bridged. But there was no diminution in the loftiness of his
feeling for her. She had not descended to him. It was he who had
been caught up into the clouds and carried to her. His reverence
for her, in that moment, was of the same order as religious awe and
fervor. It seemed to him that he had intruded upon the holy of
holies, and slowly and carefully he moved his head aside from the
contact which thrilled him like an electric shock and of which she
had not been aware.
CHAPTER VIII
Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his
grammar, reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the
books that caught his fancy. Of his own class he saw nothing. The
girls of the Lotus Club wondered what had become of him and worried
Jim with questions, and some of the fellows who put on the glove at
Riley’s were glad that Martin came no more. He made another
discovery of treasure-trove in the library. As the grammar had
shown him the tie-ribs of language, so that book showed him the
tie-ribs of poetry, and he began to learn metre and construction
and form, beneath the beauty he loved finding the why and wherefore
of that beauty. Another modern book he found treated poetry as a
representative art, treated it exhaustively, with copious
illustrations from the best in literature. Never had he read
fiction with so keen zest as he studied these books. And his fresh
mind, untaxed for twenty years and impelled by maturity of desire,
gripped hold of what he read with a virility unusual to the student
mind.
When he looked back now from his vantage-ground, the old world he
had known, the world of land and sea and ships, of sailor-men and
harpy-women, seemed a very small world; and yet it blended in with
this new world and expanded. His mind made for unity, and he was
surprised when at first he began to see points of contact between
the two worlds. And he was ennobled, as well, by the loftiness of
thought and beauty he found in the books. This led him to believe
more firmly than ever that up above him, in society like Ruth and
her family, all men and women thought these thoughts and lived
them. Down below where he lived was the ignoble, and he wanted to
purge himself of the ignoble that had soiled all his days, and to
rise to that sublimated realm where dwelt the upper classes. All
his childhood and youth had been troubled by a vague unrest; he had
never known what he wanted, but he had wanted something that he had
hunted vainly for until he met Ruth. And now his unrest had become
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sharp and painful, and he knew at last, clearly and definitely,
that it was beauty, and intellect, and love that he must have.
During those several weeks he saw Ruth half a dozen times, and each
time was an added inspiration. She helped him with his English,
corrected his pronunciation, and started him on arithmetic. But
their intercourse was not all devoted to elementary study. He had
seen too much of life, and his mind was too matured, to be wholly
content with fractions, cube root, parsing, and analysis; and there
were times when their conversation turned on other themes – the
last poetry he had read, the latest poet she had studied. And when
she read aloud to him her favorite passages, he ascended to the
topmost heaven of delight. Never, in all the women he had heard
speak, had he heard a voice like hers. The least sound of it was a
stimulus to his love, and he thrilled and throbbed with every word
she uttered. It was the quality of it, the repose, and the musical
modulation – the soft, rich, indefinable product of culture and a
gentle soul. As he listened to her, there rang in the ears of his
memory the harsh cries of barbarian women and of hags, and, in
lesser degrees of harshness, the strident voices of working women
and of the girls of his own class. Then the chemistry of vision
would begin to work, and they would troop in review across his
mind, each, by contrast, multiplying Ruth’s glories. Then, too,
his bliss was heightened by the knowledge that her mind was
comprehending what she read and was quivering with appreciation of
the beauty of the written thought. She read to him much from “The
Princess,” and often he saw her eyes swimming with tears, so finely
was her aesthetic nature strung. At such moments her own emotions
elevated him till he was as a god, and, as he gazed at her and
listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading its
deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the heights of
exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided that this was love
and that love was the greatest thing in the world. And in review
would pass along the corridors of memory all previous thrills and
burnings he had known, – the drunkenness of wine, the caresses of
women, the rough play and give and take of physical contests, – and
they seemed trivial and mean compared with this sublime ardor he
now enjoyed.
The situation was obscured to Ruth. She had never had any
experiences of the heart. Her only experiences in such matters
were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated
by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality; and she little knew that
this rough sailor was creeping into her heart and storing there
pent forces that would some day burst forth and surge through her
in waves of fire. She did not know the actual fire of love. Her
knowledge of love was purely theoretical, and she conceived of it
as lambent flame, gentle as the fall of dew or the ripple of quiet
water, and cool as the velvet-dark of summer nights. Her idea of
love was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one
softly in an atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of
ethereal calm. She did not dream of the volcanic convulsions of
love, its scorching heat and sterile wastes of parched ashes. She
knew neither her own potencies, nor the potencies of the world; and
the deeps of life were to her seas of illusion. The conjugal
affection of her father and mother constituted her ideal of love-
affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging, without
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46
shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence with
a loved one.
So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange
individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the
effects he produced upon her. It was only natural. In similar
ways she had experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild
animals in the menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or
shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning. There was something
cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him. He
came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces. The blaze of
tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles
was the primordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by
that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts
of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed, wild, and in
secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so
mildly to her hand. Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse
to tame the wild thing. It was an unconscious impulse, and
farthest from her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay
of him into a likeness of her father’s image, which image she
believed to be the finest in the world. Nor was there any way, out
of her inexperience, for her to know that the cosmic feel she
caught of him was that most cosmic of things, love, which with
equal power drew men and women together across the world, compelled
stags to kill each other in the rutting season, and drove even the
elements irresistibly to unite.
His swift development was a source of surprise and interest. She
detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by
day, like flowers in congenial soil. She read Browning aloud to
him, and was often puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave
to mooted passages. It was beyond her to realize that, out of his
experience of men and women and life, his interpretations were far
more frequently correct than hers. His conceptions seemed naive to
her, though she was often fired by his daring flights of
comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide among the stars that
she could not follow and could only sit and thrill to the impact of
unguessed power. Then she played to him – no longer at him – and