她一直没说话；显然很失望。
“怎么样？”他问。
“我有过别的希望和打算。我认为，而且一直认为，你最好还是学速记——你已经会打字了——然后到爸爸的办公室去工作。你有一副优秀的头脑，我满怀信心你能做一个成功的律师的。”
Chapter 23
That Ruth had little faith in his power as a writer, did not alter her nor diminish her in Martin's eyes. In the breathing spell of the vacation he had taken, he had spent many hours in self- analysis, and thereby learned much of himself. He had discovered that he loved beauty more than fame, and that what desire he had for fame was largely for Ruth's sake. It was for this reason that his desire for fame was strong. He wanted to be great in the world's eyes; "to make good," as he expressed it, in order that the woman he loved should be proud of him and deem him worthy.
As for himself, he loved beauty passionately, and the joy of serving her was to him sufficient wage. And more than beauty he loved Ruth. He considered love the finest thing in the world. It was love that had worked the revolution in him, changing him from an uncouth sailor to a student and an artist; therefore, to him, the finest and greatest of the three, greater than learning and artistry, was love. Already he had discovered that his brain went beyond Ruth's, just as it went beyond the brains of her brothers, or the brain of her father. In spite of every advantage of university training, and in the face of her bachelorship of arts, his power of intellect overshadowed hers, and his year or so of self-study and equipment gave him a mastery of the affairs of the world and art and life that she could never hope to possess.
All this he realized, but it did not affect his love for her, nor her love for him. Love was too fine and noble, and he was too loyal a lover for him to besmirch love with criticism. What did love have to do with Ruth's divergent views on art, right conduct, the French Revolution, or equal suffrage? They were mental processes, but love was beyond reason; it was superrational. He could not belittle love. He worshipped it. Love lay on the mountain-tops beyond the valley-land of reason. It was a sublimates condition of existence, the topmost peak of living, and it came rarely. Thanks to the school of scientific philosophers he favored, he knew the biological significance of love; but by a refined process of the same scientific reasoning he reached the conclusion that the human organism achieved its highest purpose in love, that love must not be questioned, but must be accepted as the highest guerdon of life. Thus, he considered the lover blessed over all creatures, and it was a delight to him to think of "God's own mad lover," rising above the things of earth, above wealth and judgment, public opinion and applause, rising above life itself and "dying on a kiss."
Much of this Martin had already reasoned out, and some of it he reasoned out later. In the meantime he worked, taking no recreation except when he went to see Ruth, and living like a Spartan. He paid two dollars and a half a month rent for the small room he got from his Portuguese landlady, Maria Silva, a virago and a widow, hard working and harsher tempered, rearing her large brood of children somehow, and drowning her sorrow and fatigue at irregular intervals in a gallon of the thin, sour wine that she bought from the corner grocery and saloon for fifteen cents. From detesting her and her foul tongue at first, Martin grew to admire her as he observed the brave fight she made. There were but four rooms in the little house - three, when Martin's was subtracted. One of these, the parlor, gay with an ingrain carpet and dolorous with a funeral card and a death-picture of one of her numerous departed babes, was kept strictly for company. The blinds were always down, and her barefooted tribe was never permitted to enter the sacred precinct save on state occasions. She cooked, and all ate, in the kitchen, where she likewise washed, starched, and ironed clothes on all days of the week except Sunday; for her income came largely from taking in washing from her more prosperous neighbors. Remained the bedroom, small as the one occupied by Martin, into which she and her seven little ones crowded and slept. It was an everlasting miracle to Martin how it was accomplished, and from her side of the thin partition he heard nightly every detail of the going to bed, the squalls and squabbles, the soft chattering, and the sleepy, twittering noises as of birds. Another source of income to Maria were her cows, two of them, which she milked night and morning and which gained a surreptitious livelihood from vacant lots and the grass that grew on either side the public side walks, attended always by one or more of her ragged boys, whose watchful guardianship consisted chiefly in keeping their eyes out for the poundmen.
In his own small room Martin lived, slept, studied, wrote, and kept house. Before the one window, looking out on the tiny front porch, was the kitchen table that served as desk, library, and type- writing stand. The bed, against the rear wall, occupied two-thirds of the total space of the room. The table was flanked on one side by a gaudy bureau, manufactured for profit and not for service, the thin veneer of which was shed day by day. This bureau stood in the corner, and in the opposite corner, on the table's other flank, was the kitchen - the oil-stove on a dry-goods box, inside of which were dishes and cooking utensils, a shelf on the wall for provisions, and a bucket of water on the floor. Martin had to carry his water from the kitchen sink, there being no tap in his room. On days when there was much steam to his cooking, the harvest of veneer from the bureau was unusually generous. Over the bed, hoisted by a tackle to the ceiling, was his bicycle. At first he had tried to keep it in the basement; but the tribe of Silva, loosening the bearings and puncturing the tires, had driven him out. Next he attempted the tiny front porch, until a howling southeaster drenched the wheel a night-long. Then he had retreated with it to his room and slung it aloft.
A small closet contained his clothes and the books he had accumulated and for which there was no room on the table or under the table. Hand in hand with reading, he had developed the habit of making notes, and so copiously did he make them that there would have been no existence for him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the notes were hung. Even so, he was crowded until navigating the room was a difficult task. He could not open the door without first closing the closet door, and VICE VERSA. It was impossible for him anywhere to traverse the room in a straight line. To go from the door to the head of the bed was a zigzag course that he was never quite able to accomplish in the dark without collisions. Having settled the difficulty of the conflicting doors, he had to steer sharply to the right to avoid the kitchen. Next, he sheered to the left, to escape the foot of the bed; but this sheer, if too generous, brought him against the corner of the table. With a sudden twitch and lurch, he terminated the sheer and bore off to the right along a sort of canal, one bank of which was the bed, the other the table. When the one chair in the room was at its usual place before the table, the canal was unnavigable. When the chair was not in use, it reposed on top of the bed, though sometimes he sat on the chair when cooking, reading a book while the water boiled, and even becoming skilful enough to manage a paragraph or two while steak was frying. Also, so small was the little corner that constituted the kitchen, he was able, sitting down, to reach anything he needed. In fact, it was expedient to cook sitting down; standing up, he was too often in his own way.
In conjunction with a perfect stomach that could digest anything, he possessed knowledge of the various foods that were at the same time nutritious and cheap. Pea-soup was a common article in his diet, as well as potatoes and beans, the latter large and brown and cooked in Mexican style. Rice, cooked as American housewives never cook it and can never learn to cook it, appeared on Martin's table at least once a day. Dried fruits were less expensive than fresh, and he had usually a pot of them, cooked and ready at hand, for they took the place of butter on his bread. Occasionally he graced his table with a piece of round-steak, or with a soup-bone. Coffee, without cream or milk, he had twice a day, in the evening substituting tea; but both coffee and tea were excellently cooked.
There was need for him to be economical. His vacation had consumed nearly all he had earned in the laundry, and he was so far from his market that weeks must elapse before he could hope for the first returns from his hack-work. Except at such times as he saw Ruth, or dropped in to see his sister Gertude, he lived a recluse, in each day accomplishing at least three days' labor of ordinary men. He slept a scant five hours, and only one with a constitution of iron could have held himself down, as Martin did, day after day, to nineteen consecutive hours of toil. He never lost a moment. On the looking-glass were lists of definitions and pronunciations; when shaving, or dressing, or combing his hair, he conned these lists over. Similar lists were on the wall over the oil-stove, and they were similarly conned while he was engaged in cooking or in washing the dishes. New lists continually displaced the old ones. Every strange or partly familiar word encountered in his reading was immediately jotted down, and later, when a sufficient number had been accumulated, were typed and pinned to the wall or looking- glass. He even carried them in his pockets, and reviewed them at odd moments on the street, or while waiting in butcher shop or grocery to be served.
He went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who had arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by which they had been achieved - the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these he made lists for study. He did not ape. He sought principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly. In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it for himself. He was not content with the fair face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.
He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects. He wanted to know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure. On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable connotations. Before such he bowed down and marvelled, knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated. He knew full well, from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimate knowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty was no less than that of life - nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and wonder.
In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his essay entitled "Star-dust," in which he had his fling, not at the principles of criticism, but at the principal critics. It was brilliant, deep, philosophical, and deliciously touched with laughter. Also it was promptly rejected by the magazines as often as it was submitted. But having cleared his mind of it, he went serenely on his way. It was a habit he developed, of incubating and maturing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing into the type-writer with it. That it did not see print was a matter a small moment with him. The writing of it was the culminating act of a long mental process, the drawing together of scattered threads of thought and the final generalizing upon all the data with which his mind was burdened. To write such an article was the conscious effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh material and problems. It was in a way akin to that common habit of men and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who periodically and volubly break their long-suffering silence and "have their say" till the last word is said.
虽然露丝对马丁当作家的本领缺乏信心，她在马丁眼中却并无变化，也没有被他小看。在他所度过的短短假期里，马丁花了许多时间作自我分析，对自己了解了许多。他发现自己爱美甚于爱名，而他急于成名又主要是为了露丝——因此他有强烈的成名欲，希望自己在世人眼中了不起，用他自己的话说，是“像模像样”。其目的是为了让他深爱的女人引为自豪，相信他很有出息。
说到他自己，他对美怀着满腔热情。只要能够为美服务对他已是足够的报偿。而他爱露丝又甚于爱美。他认为爱情是世界上最美好的东西。引起他心里这场革命的正是爱情。是爱情把他从一个粗鲁的水手变成了一个学生，一个艺术家。因此，在他眼里爱情比学问和艺术都伟大，是三者中最伟大的。他已经发现他的脑子比露丝想得更多，正如比她的弟弟和爸爸想得更多一样。尽管她具有大学教育的一切优势，尽管他面对的是她的学士学位，他的智慧的力量依然能使她相形见细。他这一年左右的自学和装备让他深刻地了解了世界、艺术和人生，而那是她万万办不到的。
这一切他都明白。但那并不影响他对露丝的爱，也不影响露丝对他的爱。爱情太美好，太高贵，他又是太忠诚的情人，他不能用批评指责来玷污它。爱清跟露丝对艺术、对正确行为、对法国革命、或是对选举权平等的不同看法能有什么关系？那都是思维的过程，可爱情是高于理智的，驾凌于理智以上。他不能小看了爱情。他崇拜爱情。爱情高卧在峡谷地区以外的山峰之巅，是存在的升华，是生活的极顶，是很少降临人世的。由于他所喜爱的科学哲学家流派，他懂得了爱情的生物学意义；但是通过同样的细致的科学推理他达到了一个结论：人类的生理结构在爱情中达到了最高目标。爱情不容怀疑，只能被接受为生命的最高回报。因此他认为情人是一切生灵中最幸福的人，一想起“颠倒膜拜的恋人”高于世间一切，高于财富和判断，高于舆论和赞美，高于生命本身，高于“一吻便死去”，他便非常快活。
许多这类道理马丁早就明白了，有些道理他后来也明白了。这时他干起了工作，过着斯巴达式的苦行生活，除了去看露丝从不消遣。他从一个葡萄牙女房东租来一个小房间，每月安科两块五毛。房东叫玛利亚·西尔伐，是个利落的寡妇，吃苦耐劳，脾气却精，拉扯着一大群娃娃，不时用一加仑淡薄的酸酒醉却她的疲劳和忧伤——那酒是她花五毛钱从街角的杂货店兼沙龙买来的。马丁起初报讨厌她那肮脏的舌头，后来见到她的勇敢奋斗便不禁生了几分敬意。那小屋只有四间房——除去马丁那间，只有三间。一间是客厅，铺了张彩色地毯，带了几分喜气；却挂了一份讣告和已死去的众多孩子中的一个的遗像，又带了几分忧伤。这间房严格规定只接待客人，百叶窗总是关着，除非有大事，是她那群光脚丫的小宝贝决不许擅入的基地。她在厨房因做饭，一家人在那儿吃饭，除了星期天她也在那里洗衣服，浆在服，熨衣服，因为她的收入主要得靠替她较为兴旺的邻居浆洗衣服。剩f的那间屋就是寝室，跟马丁那间一般大小，她和她那七个孩子都挤在里面睡觉。马丁对她们怎么能挤得下去永远觉得神秘。在薄薄的板壁那边地每天晚上都听见每一个细节：上床、叫喊、争吵、温和的细语和小鸟一样的睡意朦胧的啁啾。玛利亚的另一笔收入来自她的母牛，一共两只，她每人早晚都要从它们身上挤奶。那两条牛是靠偷吃空地和公用道路两边的青草活命的。通常由她一两个衣衫褴楼的娃娃看着，他们总警惕地守望着，主要是担心畜栏管事出现。
马丁就在他这间小房组生活、睡觉。读书、写作、做家务。屋子仅有一扇窗户面对着小小的门廊，窗前是一张厨房里用的桌子，权且充作书桌、图书馆和打字机台。靠后墙的床占据了屋子全部空间的三分之二。桌子一旁是一个花哨的柜子，原是做来赚钱不为实用的。上面的装饰板每天都在脱落。这柜子在屋角，在桌子的另一面，在另一个角落望是厨房——煤油炉放在一个布匹箱上。布匹箱里是婉盏和炊事用品。墙上有个放食物的架子，地面上放一桶水。屋里没有龙头，马丁得到厨房的水槽去取水。在屋里蒸汽很多的日子，从桌上装饰板脱落的碎片便获得特大丰收。他的自行车用辘轳挂在床顶的天花板下。最初他试过把它放在地下室里，可是西尔伐家的娃娃们却把轴承弄松，把轮胎扎破，把他赶了出去。然后他试了试前门那小小的门廊，那兀一场咆哮的东南风又把轮子浸泡了一夜。最后他只好撤退到自己的房里，把它挂到了空中。
