with chance effects. He wanted to know why and how. His was
deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem,
the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in
sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious
possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure. On the
other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases
that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood
all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and
incommunicable connotations. Before such he bowed down and
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marvelled, knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of
any man. And no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of
the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he
was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he
did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated. He knew
full well, from his Spencer, that man can never attain ultimate
knowledge of anything, and that the mystery of beauty was no less
than that of life – nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life
were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same
nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and
wonder.
In fact, it was when filled with these thoughts that he wrote his
essay entitled “Star-dust,” in which he had his fling, not at the
principles of criticism, but at the principal critics. It was
brilliant, deep, philosophical, and deliciously touched with
laughter. Also it was promptly rejected by the magazines as often
as it was submitted. But having cleared his mind of it, he went
serenely on his way. It was a habit he developed, of incubating
and maturing his thought upon a subject, and of then rushing into
the type-writer with it. That it did not see print was a matter a
small moment with him. The writing of it was the culminating act
of a long mental process, the drawing together of scattered threads
of thought and the final generalizing upon all the data with which
his mind was burdened. To write such an article was the conscious
effort by which he freed his mind and made it ready for fresh
material and problems. It was in a way akin to that common habit
of men and women troubled by real or fancied grievances, who
periodically and volubly break their long-suffering silence and
“have their say” till the last word is said.
CHAPTER XXIV
The weeks passed. Martin ran out of money, and publishers’ checks
were far away as ever. All his important manuscripts had come back
and been started out again, and his hack-work fared no better. His
little kitchen was no longer graced with a variety of foods.
Caught in the pinch with a part sack of rice and a few pounds of
dried apricots, rice and apricots was his menu three times a day
for five days hand-running. Then he startled to realize on his
credit. The Portuguese grocer, to whom he had hitherto paid cash,
called a halt when Martin’s bill reached the magnificent total of
three dollars and eighty-five cents.
“For you see,” said the grocer, “you no catcha da work, I losa da
mon’.”
And Martin could reply nothing. There was no way of explaining.
It was not true business principle to allow credit to a strong-
bodied young fellow of the working-class who was too lazy to work.
“You catcha da job, I let you have mora da grub,” the grocer
assured Martin. “No job, no grub. Thata da business.” And then,
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to show that it was purely business foresight and not prejudice,
“Hava da drink on da house – good friends justa da same.”
So Martin drank, in his easy way, to show that he was good friends
with the house, and then went supperless to bed.
The fruit store, where Martin had bought his vegetables, was run by
an American whose business principles were so weak that he let
Martin run a bill of five dollars before stopping his credit. The
baker stopped at two dollars, and the butcher at four dollars.
Martin added his debts and found that he was possessed of a total
credit in all the world of fourteen dollars and eighty-five cents.
He was up with his type-writer rent, but he estimated that he could
get two months’ credit on that, which would be eight dollars. When
that occurred, he would have exhausted all possible credit.
The last purchase from the fruit store had been a sack of potatoes,
and for a week he had potatoes, and nothing but potatoes, three
times a day. An occasional dinner at Ruth’s helped to keep
strength in his body, though he found it tantalizing enough to
refuse further helping when his appetite was raging at sight of so
much food spread before it. Now and again, though afflicted with
secret shame, he dropped in at his sister’s at meal-time and ate as
much as he dared – more than he dared at the Morse table.
Day by day he worked on, and day by day the postman delivered to
him rejected manuscripts. He had no money for stamps, so the
manuscripts accumulated in a heap under the table. Came a day when
for forty hours he had not tasted food. He could not hope for a
meal at Ruth’s, for she was away to San Rafael on a two weeks’
visit; and for very shame’s sake he could not go to his sister’s.
To cap misfortune, the postman, in his afternoon round, brought him
five returned manuscripts. Then it was that Martin wore his
overcoat down into Oakland, and came back without it, but with five
dollars tinkling in his pocket. He paid a dollar each on account
to the four tradesmen, and in his kitchen fried steak and onions,
made coffee, and stewed a large pot of prunes. And having dined,
he sat down at his table-desk and completed before midnight an
essay which he entitled “The Dignity of Usury.” Having typed it
out, he flung it under the table, for there had been nothing left
from the five dollars with which to buy stamps.
Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, reducing
the amount available for food by putting stamps on all his
manuscripts and sending them out. He was disappointed with his
hack-work. Nobody cared to buy. He compared it with what he found
in the newspapers, weeklies, and cheap magazines, and decided that
his was better, far better, than the average; yet it would not
sell. Then he discovered that most of the newspapers printed a
great deal of what was called “plate” stuff, and he got the address
of the association that furnished it. His own work that he sent in
was returned, along with a stereotyped slip informing him that the
staff supplied all the copy that was needed.
In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of
incident and anecdote. Here was a chance. His paragraphs were
returned, and though he tried repeatedly he never succeeded in
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placing one. Later on, when it no longer mattered, he learned that
the associate editors and sub-editors augmented their salaries by
supplying those paragraphs themselves. The comic weeklies returned
his jokes and humorous verse, and the light society verse he wrote
for the large magazines found no abiding-place. Then there was the
newspaper storiette. He knew that he could write better ones than
were published. Managing to obtain the addresses of two newspaper
syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes. When he had written
twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased. And yet, from
day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and weeklies, scores
and scores of storiettes, not one of which would compare with his.
In his despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever,
that he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-
deluded pretender.
The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever. He folded the
stamps in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and
from three weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps
and handed him the manuscript. Surely there were no live, warm
editors at the other end. It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups
– a clever mechanism operated by automatons. He reached stages of
despair wherein he doubted if editors existed at all. He had never
received a sign of the existence of one, and from absence of
judgment in rejecting all he wrote it seemed plausible that editors
were myths, manufactured and maintained by office boys,
typesetters, and pressmen.
The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and
they were not all happy. He was afflicted always with a gnawing
restlessness, more tantalizing than in the old days before he