heard. Me for her, you can stack on that. Say, why don’t you get
married with all this money to burn? You could get the finest girl
in the land.”
Martin shook his head with a smile, but in his secret heart he was
wondering why any man wanted to marry. It seemed an amazing and
incomprehensible thing.
From the deck of the Mariposa, at the sailing hour, he saw Lizzie
Connolly hiding in the skirts of the crowd on the wharf. Take her
with you, came the thought. It is easy to be kind. She will be
supremely happy. It was almost a temptation one moment, and the
succeeding moment it became a terror. He was in a panic at the
thought of it. His tired soul cried out in protest. He turned
away from the rail with a groan, muttering, “Man, you are too sick,
you are too sick.”
He fled to his stateroom, where he lurked until the steamer was
clear of the dock. In the dining saloon, at luncheon, he found
himself in the place of honor, at the captain’s right; and he was
not long in discovering that he was the great man on board. But no
more unsatisfactory great man ever sailed on a ship. He spent the
afternoon in a deck-chair, with closed eyes, dozing brokenly most
of the time, and in the evening went early to bed.
After the second day, recovered from seasickness, the full
passenger list was in evidence, and the more he saw of the
passengers the more he disliked them. Yet he knew that he did them
injustice. They were good and kindly people, he forced himself to
acknowledge, and in the moment of acknowledgment he qualified –
good and kindly like all the bourgeoisie, with all the
psychological cramp and intellectual futility of their kind, they
bored him when they talked with him, their little superficial minds
were so filled with emptiness; while the boisterous high spirits
and the excessive energy of the younger people shocked him. They
were never quiet, ceaselessly playing deck-quoits, tossing rings,
promenading, or rushing to the rail with loud cries to watch the
leaping porpoises and the first schools of flying fish.
He slept much. After breakfast he sought his deck-chair with a
magazine he never finished. The printed pages tired him. He
puzzled that men found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed
in his chair. When the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was
irritated that he must awaken. There was no satisfaction in being
awake.
Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and went
forward into the forecastle with the sailors. But the breed of
sailors seemed to have changed since the days he had lived in the
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forecastle. He could find no kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-
minded bestial creatures. He was in despair. Up above nobody had
wanted Martin Eden for his own sake, and he could not go back to
those of his own class who had wanted him in the past. He did not
want them. He could not stand them any more than he could stand
the stupid first-cabin passengers and the riotous young people.
Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes
of a sick person. During every conscious moment life blazed in a
raw glare around him and upon him. It hurt. It hurt intolerably.
It was the first time in his life that Martin had travelled first
class. On ships at sea he had always been in the forecastle, the
steerage, or in the black depths of the coal-hold, passing coal.
In those days, climbing up the iron ladders out the pit of stifling
heat, he had often caught glimpses of the passengers, in cool
white, doing nothing but enjoy themselves, under awnings spread to
keep the sun and wind away from them, with subservient stewards
taking care of their every want and whim, and it had seemed to him
that the realm in which they moved and had their being was nothing
else than paradise. Well, here he was, the great man on board, in
the midmost centre of it, sitting at the captain’s right hand, and
yet vainly harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest of
the Paradise he had lost. He had found no new one, and now he
could not find the old one.
He strove to stir himself and find something to interest him. He
ventured the petty officers’ mess, and was glad to get away. He
talked with a quartermaster off duty, an intelligent man who
promptly prodded him with the socialist propaganda and forced into
his hands a bunch of leaflets and pamphlets. He listened to the
man expounding the slave-morality, and as he listened, he thought
languidly of his own Nietzsche philosophy. But what was it worth,
after all? He remembered one of Nietzsche’s mad utterances wherein
that madman had doubted truth. And who was to say? Perhaps
Nietzsche had been right. Perhaps there was no truth in anything,
no truth in truth – no such thing as truth. But his mind wearied
quickly, and he was content to go back to his chair and doze.
Miserable as he was on the steamer, a new misery came upon him.
What when the steamer reached Tahiti? He would have to go ashore.
He would have to order his trade-goods, to find a passage on a
schooner to the Marquesas, to do a thousand and one things that
were awful to contemplate. Whenever he steeled himself
deliberately to think, he could see the desperate peril in which he
stood. In all truth, he was in the Valley of the Shadow, and his
danger lay in that he was not afraid. If he were only afraid, he
would make toward life. Being unafraid, he was drifting deeper
into the shadow. He found no delight in the old familiar things of
life. The Mariposa was now in the northeast trades, and this wine
of wind, surging against him, irritated him. He had his chair
moved to escape the embrace of this lusty comrade of old days and
nights.
The day the Mariposa entered the doldrums, Martin was more
miserable than ever. He could no longer sleep. He was soaked with
sleep, and perforce he must now stay awake and endure the white
glare of life. He moved about restlessly. The air was sticky and
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humid, and the rain-squalls were unrefreshing. He ached with life.
He walked around the deck until that hurt too much, then sat in his
chair until he was compelled to walk again. He forced himself at
last to finish the magazine, and from the steamer library he culled
several volumes of poetry. But they could not hold him, and once
more he took to walking.
He stayed late on deck, after dinner, but that did not help him,
for when he went below, he could not sleep. This surcease from
life had failed him. It was too much. He turned on the electric
light and tried to read. One of the volumes was a Swinburne. He
lay in bed, glancing through its pages, until suddenly he became
aware that he was reading with interest. He finished the stanza,
attempted to read on, then came back to it. He rested the book
face downward on his breast and fell to thinking. That was it.
The very thing. Strange that it had never come to him before.
That was the meaning of it all; he had been drifting that way all
the time, and now Swinburne showed him that it was the happy way
out. He wanted rest, and here was rest awaiting him. He glanced
at the open port-hole. Yes, it was large enough. For the first
time in weeks he felt happy. At last he had discovered the cure of
his ill. He picked up the book and read the stanza slowly aloud:-
“‘From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.'”
He looked again at the open port. Swinburne had furnished the key.
Life was ill, or, rather, it had become ill – an unbearable thing.
“That dead men rise up never!” That line stirred him with a
profound feeling of gratitude. It was the one beneficent thing in
the universe. When life became an aching weariness, death was
ready to soothe away to everlasting sleep. But what was he waiting
for? It was time to go.
He arose and thrust his head out the port-hole, looking down into
the milky wash. The Mariposa was deeply loaded, and, hanging by
his hands, his feet would be in the water. He could slip in
noiselessly. No one would hear. A smother of spray dashed up,
wetting his face. It tasted salt on his lips, and the taste was