moment. A fierce controversy was precipitated. Saleeby and
Haeckel indorsed and defended “The Shame of the Sun,” for once
finding themselves on the same side of a question. Crookes and
Wallace ranged up on the opposing side, while Sir Oliver Lodge
attempted to formulate a compromise that would jibe with his
particular cosmic theories. Maeterlinck’s followers rallied around
the standard of mysticism. Chesterton set the whole world laughing
with a series of alleged non-partisan essays on the subject, and
the whole affair, controversy and controversialists, was well-nigh
swept into the pit by a thundering broadside from George Bernard
Shaw. Needless to say the arena was crowded with hosts of lesser
lights, and the dust and sweat and din became terrific.
“It is a most marvellous happening,” Singletree, Darnley & Co.
wrote Martin, “a critical philosophic essay selling like a novel.
You could not have chosen your subject better, and all contributory
factors have been unwarrantedly propitious. We need scarcely to
assure you that we are making hay while the sun shines. Over forty
thousand copies have already been sold in the United States and
Canada, and a new edition of twenty thousand is on the presses. We
are overworked, trying to supply the demand. Nevertheless we have
helped to create that demand. We have already spent five thousand
dollars in advertising. The book is bound to be a record-breaker.”
“Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book
which we have taken the liberty of forwarding to you. You will
please note that we have increased your royalties to twenty per
cent, which is about as high as a conservative publishing house
dares go. If our offer is agreeable to you, please fill in the
proper blank space with the title of your book. We make no
stipulations concerning its nature. Any book on any subject. If
you have one already written, so much the better. Now is the time
to strike. The iron could not be hotter.”
“On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an
advance on royalties of five thousand dollars. You see, we have
faith in you, and we are going in on this thing big. We should
like, also, to discuss with you the drawing up of a contract for a
term of years, say ten, during which we shall have the exclusive
right of publishing in book-form all that you produce. But more of
this anon.”
Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental
arithmetic, finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty
thousand to be nine thousand dollars. He signed the new contract,
inserting “The Smoke of Joy” in the blank space, and mailed it back
to the publishers along with the twenty storiettes he had written
in the days before he discovered the formula for the newspaper
storiette. And promptly as the United States mail could deliver
and return, came Singletree, Darnley & Co.’s check for five
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thousand dollars.
“I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about
two o’clock,” Martin said, the morning the check arrived. “Or,
better, meet me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o’clock. I’ll be
looking out for you.”
At the appointed time she was there; but SHOES was the only clew to
the mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered
a distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by
a shoe-store and dived into a real estate office. What happened
thereupon resided forever after in her memory as a dream. Fine
gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked with Martin and
one another; a type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an
imposing document; her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his
signature; and when all was over and she was outside on the
sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her, saying, “Well, Maria, you
won’t have to pay me no seven dollars and a half this month.”
Maria was too stunned for speech.
“Or next month, or the next, or the next,” her landlord said.
She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor. And it was not
until she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her
own kind, and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she
really knew that she was the owner of the little house in which she
had lived and for which she had paid rent so long.
“Why don’t you trade with me no more?” the Portuguese grocer asked
Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the
car; and Martin explained that he wasn’t doing his own cooking any
more, and then went in and had a drink of wine on the house. He
noted it was the best wine the grocer had in stock.
“Maria,” Martin announced that night, “I’m going to leave you. And
you’re going to leave here yourself soon. Then you can rent the
house and be a landlord yourself. You’ve a brother in San Leandro
or Haywards, and he’s in the milk business. I want you to send all
your washing back unwashed – understand? – unwashed, and to go out
to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see
that brother of yours. Tell him to come to see me. I’ll be
stopping at the Metropole down in Oakland. He’ll know a good milk-
ranch when he sees one.”
And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a
dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account
that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore
shoes and went to school. Few persons ever meet the fairy princes
they dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was
hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the
guise of an ex-laundryman.
In the meantime the world had begun to ask: “Who is this Martin
Eden?” He had declined to give any biographical data to his
publishers, but the newspapers were not to be denied. Oakland was
his own town, and the reporters nosed out scores of individuals who
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244
could supply information. All that he was and was not, all that he
had done and most of what he had not done, was spread out for the
delectation of the public, accompanied by snapshots and photographs
– the latter procured from the local photographer who had once
taken Martin’s picture and who promptly copyrighted it and put it
on the market. At first, so great was his disgust with the
magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought against
publicity; but in the end, because it was easier than not to, he
surrendered. He found that he could not refuse himself to the
special writers who travelled long distances to see him. Then
again, each day was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was
occupied with writing and studying, those hours had to be occupied
somehow; so he yielded to what was to him a whim, permitted
interviews, gave his opinions on literature and philosophy, and
even accepted invitations of the bourgeoisie. He had settled down
into a strange and comfortable state of mind. He no longer cared.
He forgave everybody, even the cub reporter who had painted him red
and to whom he now granted a full page with specially posed
photographs.
He saw Lizzie occasionally, and it was patent that she regretted
the greatness that had come to him. It widened the space between
them. Perhaps it was with the hope of narrowing it that she
yielded to his persuasions to go to night school and business
college and to have herself gowned by a wonderful dressmaker who
charged outrageous prices. She improved visibly from day to day,
until Martin wondered if he was doing right, for he knew that all
her compliance and endeavor was for his sake. She was trying to
make herself of worth in his eyes – of the sort of worth he seemed
to value. Yet he gave her no hope, treating her in brotherly
fashion and rarely seeing her.
“Overdue” was rushed upon the market by the Meredith-Lowell Company
in the height of his popularity, and being fiction, in point of
sales it made even a bigger strike than “The Shame of the Sun.”
Week after week his was the credit of the unprecedented performance
of having two books at the head of the list of best-sellers. Not
only did the story take with the fiction-readers, but those who
read “The Shame of the Sun” with avidity were likewise attracted to
the sea-story by the cosmic grasp of mastery with which he had
handled it. First he had attacked the literature of mysticism, and
had done it exceeding well; and, next, he had successfully supplied
the very literature he had exposited, thus proving himself to be
that rare genius, a critic and a creator in one.