l the psychological cramp and intellectual futility of their kind,
they bored him when they talked with him, their little superficial minds
were so filled with emptiness; while the boisterous high spirits and the
excessive energy of the younger people shocked him. They were never
quiet, ceaselessly playing deck-quoits, tossing rings, promenading, or
rushing to the rail with loud cries to watch the leaping porpoises and
the first schools of flying fish.

He slept much. After breakfast he sought his deck-chair with a magazine
he never finished. The printed pages tired him. He puzzled that men
found so much to write about, and, puzzling, dozed in his chair. When
the gong awoke him for luncheon, he was irritated that he must awaken.
There was no satisfaction in being awake.

Once, he tried to arouse himself from his lethargy, and went forward into
the forecastle with the sailors. But the breed of sailors seemed to have
changed since the days he had lived in the forecastle. He could find no
kinship with these stolid-faced, ox-minded bestial creatures. He was in
despair. Up above nobody had wanted Martin Eden for his own sake, and he
could not go back to those of his own class who had wanted him in the
past. He did not want them. He could not stand them any more than he
could stand the stupid first-cabin passengers and the riotous young
people.

Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a
sick person. During every conscious moment life blazed in a raw glare
around him and upon him. It hurt. It hurt intolerably. It was the
first time in his life that Martin had travelled first class. On ships
at sea he had always been in the forecastle, the steerage, or in the
black depths of the coal-hold, passing coal. In those days, climbing up
the iron ladders out the pit of stifling heat, he had often caught
glimpses of the passengers, in cool white, doing nothing but enjoy
themselves, under awnings spread to keep the sun and wind away from them,
with subservient stewards taking care of their every want and whim, and
it had seemed to him that the realm in which they moved and had their
being was nothing else than paradise. Well, here he was, the great man
on board, in the midmost centre of it, sitting at the captain's right
hand, and yet vainly harking back to forecastle and stoke-hole in quest
of the Paradise he had lost. He had found no new one, and now he could
not find the old one.

H