Martin Eden

on shaky legs, clutching at the air for support, and saying in a voice he did not recognize:-
    “D’ye want any more? Say, d’ye want any more?”
    He was still saying it, over and over,—demanding, entreating, threatening, to know if it wanted any more,—when he felt the fellows of his gang laying hands on him, patting him on the back and trying to put his coat on him. And then came a sudden rush of blackness and oblivion.
    The tin alarm-clock on the table ticked on, but Martin Eden, his face buried on his arms, did not hear it. He heard nothing. He did not think. So absolutely had he relived life that he had fainted just as he fainted years before on the Eighth Street Bridge. For a full minute the blackness and the blankness endured. Then, like one from the dead, he sprang upright, eyes flaming, sweat pouring down his face, shouting:-
    “I licked you, Cheese-Face! It took me eleven years, but I licked you!”
    His knees were trembling under him, he felt faint, and he staggered back to the bed, sinking down and sitting on the edge of it. He was still in the clutch of the past. He looked about the room, perplexed, alarmed, wondering where he was, until he caught sight of the pile of manuscripts in the corner. Then the wheels of memory slipped ahead through four years of time, and he was aware of the present, of the books he had opened and the universe he had won from their pages, of his dreams and ambitions, and of his love for a pale wraith of a girl, sensitive and sheltered and ethereal, who would die of horror did she witness but one moment of what he had just lived through—one moment of all the muck of life through which he had waded.
    He arose to his feet and confronted himself in the looking-glass.
    “And so you arise from the mud, Martin Eden,” he said solemnly. “And you cleanse your eyes in a great brightness, and thrust your shoulders among the stars, doing what all life has done, letting the ‘ape and tiger die’ and wresting highest heritage from all powers that be.”
    He looked more closely at himself and laughed.
    “A bit of hysteria and melodrama, eh?” he queried. “Well, never mind. You licked Cheese-Face, and you’ll lick the editors if it takes twice eleven years to do it in. You can’t stop here. You’ve got to go on. It’s to a finish, you know.”

CHAPTER XVI
    The alarm-clock went off, jerking Martin out of sleep with a suddenness that would have given headache to one with less splendid constitution. Though he slept soundly, he awoke instantly, like a cat, and he awoke eagerly, glad that the five hours of unconsciousness were gone. He hated the oblivion of sleep. There was too much to do, too much of life to live. He grudged every moment of life sleep robbed him of, and before the clock had ceased its clattering he was head and ears in the washbasin and thrilling to the cold bite of the water.
    But he did not follow his regular programme. There was no unfinished story waiting his hand, no new story demanding articulation. He had studied late, and it was nearly time for breakfast. He tried to read a chapter in Fiske, but his brain was restless and he closed the book. To-day witnessed the beginning of the new battle, wherein for some time there would be no writing. He was aware of a sadness akin to that with which one leaves home and family. He looked at the manuscripts in the corner. That was it. He was going away from them, his pitiful, dishonored children that were welcome nowhere. He went over and began to rummage among them, reading snatches here and there, his favorite portions. “The Pot” he honored with reading aloud, as he did “Adventure.” “Joy,” his latest-born, completed the day before and tossed into the corner for lack of stamps, won his keenest approbation.
    “I can’t understand,” he murmured. “Or maybe it’s the editors who can’t understand. There’s nothing wrong with that. They publish worse every month. Everything they publish is worse—nearly everything, anyway.”
    After breakfast he put the typewriter in its case and carried it down into Oakland.
    “I owe a month on it,” he told the clerk in the store. “But you tell the manager I’m going to work and that I’ll be in in a month or so and straighten up.”
    He crossed on the ferry to San Francisco and made his way to an employment office. “Any kind of work, no trade,” he told the agent; and was interrupted by a newcomer, dressed rather foppishly, as some workingmen dress