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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. _Nasty_! He
had never dreamed it. He had not meant it. The whole sketch stood
before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he
sought vainly for nastiness. Then his heart began to beat again. He was
not guilty.
"Why didnt you select a nice subject?" she was saying. "We know there
are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason--"
She talked on in her indignant strain, but he was not following her. He
was smiling to himself as he looked up into her virginal face, so
innocent, so penetratingly innocent, that its purity seemed always to
enter into him, driving out of him all dross and bathing him in some
ethereal effulgence that was as cool and soft and velvety as starshine.
_We know there are nasty things in the world_! He cuddled to him the
notion of her knowing, and chuckled over it as a love joke. The next
moment, in a flashing vision of multitudinous detail, he sighted the
whole sea of lifes nastiness that he had known and voyaged over and
through, and he forgave her for not understanding the story. It was
through no fault of hers that she could not understand. He thanked God
that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew
life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the
slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to
the world. Saints in heaven--how could they be anything but fair and
pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime--ah, that was the
everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral
grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first
glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud-dripping eyes; to see out of
weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness,
arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment--
He caught a stray sequence of sentences she was uttering.
"The tone of it all is low. And there is so much that is high. Take In
Memoriam."
He was impelled to suggest "Locksley Hall," and would have done so, had
not his vision gripped him again and left him staring at her, the female
of his kind, who, out of the primordial ferment, creeping and crawling up
the vast ladder of life for a thousand thousand centuries, had emerged on
the topmost rung, having become one Ruth, pure, and fair, and divine, and
with power to make him know love, and to aspire toward purity, and to
desire to taste divinity--him, Martin Eden, who, too, had come up in some
amazing fashion from out of the ruck and the mire and the countless
mistakes and abortions of unending creation. There was the romance, and
the wonder, and the glory. There was the stuff to write, if he could
only find speech. Saints in heaven!--They were only saints and could not
help themselves. But he was a man.
"You have strength," he could hear her saying, "but it is untutored
strength."
"Like a bull in a china shop," he suggested, and won a smile.
"And you must develop discrimination. You must consult taste, and
fineness, and tone."
"I dare too much," he muttered.
She smiled approbation, and settled herself to listen to another story.
"I dont know what youll make of this," he said apologetically. "Its a
funny thing. Im afraid I got beyond my depth in it, but my intentions
were good. Dont bother about the little features of it. Just see if
you catch the feel of the big thing in it. It is big, and it is true,
though the chance is large that I have failed to make it intelligible."
He read, and as he read he watched her. At last he had reached her, he
thought. She sat without movement, her eyes steadfast upon him, scarcely
breathing, caught up and out of herself, he thought, by the witchery of
the thing he had created. He had entitled the story "Adventure," and it
was the apotheosis of adventure--not of the adventure of the storybooks,
but of real adventure, the savage taskmaster, awful of punishment and
awful of reward, faithless and whimsical, demanding terrible patience and
heartbreaking Martin Eden page 59 Martin Eden page 61 |