How many of them could tie a lanyard knot, or take a wheel or a lookout? His life spread out before him in a series of pictures of danger and daring, hardship and toil. He remembered his failures and scrapes in the process of learning. He was that much to the good, anyway. Later on they would have to begin living life and going through the mill as he had gone. Very well. While they were busy with that, he could be learning the other side of life from the books.
As the car crossed the zone of scattered dwellings that separated Oakland from Berkeley, he kept a lookout for a familiar, two-story building along the front of which ran the proud sign, HIGGINBOTHAM’S CASH STORE. Martin Eden got off at this corner. He stared up for a moment at the sign. It carried a message to him beyond its mere wording. A personality of smallness and egotism and petty underhandedness seemed to emanate from the letters themselves. Bernard Higginbotham had married his sister, and he knew him well. He let himself in with a latch-key and climbed the stairs to the second floor. Here lived his brother-in-law. The grocery was below. There was a smell of stale vegetables in the air. As he groped his way across the hall he stumbled over a toy-cart, left there by one of his numerous nephews and nieces, and brought up against a door with a resounding bang. “The pincher,” was his thought; “too miserly to burn two cents’ worth of gas and save his boarders’ necks.”
He fumbled for the knob and entered a lighted room, where sat his sister and Bernard Higginbotham. She was patching a pair of his trousers, while his lean body was distributed over two chairs, his feet dangling in dilapidated carpet-slippers over the edge of the second chair. He glanced across the top of the paper he was reading, showing a pair of dark, insincere, sharp-staring eyes. Martin Eden never looked at him without experiencing a sense of repulsion. What his sister had seen in the man was beyond him. The other affected him as so much vermin, and always aroused in him an impulse to crush him under his foot. “Some day I’ll beat the face off of him,” was the way he often consoled himself for enduring the man’s existence. The eyes, weasel-like and cruel, were looking at him complainingly.
“Well,” Martin demanded. “Out with it.”
“I had that door painted only last week,” Mr. Higginbotham half whined, half bullied; “and you know what union wages are. You should be more careful.”
Martin had intended to reply, but he was struck by the hopelessness of it. He gazed across the monstrous sordidness of soul to a chromo on the wall. It surprised him. He had always liked it, but it seemed that now he was seeing it for the first time. It was cheap, that was what it was, like everything else in this house. His mind went back to the house he had just left, and he saw, first, the paintings, and next, Her, looking at him with melting sweetness as she shook his hand at leaving. He forgot where he was and Bernard Higginbotham’s existence, till that gentleman demanded:-
“Seen a ghost?”
Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent, cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below – subservient eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.
“Yes,” Martin answered. “I seen a ghost. Good night. Good night, Gertrude.”
He started to leave the room, tripping over a loose seam in the slatternly carpet.
“Don’t bang the door,” Mr. Higginbotham cautioned him.
He felt the blood crawl in his veins, but controlled himself and closed the door softly behind him.
Mr. Higginbotham looked at his wife exultantly.
“He’s ben drinkin’,” he proclaimed in a hoarse whisper. “I told you he would.”
She nodded her head resignedly.
“His eyes was pretty shiny,” she confessed; “and he didn’t have no collar, though he went away with one. But mebbe he didn’t have more’n a couple of glasses.”
“He couldn’t stand up straight,” asserted her husband. “I watched him. He couldn’t walk across the floor without stumblin’. You heard ’m yourself almost fall down in the hall.”
“I think it was over Alice’s cart,” she said. “He couldn’t see it in the dark.”
Mr. Higginbotham’s voice and wrath began to rise. All day he effaced himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the privilege of being himself.
“I tell you that precious brother of yours was drunk.”
His voice was cold, sharp, and final, his lips stamping the enunciation of each word like the die of a machine. His wife sighed and remained silent. She was a large, stout woman, always dressed slatternly and always tired from the burdens of her flesh, her work, and her husband.
“He’s got it in him, I tell you, from his father,” Mr. Higginbotham went on accusingly. “An’ he’ll croak in the gutter the same way. You know that.”
She nodded, sighed, and went on stitching. They were agreed that Martin had come home drunk. They did not have it in their souls to know beauty, or they would have known that those shining eyes and that glowing face betokened youth’s first vision of love.
“Settin’ a fine example to the children,” Mr. Higginbotham snorted, suddenly, in the silence for which his wife was responsible and which he resented. Sometimes he almost wished she would oppose him more. “If he does it again, he’s got to get out. Understand! I won’t put up with his shinanigan – debotchin’ innocent children with his boozing.” Mr. Higginbotham liked the word, which was a new one in his vocabulary, recently gleaned from a newspaper column. “That’s what it is, debotchin’—there ain’t no other name for it.”
Still his wife sighed, shook her head sorrowfully, and stitched on. Mr. Higginbotham resumed the newspaper.
“Has he paid last week’s board?” he shot across the top of the newspaper.
She nodded, then added, “He still has some money.”
“When is he goin’ to sea again?”
“When his pay-day’s spent, I guess,” she answered. “He was over to San Francisco yesterday looking for a ship. But he’s got money, yet, an’ he’s particular about the kind of ship he signs for.”
“It’s not for a deck-swab like him to put on airs,” Mr. Higginbotham snorted. “Particular! Him!”
“He said something about a schooner that’s gettin’ ready to go off to some outlandish place to look for buried treasure, that he’d sail on her if his money held out.”
“If he only wanted to steady down, I’d give him a job drivin’ the wagon,” her husband said, but with no trace of benevolence in his voice. “Tom’s quit.”
His wife looked alarm and interrogation.
“Quit to-night. Is goin’ to work for Carruthers. They paid ’m more’n I could afford.”
“I told you you’d lose ’m,” she cried out. “He was worth more’n you was giving him.”
“Now look here, old woman,” Higginbotham bullied, “for the thousandth time I’ve told you to keep your nose out of the business. I won’t tell you again.”
“I don’t care,” she sniffled. “Tom was a good boy.” Her husband glared at her. This was unqualified defiance.
“If
