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Home -> Jack London -> Martin Eden -> Chapter 2

Martin Eden - Chapter 2

1. Chapter 1

2. Chapter 2

3. Chapter 3

4. Chapter 4

5. Chapter 5

6. Chapter 6

7. Chapter 7

8. Chapter 8

9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10

11. Chapter 11

12. Chapter 12

13. Chapter 13

14. Chapter 14

15. Chapter 15

16. Chapter 16

17. Chapter 17

18. Chapter 18

19. Chapter 19

20. Chapter 20

21. Chapter 21

22. Chapter 22

23. Chapter 23

24. Chapter 24

25. Chapter 25

26. Chapter 26

27. Chapter 27

28. Chapter 28

29. Chapter 29

30. Chapter 30

31. Chapter 31

32. Chapter 32

33. Chapter 33

34. Chapter 34

35. Chapter 35

36. Chapter 36

37. Chapter 37

38. Chapter 38

39. Chapter 39

40. Chapter 40

41. Chapter 41

42. Chapter 42

43. Chapter 43

44. Chapter 44

45. Chapter 45

46. Chapter 46







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,
"Pew!"

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 shook 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
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
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.




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