through the sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with
beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He did not
understand the music she played. It was different from the dance-
hall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard. But he
had caught hints of such music from the books, and he accepted her
playing largely on faith, patiently waiting, at first, for the
lifting measures of pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because
those measures were not long continued. Just as he caught the
swing of them and started, his imagination attuned in flight,
always they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was
meaningless to him, and that dropped his imagination, an inert
weight, back to earth.
Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in all
this. He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine the
message that her hands pronounced upon the keys. Then he dismissed
the thought as unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself more
freely to the music. The old delightful condition began to be
induced. His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh became
spirit; before his eyes and behind his eyes shone a great glory;
and then the scene before him vanished and he was away, rocking
over the world that was to him a very dear world. The known and
the unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged his
vision. He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod
market-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen.
The scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had known
it on warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against the
southeast trades through long tropic days, sinking palm-tufted
coral islets in the turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tufted
coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. Swift as thought the
pictures came and went. One instant he was astride a broncho and
flying through the fairy-colored Painted Desert country; the next
instant he was gazing down through shimmering heat into the whited
sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing ocean
Martin Eden
16
where great ice islands towered and glistened in the sun. He lay
on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the mellow-
sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue
fires, in the light of which danced the HULA dancers to the
barbaric love-calls of the singers, who chanted to tinkling
UKULELES and rumbling tom-toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night.
In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the
stars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern
Cross burned low in the sky.
He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was his
consciousness was the strings; and the flood of music was a wind
that poured against those strings and set them vibrating with
memories and dreams. He did not merely feel. Sensation invested
itself in form and color and radiance, and what his imagination
dared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way. Past,
present, and future mingled; and he went on oscillating across the
broad, warm world, through high adventure and noble deeds to Her –
ay, and with her, winning her, his arm about her, and carrying her
on in flight through the empery of his mind.
And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of all
this in his face. It was a transfigured face, with great shining
eyes that gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leap
and pulse of life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit. She was
startled. The raw, stumbling lout was gone. The ill-fitting
clothes, battered hands, and sunburned face remained; but these
seemed the prison-bars through which she saw a great soul looking
forth, inarticulate and dumb because of those feeble lips that
would not give it speech. Only for a flashing moment did she see
this, then she saw the lout returned, and she laughed at the whim
of her fancy. But the impression of that fleeting glimpse
lingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumbling
retreat and go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and another
of Browning – she was studying Browning in one of her English
courses. He seemed such a boy, as he stood blushing and stammering
his thanks, that a wave of pity, maternal in its prompting, welled
up in her. She did not remember the lout, nor the imprisoned soul,
nor the man who had stared at her in all masculineness and
delighted and frightened her. She saw before her only a boy, who
was shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt like a
nutmeg-grater and rasped her skin, and who was saying jerkily:-
“The greatest time of my life. You see, I ain’t used to things. .
. ” He looked about him helplessly. “To people and houses like
this. It’s all new to me, and I like it.”
“I hope you’ll call again,” she said, as he was saying good night
to her brothers.
He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, and
was gone.
“Well, what do you think of him?” Arthur demanded.
“He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone,” she answered. “How old
is he?”
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“Twenty – almost twenty-one. I asked him this afternoon. I didn’t
think he was that young.”
And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she
kissed her brothers goodnight.
CHAPTER III
As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He
drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it
in a long and lingering exhalation. “By God!” he said aloud, in a
voice of awe and wonder. “By God!” he repeated. And yet again he
murmured, “By God!” Then his hand went to his collar, which he
ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his pocket. A cold
drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his
vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly
aware that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams
and reconstructing the scenes just past.
He had met the woman at last – the woman that he had thought little
about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had
expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next
to her at table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into
her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit; – but no more
beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh
that gave it expression and form. He did not think of her flesh as
flesh, – which was new to him; for of the women he had known that
was the only way he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He
did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills and
frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the garb of her
spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine
startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No
word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before.
He had never believed in the divine. He had always been
irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their
immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had
contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But
what he had seen in her eyes was soul – immortal soul that could
never die. No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him the
message of immortality. But she had. She had whispered it to him
the first moment she looked at him. Her face shimmered before his
eyes as he walked along, – pale and serious, sweet and sensitive,
smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and
pure as he had never dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him
like a blow. It startled him. He had known good and bad; but
purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.
And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of
goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal
life.
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18
And promptly urged his ambition to grasp at eternal life. He was
not fit to carry water for her – he knew that; it was a miracle of
luck and a fantastic stroke that had enabled him to see her and be
with her and talk with her that night. It was accidental. There