Chapter II

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

　　The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had attimes seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and wasseated alongside of Her. The array of knives and forks frightenedhim. They bristled with unknown perils, and he gazed at them,fascinated, till their dazzle became a background across whichmoved a succession of forecastle pictures, wherein he and his matessat eating salt beef with sheath-knives and fingers, or scoopingthick pea-soup out of pannikins by means of battered iron spoons.The stench of bad beef was in his nostrils, while in his ears, tothe accompaniment of creaking timbers and groaning bulkheads,echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He watched themeating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he would becareful here. He would make no noise. He would keep his mind uponit all the time.He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur'sbrother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, andhis heart warmed toward them. How they loved each other, themembers of this family! There flashed into his mind the picture ofher mother, of the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of themwalking toward him with arms entwined. Not in his world were suchdisplays of affection between parents and children made. It was arevelation of the heights of existence that were attained in theworld above. It was the finest thing yet that he had seen in thissmall glimpse of that world. He was moved deeply by appreciationof it, and his heart was melting with sympathetic tenderness. Hehad starved for love all his life. His nature craved love. It wasan organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone without, andhardened himself in the process. He had not known that he neededlove. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation, andthrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enoughgetting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother,Norman. Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would havebeen too much for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he hadnever worked so hard in his life. The severest toil was child'splay compared with this. Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on hisforehead, and his shirt was wet with sweat from the exertion ofdoing so many unaccustomed things at once. He had to eat as he hadnever eaten before, to handle strange tools, to glancesurreptitiously about and learn how to accomplish each new thing,to receive the flood of impressions that was pouring in upon himand being mentally annotated and classified; to be conscious of ayearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull, achingrestlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in lifewhereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again straying offin speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her. Also, whenhis secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to any oneelse, to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in anyparticular occasion, that person's features were seized upon by hismind, which automatically strove to appraise them and to divinewhat they were - all in relation to her. Then he had to talk, tohear what was said to him and what was said back and forth, and toanswer, when it was necessary, with a tongue prone to looseness ofspeech that required a constant curb. And to add confusion toconfusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, thatappeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propoundedpuzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution. He wasoppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls.Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when theywould come on and what they looked like. He had heard of suchthings, and now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next fewminutes, he would see them, sit at table with exalted beings whoused them - ay, and he would use them himself. And most importantof all, far down and yet always at the surface of his thought, wasthe problem of how he should comport himself toward these persons.What should his attitude be? He wrestled continually and anxiouslywith the problem. There were cowardly suggestions that he shouldmake believe, assume a part; and there were still more cowardlysuggestions that warned him he would fail in such course, that hisnature was not fitted to live up to it, and that he would make afool of himself.It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decideupon his attitude, that he was very quiet. He did not know thathis quietness was giving the lie to Arthur's words of the daybefore, when that brother of hers had announced that he was goingto bring a wild man home to dinner and for them not to be alarmed,because they would find him an interesting wild man. Martin Edencould not have found it in him, just then, to believe that herbrother could be guilty of such treachery - especially when he hadbeen the means of getting this particular brother out of anunpleasant row. So he sat at table, perturbed by his own unfitnessand at the same time charmed by all that went on about him. Forthe first time he realized that eating was something more than autilitarian function. He was unaware of what he ate. It wasmerely food. He was feasting his love of beauty at this tablewhere eating was an aesthetic function. It was an intellectualfunction, too. His mind was stirred. He heard words spoken thatwere meaningless to him, and other words that he had seen only inbooks and that no man or woman he had known was of large enoughmental caliber to pronounce. When he heard such words droppingcarelessly from the lips of the members of this marvellous family,her family, he thrilled with delight. The romance, and beauty, andhigh vigor of the books were coming true. He was in that rare andblissful state wherein a man sees his dreams stalk out from thecrannies of fantasy and become fact.Never had he been at such an altitude of living, and he kepthimself 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 wouldbe inappropriate and a confession of inferiority on his part -which would never do if he was to win to her. Also, it was adictate of his pride. "By God!" he cried to himself, once; "I'mjust as good as them, and if they do know lots that I don't, Icould learn 'm a few myself, all the same!" And the next moment,when she or her mother addressed him as "Mr. Eden," his aggressivepride was forgotten, and he was glowing and warm with delight. Hewas a civilized man, that was what he was, shoulder to shoulder, atdinner, with people he had read about in books. He was in thebooks himself, adventuring through the printed pages of boundvolumes.But while he belied Arthur's description, and appeared a gentlelamb rather than a wild man, he was racking his brains for a courseof action. He was no gentle lamb, and the part of second fiddlewould never do for the high-pitched dominance of his nature. Hetalked only when he had to, and then his speech was like his walkto the table, filled with jerks and halts as he groped in hispolyglot vocabulary for words, debating over words he knew were fitbut which he feared he could not pronounce, rejecting other wordshe knew would not be understood or would be raw and harsh. But allthe time he was oppressed by the consciousness that thiscarefulness of diction was making a booby of him, preventing himfrom expressing what he had in him. Also, his love of freedomchafed against the restriction in much the same way his neck chafedagainst the starched fetter of a collar. Besides, he was confidentthat he could not keep it up. He was by nature powerful of thoughtand sensibility, and the creative spirit was restive and urgent.He was swiftly mastered by the concept or sensation in him thatstruggled in birth-throes to receive expression and form, and thenhe forgot himself and where he was, and the old words - the toolsof speech he knew - slipped out.Once, he declined something from the servant who interrupted andpestered at his shoulder, and he said, shortly and emphatically,"Pew!"On the instant those at the table were keyed up and expectant, theservant 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 outnaturally. 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 workedlike niggers, storing cargo-mixed freight, if you know what thatmeans. That's how the skin got knocked off.""Oh, it wasn't that," she hastened to explain, in turn. "Yourhands seemed too small for your body."His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of another of hisdeficiencies."Yes," he said depreciatingly. "They ain't big enough to stand thestrain. I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders. Theyare too strong, an' when I smash a man on the jaw the hands getsmashed, too."He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled with disgustat himself. He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talkedabout things that were not nice."It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did - and you astranger," she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though notof the reason for it.He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warmsurge of gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-wordedtongue."It wasn't nothin' at all," he said. "Any guy 'ud do it foranother. That bunch of hoodlums was lookin' for trouble, an'Arthur wasn't botherin' 'em none. They butted in on 'm, an' then Ibutted in on them an' poked a few. That's where some of the skinoff my hands went, along with some of the teeth of the gang. Iwouldn't 'a' missed it for anything. When I seen - "He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his owndepravity and utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did.And while Arthur took up the tale, for the twentieth time, of hisadventure with the drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of howMartin Eden had rushed in and rescued him, that individual, withfrowning brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, andwrestled more determinedly with the problem of how he shouldconduct himself toward these people. He certainly had notsucceeded so far. He wasn't of their tribe, and he couldn't talktheir lingo, was the way he put it to himself. He couldn't fakebeing their kind. The masquerade would fail, and besides,masquerade was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him forsham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He couldn'ttalk their talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that hewas resolved. But in the meantime, talk he must, and it must behis own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible tothem and so as not to shook them too much. And furthermore, hewouldn't claim, not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar withanything that was unfamiliar. In pursuance of this decision, whenthe two brothers, talking university shop, had used "trig" severaltimes, Martin Eden demanded:-"What is trig?""Trignometry," Norman said; "a higher form of math.""And what is math?" was the next question, which, somehow, broughtthe laugh on Norman."Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer.Martin Eden nodded. He had caught a glimpse of the apparentlyillimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw took on tangibility.His abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concreteform. In the alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematicsand the whole field of knowledge which they betokened weretransmuted into so much landscape. The vistas he saw were vistasof green foliage and forest glades, all softly luminous or shotthrough with flashing lights. In the distance, detail was veiledand blurred by a purple haze, but behind this purple haze, he knew,was the glamour of the unknown, the lure of romance. It was likewine to him. Here was adventure, something to do with head andhand, a world to conquer - and straightway from the back of hisconsciousness rushed the thought, conquering, to win to her, thatlily-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. MartinEden remembered his decision. For the first time he becamehimself, consciously and deliberately at first, but soon lost inthe joy of creating in making life as he knew it appear before hislisteners' eyes. He had been a member of the crew of the smugglingschooner Halcyon when she was captured by a revenue cutter. He sawwith wide eyes, and he could tell what he saw. He brought thepulsing sea before them, and the men and the ships upon the sea.He communicated his power of vision, till they saw with his eyeswhat he had seen. He selected from the vast mass of detail with anartist's touch, drawing pictures of life that glowed and burnedwith light and color, injecting movement so that his listenerssurged along with him on the flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm,and power. At times he shocked them with the vividness of thenarrative and his terms of speech, but beauty always followed fastupon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved by humor, byinterpretations 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 herdays. She wanted to lean toward this burning, blazing man that waslike 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 thatthe very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh itself, by thatred chafe of the collar and those bulging muscles. His roughnessfrightened her; each roughness of speech was an insult to her ear,each rough phase of his life an insult to her soul. And ever andagain would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evilto have such power over her. All that was most firmly establishedin her mind was rocking. His romance and adventure were batteringat the conventions. Before his facile perils and ready laugh, lifewas no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy,to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be livedand pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside. "Therefore,play!" was the cry that rang through her. "Lean toward him, if soyou will, and place your two hands upon his neck!" She wanted tocry out at the recklessness of the thought, and in vain sheappraised her own cleanness and culture and balanced all that shewas against what he was not. She glanced about her and saw theothers gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would havedespaired had not she seen horror in her mother's eyes - fascinatedhorror, it was true, but none the less horror. This man from outerdarkness was evil. Her mother saw it, and her mother was right.She would trust her mother's judgment in this as she had alwaystrusted it in all things. The fire of him was no longer warm, andthe 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 gulfthat separated them. Her music was a club that she swung brutallyupon his head; and though it stunned him and crushed him down, itincited him. He gazed upon her in awe. In his mind, as in herown, the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered hisambition to win across it. But he was too complicated a plexus ofsensibilities to sit staring at a gulf a whole evening, especiallywhen there was music. He was remarkably susceptible to music. Itwas like strong drink, firing him to audacities of feeling, - adrug that laid hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaringthrough the sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind withbeauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings. He did notunderstand the music she played. It was different from the dance-hall piano-banging and blatant brass bands he had heard. But hehad caught hints of such music from the books, and he accepted herplaying largely on faith, patiently waiting, at first, for thelifting measures of pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled becausethose measures were not long continued. Just as he caught theswing of them and started, his imagination attuned in flight,always they vanished away in a chaotic scramble of sounds that wasmeaningless to him, and that dropped his imagination, an inertweight, back to earth.Once, it entered his mind that there was a deliberate rebuff in allthis. He caught her spirit of antagonism and strove to divine themessage that her hands pronounced upon the keys. Then he dismissedthe thought as unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself morefreely to the music. The old delightful condition began to beinduced. His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh becamespirit; before his eyes and behind his eyes shone a great glory;and then the scene before him vanished and he was away, rockingover the world that was to him a very dear world. The known andthe unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged hisvision. He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trodmarket-places among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen.The scent of the spice islands was in his nostrils as he had knownit on warm, breathless nights at sea, or he beat up against thesoutheast trades through long tropic days, sinking palm-tuftedcoral islets in the turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tuftedcoral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. Swift as thought thepictures came and went. One instant he was astride a broncho andflying through the fairy-colored Painted Desert country; the nextinstant he was gazing down through shimmering heat into the whitedsepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing oceanwhere great ice islands towered and glistened in the sun. He layon a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the mellow-sounding surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with bluefires, in the light of which danced the hula dancers to thebarbaric love-calls of the singers, who chanted to tinklingukuleles and rumbling tom-toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night.In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against thestars. Overhead drifted a pale crescent moon, and the SouthernCross burned low in the sky.He was a harp; all life that he had known and that was hisconsciousness was the strings; and the flood of music was a windthat poured against those strings and set them vibrating withmemories and dreams. He did not merely feel. Sensation investeditself in form and color and radiance, and what his imaginationdared, it objectified in some sublimated and magic way. Past,present, and future mingled; and he went on oscillating across thebroad, warm world, through high adventure and noble deeds to Her -ay, and with her, winning her, his arm about her, and carrying heron in flight through the empery of his mind.And she, glancing at him across her shoulder, saw something of allthis in his face. It was a transfigured face, with great shiningeyes that gazed beyond the veil of sound and saw behind it the leapand pulse of life and the gigantic phantoms of the spirit. She wasstartled. The raw, stumbling lout was gone. The ill-fittingclothes, battered hands, and sunburned face remained; but theseseemed the prison-bars through which she saw a great soul lookingforth, inarticulate and dumb because of those feeble lips thatwould not give it speech. Only for a flashing moment did she seethis, then she saw the lout returned, and she laughed at the whimof her fancy. But the impression of that fleeting glimpselingered, and when the time came for him to beat a stumblingretreat and go, she lent him the volume of Swinburne, and anotherof Browning - she was studying Browning in one of her Englishcourses. He seemed such a boy, as he stood blushing and stammeringhis thanks, that a wave of pity, maternal in its prompting, welledup in her. She did not remember the lout, nor the imprisoned soul,nor the man who had stared at her in all masculineness anddelighted and frightened her. She saw before her only a boy, whowas shaking her hand with a hand so calloused that it felt like anutmeg-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 likethis. It's all new to me, and I like it.""I hope you'll call again," she said, as he was saying good nightto her brothers.He pulled on his cap, lurched desperately through the doorway, andwas gone."Well, what do you think of him?" Arthur demanded."He is most interesting, a whiff of ozone," she answered. "How oldis he?""Twenty - almost twenty-one. I asked him this afternoon. I didn'tthink he was that young."And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as shekissed her brothers goodnight.