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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
of the world, and wished that Ruth were there to share it with
him. He decided that he would describe to her many of the bits of South
Sea beauty. The creative spirit in him flamed up at the thought and
urged that he recreate this beauty for a wider audience than Ruth. And
then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea. He would write. He
would be one of the eyes through which the world saw, one of the ears
through which it heard, one of the hearts through which it felt. He
would write--everything--poetry and prose, fiction and description, and
plays like Shakespeare. There was career and the way to win to Ruth. The
men of literature were the worlds giants, and he conceived them to be
far finer than the Mr. Butlers who earned thirty thousand a year and
could be Supreme Court justices if they wanted to.
Once the idea had germinated, it mastered him, and the return voyage to
San Francisco was like a dream. He was drunken with unguessed power and
felt that he could do anything. In the midst of the great and lonely sea
he gained perspective. Clearly, and for the first lime, he saw Ruth and
her world. It was all visualized in his mind as a concrete thing which
he could take up in his two hands and turn around and about and examine.
There was much that was dim and nebulous in that world, but he saw it as
a whole and not in detail, and he saw, also, the way to master it. To
write! The thought was fire in him. He would begin as soon as he got
back. The first thing he would do would be to describe the voyage of the
treasure-hunters. He would sell it to some San Francisco newspaper. He
would not tell Ruth anything about it, and she would be surprised and
pleased when she saw his name in print. While he wrote, he could go on
studying. There were twenty-four hours in each day. He was invincible.
He knew how to work, and the citadels would go down before him. He would
not have to go to sea again--as a sailor; and for the instant he caught a
vision of a steam yacht. There were other writers who possessed steam
yachts. Of course, he cautioned himself, it would be slow succeeding at
first, and for a time he would be content to earn enough money by his
writing to enable him to go on studying. And then, after some time,--a
very indeterminate time,--when he had learned and prepared himself, he
would write the great things and his name would be on all mens lips. But
greater than that, infinitely greater and greatest of all, he would have
proved himself worthy of Ruth. Fame was all very well, but it was for
Ruth that his splendid dream arose. He was not a fame-monger, but merely
one of Gods mad lovers.
Arrived in Oakland, with his snug pay-day in his pocket, he took up his
old room at Bernard Higginbothams and set to work. He did not even let
Ruth know he was back. He would go and see her when he finished the
article on the treasure-hunters. It was not so difficult to abstain from
seeing her, because of the violent heat of creative fever that burned in
him. Besides, the very article he was writing would bring her nearer to
him. He did not know how long an article he should write, but he counted
the words in a double-page article in the Sunday supplement of the San
Francisco Examiner, and guided himself by that. Three days, at white
heat, completed his narrative; but when he had copied it carefully, in a
large scrawl that was easy to read, he learned from a rhetoric he picked
up in the library that there were such things as paragraphs and quotation
marks. He had never thought of such things before; and he promptly set
to work writing the article over, referring continually to the pages of
the rhetoric and learning more in a day about composition than the
average schoolboy in a year. When he had copied the article a second
time and rolled it up carefully, he read in Martin Eden page 36 Martin Eden page 38 |