Chapter 23

Martin Eden did not go out to hunt for a job in the morning. It was late afternoon when he gazed with aching eyes about the room. Maria hurried into the room from the kitchen. She put her hand upon his hot forehead and felt his pulse.

“Do you want to eat?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“I’m sick, Maria,” he said weakly. “What is it? Do you know?”

“Influenza,” she answered. “Two or three days and you are all right. Better not to eat now. Maybe tomorrow you can eat.”

Martin tried to get up and dress. He managed to get out of bed. Maria came in several times to change the cold cloths on his forehead. He murmured to himself, “Maria, you will get your milk ranch, all right, all right.”

“What’s the reason to write a whole library and lose his own life?” he demanded aloud. “This is no place for me. No more literature for me. I want the monthly salary, and the little home with Ruth.”

Two days later he asked for his mail, but his eyes hurt too much to permit him to read.

“You read for me, Maria,” he said. “Throw the big, long letters under the table. Read me the small letters.”

“I can’t,” was the answer. “Teresa, she goes to school, she can.”

So Teresa Silva opened his letters and read them to him. He listened absently. Suddenly he was shocked back to himself.

“‘We offer you forty dollars for all serial rights in your story.’”

“What magazine is that?” Martin shouted. “Here, give it to me!”

It was the WHITE MOUSE that was offering him forty dollars, and the story was “The Whirlpool,” another of his early horror stories. He read the letter through again and again.

Martin lay back and thought. It wasn’t a lie, after all. There were two thousand words in “The Whirlpool.” At forty dollars that would be two cents a word. Two cents a word – the newspapers had told the truth.

Well, there was one thing certain: when he got well, he would not go out looking for a job. There were more stories in his head as good as “The Whirlpool,” and at forty dollars apiece he could earn far more than in any job. Just when he thought the battle lost, it was won. The way was clear.

He found one letter from Ruth. He re-read the letter adoringly, loving each stroke of her pen, and in the end kissing her signature.

And when he answered, he told her that his best clothes were in pawn. He told her that he had been sick.

Ruth arrived immediately. Her lover was sick. The next afternoon, accompanied by Arthur, she arrived in the Morse carriage, to Silva’s house.

For the first time Ruth gazed upon the poverty. She had never dreamed it could be like this. When she looked at Martin, she was afraid. She had never seen him unshaven. Moreover: how he would continue on in this horrible house, writing and starving for a few more months.

“What is that smell?” she asked suddenly.

“Some of Maria’s washing smells, I imagine,” was the answer.

“No, no; not that. It is something else. A stale, sickish smell.”

“I can’t smell anything else, except stale tobacco smoke,” Martin announced.

“That’s it. It is terrible. Why do you smoke so much, Martin?”

“I don’t know. I began when I was only a boy.”

“It is not a nice habit, you know,” she reproved.

“That’s the fault of the tobacco. I can afford only the cheapest. But wait until I get that forty-dollar check. That forty-five dollars will pay about all my debts.”

“For two years’ work?” she asked.

“No, for less than a week’s work. Four days for ‘The Ring of Bells,’ two days for ‘The Whirlpool.’ That’s forty-five dollars for a week’s work, one hundred and eighty dollars a month. And I’m just beginning. A thousand dollars a month is not too much to buy for you all I want you to have. A salary of five hundred a month would be too small. That forty-five dollars is just a starter.”

Ruth reverted to cigarettes.

“You are a chimney, a living volcano, Martin dear, you know you are. I wish you wouldn’t smoke any more,” she whispered. “Please, for – my sake.”

“All right, I won’t,” he cried. “I’ll do anything you ask, dear love, anything; you know that.”

“You know, it is really not for my sake, Martin, but for your own. Why, you haven’t anything to eat, you poor dear,” she said with tender compassion. “You must be hungry.”

“I store my food in Maria’s safe,” he lied. “It keeps better there.”

“I’m such a silly,” said Ruth. “But I love you, Martin, I do, I do. There’s some kind of a mixture, put up by the druggists, that helps men to stop the use of tobacco, and I am going to send you some.”

The door closed, but opened again.

“I do, I do,” she whispered to him again.

Chapter 24

The sun of Martin’s good fortune rose. The day after Ruth’s visit, he received a check for three dollars from a New York scandal weekly. Two days later a newspaper published in Chicago accepted his “Treasure Hunters,” promising to pay ten dollars for it on publication. The price was small, but it was the first article he had written, his very first attempt to express his thought on the printed page.

Martin was not yet rich enough to afford meat, and the WHITE MOUSE check arrived. Forty dollars! Martin paid the grocer’s bill, and he paid the other tradesmen in full, redeemed his suit and his bicycle, paid one month’s rent on the type-writer, and paid Maria the overdue month for his room and a month in advance. This left him in his pocket a balance of nearly three dollars.

This small sum seemed a fortune. Immediately he had gone to see Ruth. He found many persons in the Morse home. Ruth’s two girl-cousins were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse was pursuing her plan to surround Ruth with young people. “Don’t get excited when you talk,” Ruth admonished Martin.

“What did you think of my cousins?” Ruth asked him afterwards.

“I liked them better than the other women. There’s plenty of fun in them.”

“Then you did like the other women?”

He shook his head.

From the evening at Ruth’s Martin brought away with him strange confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in the persons he had climbed to be with. On the other hand, he was encouraged with his success. The climb had been easier than he expected. He was superior to the climb, and (he did not, with false modesty, hide it from himself) he was superior to the people among whom he had climbed. About life and the books he knew more than they.

Chapter 25

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 thirty thousand words. It was a deliberate attack on the mysticism of the Maeterlinck school.

During the twenty-five days spent on “The Shame of the Sun,” he earned six dollars and fifty cents. A joke had brought in fifty cents, and a second one, a dollar. Then two humorous poems had earned two dollars and three dollars respectively. As a result, his wheel and suit of clothes went back to the pawnbroker.

How to write a story that he can sell? Martin decided to invent a 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 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 secret, by lover storming girl’s heart, by lover making long and noble self-sacrifice, and so on, endlessly. The formula prescribed twelve hundred words minimum dose, fifteen hundred words maximum dose.

He believed in the efficacy of his formula, and it worked. But the ten dollars for which Martin had sold “Treasure Hunters” to the Chicago newspaper did not come to hand. The article had been published, but the editor wrote him nothing. His letters were ignored. It was nothing less than robbery, he concluded.

“The Pot,” which he looked upon as one of the best things he had written, was lost to him. Martin had sent it to THE BILLOW, a society weekly in San Francisco. Two weeks later he was very glad to see, in the latest number, 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. After waiting a week, two weeks, and half a week longer, desperation conquered diffidence, and he wrote to the editor of THE BILLOW.

The letter from the editor elicited Martin’s admiration.

“We thank you,” it said, “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.

But we do not pay for unsolicited manuscripts. We assumed, naturally, when we received your story, that you understood the situation. We can only deeply regret this unfortunate misunderstanding.”

Though Martin hated his machine-made stories, they were successful.