We are overworked, trying to supply the demand.
Nevertheless we have helped to create that demand.
We have already spent five thousand dollars in advertising.
The book is bound to be a record-breaker."
"Please find herewith a contract in duplicate for your next book which we have taken the liberty of forwarding to you.
You will please note that we have increased your royalties to twenty per cent, which is about as high as a conservative publishing house dares go.
If our offer is agreeable to you, please fill in the proper blank space with the title of your book.
We make no stipulations concerning its nature.
Any book on any subject.
If you have one already written, so much the better.
Now is the time to strike. The iron could not be hotter."
"On receipt of signed contract we shall be pleased to make you an advance on royalties of five thousand dollars.
You see, we have faith in you, and we are going in on this thing big.
We should like, also, to discuss with you the drawing up of a contract for a term of years, say ten, during which we shall have the exclusive right of publishing in book-form all that you produce.
But more of this anon."
Martin laid down the letter and worked a problem in mental arithmetic, finding the product of fifteen cents times sixty thousand to be nine thousand dollars.
He signed the new contract, inserting
"The Smoke of Joy" in the blank space, and mailed it back to the publishers along with the twenty storiettes he had written in the days before he discovered the formula for the newspaper storiette.
And promptly as the United States mail could deliver and return, came Singletree, Darnley Co.’s check for five thousand dollars.
"I want you to come down town with me, Maria, this afternoon about two o’clock," Martin said, the morning the check arrived. "Or, better, meet me at Fourteenth and Broadway at two o’clock.
I’ll be looking out for you."
At the appointed time she was there; but shoes was the only clew to the mystery her mind had been capable of evolving, and she suffered a distinct shock of disappointment when Martin walked her right by a shoe-store and dived into a real estate office.
What happened thereupon resided forever after in her memory as a dream.
Fine gentlemen smiled at her benevolently as they talked with Martin and one another; a type-writer clicked; signatures were affixed to an imposing document; her own landlord was there, too, and affixed his signature; and when all was over and she was outside on the sidewalk, her landlord spoke to her, saying,
"Well, Maria, you won’t have to pay me no seven dollars and a half this month."
Maria was too stunned for speech.
"Or next month, or the next, or the next," her landlord said.
She thanked him incoherently, as if for a favor.
And it was not until she had returned home to North Oakland and conferred with her own kind, and had the Portuguese grocer investigate, that she really knew that she was the owner of the little house in which she had lived and for which she had paid rent so long.
"Why don’t you trade with me no more?" the Portuguese grocer asked Martin that evening, stepping out to hail him when he got off the car; and Martin explained that he wasn’t doing his own cooking any more, and then went in and had a drink of wine on the house.
He noted it was the best wine the grocer had in stock.
"Maria," Martin announced that night, "I’m going to leave you.
And you’re going to leave here yourself soon. Then you can rent the house and be a landlord yourself.
You’ve a brother in San Leandro or Haywards, and he’s in the milk business.
I want you to send all your washing back unwashed-understand?-unwashed, and to go out to San Leandro to-morrow, or Haywards, or wherever it is, and see that brother of yours.
Tell him to come to see me.
I’ll be stopping at the Metropole down in Oakland.
He’ll know a good milk-ranch when he sees one."
And so it was that Maria became a landlord and the sole owner of a dairy, with two hired men to do the work for her and a bank account that steadily increased despite the fact that her whole brood wore shoes and went to school.
Few persons ever meet the fairy princes they dream about; but Maria, who worked hard and whose head was hard, never dreaming about fairy princes, entertained hers in the guise of an ex-laundryman.
In the meantime the world had begun to ask: "Who is this Martin Eden?"
He had declined to give any biographical data to his publishers, but the newspapers were not to be denied.
Oakland was his own town, and the reporters nosed out scores of individuals who could supply information.
All that he was and was not, all that he had done and most of what he had not done, was spread out for the delectation of the public, accompanied by snapshots and photographs-the latter procured from the local photographer who had once taken Martin’s picture and who promptly copyrighted it and put it on the market.
At first, so great was his disgust with the magazines and all bourgeois society, Martin fought against publicity; but in the end, because it was easier than not to, he surrendered.
He found that he could not refuse himself to the special writers who travelled long distances to see him.
Then again, each day was so many hours long, and, since he no longer was occupied with writing and studying, those hours had to be occupied somehow; so he yielded to what was to him a whim, permitted interviews, gave his opinions on literature and philosophy, and even accepted invitations of the bourgeoisie.
He had settled down into a strange and comfortable state of mind.
He no longer cared.
He forgave everybody, even the cub reporter who had painted him red and to whom he now granted a full page with specially posed photographs.