rose behind them.  Next, he was no longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out, they were both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the steep face of the flying turquoise.  Under the bow the water was hissing as from a steam jet, the air was filled with driven spray, there was a rush and rumble and long-echoing roar, and the canoe floated on the placid water of the lagoon.  Moti laughed and shook the salt water from his eyes, and together they paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where Tati’s grass walls through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the setting sun.

The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of his squalid room.  He strove in vain to see Tahiti again.  He knew there was singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing in the moonlight, but he could not see them.  He could see only the littered writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had stood, and the unwashed window-pane.  He closed his eyes with a groan, and slept.

CHAPTER XLI

He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the postman on his morning round.  Martin felt tired and passive, and went through his letters aimlessly.  One thin envelope, from a robber magazine, contained for twenty-two dollars.  He had been dunning for it for a year and a half.  He noted its amount apathetically.  The old-time thrill at receiving a publisher’s check was gone.  Unlike his earlier checks, this one was not pregnant with promise of great things to come.  To him it was a check for twenty-two dollars, that was all, and it would buy him something to eat.

Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in payment for some humorous verse which had been accepted months before.  It was for ten dollars.  An idea came to him, which he calmly considered.  He did not know what he was going to do, and he felt in no hurry to do anything.  In the meantime he must live.  Also he owed numerous debts.  Would it not be a paying investment to put stamps on the huge pile of manuscripts under the table and start them on their travels again?  One or two of them might be accepted.  That would help him to live.  He decided on the investment, and, after he had cashed the checks at the bank down in Oakland, he bought ten dollars’ worth of postage stamps.  The thought of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room was repulsive to him.  For the first time he refused to consider his debts.  He knew that in his room he could manufacture a substantial breakfast at a cost of from fifteen to twenty cents.  But, instead, he went into the Forum Cafe and ordered a breakfast that cost two dollars.  He tipped the waiter a quarter, and spent fifty cents for a package of Egyptian cigarettes.  It was the first time he had smoked since Ruth had asked him to stop.  But he could see now no reason why he should not, and besides, he wanted to smoke.  And what did the money matter?  For five cents he could have bought a package of Durham and brown papers and rolled forty cigarettes—­but what of it?  Money had no meaning to him now except what it would immediately buy.  He was chartless and rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved the least living, and it was living that hurt.