“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
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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,
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252
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.
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253
“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