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, Martin Eden.
What do you want in these sick and rotten cities of men? You are
cutting your throat every day you waste in them trying to
prostitute beauty to the needs of magazinedom. What was it you
quoted me the other day? – Oh, yes, ‘Man, the latest of the
ephemera.’ Well, what do you, the latest of the ephemera, want
with fame? If you got it, it would be poison to you. You are too
simple, took elemental, and too rational, by my faith, to prosper
on such pap. I hope you never do sell a line to the magazines.
Beauty is the only master to serve. Serve her and damn the
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multitude! Success! What in hell’s success if it isn’t right
there in your Stevenson sonnet, which outranks Henley’s
‘Apparition,’ in that ‘Love-cycle,’ in those sea-poems?
“It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but
in the doing of it. You can’t tell me. I know it. You know it.
Beauty hurts you. It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that
does not heal, a knife of flame. Why should you palter with
magazines? Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty
into gold? Anyway, you can’t; so there’s no use in my getting
excited over it. You can read the magazines for a thousand years
and you won’t find the value of one line of Keats. Leave fame and
coin alone, sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to your
sea.”
“Not for fame, but for love,” Martin laughed. “Love seems to have
no place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of
Love.”
Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly. “You are so
young, Martin boy, so young. You will flutter high, but your wings
are of the finest gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments. Do not
scorch them. But of course you have scorched them already. It
required some glorified petticoat to account for that ‘Love-cycle,’
and that’s the shame of it.”
“It glorifies love as well as the petticoat,” Martin laughed.
“The philosophy of madness,” was the retort. “So have I assured
myself when wandering in hasheesh dreams. But beware. These
bourgeois cities will kill you. Look at that den of traitors where
I met you. Dry rot is no name for it. One can’t keep his sanity
in such an atmosphere. It’s degrading. There’s not one of them
who is not degrading, man and woman, all of them animated stomachs
guided by the high intellectual and artistic impulses of clams – ”
He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin. Then, with a flash of
divination, he saw the situation. The expression on his face
turned to wondering horror.
“And you wrote that tremendous ‘Love-cycle’ to her – that pale,
shrivelled, female thing!”
The next instant Martin’s right hand had shot to a throttling
clutch on his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth
rattled. But Martin, looking into his eyes, saw no fear there, –
naught but a curious and mocking devil. Martin remembered himself,
and flung Brissenden, by the neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the
same moment releasing his hold.
Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to
chuckle.
“You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the
flame,” he said.
“My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days,” Martin apologized.
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“Hope I didn’t hurt you. Here, let me mix a fresh toddy.”
“Ah, you young Greek!” Brissenden went on. “I wonder if you take
just pride in that body of yours. You are devilish strong. You
are a young panther, a lion cub. Well, well, it is you who must
pay for that strength.”
“What do you mean?” Martin asked curiously, passing aim a glass.
“Here, down this and be good.”
“Because – ” Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of
it. “Because of the women. They will worry you until you die, as
they have already worried you, or else I was born yesterday. Now
there’s no use in your choking me; I’m going to have my say. This
is undoubtedly your calf love; but for Beauty’s sake show better
taste next time. What under heaven do you want with a daughter of
the bourgeoisie? Leave them alone. Pick out some great, wanton
flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves
one while she may. There are such women, and they will love you
just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois sheltered
life.”
“Pusillanimous?” Martin protested.
“Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have
been prattled into them, and afraid to live life. They will love
you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more. What
you want is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls,
the blazing butterflies and not the little gray moths. Oh, you
will grow tired of them, too, of all the female things, if you are
unlucky enough to live. But you won’t live. You won’t go back to
your ships and sea; therefore, you’ll hang around these pest-holes
of cities until your bones are rotten, and then you’ll die.”
“You can lecture me, but you can’t make me talk back,” Martin said.
“After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the
wisdom of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours.”
They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but
they liked each other, and on Martin’s part it was no less than a
profound liking. Day after day they were together, if for no more
than the hour Brissenden spent in Martin’s stuffy room. Brissenden
never arrived without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined
together down-town, he drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal.
He invariably paid the way for both, and it was through him that
Martin learned the refinements of food, drank his first champagne,
and made acquaintance with Rhenish wines.
But Brissenden was always an enigma. With the face of an ascetic,
he was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary. He
was unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living;
and yet, dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it. He was
possessed by a madness to live, to thrill, “to squirm my little
space in the cosmic dust whence I came,” as he phrased it once
himself. He had tampered with drugs and done many strange things
in quest of new thrills, new sensations. As he told Martin, he had
once gone three days without water, had done so voluntarily, in
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191
order to experience the exquisite delight of such a thirst
assuaged. Who or what he was, Martin never learned. He was a man
without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose
present was a bitter fever of living.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Martin was steadily losing his battle. Economize as he would, the
earnings from hack-work did not balance expenses. Thanksgiving
found him with his black suit in pawn and unable to accept the
Morses’ invitation to dinner. Ruth was not made happy by his
reason for not coming, and the corresponding effect on him was one
of desperation. He told her that he would come, after all; that he
would go over to San Francisco, to the TRANSCONTINENTAL office,
collect the five dollars due him, and with it redeem his suit of
clothes.
In the morning he borrowed ten cents from Maria. He would have
borrowed it, by preference, from Brissenden, but that erratic
individual had disappeared. Two weeks had passed since Martin had
seen him, and he vainly cudgelled his brains for some cause of
offence. The ten cents carried Martin across the ferry to San
Francisco, and as he walked up Market Street he speculated upon his
predicament in case he failed to collect the money. There would
then be no way for him to return to Oakland, and he knew no one in
San Francisco from whom to borrow another ten cents.
The door to the TRANSCONTINENTAL office was ajar, and Martin, in
the act of opening it, was brought to a sudden pause by a loud
voice from within, which exclaimed:- “But that is not the question,
Mr. Ford.” (Ford, Martin knew, from his correspondence, to be the
editor’s name.) “The question is, are you prepared to pay? – cash,
and cash down, I mean? I am not interested in the prospects of the
TRANSCONTINENTAL and what you expect to make it next year. What I
want is to be paid for what I do. And I tell you, right now, the
Christmas TRANSCONTINENTAL don’t go to press till I have the money