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 m the strength of
those on 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.