Martin Eden: Chapter 39

Description

Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning's
paper.  It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on
the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was
the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists.  He ran over
the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and,
though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he
tossed the paper aside with a laugh.

"Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious," he said that
afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived
and dropped limply into the one chair.

"But what do you care?" Brissenden asked.  "Surely you don't desire
the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?"

Martin thought for a while, then said:-

"No, I really don't care for their approval, not a whit.  On the
other hand, it's very likely to make my relations with Ruth's
family a trifle awkward.  Her father always contended I was a
socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief.  Not
that I care for his opinion - but what's the odds?  I want to read
you what I've been doing to-day.  It's 'Overdue,' of course, and
I'm just about halfway through."

He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in
a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting
the oil-burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze
wandered on to Martin.

"Sit down," Brissenden said.

Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to
broach his business.

"I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I've come to interview
you," he began.

Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.

"A brother socialist?" the reporter asked, with a quick glance at
Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and
dying man.

"And he wrote that report," Martin said softly.  "Why, he is only a
boy!"

"Why don't you poke him?" Brissenden asked.  "I'd give a thousand
dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes."

The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him
and around him and at him.  But he had been commended for his
brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been
detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader
of the organized menace to society.

"You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?" he
said.  "I've a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it
will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower.
Then we can have the interview afterward."

"A photographer," Brissenden said meditatively.  "Poke him, Martin!
Poke him!"

"I guess I'm getting old," was the answer.  "I know I ought, but I
really haven't the heart.  It doesn't seem to matter."

"For his mother's sake," Brissenden urged.

"It's worth considering," Martin replied; "but it doesn't seem
worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me.  You see, it
does take energy to give a fellow a poking.  Besides, what does it
matter?"

"That's right - that's the way to take it," the cub announced
airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the
door.

"But it wasn't true, not a word of what he wrote," Martin went on,
confining his attention to Brissenden.

"It was just in a general way a description, you understand," the
cub ventured, "and besides, it's good advertising.  That's what
counts.  It was a favor to you."

"It's good advertising, Martin, old boy," Brissenden repeated
solemnly.

"And it was a favor to me - think of that!" was Martin's
contribution.

"Let me see - where were you born, Mr. Eden?" the cub asked,
assuming an air of expectant attention.

"He doesn't take notes," said Brissenden.  "He remembers it all."

"That is sufficient for me."  The cub was trying not to look
worried.  "No decent reporter needs to bother with notes."

"That was sufficient - for last night."  But Brissenden was not a
disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly.
"Martin, if you don't poke him, I'll do it myself, if I fall dead
on the floor the next moment."

"How will a spanking do?" Martin asked.

Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.

The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the
cub face downward across his knees.

"Now don't bite," Martin warned, "or else I'll have to punch your
face.  It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face."

His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a
swift and steady rhythm.  The cub struggled and cursed and
squirmed, but did not offer to bite.  Brissenden looked on gravely,
though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle,
pleading, "Here, just let me swat him once."

"Sorry my hand played out," Martin said, when at last he desisted.
"It is quite numb."

He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.

"I'll have you arrested for this," he snarled, tears of boyish
indignation running down his flushed cheeks.  "I'll make you sweat
for this.  You'll see."

"The pretty thing," Martin remarked.  "He doesn't realize that he
has entered upon the downward path.  It is not honest, it is not
square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one's fellow-creatures
the way he has done, and he doesn't know it."

"He has to come to us to be told," Brissenden filled in a pause.

"Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured.  My grocery will
undoubtedly refuse me credit now.  The worst of it is that the poor
boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class
newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel."

"But there is yet time," quoth Brissenden.  "Who knows but what you
may prove the humble instrument to save him.  Why didn't you let me
swat him just once?  I'd like to have had a hand in it."

"I'll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes,"
sobbed the erring soul.

"No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak."  Martin shook his head
lugubriously.  "I'm afraid I've numbed my hand in vain.  The young
man cannot reform.  He will become eventually a very great and
successful newspaper man.  He has no conscience.  That alone will
make him great."

With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last
for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle
he still clutched.

In the next morning's paper Martin learned a great deal more about
himself that was new to him.  "We are the sworn enemies of
society," he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview.
"No, we are not anarchists but socialists."  When the reporter
pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the
two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent
affirmation.  His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical,
and various other signs of degeneration were described.  Especially
notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-
shot eyes.

He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City
Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there
inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and
made the most revolutionary speeches.  The cub painted a high-light
picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair,
and of the death's-head tramp who kept him company and who looked
as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary confinement
in some fortress dungeon.

The cub had been industrious.  He had scurried around and nosed out
Martin's family history, and procured a photograph of
Higginbotham's Cash Store with Bernard Higginbotham himself
standing out in front.  That gentleman was depicted as an
intelligent, dignified businessman who had no patience with his
brother-in-law's socialistic views, and no patience with the
brother-in-law, either, whom he was quoted as characterizing as a
lazy good-for-nothing who wouldn't take a job when it was offered
to him and who would go to jail yet.  Hermann Yon Schmidt, Marian's
husband, had likewise been interviewed.  He had called Martin the
black sheep of the family and repudiated him.  "He tried to sponge
off of me, but I put a stop to that good and quick," Von Schmidt
had said to the reporter.  "He knows better than to come bumming
around here.  A man who won't work is no good, take that from me."

This time Martin was genuinely angry.  Brissenden looked upon the
affair as a good joke, but he could not console Martin, who knew
that it would be no easy task to explain to Ruth.  As for her
father, he knew that he must be overjoyed with what had happened
and that he would make the most of it to break off the engagement.
How much he would make of it he was soon to realize.  The afternoon
mail brought a letter from Ruth.  Martin opened it with a
premonition of disaster, and read it standing at the open door when
he had received it from the postman.  As he read, mechanically his
hand sought his pocket for the tobacco and brown paper of his old
cigarette days.  He was not aware that the pocket was empty or that
he had even reached for the materials with which to roll a
cigarette.

It was not a passionate letter.  There were no touches of anger in
it.  But all the way through, from the first sentence to the last,
was sounded the note of hurt and disappointment.  She had expected
better of him.  She had thought he had got over his youthful
wildness, that her love for him had been sufficiently worth while
to enable him to live seriously and decently.  And now her father
and mother had taken a firm stand and commanded that the engagement
be broken.  That they were justified in this she could not but
admit.  Their relation could never be a happy one.  It had been
unfortunate from the first.  But one regret she voiced in the whole
letter, and it was a bitter one to Martin.  "If only you had
settled down to some position and attempted to make something of
yourself," she wrote.  "But it was not to be.  Your past life had
been too wild and irregular.  I can understand that you are not to
be blamed.  You could act only according to your nature and your
early training.  So I do not blame you, Martin.  Please remember
that.  It was simply a mistake.  As father and mother have
contended, we were not made for each other, and we should both be
happy because it was discovered not too late." . . "There is no use
trying to see me," she said toward the last.  "It would be an
unhappy meeting for both of us, as well as for my mother.  I feel,
as it is, that I have caused her great pain and worry.  I shall
have to do much living to atone for it."

He read it through to the end, carefully, a second time, then sat
down and replied.  He outlined the remarks he had uttered at the
socialist meeting, pointing out that they were in all ways the
converse of what the newspaper had put in his mouth.  Toward the
end of the letter he was God's own lover pleading passionately for
love.  "Please answer," he said, "and in your answer you have to
tell me but one thing.  Do you love me?  That is all - the answer
to that one question."

But no answer came the next day, nor the next.  "Overdue" lay
untouched upon the table, and each day the heap of returned
manuscripts under the table grew larger.  For the first time
Martin's glorious sleep was interrupted by insomnia, and he tossed
through long, restless nights.  Three times he called at the Morse
home, but was turned away by the servant who answered the bell.
Brissenden lay sick in his hotel, too feeble to stir out, and,
though Martin was with him often, he did not worry him with his
troubles.

For Martin's troubles were many.  The aftermath of the cub
reporter's deed was even wider than Martin had anticipated.  The
Portuguese grocer refused him further credit, while the
greengrocer, who was an American and proud of it, had called him a
traitor to his country and refused further dealings with him -
carrying his patriotism to such a degree that he cancelled Martin's
account and forbade him ever to attempt to pay it.  The talk in the
neighborhood reflected the same feeling, and indignation against
Martin ran high.  No one would have anything to do with a socialist
traitor.  Poor Maria was dubious and frightened, but she remained
loyal.  The children of the neighborhood recovered from the awe of
the grand carriage which once had visited Martin, and from safe
distances they called him "hobo" and "bum."  The Silva tribe,
however, stanchly defended him, fighting more than one pitched
battle for his honor, and black eyes and bloody noses became quite
the order of the day and added to Maria's perplexities and
troubles.

Once, Martin met Gertrude on the street, down in Oakland, and
learned what he knew could not be otherwise - that Bernard
Higginbotham was furious with him for having dragged the family
into public disgrace, and that he had forbidden him the house.

"Why don't you go away, Martin?" Gertrude had begged.  "Go away and
get a job somewhere and steady down.  Afterwards, when this all
blows over, you can come back."

Martin shook his head, but gave no explanations.  How could he
explain?  He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that
yawned between him and his people.  He could never cross it and
explain to them his position, - the Nietzschean position, in regard
to socialism.  There were not words enough in the English language,
nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible
to them.  Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was
to get a job.  That was their first word and their last.  It
constituted their whole lexicon of ideas.  Get a job!  Go to work!
Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.  Small
wonder the world belonged to the strong.  The slaves were obsessed
by their own slavery.  A job was to them a golden fetich before
which they fell down and worshipped.

He shook his head again, when Gertrude offered him money, though he
knew that within the day he would have to make a trip to the
pawnbroker.

"Don't come near Bernard now," she admonished him.  "After a few
months, when he is cooled down, if you want to, you can get the job
of drivin' delivery-wagon for him.  Any time you want me, just send
for me an' I'll come.  Don't forget."

She went away weeping audibly, and he felt a pang of sorrow shoot
through him at sight of her heavy body and uncouth gait.  As he
watched her go, the Nietzschean edifice seemed to shake and totter.
The slave-class in the abstract was all very well, but it was not
wholly satisfactory when it was brought home to his own family.
And yet, if there was ever a slave trampled by the strong, that
slave was his sister Gertrude.  He grinned savagely at the paradox.
A fine Nietzsche-man he was, to allow his intellectual concepts to
be shaken by the first sentiment or emotion that strayed along -
ay, to be shaken by the slave-morality itself, for that was what
his pity for his sister really was.  The true noble men were above
pity and compassion.  Pity and compassion had been generated in the
subterranean barracoons of the slaves and were no more than the
agony and sweat of the crowded miserables and weaklings.

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1. Ebooks list page : 86
2. Martin Eden: Chapter 12
3. Martin Eden: Chapter 18
4. Martin Eden: Chapter 20
5. Martin Eden: Chapter 19
6. Martin Eden: Chapter 22
7. Martin Eden: Chapter 24
8. Martin Eden: Chapter 1
9. Martin Eden: Chapter 21
10. Martin Eden: Chapter 23
11. Martin Eden: Chapter 6
12. Martin Eden: Chapter 27
13. Martin Eden: Chapter 17
14. Martin Eden: Chapter 15
15. Martin Eden: Chapter 7
16. Martin Eden: Chapter 4