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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
of a great fund of experience with girls and women who had
been absolutely different from her. They had known about love and life
and flirtation, while she knew nothing about such things. Her prodigious
innocence appalled him, freezing on his lips all ardors of speech, and
convincing him, in spite of himself, of his own unworthiness. Also he
was handicapped in another way. He had himself never been in love
before. He had liked women in that turgid past of his, and been
fascinated by some of them, but he had not known what it was to love
them. He had whistled in a masterful, careless way, and they had come to
him. They had been diversions, incidents, part of the game men play, but
a small part at most. And now, and for the first time, he was a
suppliant, tender and timid and doubting. He did not know the way of
love, nor its speech, while he was frightened at his loved ones clear
innocence.
In the course of getting acquainted with a varied world, whirling on
through the ever changing phases of it, he had learned a rule of conduct
which was to the effect that when one played a strange game, he should
let the other fellow play first. This had stood him in good stead a
thousand times and trained him as an observer as well. He knew how to
watch the thing that was strange, and to wait for a weakness, for a place
of entrance, to divulge itself. It was like sparring for an opening in
fist-fighting. And when such an opening came, he knew by long experience
to play for it and to play hard.
So he waited with Ruth and watched, desiring to speak his love but not
daring. He was afraid of shocking her, and he was not sure of himself.
Had he but known it, he was following the right course with her. Love
came into the world before articulate speech, and in its own early youth
it had learned ways and means that it had never forgotten. It was in
this old, primitive way that Martin wooed Ruth. He did not know he was
doing it at first, though later he divined it. The touch of his hand on
hers was vastly more potent than any word he could utter, the impact of
his strength on her imagination was more alluring than the printed poems
and spoken passions of a thousand generations of lovers. Whatever his
tongue could express would have appealed, in part, to her judgment; but
the touch of hand, the fleeting contact, made its way directly to her
instinct. Her judgment was as young as she, but her instincts were as
old as the race and older. They had been young when love was young, and
they were wiser than convention and opinion and all the new-born things.
So her judgment did not act. There was no call upon it, and she did not
realize the strength of the appeal Martin made from moment to moment to
her love-nature. That he loved her, on the other hand, was as clear as
day, and she consciously delighted in beholding his
love-manifestations--the glowing eyes with their tender lights, the
trembling hands, and the never failing swarthy flush that flooded darkly
under his sunburn. She even went farther, in a timid way inciting him,
but doing it so delicately that he never suspected, and doing it half-
consciously, so that she scarcely suspected herself. She thrilled with
these proofs of her power that proclaimed her a woman, and she took an
Eve-like delight in tormenting him and playing upon him.
Tongue-tied by inexperience and by excess of ardor, wooing unwittingly
and awkwardly, Martin continued his approach by contact. The touch of
his hand was pleasant to her, and something deliciously more than
pleasant. Martin did not know it, but he did know that it was not
distasteful to her. Not that they touched hands often, save at meeting
and parting; but that in handling the bicycles, in strapping on the books
of verse they carried into the hills, and in conning the pages of books
side by side, there were opportunities for hand to stray against hand.
And there were opportunities, too, for her hair to brush his cheek, and
for shoulder to touch shoulder, as they Martin Eden page 79 Martin Eden page 81 |