Ministers began to preach sermons against
"Ephemera," and one, who too stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy.
The great poem contributed to the gayety of the world.
The comic verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes were perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of
"Ephemera" would drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to the bottom of the river.
Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger.
The effect produced upon him was one of great sadness.
In the crash of his whole world, with love on the pinnacle, the crash of magazinedom and the dear public was a small crash indeed.
Brissenden had been wholly right in his judgment of the magazines, and he, Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find it out for himself.
The magazines were all Brissenden had said they were and more.
Well, he was done, he solaced himself.
He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.
The visions of Tahiti-clean, sweet Tahiti-were coming to him more frequently.
And there were the low Paumotus, and the high Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill a pig in honor of his coming, and where Tamari’s flower-garlanded daughters would seize his hands and with song and laughter garland him with flowers.
The South Seas were calling, and he knew that sooner or later he would answer the call.
In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long traverse he had made through the realm of knowledge.
When The Parthenon check of three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to him, he turned it over to the local lawyer who had attended to Brissenden’s affairs for his family.
Martin took a receipt for the check, and at the same time gave a note for the hundred dollars Brissenden had let him have.
The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese restaurants.
At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight, the tide turned.
But it had turned too late.
Without a thrill he opened a thick envelope from The Millennium , scanned the face of a check that represented three hundred dollars, and noted that it was the payment on acceptance for "Adventure."
Every debt he owed in the world, including the pawnshop, with its usurious interest, amounted to less than a hundred dollars.
And when he had paid everything, and lifted the hundred-dollar note with Brissenden’s lawyer, he still had over a hundred dollars in pocket.
He ordered a suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals in the best cafйs in town.
He still slept in his little room at Maria’s, but the sight of his new clothes caused the neighborhood children to cease from calling him "hobo" and "tramp" from the roofs of woodsheds and over back fences.
"Wiki– Wiki," his Hawaiian short story, was bought by Warren’s Monthly for two hundred and fifty dollars.
The Northern Review took his essay, "The Cradle of Beauty," and Mackintosh’s Magazine took "The Palmist"-the poem he had written to Marian.
The editors and readers were back from their summer vacations, and manuscripts were being handled quickly.
But Martin could not puzzle out what strange whim animated them to this general acceptance of the things they had persistently rejected for two years.
Nothing of his had been published.
He was not known anywhere outside of Oakland, and in Oakland, with the few who thought they knew him, he was notorious as a red-shirt and a socialist.
So there was no explaining this sudden acceptability of his wares.
It was sheer jugglery of fate.
After it had been refused by a number of magazines, he had taken Brissenden’s rejected advice and started, "The Shame of the Sun" on the round of publishers.
After several refusals, Singletree, Darnley Co. accepted it, promising fall publication.
When Martin asked for an advance on royalties, they wrote that such was not their custom, that books of that nature rarely paid for themselves, and that they doubted if his book would sell a thousand copies.
Martin figured what the book would earn him on such a sale.
Retailed at a dollar, on a royalty of fifteen per cent, it would bring him one hundred and fifty dollars.
He decided that if he had it to do over again he would confine himself to fiction.
"Adventure," one-fourth as long, had brought him twice as much from The Millennium .
That newspaper paragraph he had read so long ago had been true, after all.
The first-class magazines did not pay on acceptance, and they paid well.
Not two cents a word, but four cents a word, had The Millennium paid him.
And, furthermore, they bought good stuff, too, for were they not buying his?
This last thought he accompanied with a grin.
He wrote to Singletree, Darnley Co., offering to sell out his rights in
"The Shame of the Sun" for a hundred dollars, but they did not care to take the risk.
In the meantime he was not in need of money, for several of his later stories had been accepted and paid for.
He actually opened a bank account, where, without a debt in the world, he had several hundred dollars to his credit.