Martin began, that morning, a story which he had sketched out a number of weeks before and which ever since had been worrying him with its insistent clamor to be created.  Apparently it was to be a rattling sea story, a tale of twentieth-century adventure and romance, handling real characters, in a real world, under real conditions.  But beneath the swing and go of the story was to be something else—­something that the superficial reader would never discern and which, on the other hand, would not diminish in any way the interest and enjoyment for such a reader.  It was this, and not the mere story, that impelled Martin to write it.  For that matter, it was always the great, universal motif that suggested plots to him.  After having found such a motif, he cast about for the particular persons and particular location in time and space wherewith and wherein to utter the universal thing.  “Overdue” was the title he had decided for it, and its length he believed would not be more than sixty thousand words—­a bagatelle for him with his splendid vigor of production.  On this first day he took hold of it with conscious delight in the mastery of his tools.  He no longer worried for fear that the sharp, cutting edges should slip and mar his work.  The long months of intense application and study had brought their reward.  He could now devote himself with sure hand to the larger phases of the thing he shaped; and as he worked, hour after hour, he felt, as never before, the sure and cosmic grasp with which he held life and the affairs of life.  “Overdue” would tell a story that would be true of its particular characters and its particular events; but it would tell, too, he was confident, great vital things that would be true of all time, and all sea, and all life—­thanks to Herbert Spencer, he thought, leaning back for a moment from the table.  Ay, thanks to Herbert Spencer and to the master-key of life, evolution, which Spencer had placed in his hands.

He was conscious that it was great stuff he was writing.  “It will go!  It will go!” was the refrain that kept, sounding in his ears.  Of course it would go.  At last he was turning out the thing at which the magazines would jump.  The whole story worked out before him in lightning flashes.  He broke off from it long enough to write a paragraph in his note-book.  This would be the last paragraph in “Overdue”; but so thoroughly was the whole book already composed in his brain that he could write, weeks before he had arrived at the end, the end itself.  He compared the tale, as yet unwritten, with the tales of the sea-writers, and he felt it to be immeasurably superior.  “There’s only one man who could touch it,” he murmured aloud, “and that’s Conrad.  And it ought to make even him sit up and shake hands with me, and say, ‘Well done, Martin, my boy.’”