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 nebular 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