Kabanata Kabanata 2 · Chapter II

. Chapter II

The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.

Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times

seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and was seated alongside

of Her. The array of knives and forks frightened him. They bristled

with unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their

dazzle became a background across which moved a succession of

forecastle pictures, wherein he and his mates sat eating salt beef with

sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins

by means of battered iron spoons. The stench of bad beef was in his

nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers

and groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He

watched them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he

would be careful here. He would make no noise. He would keep his mind

upon it all the time.

He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur’s

brother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his

heart warmed toward them. How they loved each other, the members of

this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of her mother, of

the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them walking toward him with

arms entwined. Not in his world were such displays of affection between

parents and children made. It was a revelation of the heights of

existence that were attained in the world above. It was the finest

thing yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that world. He was

moved deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting with

sympathetic tenderness. He had starved for love all his life. His

nature craved love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had

gone without, and hardened himself in the process. He had not known

that he needed love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in

operation, and thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and

splendid.

He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough

getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman.

Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would have been too much

for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never worked so

hard in his life. The severest toil was child’s play compared with

this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on his forehead, and his shirt

was wet with sweat from the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed

things at once. He had to eat as he had never eaten before, to handle

strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and learn how to

accomplish each new thing, to receive the flood of impressions that was

pouring in upon him and being mentally annotated and classified; to be

conscious of a yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a

dull, aching restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the

walk in life whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again

straying off in speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her.

Also, when his secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to

any one else, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in

any particular occasion, that person’s features were seized upon by his

mind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divine what

they were—all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to hear what was

said to him and what was said back and forth, and to answer, when it

was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required

a constant curb. And to add confusion to confusion, there was the

servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his

shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums

demanding instantaneous solution. He was oppressed throughout the meal

by the thought of finger-bowls. Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of

times, he wondered when they would come on and what they looked like.

He had heard of such things, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the

next few minutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings

who used them—ay, and he would use them himself. And most important of

all, far down and yet always at the surface of his thought, was the

problem of how he should comport himself toward these persons. What

should his attitude be? He wrestled continually and anxiously with the

problem. There were cowardly suggestions that he should make believe,

assume a part; and there were still more cowardly suggestions that

warned him he would fail in such course, that his nature was not fitted

to live up to it, and that he would make a fool of himself.

It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide upon

his attitude, that he was very quiet. He did not know that his

quietness was giving the lie to Arthur’s words of the day before, when

that brother of hers had announced that he was going to bring a wild

man home to dinner and for them not to be alarmed, because they would

find him an interesting wild man. Martin Eden could not have found it

in him, just then, to believe that her brother could be guilty of such

treachery—especially when he had been the means of getting this

particular brother out of an unpleasant row. So he sat at table,

perturbed by his own unfitness and at the same time charmed by all that

went on about him. For the first time he realized that eating was

something more than a utilitarian function. He was unaware of what he

ate. It was merely food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this

table where eating was an aesthetic function. It was an intellectual

function, too. His mind was stirred. He heard words spoken that were

meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only in books and

that no man or woman he had known was of large enough mental caliber to

pronounce. When he heard such words dropping carelessly from the lips

of the members of this marvellous family, her family, he thrilled with

delight. The romance, and beauty, and high vigor of the books were

coming true. He was in that rare and blissful state wherein a man sees

his dreams stalk out from the crannies of fantasy and become fact.

Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kept himself in

the background, listening, observing, and pleasuring, replying in

reticent monosyllables, saying, “Yes, miss,” and “No, miss,” to her,

and “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” to her mother. He curbed the

impulse, arising out of his sea-training, to say “Yes, sir,” and “No,

sir,” to her brothers. He felt that it would be inappropriate and a

confession of inferiority on his part—which would never do if he was to

win to her. Also, it was a dictate of his pride. “By God!” he cried to

himself, once; “I’m just as good as them, and if they do know lots that

I don’t, I could learn ’m a few myself, all the same!” And the next

moment, when she or her mother addressed him as “Mr. Eden,” his

aggressive pride was forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with

delight. He was a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to

shoulder, at dinner, with people he had read about in books. He was in

the books himself, adventuring through the printed pages of bound

volumes.

But while he belied Arthur’s description, and appeared a gentle lamb

rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a course of

action. He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddle would

never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature. He talked only

when he had to, and then his speech was like his walk to the table,

filled with jerks and halts as he groped in his polyglot vocabulary for

words, debating over words he knew were fit but which he feared he

could not pronounce, rejecting other words he knew would not be

understood or would be raw and harsh. But all the time he was oppressed

by the consciousness that this carefulness of diction was making a

booby of him, preventing him from expressing what he had in him. Also,

his love of freedom chafed against the restriction in much the same way

his neck chafed against the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he

was confident that he could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful

of thought and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and

urgent. He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him that

struggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and then 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, “Pow!”

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.”

“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 shock 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 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 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 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 lilting

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 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?”

“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.