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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
leaned together over the beauty
of the books. She smiled to herself at vagrant impulses which arose from
nowhere and suggested that she rumple his hair; while he desired greatly,
when they tired of reading, to rest his head in her lap and dream with
closed eyes about the future that was to be theirs. On Sunday picnics at
Shellmound Park and Schuetzen Park, in the past, he had rested his head
on many laps, and, usually, he had slept soundly and selfishly while the
girls shaded his face from the sun and looked down and loved him and
wondered at his lordly carelessness of their love. To rest his head in a
girls lap had been the easiest thing in the world until now, and now he
found Ruths lap inaccessible and impossible. Yet it was right here, in
his reticence, that the strength of his wooing lay. It was because of
this reticence that he never alarmed her. Herself fastidious and timid,
she never awakened to the perilous trend of their intercourse. Subtly
and unaware she grew toward him and closer to him, while he, sensing the
growing closeness, longed to dare but was afraid.
Once he dared, one afternoon, when he found her in the darkened living
room with a blinding headache.
"Nothing can do it any good," she had answered his inquiries. "And
besides, I dont take headache powders. Doctor Hall wont permit me."
"I can cure it, I think, and without drugs," was Martins answer. "I am
not sure, of course, but Id like to try. Its simply massage. I
learned the trick first from the Japanese. They are a race of masseurs,
you know. Then I learned it all over again with variations from the
Hawaiians. They call it _lomi-lomi_. It can accomplish most of the
things drugs accomplish and a few things that drugs cant."
Scarcely had his hands touched her head when she sighed deeply.
"That is so good," she said.
She spoke once again, half an hour later, when she asked, "Arent you
tired?"
The question was perfunctory, and she knew what the answer would be. Then
she lost herself in drowsy contemplation of the soothing balm of his
strength: Life poured from the ends of his fingers, driving the pain
before it, or so it seemed to her, until with the easement of pain, she
fell asleep and he stole away.
She called him up by telephone that evening to thank him.
"I slept until dinner," she said. "You cured me completely, Mr. Eden,
and I dont know how to thank you."
He was warm, and bungling of speech, and very happy, as he replied to
her, and there was dancing in his mind, throughout the telephone
conversation, the memory of Browning and of sickly Elizabeth Barrett.
What had been done could be done again, and he, Martin Eden, could do it
and would do it for Ruth Morse. He went back to his room and to the
volume of Spencers "Sociology" lying open on the bed. But he could not
read. Love tormented him and overrode his will, so that, despite all
determination, he found himself at the little ink-stained table. The
sonnet he composed that night was the first of a love-cycle of fifty
sonnets which was completed within two months. He had the "Love-sonnets
from the Portuguese" in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best
conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of
his own sweet love-madness.
The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the "Love-cycle," to
reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got more
closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature of their
policy and content. The hours he spent with Ruth were maddening alike in
promise and in inconclusiveness. It was a week after he cured her
headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt was proposed by Norman and
seconded by Arthur and Olney. Martin was the only one capable of
handling a boat, and he was pressed into service. Ruth sat near him in
the stern, while the three young fellows lounged amidships, deep in a
wordy wrangle over "frat" affairs.
The moon had not yet risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault of the
sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a sudden feeling Martin Eden page 80 Martin Eden page 82 |