Chapter XXXII

CHAPTER XXXII

Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin's second
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 - "

"Measuring him by the yardstick of their own miserable egos,"
Martin broke in.