started to
take off his shoes, but fell to staring at the white plaster wall
opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty brown where rain had
leaked through the roof. On this befouled background visions began
to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and stared long, till his
lips began to move and he murmured, "Ruth."

"Ruth." He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful.
It delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition
of it. "Ruth." It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with.
Each time he murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing
the foul wall with a golden radiance. This radiance did not stop
at the wall. It extended on into infinity, and through its golden
depths his soul went questing after hers. The best that was in him
was out in splendid flood. The very thought of her ennobled and
purified him, made him better, and made him want to be better.
This was new to him. He had never known women who had made him
better. They had always had the counter effect of making him
beastly. He did not know that many of them had done their best,
bad as it was. Never having been conscious of himself, he did not
know that he had that in his being that drew love from women and
which had been the cause of their reaching out for his youth.
Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about
them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had
been better because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he
lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always
reached out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was not just
to them, nor to himself. But he, who for the first time was
becoming conscious of himself, was in no condition to judge, and he
burned with shame as he stared at the vision of his infamy.

He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-
glass over the wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked
again, long and carefully. It was the first time he had ever
really seen himself. His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that
moment they had been filled with the ever changing panorama of the
world, at which