Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at
times seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and was
seated alongside of Her. The array of knives and forks frightened
him. They bristled with unknown perils, and he gazed at them,
fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across which
moved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates
sat eating salt beef with sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping
thick pea-soup out of pannikins by means of battered iron spoons.
The stench of bad beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, to
the accompaniment of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads,
echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He watched them
eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he would be
careful here. He would make no noise. He would keep his mind upon
it all the time.
He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur’s
brother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and
his heart warmed toward them. How they loved each other, the
members of this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of
her mother, of the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them
walking toward him with arms entwined. Not in his world were such
displays of affection between parents and children made. It was a
revelation of the heights of existence that were attained in the
world above. It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in this
small glimpse of that world. He was moved deeply by appreciation
of it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness. He
had starved for love all his life. His nature craved love. It was
an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without, and
hardened himself in the process. He had not known that he needed
love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation, and
thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.
He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough
getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother,
Norman. Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would have
been too much for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had
never worked so hard in his life. The severest toil was child’s
play compared with this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on his
forehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from the exertion of
doing so many unaccustomed things at once. He had to eat as he had
never eaten before, to handle strange tools, to glance
surreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish each new thing,
to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon him
Martin Eden
11
and being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of a
yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, aching
restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life
whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again straying off
in speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her. Also, when
his secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to any one
else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in any
particular occasion, that person’s features were seized upon by his
mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine
what they were – all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to
hear what was said to him and what was said back and forth, and to
answer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of
speech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion to
confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that
appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded
puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He was
oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls.
Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they
would come on and what they looked like. He had heard of such
things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next few
minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings who
used them – ay, and he would use them himself. And most important
of all, far down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was
the problem of how he should comport himself toward these persons.
What should his attitude be? He wrestled continually and anxiously
with the problem. There were cowardly suggestions that he should
make believe, assume a part; and there were still more cowardly
suggestions that warned him he would fail in such course, that his
nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that he would make a
fool of himself.
It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide
upon his attitude, that he was very quiet. He did not know that
his quietness was giving the lie to Arthur’s words of the day
before, when that brother of hers had announced that he was going
to bring a wild man home to dinner and for them not to be alarmed,
because they would find him an interesting wild man. Martin Eden
could not have found it in him, just then, to believe that her
brother could be guilty of such treachery – especially when he had
been the means of getting this particular brother out of an
unpleasant row. So he sat at table, perturbed by his own unfitness
and at the same time charmed by all that went on about him. For
the first time he realized that eating was something more than a
utilitarian function. He was unaware of what he ate. It was
merely food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this table
where eating was an aesthetic function. It was an intellectual
function, too. His mind was stirred. He heard words spoken that
were meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only in
books and that no man or woman he had known was of large enough
mental caliber to pronounce. When he heard such words dropping
carelessly from the lips of the members of this marvellous family,
her family, he thrilled with delight. The romance, and beauty, and
high vigor of the books were coming true. He was in that rare and
blissful state wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out from the
crannies of fantasy and become fact.
Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept
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12
himself in the background, listening, observing, and pleasuring,
replying in reticent monosyllables, saying, “Yes, miss,” and “No,
miss,” to her, and “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” to her mother.
He curbed the impulse, arising out of his sea-training, to say
“Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to her brothers. He felt that it would
be inappropriate and a confession of inferiority on his part –
which would never do if he was to win to her. Also, it was a
dictate of his pride. “By God!” he cried to himself, once; “I’m
just as good as them, and if they do know lots that I don’t, I
could learn ‘m a few myself, all the same!” And the next moment,
when she or her mother addressed him as “Mr. Eden,” his aggressive
pride was forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with delight. He
was a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, at
dinner, with people he had read about in books. He was in the
books himself, adventuring through the printed pages of bound
volumes.
But while he belied Arthur’s description, and appeared a gentle
lamb rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course
of action. He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle
would never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature. He
talked only when he had to, and then his speech was like his walk
to the table, filled with jerks and halts as he groped in his
polyglot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew were fit
but which he feared he could not pronounce, rejecting other words
he knew would not be understood or would be raw and harsh. But all
the time he was oppressed by the consciousness that this
carefulness of diction was making a booby of him, preventing him
from expressing what he had in him. Also, his love of freedom
chafed against the restriction in much the same way his neck chafed
against the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he was confident
that he could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful of thought
and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent.
He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that
struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then