Kabanata Kabanata 28 · Chapter XXVIII

. 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 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 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

manager his little account had been overlooked.

Even if it isn’t more than five dollars, Martin thought to himself, it

will buy enough beans and pea-soup to enable me to write half a dozen

like it, and possibly as good.

Back came a cool letter from the editor that at least elicited Martin’s

admiration.

“We thank you,” it ran, “for your excellent contribution. All of us in

the office enjoyed it immensely, and, as you see, it was given the

place of honor and immediate publication. We earnestly hope that you

liked the illustrations.

“On rereading your letter it seems to us that you are laboring under

the misapprehension that we pay for unsolicited manuscripts. This is

not our custom, and of course yours was unsolicited. We assumed,

naturally, when we received your story, that you understood the

situation. We can only deeply regret this unfortunate misunderstanding,

and assure you of our unfailing regard. Again, thanking you for your

kind contribution, and hoping to receive more from you in the near

future, we remain, etc.”

There was also a postscript to the effect that though _The Billow_

carried no free-list, it took great pleasure in sending him a

complimentary subscription for the ensuing year.

After that experience, Martin typed at the top of the first sheet of

all his manuscripts: “Submitted at your usual rate.”

Some day, he consoled himself, they will be submitted at _my_ usual

rate.

He discovered in himself, at this period, a passion for perfection,

under the sway of which he rewrote and polished “The Jostling Street,”

“The Wine of Life,” “Joy,” the “Sea Lyrics,” and others of his earlier

work. As of old, nineteen hours of labor a day was all too little to

suit him. He wrote prodigiously, and he read prodigiously, forgetting

in his toil the pangs caused by giving up his tobacco. Ruth’s promised

cure for the habit, flamboyantly labelled, he stowed away in the most

inaccessible corner of his bureau. Especially during his stretches of

famine he suffered from lack of the weed; but no matter how often he

mastered the craving, it remained with him as strong as ever. He

regarded it as the biggest thing he had ever achieved. Ruth’s point of

view was that he was doing no more than was right. She brought him the

anti-tobacco remedy, purchased out of her glove money, and in a few

days forgot all about it.

His machine-made storiettes, though he hated them and derided them,

were successful. By means of them he redeemed all his pledges, paid

most of his bills, and bought a new set of tires for his wheel. The

storiettes at least kept the pot a-boiling and gave him time for

ambitious work; while the one thing that upheld him was the forty

dollars he had received from _The White Mouse_. He anchored his faith

to that, and was confident that the really first-class magazines would

pay an unknown writer at least an equal rate, if not a better one. But

the thing was, how to get into the first-class magazines. His best

stories, essays, and poems went begging among them, and yet, each

month, he read reams of dull, prosy, inartistic stuff between all their

various covers. If only one editor, he sometimes thought, would descend

from his high seat of pride to write me one cheering line! No matter if

my work is unusual, no matter if it is unfit, for prudential reasons,

for their pages, surely there must be some sparks in it, somewhere, a

few, to warm them to some sort of appreciation. And thereupon he would

get out one or another of his manuscripts, such as “Adventure,” and

read it over and over in a vain attempt to vindicate the editorial

silence.

As the sweet California spring came on, his period of plenty came to an

end. For several weeks he had been worried by a strange silence on the

part of the newspaper storiette syndicate. Then, one day, came back to

him through the mail ten of his immaculate machine-made storiettes.

They were accompanied by a brief letter to the effect that the

syndicate was overstocked, and that some months would elapse before it

would be in the market again for manuscripts. Martin had even been

extravagant on the strength of those ten storiettes. Toward the last

the syndicate had been paying him five dollars each for them and

accepting every one he sent. So he had looked upon the ten as good as

sold, and he had lived accordingly, on a basis of fifty dollars in the

bank. So it was that he entered abruptly upon a lean period, wherein he

continued selling his earlier efforts to publications that would not

pay and submitting his later work to magazines that would not buy.

Also, he resumed his trips to the pawn-broker down in Oakland. A few

jokes and snatches of humorous verse, sold to the New York weeklies,

made existence barely possible for him. It was at this time that he

wrote letters of inquiry to the several great monthly and quarterly

reviews, and learned in reply that they rarely considered unsolicited

articles, and that most of their contents were written upon order by

well-known specialists who were authorities in their various fields.