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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
days and nights of toil, offering the blazing sunlight
glory or dark death at the end of thirst and famine or of the long drag
and monstrous delirium of rotting fever, through blood and sweat and
stinging insects leading up by long chains of petty and ignoble contacts
to royal culminations and lordly achievements.
It was this, all of it, and more, that he had put into his story, and it
was this, he believed, that warmed her as she sat and listened. Her eyes
were wide, color was in her pale cheeks, and before he finished it seemed
to him that she was almost panting. Truly, she was warmed; but she was
warmed, not by the story, but by him. She did not think much of the
story; it was Martins intensity of power, the old excess of strength
that seemed to pour from his body and on and over her. The paradox of it
was that it was the story itself that was freighted with his power, that
was the channel, for the time being, through which his strength poured
out to her. She was aware only of the strength, and not of the medium,
and when she seemed most carried away by what he had written, in reality
she had been carried away by something quite foreign to it--by a thought,
terrible and perilous, that had formed itself unsummoned in her brain.
She had caught herself wondering what marriage was like, and the becoming
conscious of the waywardness and ardor of the thought had terrified her.
It was unmaidenly. It was not like her. She had never been tormented by
womanhood, and she had lived in a dreamland of Tennysonian poesy, dense
even to the full significance of that delicate masters delicate
allusions to the grossnesses that intrude upon the relations of queens
and knights. She had been asleep, always, and now life was thundering
imperatively at all her doors. Mentally she was in a panic to shoot the
bolts and drop the bars into place, while wanton instincts urged her to
throw wide her portals and bid the deliciously strange visitor to enter
in.
Martin waited with satisfaction for her verdict. He had no doubt of what
it would be, and he was astounded when he heard her say:
"It is beautiful."
"It is beautiful," she repeated, with emphasis, after a pause.
Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than mere beauty
in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its
handmaiden. He sprawled silently on the ground, watching the grisly form
of a great doubt rising before him. He had failed. He was inarticulate.
He had seen one of the greatest things in the world, and he had not
expressed it.
"What did you think of the--" He hesitated, abashed at his first attempt
to use a strange word. "Of the _motif_?" he asked.
"It was confused," she answered. "That is my only criticism in the large
way. I followed the story, but there seemed so much else. It is too
wordy. You clog the action by introducing so much extraneous material."
"That was the major _motif_," he hurriedly explained, "the big
underrunning _motif_, the cosmic and universal thing. I tried to make it
keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial after all. I
was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly. I did not succeed in
suggesting what I was driving at. But Ill learn in time."
She did not follow him. She was a bachelor of arts, but he had gone
beyond her limitations. This she did not comprehend, attributing her
incomprehension to his incoherence.
"You were too voluble," she said. "But it was beautiful, in places."
He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he would
read her the "Sea Lyrics." He lay in dull despair, while she watched him
searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and wayward thoughts of
marriage.
"You want to be famous?" she asked abruptly.
"Yes, a little bit," he confessed. "That is part of the adventure. It
is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that counts. And
after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means to something else.
I want to be famous very much, for that matter, and for that reason."
"For your sake," Martin Eden page 60 Martin Eden page 62 |