Martin Eden: Chapter 32

作者: Jack London

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Author: Jack London

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, 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
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 - "

"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 -
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
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
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
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 place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of
Love."

Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly.  "You are so
young, Martin boy, so young.  You will flutter high, but your wings
are of the finest gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments.  Do not
scorch them.  But of course you have scorched them already.  It
required some glorified petticoat to account for that 'Love-cycle,'
and that's the shame of it."

"It glorifies love as well as the petticoat," Martin laughed.

"The philosophy of madness," was the retort.  "So have I assured
myself when wandering in hasheesh dreams.  But beware.  These
bourgeois cities will kill you.  Look at that den of traitors where
I met you.  Dry rot is no name for it.  One can't keep his sanity
in such an atmosphere.  It's degrading.  There's not one of them
who is not degrading, man and woman, all of them animated stomachs
guided by the high intellectual and artistic impulses of clams - "

He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin. Then, with a flash of
divination, he saw the situation. The expression on his face
turned to wondering horror.

"And you wrote that tremendous 'Love-cycle' to her - that pale,
shrivelled, female thing!"

The next instant Martin's right hand had shot to a throttling
clutch on his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth
rattled. But Martin, looking into his eyes, saw no fear there, -
naught but a curious and mocking devil. Martin remembered himself,
and flung Brissenden, by the neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the
same moment releasing his hold.

Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to
chuckle.

"You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the
flame," he said.

"My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days," Martin apologized.
"Hope I didn't hurt you. Here, let me mix a fresh toddy."

"Ah, you young Greek!" Brissenden went on.  "I wonder if you take
just pride in that body of yours.  You are devilish strong.  You
are a young panther, a lion cub.  Well, well, it is you who must
pay for that strength."

"What do you mean?" Martin asked curiously, passing aim a glass.
"Here, down this and be good."

"Because - " Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of
it.  "Because of the women.  They will worry you until you die, as
they have already worried you, or else I was born yesterday.  Now
there's no use in your choking me; I'm going to have my say.  This
is undoubtedly your calf love; but for Beauty's sake show better
taste next time.  What under heaven do you want with a daughter of
the bourgeoisie?  Leave them alone.  Pick out some great, wanton
flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves
one while she may.  There are such women, and they will love you
just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois sheltered
life."

"Pusillanimous?" Martin protested.

"Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have
been prattled into them, and afraid to live life.  They will love
you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more.  What
you want is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls,
the blazing butterflies and not the little gray moths.  Oh, you
will grow tired of them, too, of all the female things, if you are
unlucky enough to live.  But you won't live.  You won't go back to
your ships and sea; therefore, you'll hang around these pest-holes
of cities until your bones are rotten, and then you'll die."

"You can lecture me, but you can't make me talk back," Martin said.
"After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the
wisdom of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours."

They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but
they liked each other, and on Martin's part it was no less than a
profound liking. Day after day they were together, if for no more
than the hour Brissenden spent in Martin's stuffy room. Brissenden
never arrived without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined
together down-town, he drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal.
He invariably paid the way for both, and it was through him that
Martin learned the refinements of food, drank his first champagne,
and made acquaintance with Rhenish wines.

But Brissenden was always an enigma.  With the face of an ascetic,
he was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary.  He
was unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living;
and yet, dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it.  He was
possessed by a madness to live, to thrill, "to squirm my little
space in the cosmic dust whence I came," as he phrased it once
himself.  He had tampered with drugs and done many strange things
in quest of new thrills, new sensations.  As he told Martin, he had
once gone three days without water, had done so voluntarily, in
order to experience the exquisite delight of such a thirst
assuaged.  Who or what he was, Martin never learned.  He was a man
without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose
present was a bitter fever of living.