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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
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, Martin Eden page 10 Martin Eden page 12 |