The Man behind the Legend: Memoirs, Autobiographical Novels & Essays of Jack London. Jack London
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“Dig up, or I’ll shake it out of you, even if it’s all in nickels.” Then, to the two affrighted onlookers: “Keep away! If you interfere, somebody’s liable to get hurt.”
Mr. Ends was choking, and it was not until the grip on his throat was eased that he was able to signify his acquiescence in the digging-up programme. All together, after repeated digs, its trousers pocket yielded four dollars and fifteen cents.
“Inside out with it,” Martin commanded.
An additional ten cents fell out. Martin counted the result of his raid a second time to make sure.
“You next!” he shouted at Mr. Ford. “I want seventy-five cents more.”
Mr. Ford did not wait, but ransacked his pockets, with the result of sixty cents.
“Sure that is all?” Martin demanded menacingly, possessing himself of it. “What have you got in your vest pockets?”
In token of his good faith, Mr. Ford turned two of his pockets inside out. A strip of cardboard fell to the floor from one of them. He recovered it and was in the act of returning it, when Martin cried:-
“What’s that?—A ferry ticket? Here, give it to me. It’s worth ten cents. I’ll credit you with it. I’ve now got four dollars and ninety-five cents, including the ticket. Five cents is still due me.”
He looked fiercely at Mr. White, and found that fragile creature in the act of handing him a nickel.
“Thank you,” Martin said, addressing them collectively. “I wish you a good day.”
“Robber!” Mr. Ends snarled after him.
“Sneak-thief!” Martin retorted, slamming the door as he passed out.
Martin was elated—so elated that when he recollected that The Hornet owed him fifteen dollars for “The Peri and the Pearl,” he decided forthwith to go and collect it. But The Hornet was run by a set of clean-shaven, strapping young men, frank buccaneers who robbed everything and everybody, not excepting one another. After some breakage of the office furniture, the editor (an ex-college athlete), ably assisted by the business manager, an advertising agent, and the porter, succeeded in removing Martin from the office and in accelerating, by initial impulse, his descent of the first flight of stairs.
“Come again, Mr. Eden; glad to see you any time,” they laughed down at him from the landing above.
Martin grinned as he picked himself up.
“Phew!” he murmured back. “The Transcontinental crowd were nanny-goats, but you fellows are a lot of prize-fighters.”
More laughter greeted this.
“I must say, Mr. Eden,” the editor of The Hornet called down, “that for a poet you can go some yourself. Where did you learn that right cross—if I may ask?”
“Where you learned that half-Nelson,” Martin answered. “Anyway, you’re going to have a black eye.”
“I hope your neck doesn’t stiffen up,” the editor wished solicitously: “What do you say we all go out and have a drink on it—not the neck, of course, but the little rough-house?”
“I’ll go you if I lose,” Martin accepted.
And robbers and robbed drank together, amicably agreeing that the battle was to the strong, and that the fifteen dollars for “The Peri and the Pearl” belonged by right to The Hornet’s editorial staff.
Chapter XXXIV
Arthur remained at the gate while Ruth climbed Maria’s front steps. She heard the rapid click of the type-writer, and when Martin let her in, found him on the last page of a manuscript. She had come to make certain whether or not he would be at their table for Thanksgiving dinner; but before she could broach the subject Martin plunged into the one with which he was full.
“Here, let me read you this,” he cried, separating the carbon copies and running the pages of manuscript into shape. “It’s my latest, and different from anything I’ve done. It is so altogether different that I am almost afraid of it, and yet I’ve a sneaking idea it is good. You be judge. It’s an Hawaiian story. I’ve called it ‘Wiki-wiki.’”
His face was bright with the creative glow, though she shivered in the cold room and had been struck by the coldness of his hands at greeting. She listened closely while he read, and though he from time to time had seen only disapprobation in her face, at the close he asked:-
“Frankly, what do you think of it?”
“I—I don’t know,” she, answered. “Will it—do you think it will sell?”
“I’m afraid not,” was the confession. “It’s too strong for the magazines. But it’s true, on my word it’s true.”
“But why do you persist in writing such things when you know they won’t sell?” she went on inexorably. “The reason for your writing is to make a living, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right; but the miserable story got away with me. I couldn’t help writing it. It demanded to be written.”
“But that character, that Wiki-Wiki, why do you make him talk so roughly? Surely it will offend your readers, and surely that is why the editors are justified in refusing your work.”
“Because the real Wiki-Wiki would have talked that way.”
“But it is not good taste.”
“It is life,” he replied bluntly. “It is real. It is true. And I must write life as I see it.”
She made no answer, and for an awkward moment they sat silent. It was because he loved her that he did not quite understand her, and she could not understand him because he was so large that he bulked beyond her horizon.
“Well, I’ve collected from the Transcontinental,” he said in an effort to shift the conversation to a more comfortable subject. The picture of the bewhiskered trio, as he had last seen them, mulcted of four dollars and ninety cents and a ferry ticket, made him chuckle.
“Then you’ll come!” she cried joyously. “That was what I came to find out.”
“Come?” he muttered absently. “Where?”
“Why, to dinner to-morrow. You know you said you’d recover your suit if you got that money.”
“I forgot all about it,” he said humbly. “You see, this morning the poundman got Maria’s two cows and the baby calf, and—well, it happened that Maria didn’t have any money, and so I had to recover her cows for her. That’s where the Transcontinental fiver went—‘The Ring of Bells’ went into the poundman’s pocket.”
“Then you won’t come?”
He looked down at his clothing.
“I can’t.”
Tears of disappointment and reproach glistened in her blue eyes, but she said nothing.
“Next Thanksgiving you’ll have dinner with me in Delmonico’s,” he said cheerily; “or in London, or Paris, or anywhere you wish. I know it.”
“I saw in the paper a few days ago,” she announced abruptly, “that there had been several local appointments to the Railway Mail. You passed first, didn’t you?”
He was compelled to admit that the call had come for him, but that he had declined it. “I was so sure—I am so sure—of myself,” he concluded. “A year from now I’ll be earning more than a dozen men in the Railway Mail. You wait and see.”
“Oh,” was all she said, when he finished. She stood up, pulling at her gloves.