Kabanata Kabanata 43 · Chapter XLIII

. Chapter XLIII

“The Shame of the Sun” was published in October. As Martin cut the

cords of the express package and the half-dozen complimentary copies

from the publishers spilled out on the table, a heavy sadness fell upon

him. He thought of the wild delight that would have been his had this

happened a few short months before, and he contrasted that delight that

should have been with his present uncaring coldness. His book, his

first book, and his pulse had not gone up a fraction of a beat, and he

was only sad. It meant little to him now. The most it meant was that it

might bring some money, and little enough did he care for money.

He carried a copy out into the kitchen and presented it to Maria.

“I did it,” he explained, in order to clear up her bewilderment. “I

wrote it in the room there, and I guess some few quarts of your

vegetable soup went into the making of it. Keep it. It’s yours. Just to

remember me by, you know.”

He was not bragging, not showing off. His sole motive was to make her

happy, to make her proud of him, to justify her long faith in him. She

put the book in the front room on top of the family Bible. A sacred

thing was this book her lodger had made, a fetich of friendship. It

softened the blow of his having been a laundryman, and though she could

not understand a line of it, she knew that every line of it was great.

She was a simple, practical, hard-working woman, but she possessed

faith in large endowment.

Just as emotionlessly as he had received “The Shame of the Sun” did he

read the reviews of it that came in weekly from the clipping bureau.

The book was making a hit, that was evident. It meant more gold in the

money sack. He could fix up Lizzie, redeem all his promises, and still

have enough left to build his grass-walled castle.

Singletree, Darnley & Co. had cautiously brought out an edition of

fifteen hundred copies, but the first reviews had started a second

edition of twice the size through the presses; and ere this was

delivered a third edition of five thousand had been ordered. A London

firm made arrangements by cable for an English edition, and hot-footed

upon this came the news of French, German, and Scandinavian

translations in progress. The attack upon the Maeterlinck school could

not have been made at a more opportune 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 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 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.

Money poured in on him, fame poured in on him; he flashed, comet-like,

through the world of literature, and he was more amused than interested

by the stir he was making. One thing was puzzling him, a little thing

that would have puzzled the world had it known. But the world would

have puzzled over his bepuzzlement rather than over the little thing

that to him loomed gigantic. Judge Blount invited him to dinner. That

was the little thing, or the beginning of the little thing, that was

soon to become the big thing. He had insulted Judge Blount, treated him

abominably, and Judge Blount, meeting him on the street, invited him to

dinner. Martin bethought himself of the numerous occasions on which he

had met Judge Blount at the Morses’ and when Judge Blount had not

invited him to dinner. Why had he not invited him to dinner then? he

asked himself. He had not changed. He was the same Martin Eden. What

made the difference? The fact that the stuff he had written had

appeared inside the covers of books? But it was work performed. It was

not something he had done since. It was achievement accomplished at the

very time Judge Blount was sharing this general view and sneering at

his Spencer and his intellect. Therefore it was not for any real value,

but for a purely fictitious value that Judge Blount invited him to

dinner.

Martin grinned and accepted the invitation, marvelling the while at his

complacence. And at the dinner, where, with their womankind, were half

a dozen of those that sat in high places, and where Martin found

himself quite the lion, Judge Blount, warmly seconded by Judge Hanwell,

urged privately that Martin should permit his name to be put up for the

Styx—the ultra-select club to which belonged, not the mere men of

wealth, but the men of attainment. And Martin declined, and was more

puzzled than ever.

He was kept busy disposing of his heap of manuscripts. He was

overwhelmed by requests from editors. It had been discovered that he

was a stylist, with meat under his style. _The Northern Review_, after

publishing “The Cradle of Beauty,” had written him for half a dozen

similar essays, which would have been supplied out of the heap, had not

_Burton’s Magazine_, in a speculative mood, offered him five hundred

dollars each for five essays. He wrote back that he would supply the

demand, but at a thousand dollars an essay. He remembered that all

these manuscripts had been refused by the very magazines that were now

clamoring for them. And their refusals had been cold-blooded,

automatic, stereotyped. They had made him sweat, and now he intended to

make them sweat. _Burton’s Magazine_ paid his price for five essays,

and the remaining four, at the same rate, were snapped up by

_Mackintosh’s Monthly, The Northern Review_ being too poor to stand the

pace. Thus went out to the world “The High Priests of Mystery,” “The

Wonder-Dreamers,” “The Yardstick of the Ego,” “Philosophy of Illusion,”

“God and Clod,” “Art and Biology,” “Critics and Test-tubes,”

“Star-dust,” and “The Dignity of Usury,”—to raise storms and rumblings

and mutterings that were many a day in dying down.

Editors wrote to him telling him to name his own terms, which he did,

but it was always for work performed. He refused resolutely to pledge

himself to any new thing. The thought of again setting pen to paper

maddened him. He had seen Brissenden torn to pieces by the crowd, and

despite the fact that him the crowd acclaimed, he could not get over

the shock nor gather any respect for the crowd. His very popularity

seemed a disgrace and a treason to Brissenden. It made him wince, but

he made up his mind to go on and fill the money-bag.

He received letters from editors like the following: “About a year ago

we were unfortunate enough to refuse your collection of love-poems. We

were greatly impressed by them at the time, but certain arrangements

already entered into prevented our taking them. If you still have them,

and if you will be kind enough to forward them, we shall be glad to

publish the entire collection on your own terms. We are also prepared

to make a most advantageous offer for bringing them out in book-form.”

Martin recollected his blank-verse tragedy, and sent it instead. He

read it over before mailing, and was particularly impressed by its

sophomoric amateurishness and general worthlessness. But he sent it;

and it was published, to the everlasting regret of the editor. The

public was indignant and incredulous. It was too far a cry from Martin

Eden’s high standard to that serious bosh. It was asserted that he had

never written it, that the magazine had faked it very clumsily, or that

Martin Eden was emulating the elder Dumas and at the height of success

was hiring his writing done for him. But when he explained that the

tragedy was an early effort of his literary childhood, and that the

magazine had refused to be happy unless it got it, a great laugh went

up at the magazine’s expense and a change in the editorship followed.

The tragedy was never brought out in book-form, though Martin pocketed

the advance royalties that had been paid.

_Coleman’s Weekly_ sent Martin a lengthy telegram, costing nearly three

hundred dollars, offering him a thousand dollars an article for twenty

articles. He was to travel over the United States, with all expenses

paid, and select whatever topics interested him. The body of the

telegram was devoted to hypothetical topics in order to show him the

freedom of range that was to be his. The only restriction placed upon

him was that he must confine himself to the United States. Martin sent

his inability to accept and his regrets by wire “collect.”

“Wiki-Wiki,” published in _Warren’s Monthly_, was an instantaneous

success. It was brought out forward in a wide-margined, beautifully

decorated volume that struck the holiday trade and sold like wildfire.

The critics were unanimous in the belief that it would take its place

with those two classics by two great writers, “The Bottle Imp” and “The

Magic Skin.”

The public, however, received the “Smoke of Joy” collection rather

dubiously and coldly. The audacity and unconventionality of the

storiettes was a shock to bourgeois morality and prejudice; but when

Paris went mad over the immediate translation that was made, the

American and English reading public followed suit and bought so many

copies that Martin compelled the conservative house of Singletree,

Darnley & Co. to pay a flat royalty of twenty-five per cent for a third

book, and thirty per cent flat for a fourth. These two volumes

comprised all the short stories he had written and which had received,

or were receiving, serial publication. “The Ring of Bells” and his

horror stories constituted one collection; the other collection was

composed of “Adventure,” “The Pot,” “The Wine of Life,” “The

Whirlpool,” “The Jostling Street,” and four other stories. The

Lowell-Meredith Company captured the collection of all his essays, and

the Maxmillian Company got his “Sea Lyrics” and the “Love-cycle,” the

latter receiving serial publication in the _Ladies’ Home Companion_

after the payment of an extortionate price.

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when he had disposed of the last

manuscript. The grass-walled castle and the white, coppered schooner

were very near to him. Well, at any rate he had discovered Brissenden’s

contention that nothing of merit found its way into the magazines. His

own success demonstrated that Brissenden had been wrong.

And yet, somehow, he had a feeling that Brissenden had been right,

after all. “The Shame of the Sun” had been the cause of his success

more than the stuff he had written. That stuff had been merely

incidental. It had been rejected right and left by the magazines. The

publication of “The Shame of the Sun” had started a controversy and

precipitated the landslide in his favor. Had there been no “Shame of

the Sun” there would have been no landslide, and had there been no

miracle in the go of “The Shame of the Sun” there would have been no

landslide. Singletree, Darnley & Co. attested that miracle. They had

brought out a first edition of fifteen hundred copies and been dubious

of selling it. They were experienced publishers and no one had been

more astounded than they at the success which had followed. To them it

had been in truth a miracle. They never got over it, and every letter

they wrote him reflected their reverent awe of that first mysterious

happening. They did not attempt to explain it. There was no explaining

it. It had happened. In the face of all experience to the contrary, it

had happened.

So it was, reasoning thus, that Martin questioned the validity of his

popularity. It was the bourgeoisie that bought his books and poured its

gold into his money-sack, and from what little he knew of the

bourgeoisie it was not clear to him how it could possibly appreciate or

comprehend what he had written. His intrinsic beauty and power meant

nothing to the hundreds of thousands who were acclaiming him and buying

his books. He was the fad of the hour, the adventurer who had stormed

Parnassus while the gods nodded. The hundreds of thousands read him and

acclaimed him with the same brute non-understanding with which they had

flung themselves on Brissenden’s “Ephemera” and torn it to pieces—a

wolf-rabble that fawned on him instead of fanging him. Fawn or fang, it

was all a matter of chance. One thing he knew with absolute certitude:

“Ephemera” was infinitely greater than anything he had done. It was

infinitely greater than anything he had in him. It was a poem of

centuries. Then the tribute the mob paid him was a sorry tribute

indeed, for that same mob had wallowed “Ephemera” into the mire. He

sighed heavily and with satisfaction. He was glad the last manuscript

was sold and that he would soon be done with it all.