Jack London Martin Eden

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insolent eyes over the other's disease-ravaged frame.
"Only I'm not worthy of it?"
"On the contrary," Martin considered, "because the incident is not
worthy." He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome. "I confess
you made a fool of me, Brissenden. That I am hungry and you are
aware of it are only ordinary phenomena, and there's no disgrace.
You see, I laugh at the conventional little moralities of the herd;
then you drift by, say a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the
slave of the same little moralities."
"You were insulted," Brissenden affirmed.
"I certainly was, a moment ago. The prejudice of early youth, you
know. I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have
since learned. They are the skeletons in my particular closet."
"But you've got the door shut on them now?"
"I certainly have."
"Sure?"
"Sure."
"Then let's go and get something to eat."
"I'll go you," Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current
Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and
seeing the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change
back on the table.
Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly
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weight of Brissenden's hand upon his shoulder.
CHAPTER XXXII
Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin's second
Martin Eden
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187
visitor. But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated
Brissenden in her parlor's grandeur of respectability.
"Hope you don't mind my coming?" Brissenden began.
"No, no, not at all," Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him
to the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed. "But how did you
know where I lived?"
"Called up the Morses. Miss Morse answered the 'phone. And here I
am." He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the
table. "There's a book, by a poet. Read it and keep it." And
then, in reply to Martin's protest: "What have I to do with books?
I had another hemorrhage this morning. Got any whiskey? No, of
course not. Wait a minute."
He was off and away. Martin watched his long figure go down the
outside steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang
the shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over, the
collapsed ruin of the chest. Martin got two tumblers, and fell to
reading the book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow's latest collection.
"No Scotch," Brissenden announced on his return. "The beggar sells
nothing but American whiskey. But here's a quart of it."
"I'll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we'll make a
toddy," Martin offered.
"I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?" he went on,
holding up the volume in question.
"Possibly fifty dollars," came the answer. "Though he's lucky if
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he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk
bringing it out."
"Then one can't make a living out of poetry?"
Martin's tone and face alike showed his dejection.
"Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.
There's Bruce, and Virginia Spring, and Sedgwick. They do very
nicely. But poetry - do you know how Vaughn Marlow makes his
living? - teaching in a boys' cramming-joint down in Pennsylvania,
and of all private little hells such a billet is the limit. I
wouldn't trade places with him if he had fifty years of life before
him. And yet his work stands out from the ruck of the contemporary
versifiers as a balas ruby among carrots. And the reviews he gets!
Damn them, all of them, the crass manikins!"
"Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who
do write," Martin concurred. "Why, I was appalled at the
quantities of rubbish written about Stevenson and his work."
"Ghouls and harpies!" Brissenden snapped out with clicking teeth.
"Yes, I know the spawn - complacently pecking at him for his Father
Damien letter, analyzing him, weighing him - "
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188
"Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos,"
Martin broke in.
"Yes, that's it, a good phrase, - mouthing and besliming the True,
and Beautiful, and Good, and finally patting him on the back and
saying, 'Good dog, Fido.' Faugh! 'The little chattering daws of
men,' Richard Realf called them the night he died."
"Pecking at star-dust," Martin took up the strain warmly; "at the
meteoric flight of the master-men. I once wrote a squib on them -
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the critics, or the reviewers, rather."
"Let's see it," Brissenden begged eagerly.
So Martin unearthed a carbon copy of "Star-dust," and during the
reading of it Brissenden chuckled, rubbed his hands, and forgot to
sip his toddy.
"Strikes me you're a bit of star-dust yourself, flung into a world
of cowled gnomes who cannot see," was his comment at the end of it.
"Of course it was snapped up by the first magazine?"
Martin ran over the pages of his manuscript book. "It has been
refused by twenty-seven of them."
Brissenden essayed a long and hearty laugh, but broke down in a fit
of coughing.
"Say, you needn't tell me you haven't tackled poetry," he gasped.
"Let me see some of it."
"Don't read it now," Martin pleaded. "I want to talk with you.
I'll make up a bundle and you can take it home."
Brissenden departed with the "Love-cycle," and "The Peri and the
Pearl," returning next day to greet Martin with:-
"I want more."
Not only did he assure Martin that he was a poet, but Martin
learned that Brissenden also was one. He was swept off his feet by
the other's work, and astounded that no attempt had been made to
publish it.
"A plague on all their houses!" was Brissenden's answer to Martin's
volunteering to market his work for him. "Love Beauty for its own
sake," was his counsel, "and leave the magazines alone. Back to
your ships and your sea - that's my advice to you, Martin Eden.
What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men? You are
cutting your throat every day you waste in them trying to
prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom. What was it you
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quoted me the other day? - Oh, yes, 'Man, the latest of the
ephemera.' Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want
with fame? If you got it, it would be poison to you. You are too
simple, took elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper
on such pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.
Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her and damn the
Martin Eden
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189
multitude! Success! What in hell's success if it isn't right
there in your Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley's
'Apparition,' in that 'Love-cycle,' in those sea-poems?
"It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but
in the doing of it. You can't tell me. I know it. You know it.
Beauty hurts you. It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that
does not heal, a knife of flame. Why should you palter with
magazines? Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty
into gold? Anyway, you can't; so there's no use in my getting
excited over it. You can read the magazines for a thousand years [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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