One day Martin became aware that he was lonely.  He was healthy and strong, and had nothing to do.  The cessation from writing and studying, the death of Brissenden, and the estrangement from Ruth had made a big hole in his life; and his life refused to be pinned down to good living in cafes and the smoking of Egyptian cigarettes.  It was true the South Seas were calling to him, but he had a feeling that the game was not yet played out in the United States.  Two books were soon to be published, and he had more books that might find publication.  Money could be made out of them, and he would wait and take a sackful of it into the South Seas.  He knew a valley and a bay in the Marquesas that he could buy for a thousand Chili dollars.  The valley ran from the horseshoe, land-locked bay to the tops of the dizzy, cloud-capped peaks and contained perhaps ten thousand acres.  It was filled with tropical fruits, wild chickens, and wild pigs, with an occasional herd of wild cattle, while high up among the peaks were herds of wild goats harried by packs of wild dogs.  The whole place was wild.  Not a human lived in it.  And he could buy it and the bay for a thousand Chili dollars.

The bay, as he remembered it, was magnificent, with water deep enough to accommodate the largest vessel afloat, and so safe that the South Pacific Directory recommended it to the best careening place for ships for hundreds of miles around.  He would buy a schooner—­one of those yacht-like, coppered crafts that sailed like witches—­and go trading copra and pearling among the islands.  He would make the valley and the bay his headquarters.  He would build a patriarchal grass house like Tati’s, and have it and the valley and the schooner filled with dark-skinned servitors.  He would entertain there the factor of Taiohae, captains of wandering traders, and all the best of the South Pacific riffraff.  He would keep open house and entertain like a prince.  And he would forget the books he had opened and the world that had proved an illusion.

To do all this he must wait in California to fill the sack with money.  Already it was beginning to flow in.  If one of the books made a strike, it might enable him to sell the whole heap of manuscripts.  Also he could collect the stories and the poems into books, and make sure of the valley and the bay and the schooner.  He would never write again.  Upon that he was resolved.  But in the meantime, awaiting the publication of the books, he must do something more than live dazed and stupid in the sort of uncaring trance into which he had fallen.

He noted, one Sunday morning, that the Bricklayers’ Picnic took place that day at Shell Mound Park, and to Shell Mound Park he went.  He had been to the working-class picnics too often in his earlier life not to know what they were like, and as he entered the park he experienced a recrudescence of all the old sensations.  After all, they were his kind, these working people.  He had been born among them, he had lived among them, and though he had strayed for a time, it was well to come back among them.