among whom he had climbed – with the exception, of course, of
Professor Caldwell. About life and the books he knew more than
they, and he wondered into what nooks and crannies they had cast
aside their educations. He did not know that he was himself
possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did he know that the persons
who were given to probing the depths and to thinking ultimate
thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of the world’s
Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely eagles
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sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its
swarming freight of gregarious life.
CHAPTER XXVIII
But success had lost Martin’s address, and her messengers no longer
came to his door. For twenty-five days, working Sundays and
holidays, he toiled on “The Shame of the Sun,” a long essay of some
thirty thousand words. It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism
of the Maeterlinck school – an attack from the citadel of positive
science upon the wonder-dreamers, but an attack nevertheless that
retained much of beauty and wonder of the sort compatible with
ascertained fact. It was a little later that he followed up the
attack with two short essays, “The Wonder-Dreamers” and “The
Yardstick of the Ego.” And on essays, long and short, he began to
pay the travelling expenses from magazine to magazine.
During the twenty-five days spent on “The Shame of the Sun,” he
sold hack-work to the extent of six dollars and fifty cents. A
joke had brought in fifty cents, and a second one, sold to a high-
grade comic weekly, had fetched a dollar. Then two humorous poems
had earned two dollars and three dollars respectively. As a
result, having exhausted his credit with the tradesmen (though he
had increased his credit with the grocer to five dollars), his
wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker. The type-
writer people were again clamoring for money, insistently pointing
out that according to the agreement rent was to be paid strictly in
advance.
Encouraged by his several small sales, Martin went back to hack-
work. Perhaps there was a living in it, after all. Stored away
under his table were the twenty storiettes which had been rejected
by the newspaper short-story syndicate. He read them over in order
to find out how not to write newspaper storiettes, and so doing,
reasoned out the perfect formula. He found that the newspaper
storiette should never be tragic, should never end unhappily, and
should never contain beauty of language, subtlety of thought, nor
real delicacy of sentiment. Sentiment it must contain, plenty of
it, pure and noble, of the sort that in his own early youth had
brought his applause from “nigger heaven” – the “For-God-my-
country-and-the-Czar” and “I-may-be-poor-but-I-am-honest” brand of
sentiment.
Having learned such precautions, Martin consulted “The Duchess” for
tone, and proceeded to mix according to formula. The formula
consists of three parts: (1) a pair of lovers are jarred apart;
(2) by some deed or event they are reunited; (3) marriage bells.
The third part was an unvarying quantity, but the first and second
parts could be varied an infinite number of times. Thus, the pair
of lovers could be jarred apart by misunderstood motives, by
accident of fate, by jealous rivals, by irate parents, by crafty
guardians, by scheming relatives, and so forth and so forth; they
could be reunited by a brave deed of the man lover, by a similar
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deed of the woman lover, by change of heart in one lover or the
other, by forced confession of crafty guardian, scheming relative,
or jealous rival, by voluntary confession of same, by discovery of
some unguessed secret, by lover storming girl’s heart, by lover
making long and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly. It was
very fetching to make the girl propose in the course of being
reunited, and Martin discovered, bit by bit, other decidedly
piquant and fetching ruses. But marriage bells at the end was the
one thing he could take no liberties with; though the heavens
rolled up as a scroll and the stars fell, the wedding bells must go
on ringing just the same. In quantity, the formula prescribed
twelve hundred words minimum dose, fifteen hundred words maximum
dose.
Before he got very far along in the art of the storiette, Martin
worked out half a dozen stock forms, which he always consulted when
constructing storiettes. These forms were like the cunning tables
used by mathematicians, which may be entered from top, bottom,
right, and left, which entrances consist of scores of lines and
dozens of columns, and from which may be drawn, without reasoning
or thinking, thousands of different conclusions, all unchallengably
precise and true. Thus, in the course of half an hour with his
forms, Martin could frame up a dozen or so storiettes, which he put
aside and filled in at his convenience. He found that he could
fill one in, after a day of serious work, in the hour before going
to bed. As he later confessed to Ruth, he could almost do it in
his sleep. The real work was in constructing the frames, and that
was merely mechanical.
He had no doubt whatever of the efficacy of his formula, and for
once he knew the editorial mind when he said positively to himself
that the first two he sent off would bring checks. And checks they
brought, for four dollars each, at the end of twelve days.
In the meantime he was making fresh and alarming discoveries
concerning the magazines. Though the TRANSCONTINENTAL had
published “The Ring of Bells,” no check was forthcoming. Martin
needed it, and he wrote for it. An evasive answer and a request
for more of his work was all he received. He had gone hungry two
days waiting for the reply, and it was then that he put his wheel
back in pawn. He wrote regularly, twice a week, to the
TRANSCONTINENTAL for his five dollars, though it was only semi-
occasionally that he elicited a reply. He did not know that the
TRANSCONTINENTAL had been staggering along precariously for years,
that it was a fourth-rater, or tenth-rater, without standing, with
a crazy circulation that partly rested on petty bullying and partly
on patriotic appealing, and with advertisements that were scarcely
more than charitable donations. Nor did he know that the
TRANSCONTINENTAL was the sole livelihood of the editor and the
business manager, and that they could wring their livelihood out of
it only by moving to escape paying rent and by never paying any
bill they could evade. Nor could he have guessed that the
particular five dollars that belonged to him had been appropriated
by the business manager for the painting of his house in Alameda,
which painting he performed himself, on week-day afternoons,
because he could not afford to pay union wages and because the
first scab he had employed had had a ladder jerked out from under
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him and been sent to the hospital with a broken collar-bone.
The ten dollars for which Martin had sold “Treasure Hunters” to the
Chicago newspaper did not come to hand. The article had been
published, as he had ascertained at the file in the Central
Reading-room, but no word could he get from the editor. His
letters were ignored. To satisfy himself that they had been
received, he registered several of them. It was nothing less than
robbery, he concluded – a cold-blooded steal; while he starved, he
was pilfered of his merchandise, of his goods, the sale of which
was the sole way of getting bread to eat.
YOUTH AND AGE was a weekly, and it had published two-thirds of his
twenty-one-thousand-word serial when it went out of business. With
it went all hopes of getting his sixteen dollars.
To cap the situation, “The Pot,” which he looked upon as one of the
best things he had written, was lost to him. In despair, casting
about frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to THE
BILLOW, a society weekly in San Francisco. His chief reason for
submitting it to that publication was that, having only to travel
across the bay from Oakland, a quick decision could be reached.
Two weeks later he was overjoyed to see, in the latest number on
the news-stand, his story printed in full, illustrated, and in the
place of honor. He went home with leaping pulse, wondering how
much they would pay him for one of the best things he had done.
Also, the celerity with which it had been accepted and published
was a pleasant thought to him. That the editor had not informed
him of the acceptance made the surprise more complete. After
waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation
conquered diffidence, and he wrote to the editor of THE BILLOW,
suggesting that possibly through some negligence of the business