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 cafes 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