Chapter XLI - Page 2

did he make any. He had no
inclination. He was waiting for some impulse, from he knew not
where, to put his stopped life into motion again. In the meantime
his life remained run down, planless, and empty and idle.

Once he made a trip to San Francisco to look up the "real dirt."
But at the last moment, as he stepped into the upstairs entrance,
he recoiled and turned and fled through the swarming ghetto. He
was frightened at the thought of hearing philosophy discussed, and
he fled furtively, for fear that some one of the "real dirt" might
chance along and recognize him.

Sometimes he glanced over the magazines and newspapers to see how
"Ephemera" was being maltreated. It had made a hit. But what a
hit! Everybody had read it, and everybody was discussing whether
or not it was really poetry. The local papers had taken it up, and
daily there appeared columns of learned criticisms, facetious
editorials, and serious letters from subscribers. Helen Della
Delmar (proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets and rolling of
tomtoms to be the greatest woman poet in the United States) denied
Brissenden a seat beside her on Pegasus and wrote voluminous
letters to the public, proving that he was no poet.

THE PARTHENON came out in its next number patting itself on the
back for the stir it had made, sneering at Sir John Value, and
exploiting Brissenden's death with ruthless commercialism. A
newspaper with a sworn circulation of half a million published an
original and spontaneous poem by Helen Della Delmar, in which she
gibed and sneered at Brissenden. Also, she was guilty of a second
poem, in which she parodied him.

Martin had many times to be glad that Brissenden was dead. He had
hated the crowd so, and here all that was finest and most sacred of
him had been thrown to the crowd. Daily the vivisection of Beauty
went on. Every nincompoop in the land rushed into free print,
floating their wizened little egos into the public eye on the surge
of Brissenden's greatness. Quoth one paper: "We have received a
letter from a gentleman who wrote a poem just like it, only better,
some time ago." Another paper, in deadly seriousness, reproving
Helen Della Delmar for her parody, said: "But unquestionably Miss
Delmar wrote it in a moment of badinage and not quite with the
respect that one great poet should show to another and perhaps to
the greatest. However, whether Miss Delmar be jealous or not of
the man who invented 'Ephemera,' it is certain that she, like
thousands of others, is fascinated by his work, and that the day
may come when she will try to write lines like his."

Ministers began to preach sermons against "Ephemera," and one, who
too stoutly stood for much of its content, was expelled for