Produced by MRK
By E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
"Maraton has come! Maraton! Maraton is here!"
Across Soho, threading his way with devilish ingenuity through mazes ofnarrow streets, scattering with his hooter little groups of gibbering,swarthy foreigners, Aaron Thurnbrein, bent double over his ancientbicycle, sped on his way towards the Commercial Road and eastwards.With narrow cheeks smeared with dust, yellow teeth showing behind hisparted lips, through which the muttered words came with unevenvehemence, ragged clothes, a ragged handkerchief around his neck, agreasy cap upon his head—this messenger, charged with great tidings,proclaimed himself, by his visible existence, one of the submergedclinging to his last spar, fighting still with hands which beat the air,yet carrying the undaunted light of battle in his blazing eyes,deep-sunken, almost cavernous, the last refuge, perhaps, of that ebbinglife. Drops of perspiration were upon his forehead, his breath camehard and painfully. Before he had reached his destination, one couldalmost hear the rattle in his throat. He even staggered as at last hedropped from his bicycle and, wheeling it across a broad pavement, leftit reclining against a box of apples exposed in front of a smallgreengrocer's shop.
The neighbourhood was ugly and dirty, the shop was ugly and dirty. Theinterior into which he passed was dark, odoriferous, bare of stock,poverty-smitten. A woman, lean, hard-featured, with thin grey hairdisordered and unkempt, looked up quickly at his coming and as quicklydown again. Her face was perhaps too lifeless to express any emotionwhatsoever, but there might have been a shade of disappointment in theswift withdrawal of her gaze. A customer would have been next door to amiracle, but hope dies hard.
"You!" she muttered. "What are you bothering about?"
"I want David," Aaron Thurnbrein panted. "I have news! Is he behind?"
The woman moved away to let him pass.
"He is behind," she answered, in a dull, lifeless tone. "Since you tookhim with you to Bermondsey, he does no work. What does it matter? Westarve a little sooner. Take him to another meeting, if you will. I'drather you taught him how to steal. There's rest in the prisons, atleast."
Aaron Thurnbrein brushed past her, inattentive, unlistening. She wasnot amongst those who counted. He pushed open an ill-fitting door,whose broken glass top was stuffed with brown paper. The room withinwas almost horrible in its meagreness. The floor was uncarpeted, thewall unpapered. In a three-legged chair drawn up to the table, withpaper before him and a pencil in his hand, sat David Ross. He looked upat the panting intruder, only to glower.
"What do you want, boy?" he asked pettishly. "I am at work. I needthese figures. I am to speak to-night at Poplar."
"Put them away!" Aaron Thurnbrein cried. "Soon you and I will be neededno more. A greater than we have known is here—here in London!"
The older man looked up, for a moment, as though puzzled. Then a lightbroke suddenly across his face, a light which seemed somehow to becomereflected in the face of the starveling youth.
"Maraton!" he almost shrieked.
"Maraton!" the other echoed. "He is here in London!"
The face of the older man twitched with excitement.
"But they will arrest him!"
"If they dared," Aaron Thurnbrein declared harshly, "a million of uswould tear him out of prison. But they will not. Maraton is t