CHAPTER XLIII



"The Shame of the Sun" was published in October. As Martin cut the
cords of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary
copies from the publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy
sadness fell upon him. He thought of the wild delight that would
have been his had this happened a few short months before, and he
contrasted that delight that should have been with his present
uncaring coldness. His book, his first book, and his pulse had not
gone up a fraction of a beat, and he was only sad. It meant little
to him now. The most it meant was that it might bring some money,
and little enough did he care for money.

He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.

"I did it," he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment.
"I wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your
vegetable soup went into the making of it. Keep it. It's yours.
Just to remember me by, you know."

He was not bragging, not showing off. His sole motive was to make
her happy, to make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in
him. She put the book in the front room on top of the family
Bible. A sacred thing was this book her lodger had made, a fetich
of friendship. It softened the blow of his having been a
laundryman, and though she could not understand a line of it, she
knew that every line of it was great. She was a simple, practical,
hard-working woman, but she possessed faith in large endowment.

Just as emotionlessly as he had received "The Shame of the Sun" did
he read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping
bureau. The book was making a hit, that was evident. It meant
more gold in the money sack. He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all
his promises, and still have enough left to build his grass-walled
castle.

Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of
fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second
edition of twice the size through the presses; and ere this was
delivered a third edition of five thousand had been ordered. A
London firm made arrangements by cable for an English edition, and
hot-footed upon this came the news of French, German, and
Scandinavian translations in progress. The attack upon the
Maeterlinck school could not have been made at a more opportune
moment. A fierce controversy was precipitated. Saleeby and
Haeckel indorsed and defended "The Shame of the Sun," for once
finding themselves on the same side of a question. Crookes and
Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge
attempted to formulate a compromise that would jibe with his
particular cosmic theories. Maeterlinck's followers rallied around
the standard of mysticism. Chesterton set the whole world laughing
with a series of alleged non-partisan essays on the subject, and
the whole affair, controversy and controversialists, was well-nigh
swept into the pit by a thundering broadside from George Bernard
Shaw. Needless to say the arena was crowded with hosts of lesser
lights, and the dust and sweat and din became terrific.

"It is a most marvellous happening," Singletree, Darnley & Co.
wrote Martin, "a critical philosophic essay selling like a novel.
You could not have chosen your subject better, and all contributory
factors have been unwarrantedly propitious. We need scarcely to
assure you that we are making hay while the sun shines. Over forty
thousand copies have already been sold in the United States and
Canada, and a new edition of twenty thousand is on the presses. We
are overworked, trying to supply the demand. Nevertheless we have
helped to create that demand. We have already spent five thousand
dollars in advertising. The book is bound to be a record-breaker."

"Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book
which we have taken the liberty of forwarding to you. You will
please note that we have increased your royalties to twenty per
cent, which is about as high as a conservative publishing house
dares go. If our offer is agreeable to you, please fill in the
proper blank space with the title of your book. We make no
stipulations concerning its nature. Any book on any subject. If
you have one already written, so much the better. Now is the time
to strike. The iron could not be hotter."

"On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an
advance on royalties of five thousand dollars. You see, we have
faith in you, and we are going in on this thing big. We should
like, also, to discuss with you the drawing up of a contract for a
term of years, say ten, during which we shall have the exclusive
right of publishing in book-form all that you produce. But more of
this anon."

Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental
arithmetic, finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty
thousand to be nine thousand dollars. He signed the new contract,
inserting "The Smoke of Joy" in the blank space, and mailed it back
to the publishers along with the twenty storiettes he had written
in the days before he discovered the formula for the newspaper
storiette. And promptly as the United States mail could deliver
and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.'s check for five
thousand dollars.

"I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about
two o'clock," Martin said, the morning the check arrived. "Or,
better, meet me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o'clock. I'll be
looking out for you."

At the appointed time she was there; but SHOES was the only clew to
the mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered
a distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by
a shoe-store and dived into a real estate office. What happened
thereupon resided forever after in her memory as a dream. Fine
gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked with Martin and
one another; a type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an
imposing document; her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his
signature; and when all was over and she was outside on the
sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her, saying, "Well, Maria, you
won't have to pay me no seven dollars and a half this month."

Maria was too stunned for speech.

"Or next month, or the next, or the next," her landlord said.

She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor. And it was not
until she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her
own kind, and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she
really knew that she was the owner of the little house in which she
had lived and for which she had paid rent so long.

"Why don't you trade with me no more?" the Portuguese grocer asked
Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the
car; and Martin explained that he wasn't doing his own cooking any
more, and then went in and had a drink of wine on the house. He
noted it was the best wine the grocer had in stock.

"Maria," Martin announced that night, "I'm going to leave you. And
you're going to leave here yourself soon. Then you can rent the
house and be a landlord yourself. You've a brother in San Leandro
or Haywards, and he's in the milk business. I want you to send all
your washing back unwashed - understand? - unwashed, and to go out
to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see
that brother of yours. Tell him to come to see me. I'll be
stopping at the Metropole down in Oakland. He'll know a good milk-
ranch when he sees one."

And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a
dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account
that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore
shoes and went to school. Few persons ever meet the fairy princes
they dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was
hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the
guise of an ex-laundryman.

In the meantime the world had begun to ask: "Who is this Martin
Eden?" He had declined to give any biographical data to his
publishers, but the newspapers were not to be denied. Oakland was
his own town, and the reporters nosed out scores of individuals who
could supply information. All that he was and was not, all that he
had done and most of what he had not done, was spread out for the
delectation of the public, accompanied by snapshots and photographs
- the latter procured from the local photographer who had once
taken Martin's picture and who promptly copyrighted it and put it
on the market. At first, so great was his disgust with the
magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought against
publicity; but in the end, because it was easier than not to, he
surrendered. He found that he could not refuse himself to the
special writers who travelled long distances to see him. Then
again, each day was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was
occupied with writing and studying, those hours had to be occupied
somehow; so he yielded to what was to him a whim, permitted
interviews, gave his opinions on literature and philosophy, and
even accepted invitations of the bourgeoisie. He had settled down
into a strange and comfortable state of mind. He no longer cared.
He forgave everybody, even the cub reporter who had painted him red
and to whom he now granted a full page with specially posed
photographs.

He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she regretted
the greatness that had come to him. It widened the space between
them. Perhaps it was with the hope of narrowing it that she
yielded to his persuasions to go to night school and business
college and to have herself gowned by a wonderful dressmaker who
charged outrageous prices. She improved visibly from day to day,
until Martin wondered if he was doing right, for he knew that all
her compliance and endeavor was for his sake. She was trying to
make herself of worth in his eyes - of the sort of worth he seemed
to value. Yet he gave her no hope, treating her in brotherly
fashion and rarely seeing her.

"Overdue" was rushed upon the market by the Meredith-Lowell Company
in the height of his popularity, and being fiction, in point of
sales it made even a bigger strike than "The Shame of the Sun."
Week after week his was the credit of the unprecedented performance
of having two books at the head of the list of best-sellers. Not
only did the story take with the fiction-readers, but those who
read "The Shame of the Sun" with avidity were likewise attracted to
the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of mastery with which he had
handled it. First he had attacked the literature of mysticism, and
had done it exceeding well; and, next, he had successfully supplied
the very literature he had exposited, thus proving himself to be
that rare genius, a critic and a creator in one.

Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-
like, through the world of literature, and he was more amused than
interested by the stir he was making. One thing was puzzling him,
a little thing that would have puzzled the world had it known. But
the world would have puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather than over
the little thing that to him loomed gigantic. Judge Blount invited
him to dinner. That was the little thing, or the beginning of the
little thing, that was soon to become the big thing. He had
insulted Judge Blount, treated him abominably, and Judge Blount,
meeting him on the street, invited him to dinner. Martin bethought
himself of the numerous occasions on which he had met Judge Blount
at the Morses' and when Judge Blount had not invited him to dinner.
Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he asked himself. He
had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What made the
difference? The fact that the stuff he had written had appeared
inside the covers of books? But it was work performed. It was not
something he had done since. It was achievement accomplished at
the very time Judge Blount was sharing this general view and
sneering at his Spencer and his intellect. Therefore it was not
for any real value, but for a purely fictitious value that Judge
Blount invited him to dinner.

Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at
his complacence. And at the dinner, where, with their womankind,
were half a dozen of those that sat in high places, and where
Martin found himself quite the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded
by Judge Hanwell, urged privately that Martin should permit his
name to be put up for the Styx - the ultra-select club to which
belonged, not the mere men of wealth, but the men of attainment.
And Martin declined, and was more puzzled than ever.

He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts. He was
overwhelmed by requests from editors. It had been discovered that
he was a stylist, with meat under his style. THE NORTHERN REVIEW,
after publishing "The Cradle of Beauty," had written him for half a
dozen similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the
heap, had not BURTON'S MAGAZINE, in a speculative mood, offered him
five hundred dollars each for five essays. He wrote back that he
would supply the demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay. He
remembered that all these manuscripts had been refused by the very
magazines that were now clamoring for them. And their refusals had
been cold-blooded, automatic, stereotyped. They had made him
sweat, and now he intended to make them sweat. BURTON'S MAGAZINE
paid his price for five essays, and the remaining four, at the same
rate, were snapped up by MACKINTOSH'S MONTHLY, THE NORTHERN REVIEW
being too poor to stand the pace. Thus went out to the world "The
High Priests of Mystery," "The Wonder-Dreamers," "The Yardstick of
the Ego," "Philosophy of Illusion," "God and Clod," "Art and
Biology," "Critics and Test-tubes," "Star-dust," and "The Dignity
of Usury," - to raise storms and rumblings and mutterings that were
many a day in dying down.

Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, which he
did, but it was always for work performed. He refused resolutely
to pledge himself to any new thing. The thought of again setting
pen to paper maddened him. He had seen Brissenden torn to pieces
by the crowd, and despite the fact that him the crowd acclaimed, he
could not get over the shock nor gather any respect for the crowd.
His very popularity seemed a disgrace and a treason to Brissenden.
It made him wince, but he made up his mind to go on and fill the
money-bag.

He received letters from editors like the following: "About a year
ago we were unfortunate enough to refuse your collection of love-
poems. We were greatly impressed by them at the time, but certain
arrangements already entered into prevented our taking them. If
you still have them, and if you will be kind enough to forward
them, we shall be glad to publish the entire collection on your own
terms. We are also prepared to make a most advantageous offer for
bringing them out in book-form."

Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it instead.
He read it over before mailing, and was particularly impressed by
its sophomoric amateurishness and general worthlessness. But he
sent it; and it was published, to the everlasting regret of the
editor. The public was indignant and incredulous. It was too far
a cry from Martin Eden's high standard to that serious bosh. It
was asserted that he had never written it, that the magazine had
faked it very clumsily, or that Martin Eden was emulating the elder
Dumas and at the height of success was hiring his writing done for
him. But when he explained that the tragedy was an early effort of
his literary childhood, and that the magazine had refused to be
happy unless it got it, a great laugh went up at the magazine's
expense and a change in the editorship followed. The tragedy was
never brought out in book-form, though Martin pocketed the advance
royalties that had been paid.

COLEMAN'S WEEKLY sent Martin a lengthy telegram, costing nearly
three hundred dollars, offering him a thousand dollars an article
for twenty articles. He was to travel over the United States, with
all expenses paid, and select whatever topics interested him. The
body of the telegram was devoted to hypothetical topics in order to
show him the freedom of range that was to be his. The only
restriction placed upon him was that he must confine himself to the
United States. Martin sent his inability to accept and his regrets
by wire "collect."

"Wiki-Wiki," published in WARREN'S MONTHLY, was an instantaneous
success. It was brought out forward in a wide-margined,
beautifully decorated volume that struck the holiday trade and sold
like wildfire. The critics were unanimous in the belief that it
would take its place with those two classics by two great writers,
"The Bottle Imp" and "The Magic Skin."

The public, however, received the "Smoke of Joy" collection rather
dubiously and coldly. The audacity and unconventionality of the
storiettes was a shock to bourgeois morality and prejudice; but
when Paris went mad over the immediate translation that was made,
the American and English reading public followed suit and bought so
many copies that Martin compelled the conservative house of
Singletree, Darnley & Co. to pay a flat royalty of twenty-five per
cent for a third book, and thirty per cent flat for a fourth.
These two volumes comprised all the short stories he had written
and which had received, or were receiving, serial publication.
"The Ring of Bells" and his horror stories constituted one
collection; the other collection was composed of "Adventure," "The
Pot," "The Wine of Life," "The Whirlpool," "The Jostling Street,"
and four other stories. The Lowell-Meredith Company captured the
collection of all his essays, and the Maxmillian Company got his
"Sea Lyrics" and the "Love-cycle," the latter receiving serial
publication in the LADIES' HOME COMPANION after the payment of an
extortionate price.

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of the last
manuscript. The grass-walled castle and the white, coppered
schooner were very near to him. Well, at any rate he had
discovered Brissenden's contention that nothing of merit found its
way into the magazines. His own success demonstrated that
Brissenden had been wrong.

And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had been right,
after all. "The Shame of the Sun" had been the cause of his
success more than the stuff he had written. That stuff had been
merely incidental. It had been rejected right and left by the
magazines. The publication of "The Shame of the Sun" had started a
controversy and precipitated the landslide in his favor. Had there
been no "Shame of the Sun" there would have been no landslide, and
had there been no miracle in the go of "The Shame of the Sun" there
would have been no landslide. Singletree, Darnley & Co. attested
that miracle. They had brought out a first edition of fifteen
hundred copies and been dubious of selling it. They were
experienced publishers and no one had been more astounded than they
at the success which had followed. To them it had been in truth a
miracle. They never got over it, and every letter they wrote him
reflected their reverent awe of that first mysterious happening.
They did not attempt to explain it. There was no explaining it.
It had happened. In the face of all experience to the contrary, it
had happened.

So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of
his popularity. It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and
poured its gold into his money-sack, and from what little he knew
of the bourgeoisie it was not clear to him how it could possibly
appreciate or comprehend what he had written. His intrinsic beauty
and power meant nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were
acclaiming him and buying his books. He was the fad of the hour,
the adventurer who had stormed Parnassus while the gods nodded.
The hundreds of thousands read him and acclaimed him with the same
brute non-understanding with which they had flung themselves on
Brissenden's "Ephemera" and torn it to pieces - a wolf-rabble that
fawned on him instead of fanging him. Fawn or fang, it was all a
matter of chance. One thing he knew with absolute certitude:
"Ephemera" was infinitely greater than anything he had done. It
was infinitely greater than anything he had in him. It was a poem
of centuries. Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry
tribute indeed, for that same mob had wallowed "Ephemera" into the
mire. He sighed heavily and with satisfaction. He was glad the
last manuscript was sold and that he would soon be done with it
all.



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, 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 Yon 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."