Chapter XLVI - Page 2

excuses to get rid of them.

He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he
lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-
formed thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or
rather, at wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of
his intelligence.

He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. There were
a dozen requests for autographs - he knew them at sight; there were
professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks,
ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and
the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the
inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to
purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of
communist colonization. There were letters from women seeking to
know him, and over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt
for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her good faith and as proof of
her respectability.

Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters,
the former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their
knees for his books - his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept
all he possessed in pawn for so many dreary months in order to find
them in postage. There were unexpected checks for English serial
rights and for advance payments on foreign translations. His
English agent announced the sale of German translation rights in
three of his books, and informed him that Swedish editions, from
which he could expect nothing because Sweden was not a party to the
Berne Convention, were already on the market. Then there was a
nominal request for his permission for a Russian translation, that
country being likewise outside the Berne Convention.

He turned to the huge bundle of clippings which had come in from
his press bureau, and read about himself and his vogue, which had
become a furore. All his creative output had been flung to the
public in one magnificent sweep. That seemed to account for it.
He had taken the public off its feet, the way Kipling had, that
time when he lay near to death and all the mob, animated by a mob-
mind thought, began suddenly to read him. Martin remembered how
that same world-mob, having read him and acclaimed him and not
understood him in the least, had, abruptly, a few months later,
flung itself upon him and torn him to pieces. Martin grinned at
the thought. Who was he that he should not be similarly treated in
a few more months? Well, he would fool the mob. He would be away,
in the South Seas, building his grass house, trading for pearls and
copra, jumping reefs in frail outriggers, catching sharks and
bonitas, hunting wild goats among the cliffs of the valley