ain."

"Because, you poor kid, he's way out of date."

It took me days to get into my work.

* * * * *

About two months later, back he came. From one of our front windows he
looked down into the old Gardens, into all the loveliness the April
twilight was bringing there, and,

"Where can I get a typewriter?" he asked. "I've got such an awful lot of
stuff that I want to dictate it right off the bat."

This was _literature_ in the making. For hours in Joe's room that week I
sat and heard him make it. In one corner lay a heap of dirty shirts and
collars, in another a stack of papers and books. An English stenographer
sat at the window, J. K. strode up and down and talked. It was real
enough, this narrative. Facts and figures, he had them down cold, to
back up with a crushing force the points he was making against the Czar.
Poverty, tyranny, bloody oppression, wholesale slaughter of a people in
a half-mad monarch's war--Joe pounded them in with sledgehammer blows.
He not only made you sure they were true, he made you sure that these
things must be stopped and that you as a decent American certainly
wanted to help with your money. And as for the revolution itself, he
left no doubt in your mind about that. It was there all right, Joe had
seen people give up their lives, he had seen men and women clubbed and
shot down, he had been so near he had seen the blood. (But he made human
blood so darned commonplace, curse him!) And in Petersburg for two long
nights he had gone about a city in darkness, every street light put out
by the strikers, the streets filled with surging black masses of
figures. Yes, Joe had certainly seen big things.

Then what was the matter with me, I thought, that all this did not
thrill me? "Young men are lucky. They will see great things." All right,
here was one of _my_ great things, a whole nation rising to throw off
its chains, to show the world that wars must cease--and to me it didn't
seem great at all, it seemed only big, and there was a world of
difference. Big? It was enormous, not only what Joe had seen up there,
but what he was doing right here in this room. He was talking to a
million people, damn him, and doubtless this was just the kind of
writing that would appeal to them. Thousands of his commonplace readers
would send their dollars to Russia, where dyspeptic professors of
economics would use the money to hire halls, into which millions of
commonplace R