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Despite that he knew what he was to see, when he did turn his head and beheld his wife and Sonny, the pair he had seen thieving in the dark, he went suddenly dizzy, and paused, supporting himself with a hand against a pillar, and smiling vacuously at the grouped singing boys who were pulsing the sensuous night into richer sensuousness with their honi kaua wiki-wiki refrain.
"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?
The only restriction placed upon him was that he must confine himself to the United States. Martin sent his inability to accept and his regrets by wire "collect." "Wiki-Wiki," published in Warren's Monthly, was an instantaneous success. It was brought out forward in a wide-margined, beautifully decorated volume that struck the holiday trade and sold like wildfire.
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.
That had been her criticism of his "Love-cycle." She, too, had urged him to get a job. It was true, she refined it to "position," but it meant the same thing, and in his own mind the old nomenclature stuck. He had read her all that he wrote poems, stories, essays "Wiki-Wiki," "The Shame of the Sun," everything.
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.
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 story, was bought by Warren's Monthly for two hundred and fifty dollars.
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