bathing him in some ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft
and velvety as starshine. WE KNOW THERE ARE NASTY THINGS IN THE
WORLD! He cuddled to him the notion of her knowing, and chuckled
over it as a love joke. The next moment, in a flashing vision of
multitudinous detail, he sighted the whole sea of life’s nastiness
that he had known and voyaged over and through, and he forgave her
for not understanding the story. It was through no fault of hers
that she could not understand. He thanked God that she had been
born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew life, its
foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the
slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on
it to the world. Saints in heaven – how could they be anything but
fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime – ah, that
was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while.
To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise
himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-
dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and
viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and
truth, and high spiritual endowment –
He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.
“The tone of it all is low. And there is so much that is high.
Take ‘In Memoriam.'”
He was impelled to suggest “Locksley Hall,” and would have done so,
had not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her,
the female of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment,
creeping and crawling up the vast ladder of life for a thousand
thousand centuries, had emerged on the topmost rung, having become
one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and with power to make him
know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to desire to taste
divinity – him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some amazing
fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless
mistakes and abortions of unending creation. There was the
romance, and the wonder, and the glory. There was the stuff to
write, if he could only find speech. Saints in heaven! – They were
only saints and could not help themselves. But he was a man.
“You have strength,” he could hear her saying, “but it is untutored
strength.”
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“Like a bull in a china shop,” he suggested, and won a smile.
“And you must develop discrimination. You must consult taste, and
fineness, and tone.”
“I dare too much,” he muttered.
She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another
story.
“I don’t know what you’ll make of this,” he said apologetically.
“It’s a funny thing. I’m afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but
my intentions were good. Don’t bother about the little features of
it. Just see if you catch the feel of the big thing in it. It is
big, and it is true, though the chance is large that I have failed
to make it intelligible.”
He read, and as he read he watched her. At last he had reached
her, he thought. She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon
him, scarcely breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought,
by the witchery of the thing he had created. He had entitled the
story “Adventure,” and it was the apotheosis of adventure – not of
the adventure of the storybooks, but of real adventure, the savage
taskmaster, awful of punishment and awful of reward, faithless and
whimsical, demanding terrible patience and heartbreaking days and
nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight glory or dark death
at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag and monstrous
delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and stinging
insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts to
royal culminations and lordly achievements.
It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story,
and it was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and
listened. Her eyes were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and
before he finished it seemed to him that she was almost panting.
Truly, she was warmed; but she was warmed, not by the story, but by
him. She did not think much of the story; it was Martin’s
intensity of power, the old excess of strength that seemed to pour
from his body and on and over her. The paradox of it was that it
was the story itself that was freighted with his power, that was
the channel, for the time being, through which his strength poured
out to her. She was aware only of the strength, and not of the
medium, and when she seemed most carried away by what he had
written, in reality she had been carried away by something quite
foreign to it – by a thought, terrible and perilous, that had
formed itself unsummoned in her brain. She had caught herself
wondering what marriage was like, and the becoming conscious of the
waywardness and ardor of the thought had terrified her. It was
unmaidenly. It was not like her. She had never been tormented by
womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy,
dense even to the full significance of that delicate master’s
delicate allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the
relations of queens and knights. She had been asleep, always, and
now life was thundering imperatively at all her doors. Mentally
she was in a panic to shoot the bolts and drop the bars into place,
while wanton instincts urged her to throw wide her portals and bid
the deliciously strange visitor to enter in.
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Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict. He had no doubt
of what it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:
“It is beautiful.”
“It is beautiful,” she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.
Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere
beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made
beauty its handmaiden. He sprawled silently on the ground,
watching the grisly form of a great doubt rising before him. He
had failed. He was inarticulate. He had seen one of the greatest
things in the world, and he had not expressed it.
“What did you think of the – ” He hesitated, abashed at his first
attempt to use a strange word. “Of the MOTIF?” he asked.
“It was confused,” she answered. “That is my only criticism in the
large way. I followed the story, but there seemed so much else.
It is too wordy. You clog the action by introducing so much
extraneous material.”
“That was the major MOTIF,” he hurriedly explained, “the big
underrunning MOTIF, the cosmic and universal thing. I tried to
make it keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial
after all. I was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly.
I did not succeed in suggesting what I was driving at. But I’ll
learn in time.”
She did not follow him. She was a bachelor of arts, but he had
gone beyond her limitations. This she did not comprehend,
attributing her incomprehension to his incoherence.
“You were too voluble,” she said. “But it was beautiful, in
places.”
He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he
would read her the “Sea Lyrics.” He lay in dull despair, while she
watched him searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and
wayward thoughts of marriage.
“You want to be famous?” she asked abruptly.
“Yes, a little bit,” he confessed. “That is part of the adventure.
It is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that
counts. And after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means
to something else. I want to be famous very much, for that matter,
and for that reason.”
“For your sake,” he wanted to add, and might have added had she
proved enthusiastic over what he had read to her.
But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that
would at least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was
which he had hinted at. There was no career for him in literature.
Of that she was convinced. He had proved it to-day, with his
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amateurish and sophomoric productions. He could talk well, but he
was incapable of expressing himself in a literary way. She
compared Tennyson, and Browning, and her favorite prose masters
with him, and to his hopeless discredit. Yet she did not tell him
her whole mind. Her strange interest in him led her to temporize.
His desire to write was, after all, a little weakness which he
would grow out of in time. Then he would devote himself to the