Martin Eden

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,