Bab Bab 35 · Chapter XXXV

. Chapter XXXV

Brissenden gave no explanation of his long absence, nor did Martin pry

into it. He was content to see his friend’s cadaverous face opposite

him through the steam rising from a tumbler of toddy.

“I, too, have not been idle,” Brissenden proclaimed, after hearing

Martin’s account of the work he had accomplished.

He pulled a manuscript from his inside coat pocket and passed it to

Martin, who looked at the title and glanced up curiously.

“Yes, that’s it,” Brissenden laughed. “Pretty good title, eh?

‘Ephemera’—it is the one word. And you’re responsible for it, what of

your _man_, who is always the erected, the vitalized inorganic, the

latest of the ephemera, the creature of temperature strutting his

little space on the thermometer. It got into my head and I had to write

it to get rid of it. Tell me what you think of it.”

Martin’s face, flushed at first, paled as he read on. It was perfect

art. Form triumphed over substance, if triumph it could be called where

the last conceivable atom of substance had found expression in so

perfect construction as to make Martin’s head swim with delight, to put

passionate tears into his eyes, and to send chills creeping up and down

his back. It was a long poem of six or seven hundred lines, and it was

a fantastic, amazing, unearthly thing. It was terrific, impossible; and

yet there it was, scrawled in black ink across the sheets of paper. It

dealt with man and his soul-gropings in their ultimate terms, plumbing

the abysses of space for the testimony of remotest suns and rainbow

spectrums. It was a mad orgy of imagination, wassailing in the skull of

a dying man who half sobbed under his breath and was quick with the

wild flutter of fading heart-beats. The poem swung in majestic rhythm

to the cool tumult of interstellar conflict, to the onset of starry

hosts, to the impact of cold suns and the flaming up of nebulae in the

darkened void; and through it all, unceasing and faint, like a silver

shuttle, ran the frail, piping voice of man, a querulous chirp amid the

screaming of planets and the crash of systems.

“There is nothing like it in literature,” Martin said, when at last he

was able to speak. “It’s wonderful!—wonderful! It has gone to my head.

I am drunken with it. That great, infinitesimal question—I can’t shake

it out of my thoughts. That questing, eternal, ever recurring, thin

little wailing voice of man is still ringing in my ears. It is like the

dead-march of a gnat amid the trumpeting of elephants and the roaring

of lions. It is insatiable with microscopic desire. I now I’m making a

fool of myself, but the thing has obsessed me. You are—I don’t know

what you are—you are wonderful, that’s all. But how do you do it? How

do you do it?”

Martin paused from his rhapsody, only to break out afresh.

“I shall never write again. I am a dauber in clay. You have shown me

the work of the real artificer-artisan. Genius! This is something more

than genius. It transcends genius. It is truth gone mad. It is true,

man, every line of it. I wonder if you realize that, you dogmatist.

Science cannot give you the lie. It is the truth of the sneer, stamped

out from the black iron of the Cosmos and interwoven with mighty

rhythms of sound into a fabric of splendor and beauty. And now I won’t

say another word. I am overwhelmed, crushed. Yes, I will, too. Let me

market it for you.”

Brissenden grinned. “There’s not a magazine in Christendom that would

dare to publish it—you know that.”

“I know nothing of the sort. I know there’s not a magazine in

Christendom that wouldn’t jump at it. They don’t get things like that

every day. That’s no mere poem of the year. It’s the poem of the

century.”

“I’d like to take you up on the proposition.”

“Now don’t get cynical,” Martin exhorted. “The magazine editors are not

wholly fatuous. I know that. And I’ll close with you on the bet. I’ll

wager anything you want that ‘Ephemera’ is accepted either on the first

or second offering.”

“There’s just one thing that prevents me from taking you.” Brissenden

waited a moment. “The thing is big—the biggest I’ve ever done. I know

that. It’s my swan song. I am almighty proud of it. I worship it. It’s

better than whiskey. It is what I dreamed of—the great and perfect

thing—when I was a simple young man, with sweet illusions and clean

ideals. And I’ve got it, now, in my last grasp, and I’ll not have it

pawed over and soiled by a lot of swine. No, I won’t take the bet. It’s

mine. I made it, and I’ve shared it with you.”

“But think of the rest of the world,” Martin protested. “The function

of beauty is joy-making.”

“It’s my beauty.”

“Don’t be selfish.”

“I’m not selfish.” Brissenden grinned soberly in the way he had when

pleased by the thing his thin lips were about to shape. “I’m as

unselfish as a famished hog.”

In vain Martin strove to shake him from his decision. Martin told him

that his hatred of the magazines was rabid, fanatical, and that his

conduct was a thousand times more despicable than that of the youth who

burned the temple of Diana at Ephesus. Under the storm of denunciation

Brissenden complacently sipped his toddy and affirmed that everything

the other said was quite true, with the exception of the magazine

editors. His hatred of them knew no bounds, and he excelled Martin in

denunciation when he turned upon them.

“I wish you’d type it for me,” he said. “You know how a thousand times

better than any stenographer. And now I want to give you some advice.”

He drew a bulky manuscript from his outside coat pocket. “Here’s your

‘Shame of the Sun.’ I’ve read it not once, but twice and three

times—the highest compliment I can pay you. After what you’ve said

about ‘Ephemera’ I must be silent. But this I will say: when ‘The Shame

of the Sun’ is published, it will make a hit. It will start a

controversy that will be worth thousands to you just in advertising.”

Martin laughed. “I suppose your next advice will be to submit it to the

magazines.”

“By all means no—that is, if you want to see it in print. Offer it to

the first-class houses. Some publisher’s reader may be mad enough or

drunk enough to report favorably on it. You’ve read the books. The meat

of them has been transmuted in the alembic of Martin Eden’s mind and

poured into ‘The Shame of the Sun,’ and one day Martin Eden will be

famous, and not the least of his fame will rest upon that work. So you

must get a publisher for it—the sooner the better.”

Brissenden went home late that night; and just as he mounted the first

step of the car, he swung suddenly back on Martin and thrust into his

hand a small, tightly crumpled wad of paper.

“Here, take this,” he said. “I was out to the races to-day, and I had

the right dope.”

The bell clanged and the car pulled out, leaving Martin wondering as to

the nature of the crinkly, greasy wad he clutched in his hand. Back in

his room he unrolled it and found a hundred-dollar bill.

He did not scruple to use it. He knew his friend had always plenty of

money, and he knew also, with profound certitude, that his success

would enable him to repay it. In the morning he paid every bill, gave

Maria three months’ advance on the room, and redeemed every pledge at

the pawnshop. Next he bought Marian’s wedding present, and simpler

presents, suitable to Christmas, for Ruth and Gertrude. And finally, on

the balance remaining to him, he herded the whole Silva tribe down into

Oakland. He was a winter late in redeeming his promise, but redeemed it

was, for the last, least Silva got a pair of shoes, as well as Maria

herself. Also, there were horns, and dolls, and toys of various sorts,

and parcels and bundles of candies and nuts that filled the arms of all

the Silvas to overflowing.

It was with this extraordinary procession trooping at his and Maria’s

heels into a confectioner’s in quest of the biggest candy-cane ever

made, that he encountered Ruth and her mother. Mrs. Morse was shocked.

Even Ruth was hurt, for she had some regard for appearances, and her

lover, cheek by jowl with Maria, at the head of that army of Portuguese

ragamuffins, was not a pretty sight. But it was not that which hurt so

much as what she took to be his lack of pride and self-respect.

Further, and keenest of all, she read into the incident the

impossibility of his living down his working-class origin. There was

stigma enough in the fact of it, but shamelessly to flaunt it in the

face of the world—her world—was going too far. Though her engagement to

Martin had been kept secret, their long intimacy had not been

unproductive of gossip; and in the shop, glancing covertly at her lover

and his following, had been several of her acquaintances. She lacked

the easy largeness of Martin and could not rise superior to her

environment. She had been hurt to the quick, and her sensitive nature

was quivering with the shame of it. So it was, when Martin arrived

later in the day, that he kept her present in his breast-pocket,

deferring the giving of it to a more propitious occasion. Ruth in

tears—passionate, angry tears—was a revelation to him. The spectacle of

her suffering convinced him that he had been a brute, yet in the soul

of him he could not see how nor why. It never entered his head to be

ashamed of those he knew, and to take the Silvas out to a Christmas

treat could in no way, so it seemed to him, show lack of consideration

for Ruth. On the other hand, he did see Ruth’s point of view, after she

had explained it; and he looked upon it as a feminine weakness, such as

afflicted all women and the best of women.