Chapter 46

“Say, Joe,” was his greeting to his old-time working-mate next morning, “there’s a Frenchman out on Twenty-eighth Street. He’s made a pot of money, and he’s going back to France. It’s a dandy, well- appointed, small steam laundry. There’s a start for you if you want to settle down. Here, take this; buy some clothes with it and be at this man’s office by ten o’clock. He looked up the laundry for me, and he’ll take you out and show you around. If you like it, and think it is worth the price — twelve thousand — let me know and it is yours. Now run along. I’m busy. I’ll see you later.”

“Now look here, Mart,” the other said slowly, with kindling anger, “I come here this mornin’ to see you. Savve? I didn’t come here to get no laundry. I come a here for a talk for old friends’ sake, and you shove a laundry at me. I tell you, what you can do. You can take that laundry an’ go to hell.”

He was out of the room when Martin caught him and whirled him around.

“Now look here, Joe,” he said; “if you act that way, I’ll punch your head. An for old friends’ sake I’ll punch it hard. Savve? — you will, will you?”

Joe had clinched and attempted to throw him, and he was twisting and writhing out of the advantage of the other’s hold. They reeled about the room, locked in each other’s arms, and came down with a crash across the splintered wreckage of a wicker chair. Joe was underneath, with arms spread out and held and with Martin’s knee on his chest. He was panting and gasping for breath when Martin released him.

“Now we’ll talk a moment,” Martin said. “You can’t get fresh with me. I want that laundry business finished first of all. Then you can come back and we’ll talk for old sake’s sake. I told you I was busy. Look at that.”

A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of letters and magazines.

“How can I wade through that and talk with you? You go and fix up that laundry, and then we’ll get together.”

“All right,” Joe admitted reluctantly. “I thought you was turnin’ me down, but I guess I was mistaken. But you can’t lick me, Mart, in a stand-up fight. I’ve got the reach on you.”

“We’ll put on the gloves sometime and see,” Martin said with a smile.

“Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going.” Joe extended his arm. “You see that reach? It’ll make you go a few.”

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman. He was becoming anti- social. Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people. Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated him. They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses to get rid of them.

He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-formed thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.

He roused himself and began glancing through his mail. There were a dozen requests for autographs — he knew them at sight; there were professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of communist colonization. There were letters from women seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her good faith and as proof of her respectability.

Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters, the former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their knees for his books — his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept all he possessed