Martin Eden: Chapter 41

作者: Jack London

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Author: Jack London

He slept heavily all night, and did not stir until aroused by the
postman on his morning round.  Martin felt tired and passive, and
went through his letters aimlessly.  One thin envelope, from a
robber magazine, contained for twenty-two dollars.  He had been
dunning for it for a year and a half.  He noted its amount
apathetically.  The old-time thrill at receiving a publisher's
check was gone.  Unlike his earlier checks, this one was not
pregnant with promise of great things to come.  To him it was a
check for twenty-two dollars, that was all, and it would buy him
something to eat.

Another check was in the same mail, sent from a New York weekly in
payment for some humorous verse which had been accepted months
before.  It was for ten dollars.  An idea came to him, which he
calmly considered.  He did not know what he was going to do, and he
felt in no hurry to do anything.  In the meantime he must live.
Also he owed numerous debts.  Would it not be a paying investment
to put stamps on the huge pile of manuscripts under the table and
start them on their travels again?  One or two of them might be
accepted.  That would help him to live.  He decided on the
investment, and, after he had cashed the checks at the bank down in
Oakland, he bought ten dollars' worth of postage stamps.  The
thought of going home to cook breakfast in his stuffy little room
was repulsive to him.  For the first time he refused to consider
his debts.  He knew that in his room he could manufacture a
substantial breakfast at a cost of from fifteen to twenty cents.
But, instead, he went into the Forum Cafe and ordered a breakfast
that cost two dollars.  He tipped the waiter a quarter, and spent
fifty cents for a package of Egyptian cigarettes.  It was the first
time he had smoked since Ruth had asked him to stop.  But he could
see now no reason why he should not, and besides, he wanted to
smoke.  And what did the money matter?  For five cents he could
have bought a package of Durham and brown papers and rolled forty
cigarettes - but what of it?  Money had no meaning to him now
except what it would immediately buy.  He was chartless and
rudderless, and he had no port to make, while drifting involved the
least living, and it was living that hurt.

The days slipped along, and he slept eight hours regularly every
night.  Though now, while waiting for more checks, he ate in the
Japanese restaurants where meals were served for ten cents, his
wasted body filled out, as did the hollows in his cheeks.  He no
longer abused himself with short sleep, overwork, and overstudy.
He wrote nothing, and the books were closed.  He walked much, out
in the hills, and loafed long hours in the quiet parks.  He had no
friends nor acquaintances, nor did he make any.  He had no
inclination.  He was waiting for some impulse, from he knew not
where, to put his stopped life into motion again.  In the meantime
his life remained run down, planless, and empty and idle.

Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the "real dirt."
But at the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance,
he recoiled and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto. He
was frightened at the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and
he fled furtively, for fear that some one of the "real dirt" might
chance along and recognize him.

Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how
"Ephemera" was being maltreated.  It had made a hit.  But what a
hit!  Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether
or not it was really poetry.  The local papers had taken it up, and
daily there appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious
editorials, and serious letters from subscribers.  Helen Della
Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and rolling of
tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the United States) denied
Brissenden a seat beside her on Pegasus and wrote voluminous
letters to the public, proving that he was no poet.

THE PARTHENON came out in its next number patting itself on the
back for the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and
exploiting Brissenden's death with ruthless commercialism. A
newspaper with a sworn circulation of half a million published an
original and spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in which she
gibed and sneered at Brissenden. Also, she was guilty of a second
poem, in which she parodied him.

Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead.  He had
hated the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of
him had been thrown to the crowd.  Daily the vivisection of Beauty
went on.  Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print,
floating their wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge
of Brissenden's greatness.  Quoth one paper:  "We have received a
letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just like it, only better,
some time ago."  Another paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving
Helen Della Delmar for her parody, said:  "But unquestionably Miss
Delmar wrote it in a moment of badinage and not quite with the
respect that one great poet should show to another and perhaps to
the greatest.  However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous or not of
the man who invented 'Ephemera,' it is certain that she, like
thousands of others, is fascinated by his work, and that the day
may come when she will try to write lines like his."

Ministers began to preach sermons against "Ephemera," and one, who
too stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for heresy.
The great poem contributed to the gayety of the world. The comic
verse-writers and the cartoonists took hold of it with screaming
laughter, and in the personal columns of society weeklies jokes
were perpetrated on it to the effect that Charley Frensham told
Archie Jennings, in confidence, that five lines of "Ephemera" would
drive a man to beat a cripple, and that ten lines would send him to
the bottom of the river.

Martin did not laugh; nor did he grit his teeth in anger.  The
effect produced upon him was one of great sadness.  In the crash of
his whole world, with love on the pinnacle, the crash of
magazinedom and the dear public was a small crash indeed.
Brissenden had been wholly right in his judgment of the magazines,
and he, Martin, had spent arduous and futile years in order to find
it out for himself.  The magazines were all Brissenden had said
they were and more.  Well, he was done, he solaced himself.  He had
hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.
The visions of Tahiti - clean, sweet Tahiti - were coming to him
more frequently.  And there were the low Paumotus, and the high
Marquesas; he saw himself often, now, on board trading schooners or
frail little cutters, slipping out at dawn through the reef at
Papeete and beginning the long beat through the pearl-atolls to
Nukahiva and the Bay of Taiohae, where Tamari, he knew, would kill
a pig in honor of his coming, and where Tamari's flower-garlanded
daughters would seize his hands and with song and laughter garland
him with flowers.  The South Seas were calling, and he knew that
sooner or later he would answer the call.

In the meantime he drifted, resting and recuperating after the long
traverse he had made through the realm of knowledge. When THE
PARTHENON check of three hundred and fifty dollars was forwarded to
him, he turned it over to the local lawyer who had attended to
Brissenden's affairs for his family. Martin took a receipt for the
check, and at the same time gave a note for the hundred dollars
Brissenden had let him have.

The time was not long when Martin ceased patronizing the Japanese
restaurants.  At the very moment when he had abandoned the fight,
the tide turned.  But it had turned too late.  Without a thrill he
opened a thick envelope from THE MILLENNIUM, scanned the face of a
check that represented three hundred dollars, and noted that it was
the payment on acceptance for "Adventure."  Every debt he owed in
the world, including the pawnshop, with its usurious interest,
amounted to less than a hundred dollars.  And when he had paid
everything, and lifted the hundred-dollar note with Brissenden's
lawyer, he still had over a hundred dollars in pocket.  He ordered
a suit of clothes from the tailor and ate his meals in the best
cafes in town.  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.  THE NORTHERN REVIEW
took his essay, "The Cradle of Beauty," and MACKINTOSH'S MAGAZINE
took "The Palmist" - the poem he had written to Marian.  The
editors and readers were back from their summer vacations, and
manuscripts were being handled quickly.  But Martin could not
puzzle out what strange whim animated them to this general
acceptance of the things they had persistently rejected for two
years.  Nothing of his had been published.  He was not known
anywhere outside of Oakland, and in Oakland, with the few who
thought they knew him, he was notorious as a red-shirt and a
socialist.  So there was no explaining this sudden acceptability of
his wares.  It was sheer jugglery of fate.

After it had been refused by a number of magazines, he had taken
Brissenden's rejected advice and started, "The Shame of the Sun" on
the round of publishers. After several refusals, Singletree,
Darnley

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