Martin Eden | Page 9

pannikins
by means of battered iron spoons. The stench of bad beef was in his
nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers
and groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters.
He watched them eating, and decided that they ate like pigs. Well, he
would be careful here. He would make no noise. He would keep his
mind upon it all the time.
He glanced around the table. Opposite him was Arthur, and Arthur's
brother, Norman. They were her brothers, he reminded himself, and his
heart warmed toward them. How they loved each other, the members of
this family! There flashed into his mind the picture of her mother, of
the kiss of greeting, and of the pair of them walking toward him with
arms entwined. Not in his world were such displays of affection
between parents and children made. It was a revelation of the heights of
existence that were attained in the world above. It was the finest thing
yet that he had seen in this small glimpse of that world. He was moved
deeply by appreciation of it, and his heart was melting with
sympathetic tenderness. He had starved for love all his life. His nature
craved love. It was an organic demand of his being. Yet he had gone
without, and hardened himself in the process. He had not known that he
needed love. Nor did he know it now. He merely saw it in operation,
and thrilled to it, and thought it fine, and high, and splendid.
He was glad that Mr. Morse was not there. It was difficult enough
getting acquainted with her, and her mother, and her brother, Norman.
Arthur he already knew somewhat. The father would have been too
much for him, he felt sure. It seemed to him that he had never worked
so hard in his life. The severest toil was child's play compared with this.
Tiny nodules of moisture stood out on his forehead, and his shirt was
wet with sweat from the exertion of doing so many unaccustomed
things at once. He had to eat as he had never eaten before, to handle
strange tools, to glance surreptitiously about and learn how to
accomplish each new thing, to receive the flood of impressions that was

pouring in upon him and being mentally annotated and classified; to be
conscious of a yearning for her that perturbed him in the form of a dull,
aching restlessness; to feel the prod of desire to win to the walk in life
whereon she trod, and to have his mind ever and again straying off in
speculation and vague plans of how to reach to her. Also, when his
secret glance went across to Norman opposite him, or to any one else,
to ascertain just what knife or fork was to be used in any particular
occasion, that person's features were seized upon by his mind, which
automatically strove to appraise them and to divine what they were - all
in relation to her. Then he had to talk, to hear what was said to him and
what was said back and forth, and to answer, when it was necessary,
with a tongue prone to looseness of speech that required a constant curb.
And to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing
menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that
propounded puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution.
He was oppressed throughout the meal by the thought of finger-bowls.
Irrelevantly, insistently, scores of times, he wondered when they would
come on and what they looked like. He had heard of such things, and
now, sooner or later, somewhere in the next few minutes, he would see
them, sit at table with exalted beings who used them - ay, and he would
use them himself. And most important of all, far down and yet always
at the surface of his thought, was the problem of how he should
comport himself toward these persons. What should his attitude be? He
wrestled continually and anxiously with the problem. There were
cowardly suggestions that he should make believe, assume a part; and
there were still more cowardly suggestions that warned him he would
fail in such course, that his nature was not fitted to live up to it, and that
he would make a fool of himself.
It was during the first part of the dinner, struggling to decide upon his
attitude, that he was very quiet. He did not know that his quietness was
giving the lie to Arthur's words of the day before, when that brother of
hers had announced that he was going to bring a wild man home to
dinner and for them not to be alarmed, because they would find him an
interesting