Martin went back to his pearl-diving article, which would have been
finished sooner if it had not been broken in upon so frequently by
his attempts to write poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired
by Ruth, but they were never completed. Not in a day could he
learn to chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure were
serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them,
an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great
poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own. It
was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought
after but could not capture. It seemed a glow to him, a warm and
trailing vapor, ever beyond his reaching, though sometimes he was
rewarded by catching at shreds of it and weaving them into phrases
that echoed in his brain with haunting notes or drifted across his
vision in misty wafture of unseen beauty. It was baffling. He
ached with desire to express and could but gibber prosaically as
everybody gibbered. He read his fragments aloud. The metre
marched along on perfect feet, and the rhyme pounded a longer and
equally faultless rhythm, but the glow and high exaltation that he
felt within were lacking. He could not understand, and time and
again, in despair, defeated and depressed, he returned to his
article. Prose was certainly an easier medium.

Following the "Pearl-diving," he wrote an article on the sea as a
career, another on turtle-catching, and a third on the northeast
trades. Then he tried, as an experiment, a short story, and before
he broke his stride he had finished six short stories and
despatched them to various magazines. He wrote prolifically,
intensely, from morning till night, and late at night, except when
he broke off to go to the reading-room, draw books from the
library, or to call on Ruth. He was profoundly happy. Life was
pitched high. He was in a fever that never broke. The joy of
creation that is supposed to belong to the gods was his. All the
life about him - the odors of stale vegetables and soapsuds, the
slatternly form of his sister, and the jeering face of Mr.
Higginbotham - was a dream. The real world was in his mind, and
the stories he wrote were so many pieces of reality out of his
mind.

The days were too short. There was so much he wanted to study. He
cut his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along
upon it. He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back
to five. He could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon
any one of his pursuits. It was with regret that he ceased from
writing to study, that he ceased from study to go to the library,
that he tore himself away from that chart-room of knowledge or from
the magazines in the reading-room that were filled with the secrets
of writers who succeeded in selling their wares. It was like
severing heart strings, when he was with Ruth, to stand up and go;
and he scorched through the dark streets so as to get home to his
books at the least possible expense of time. And hardest of all
was it to shut up the algebra or physics, put note-book and pencil
aside, and close his tired eyes in sleep. He hated the thought of
ceasing to live, even for so short a time, and his sole consolation
was that the alarm clock was set five hours ahead. He would lose
only five hours anyway, and then the jangling bell would jerk him
out of unconsciousness and he would have before him another
glorious day of nineteen hours.

In the meantime the weeks were passing, his money was ebbing low,
and there was no money coming in. A month after he had mailed it,
the adventure serial for boys was returned to him by THE YOUTH'S
COMPANION. The rejection slip was so tactfully worded that he felt
kindly toward the editor. But he did not feel so kindly toward the
editor of the SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER. After waiting two whole
weeks, Martin had written to him. A week later he wrote again. At
the end of the month, he went over to San Francisco and personally
called upon the editor. But he did not meet that exalted
personage, thanks to a Cerberus of an office boy, of tender years
and red hair, who guarded the portals. At the end of the fifth
week the manuscript came back to him, by mail, without comment.
There was no rejection slip, no explanation, nothing. In the same
way his other articles were tied up with the other leading San
Francisco papers. When he recovered them, he sent them to the
magazines in the East, from which they were returned more promptly,
accompanied always by the printed rejection slips.

The short stories were returned in similar fashion. He read them
over and over, and liked them so much that he could not puzzle out
the cause of their rejection, until, one day, he read in a
newspaper that manuscripts should always be typewritten. That
explained it. Of course editors were so busy that they could not
afford the time and strain of reading handwriting. Martin rented a
typewriter and spent a day mastering the machine. Each day he
typed what he composed, and he typed his earlier manuscripts as
fast as they were returned him. He was surprised when the typed
ones began to come back. His jaw seemed to become squarer, his
chin more aggressive, and he bundled the manuscripts off to new
editors.

The thought came to him that he was not a good judge of his own
work. He tried it out on Gertrude. He read his stories aloud to
her. Her eyes glistened, and she looked at him proudly as she
said:-

"Ain't it grand, you writin' those sort of things."

"Yes, yes," he demanded impatiently. "But the story - how did you
like it?"

"Just grand," was the reply. "Just grand, an' thrilling, too. I
was all worked up."

He could see that her mind was not clear. The perplexity was
strong in her good-natured face. So he waited.

"But, say, Mart," after a long pause, "how did it end? Did that
young man who spoke so highfalutin' get her?"

And, after he had explained the end, which he thought he had made
artistically obvious, she would say:-

"That's what I wanted to know. Why didn't you write that way in
the story?"

One thing he learned, after he had read her a number of stories,
namely, that she liked happy endings.

"That story was perfectly grand," she announced, straightening up
from the wash-tub with a tired sigh and wiping the sweat from her
forehead with a red, steamy hand; "but it makes me sad. I want to
cry. There is too many sad things in the world anyway. It makes
me happy to think about happy things. Now if he'd married her, and
- You don't mind, Mart?" she queried apprehensively. "I just
happen to feel that way, because I'm tired, I guess. But the story
was grand just the same, perfectly grand. Where are you goin' to
sell it?"

"That's a horse of another color," he laughed.

"But if you DID sell it, what do you think you'd get for it?"

"Oh, a hundred dollars. That would be the least, the way prices
go."

"My! I do hope you'll sell it!"

"Easy money, eh?" Then he added proudly: "I wrote it in two days.
That's fifty dollars a day."

He longed to read his stories to Ruth, but did not dare. He would
wait till some were published, he decided, then she would
understand what he had been working for. In the meantime he toiled
on. Never had the spirit of adventure lured him more strongly than
on this amazing exploration of the realm of mind. He bought the
text-books on physics and chemistry, and, along with his algebra,
worked out problems and demonstrations. He took the laboratory
proofs on faith, and his intense power of vision enabled him to see
the reactions of chemicals more understandingly than the average
student saw them in the laboratory. Martin wandered on through the
heavy pages, overwhelmed by the clews he was getting to the nature
of things. He had accepted the world as the world, but now he was
comprehending the organization of it, the play and interplay of
force and matter. Spontaneous explanations of old matters were
continually arising in his mind. Levers and purchases fascinated
him, and his mind roved backward to hand-spikes and blocks and
tackles at sea. The theory of navigation, which enabled the ships
to travel unerringly their courses over the pathless ocean, was
made clear to him. The mysteries of storm, and rain, and tide were
revealed, and the reason for the existence of trade-winds made him
wonder whether he had written his article on the northeast trade
too soon. At any rate he knew he could write it better now. One
afternoon he went out with Arthur to the University of California,
and, with bated breath and a feeling of religious awe, went through
the laboratories, saw demonstrations, and listened to a physics
professor lecturing to his classes.

But he did not neglect his writing. A stream of short stories
flowed from his pen, and he branched out into the easier forms of
verse - the kind he saw printed in the magazines - though he lost
his head and wasted two weeks on a tragedy in blank verse, the
swift rejection of which, by half a dozen magazines, dumfounded
him. Then he discovered Henley and wrote a series of sea-poems on
the model of "Hospital Sketches." They were simple poems, of light
and color, and romance and adventure. "Sea Lyrics," he called
them, and he judged them to be the best work he had yet done.
There were thirty, and he completed them in a month, doing one a
day after having done his regular day's work on fiction, which
day's work was the equivalent to a week's work of the average
successful writer. The toil meant nothing to him. It was not
toil. He was finding speech, and all the beauty and wonder that
had been pent for years behind his inarticulate lips was now
pouring forth in a wild and virile flood.

He showed the "Sea Lyrics" to no one, not even to the editors. He
had become distrustful of editors. But it was not distrust that
prevented him from submitting the "Lyrics." They were so beautiful
to him that he was impelled to save them to share with Ruth in some
glorious, far-off time when he would dare to read to her what he
had written. Against that time he kept them with him, reading them
aloud, going over them until he knew them by heart.

He lived every moment of his waking hours, and he lived in his
sleep, his subjective mind rioting through his five hours of
surcease and combining the thoughts and events of the day into
grotesque and impossible marvels. In reality, he never rested, and
a weaker body or a less firmly poised brain would have been
prostrated in a general break-down. His late afternoon calls on
Ruth were rarer now, for June was approaching, when she would take
her degree and finish with the university. Bachelor of Arts! -
when he thought of her degree, it seemed she fled beyond him faster
than he could pursue.

One afternoon a week she gave to him, and arriving late, he usually
stayed for dinner and for music afterward. Those were his red-
letter days. The atmosphere of the house, in such contrast with
that in which he lived, and the mere nearness to her, sent him
forth each time with a firmer grip on his resolve to climb the
heights. In spite of the beauty in him, and the aching desire to
create, it was for her that he struggled. He was a lover first and
always. All other things he subordinated to love.

Greater than his adventure in the world of thought was his love-
adventure. The world itself was not so amazing because of the
atoms and molecules that composed it according to the propulsions
of irresistible force; what made it amazing was the fact that Ruth
lived in it. She was the most amazing thing he had ever known, or
dreamed, or guessed.

But he was oppressed always by her remoteness. She was so far from
him, and he did not know how to approach her. He had been a
success with girls and women in his own class; but he had never
loved any of them, while he did love her, and besides, she was not
merely of another class. His very love elevated her above all
classes. She was a being apart, so far apart that he did not know
how to draw near to her as a lover should draw near. It was true,
as he acquired knowledge and language, that he was drawing nearer,
talking her speech, discovering ideas and delights in common; but
this did not satisfy his lover's yearning. His lover's imagination
had made her holy, too holy, too spiritualized, to have any kinship
with him in the flesh. It was his own love that thrust her from
him and made her seem impossible for him. Love itself denied him
the one thing that it desired.

And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was
bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it
was ever narrower. They had been eating cherries - great,
luscious, black cherries with a juice of the color of dark wine.
And later, as she read aloud to him from "The Princess," he chanced
to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips. For the moment
her divinity was shattered. She was clay, after all, mere clay,
subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or
anybody's clay. Her lips were flesh like his, and cherries dyed
them as cherries dyed his. And if so with her lips, then was it so
with all of her. She was woman, all woman, just like any woman.
It came upon him abruptly. It was a revelation that stunned him.
It was as if he had seen the sun fall out of the sky, or had seen
worshipped purity polluted.

Then he realized the significance of it, and his heart began
pounding and challenging him to play the lover with this woman who
was not a spirit from other worlds but a mere woman with lips a
cherry could stain. He trembled at the audacity of his thought;
but all his soul was singing, and reason, in a triumphant paean,
assured him he was right. Something of this change in him must
have reached her, for she paused from her reading, looked up at
him, and smiled. His eyes dropped from her blue eyes to her lips,
and the sight of the stain maddened him. His arms all but flashed
out to her and around her, in the way of his old careless life.
She seemed to lean toward him, to wait, and all his will fought to
hold him back.

"You were not following a word," she pouted.

Then she laughed at him, delighting in his confusion, and as he
looked into her frank eyes and knew that she had divined nothing of
what he felt, he became abashed. He had indeed in thought dared
too far. Of all the women he had known there was no woman who
would not have guessed - save her. And she had not guessed. There
was the difference. She was different. He was appalled by his own
grossness, awed by her clear innocence, and he gazed again at her
across the gulf. The bridge had broken down.

But still the incident had brought him nearer. The memory of it
persisted, and in the moments when he was most cast down, he dwelt
upon it eagerly. The gulf was never again so wide. He had
accomplished a distance vastly greater than a bachelorship of arts,
or a dozen bachelorships. She was pure, it was true, as he had
never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips. She was
subject to the laws of the universe just as inexorably as he was.
She had to eat to live, and when she got her feet wet, she caught
cold. But that was not the point. If she could feel hunger and
thirst, and heat and cold, then could she feel love - and love for
a man. Well, he was a man. And why could he not be the man?
"It's up to me to make good," he would murmur fervently. "I will
be THE man. I will make myself THE man. I will make good."