WATCH Hot Elisha Cuthbert Showing All  CLICK HERE for Instant Access Elisha Cuthbert Photos |
Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
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 aint used to things. . . " He
looked about him helplessly. "To people and houses like this. Its all
new to me, and I like it."
"I hope youll 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 didnt think
he was that young."
And I am three years older, was the thought in her mind as she kissed her
brothers goodnight.
CHAPTER III As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it in a long and lingering exhalation. "By God!" he said aloud, in a voice of awe and wonder. "By God!" he repeated. And yet again he murmured, "By God!" Then his hand went to his collar, which he ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his pocket. A cold drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly aware that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams and reconstructing the scenes just past. He had met the woman at last--the woman that he had thought little about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next to her at table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit;--but no more beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh that gave it expression and form. He did not think of her flesh as flesh,--which was new to him; for of the women he had known that was the only way he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills and frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the garb of her spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before. He had never believed in the divine. He had always been irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But what he had seen in Martin Eden page 11 Martin Eden page 13 |