Why, man, I could insult you by asking you to have something to eat."
Martin felt the heat in his face of the involuntary blood, and Brissenden laughed triumphantly.
"A full man is not insulted by such an invitation," he concluded.
"You are a devil," Martin cried irritably.
"Anyway, I didn’t ask you."
"You didn’t dare."
"Oh, I don’t know about that.
I invite you now."
Brissenden half rose from his chair as he spoke, as if with the intention of departing to the restaurant forthwith.
Martin’s fists were tight-clenched, and his blood was drumming in his temples.
"Bosco!
He eats ’em alive!
Eats ’em alive!" Brissenden exclaimed, imitating the spieler of a locally famous snake-eater.
"I could certainly eat you alive," Martin said, in turn running insolent eyes over the other’s disease-ravaged frame.
"Only I’m not worthy of it?"
"On the contrary," Martin considered, "because the incident is not worthy." He broke into a laugh, hearty and wholesome. "I confess you made a fool of me, Brissenden.
That I am hungry and you are aware of it are only ordinary phenomena, and there’s no disgrace.
You see, I laugh at the conventional little moralities of the herd; then you drift by, say a sharp, true word, and immediately I am the slave of the same little moralities."
"You were insulted," Brissenden affirmed.
"I certainly was, a moment ago.
The prejudice of early youth, you know.
I learned such things then, and they cheapen what I have since learned.
They are the skeletons in my particular closet."
"But you’ve got the door shut on them now?"
"I certainly have."
"Sure?"
"Sure."
"Then let’s go and get something to eat."
"I’ll go you," Martin answered, attempting to pay for the current Scotch and soda with the last change from his two dollars and seeing the waiter bullied by Brissenden into putting that change back on the table.
Martin pocketed it with a grimace, and felt for a moment the kindly weight of Brissenden’s hand upon his shoulder.
CHAPTER XXXII
Promptly, the next afternoon, Maria was excited by Martin’s second visitor.
But she did not lose her head this time, for she seated Brissenden in her parlor’s grandeur of respectability.
"Hope you don’t mind my coming?" Brissenden began.
"No, no, not at all," Martin answered, shaking hands and waving him to the solitary chair, himself taking to the bed. "But how did you know where I lived?"
"Called up the Morses.
Miss Morse answered the ’phone.
And here I am." He tugged at his coat pocket and flung a thin volume on the table. "There’s a book, by a poet.
Read it and keep it." And then, in reply to Martin’s protest: "What have I to do with books?
I had another hemorrhage this morning.
Got any whiskey?
No, of course not.
Wait a minute."
He was off and away.
Martin watched his long figure go down the outside steps, and, on turning to close the gate, noted with a pang the shoulders, which had once been broad, drawn in now over, the collapsed ruin of the chest.
Martin got two tumblers, and fell to reading the book of verse, Henry Vaughn Marlow’s latest collection.
"No Scotch," Brissenden announced on his return. "The beggar sells nothing but American whiskey.
But here’s a quart of it."
"I’ll send one of the youngsters for lemons, and we’ll make a toddy," Martin offered. "I wonder what a book like that will earn Marlow?" he went on, holding up the volume in question.
"Possibly fifty dollars," came the answer. "Though he’s lucky if he pulls even on it, or if he can inveigle a publisher to risk bringing it out."