Chapter XLIV - Page 2

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