Chapter XII

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