his own. The envelope was postmarked “San Leandro.” Martin did
not require a second thought to discover the author.
Higginbotham’s grammar, Higginbotham’s colloquialisms,
Higginbotham’s mental quirks and processes, were apparent
throughout. Martin saw in every line, not the fine Italian hand,
but the coarse grocer’s fist, of his brother-in-law.
But why? he vainly questioned. What injury had he done Bernard
Higginbotham? The thing was so unreasonable, so wanton. There was
no explaining it. In the course of the week a dozen similar
letters were forwarded to Martin by the editors of various Eastern
magazines. The editors were behaving handsomely, Martin concluded.
He was wholly unknown to them, yet some of them had even been
sympathetic. It was evident that they detested anonymity. He saw
that the malicious attempt to hurt him had failed. In fact, if
anything came of it, it was bound to be good, for at least his name
had been called to the attention of a number of editors. Sometime,
perhaps, reading a submitted manuscript of his, they might remember
him as the fellow about whom they had received an anonymous letter.
And who was to say that such a remembrance might not sway the
balance of their judgment just a trifle in his favor?
It was about this time that Martin took a great slump in Maria’s
estimation. He found her in the kitchen one morning groaning with
pain, tears of weakness running down her cheeks, vainly endeavoring
to put through a large ironing. He promptly diagnosed her
affliction as La Grippe, dosed her with hot whiskey (the remnants
in the bottles for which Brissenden was responsible), and ordered
her to bed. But Maria was refractory. The ironing had to be done,
she protested, and delivered that night, or else there would be no
food on the morrow for the seven small and hungry Silvas.
To her astonishment (and it was something that she never ceased
from relating to her dying day), she saw Martin Eden seize an iron
from the stove and throw a fancy shirt-waist on the ironing-board.
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It was Kate Flanagan’s best Sunday waist, than whom there was no
more exacting and fastidiously dressed woman in Maria’s world.
Also, Miss Flanagan had sent special instruction that said waist
must be delivered by that night. As every one knew, she was
keeping company with John Collins, the blacksmith, and, as Maria
knew privily, Miss Flanagan and Mr. Collins were going next day to
Golden Gate Park. Vain was Maria’s attempt to rescue the garment.
Martin guided her tottering footsteps to a chair, from where she
watched him with bulging eyes. In a quarter of the time it would
have taken her she saw the shirt-waist safely ironed, and ironed as
well as she could have done it, as Martin made her grant.
“I could work faster,” he explained, “if your irons were only
hotter.”
To her, the irons he swung were much hotter than she ever dared to
use.
“Your sprinkling is all wrong,” he complained next. “Here, let me
teach you how to sprinkle. Pressure is what’s wanted. Sprinkle
under pressure if you want to iron fast.”
He procured a packing-case from the woodpile in the cellar, fitted
a cover to it, and raided the scrap-iron the Silva tribe was
collecting for the junkman. With fresh-sprinkled garments in the
box, covered with the board and pressed by the iron, the device was
complete and in operation.
“Now you watch me, Maria,” he said, stripping off to his undershirt
and gripping an iron that was what he called “really hot.”
“An’ when he feenish da iron’ he washa da wools,” as she described
it afterward. “He say, ‘Maria, you are da greata fool. I showa
you how to washa da wools,’ an’ he shows me, too. Ten minutes he
maka da machine – one barrel, one wheel-hub, two poles, justa like
dat.”
Martin had learned the contrivance from Joe at the Shelly Hot
Springs. The old wheel-hub, fixed on the end of the upright pole,
constituted the plunger. Making this, in turn, fast to the spring-
pole attached to the kitchen rafters, so that the hub played upon
the woollens in the barrel, he was able, with one hand, thoroughly
to pound them.
“No more Maria washa da wools,” her story always ended. “I maka da
kids worka da pole an’ da hub an’ da barrel. Him da smarta man,
Mister Eden.”
Nevertheless, by his masterly operation and improvement of her
kitchen-laundry he fell an immense distance in her regard. The
glamour of romance with which her imagination had invested him
faded away in the cold light of fact that he was an ex-laundryman.
All his books, and his grand friends who visited him in carriages
or with countless bottles of whiskey, went for naught. He was,
after all, a mere workingman, a member of her own class and caste.
He was more human and approachable, but, he was no longer mystery.
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Martin’s alienation from his family continued. Following upon Mr.
Higginbotham’s unprovoked attack, Mr. Hermann von Schmidt showed
his hand. The fortunate sale of several storiettes, some humorous
verse, and a few jokes gave Martin a temporary splurge of
prosperity. Not only did he partially pay up his bills, but he had
sufficient balance left to redeem his black suit and wheel. The
latter, by virtue of a twisted crank-hanger, required repairing,
and, as a matter of friendliness with his future brother-in-law, he
sent it to Von Schmidt’s shop.
The afternoon of the same day Martin was pleased by the wheel being
delivered by a small boy. Von Schmidt was also inclined to be
friendly, was Martin’s conclusion from this unusual favor.
Repaired wheels usually had to be called for. But when he examined
the wheel, he discovered no repairs had been made. A little later
in the day he telephoned his sister’s betrothed, and learned that
that person didn’t want anything to do with him in “any shape,
manner, or form.”
“Hermann von Schmidt,” Martin answered cheerfully, “I’ve a good
mind to come over and punch that Dutch nose of yours.”
“You come to my shop,” came the reply, “an’ I’ll send for the
police. An’ I’ll put you through, too. Oh, I know you, but you
can’t make no rough-house with me. I don’t want nothin’ to do with
the likes of you. You’re a loafer, that’s what, an’ I ain’t
asleep. You ain’t goin’ to do no spongin’ off me just because I’m
marryin’ your sister. Why don’t you go to work an’ earn an honest
livin’, eh? Answer me that.”
Martin’s philosophy asserted itself, dissipating his anger, and he
hung up the receiver with a long whistle of incredulous amusement.
But after the amusement came the reaction, and he was oppressed by
his loneliness. Nobody understood him, nobody seemed to have any
use for him, except Brissenden, and Brissenden had disappeared, God
alone knew where.
Twilight was falling as Martin left the fruit store and turned
homeward, his marketing on his arm. At the corner an electric car
had stopped, and at sight of a lean, familiar figure alighting, his
heart leapt with joy. It was Brissenden, and in the fleeting
glimpse, ere the car started up, Martin noted the overcoat pockets,
one bulging with books, the other bulging with a quart bottle of
whiskey.
CHAPTER XXXV
Brissenden gave no explanation of his long absence, nor did Martin
pry into it. He was content to see his friend’s cadaverous face
opposite him through the steam rising from a tumbler of toddy.
“I, too, have not been idle,” Brissenden proclaimed, after hearing
Martin’s account of the work he had accomplished.
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He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and passed it to
Martin, who looked at the title and glanced up curiously.
“Yes, that’s it,” Brissenden laughed. “Pretty good title, eh?
‘Ephemera’ – it is the one word. And you’re responsible for it,
what of your MAN, who is always the erected, the vitalized
inorganic, the latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature
strutting his little space on the thermometer. It got into my head
and I had to write it to get rid of it. Tell me what you think of
it.”
Martin’s face, flushed at first, paled as he read on. It was
perfect art. Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be
called where the last conceivable atom of substance had found
expression in so perfect construction as to make Martin’s head swim
with delight, to put passionate tears into his eyes, and to send
chills creeping up and down his back. It was a long poem of six or
seven hundred lines, and it was a fantastic, amazing, unearthly
thing. It was terrific, impossible; and yet there it was, scrawled
in black ink across the sheets of paper. It dealt with man and his
soul-gropings in their ultimate terms, plumbing the abysses of
space for the testimony of remotest suns and rainbow spectrums. It