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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
no pause of the
realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand coming out to his, and she
looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands, frankly, like a man.
The women he had known did not shake hands that way. For that matter,
most of them did not shake hands at all. A flood of associations,
visions of various ways he had made the acquaintance of women, rushed
into his mind and threatened to swamp it. But he shook them aside and
looked at her. Never had he seen such a woman. The women he had known!
Immediately, beside her, on either hand, ranged the women he had known.
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. There were women of the cattle camps, and swarthy
cigarette-smoking women of Old Mexico. These, in turn, were crowded out
by Japanese women, doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by
Eurasians, delicate featured, stamped with degeneracy; by full-bodied
South-Sea-Island women, flower-crowned and brown-skinned. All these were
blotted out by a grotesque and terrible nightmare brood--frowsy,
shuffling creatures from the pavements of Whitechapel, gin-bloated hags
of the stews, and all the vast hells following of harpies, vile-mouthed
and filthy, that under the guise of monstrous female form prey upon
sailors, the scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit.
"Wont you sit down, Mr. Eden?" the girl was saying. "I have been
looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us. It was brave
of you--"
He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at all,
what he had done, and that any fellow would have done it. She noticed
that the hand he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in the process
of healing, and a glance at the other loose-hanging hand showed it to be
in the same condition. Also, with quick, critical eye, she noted a scar
on his cheek, another that peeped out from under the hair of the
forehead, and a third that ran down and disappeared under the starched
collar. She repressed a smile at sight of the red line that marked the
chafe of the collar against the bronzed neck. He was evidently unused to
stiff collars. Likewise her feminine eye took in the clothes he wore,
the cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the
shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that advertised
bulging biceps muscles.
While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at all, he
was obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair. He found time to
admire the ease with which she sat down, then lurched toward a chair
facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the awkward figure he was
cutting. This was a new experience for him. All his life, up to then,
he had been unaware of being either graceful or awkward. Such thoughts
of self had never entered his mind. He sat down gingerly on the edge of
the chair, greatly worried by his hands. They were in the way wherever
he put them. Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin Eden followed his
exit with longing eyes. He felt lost, alone there in the room with that
pale spirit of a woman. There was no bar-keeper upon whom to call for
drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a can of beer and by
means of that social fluid start the amenities of friendship flowing.
"You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden," the girl was saying. "How
did it happen? I am sure it must have been some adventure."
"A Mexican with a knife, miss," he answered, moistening his parched lips
and clearing hip throat. "It was just a fight. After I got the knife
away, he tried to bite off my nose."
Baldly as he had stated it, in his eyes was a rich vision of that hot,
starry night at Salina Cruz, the white strip of beach, the Martin Eden page 2 Martin Eden page 4 |