had been turned over to them by Ruth. They had read them. It was the
very same work that had put his name in all the papers, and, it was his
name being in all the papers that led them to invite him.
One thing was certain: the Morses had not cared to have him for himself
or for his work. Therefore they could not want him now for himself or
for his work, but for the fame that was his, because he was somebody
amongst men, and--why not?--because he had a hundred thousand dollars or
so. That was the way bourgeois society valued a man, and who was he to
expect it otherwise? But he was proud. He disdained such valuation. He
desired to be valued for himself, or for his work, which, after all, was
an expression of himself. That was the way Lizzie valued him. The work,
with her, did not even count. She valued him, himself. That was the way
Jimmy, the plumber, and all the old gang valued him. That had been
proved often enough in the days when he ran with them; it had been proved
that Sunday at Shell Mound Park. His work could go hang. What they
liked, and were willing to scrap for, was just Mart Eden, one of the
bunch and a pretty good guy.
Then there was Ruth. She had liked him for himself, that was
indisputable. And yet, much as she had liked him she had liked the
bourgeois standard of valuation more. She had opposed his writing, and
principally, it seemed to him, because it did not earn money. That had
been her criticism of his "Love-cycle." She, too, had urged him to get a
job. It was true, she refined it to "position," but it meant the same
thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature stuck. He had read her
all that he wrote--poems, stories, essays--"Wiki-Wiki," "The Shame of the
Sun," everything. And she had always and consistently urged him to get a
job, to go to work--good God!--as if he hadn't been working, robbing
sleep, exhausting life, in order to be worthy of her.
So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate
regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was
becoming an obsession. Work performed. The phrase haunted his brain. He
sat opposite Bernard Higginbotham at a heavy Sunday dinner over
Higginbotham's Cash Store, and it was all he could do to restrain himself
from shouting out:-
"It was work performed! And now you feed me, when then you let me
starve, forbade me your house, and damned me because I wouldn't get a
job. And the work was already done, all done. And now, when I speak,
you check the thought unuttered on your lips and hang on my lips and pay
respectful attention to whatever I choose to say. I tell you your party
is rotten and filled with grafters, and instead of flying into a rage you
hum and haw and admit there is a great deal in what I say. And why?
Because I'm famous; because I've a lot of money. Not because I'm Martin
Eden, a pretty good fellow and not particularly a fool. I could tell you
the moon is made of green cheese and you would subscribe to the notion,
at least you would not repudiate it, because I've got dollars, mountains
of them. And it was all done long ago; it was work performed, I tell
you, when you spat upon me as the dirt under your feet."
But Martin did not shout out. The thought gnawed in his brain, an
unceasing torment, while he smiled and succeeded in being tolerant. As
he grew silent, Bernard Higginbotham got the reins and did the talking.
He was a success himself, and proud of it. He was self-made. No one had
helped him. He owed no man. He was fulfilling his duty as a citizen and
bringing up a large family. And there was Higginbotham's Cash Store,
that monument of his own industry and ability. He loved Higginbotham's
Cash Store as some men loved their wives. He opened up his heart to
Martin, showed with what keenness and with what enormous planning he had
made the store. And he had plans for it, ambitious plans. The
neighborhood was growing up fast. The store was really too small. If he
had more room, he would be able to put in a score of labor-saving and
money-saving improvements. And he would do it yet. He was straining
every effort for the day when he could buy the adjoining lot and put up
another two-story frame building. The upstairs he could rent, and the
whole ground-floor of both buildings would be Higginbotham's Cash Store.
His eyes glistened when he spoke of the new sign that would stretch clear
across both buildings.
Martin forgot to listen. The refrain of "Work performed," in his own
brain, was drowning the other's clatter. The refrain maddened him, and
he tried to escape from it.
"How much did you say it would cost?" he asked suddenly.
His brother-in-law paused in the middle of an expatiation on the business
opportunities of the neighborhood. He hadn't said how much it would
cost. But he knew. He had figured it out a score of times.
"At the way lumber is now," he said, "four thousand could do it."
"Including the sign?"
"I didn't count on that. It'd just have to come, onc't the buildin' was
there."
"And the ground?"
"Three thousand more."
He leaned forward, licking his lips, nervously spreading and closing his
fingers, while he watched Martin write a check. When it was passed over
to him, he glanced at the amount-seven thousand dollars.
"I--I can't afford to pay more than six per cent," he said huskily.
Martin wanted to laugh, but, instead, demanded:-
"How much would that be?"
"Lemme see. Six per cent--six times seven--four hundred an' twenty."
"That would be thirty-five dollars a month, wouldn't it?"
Higginbotham nodded.
"Then, if you've no objection, well arrange it this way." Martin glanced
at Gertrude. "You can have the principal to keep for yourself, if you'll
use the thirty-five dollars a month for cooking and washing and
scrubbing. The seven thousand is yours if you'll guarantee that Gertrude
does no more drudgery. Is it a go?"
Mr. Higginbotham swallowed hard. That his wife should do no more
housework was an affront to his thrifty soul. The magnificent present
was the coating of a pill, a bitter pill. That his wife should not work!
It gagged him.
"All right, then," Martin said. "I'll pay the thirty-five a month, and--"
He reached across the table for the check. But Bernard Higginbotham got
his hand on it first, crying:
"I accept! I accept!"
When Martin got on the electric car, he was very sick and tired. He
looked up at the assertive sign.
"The swine," he groaned. "The swine, the swine."
When Mackintosh's Magazine published "The Palmist," featuring it with
decorations by Berthier and with two pictures by Wenn, Hermann von
Schmidt forgot that he had called the verses obscene. He announced that
his wife had inspired the poem, saw to it that the news reached the ears
of a reporter, and submitted to an interview by a staff writer who was
accompanied by a staff photographer and a staff artist. The result was a
full page in a Sunday supplement, filled with photographs and idealized
drawings of Marian, with many intimate details of Martin Eden and his
family, and with the full text of "The Palmist" in large type, and
republished by special permission of Mackintosh's Magazine. It caused
quite a stir in the neighborhood, and good housewives were proud to have
the acquaintances of the great writer's sister, while those who had not
made haste to cultivate it. Hermann von Schmidt chuckled in his little
repair shop and decided to order a new lathe. "Better than advertising,"
he told Marian, "and it costs nothing."
"We'd better have him to dinner," she suggested.
And to dinner Martin came, making himself agreeable with the fat
wholesale butcher and his fatter wife--important folk, they, likely to be
of use to a rising young man like Hermann Von Schmidt. No less a bait,
however, had been required to draw them to his house than his great
brother-in-law. Another man at table who had swallowed the same bait was
the superintendent of the Pacific Coast agencies for the Asa Bicycle
Company. Him Von Schmidt desired to please and propitiate because from
him could be obtained the Oakland agency for the bicycle. So Hermann von
Schmidt found it a goodly asset to have Martin for a brother-in-law, but
in his heart of hearts he couldn't understand where it all came in. In
the silent watches of the night, while his wife slept, he had floundered
through Martin's books and poems, and decided that the world was a fool
to buy them.
And in his heart of hearts Martin understood the situation only too well,
as he leaned back and gloated at Von Schmidt's head, in fancy punching it
well-nigh off of him, sending blow after blow home just right--the
chuckle-headed Dutchman! One thing he did like about him, however. Poor
as he was, and determined to rise as he was, he nevertheless hired one
servant to take the heavy work off of Marian's hands. Martin talked with
the superintendent of the Asa agencies, and after dinner he drew him
aside with Hermann, whom he backed financially for the best bicycle store
with fittings in Oakland. He went further, and in a private talk with
Hermann told him to keep his eyes open for an automobile agency and
garage, for there was no reason that he should not be able to run both
establishments successfully.
With tears in her eyes and her arms around his neck, Marian, at parting,
told Martin how much she loved him and always had loved him. It was
true, there was a perceptible halt midway in her assertion, which she
glossed over with more tears and kisses and incoherent stammerings, and
which Martin inferred to be her appeal for forgiveness for the time she
had lacked faith in him and insisted on his getting a job.
"He can't never keep his money, that's sure," Hermann von Schmidt
confided to his wife. "He got mad when I spoke of interest, an' he said
damn the principal and if I mentioned it again, he'd punch my Dutch head
off. That's what he said--my Dutch head. But he's all right, even if he
ain't no business man. He's given me my chance, an' he's all right."
Invitations to dinner poured in on Martin; and the more they poured, the
more he puzzled. He sat, the guest of honor, at an Arden Club banquet,
with men of note whom he had heard about and read about all his life; and
they told him how, when they had read "The Ring of Bells" in the
Transcontinental, and "The Peri and the Pearl" in The Hornet, they had
immediately picked him for a winner. My God! and I was hungry and in
rags, he thought to himself. Why didn't you give me a dinner then? Then
was the time. It was work performed. If you are feeding me now for work
performed, why did you not feed me then when I needed it? Not one word
in "The Ring of Bells," nor in "The Peri and the Pearl" has been changed.
No; you're not feeding me now for work performed. You are feeding me
because everybody else is feeding me and because it is an honor to feed
me. You are feeding me now because you are herd animals; because you are
part of the mob; because the one blind, automatic thought in the mob-mind
just now is to feed me. And where does Martin Eden and the work Martin
Eden performed come in in all this? he asked himself plaintively, then
arose to respond cleverly and wittily to a clever and witty toast.
So it went. Wherever he happened to be--at the Press Club, at the
Redwood Club, at pink teas and literary gatherings--always were
remembered "The Ring of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" when they
were first published. And always was Martin's maddening and unuttered
demand: Why didn't you feed me then? It was work performed. "The Ring
of Bells" and "The Peri and the Pearl" are not changed one iota. They
were just as artistic, just as worth while, then as now. But you are not
feeding me for their sake, nor for the sake of anything else I have
written. You're feeding me because it is the style of feeding just now,
because the whole mob is crazy with the idea of feeding Martin Eden.
And often, at such times, he would abruptly see slouch in among the
company a young hoodlum in square-cut coat and under a stiff-rim Stetson
hat. It happened to him at the Gallina Society in Oakland one afternoon.
As he rose from his chair and stepped forward across the platform, he saw
stalk through the wide door at the rear of the great room the young
hoodlum with the square-cut coat and stiff-rim hat. Five hundred
fashionably gowned women turned their heads, so intent and steadfast was
Martin's gaze, to see what he was seeing. But they saw only the empty
centre aisle. He saw the young tough lurching down that aisle and
wondered if he would remove the stiff-rim which never yet had he seen him
without. Straight down the aisle he came, and up the platform. Martin
could have wept over that youthful shade of himself, when he thought of
all that lay before him. Across the platform he swaggered, right up to
Martin, and into the foreground of Martin's consciousness disappeared.
The five hundred women applauded softly with gloved hands, seeking to
encourage the bashful great man who was their guest. And Martin shook
the vision from his brain, smiled, and began to speak.
The Superintendent of Schools, good old man, stopped Martin on the street
and remembered him, recalling seances in his office when Martin was
expelled from school for fighting.
"I read your 'Ring of Bells' in one of the magazines quite a time ago,"
he said. "It was as good as Poe. Splendid, I said at the time,
splendid!"
Yes, and twice in the months that followed you passed me on the street
and did not know me, Martin almost said aloud. Each time I was hungry
and heading for the pawnbroker. Yet it was work performed. You did not
know me then. Why do you know me now?
"I was remarking to my wife only the other day," the other was saying,
"wouldn't it be a good idea to have you out to dinner some time? And she
quite agreed with me. Yes, she quite agreed with me."
"Dinner?" Martin said so sharply that it was almost a snarl.
"Why, yes, yes, dinner, you know--just pot luck with us, with your old
superintendent, you rascal," he uttered nervously, poking Martin in an
attempt at jocular fellowship.
Martin went down the street in a daze. He stopped at the corner and
looked about him vacantly.
"Well, I'll be damned!" he murmured at last. "The old fellow was afraid
of me."
CHAPTER XLV
Kreis came to Martin one day--Kreis, of the "real dirt"; and Martin
turned to him with relief, to receive the glowing details of a scheme
sufficiently wild-catty to interest him as a fictionist rather than an
investor. Kreis paused long enough in the midst of his exposition to
tell him that in most of his "Shame of the Sun" he had been a chump.
"But I didn't come here to spout philosophy," Kreis went on. "What I
want to know is whether or not you will put a thousand dollars in on this
deal?"
"No, I'm not chump enough for that, at any rate," Martin answered. "But
I'll tell you what I will do. You gave me the greatest night of my life.
You gave me what money cannot buy. Now I've got money, and it means
nothing to me. I'd like to turn over to you a thousand dollars of what I
don't value for what you gave me that night and which was beyond price.
You need the money. I've got more than I need. You want it. You came
for it. There's no use scheming it out of me. Take it."
Kreis betrayed no surprise. He folded the check away in his pocket.
"At that rate I'd like the contract of providing you with many such
nights," he said.
"Too late." Martin shook his head. "That night was the one night for
me. I was in paradise. It's commonplace with you, I know. But it
wasn't to me. I shall never live at such a pitch again. I'm done with
philosophy. I want never to hear another word of it."
"The first dollar I ever made in my life out of my philosophy," Kreis
remarked, as he paused in the doorway. "And then the market broke."
Mrs. Morse drove by Martin on the street one day, and smiled and nodded.
He smiled back and lifted his hat. The episode did not affect him. A
month before it might have disgusted him, or made him curious and set him
to speculating about her state of consciousness at that moment. But now
it was not provocative of a second thought. He forgot about it the next
moment. He forgot about it as he would have forgotten the Central Bank
Building or the City Hall after having walked past them. Yet his mind
was preternaturally active. His thoughts went ever around and around in
a circle. The centre of that circle was "work performed"; it ate at his
brain like a deathless maggot. He awoke to it in the morning. It
tormented his dreams at night. Every affair of life around him that
penetrated through his senses immediately related itself to "work
performed." He drove along the path of relentless logic to the
conclusion that he was nobody, nothing. Mart Eden, the hoodlum, and Mart
Eden, the sailor, had been real, had been he; but Martin Eden! the famous
writer, did not exist. Martin Eden, the famous writer, was a vapor that
had arisen in the mob-mind and by the mob-mind had been thrust into the
corporeal being of Mart Eden, the hoodlum and sailor. But it couldn't
fool him. He was not that sun-myth that the mob was worshipping and
sacrificing dinners to. He knew better.
He read the magazines about himself, and pored over portraits of himself
published therein until he was unable to associate his identity with
those portraits. He was the fellow who had lived and thrilled and loved;
who had been easy-going and tolerant of the frailties of life; who had
served in the forecastle, wandered in strange lands, and led his gang in
the old fighting days. He was the fellow who had been stunned at first
by the thousands of books in the free library, and who had afterward
learned his way among them and mastered them; he was the fellow who had
burned the midnight oil and bedded with a spur and written books himself.
But the one thing he was not was that colossal appetite that all the mob
was bent upon feeding.
There were things, however, in the magazines that amused him. All the
magazines were claiming him. Warren's Monthly advertised to its
subscribers that it was always on the quest after new writers, and that,
among others, it had introduced Martin Eden to the reading public. The
White Mouse claimed him; so did The Northern Review and Mackintosh's
Magazine, until silenced by The Globe, which pointed triumphantly to its
files where the mangled "Sea Lyrics" lay buried. Youth and Age, which
had come to life again after having escaped paying its bills, put in a
prior claim, which nobody but farmers' children ever read. The
Transcontinental made a dignified and convincing statement of how it
first discovered Martin Eden, which was warmly disputed by The Hornet,
with the exhibit of "The Peri and the Pearl." The modest claim of
Singletree, Darnley & Co. was lost in the din. Besides, that publishing
firm did not own a magazine wherewith to make its claim less modest.
The newspapers calculated Martin's royalties. In some way the
magnificent offers certain magazines had made him leaked out, and Oakland
ministers called upon him in a friendly way, while professional begging
letters began to clutter his mail. But worse than all this were the
women. His photographs were published broadcast, and special writers
exploited his strong, bronzed face, his scars, his heavy shoulders, his
clear, quiet eyes, and the slight hollows in his cheeks like an
ascetic's. At this last he remembered his wild youth and smiled. Often,
among the women he met, he would see now one, now another, looking at
him, appraising him, selecting him. He laughed to himself. He
remembered Brissenden's warning and laughed again. The women would never
destroy him, that much was certain. He had gone past that stage.
Once, walking with Lizzie toward night school, she caught a glance
directed toward him by a well-gowned, handsome woman of the bourgeoisie.
The glance was a trifle too long, a shade too considerative. Lizzie knew
it for what it was, and her body tensed angrily. Martin noticed, noticed
the cause of it, told her how used he was becoming to it and that he did
not care anyway.
"You ought to care," she answered with blazing eyes. "You're sick.
That's what's the matter."
"Never healthier in my life. I weigh five pounds more than I ever did."
"It ain't your body. It's your head. Something's wrong with your think-
machine. Even I can see that, an' I ain't nobody."
He walked on beside her, reflecting.
"I'd give anything to see you get over it," she broke out impulsively.
"You ought to care when women look at you that way, a man like you. It's
not natural. It's all right enough for sissy-boys. But you ain't made
that way. So help me, I'd be willing an' glad if the right woman came
along an' made you care."
When he left Lizzie at night school, he returned to the Metropole.
Once in his rooms, he dropped into a Morris chair and sat staring
straight before him. He did not doze. Nor did he think. His mind was a
blank, save for the intervals when unsummoned memory pictures took form
and color and radiance just under his eyelids. He saw these pictures,
but he was scarcely conscious of them--no more so than if they had been
dreams. Yet he was not asleep. Once, he roused himself and glanced at
his watch. It was just eight o'clock. He had nothing to do, and it was
too early for bed. Then his mind went blank again, and the pictures
began to form and vanish under his eyelids. There was nothing
distinctive about the pictures. They were always masses of leaves and
shrub-like branches shot through with hot sunshine.
A knock at the door aroused him. He was not asleep, and his mind
immediately connected the knock with a telegram, or letter, or perhaps
one of the servants bringing back clean clothes from the laundry. He was
thinking about Joe and wondering where he was, as he said, "Come in."
He was still thinking about Joe, and did not turn toward the door. He
heard it close softly. There was a long silence. He forgot that there
had been a knock at the door, and was still staring blankly before him
when he heard a woman's sob. It was involuntary, spasmodic, checked, and
stifled--he noted that as he turned about. The next instant he was on
his feet.
"Ruth!" he said, amazed and bewildered.
Her face was white and strained. She stood just inside the door, one
hand against it for support, the other pressed to her side. She extended
both hands toward him piteously, and started forward to meet him. As he
caught her hands and led her to the Morris chair he noticed how cold they
were. He drew up another chair and sat down on the broad arm of it. He
was too confused to speak. In his own mind his affair with Ruth was
closed and sealed. He felt much in the same way that he would have felt
had the Shelly Hot Springs Laundry suddenly invaded the Hotel Metropole
with a whole week's washing ready for him to pitch into. Several times
he was about to speak, and each time he hesitated.
"No one knows I am here," Ruth said in a faint voice, with an appealing
smile.
"What did you say?"
He was surprised at the sound of his own voice.
She repeated her words.
"Oh," he said, then wondered what more he could possibly say.
"I saw you come in, and I waited a few minutes."
"Oh," he said again.
He had never been so tongue-tied in his life. Positively he did not have
an idea in his head. He felt stupid and awkward, but for the life of him
he could think of nothing to say. It would have been easier had the
intrusion been the Shelly Hot Springs laundry. He could have rolled up
his sleeves and gone to work.
"And then you came in," he said finally.
She nodded, with a slightly arch expression, and loosened the scarf at
her throat.
"I saw you first from across the street when you were with that girl."
"Oh, yes," he said simply. "I took her down to night school."
"Well, aren't you glad to see me?" she said at the end of another
silence.
"Yes, yes." He spoke hastily. "But wasn't it rash of you to come here?"
"I slipped in. Nobody knows I am here. I wanted to see you. I came to
tell you I have been very foolish. I came because I could no longer stay
away, because my heart compelled me to come, because--because I wanted to
come."
She came forward, out of her chair and over to him. She rested her hand
on his shoulder a moment, breathing quickly, and then slipped into his
arms. And in his large, easy way, desirous of not inflicting hurt,
knowing that to repulse this proffer of herself was to inflict the most
grievous hurt a woman could receive, he folded his arms around her and
held her close. But there was no warmth in the embrace, no caress in the
contact. She had come into his arms, and he held her, that was all. She
nestled against him, and then, with a change of position, her hands crept
up and rested upon his neck. But his flesh was not fire beneath those
hands, and he felt awkward and uncomfortable.
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