Kabanata Kabanata 20 · Chapter XX

. Chapter XX

The desire to write was stirring in Martin once more. Stories and poems

were springing into spontaneous creation in his brain, and he made

notes of them against the future time when he would give them

expression. But he did not write. This was his little vacation; he had

resolved to devote it to rest and love, and in both matters he

prospered. He was soon spilling over with vitality, and each day he saw

Ruth, at the moment of meeting, she experienced the old shock of his

strength and health.

“Be careful,” her mother warned her once again. “I am afraid you are

seeing too much of Martin Eden.”

But Ruth laughed from security. She was sure of herself, and in a few

days he would be off to sea. Then, by the time he returned, she would

be away on her visit East. There was a magic, however, in the strength

and health of Martin. He, too, had been told of her contemplated

Eastern trip, and he felt the need for haste. Yet he did not know how

to make love to a girl like Ruth. Then, too, he was handicapped by the

possession of a great fund of experience with girls and women who had

been absolutely different from her. They had known about love and life

and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things. Her

prodigious innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of

speech, and convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own

unworthiness. Also he was handicapped in another way. He had himself

never been in love before. He had liked women in that turgid past of

his, and been fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it

was to love them. He had whistled in a masterful, careless way, and

they had come to him. They had been diversions, incidents, part of the

game men play, but a small part at most. And now, and for the first

time, he was a suppliant, tender and timid and doubting. He did not

know the way of love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his

loved one’s clear innocence.

In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling on

through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of

conduct which was to the effect that when one played a strange game, he

should let the other fellow play first. This had stood him in good

stead a thousand times and trained him as an observer as well. He knew

how to watch the thing that was strange, and to wait for a weakness,

for a place of entrance, to divulge itself. It was like sparring for an

opening in fist-fighting. And when such an opening came, he knew by

long experience to play for it and to play hard.

So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but not

daring. He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of himself.

Had he but known it, he was following the right course with her. Love

came into the world before articulate speech, and in its own early

youth it had learned ways and means that it had never forgotten. It was

in this old, primitive way that Martin wooed Ruth. He did not know he

was doing it at first, though later he divined it. The touch of his

hand on hers was vastly more potent than any word he could utter, the

impact of his strength on her imagination was more alluring than the

printed poems and spoken passions of a thousand generations of lovers.

Whatever his tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to her

judgment; but the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way

directly to her instinct. Her judgment was as young as she, but her

instincts were as old as the race and older. They had been young when

love was young, and they were wiser than convention and opinion and all

the new-born things. So her judgment did not act. There was no call

upon it, and she did not realize the strength of the appeal Martin made

from moment to moment to her love-nature. That he loved her, on the

other hand, was as clear as day, and she consciously delighted in

beholding his love-manifestations—the glowing eyes with their tender

lights, the trembling hands, and the never failing swarthy flush that

flooded darkly under his sunburn. She even went farther, in a timid way

inciting him, but doing it so delicately that he never suspected, and

doing it half-consciously, so that she scarcely suspected herself. She

thrilled with these proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman,

and she took an Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon

him.

Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing unwittingly

and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by contact. The touch of

his hand was pleasant to her, and something deliciously more than

pleasant. Martin did not know it, but he did know that it was not

distasteful to her. Not that they touched hands often, save at meeting

and parting; but that in handling the bicycles, in strapping on the

books of verse they carried into the hills, and in conning the pages of

books side by side, there were opportunities for hand to stray against

hand. And there were opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his

cheek, and for shoulder to touch shoulder, as they leaned together over

the beauty of the books. She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses

which arose from nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while

he desired greatly, when they tired of reading, to rest his head in her

lap and dream with closed eyes about the future that was to be theirs.

On Sunday picnics at Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park, in the past,

he had rested his head on many laps, and, usually, he had slept soundly

and selfishly while the girls shaded his face from the sun and looked

down and loved him and wondered at his lordly carelessness of their

love. To rest his head in a girl’s lap had been the easiest thing in

the world until now, and now he found Ruth’s lap inaccessible and

impossible. Yet it was right here, in his reticence, that the strength

of his wooing lay. It was because of this reticence that he never

alarmed her. Herself fastidious and timid, she never awakened to the

perilous trend of their intercourse. Subtly and unaware she grew toward

him and closer to him, while he, sensing the growing closeness, longed

to dare but was afraid.

Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened living

room with a blinding headache.

“Nothing can do it any good,” she had answered his inquiries. “And

besides, I don’t take headache powders. Doctor Hall won’t permit me.”

“I can cure it, I think, and without drugs,” was Martin’s answer. “I am

not sure, of course, but I’d like to try. It’s simply massage. I

learned the trick first from the Japanese. They are a race of masseurs,

you know. Then I learned it all over again with variations from the

Hawaiians. They call it _lomi-lomi_. It can accomplish most of the

things drugs accomplish and a few things that drugs can’t.”

Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.

“That is so good,” she said.

She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, “Aren’t you

tired?”

The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would be.

Then she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing balm of

his strength: Life poured from the ends of his fingers, driving the

pain before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the easement of

pain, she fell asleep and he stole away.

She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.

“I slept until dinner,” she said. “You cured me completely, Mr. Eden,

and I don’t know how to thank you.”

He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied to

her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone

conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth Barrett.

What had been done could be done again, and he, Martin Eden, could do

it and would do it for Ruth Morse. He went back to his room and to the

volume of Spencer’s “Sociology” lying open on the bed. But he could not

read. Love tormented him and overrode his will, so that, despite all

determination, he found himself at the little ink-stained table. The

sonnet he composed that night was the first of a love-cycle of fifty

sonnets which was completed within two months. He had the “Love-sonnets

from the Portuguese” in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best

conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of

his own sweet love-madness.

The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the “Love-cycle,” to

reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got more

closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature of their

policy and content. The hours he spent with Ruth were maddening alike

in promise and in inconclusiveness. It was a week after he cured her

headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt was proposed by Norman

and seconded by Arthur and Olney. Martin was the only one capable of

handling a boat, and he was pressed into service. Ruth sat near him in

the stern, while the three young fellows lounged amidships, deep in a

wordy wrangle over “frat” affairs.

The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault of

the sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a sudden

feeling of loneliness. She glanced at him. A puff of wind was heeling

the boat over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand on tiller and

the other on main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the same time peering

ahead to make out the near-lying north shore. He was unaware of her

gaze, and she watched him intently, speculating fancifully about the

strange warp of soul that led him, a young man with signal powers, to

fritter away his time on the writing of stories and poems foredoomed to

mediocrity and failure.

Her eyes wandered along the strong throat, dimly seen in the starlight,

and over the firm-poised head, and the old desire to lay her hands upon

his neck came back to her. The strength she abhorred attracted her. Her

feeling of loneliness became more pronounced, and she felt tired. Her

position on the heeling boat irked her, and she remembered the headache

he had cured and the soothing rest that resided in him. He was sitting

beside her, quite beside her, and the boat seemed to tilt her toward

him. Then arose in her the impulse to lean against him, to rest herself

against his strength—a vague, half-formed impulse, which, even as she

considered it, mastered her and made her lean toward him. Or was it the

heeling of the boat? She did not know. She never knew. She knew only

that she was leaning against him and that the easement and soothing

rest were very good. Perhaps it had been the boat’s fault, but she made

no effort to retrieve it. She leaned lightly against his shoulder, but

she leaned, and she continued to lean when he shifted his position to

make it more comfortable for her.

It was a madness, but she refused to consider the madness. She was no

longer herself but a woman, with a woman’s clinging need; and though

she leaned ever so lightly, the need seemed satisfied. She was no

longer tired. Martin did not speak. Had he, the spell would have been

broken. But his reticence of love prolonged it. He was dazed and dizzy.

He could not understand what was happening. It was too wonderful to be

anything but a delirium. He conquered a mad desire to let go sheet and

tiller and to clasp her in his arms. His intuition told him it was the

wrong thing to do, and he was glad that sheet and tiller kept his hands

occupied and fended off temptation. But he luffed the boat less

delicately, spilling the wind shamelessly from the sail so as to

prolong the tack to the north shore. The shore would compel him to go

about, and the contact would be broken. He sailed with skill, stopping

way on the boat without exciting the notice of the wranglers, and

mentally forgiving his hardest voyages in that they had made this

marvellous night possible, giving him mastery over sea and boat and

wind so that he could sail with her beside him, her dear weight against

him on his shoulder.

When the first light of the rising moon touched the sail, illuminating

the boat with pearly radiance, Ruth moved away from him. And, even as

she moved, she felt him move away. The impulse to avoid detection was

mutual. The episode was tacitly and secretly intimate. She sat apart

from him with burning cheeks, while the full force of it came home to

her. She had been guilty of something she would not have her brothers

see, nor Olney see. Why had she done it? She had never done anything

like it in her life, and yet she had been moonlight-sailing with young

men before. She had never desired to do anything like it. She was

overcome with shame and with the mystery of her own burgeoning

womanhood. She stole a glance at Martin, who was busy putting the boat

about on the other tack, and she could have hated him for having made

her do an immodest and shameful thing. And he, of all men! Perhaps her

mother was right, and she was seeing too much of him. It would never

happen again, she resolved, and she would see less of him in the

future. She entertained a wild idea of explaining to him the first time

they were alone together, of lying to him, of mentioning casually the

attack of faintness that had overpowered her just before the moon came

up. Then she remembered how they had drawn mutually away before the

revealing moon, and she knew he would know it for a lie.

In the days that swiftly followed she was no longer herself but a

strange, puzzling creature, wilful over judgment and scornful of

self-analysis, refusing to peer into the future or to think about

herself and whither she was drifting. She was in a fever of tingling

mystery, alternately frightened and charmed, and in constant

bewilderment. She had one idea firmly fixed, however, which insured her

security. She would not let Martin speak his love. As long as she did

this, all would be well. In a few days he would be off to sea. And even

if he did speak, all would be well. It could not be otherwise, for she

did not love him. Of course, it would be a painful half hour for him,

and an embarrassing half hour for her, because it would be her first

proposal. She thrilled deliciously at the thought. She was really a

woman, with a man ripe to ask for her in marriage. It was a lure to all

that was fundamental in her sex. The fabric of her life, of all that

constituted her, quivered and grew tremulous. The thought fluttered in

her mind like a flame-attracted moth. She went so far as to imagine

Martin proposing, herself putting the words into his mouth; and she

rehearsed her refusal, tempering it with kindness and exhorting him to

true and noble manhood. And especially he must stop smoking cigarettes.

She would make a point of that. But no, she must not let him speak at

all. She could stop him, and she had told her mother that she would.

All flushed and burning, she regretfully dismissed the conjured

situation. Her first proposal would have to be deferred to a more

propitious time and a more eligible suitor.