but in them smouldered a fire, or, rather, lurked an expression
dual and strangely contradictory. Defiant, indomitable, even harsh
to excess, they at the same time aroused pity. Martin found
himself pitying him he knew not why, though he was soon to learn.
“Oh, I’m a lunger,” Brissenden announced, offhand, a little later,
having already stated that he came from Arizona. “I’ve been down
there a couple of years living on the climate.”
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“Aren’t you afraid to venture it up in this climate?”
“Afraid?”
There was no special emphasis of his repetition of Martin’s word.
But Martin saw in that ascetic face the advertisement that there
was nothing of which it was afraid. The eyes had narrowed till
they were eagle-like, and Martin almost caught his breath as he
noted the eagle beak with its dilated nostrils, defiant, assertive,
aggressive. Magnificent, was what he commented to himself, his
blood thrilling at the sight. Aloud, he quoted:-
“‘Under the bludgeoning of Chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.'”
“You like Henley,” Brissenden said, his expression changing swiftly
to large graciousness and tenderness. “Of course, I couldn’t have
expected anything else of you. Ah, Henley! A brave soul. He
stands out among contemporary rhymesters – magazine rhymesters – as
a gladiator stands out in the midst of a band of eunuchs.”
“You don’t like the magazines,” Martin softly impeached.
“Do you?” was snarled back at him so savagely as to startle him.
“I – I write, or, rather, try to write, for the magazines,” Martin
faltered.
“That’s better,” was the mollified rejoinder. “You try to write,
but you don’t succeed. I respect and admire your failure. I know
what you write. I can see it with half an eye, and there’s one
ingredient in it that shuts it out of the magazines. It’s guts,
and magazines have no use for that particular commodity. What they
want is wish-wash and slush, and God knows they get it, but not
from you.”
“I’m not above hack-work,” Martin contended.
“On the contrary – ” Brissenden paused and ran an insolent eye
over Martin’s objective poverty, passing from the well-worn tie and
the saw-edged collar to the shiny sleeves of the coat and on to the
slight fray of one cuff, winding up and dwelling upon Martin’s
sunken cheeks. “On the contrary, hack-work is above you, so far
above you that you can never hope to rise to it. Why, man, I could
insult you by asking you to have something to eat.”
Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and
Brissenden laughed triumphantly.
“A full man is not insulted by such an invitation,” he concluded.
“You are a devil,” Martin cried irritably.
“Anyway, I didn’t ask you.”
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“You didn’t dare.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I invite you now.”
Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if with the
intention of departing to the restaurant forthwith.
Martin’s fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was drumming in
his temples.
“Bosco! He eats ’em alive! Eats ’em alive!” Brissenden
exclaimed, imitating the SPIELER of a locally famous snake-eater.
“I could certainly eat you alive,” Martin said, in turn running
insolent eyes over the other’s disease-ravaged frame.
“Only I’m not worthy of it?”
“On the contrary,” Martin considered, “because the incident is not
worthy.” He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome. “I confess
you made a fool of me, Brissenden. That I am hungry and you are
aware of it are only ordinary phenomena, and there’s no disgrace.
You see, I laugh at the conventional little moralities of the herd;
then you drift by, say a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the
slave of the same little moralities.”
“You were insulted,” Brissenden affirmed.
“I certainly was, a moment ago. The prejudice of early youth, you
know. I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have
since learned. They are the skeletons in my particular closet.”
“But you’ve got the door shut on them now?”
“I certainly have.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
“Then let’s go and get something to eat.”
“I’ll go you,” Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current
Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and
seeing the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change
back on the table.
Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly
weight of Brissenden’s hand upon his shoulder.
CHAPTER XXXII
Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin’s second
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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 – ”
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“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