Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman.
He was becoming anti-social.
Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people.
Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated him.
They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for 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 that lay next to the valley of Taiohae.
In the moment of that thought the desperateness of his situation dawned upon him.
He saw, cleared eyed, that he was in the Valley of the Shadow.
All the life that was in him was fading, fainting, making toward death.
He realized how much he slept, and how much he desired to sleep.
Of old, he had hated sleep.
It had robbed him of precious moments of living.
Four hours of sleep in the twenty-four had meant being robbed of four hours of life.
How he had grudged sleep!
Now it was life he grudged.
Life was not good; its taste in his mouth was without tang, and bitter.
This was his peril.
Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing.
Some remote instinct for preservation stirred in him, and he knew he must get away.
He glanced about the room, and the thought of packing was burdensome.
Perhaps it would be better to leave that to the last.
In the meantime he might be getting an outfit.
He put on his hat and went out, stopping in at a gun-store, where he spent the remainder of the morning buying automatic rifles, ammunition, and fishing tackle.
Fashions changed in trading, and he knew he would have to wait till he reached Tahiti before ordering his trade-goods.
They could come up from Australia, anyway.
This solution was a source of pleasure.
He had avoided doing something, and the doing of anything just now was unpleasant.
He went back to the hotel gladly, with a feeling of satisfaction in that the comfortable Morris chair was waiting for him; and he groaned inwardly, on entering his room, at sight of Joe in the Morris chair.
Joe was delighted with the laundry.
Everything was settled, and he would enter into possession next day.
Martin lay on the bed, with closed eyes, while the other talked on.
Martin’s thoughts were far away-so far away that he was rarely aware that he was thinking.
It was only by an effort that he occasionally responded.
And yet this was Joe, whom he had always liked.