Martin Eden: Chapters 1–6

He wore rough clothes that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious hall in which he found himself.

“Hold on, Arthur, my boy,” he said, attempting to mask his anxiety with facetious utterance.

Into his eyes leaped a wistfulness and a yearning as promptly as the yearning leaps into the eyes of a starving man at sight of food.

At the slightest impact of the outside world upon his consciousness, his thoughts, sympathies, and emotions leapt and played like lambent flame.

She was a pale, ethereal creature, with wide, spiritual blue eyes and a wealth of golden hair.

No, she was a spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such sublimated beauty was not of the earth.

For an eternal second he stood in the midst of a portrait gallery, wherein she occupied the central place, while about her were limned many women, all to be weighed and measured by a fleeting glance, herself the unit of weight and measure.

He saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls of the factories, and the simpering, boisterous girls from the south of Market.

Such sordid things as stabbing affrays were evidently not fit subjects for conversation with a lady.

Follow her he did, though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by critical phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling.

“There are many lines that could be spared from the book you were reading,” she said, her voice primly firm and dogmatic.

His voice was determined, his eyes were flashing, the lines of his face had grown harsh. And to her it seemed that the angle of his jaw had changed; its pitch had become unpleasantly aggressive. At the same time a wave of intense virility seemed to surge out from him and impinge upon her.

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...

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?

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 was by nature powerful of thought and sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent.

And furthermore, he wouldn’t claim, not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar with anything that was unfamiliar.

The glimmering vision was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur, who, all evening, had been trying to draw his wild man out.

The fire of him was no longer warm, and the fear of him was no longer poignant.

It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings.

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.

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.

He was humble and meek, filled with self-disparagement and abasement.

Martin came back and looked at the beady eyes, sneering, truculent, cowardly, and there leaped into his vision, as on a screen, the same eyes when their owner was making a sale in the store below—subservient eyes, smug, and oily, and flattering.

All day he effaced himself in the store, reserving for the evening, with his family, the privilege of being himself.

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

How different, he thought, from the atmosphere of beauty and repose of the house wherein Ruth dwelt.

He was appalled at the problem confronting him, weighted down by the incubus of his working-class station.

The high, bulging shelves of heavy tomes humbled him and at the same time stimulated him.

He was amazed at the man’s sympathy with life and at his incisive psychology.

He ran across a book in the library on the care of the body, and promptly developed a penchant for a cold-water bath every morning, much to the amazement of Jim, and to the bewilderment of Mr. Higginbotham, who was not in sympathy with such high-fangled notions and who seriously debated whether or not he should charge Martin extra for the water.

And as they waxed maudlin he studied them, watching the beast rise and master them and thanking God that he was no longer as they.

He knew, did he belong in Ruth’s class, that there would be no overtures from these girls; and with each glance of theirs he felt the fingers of his own class clutching at him to hold him down.

He was at home here, and he held his own royally in the badinage, bristling with slang and sharpness, that was always the preliminary to getting acquainted in these swift-moving affairs.

Their bid was low pleasure, narrow as the grave, that palled, and the grave was at the end of it.