Efectos visuales
(d) The one opened the door with a latch-key and went in,
followed by a young fellow who awkwardly removed his cap. He wore rough clothes
that smacked of the sea, and he was manifestly out of place in the spacious
hall in which he found himself. He did not know what to do with his cap, and
was stuffing it into his coat pocket when the other took it from him. The act
was done quietly and naturally, and the awkward young fellow appreciated it.
"He understands," was his thought.
"He'll see me through all right." He walked
at the other's heels with a swing to his shoulders, and his legs spread unwittingly,
as if the level floors were tilting up and sinking down to the heave and lunge
of the sea. The wide rooms seemed too narrow for his rolling gait, and to himself
he was in terror lest his broad shoulders should collide with the doorways or
sweep the bric-a-brac from the low mantel. He recoiled from side to side between
the various objects and multiplied the hazards that in reality lodged only in
his mind. Between a grand piano and a centre-table piled high with books was
space for a half a dozen to walk abreast, yet he essayed it with trepidation.
(e) His heavy arms hung loosely at his sides.
He did not know what to do with those arms and hands, and when, to his excited
vision, one arm seemed liable to brush against the books on the table, he lurched
away like a frightened horse, barely missing the piano stool. He watched the
easy walk of the other in front of him, and for the first time realized that
his walk was different from that of other men. He experienced a momentary pang
of shame that he should walk so uncouthly. The sweat burst through the skin
of his forehead in tiny beads, and he paused and mopped his bronzed face with
his handkerchief.
(a) "Hold on, Arthur, my boy," he said, attempting
to mask his anxiety with facetious utterance. "This is too much all at once
for yours truly. Give me a chance to get my nerve. You know I didn't want to
come, an' I guess your fam'ly ain't hankerin' to see me neither."
(b) He stepped back to the table, tore open
the envelope, and began to read, giving the stranger an opportunity to recover
himself. And the stranger understood and appreciated. His was the gift of sympathy,
understanding; and beneath his alarmed exterior that sympathetic process went
on. He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own depravity and
utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did.
(h)And while Arthur took up the tale, for
the twentieth time, of his adventure with the drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat
and of how Martin Eden had rushed in and rescued him, that individual, with
frowning brows, meditated upon the fool he had made of himself, and wrestled
more determinedly with the problem of how he should conduct himself toward
these people. He certainly had not succeeded so far. He wasn't of their tribe,
and he couldn't talk their lingo, was the way he put it to himself. He couldn't
fake being their kind. The masquerade would fail, and besides, masquerade
was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him for sham or artifice.
Whatever happened, he must be real. He couldn't talk their talk just yet,
though in time he would. Upon that he was resolved. But in the meantime, talk
he must, and it must be his own talk, toned down, of course, so as to be comprehensible
to them and so as not to shook them too much. And furthermore, he wouldn't
claim, not even by tacit acceptance, to be familiar with anything that was
unfamiliar. In pursuance of this decision, when the two brothers, talking
university shop, had used "trig" several times, Martin Eden demanded:- "What
is TRIG?" "Trignometry," Norman said; "a higher form of math." "And what is
math?" was the next question, which, somehow, brought the laugh on Norman.
"Mathematics, arithmetic," was the answer. Martin Eden nodded. He had caught
a glimpse of the apparently illimitable vistas of knowledge. What he saw took
on tangibility. His abnormal power of vision made abstractions take on concrete
form. In the alchemy of his brain, trigonometry and mathematics and the whole
field of knowledge which they betokened were transmuted into so much landscape.
The vistas he saw were vistas of green foliage and forest glades, all softly
luminous or shot through with flashing lights. In the distance, detail was
veiled and blurred by a purple haze, but behind this purple haze, he knew,
was the glamour of the unknown, the lure of romance. It was like wine to him.
Here was adventure, something to do with head and hand, a world to conquer
- and straightway from the back of his consciousness rushed the thought, CONQUERING,
TO WIN TO HER, THAT LILY-PALE SPIRIT SITTING BESIDE HIM. The glimmering vision
was rent asunder and dissipated by Arthur, who, all evening, had been trying
to draw his wild man out. Martin Eden remembered his decision. For the first
time he became himself, consciously and deliberately at first, but soon lost
in the joy of creating in making life as he knew it appear before his listeners'
eyes. He had been a member of the crew of the smuggling schooner Halcyon when
she was captured by a revenue cutter. He saw with wide eyes, and he could
tell what he saw. He brought the pulsing sea before them, and the men and
the ships upon the sea. He communicated his power of vision, till they saw
with his eyes what he had seen. He selected from the vast mass of detail with
an artist's touch, drawing pictures of life that glowed and burned with light
and color, injecting movement so that his listeners surged along with him
on the flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm, and power. At times he shocked
them with the vividness of the narrative and his terms of speech, but beauty
always followed fast upon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved
by humor, by interpretations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors'
minds. And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes. His
fire warmed her. She wondered if she had been cold all her days. She wanted
to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was like a volcano spouting
forth strength, robustness, and health. She felt that she must lean toward
him, and resisted by an effort. Then, too, there was the counter impulse to
shrink away from him. She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by
toil so that the very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh itself, by that
red chafe of the collar and those bulging muscles. His roughness frightened
her; each roughness of speech was an insult to her ear, each rough phase of
his life an insult to her soul. And ever and again would come the draw of
him, till she thought he must be evil to have such power over her. All that
was most firmly established in her mind was rocking. His romance and adventure
were battering at the conventions. Before his facile perils and ready laugh,
life was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy, to
be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived and pleasured
in, and carelessly to be flung aside. "Therefore, play!" was the cry that
rang through her. "Lean toward him, if so you will, and place your two hands
upon his neck!" She wanted to cry out at the recklessness of the thought,
and in vain she appraised her own cleanness and culture and balanced all that
she was against what he was not. She glanced about her and saw the others
gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would have despaired had not she
seen horror in her mother's eyes - fascinated horror, it was true, but none
the less horror. This man from outer darkness was evil. Her mother saw it,
and her mother was right. She would trust her mother's judgment in this as
she had always trusted it in all things. The fire of him was no longer warm,
and the fear of him was no longer poignant. Later, at the piano, she played
for him, and at him, aggressively, with the vague intent of emphasizing the
impassableness of the gulf that separated them. Her music was a club that
she swung brutally upon his head; and though it stunned him and crushed him
down, it incited him. He gazed upon her in awe. In his mind, as in her own,
the gulf widened; but faster than it widened, towered his ambition to win
across it. But he was too complicated a plexus of sensibilities to sit staring
at a gulf a whole evening, especially when there was music. He was remarkably
susceptible to music. It was like strong drink, firing him to audacities of
feeling, - a drug that laid hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring
through the sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with beauty, loosed
romance and to its heels added wings. He did not understand the music she
played. It was different from the dance- hall piano-banging and blatant brass
bands he had heard. But he had caught hints of such music from the books,
and he accepted her playing largely on faith, patiently waiting, at first,
for the lifting measures of pronounced and simple rhythm, puzzled because
those measures were not long continued. Just as he caught the swing of them
and started, his imagination attuned in flight, always they vanished away
in a chaotic scramble of sounds that was meaningless to him, and that dropped
his imagination, an inert weight, back to earth. Once, it entered his mind
that there was a deliberate rebuff in all this. He caught her spirit of antagonism
and strove to divine the message that her hands pronounced upon the keys.
Then he dismissed the thought as unworthy and impossible, and yielded himself
more freely to the music. The old delightful condition began to be induced.
His feet were no longer clay, and his flesh became spirit; before his eyes
and behind his eyes shone a great glory; and then the scene before him vanished
and he was away, rocking over the world that was to him a very dear world.
The known and the unknown were commingled in the dream-pageant that thronged
his vision. He entered strange ports of sun-washed lands, and trod market-places
among barbaric peoples that no man had ever seen. The scent of the spice islands
was in his nostrils as he had known it on warm, breathless nights at sea,
or he beat up against the southeast trades through long tropic days, sinking
palm-tufted coral islets in the turquoise sea behind and lifting palm-tufted
coral islets in the turquoise sea ahead. Swift as thought the pictures came
and went. One instant he was astride a broncho and flying through the fairy-colored
Painted Desert country; the next instant he was gazing down through shimmering
heat into the whited sepulchre of Death Valley, or pulling an oar on a freezing
ocean where great ice islands towered and glistened in the sun.
He lay on a coral beach where the cocoanuts grew down to the mellow- sounding
surf. The hulk of an ancient wreck burned with blue fires, in the light of which
danced the HULA dancers to the barbaric love-calls of the singers, who chanted
to tinkling UKULELES and rumbling tom-toms. It was a sensuous, tropic night.
In the background a volcano crater was silhouetted against the stars. Overhead
drifted a pale crescent moon, and the Southern Cross burned low in the sky.
(c) He mopped his forehead dry and glanced about him with a controlled
face, though in the eyes there was an expression such as wild animals betray
when they fear the trap. He was surrounded by the unknown, apprehensive of what
might happen, ignorant of what he should do, aware that he walked and bore himself
awkwardly, fearful that every attribute and power of him was similarly afflicted.