he forgot himself and where he was, and the old words – the tools
of speech he knew – slipped out.
Once, he declined something from the servant who interrupted and
pestered at his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically,
“Pew!”
On the instant those at the table were keyed up and expectant, the
servant was smugly pleased, and he was wallowing in mortification.
But he recovered himself quickly.
“It’s the Kanaka for ‘finish,'” he explained, “and it just come out
naturally. It’s spelt p-a-u.”
He caught her curious and speculative eyes fixed on his hands, and,
being in explanatory mood, he said:-
“I just come down the Coast on one of the Pacific mail steamers.
She was behind time, an’ around the Puget Sound ports we worked
like niggers, storing cargo-mixed freight, if you know what that
means. That’s how the skin got knocked off.”
Martin Eden
13
“Oh, it wasn’t that,” she hastened to explain, in turn. “Your
hands seemed too small for your body.”
His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of another of his
deficiencies.
“Yes,” he said depreciatingly. “They ain’t big enough to stand the
strain. I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders. They
are too strong, an’ when I smash a man on the jaw the hands get
smashed, too.”
He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled with disgust
at himself. He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked
about things that were not nice.
“It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did – and you a
stranger,” she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though not
of the reason for it.
He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warm
surge of gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-worded
tongue.
“It wasn’t nothin’ at all,” he said. “Any guy ‘ud do it for
another. That bunch of hoodlums was lookin’ for trouble, an’
Arthur wasn’t botherin’ ’em none. They butted in on ‘m, an’ then I
butted in on them an’ poked a few. That’s where some of the skin
off my hands went, along with some of the teeth of the gang. I
wouldn’t ‘a’ missed it for anything. When I seen – ”
He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own
depravity and utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did.
And while Arthur took up the tale, for the twentieth time, of his
adventure with the drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how
Martin Eden had rushed in and rescued him, that individual, with
frowning brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, and
wrestled more determinedly with the problem of how he should
conduct himself toward these people. He certainly had not
succeeded so far. He wasn’t of their tribe, and he couldn’t talk
their lingo, was the way he put it to himself. He couldn’t fake
being their kind. The masquerade would fail, and besides,
masquerade was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him for
sham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He couldn’t
talk their talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that he
was resolved. But in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be
his own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible to
them and so as not to shook them too much. And furthermore, he
wouldn’t claim, not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar with
anything that was unfamiliar. In pursuance of this decision, when
the two brothers, talking university shop, had used “trig” several
times, Martin Eden demanded:-
“What is TRIG?”
“Trignometry,” Norman said; “a higher form of math.”
“And what is math?” was the next question, which, somehow, brought
Martin Eden
14
the laugh on Norman.
“Mathematics, arithmetic,” was the answer.
Martin Eden nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the apparently
illimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw took on tangibility.
His abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete
form. In the alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematics
and the whole field of knowledge which they betokened were
transmuted into so much landscape. The vistas he saw were vistas
of green foliage and forest glades, all softly luminous or shot
through with flashing lights. In the distance, detail was veiled
and blurred by a purple haze, but behind this purple haze, he knew,
was the glamour of the unknown, the lure of romance. It was like
wine to him. Here was adventure, something to do with head and
hand, a world to conquer – and straightway from the back of his
consciousness rushed the thought, CONQUERING, TO WIN TO HER, THAT
LILY-PALE SPIRIT SITTING BESIDE HIM.
The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur,
who, all evening, had been trying to draw his wild man out. Martin
Eden remembered his decision. For the first time he became
himself, consciously and deliberately at first, but soon lost in
the joy of creating in making life as he knew it appear before his
listeners’ eyes. He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling
schooner Halcyon when she was captured by a revenue cutter. He saw
with wide eyes, and he could tell what he saw. He brought the
pulsing sea before them, and the men and the ships upon the sea.
He communicated his power of vision, till they saw with his eyes
what he had seen. He selected from the vast mass of detail with an
artist’s touch, drawing pictures of life that glowed and burned
with light and color, injecting movement so that his listeners
surged along with him on the flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm,
and power. At times he shocked them with the vividness of the
narrative and his terms of speech, but beauty always followed fast
upon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved by humor, by
interpretations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors’ minds.
And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes.
His fire warmed her. She wondered if she had been cold all her
days. She wanted to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was
like a volcano spouting forth strength, robustness, and health.
She felt that she must lean toward him, and resisted by an effort.
Then, too, there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him.
She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by toil so that
the very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh itself, by that
red chafe of the collar and those bulging muscles. His roughness
frightened her; each roughness of speech was an insult to her ear,
each rough phase of his life an insult to her soul. And ever and
again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil
to have such power over her. All that was most firmly established
in her mind was rocking. His romance and adventure were battering
at the conventions. Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life
was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy,
to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived
and pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside. “Therefore,
play!” was the cry that rang through her. “Lean toward him, if so
Martin Eden
15
you will, and place your two hands upon his neck!” She wanted to
cry out at the recklessness of the thought, and in vain she
appraised her own cleanness and culture and balanced all that she
was against what he was not. She glanced about her and saw the
others gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would have
despaired had not she seen horror in her mother’s eyes – fascinated
horror, it was true, but none the less horror. This man from outer
darkness was evil. Her mother saw it, and her mother was right.
She would trust her mother’s judgment in this as she had always
trusted it in all things. The fire of him was no longer warm, and
the fear of him was no longer poignant.
Later, at the piano, she played for him, and at him, aggressively,
with the vague intent of emphasizing the impassableness of the gulf
that separated them. Her music was a club that she swung brutally
upon his head; and though it stunned him and crushed him down, it
incited him. He gazed upon her in awe. In his mind, as in her
own, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered his
ambition to win across it. But he was too complicated a plexus of
sensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a whole evening, especially
when there was music. He was remarkably susceptible to music. It
was like strong drink, firing him to audacities of feeling, – a
drug that laid hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring