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 in payment for three of his triolets. 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. To cap
everything, the adventure serial for boys, his second attempt, was
accepted before the end of the week by a juvenile monthly calling
itself YOUTH AND AGE. It was true the serial was twenty-one
thousand words, and they offered to pay him sixteen dollars on
publication, which was something like seventy-five cents a thousand
words; but it was equally true that it was the second thing he had
attempted to write and that he was himself thoroughly aware of its
clumsy worthlessness.

But even his earliest efforts were not marked with the clumsiness
of mediocrity. What characterized them was the clumsiness of too
great strength - the clumsiness which the tyro betrays when he
crushes butterflies with battering rams and hammers out vignettes
with a war-club. So it was that Martin was glad to sell his early
efforts for songs. He knew them for what they were, and it had not
taken him long to acquire this knowledge. What he pinned his faith
to was his later work. He had striven to be something more than a
mere writer of magazine fiction. He had sought to equip himself
with the tools of artistry. On the other hand, he had not
sacrificed strength. His conscious aim had been to increase his
strength by avoiding excess of strength. Nor had he departed from
his love of reality. His work was realism, though he had
endeavored to fuse with it the fancies and beauties of imagination.
What he sought was an impassioned realism, shot through with human
aspiration and faith. What he wanted was life as it was, with all
its spirit-groping and soul-reaching left in.

He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of
fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin;
the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heaven-sent dreams
and divine possibilities. Both the god and the clod schools erred,
in Martin's estimation, and erred through too great singleness of
sight and purpose. There was a compromise that approximated the
truth, though it flattered not the school of god, while it
challenged the brute-savageness of the school of clod. It was his
story, "Adventure," which had dragged with Ruth, that Martin
believed had achieved his ideal of the true in fiction; and it was
in an essay, "God and Clod," that he had expressed his views on the
whole general subject.

But "Adventure," and all that he deemed his best work, still went
begging among the editors. His early work counted for nothing in
his eyes except for the money it brought, and his horror stories,
two of which he had sold, he did not consider high work nor his
best work. To him they were frankly imaginative and fantastic,
though invested with all the glamour of the real, wherein lay their
power. This investiture of the grotesque and impossible with
reality, he looked upon as a trick - a skilful trick at best.
Great literature could not reside in such a field. Their artistry
was high, but he denied the worthwhileness of artistry when
divorced from humanness. The trick had been to fling over the face
of his artistry a mask of humanness, and this he had done in the
half-dozen or so stories of the horror brand he had written before
he emerged upon the high peaks of "Adventure," "Joy," "The Pot,"
and "The Wine of Life."

The three dollars he received for the triolets he used to eke out a
precarious existence against the arrival of the WHITE MOUSE check.
He cashed the first check with the suspicious Portuguese grocer,
paying a dollar on account and dividing the remaining two dollars
between the baker and the fruit store. Martin was not yet rich
enough to afford meat, and he was on slim allowance when the WHITE
MOUSE check arrived. He was divided on the cashing of it. He had
never been in a bank in his life, much less been in one on
business, and he had a naive and childlike desire to walk into one
of the big banks down in Oakland and fling down his indorsed check
for forty dollars. On the other hand, practical common sense ruled
that he should cash it with his grocer and thereby make an
impression that would later result in an increase of credit.
Reluctantly Martin yielded to the claims of the grocer, paying his
bill with him in full, and receiving in change a pocketful of
jingling coin. Also, 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, for emergencies, a balance
of nearly three dollars.

In itself, this small sum seemed a fortune. Immediately on
recovering his clothes he had gone to see Ruth, and on the way he
could not refrain from jingling the little handful of silver in his
pocket. He had been so long without money that, like a rescued
starving man who cannot let the unconsumed food out of his sight,
Martin could not keep his hand off the silver. He was not mean,
nor avaricious, but the money meant more than so many dollars and
cents. It stood for success, and the eagles stamped upon the coins
were to him so many winged victories.

It came to him insensibly that it was a very good world. It
certainly appeared more beautiful to him. For weeks it had been a
very dull and sombre world; but now, with nearly all debts paid,
three dollars jingling in his pocket, and in his mind the
consciousness of success, the sun shone bright and warm, and even a
rain-squall that soaked unprepared pedestrians seemed a merry
happening to him. When he starved, his thoughts had dwelt often
upon the thousands he knew were starving the world over; but now
that he was feasted full, the fact of the thousands starving was no
longer pregnant in his brain. He forgot about them, and, being in
love, remembered the countless lovers in the world. Without
deliberately thinking about it, MOTIFS for love-lyrics began to
agitate his brain. Swept away by the creative impulse, he got off
the electric car, without vexation, two blocks beyond his crossing.

He found a number of persons in the Morse home. Ruth's two girl-
cousins were visiting her from San Rafael, and Mrs. Morse, under
pretext of entertaining them, was pursuing her plan of surrounding
Ruth with young people. The campaign had begun during Martin's
enforced absence, and was already in full swing. She was making a
point of having at the house men who were doing things. Thus, in
addition to the cousins Dorothy and Florence, Martin encountered
two university professors, one of Latin, the other of English; a
young army officer just back from the Philippines, one-time school-
mate of Ruth's; a young fellow named Melville, private secretary to
Joseph Perkins, head of the San Francisco Trust Company; and
finally of the men, a live bank cashier, Charles Hapgood, a
youngish man of thirty-five, graduate of Stanford University,
member of the Nile Club and the Unity Club, and a conservative
speaker for the Republican Party during campaigns - in short, a
rising young man in every way. Among the women was one who painted
portraits, another who was a professional musician, and still
another who possessed the degree of Doctor of Sociology and who was
locally famous for her social settlement work in the slums of San
Francisco. But the women did not count for much in Mrs. Morse's
plan. At the best, they were necessary accessories. The men who
did things must be drawn to the house somehow.

"Don't get excited when you talk," Ruth admonished Martin, before
the ordeal of introduction began.

He bore himself a bit stiffly at first, oppressed by a sense of his
own awkwardness, especially of his shoulders, which were up to
their old trick of threatening destruction to furniture and
ornaments. Also, he was rendered self-conscious by the company.
He had never before been in contact with such exalted beings nor
with so many of them. Melville, the bank cashier, fascinated him,
and he resolved to investigate him at the first opportunity. For
underneath Martin's awe lurked his assertive ego, and he felt the
urge to measure himself with these men and women and to find out
what they had learned from the books and life which he had not
learned.

Ruth's eyes roved to him frequently to see how he was getting on,
and she was surprised and gladdened by the ease with which he got
acquainted with her cousins. He certainly did not grow excited,
while being seated removed from him the worry of his shoulders.
Ruth knew them for clever girls, superficially brilliant, and she
could scarcely understand their praise of Martin later that night
at going to bed. But he, on the other hand, a wit in his own
class, a gay quizzer and laughter-maker at dances and Sunday
picnics, had found the making of fun and the breaking of good-
natured lances simple enough in this environment. And on this
evening success stood at his back, patting him on the shoulder and
telling him that he was making good, so that he could afford to
laugh and make laughter and remain unabashed.

Later, Ruth's anxiety found justification. Martin and Professor
Caldwell had got together in a conspicuous corner, and though
Martin no longer wove the air with his hands, to Ruth's critical
eye he permitted his own eyes to flash and glitter too frequently,
talked too rapidly and warmly, grew too intense, and allowed his
aroused blood to redden his cheeks too much. He lacked decorum and
control, and was in decided contrast to the young professor of
English with whom he talked.

But Martin was not concerned with appearances! He had been swift
to note the other's trained mind and to appreciate his command of
knowledge. Furthermore, Professor Caldwell did not realize
Martin's concept of the average English professor. Martin wanted
him to talk shop, and, though he seemed averse at first, succeeded
in making him do it. For Martin did not see why a man should not
talk shop.

"It's absurd and unfair," he had told Ruth weeks before, "this
objection to talking shop. For what reason under the sun do men
and women come together if not for the exchange of the best that is
in them? And the best that is in them is what they are interested
in, the thing by which they make their living, the thing they've
specialized on and sat up days and nights over, and even dreamed
about. Imagine Mr. Butler living up to social etiquette and
enunciating his views on Paul Verlaine or the German drama or the
novels of D'Annunzio. We'd be bored to death. I, for one, if I
must listen to Mr. Butler, prefer to hear him talk about his law.
It's the best that is in him, and life is so short that I want the
best of every man and woman I meet."

"But," Ruth had objected, "there are the topics of general interest
to all."

"There, you mistake," he had rushed on. "All persons in society,
all cliques in society - or, rather, nearly all persons and cliques
- ape their betters. Now, who are the best betters? The idlers,
the wealthy idlers. They do not know, as a rule, the things known
by the persons who are doing something in the world. To listen to
conversation about such things would mean to be bored, wherefore
the idlers decree that such things are shop and must not be talked
about. Likewise they decree the things that are not shop and which
may be talked about, and those things are the latest operas, latest
novels, cards, billiards, cocktails, automobiles, horse shows,
trout fishing, tuna-fishing, big-game shooting, yacht sailing, and
so forth - and mark you, these are the things the idlers know. In
all truth, they constitute the shop-talk of the idlers. And the
funniest part of it is that many of the clever people, and all the
would-be clever people, allow the idlers so to impose upon them.
As for me, I want the best a man's got in him, call it shop
vulgarity or anything you please."

And Ruth had not understood. This attack of his on the established
had seemed to her just so much wilfulness of opinion.

So Martin contaminated Professor Caldwell with his own earnestness,
challenging him to speak his mind. As Ruth paused beside them she
heard Martin saying:-

"You surely don't pronounce such heresies in the University of
California?"

Professor Caldwell shrugged his shoulders. "The honest taxpayer
and the politician, you know. Sacramento gives us our
appropriations and therefore we kowtow to Sacramento, and to the
Board of Regents, and to the party press, or to the press of both
parties."

"Yes, that's clear; but how about you?" Martin urged. "You must be
a fish out of the water."

"Few like me, I imagine, in the university pond. Sometimes I am
fairly sure I am out of water, and that I should belong in Paris,
in Grub Street, in a hermit's cave, or in some sadly wild Bohemian
crowd, drinking claret, - dago-red they call it in San Francisco, -
dining in cheap restaurants in the Latin Quarter, and expressing
vociferously radical views upon all creation. Really, I am
frequently almost sure that I was cut out to be a radical. But
then, there are so many questions on which I am not sure. I grow
timid when I am face to face with my human frailty, which ever
prevents me from grasping all the factors in any problem - human,
vital problems, you know."

And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had
come the "Song of the Trade Wind":-


"I am strongest at noon,
But under the moon
I stiffen the bunt of the sail."


He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the
other reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade,
steady, and cool, and strong. He was equable, he was to be relied
upon, and withal there was a certain bafflement about him. Martin
had the feeling that he never spoke his full mind, just as he had
often had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest
but always held reserves of strength that were never used.
Martin's trick of visioning was active as ever. His brain was a
most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its
contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection.
Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin's mind immediately
presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily
expressed themselves to him in vision. It was sheerly automatic,
and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living
present. Just as Ruth's face, in a momentary jealousy had called
before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor
Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white
billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not
disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new memory-
visions rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were
thrown upon the screen of his consciousness. These visions came
out of the actions and sensations of the past, out of things and
events and books of yesterday and last week - a countless host of
apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever thronged his mind.

So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell's easy flow of
speech - the conversation of a clever, cultured man - that Martin
kept seeing himself down all his past. He saw himself when he had
been quite the hoodlum, wearing a "stiff-rim" Stetson hat and a
square-cut, double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the
shoulders and possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police
permitted. He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to
palliate it. At one time in his life he had been just a common
hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the police and
terrorized honest, working-class householders. But his ideals had
changed. He glanced about him at the well-bred, well-dressed men
and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere of culture
and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his early
youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness,
stalked across the room. This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he
saw merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual
university professor.

For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place. He
had fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and
everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by
his willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command
respect. But he had never taken root. He had fitted in
sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself. He
had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always
the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on through life
seeking it until he found books and art and love. And here he was,
in the midst of all this, the only one of all the comrades he had
adventured with who could have made themselves eligible for the
inside of the Morse home.

But such thoughts and visions did not prevent him from following
Professor Caldwell closely. And as he followed, comprehendingly
and critically, he noted the unbroken field of the other's
knowledge. As for himself, from moment to moment the conversation
showed him gaps and open stretches, whole subjects with which he
was unfamiliar. Nevertheless, thanks to his Spencer, he saw that
he possessed the outlines of the field of knowledge. It was a
matter only of time, when he would fill in the outline. Then watch
out, he thought - 'ware shoal, everybody! He felt like sitting at
the feet of the professor, worshipful and absorbent; but, as he
listened, he began to discern a weakness in the other's judgments -
a weakness so stray and elusive that he might not have caught it
had it not been ever present. And when he did catch it, he leapt
to equality at once.

Ruth came up to them a second time, just as Martin began to speak.

"I'll tell you where you are wrong, or, rather, what weakens your
judgments," he said. "You lack biology. It has no place in your
scheme of things. - Oh, I mean the real interpretative biology,
from the ground up, from the laboratory and the test-tube and the
vitalized inorganic right on up to the widest aesthetic and
sociological generalizations."

Ruth was appalled. She had sat two lecture courses under Professor
Caldwell and looked up to him as the living repository of all
knowledge.

"I scarcely follow you," he said dubiously.

Martin was not so sure but what he had followed him.

"Then I'll try to explain," he said. "I remember reading in
Egyptian history something to the effect that understanding could
not be had of Egyptian art without first studying the land
question."

"Quite right," the professor nodded.

"And it seems to me," Martin continued, "that knowledge of the land
question, in turn, of all questions, for that matter, cannot be had
without previous knowledge of the stuff and the constitution of
life. How can we understand laws and institutions, religions and
customs, without understanding, not merely the nature of the
creatures that made them, but the nature of the stuff out of which
the creatures are made? Is literature less human than the
architecture and sculpture of Egypt? Is there one thing in the
known universe that is not subject to the law of evolution? - Oh, I
know there is an elaborate evolution of the various arts laid down,
but it seems to me to be too mechanical. The human himself is left
out. The evolution of the tool, of the harp, of music and song and
dance, are all beautifully elaborated; but how about the evolution
of the human himself, the development of the basic and intrinsic
parts that were in him before he made his first tool or gibbered
his first chant? It is that which you do not consider, and which I
call biology. It is biology in its largest aspects.

"I know I express myself incoherently, but I've tried to hammer out
the idea. It came to me as you were talking, so I was not primed
and ready to deliver it. You spoke yourself of the human frailty
that prevented one from taking all the factors into consideration.
And you, in turn, - or so it seems to me, - leave out the
biological factor, the very stuff out of which has been spun the
fabric of all the arts, the warp and the woof of all human actions
and achievements."

To Ruth's amazement, Martin was not immediately crushed, and that
the professor replied in the way he did struck her as forbearance
for Martin's youth. Professor Caldwell sat for a full minute,
silent and fingering his watch chain.

"Do you know," he said at last, "I've had that same criticism
passed on me once before - by a very great man, a scientist and
evolutionist, Joseph Le Conte. But he is dead, and I thought to
remain undetected; and now you come along and expose me.
Seriously, though - and this is confession - I think there is
something in your contention - a great deal, in fact. I am too
classical, not enough up-to-date in the interpretative branches of
science, and I can only plead the disadvantages of my education and
a temperamental slothfulness that prevents me from doing the work.
I wonder if you'll believe that I've never been inside a physics or
chemistry laboratory? It is true, nevertheless. Le Conte was
right, and so are you, Mr. Eden, at least to an extent - how much I
do not know."

Ruth drew Martin away with her on a pretext; when she had got him
aside, whispering:-

"You shouldn't have monopolized Professor Caldwell that way. There
may be others who want to talk with him."

"My mistake," Martin admitted contritely. "But I'd got him stirred
up, and he was so interesting that I did not think. Do you know,
he is the brightest, the most intellectual, man I have ever talked
with. And I'll tell you something else. I once thought that
everybody who went to universities, or who sat in the high places
in society, was just as brilliant and intelligent as he."

"He's an exception," she answered.

"I should say so. Whom do you want me to talk to now? - Oh, say,
bring me up against that cashier-fellow."

Martin talked for fifteen minutes with him, nor could Ruth have
wished better behavior on her lover's part. Not once did his eyes
flash nor his cheeks flush, while the calmness and poise with which
he talked surprised her. But in Martin's estimation the whole
tribe of bank cashiers fell a few hundred per cent, and for the
rest of the evening he labored under the impression that bank
cashiers and talkers of platitudes were synonymous phrases. The
army officer he found good-natured and simple, a healthy, wholesome
young fellow, content to occupy the place in life into which birth
and luck had flung him. On learning that he had completed two
years in the university, Martin was puzzled to know where he had
stored it away. Nevertheless Martin liked him better than the
platitudinous bank cashier.

"I really don't object to platitudes," he told Ruth later; "but
what worries me into nervousness is the pompous, smugly complacent,
superior certitude with which they are uttered and the time taken
to do it. Why, I could give that man the whole history of the
Reformation in the time he took to tell me that the Union-Labor
Party had fused with the Democrats. Do you know, he skins his
words as a professional poker-player skins the cards that are dealt
out to him. Some day I'll show you what I mean."

"I'm sorry you don't like him," was her reply. "He's a favorite of
Mr. Butler's. Mr. Butler says he is safe and honest - calls him
the Rock, Peter, and says that upon him any banking institution can
well be built."

"I don't doubt it - from the little I saw of him and the less I
heard from him; but I don't think so much of banks as I did. You
don't mind my speaking my mind this way, dear?"

"No, no; it is most interesting."

"Yes," Martin went on heartily, "I'm no more than a barbarian
getting my first impressions of civilization. Such impressions
must be entertainingly novel to the civilized person."

"What did you think of my cousins?" Ruth queried.

"I liked them better than the other women. There's plenty of fun
in them along with paucity of pretence."

"Then you did like the other women?"

He shook his head.

"That social-settlement woman is no more than a sociological poll-
parrot. I swear, if you winnowed her out between the stars, like
Tomlinson, there would be found in her not one original thought.
As for the portrait-painter, she was a positive bore. She'd make a
good wife for the cashier. And the musician woman! I don't care
how nimble her fingers are, how perfect her technique, how
wonderful her expression - the fact is, she knows nothing about
music."

"She plays beautifully," Ruth protested.

"Yes, she's undoubtedly gymnastic in the externals of music, but
the intrinsic spirit of music is unguessed by her. I asked her
what music meant to her - you know I'm always curious to know that
particular thing; and she did not know what it meant to her, except
that she adored it, that it was the greatest of the arts, and that
it meant more than life to her."

"You were making them talk shop," Ruth charged him.

"I confess it. And if they were failures on shop, imagine my
sufferings if they had discoursed on other subjects. Why, I used
to think that up here, where all the advantages of culture were
enjoyed - " He paused for a moment, and watched the youthful shade
of himself, in stiff-rim and square-cut, enter the door and swagger
across the room. "As I was saying, up here I thought all men and
women were brilliant and radiant. But now, from what little I've
seen of them, they strike me as a pack of ninnies, most of them,
and ninety percent of the remainder as bores. Now there's
Professor Caldwell - he's different. He's a man, every inch of him
and every atom of his gray matter."

Ruth's face brightened.

"Tell me about him," she urged. "Not what is large and brilliant -
I know those qualities; but whatever you feel is adverse. I am
most curious to know."

"Perhaps I'll get myself in a pickle." Martin debated humorously
for a moment. "Suppose you tell me first. Or maybe you find in
him nothing less than the best."

"I attended two lecture courses under him, and I have known him for
two years; that is why I am anxious for your first impression."

"Bad impression, you mean? Well, here goes. He is all the fine
things you think about him, I guess. At least, he is the finest
specimen of intellectual man I have met; but he is a man with a
secret shame."

"Oh, no, no!" he hastened to cry. "Nothing paltry nor vulgar.
What I mean is that he strikes me as a man who has gone to the
bottom of things, and is so afraid of what he saw that he makes
believe to himself that he never saw it. Perhaps that's not the
clearest way to express it. Here's another way. A man who has
found the path to the hidden temple but has not followed it; who
has, perhaps, caught glimpses of the temple and striven afterward
to convince himself that it was only a mirage of foliage. Yet
another way. A man who could have done things but who placed no
value on the doing, and who, all the time, in his innermost heart,
is regretting that he has not done them; who has secretly laughed
at the rewards for doing, and yet, still more secretly, has yearned
for the rewards and for the joy of doing."

"I don't read him that way," she said. "And for that matter, I
don't see just what you mean."

"It is only a vague feeling on my part," Martin temporized. "I
have no reason for it. It is only a feeling, and most likely it is
wrong. You certainly should know him better than I."

From the evening at Ruth's Martin brought away with him strange
confusions and conflicting feelings. He was disappointed in his
goal, 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 beings
among whom he had climbed - with the exception, of course, of
Professor Caldwell. About life and the books he knew more than
they, and he wondered into what nooks and crannies they had cast
aside their educations. He did not know that he was himself
possessed of unusual brain vigor; nor did he know that the persons
who were given to probing the depths and to thinking ultimate
thoughts were not to be found in the drawing rooms of the world's
Morses; nor did he dream that such persons were as lonely eagles
sailing solitary in the azure sky far above the earth and its
swarming freight of gregarious life.