第 四十 章 · Chapter XL

. Chapter XL

“Overdue” still continued to lie forgotten on the table. Every

manuscript that he had had out now lay under the table. Only one

manuscript he kept going, and that was Brissenden’s “Ephemera.” His

bicycle and black suit were again in pawn, and the type-writer people

were once more worrying about the rent. But such things no longer

bothered him. He was seeking a new orientation, and until that was

found his life must stand still.

After several weeks, what he had been waiting for happened. He met Ruth

on the street. It was true, she was accompanied by her brother, Norman,

and it was true that they tried to ignore him and that Norman attempted

to wave him aside.

“If you interfere with my sister, I’ll call an officer,” Norman

threatened. “She does not wish to speak with you, and your insistence

is insult.”

“If you persist, you’ll have to call that officer, and then you’ll get

your name in the papers,” Martin answered grimly. “And now, get out of

my way and get the officer if you want to. I’m going to talk with

Ruth.”

“I want to have it from your own lips,” he said to her.

She was pale and trembling, but she held up and looked inquiringly.

“The question I asked in my letter,” he prompted.

Norman made an impatient movement, but Martin checked him with a swift

look.

She shook her head.

“Is all this of your own free will?” he demanded.

“It is.” She spoke in a low, firm voice and with deliberation. “It is

of my own free will. You have disgraced me so that I am ashamed to meet

my friends. They are all talking about me, I know. That is all I can

tell you. You have made me very unhappy, and I never wish to see you

again.”

“Friends! Gossip! Newspaper misreports! Surely such things are not

stronger than love! I can only believe that you never loved me.”

A blush drove the pallor from her face.

“After what has passed?” she said faintly. “Martin, you do not know

what you are saying. I am not common.”

“You see, she doesn’t want to have anything to do with you,” Norman

blurted out, starting on with her.

Martin stood aside and let them pass, fumbling unconsciously in his

coat pocket for the tobacco and brown papers that were not there.

It was a long walk to North Oakland, but it was not until he went up

the steps and entered his room that he knew he had walked it. He found

himself sitting on the edge of the bed and staring about him like an

awakened somnambulist. He noticed “Overdue” lying on the table and drew

up his chair and reached for his pen. There was in his nature a logical

compulsion toward completeness. Here was something undone. It had been

deferred against the completion of something else. Now that something

else had been finished, and he would apply himself to this task until

it was finished. What he would do next he did not know. All that he did

know was that a climacteric in his life had been attained. A period had

been reached, and he was rounding it off in workman-like fashion. He

was not curious about the future. He would soon enough find out what it

held in store for him. Whatever it was, it did not matter. Nothing

seemed to matter.

For five days he toiled on at “Overdue,” going nowhere, seeing nobody,

and eating meagrely. On the morning of the sixth day the postman

brought him a thin letter from the editor of _The Parthenon_. A glance

told him that “Ephemera” was accepted. “We have submitted the poem to

Mr. Cartwright Bruce,” the editor went on to say, “and he has reported

so favorably upon it that we cannot let it go. As an earnest of our

pleasure in publishing the poem, let me tell you that we have set it

for the August number, our July number being already made up. Kindly

extend our pleasure and our thanks to Mr. Brissenden. Please send by

return mail his photograph and biographical data. If our honorarium is

unsatisfactory, kindly telegraph us at once and state what you consider

a fair price.”

Since the honorarium they had offered was three hundred and fifty

dollars, Martin thought it not worth while to telegraph. Then, too,

there was Brissenden’s consent to be gained. Well, he had been right,

after all. Here was one magazine editor who knew real poetry when he

saw it. And the price was splendid, even though it was for the poem of

a century. As for Cartwright Bruce, Martin knew that he was the one

critic for whose opinions Brissenden had any respect.

Martin rode down town on an electric car, and as he watched the houses

and cross-streets slipping by he was aware of a regret that he was not

more elated over his friend’s success and over his own signal victory.

The one critic in the United States had pronounced favorably on the

poem, while his own contention that good stuff could find its way into

the magazines had proved correct. But enthusiasm had lost its spring in

him, and he found that he was more anxious to see Brissenden than he

was to carry the good news. The acceptance of _The Parthenon_ had

recalled to him that during his five days’ devotion to “Overdue” he had

not heard from Brissenden nor even thought about him. For the first

time Martin realized the daze he had been in, and he felt shame for

having forgotten his friend. But even the shame did not burn very

sharply. He was numb to emotions of any sort save the artistic ones

concerned in the writing of “Overdue.” So far as other affairs were

concerned, he had been in a trance. For that matter, he was still in a

trance. All this life through which the electric car whirred seemed

remote and unreal, and he would have experienced little interest and

less shock if the great stone steeple of the church he passed had

suddenly crumbled to mortar-dust upon his head.

At the hotel he hurried up to Brissenden’s room, and hurried down

again. The room was empty. All luggage was gone.

“Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?” he asked the clerk, who looked

at him curiously for a moment.

“Haven’t you heard?” he asked.

Martin shook his head.

“Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead in bed. Suicide.

Shot himself through the head.”

“Is he buried yet?” Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one

else’s voice, from a long way off, asking the question.

“No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. Lawyers engaged by

his people saw to the arrangements.”

“They were quick about it, I must say,” Martin commented.

“Oh, I don’t know. It happened five days ago.”

“Five days ago?”

“Yes, five days ago.”

“Oh,” Martin said as he turned and went out.

At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram to

_The Parthenon_, advising them to proceed with the publication of the

poem. He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare

home, so he sent the message collect.

Once in his room, he resumed his writing. The days and nights came and

went, and he sat at his table and wrote on. He went nowhere, save to

the pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when he was

hungry and had something to cook, and just as methodically went without

when he had nothing to cook. Composed as the story was, in advance,

chapter by chapter, he nevertheless saw and developed an opening that

increased the power of it, though it necessitated twenty thousand

additional words. It was not that there was any vital need that the

thing should be well done, but that his artistic canons compelled him

to do it well. He worked on in the daze, strangely detached from the

world around him, feeling like a familiar ghost among these literary

trappings of his former life. He remembered that some one had said that

a ghost was the spirit of a man who was dead and who did not have sense

enough to know it; and he paused for the moment to wonder if he were

really dead and unaware of it.

Came the day when “Overdue” was finished. The agent of the type-writer

firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while Martin, on

the one chair, typed the last pages of the final chapter. “Finis,” he

wrote, in capitals, at the end, and to him it was indeed finis. He

watched the type-writer carried out the door with a feeling of relief,

then went over and lay down on the bed. He was faint from hunger. Food

had not passed his lips in thirty-six hours, but he did not think about

it. He lay on his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all,

while the daze or stupor slowly welled up, saturating his

consciousness. Half in delirium, he began muttering aloud the lines of

an anonymous poem Brissenden had been fond of quoting to him. Maria,

listening anxiously outside his door, was perturbed by his monotonous

utterance. The words in themselves were not significant to her, but the

fact that he was saying them was. “I have done,” was the burden of the

poem.

“‘I have done—

Put by the lute.

Song and singing soon are over

As the airy shades that hover

In among the purple clover.

I have done—

Put by the lute.

Once I sang as early thrushes

Sing among the dewy bushes;

Now I’m mute.

I am like a weary linnet,

For my throat has no song in it;

I have had my singing minute.

I have done.

Put by the lute.’”

Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove, where

she filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lion’s share of

chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from the bottom of

the pot. Martin roused himself and sat up and began to eat, between

spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been talking in his sleep

and that he did not have any fever.

After she left him he sat drearily, with drooping shoulders, on the

edge of the bed, gazing about him with lack-lustre eyes that saw

nothing until the torn wrapper of a magazine, which had come in the

morning’s mail and which lay unopened, shot a gleam of light into his

darkened brain. It is _The Parthenon_, he thought, the August

_Parthenon_, and it must contain “Ephemera.” If only Brissenden were

here to see!

He was turning the pages of the magazine, when suddenly he stopped.

“Ephemera” had been featured, with gorgeous head-piece and

Beardsley-like margin decorations. On one side of the head-piece was

Brissenden’s photograph, on the other side was the photograph of Sir

John Value, the British Ambassador. A preliminary editorial note quoted

Sir John Value as saying that there were no poets in America, and the

publication of “Ephemera” was _The Parthenon’s_. “There, take that, Sir

John Value!” Cartwright Bruce was described as the greatest critic in

America, and he was quoted as saying that “Ephemera” was the greatest

poem ever written in America. And finally, the editor’s foreword ended

with: “We have not yet made up our minds entirely as to the merits of

“Ephemera”; perhaps we shall never be able to do so. But we have read

it often, wondering at the words and their arrangement, wondering where

Mr. Brissenden got them, and how he could fasten them together.” Then

followed the poem.

“Pretty good thing you died, Briss, old man,” Martin murmured, letting

the magazine slip between his knees to the floor.

The cheapness and vulgarity of it was nauseating, and Martin noted

apathetically that he was not nauseated very much. He wished he could

get angry, but did not have energy enough to try. He was too numb. His

blood was too congealed to accelerate to the swift tidal flow of

indignation. After all, what did it matter? It was on a par with all

the rest that Brissenden had condemned in bourgeois society.

“Poor Briss,” Martin communed; “he would never have forgiven me.”

Rousing himself with an effort, he possessed himself of a box which had

once contained type-writer paper. Going through its contents, he drew

forth eleven poems which his friend had written. These he tore

lengthwise and crosswise and dropped into the waste basket. He did it

languidly, and, when he had finished, sat on the edge of the bed

staring blankly before him.

How long he sat there he did not know, until, suddenly, across his

sightless vision he saw form a long horizontal line of white. It was

curious. But as he watched it grow in definiteness he saw that it was a

coral reef smoking in the white Pacific surges. Next, in the line of

breakers he made out a small canoe, an outrigger canoe. In the stern he

saw a young bronzed god in scarlet hip-cloth dipping a flashing paddle.

He recognized him. He was Moti, the youngest son of Tati, the chief,

and this was Tahiti, and beyond that smoking reef lay the sweet land of

Papara and the chief’s grass house by the river’s mouth. It was the end

of the day, and Moti was coming home from the fishing. He was waiting

for the rush of a big breaker whereon to jump the reef. Then he saw

himself, sitting forward in the canoe as he had often sat in the past,

dipping a paddle that waited Moti’s word to dig in like mad when the

turquoise wall of the great breaker rose behind them. Next, he was no

longer an onlooker but was himself in the canoe, Moti was crying out,

they were both thrusting hard with their paddles, racing on the steep

face of the flying turquoise. Under the bow the water was hissing as

from a steam jet, the air was filled with driven spray, there was a

rush and rumble and long-echoing roar, and the canoe floated on the

placid water of the lagoon. Moti laughed and shook the salt water from

his eyes, and together they paddled in to the pounded-coral beach where

Tati’s grass walls through the cocoanut-palms showed golden in the

setting sun.

The picture faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of his

squalid room. He strove in vain to see Tahiti again. He knew there was

singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing in the

moonlight, but he could not see them. He could see only the littered

writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had stood, and the

unwashed window-pane. He closed his eyes with a groan, and slept.