rest.”
“Oh,” said the other, with comprehension.
“What is the best time to call? The afternoon? – not too close to
meal-time? Or the evening? Or Sunday?”
“I’ll tell you,” the librarian said with a brightening face. “You
call her up on the telephone and find out.”
“I’ll do it,” he said, picking up his books and starting away.
He turned back and asked:-
“When you’re speakin’ to a young lady – say, for instance, Miss
Lizzie Smith – do you say ‘Miss Lizzie’? or ‘Miss Smith’?”
“Say ‘Miss Smith,'” the librarian stated authoritatively. “Say
‘Miss Smith’ always – until you come to know her better.”
So it was that Martin Eden solved the problem.
“Come down any time; I’ll be at home all afternoon,” was Ruth’s
reply over the telephone to his stammered request as to when he
could return the borrowed books.
She met him at the door herself, and her woman’s eyes took in
immediately the creased trousers and the certain slight but
indefinable change in him for the better. Also, she was struck by
his face. It was almost violent, this health of his, and it seemed
to rush out of him and at her in waves of force. She felt the urge
Martin Eden
39
again of the desire to lean toward him for warmth, and marvelled
again at the effect his presence produced upon her. And he, in
turn, knew again the swimming sensation of bliss when he felt the
contact of her hand in greeting. The difference between them lay
in that she was cool and self-possessed while his face flushed to
the roots of the hair. He stumbled with his old awkwardness after
her, and his shoulders swung and lurched perilously.
Once they were seated in the living-room, he began to get on easily
– more easily by far than he had expected. She made it easy for
him; and the gracious spirit with which she did it made him love
her more madly than ever. They talked first of the borrowed books,
of the Swinburne he was devoted to, and of the Browning he did not
understand; and she led the conversation on from subject to
subject, while she pondered the problem of how she could be of help
to him. She had thought of this often since their first meeting.
She wanted to help him. He made a call upon her pity and
tenderness that no one had ever made before, and the pity was not
so much derogatory of him as maternal in her. Her pity could not
be of the common sort, when the man who drew it was so much man as
to shock her with maidenly fears and set her mind and pulse
thrilling with strange thoughts and feelings. The old fascination
of his neck was there, and there was sweetness in the thought of
laying her hands upon it. It seemed still a wanton impulse, but
she had grown more used to it. She did not dream that in such
guise new-born love would epitomize itself. Nor did she dream that
the feeling he excited in her was love. She thought she was merely
interested in him as an unusual type possessing various potential
excellencies, and she even felt philanthropic about it.
S
he did not know she desired him; but with him it was different.
He knew that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never
before desired anything in his life. He had loved poetry for
beauty’s sake; but since he met her the gates to the vast field of
love-poetry had been opened wide. She had given him understanding
even more than Bulfinch and Gayley. There was a line that a week
before he would not have favored with a second thought – “God’s own
mad lover dying on a kiss”; but now it was ever insistent in his
mind. He marvelled at the wonder of it and the truth; and as he
gazed upon her he knew that he could die gladly upon a kiss. He
felt himself God’s own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood
could have given him greater pride. And at last he knew the
meaning of life and why he had been born.
As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring. He
reviewed all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at
the door, and longed for it again. His gaze wandered often toward
her lips, and he yearned for them hungrily. But there was nothing
gross or earthly about this yearning. It gave him exquisite
delight to watch every movement and play of those lips as they
enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were not ordinary lips
such as all men and women had. Their substance was not mere human
clay. They were lips of pure spirit, and his desire for them
seemed absolutely different from the desire that had led him to
other women’s lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical
lips upon them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor
with which one would kiss the robe of God. He was not conscious of
Martin Eden
40
this transvaluation of values that had taken place in him, and was
unaware that the light that shone in his eyes when he looked at her
was quite the same light that shines in all men’s eyes when the
desire of love is upon them. He did not dream how ardent and
masculine his gaze was, nor that the warm flame of it was affecting
the alchemy of her spirit. Her penetrative virginity exalted and
disguised his own emotions, elevating his thoughts to a star-cool
chastity, and he would have been startled to learn that there was
that shining out of his eyes, like warm waves, that flowed through
her and kindled a kindred warmth. She was subtly perturbed by it,
and more than once, though she knew not why, it disrupted her train
of thought with its delicious intrusion and compelled her to grope
for the remainder of ideas partly uttered. Speech was always easy
with her, and these interruptions would have puzzled her had she
not decided that it was because he was a remarkable type. She was
very sensitive to impressions, and it was not strange, after all,
that this aura of a traveller from another world should so affect
her.
The problem in the background of her consciousness was how to help
him, and she turned the conversation in that direction; but it was
Martin who came to the point first.
“I wonder if I can get some advice from you,” he began, and
received an acquiescence of willingness that made his heart bound.
“You remember the other time I was here I said I couldn’t talk
about books an’ things because I didn’t know how? Well, I’ve ben
doin’ a lot of thinkin’ ever since. I’ve ben to the library a
whole lot, but most of the books I’ve tackled have ben over my
head. Mebbe I’d better begin at the beginnin’. I ain’t never had
no advantages. I’ve worked pretty hard ever since I was a kid, an’
since I’ve ben to the library, lookin’ with new eyes at books – an’
lookin’ at new books, too – I’ve just about concluded that I ain’t
ben reading the right kind. You know the books you find in cattle-
camps an’ fo’c’s’ls ain’t the same you’ve got in this house, for
instance. Well, that’s the sort of readin’ matter I’ve ben
accustomed to. And yet – an’ I ain’t just makin’ a brag of it –
I’ve ben different from the people I’ve herded with. Not that I’m
any better than the sailors an’ cow-punchers I travelled with, – I
was cow-punchin’ for a short time, you know, – but I always liked
books, read everything I could lay hands on, an’ – well, I guess I
think differently from most of ’em.
“Now, to come to what I’m drivin’ at. I was never inside a house
like this. When I come a week ago, an’ saw all this, an’ you, an’
your mother, an’ brothers, an’ everything – well, I liked it. I’d
heard about such things an’ read about such things in some of the
books, an’ when I looked around at your house, why, the books come
true. But the thing I’m after is I liked it. I wanted it. I want
it now. I want to breathe air like you get in this house – air
that is filled with books, and pictures, and beautiful things,
where people talk in low voices an’ are clean, an’ their thoughts
are clean. The air I always breathed was mixed up with grub an’
house-rent an’ scrappin’ an booze an’ that’s all they talked about,
too. Why, when you was crossin’ the room to kiss your mother, I
thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever seen. I’ve seen a