that were new to him; and gave him insights, not into new
biological laws, but into new applications of the old laws. They
were too earnest to be always polite, and more than once the
chairman rapped and pounded for order.
It chanced that a cub reporter sat in the audience, detailed there
on a day dull of news and impressed by the urgent need of
journalism for sensation. He was not a bright cub reporter. He
was merely facile and glib. He was too dense to follow the
discussion. In fact, he had a comfortable feeling that he was
vastly superior to these wordy maniacs of the working class. Also,
he had a great respect for those who sat in the high places and
dictated the policies of nations and newspapers. Further, he had
an ideal, namely, of achieving that excellence of the perfect
reporter who is able to make something – even a great deal – out of
nothing.
He did not know what all the talk was about. It was not necessary.
Words like REVOLUTION gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist,
able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was
able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word REVOLUTION.
He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made
the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the
arch-anarch of the show, transforming his reactionary individualism
into the most lurid, red-shirt socialist utterance. The cub
reporter was an artist, and it was a large brush with which he laid
on the local color – wild-eyed long-haired men, neurasthenia and
degenerate types of men, voices shaken with passion, clenched fists
raised on high, and all projected against a background of oaths,
yells, and the throaty rumbling of angry men.
CHAPTER XXXIX
Martin Eden
219
Over the coffee, in his little room, Martin read next morning’s
paper. It was a novel experience to find himself head-lined, on
the first page at that; and he was surprised to learn that he was
the most notorious leader of the Oakland socialists. He ran over
the violent speech the cub reporter had constructed for him, and,
though at first he was angered by the fabrication, in the end he
tossed the paper aside with a laugh.
“Either the man was drunk or criminally malicious,” he said that
afternoon, from his perch on the bed, when Brissenden had arrived
and dropped limply into the one chair.
“But what do you care?” Brissenden asked. “Surely you don’t desire
the approval of the bourgeois swine that read the newspapers?”
Martin thought for a while, then said:-
“No, I really don’t care for their approval, not a whit. On the
other hand, it’s very likely to make my relations with Ruth’s
family a trifle awkward. Her father always contended I was a
socialist, and this miserable stuff will clinch his belief. Not
that I care for his opinion – but what’s the odds? I want to read
you what I’ve been doing to-day. It’s ‘Overdue,’ of course, and
I’m just about halfway through.”
He was reading aloud when Maria thrust open the door and ushered in
a young man in a natty suit who glanced briskly about him, noting
the oil-burner and the kitchen in the corner before his gaze
wandered on to Martin.
“Sit down,” Brissenden said.
Martin made room for the young man on the bed and waited for him to
broach his business.
“I heard you speak last night, Mr. Eden, and I’ve come to interview
you,” he began.
Brissenden burst out in a hearty laugh.
“A brother socialist?” the reporter asked, with a quick glance at
Brissenden that appraised the color-value of that cadaverous and
dying man.
“And he wrote that report,” Martin said softly. “Why, he is only a
boy!”
“Why don’t you poke him?” Brissenden asked. “I’d give a thousand
dollars to have my lungs back for five minutes.”
The cub reporter was a trifle perplexed by this talking over him
and around him and at him. But he had been commended for his
brilliant description of the socialist meeting and had further been
detailed to get a personal interview with Martin Eden, the leader
of the organized menace to society.
“You do not object to having your picture taken, Mr. Eden?” he
Martin Eden
220
said. “I’ve a staff photographer outside, you see, and he says it
will be better to take you right away before the sun gets lower.
Then we can have the interview afterward.”
“A photographer,” Brissenden said meditatively. “Poke him, Martin!
Poke him!”
“I guess I’m getting old,” was the answer. “I know I ought, but I
really haven’t the heart. It doesn’t seem to matter.”
“For his mother’s sake,” Brissenden urged.
“It’s worth considering,” Martin replied; “but it doesn’t seem
worth while enough to rouse sufficient energy in me. You see, it
does take energy to give 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.”
Martin Eden
221
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-