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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
Came a day when for forty hours
he had not tasted food. He could not hope for a meal at Ruths, for she
was away to San Rafael on a two weeks visit; and for very shames sake
he could not go to his sisters. To cap misfortune, the postman, in his
afternoon round, brought him five returned manuscripts. Then it was that
Martin wore his overcoat down into Oakland, and came back without it, but
with five dollars tinkling in his pocket. He paid a dollar each on
account to the four tradesmen, and in his kitchen fried steak and onions,
made coffee, and stewed a large pot of prunes. And having dined, he sat
down at his table-desk and completed before midnight an essay which he
entitled "The Dignity of Usury." Having typed it out, he flung it under
the table, for there had been nothing left from the five dollars with
which to buy stamps.
Later on he pawned his watch, and still later his wheel, reducing the
amount available for food by putting stamps on all his manuscripts and
sending them out. He was disappointed with his hack-work. Nobody cared
to buy. He compared it with what he found in the newspapers, weeklies,
and cheap magazines, and decided that his was better, far better, than
the average; yet it would not sell. Then he discovered that most of the
newspapers printed a great deal of what was called "plate" stuff, and he
got the address of the association that furnished it. His own work that
he sent in was returned, along with a stereotyped slip informing him that
the staff supplied all the copy that was needed.
In one of the great juvenile periodicals he noted whole columns of
incident and anecdote. Here was a chance. His paragraphs were returned,
and though he tried repeatedly he never succeeded in placing one. Later
on, when it no longer mattered, he learned that the associate editors and
sub-editors augmented their salaries by supplying those paragraphs
themselves. The comic weeklies returned his jokes and humorous verse,
and the light society verse he wrote for the large magazines found no
abiding-place. Then there was the newspaper storiette. He knew that he
could write better ones than were published. Managing to obtain the
addresses of two newspaper syndicates, he deluged them with storiettes.
When he had written twenty and failed to place one of them, he ceased.
And yet, from day to day, he read storiettes in the dailies and weeklies,
scores and scores of storiettes, not one of which would compare with his.
In his despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever, that
he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-deluded
pretender.
The inhuman editorial machine ran smoothly as ever. He folded the stamps
in with his manuscript, dropped it into the letter-box, and from three
weeks to a month afterward the postman came up the steps and handed him
the manuscript. Surely there were no live, warm editors at the other
end. It was all wheels and cogs and oil-cups--a clever mechanism
operated by automatons. He reached stages of despair wherein he doubted
if editors existed at all. He had never received a sign of the existence
of one, and from absence of judgment in rejecting all he wrote it seemed
plausible that editors were myths, manufactured and maintained by office
boys, typesetters, and pressmen.
The hours he spent with Ruth were the only happy ones he had, and they
were not all happy. He was afflicted always with a gnawing restlessness,
more tantalizing than in the old days before he possessed her love; for
now that he did possess her love, the possession of her was far away as
ever. He had asked for two years; time was flying, and he was achieving
nothing. Again, he was always conscious of the fact that she did not
approve what he was doing. She did not say so directly. Yet indirectly
she let him understand it as clearly and definitely as she could have
spoken it. It was not resentment with her, but disapproval; though less
sweet-natured women might have resented where she was no more than
disappointed. Her disappointment lay in that this man she had taken to
mould, refused to be moulded. To a certain extent she had found his Martin Eden page 93 Martin Eden page 95 |