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Elisha Cuthbert Photos Books: Martin Eden The Pickwick Papers The Sea Wolf |
to Brissendens room, and hurried down again.
The room was empty. All luggage was gone.
"Did Mr. Brissenden leave any address?" he asked the clerk, who looked at
him curiously for a moment.
"Havent you heard?" he asked.
Martin shook his head.
"Why, the papers were full of it. He was found dead in bed. Suicide.
Shot himself through the head."
"Is he buried yet?" Martin seemed to hear his voice, like some one elses
voice, from a long way off, asking the question.
"No. The body was shipped East after the inquest. Lawyers engaged by
his people saw to the arrangements."
"They were quick about it, I must say," Martin commented.
"Oh, I dont know. It happened five days ago."
"Five days ago?"
"Yes, five days ago."
"Oh," Martin said as he turned and went out.
At the corner he stepped into the Western Union and sent a telegram to
The Parthenon, advising them to proceed with the publication of the poem.
He had in his pocket but five cents with which to pay his carfare home,
so he sent the message collect.
Once in his room, he resumed his writing. The days and nights came and
went, and he sat at his table and wrote on. He went nowhere, save to the
pawnbroker, took no exercise, and ate methodically when he was hungry and
had something to cook, and just as methodically went without when he had
nothing to cook. Composed as the story was, in advance, chapter by
chapter, he nevertheless saw and developed an opening that increased the
power of it, though it necessitated twenty thousand additional words. It
was not that there was any vital need that the thing should be well done,
but that his artistic canons compelled him to do it well. He worked on
in the daze, strangely detached from the world around him, feeling like a
familiar ghost among these literary trappings of his former life. He
remembered that some one had said that a ghost was the spirit of a man
who was dead and who did not have sense enough to know it; and he paused
for the moment to wonder if he were really dead did unaware of it.
Came the day when "Overdue" was finished. The agent of the type-writer
firm had come for the machine, and he sat on the bed while Martin, on the
one chair, typed the last pages of the final chapter. "Finis," he wrote,
in capitals, at the end, and to him it was indeed finis. He watched the
type-writer carried out the door with a feeling of relief, then went over
and lay down on the bed. He was faint from hunger. Food had not passed
his lips in thirty-six hours, but he did not think about it. He lay on
his back, with closed eyes, and did not think at all, while the daze or
stupor slowly welled up, saturating his consciousness. Half in delirium,
he began muttering aloud the lines of an anonymous poem Brissenden had
been fond of quoting to him. Maria, listening anxiously outside his
door, was perturbed by his monotonous utterance. The words in themselves
were not significant to her, but the fact that he was saying them was. "I
have done," was the burden of the poem.
"I have done--
Put by the lute.
Song and singing soon are over
As the airy shades that hover
In among the purple clover.
I have done--
Put by the lute.
Once I sang as early thrushes
Sing among the dewy bushes;
Now Im mute.
I am like a weary linnet,
For my throat has no song in it;
I have had my singing minute.
I have done.
Put by the lute."
Maria could stand it no longer, and hurried away to the stove, where she
filled a quart-bowl with soup, putting into it the lions share of
chopped meat and vegetables which her ladle scraped from the bottom of
the pot. Martin roused himself and sat up and began to eat, between
spoonfuls reassuring Maria that he had not been talking in his sleep and
that he did not have any fever.
After she left him he sat drearily, Martin Eden page 158 Martin Eden page 160 |