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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
nights. Her idea of love
was more that of placid affection, serving the loved one softly in an
atmosphere, flower-scented and dim-lighted, of ethereal calm. She did
not dream of the volcanic convulsions of love, its scorching heat and
sterile wastes of parched ashes. She knew neither her own potencies, nor
the potencies of the world; and the deeps of life were to her seas of
illusion. The conjugal affection of her father and mother constituted
her ideal of love-affinity, and she looked forward some day to emerging,
without shock or friction, into that same quiet sweetness of existence
with a loved one.
So it was that she looked upon Martin Eden as a novelty, a strange
individual, and she identified with novelty and strangeness the effects
he produced upon her. It was only natural. In similar ways she had
experienced unusual feelings when she looked at wild animals in the
menagerie, or when she witnessed a storm of wind, or shuddered at the
bright-ribbed lightning. There was something cosmic in such things, and
there was something cosmic in him. He came to her breathing of large
airs and great spaces. The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in
his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life. He was
marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher
deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed,
wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came
so mildly to her hand. Likewise she was stirred by the common impulse to
tame the wild thing. It was an unconscious impulse, and farthest from
her thoughts that her desire was to re-thumb the clay of him into a
likeness of her fathers image, which image she believed to be the finest
in the world. Nor was there any way, out of her inexperience, for her to
know that the cosmic feel she caught of him was that most cosmic of
things, love, which with equal power drew men and women together across
the world, compelled stags to kill each other in the rutting season, and
drove even the elements irresistibly to unite.
His swift development was a source of surprise and interest. She
detected unguessed finenesses in him that seemed to bud, day by day, like
flowers in congenial soil. She read Browning aloud to him, and was often
puzzled by the strange interpretations he gave to mooted passages. It
was beyond her to realize that, out of his experience of men and women
and life, his interpretations were far more frequently correct than hers.
His conceptions seemed naive to her, though she was often fired by his
daring flights of comprehension, whose orbit-path was so wide among the
stars that she could not follow and could only sit and thrill to the
impact of unguessed power. Then she played to him--no longer at him--and
probed him with music that sank to depths beyond her plumb-line. His
nature opened to music as a flower to the sun, and the transition was
quick from his working-class rag-time and jingles to her classical
display pieces that she knew nearly by heart. Yet he betrayed a
democratic fondness for Wagner, and the "Tannhauser" overture, when she
had given him the clew to it, claimed him as nothing else she played. In
an immediate way it personified his life. All his past was the Venusburg
motif, while her he identified somehow with the Pilgrims Chorus motif;
and from the exalted state this elevated him to, he swept onward and
upward into that vast shadow-realm of spirit-groping, where good and evil
war eternally.
Sometimes he questioned, and induced in her mind temporary doubts as to
the correctness of her own definitions and conceptions of music. But her
singing he did not question. It was too wholly her, and he sat always
amazed at the divine melody of her pure soprano voice. And he could not
help but contrast it with the weak pipings and shrill quaverings of
factory girls, ill-nourished and untrained, and with the raucous
shriekings from gin-cracked throats of the women of the seaport towns.
She enjoyed singing and playing to him. In truth, it was the first time
she had ever had a human soul to play with, and the plastic clay of him
was a delight to mould; for she thought Martin Eden page 32 Martin Eden page 34 |