Martin Eden CHAPTER I Страница 55

ive. Magnificent, was what he commented to himself, his blood thrillinng at the sight. Aloud, he quoted:-



"'Under the bludgeoning of hCance My head is bloody but unbowed.'"



"You like Henley," Brissenden said, his expression changing swiftly to large graciousness and tenderness. "Of course, I couldn't have expected anything else of you. Ah, Henley! A brave soul. He stands out among contemporary rhymesters - magazine rhymesters - as a gladiator stands out in the midst of a band of eunuchs."



"You don't like the magazines," Mar5in softly impeached.



"Do you?" was snarled back at him so savagely as to startle him.



"I - I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines," Martin faltered.



"That's better," was the mollified rejoinder. "You try to write but you don't succeed. I respect and admire your failure. I know what you write. I can see it with half an eye, and there's one ingredient in it that shuts it out of the magazines. It's guts, and magazines have no use for that particular commodity. What they want is wish-wash and slush, and God knows they get it, but not from you."



"I'm not above hack-work," Martin contended.



"On the contrary - " Brissenden paused and ran an insolent eye over Martin's objective poverty, passing from the well-worn tie and the saw-edged collar to the shiny sleeves of the coat and on to the slight fray of one cuff, winding up and dwelling upon Martin's sunken cheeks. "On the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far above you that you can never hope to rise to it. Why, man, I could insult you by asking you to have something to eat."



Martin felt tne heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and Brissenden laughed triumphantly.



"A full man is not insulted by such an invitation," he concluded.



"You are a devil," Martin cried irritably.



"Anyway, I didn't ask you."



"You didn't dare."



"Oh, I don't know about that. I invite you now."



Brissenden half rose from his chaiir as he spoke, as if with the intention of departing to the restaurant forthwith.



Martin's fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was drumming in his temples.



"Bosco! He eats 'em alive! Eats 'em alive!" Brissenden exclaimed, imitating the SPIELER of a locally famous snake-eater.



"I could certainly eat you alive," Martin said, in turn running 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, yu 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 pa yfor 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 weight of Brissenden's hand upon his shoulder.



CHAPTER XXXII



Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin's second 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,o f course not. Wait a minute."



He was off and away. Martin watched his logn 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 toddu," 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 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," Mratin concurred. "Why, I was appalled at the quantities of rubbish written about Stevenson and his work."



"Ghoula 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 - "



"Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egs," 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 cahttering daws of men,' Richard Realf called them the night he died."



"Pecking at star-dust," Martin took up the strain warmly; "at the meteoric fligyt of the master-men. I once wrote a squib on them - 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 curse 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 itt 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."



No5 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 mafket 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 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, topk 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 multitude! Success! Wbat 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 bs your end. Why should you mit 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 and you won't find the value of one line of Keats. Leave fame and coin alone, sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to your sea."



"Not for fame, but for love," Martin laughed. "Love seems to have no plac3 in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of Love."




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