Martin Eden

a fellow a poking. Besides, what does it matter?”
    “That’s right—that’s the way to take it,” the cub announced airily, though he had already begun to glance anxiously at the door.
    “But it wasn’t true, not a word of what he wrote,” Martin went on, confining his attention to Brissenden.
    “It was just in a general way a description, you understand,” the cub ventured, “and besides, it’s good advertising. That’s what counts. It was a favor to you.”
    “It’s good advertising, Martin, old boy,” Brissenden repeated solemnly.
    “And it was a favor to me—think of that!” was Martin’s contribution.
    “Let me see—where were you born, Mr. Eden?” the cub asked, assuming an air of expectant attention.
    “He doesn’t take notes,” said Brissenden. “He remembers it all.”
    “That is sufficient for me.” The cub was trying not to look worried. “No decent reporter needs to bother with notes.”
    “That was sufficient—for last night.” But Brissenden was not a disciple of quietism, and he changed his attitude abruptly. “Martin, if you don’t poke him, I’ll do it myself, if I fall dead on the floor the next moment.”
    “How will a spanking do?” Martin asked.
    Brissenden considered judicially, and nodded his head.
    The next instant Martin was seated on the edge of the bed with the cub face downward across his knees.
    “Now don’t bite,” Martin warned, “or else I’ll have to punch your face. It would be a pity, for it is such a pretty face.”
    His uplifted hand descended, and thereafter rose and fell in a swift and steady rhythm. The cub struggled and cursed and squirmed, but did not offer to bite. Brissenden looked on gravely, though once he grew excited and gripped the whiskey bottle, pleading, “Here, just let me swat him once.”
    “Sorry my hand played out,” Martin said, when at last he desisted. “It is quite numb.”
    He uprighted the cub and perched him on the bed.
    “I’ll have you arrested for this,” he snarled, tears of boyish indignation running down his flushed cheeks. “I’ll make you sweat for this. You’ll see.”
    “The pretty thing,” Martin remarked. “He doesn’t realize that he has entered upon the downward path. It is not honest, it is not square, it is not manly, to tell lies about one’s fellow-creatures the way he has done, and he doesn’t know it.”
    “He has to come to us to be told,” Brissenden filled in a pause.
    “Yes, to me whom he has maligned and injured. My grocery will undoubtedly refuse me credit now. The worst of it is that the poor boy will keep on this way until he deteriorates into a first-class newspaper man and also a first-class scoundrel.”
    “But there is yet time,” quoth Brissenden. “Who knows but what you may prove the humble instrument to save him. Why didn’t you let me swat him just once? I’d like to have had a hand in it.”
    “I’ll have you arrested, the pair of you, you b-b-big brutes,” sobbed the erring soul.
    “No, his mouth is too pretty and too weak.” Martin shook his head lugubriously. “I’m afraid I’ve numbed my hand in vain. The young man cannot reform. He will become eventually a very great and successful newspaper man. He has no conscience. That alone will make him great.”
    With that the cub passed out the door in trepidation to the last for fear that Brissenden would hit him in the back with the bottle he still clutched.
    In the next morning’s paper Martin learned a great deal more about himself that was new to him. “We are the sworn enemies of society,” he found himself quoted as saying in a column interview. “No, we are not anarchists but socialists.” When the reporter pointed out to him that there seemed little difference between the two schools, Martin had shrugged his shoulders in silent affirmation. His face was described as bilaterally asymmetrical, and various other signs of degeneration were described. Especially notable were his thuglike hands and the fiery gleams in his blood-shot eyes.
    He learned, also, that he spoke nightly to the workmen in the City Hall Park, and that among the anarchists and agitators that there inflamed the minds of the people he drew the largest audiences and made the most revolutionary speeches. The cub painted a high-light picture of his poor little room, its oil-stove and the one chair, and of the death’s-head tramp who kept him company and who looked as if he had just emerged from twenty years of solitary