Chapter XXVIII

CHAPTER XXVIII

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