For that matter, most of them did not shake hands at all. A flood
of associations, visions of various ways he had made the
acquaintance of women, rushed into his mind and threatened to swamp
it. But he shook them aside and looked at her. Never had he seen
such a woman. The women he had known! Immediately, beside her, on
either hand, ranged the women he had known. For an eternal second
he stood in the midst of a portrait gallery, wherein she occupied
the central place, while about her were limned many women, all to
be weighed and measured by a fleeting glance, herself the unit of
weight and measure. He saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls
of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the
south of Market. There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy
cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. These, in turn, were
crowded out by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on
wooden clogs; by Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with
degeneracy; by full-bodied South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned
and brown-skinned. All these were blotted out by a grotesque and
terrible nightmare brood – frowsy, shuffling creatures from the
pavements of Whitechapel, gin-bloated hags of the stews, and all
the vast hell’s following of harpies, vile-mouthed and filthy, that
under the guise of monstrous female form prey upon sailors, the
scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit.
Martin Eden
5
“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Eden?” the girl was saying. “I have been
looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us. It was
brave of you – ”
He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at
all, what he had done, and that any fellow would have done it. She
noticed that the hand he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in
the process of healing, and a glance at the other loose-hanging
hand showed it to be in the same condition. Also, with quick,
critical eye, she noted a scar on his cheek, another that peeped
out from under the hair of the forehead, and a third that ran down
and disappeared under the starched collar. She repressed a smile
at sight of the red line that marked the chafe of the collar
against the bronzed neck. He was evidently unused to stiff
collars. Likewise her feminine eye took in the clothes he wore,
the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the
shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that
advertised bulging biceps muscles.
While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at
all, he was obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair. He
found time to admire the ease with which she sat down, then lurched
toward a chair facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the
awkward figure he was cutting. This was a new experience for him.
All his life, up to then, he had been unaware of being either
graceful or awkward. Such thoughts of self had never entered his
mind. He sat down gingerly on the edge of the chair, greatly
worried by his hands. They were in the way wherever he put them.
Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his exit with
longing eyes. He felt lost, alone there in the room with that pale
spirit of a woman. There was no bar-keeper upon whom to call for
drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a can of beer
and by means of that social fluid start the amenities of friendship
flowing.
“You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden,” the girl was saying.
“How did it happen? I am sure it must have been some adventure.”
“A Mexican with a knife, miss,” he answered, moistening his parched
lips and clearing hip throat. “It was just a fight. After I got
the knife away, he tried to bite off my nose.”
Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision of that
hot, starry night at Salina Cruz, the white strip of beach, the
lights of the sugar steamers in the harbor, the voices of the
drunken sailors in the distance, the jostling stevedores, the
flaming passion in the Mexican’s face, the glint of the beast-eyes
in the starlight, the sting of the steel in his neck, and the rush
of blood, the crowd and the cries, the two bodies, his and the
Mexican’s, locked together, rolling over and over and tearing up
the sand, and from away off somewhere the mellow tinkling of a
guitar. Such was the picture, and he thrilled to the memory of it,
wondering if the man could paint it who had painted the pilot-
schooner on the wall. The white beach, the stars, and the lights
of the sugar steamers would look great, he thought, and midway on
the sand the dark group of figures that surrounded the fighters.
Martin Eden
6
The knife occupied a place in the picture, he decided, and would
show well, with a sort of gleam, in the light of the stars. But of
all this no hint had crept into his speech. “He tried to bite off
my nose,” he concluded.
“Oh,” the girl said, in a faint, far voice, and he noticed the
shock in her sensitive face.
He felt a shock himself, and a blush of embarrassment shone faintly
on his sunburned cheeks, though to him it burned as hotly as when
his cheeks had been exposed to the open furnace-door in the fire-
room. Such sordid things as stabbing affrays were evidently not
fit subjects for conversation with a lady. People in the books, in
her walk of life, did not talk about such things – perhaps they did
not know about them, either.
There was a brief pause in the conversation they were trying to get
started. Then she asked tentatively about the scar on his cheek.
Even as she asked, he realized that she was making an effort to
talk his talk, and he resolved to get away from it and talk hers.
“It was just an accident,” he said, putting his hand to his cheek.
“One night, in a calm, with a heavy sea running, the main-boom-lift
carried away, an’ next the tackle. The lift was wire, an’ it was
threshin’ around like a snake. The whole watch was tryin’ to grab
it, an’ I rushed in an’ got swatted.”
“Oh,” she said, this time with an accent of comprehension, though
secretly his speech had been so much Greek to her and she was
wondering what a LIFT was and what SWATTED meant.
“This man Swineburne,” he began, attempting to put his plan into
execution and pronouncing the I long.
“Who?”
“Swineburne,” he repeated, with the same mispronunciation. “The
poet.”
“Swinburne,” she corrected.
“Yes, that’s the chap,” he stammered, his cheeks hot again. “How
long since he died?”
“Why, I haven’t heard that he was dead.” She looked at him
curiously. “Where did you make his acquaintance?”
“I never clapped eyes on him,” was the reply. “But I read some of
his poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come
in. How do you like his poetry?”
And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject
he had suggested. He felt better, and settled back slightly from
the edge of the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands,
as if it might get away from him and buck him to the floor. He had
succeeded in making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he
strove to follow her, marvelling at all the knowledge that was
Martin Eden
7
stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale
beauty of her face. Follow her he did, though bothered by
unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by critical
phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but
that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling. Here
was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and
wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be. He forgot himself
and stared at her with hungry eyes. Here was something to live
for, to win to, to fight for – ay, and die for. The books were
true. There were such women in the world. She was one of them.
She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases
spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures
of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s sake – for a
pale woman, a flower of gold. And through the swaying, palpitant
vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman,
sitting there and talking of literature and art. He listened as
well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of
the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was