Martin Eden | Page 5

her to a pale gold flower upon a slender stem. No, she was a
spirit, a divinity, a goddess; such sublimated beauty was not of the
earth. Or perhaps the books were right, and there were many such as
she in the upper walks of life. She might well be sung by that chap,
Swinburne. Perhaps he had had somebody like her in mind when he
painted that girl, Iseult, in the book there on the table. All this plethora
of sight, and feeling, and thought occurred on the instant. There was no
pause of the realities wherein he moved. He saw her hand coming out
to his, and she looked him straight in the eyes as she shook hands,
frankly, like a man. The women he had known did not shake hands that
way. For that matter, most of them did not shake hands at all. A flood
of associations, visions of various ways he had made the acquaintance
of women, rushed into his mind and threatened to swamp it. But he
shook them aside and looked at her. Never had he seen such a woman.
The women he had known! Immediately, beside her, on either hand,
ranged the women he had known. For an eternal second he stood in the

midst of a portrait gallery, wherein she occupied the central place,
while about her were limned many women, all to be weighed and
measured by a fleeting glance, herself the unit of weight and measure.
He saw the weak and sickly faces of the girls of the factories, and the
simpering, boisterous girls from the south of Market. There were
women of the cattle camps, and swarthy cigarette-smoking women of
Old Mexico. These, in turn, were crowded out by Japanese women,
doll-like, stepping mincingly on wooden clogs; by Eurasians, delicate
featured, stamped with degeneracy; by full-bodied South-Sea-Island
women, flower-crowned and brown-skinned. All these were blotted out
by a grotesque and terrible nightmare brood - frowsy, shuffling
creatures from the pavements of Whitechapel, gin-bloated hags of the
stews, and all the vast hell's following of harpies, vile-mouthed and
filthy, that under the guise of monstrous female form prey upon sailors,
the scrapings of the ports, the scum and slime of the human pit.
"Won't you sit down, Mr. Eden?" the girl was saying. "I have been
looking forward to meeting you ever since Arthur told us. It was brave
of you - "
He waved his hand deprecatingly and muttered that it was nothing at all,
what he had done, and that any fellow would have done it. She noticed
that the hand he waved was covered with fresh abrasions, in the process
of healing, and a glance at the other loose-hanging hand showed it to be
in the same condition. Also, with quick, critical eye, she noted a scar on
his cheek, another that peeped out from under the hair of the forehead,
and a third that ran down and disappeared under the starched collar.
She repressed a smile at sight of the red line that marked the chafe of
the collar against the bronzed neck. He was evidently unused to stiff
collars. Likewise her feminine eye took in the clothes he wore, the
cheap and unaesthetic cut, the wrinkling of the coat across the
shoulders, and the series of wrinkles in the sleeves that advertised
bulging biceps muscles.
While he waved his hand and muttered that he had done nothing at all,
he was obeying her behest by trying to get into a chair. He found time
to admire the ease with which she sat down, then lurched toward a

chair facing her, overwhelmed with consciousness of the awkward
figure he was cutting. This was a new experience for him. All his life,
up to then, he had been unaware of being either graceful or awkward.
Such thoughts of self had never entered his mind. He sat down gingerly
on the edge of the chair, greatly worried by his hands. They were in the
way wherever he put them. Arthur was leaving the room, and Martin
Eden followed his exit with longing eyes. He felt lost, alone there in the
room with that pale spirit of a woman. There was no bar-keeper upon
whom to call for drinks, no small boy to send around the corner for a
can of beer and by means of that social fluid start the amenities of
friendship flowing.
"You have such a scar on your neck, Mr. Eden," the girl was saying.
"How did it happen? I am sure it must have been some adventure."
"A Mexican with a knife, miss," he answered, moistening his parched
lips and clearing hip throat. "It was just a fight. After I got the knife
away, he tried to bite off my nose."
Baldly as he had