Chapter III

CHAPTER III

As Martin Eden went down the steps, his hand dropped into his coat
pocket. It came out with a brown rice paper and a pinch of Mexican
tobacco, which were deftly rolled together into a cigarette. He
drew the first whiff of smoke deep into his lungs and expelled it
in a long and lingering exhalation. "By God!" he said aloud, in a
voice of awe and wonder. "By God!" he repeated. And yet again he
murmured, "By God!" Then his hand went to his collar, which he
ripped out of the shirt and stuffed into his pocket. A cold
drizzle was falling, but he bared his head to it and unbuttoned his
vest, swinging along in splendid unconcern. He was only dimly
aware that it was raining. He was in an ecstasy, dreaming dreams
and reconstructing the scenes just past.

He had met the woman at last - the woman that he had thought little
about, not being given to thinking about women, but whom he had
expected, in a remote way, he would sometime meet. He had sat next
to her at table. He had felt her hand in his, he had looked into
her eyes and caught a vision of a beautiful spirit; - but no more
beautiful than the eyes through which it shone, nor than the flesh
that gave it expression and form. He did not think of her flesh as
flesh, - which was new to him; for of the women he had known that
was the only way he thought. Her flesh was somehow different. He
did not conceive of her body as a body, subject to the ills and
frailties of bodies. Her body was more than the garb of her
spirit. It was an emanation of her spirit, a pure and gracious
crystallization of her divine essence. This feeling of the divine
startled him. It shocked him from his dreams to sober thought. No
word, no clew, no hint, of the divine had ever reached him before.
He had never believed in the divine. He had always been
irreligious, scoffing good-naturedly at the sky-pilots and their
immortality of the soul. There was no life beyond, he had
contended; it was here and now, then darkness everlasting. But
what he had seen in her eyes was soul - immortal soul that could
never die. No man he had known, nor any woman, had given him the
message of immortality. But she had. She had whispered it to him
the first moment she looked at him. Her face shimmered before his
eyes as he walked along, - pale and serious, sweet and sensitive,
smiling with pity and tenderness as only a spirit could smile, and
pure as he had never dreamed purity could be. Her purity smote him
like a blow. It startled him. He had known good and bad; but
purity, as an attribute of existence, had never entered his mind.
And now, in her, he conceived purity to be the superlative of
goodness and of cleanness, the sum of which constituted eternal
life.

And