his arms, as he gazed with unseeing eyes at the blur of the great
city across the bay. For once there were no visions in his brain.
Only colors and lights and glows pulsed there, warm as the day and
warm as his love. He bent over her. She was speaking.
“When did you love me?” she whispered.
“From the first, the very first, the first moment I laid eye on
you. I was mad for love of you then, and in all the time that has
passed since then I have only grown the madder. I am maddest, now,
dear. I am almost a lunatic, my head is so turned with joy.”
“I am glad I am a woman, Martin – dear,” she said, after a long
sigh.
He crushed her in his arms again and again, and then asked:-
“And you? When did you first know?”
“Oh, I knew it all the time, almost, from the first.”
“And I have been as blind as a bat!” he cried, a ring of vexation
in his voice. “I never dreamed it until just how, when I – when I
kissed you.”
“I didn’t mean that.” She drew herself partly away and looked at
him. “I meant I knew you loved almost from the first.”
“And you?” he demanded.
“It came to me suddenly.” She was speaking very slowly, her eyes
warm and fluttery and melting, a soft flush on her cheeks that did
not go away. “I never knew until just now when – you put your arms
around me. And I never expected to marry you, Martin, not until
just now. How did you make me love you?”
“I don’t know,” he laughed, “unless just by loving you, for I loved
you hard enough to melt the heart of a stone, much less the heart
of the living, breathing woman you are.”
“This is so different from what I thought love would be,” she
announced irrelevantly.
“What did you think it would be like?”
“I didn’t think it would be like this.” She was looking into his
eyes at the moment, but her own dropped as she continued, “You see,
I didn’t know what this was like.”
He offered to draw her toward him again, but it was no more than a
tentative muscular movement of the girdling arm, for he feared that
he might be greedy. Then he felt her body yielding, and once again
she was close in his arms and lips were pressed on lips.
“What will my people say?” she queried, with sudden apprehension,
in one of the pauses.
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“I don’t know. We can find out very easily any time we are so
minded.”
“But if mamma objects? I am sure I am afraid to tell her.”
“Let me tell her,” he volunteered valiantly. “I think your mother
does not like me, but I can win her around. A fellow who can win
you can win anything. And if we don’t – ”
“Yes?”
“Why, we’ll have each other. But there’s no danger not winning
your mother to our marriage. She loves you too well.”
“I should not like to break her heart,” Ruth said pensively.
He felt like assuring her that mothers’ hearts were not so easily
broken, but instead he said, “And love is the greatest thing in the
world.”
“Do you know, Martin, you sometimes frighten me. I am frightened
now, when I think of you and of what you have been. You must be
very, very good to me. Remember, after all, that I am only a
child. I never loved before.”
“Nor I. We are both children together. And we are fortunate above
most, for we have found our first love in each other.”
“But that is impossible!” she cried, withdrawing herself from his
arms with a swift, passionate movement. “Impossible for you. You
have been a sailor, and sailors, I have heard, are – are – ”
Her voice faltered and died away.
“Are addicted to having a wife in every port?” he suggested. “Is
that what you mean?”
“Yes,” she answered in a low voice.
“But that is not love.” He spoke authoritatively. “I have been in
many ports, but I never knew a passing touch of love until I saw
you that first night. Do you know, when I said good night and went
away, I was almost arrested.”
“Arrested?”
“Yes. The policeman thought I was drunk; and I was, too – with
love for you.”
“But you said we were children, and I said it was impossible, for
you, and we have strayed away from the point.”
“I said that I never loved anybody but you,” he replied. “You are
my first, my very first.”
“And yet you have been a sailor,” she objected.
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“But that doesn’t prevent me from loving you the first.”
“And there have been women – other women – oh!”
And to Martin Eden’s supreme surprise, she burst into a storm of
tears that took more kisses than one and many caresses to drive
away. And all the while there was running through his head
Kipling’s line: “AND THE COLONEL’S LADY AND JUDY O’GRADY ARE
SISTERS UNDER THEIR SKINS.” It was true, he decided; though the
novels he had read had led him to believe otherwise. His idea, for
which the novels were responsible, had been that only formal
proposals obtained in the upper classes. It was all right enough,
down whence he had come, for youths and maidens to win each other
by contact; but for the exalted personages up above on the heights
to make love in similar fashion had seemed unthinkable. Yet the
novels were wrong. Here was a proof of it. The same pressures and
caresses, unaccompanied by speech, that were efficacious with the
girls of the working-class, were equally efficacious with the girls
above the working-class. They were all of the same flesh, after
all, sisters under their skins; and he might have known as much
himself had he remembered his Spencer. As he held Ruth in his arms
and soothed her, he took great consolation in the thought that the
Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady were pretty much alike under their
skins. It brought Ruth closer to him, made her possible. Her dear
flesh was as anybody’s flesh, as his flesh. There was no bar to
their marriage. Class difference was the only difference, and
class was extrinsic. It could be shaken off. A slave, he had
read, had risen to the Roman purple. That being so, then he could
rise to Ruth. Under her purity, and saintliness, and culture, and
ethereal beauty of soul, she was, in things fundamentally human,
just like Lizzie Connolly and all Lizzie Connollys. All that was
possible of them was possible of her. She could love, and hate,
maybe have hysterics; and she could certainly be jealous, as she
was jealous now, uttering her last sobs in his arms.
“Besides, I am older than you,” she remarked suddenly, opening her
eyes and looking up at him, “three years older.”
“Hush, you are only a child, and I am forty years older than you,
in experience,” was his answer.
In truth, they were children together, so far as love was
concerned, and they were as naive and immature in the expression of
their love as a pair of children, and this despite the fact that
she was crammed with a university education and that his head was
full of scientific philosophy and the hard facts of life.
They sat on through the passing glory of the day, talking as lovers
are prone to talk, marvelling at the wonder of love and at destiny
that had flung them so strangely together, and dogmatically
believing that they loved to a degree never attained by lovers
before. And they returned insistently, again and again, to a
rehearsal of their first impressions of each other and to hopeless
attempts to analyze just precisely what they felt for each other
and how much there was of it.
The cloud-masses on the western horizon received the descending
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sun, and the circle of the sky turned to rose, while the zenith
glowed with the same warm color. The rosy light was all about
them, flooding over them, as she sang, “Good-by, Sweet Day.” She
sang softly, leaning in the cradle of his arm, her hands in his,
their hearts in each other’s hands.
CHAPTER XXII
Mrs. Morse did not require a mother’s intuition to read the
advertisement in Ruth’s face when she returned home. The flush
that would not leave the cheeks told the simple story, and more
eloquently did the eyes, large and bright, reflecting an
unmistakable inward glory.
“What has happened?” Mrs. Morse asked, having bided her time till
Ruth had gone to bed.
“You know?” Ruth queried, with trembling lips.
For reply, her mother’s arm went around her, and a hand was softly
caressing her hair.
“He did not speak,” she blurted out. “I did not intend that it