الفصل الفصل 4 · Chapter IV

. Chapter IV

Martin Eden, with blood still crawling from contact with his

brother-in-law, felt his way along the unlighted back hall and entered

his room, a tiny cubbyhole with space for a bed, a wash-stand, and one

chair. Mr. Higginbotham was too thrifty to keep a servant when his wife

could do the work. Besides, the servant’s room enabled them to take in

two boarders instead of one. Martin placed the Swinburne and Browning

on the chair, took off his coat, and sat down on the bed. A screeching

of asthmatic springs greeted the weight of his body, but he did not

notice them. He started to take off his shoes, but fell to staring at

the white plaster wall opposite him, broken by long streaks of dirty

brown where rain had leaked through the roof. On this befouled

background visions began to flow and burn. He forgot his shoes and

stared long, till his lips began to move and he murmured, “Ruth.”

“Ruth.” He had not thought a simple sound could be so beautiful. It

delighted his ear, and he grew intoxicated with the repetition of it.

“Ruth.” It was a talisman, a magic word to conjure with. Each time he

murmured it, her face shimmered before him, suffusing the foul wall

with a golden radiance. This radiance did not stop at the wall. It

extended on into infinity, and through its golden depths his soul went

questing after hers. The best that was in him was out in splendid

flood. The very thought of her ennobled and purified him, made him

better, and made him want to be better. This was new to him. He had

never known women who had made him better. They had always had the

counter effect of making him beastly. He did not know that many of them

had done their best, bad as it was. Never having been conscious of

himself, he did not know that he had that in his being that drew love

from women and which had been the cause of their reaching out for his

youth. Though they had often bothered him, he had never bothered about

them; and he would never have dreamed that there were women who had

been better because of him. Always in sublime carelessness had he

lived, till now, and now it seemed to him that they had always reached

out and dragged at him with vile hands. This was not just to them, nor

to himself. But he, who for the first time was becoming conscious of

himself, was in no condition to judge, and he burned with shame as he

stared at the vision of his infamy.

He got up abruptly and tried to see himself in the dirty looking-glass

over the wash-stand. He passed a towel over it and looked again, long

and carefully. It was the first time he had ever really seen himself.

His eyes were made for seeing, but up to that moment they had been

filled with the ever changing panorama of the world, at which he had

been too busy gazing, ever to gaze at himself. He saw the head and face

of a young fellow of twenty, but, being unused to such appraisement, he

did not know how to value it. Above a square-domed forehead he saw a

mop of brown hair, nut-brown, with a wave to it and hints of curls that

were a delight to any woman, making hands tingle to stroke it and

fingers tingle to pass caresses through it. But he passed it by as

without merit, in Her eyes, and dwelt long and thoughtfully on the

high, square forehead,—striving to penetrate it and learn the quality

of its content. What kind of a brain lay behind there? was his

insistent interrogation. What was it capable of? How far would it take

him? Would it take him to her?

He wondered if there was soul in those steel-gray eyes that were often

quite blue of color and that were strong with the briny airs of the

sun-washed deep. He wondered, also, how his eyes looked to her. He

tried to imagine himself she, gazing into those eyes of his, but failed

in the jugglery. He could successfully put himself inside other men’s

minds, but they had to be men whose ways of life he knew. He did not

know her way of life. She was wonder and mystery, and how could he

guess one thought of hers? Well, they were honest eyes, he concluded,

and in them was neither smallness nor meanness. The brown sunburn of

his face surprised him. He had not dreamed he was so black. He rolled

up his shirt-sleeve and compared the white underside of the arm with

his face. Yes, he was a white man, after all. But the arms were

sunburned, too. He twisted his arm, rolled the biceps over with his

other hand, and gazed underneath where he was least touched by the sun.

It was very white. He laughed at his bronzed face in the glass at the

thought that it was once as white as the underside of his arm; nor did

he dream that in the world there were few pale spirits of women who

could boast fairer or smoother skins than he—fairer than where he had

escaped the ravages of the sun.

His might have been a cherub’s mouth, had not the full, sensuous lips a

trick, under stress, of drawing firmly across the teeth. At times, so

tightly did they draw, the mouth became stern and harsh, even ascetic.

They were the lips of a fighter and of a lover. They could taste the

sweetness of life with relish, and they could put the sweetness aside

and command life. The chin and jaw, strong and just hinting of square

aggressiveness, helped the lips to command life. Strength balanced

sensuousness and had upon it a tonic effect, compelling him to love

beauty that was healthy and making him vibrate to sensations that were

wholesome. And between the lips were teeth that had never known nor

needed the dentist’s care. They were white and strong and regular, he

decided, as he looked at them. But as he looked, he began to be

troubled. Somewhere, stored away in the recesses of his mind and

vaguely remembered, was the impression that there were people who

washed their teeth every day. They were the people from up above—people

in her class. She must wash her teeth every day, too. What would she

think if she learned that he had never washed his teeth in all the days

of his life? He resolved to get a tooth-brush and form the habit. He

would begin at once, to-morrow. It was not by mere achievement that he

could hope to win to her. He must make a personal reform in all things,

even to tooth-washing and neck-gear, though a starched collar affected

him as a renunciation of freedom.

He held up his hand, rubbing the ball of the thumb over the calloused

palm and gazing at the dirt that was ingrained in the flesh itself and

which no brush could scrub away. How different was her palm! He

thrilled deliciously at the remembrance. Like a rose-petal, he thought;

cool and soft as a snowflake. He had never thought that a mere woman’s

hand could be so sweetly soft. He caught himself imagining the wonder

of a caress from such a hand, and flushed guiltily. It was too gross a

thought for her. In ways it seemed to impugn her high spirituality. She

was a pale, slender spirit, exalted far beyond the flesh; but

nevertheless the softness of her palm persisted in his thoughts. He was

used to the harsh callousness of factory girls and working women. Well

he knew why their hands were rough; but this hand of hers . . . It was

soft because she had never used it to work with. The gulf yawned

between her and him at the awesome thought of a person who did not have

to work for a living. He suddenly saw the aristocracy of the people who

did not labor. It towered before him on the wall, a figure in brass,

arrogant and powerful. He had worked himself; his first memories seemed

connected with work, and all his family had worked. There was Gertrude.

When her hands were not hard from the endless housework, they were

swollen and red like boiled beef, what of the washing. And there was

his sister Marian. She had worked in the cannery the preceding summer,

and her slim, pretty hands were all scarred with the tomato-knives.

Besides, the tips of two of her fingers had been left in the cutting

machine at the paper-box factory the preceding winter. He remembered

the hard palms of his mother as she lay in her coffin. And his father

had worked to the last fading gasp; the horned growth on his hands must

have been half an inch thick when he died. But Her hands were soft, and

her mother’s hands, and her brothers’. This last came to him as a

surprise; it was tremendously indicative of the highness of their

caste, of the enormous distance that stretched between her and him.

He sat back on the bed with a bitter laugh, and finished taking off his

shoes. He was a fool; he had been made drunken by a woman’s face and by

a woman’s soft, white hands. And then, suddenly, before his eyes, on

the foul plaster-wall appeared a vision. He stood in front of a gloomy

tenement house. It was night-time, in the East End of London, and

before him stood Margey, a little factory girl of fifteen. He had seen

her home after the bean-feast. She lived in that gloomy tenement, a

place not fit for swine. His hand was going out to hers as he said good

night. She had put her lips up to be kissed, but he wasn’t going to

kiss her. Somehow he was afraid of her. And then her hand closed on his

and pressed feverishly. He felt her callouses grind and grate on his,

and a great wave of pity welled over him. He saw her yearning, hungry

eyes, and her ill-fed female form which had been rushed from childhood

into a frightened and ferocious maturity; then he put his arms about

her in large tolerance and stooped and kissed her on the lips. Her glad

little cry rang in his ears, and he felt her clinging to him like a

cat. Poor little starveling! He continued to stare at the vision of

what had happened in the long ago. His flesh was crawling as it had

crawled that night when she clung to him, and his heart was warm with

pity. It was a gray scene, greasy gray, and the rain drizzled greasily

on the pavement stones. And then a radiant glory shone on the wall, and

up through the other vision, displacing it, glimmered Her pale face

under its crown of golden hair, remote and inaccessible as a star.

He took the Browning and the Swinburne from the chair and kissed them.

Just the same, she told me to call again, he thought. He took another

look at himself in the glass, and said aloud, with great solemnity:-

“Martin Eden, the first thing to-morrow you go to the free library an’

read up on etiquette. Understand!”

He turned off the gas, and the springs shrieked under his body.

“But you’ve got to quit cussin’, Martin, old boy; you’ve got to quit

cussin’,” he said aloud.

Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and

audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters.