Kabanata Kabanata 44 · Chapter XLIV

. Chapter XLIV

Mr. Morse met Martin in the office of the Hotel Metropole. Whether he

had happened there just casually, intent on other affairs, or whether

he had come there for the direct purpose of inviting him to dinner,

Martin never could quite make up his mind, though he inclined toward

the second hypothesis. At any rate, invited to dinner he was by Mr.

Morse—Ruth’s father, who had forbidden him the house and broken off the

engagement.

Martin was not angry. He was not even on his dignity. He tolerated Mr.

Morse, wondering the while how it felt to eat such humble pie. He did

not decline the invitation. Instead, he put it off with vagueness and

indefiniteness and inquired after the family, particularly after Mrs.

Morse and Ruth. He spoke her name without hesitancy, naturally, though

secretly surprised that he had had no inward quiver, no old, familiar

increase of pulse and warm surge of blood.

He had many invitations to dinner, some of which he accepted. Persons

got themselves introduced to him in order to invite him to dinner. And

he went on puzzling over the little thing that was becoming a great

thing. Bernard Higginbotham invited him to dinner. He puzzled the

harder. He remembered the days of his desperate starvation when no one

invited him to dinner. That was the time he needed dinners, and went

weak and faint for lack of them and lost weight from sheer famine. That

was the paradox of it. When he wanted dinners, no one gave them to him,

and now that he could buy a hundred thousand dinners and was losing his

appetite, dinners were thrust upon him right and left. But why? There

was no justice in it, no merit on his part. He was no different. All

the work he had done was even at that time work performed. Mr. and Mrs.

Morse had condemned him for an idler and a shirk and through Ruth had

urged that he take a clerk’s position in an office. Furthermore, they

had been aware of his work performed. Manuscript after manuscript of

his 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, we’ll 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.”