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Broken to the Plow written by Charles Caldwell Dobie

C >> Charles Caldwell Dobie >> Broken to the Plow




"I didn't hear what you said," escaped him.

Storch leaned forward. "I was asking what you were doing ... up north
in the mountains during December. Only a desperate man or a fool would
take a chance like that... And I can see you're not a fool... There
aren't any prisons up that way that I know of."

"_Prisons_! What do you mean?"

"You've escaped from somewhere."

"How do you know?"

"You're still furtive in spite of your pretended calm. I know the
look. I know the feeling. I've seen scores of men who have been
through the mill. I've been through the mill myself. Not once, but
several times. I've been in nearly every jail in the country worth
putting up at... Even the Federal prisons haven't been proof against
me. I've beat them all. It's a game I like to play. Just as one man
plunges into stocks, or another breaks strikes, or another leads a
howling mob to victory... Every man has his game. What's yours?"

Fred shrugged. "Why are you telling me all this?" he countered. "You
don't know me."

Storch laughed, showing his greenish teeth again. "What difference
does that make?... I'm a pretty good judge of character, and I think
I've got you right. You might play a rough game, but it would be
square--according to your standards... I question most standards, but
that is neither here nor there. They shackle some people
extraordinarily. Just now you're drifting about without any. But
you'll tie to some sort of anchor pretty soon... That's why you
interest me. I want to get you while you're still drifting."

Fred felt a sudden chill. He was suspicious of this ironically genial
man opposite him who bought him food and then prodded for his secret.
There was something diabolical about the way he calmly admitted an
impersonal but curiously definite interest.

"What is your business, anyway?" Fred shot out, suddenly.

"I'm a fisher for men," he replied, cryptically. "Some people build up
... others destroy. There must be always those who clear the
ground--the wreckers, in other words... There's too much attention
paid to building. Folks are in such a hurry they go about rearing all
kinds of crazy structures on rotten foundations... I'm looking for
some human dynamite to make a good job."

Fred drew back. "You've got me wrong," he said. "I'm not a radical."

"Not yet, of course. Your kind take a lot of punishment before they
see the light. But you're a good prospect--a damned good prospect.
You're a good deal like a young fellow I met last fall when I was
working over in the shipyards in Oakland. He--"

"Shipyards?" interrupted Fred. "Not Hilmer's shipyards, by any
chance?"

Storch leaned forward, drawing his shaggy eyebrows together. "Why?"

"I know Hilmer, that's all."

Storch continued his searching scrutiny. Fred felt uneasy--it seemed
as if this man opposite him was drawing the innermost secret of his
soul to the surface. Finally Storch rubbed his hands together with an
air of satisfaction as he said:

"So you know Hilmer!... That makes you all the more interesting...
Well, well, let's be moving. I'll put you up for the night. I've got a
shelter, such as it is."

Fred rose. He had an impulse to refuse. There was something uncanny
about the power of Storch. He was at once fascinating and repulsive.
But, on second thought, any shelter was better than a night spent on
the streets. He had had two months of buffeting and he was ready for
even an indifferent comfort.

He ended by going with his new-found friend. They trotted south along
the Embarcadero, hugging the shadows close. This street, once noisy
with a coarse, guzzling gayety, was silent. A few disconsolate men
hung about the emasculated bars trying to rouse their sluggish spirits
on colicky draughts of near beer and grape juice, but the effect was
dismal and forbidding. Fred felt a great depression overwhelm him.

He had grown accustomed to the silence of the open spaces, but this
silence of the city had a portentous quality which frightened him. It
reminded him of that ominous quiet that had settled down on Fairview
after that heartbreaking celebration on Christmas Eve. What were men
doing with their idle moments? How were they escaping from the drab
to-day? Did the crowded lobbies of the sailors' lodging houses spell
the final word in the bleak entertainment that intolerance had left
them? Upon one of the street corners a Salvation Army lassie harangued
an indifferent handful. But there seemed nothing now from which to
save these men except monotony, and religion of the fife-and-drum
order was offering only a very dreary escape. Did the moral values of
negative virtue make men any more admirable? he found himself
wondering.

Storch led the way in silence. Finally they turned up toward the
slopes of Rincon Hill. A cluster of shacks, clinging crazily to the
tawny banks, loomed ahead in the darkness. Storch clambered along a
beaten trail and presently he leaped toward the broader confines of a
street which opened its arms abruptly to receive them. Fred followed.
The thoroughfare upon which he found himself standing was little more
than a lane, hedged on either side by crazy structures that nearly all
had sprung to rambling life from one-roomed refugee shacks which had
dotted the city after the fire and earthquake. Most of them were vine
clad and brightened with beds of scarlet geraniums, but the house
before which Storch halted rose uncompromisingly from the sun-baked
ground without the charity of a covering. Storch turned the key and
threw the door open, motioning Fred to enter. Fred did as he was
bidden and found himself in a cluttered room, showing harshly in the
light streaming in from a near-by street lamp. The air was foul with
stale tobacco, refuse, and imprisoned odors of innumerable greasy
meals and the sweaty apparel of men who work with their hands.

Storch lighted a lamp. A tumble-down couch stood against the wall, and
in an opposite corner a heap of tattered quilts had been flung
disdainfully. Tables and chairs and even the floor were piled with
papers and cheaply covered books and tattered magazines.

Storch pointed to the couch. "You sleep there to-night. I'll roll up
on the floor."

It never occurred to Fred to protest. The two began to shed their
outer garments. Fred crawled in between the musty quilts. Storch blew
out the lamp, and Fred saw him move toward the quilts in the corner.
Without bothering to straighten them out he flung himself down and
pulled a covering over him. The light from the street lamp continued
to flood the room. Presently Fred heard Storch chuckling.

"So you know Hilmer!" he was repeating again, making a sound of
satisfaction, as one does over a succulent morsel. "Well ... well ...
fancy how things turn out!"

Fred made no reply, and after a time a gentle snoring told that Storch
had fallen asleep.

Fred tossed about, oppressed by the close air. But, in the end, even
he fell into a series of fitful dozes. He dreamed the room in which he
was sleeping was suddenly transformed into a huge spider web from
which there was no escape. And he caught glimpses of Storch himself
hanging spider-wise from a gossamer thread, spinning dizzily in
midair... He awoke repeatedly, returning as often to the same dream.
Toward morning he heard a faint stirring about. But he lay huddled in
a pretense of sleep... Finally the door banged and he knew that Storch
had left... He let out a profound sigh and turned his face from the
light...




CHAPTER XVII


When Fred Starratt awoke a noonday sun was flooding in at the single
window. Consciousness brought no confusion ... he was beginning to
grow accustomed to sudden shifts in fortune and strange environments
had long since ceased to be a waking novelty. Outside he could hear
the genial noises of a thickly populated lane--shrilly cried bits of
neighborhood gossip bandied from doorstep to doorstep ... the laughter
of children ... the call of a junkman ... even a smothered cackling
from some captive hen fulfilling its joyful function in spite of
restraint. He did not rise at once, but he lay there thinking, trying
to force the realization that he was again in San Francisco... He
wondered dimly at the power of the homing instinct that had driven him
back. It was plain to him now that almost any other environment would
have been materially better. He had had the whole state of California
to choose from, indeed he might have flown even farther afield. But
from the very beginning his feet had turned homeward with uncanny
precision. On those first days and nights when he had lain huddled in
any uncertain shelter that came to hand the one thought that had
goaded him on was the promise of this return.

And those first hours of freedom had been at once the sweetest and the
bitterest. Wet to the skin, starved, furtive, like a lean, dog-harried
coyote he had achieved the mountains and safety more dead than alive.
Looking back, he could see that only the sheerest madness had tempted
him to flight in the first place. Without an ounce of provisions,
without blankets, at the start lacking even a hat, he had defied the
elements and won. God was indeed tender with all fools and madmen!

He knew now that under ordinary circumstances he must have perished in
the mountain passes. But the weather had been warm there all during
December and more rain than snow had fallen, keeping the beaten paths
reasonably open... He had thought always of these snow-pent places as
quite devoid of any life at the winter season, and he was amazed to
find how many human beings burrowed in and hibernated during the
storm-bound months. Elsewhere, the skulking traveler received a chary
welcome, but in the silent fastness of the hills latchstring and
hearthstone and tobacco store were for genial sharing. In almost any
one of these log shelters that he chanced upon he might have settled
himself in content and found an indefinite welcome, but the urge to be
up and on sent him forward to the next rude threshold. Thus mountain
cabin succeeded mountain cabin until, presently, one day Fred Starratt
found himself swinging down to the plains again--to the broad-bosomed
valleys lying parched and expectant under the cruel spell of drought.
Now people regarded him suspiciously, dogs snapped at his heels, and
farmers' women thrust him doles of food through half-opened kitchen
doors. Here and there he picked up a stray job or two. But he was
plainly inefficient for most tasks assigned him... In the small towns
there were not enough jobs to go round ... young men were returning
from overseas and dislodging the incompetents who had achieved
prosperity because of the labor shortage. The inland cities were in
the grip of strikes ... there were plenty of jobs, but few with the
temerity to attempt to fill them. And, besides, what had Fred Starratt
to offer in the way either of skill or brawn?... He grew to know the
meaning of impotence. No, he was a creature of the paved streets, and
to the paved streets he returned as swiftly as his feet and his
indifferent fortune could carry him. Besides, he had grown hungry for
familiar sights and faces, and perhaps, down deep, curiosity had been
the mainspring of his return. Even bitter ties have a pull that cannot
always be denied. At Fairview the presence of Monet had held him
almost a willing captive. There was something about the flame burning
in that almost frail body that had lighted even the ugliness of
Fairview with a strange beauty. He could not think of him as dead.
That last moment had been too tinged with the haunting poetry of life.
How often he had reconstructed that scene--the gray, sullen rain
pattering on the spent leaves, the quick-rushing sound of a body in
flight, the sudden leap of a soul toward greater freedom! And then the
vision of the churning pool below closing in triumphantly as it might
have done upon some reclaimed pagan creature that had tasted the
bitter wine of exile and returned in leaping joy to its chosen
element! It was not the shock and sadness of death that had sent Fred
Starratt for a moment stark mad into the storm and freedom, but rather
an ecstasy of loneliness ... a yearning to match daring with daring.

And now he was home again, in his own gray-green city, lying beneath
tattered quilts in a hovel, with the selfsame February sun that had
once pricked him to a spiritual adventure flooding in upon him! He
rose and threw open the door. The soft noontide air floated in,
displacing the fetid atmosphere. He looked about the room searchingly.
In the daylight it seemed even more unkempt, but less forbidding. A
two-burner kerosene stove stood upon an empty box just under the
window. On another upturned box at its side lay a few odds and ends of
cooking utensils, shriveling bits of food, a plate or two. He found a
loaf of dry bread and cut a slice from it. This, together with a glass
of water, completed his breakfast.

He tried to brush his weather-beaten clothes into decency with a stump
of a whisk broom and to wipe the dust of the highroad from his almost
spent shoes. But, somehow, these feeble attempts at gentility seemed
to increase his forlorn appearance.

He went over and straightened out the bedcoverings. At least he would
leave the couch in some semblance of order. What did Storch expect him
to do? Come back again for shelter? He had no plans, but as he went
out, banging the door, he felt no wish to return.

His first thought now was to see Ginger. He went to the Turk Street
address. He found a huge frame mansion of the 'eighties converted into
cheap lodgings. The landlady, wearing large jet and gold ornaments,
eyed him suspiciously. Miss Molineaux no longer lived there. Her
present address? She had left none. Thus dismissed, he turned his
steps toward the Hilmers'.

He had expected to come upon the vision of his wife wheeling Mrs.
Hilmer up and down the sidewalk, and yet, when these expectations were
realized, he experienced a shock. There she was, Helen Starratt, in a
black dress and a black hat, pacing with drab patience the full length
of the block and back again. He could not get a good view of her face
because her hat shaded her eyes. Mrs. Hilmer's figure, equally
indistinct, was a shapeless mass of humanity. A child, coming out of a
nearby house with a pair of roller skates in her hand, stood off and
answered his questions, at first reluctantly, but finally with the
importance of encouraged childhood... Who was the lady in the wheeled
chair? Mrs. Hilmer. And the other one in black? Her name was Starratt.
No, she didn't know her very well. But people said she was very sad.
She dressed in black and looked unhappy. Why? Because her husband was
dead. No, there was no mistake--she had heard her mother say so many
times--Mrs. Starratt's husband was dead, quite dead!...

He turned back toward town. _Dead, quite dead_! Well, the child had
reckoned better than she knew!

He retraced his steps slowly, resting upon many hospitable doorsteps
that afternoon. The noise of the city confused him, the stone
pavements hurt his ankles, he was hungry and faint. He did not know
what to do or where to go. Only one shelter lay open to him. Should he
go back to Storch?

Finally, toward five o'clock, he found himself standing upon the
corner of California and Montgomery streets, watching the tide of
office workers flooding homeward. A truant animation was flaming them
briefly. Familiar face after familiar face passed, lighted with the
joy of sudden release from servitude. Fred Starratt was curiously
unmoved. He had fancied that he would feel a great yearning toward all
this well-ordered sanity. He had fancied that he would be overwhelmed
with memories, with regrets, with futile tears. But he knew now that
even if it were possible to re-enter the world in which he had once
moved he would refuse scornfully. Was it always so with those who
achieved death? Ah yes, death was the great progression, one never
re-entered the circle of life one quitted. Dead, quite dead! Or, as
Storch put it, "A field freshly broken to the plow!" A field awaiting
the eternal upspringing and the inevitable harvest... And so on, again
and again, to the end of time!

He came out of his musings with a renewed sense of faintness and the
realization that the street was rapidly being emptied of its throng. A
few stragglers hurried toward the ferry. He roused himself. A
green-gold light was enlivening the west and giving a ghostly
unreality to the street lamps twinkling in a premature blossoming.

He was turning to go when he saw a familiar figure coming up the
street. He looked twice to assure himself that he was not mistaken. It
was Brauer!

He stood a moment longer, roused to indifferent curiosity, but, as
Brauer brushed close, a sudden malevolent hatred shook him. He squared
himself and said in a hoarse tone:

"I'm starving... I want money ... to eat!" Brauer turned a face of
amazed and insolent incredulity toward Fred.

"Well, you won't get it from me!" he flung back.

Fred Starratt grasped Brauer's puny wrist in a ferocious grip.

"Oh yes, I will... Do you know who I am?"

"You? ... No... Let me go; you're hurting me!"

"Look at me closely!"

"I tell you I don't know you. Are you crazy?"

"Perhaps... I've been in an insane asylum... Now do you know who I
am?"

Brauer fell back. "No," he breathed: "it can't be possible! Fred
Starratt is dead."

Fred began to laugh. "You're right. But I want something to eat just
the same. You're going to take me into Hjul's ... and buy me a meal.
... And after I've eaten perhaps you'll hear how I died and who killed
me."

He could feel Brauer trembling in his grasp. A rising cruelty
overwhelmed him. He flung Brauer from him with a gesture of contempt.

"Are we going to eat?" he asked, coldly.

"Yes ... whatever you say."

Fred nodded and together the two drifted down Montgomery Street.

Sitting over a generous platter of pot roast and spaghetti at Hjul's,
with Brauer's pallid face staring up at him, Fred Starratt had the
realization that there was at least one mouselike human to whom he
could play the role of cat.

Brauer did not need to be prodded to speech. He told everything with
the eagerness of a child caught in a fault and seeking to curry the
favor of his questioner. He and Kendricks were placing all the Hilmer
insurance. Yes, they were rebating--that went without saying. And what
else lay at the bottom of Hilmer's generosity? Fred Starratt put the
question insinuatingly. Ah yes, the little matter of standing by when
Starratt had been sent to Fairview. No, Hilmer had made no demand, but
he had advised Brauer to be firm--through his lawyer, of course ... a
hint, nothing more--that some sort of example should be made of men
who...
Yes, that was just as it had happened.

"And you knew where they were sending me?" Fred was moved to demand,
harshly.

"Well ... yes... But Hilmer's lawyer put it so convincingly...
Everything was to be for the best."

"Including your share in the Hilmer business?"

Brauer had the grace to wince. "Well, there was nothing said
absolutely."

"And what did you figure was Hilmer's reason for ... well, wanting me
to summer at Fairview?"

Brauer toyed with a spoon. "There could only be one reason."

"Don't be afraid. You mean that my wife..."

"Yes ... just that!"

Fred Starratt had a sense that he should have been stirred to anger,
but instead a great pity swept him, pity for a human being who could
sell another so shamelessly and not have the grace to deny it. Yes, he
realized now that there were times when a lie was the most
self-respecting and admirable thing in the world.

"It appears that I am dead also. I saw my wife to-day mourning for me
in the most respectable of weeds."

"Your hat, you see--it was found in the water ... not far from the
dead body of your friend... Naturally..."

"Yes, naturally, the wish was father to the thought. Just so!"

And with that Fred Starratt laughed so unpleasantly that Brauer
shivered and his face reddened.

By this time Fred Starratt had finished eating. Brauer paid the check
and the two departed. At the first street corner Brauer attempted to
slip a five-dollar bill into Starratt's hand. He refused scornfully.

"Money? I don't want your money. There is only one thing that will buy
my good will--_your silence_. Do you understand what I mean? ... I'm
not the same man you tricked last July. Then I thought I had
everything to lose. Now I know that no one ever loses anything... You
don't understand me, do you? ... Oh, well, it doesn't matter."

Brauer's frightened lips scarcely moved as he asked:

"Where are you staying?"

"Anywhere I can find a shelter... Last night I spent with an
anarchist... I think he'd blow up almost anyone for just the sheer joy
of it."

Brauer shuddered. "Where will you spend to-night?"

"I think I'll go back to the same place... This morning I was
undecided. But I've heard a lot of things since then... I'm taking an
interest in life again... By the way, the man I'm staying with knows
Hilmer... And I don't think he likes him, either... I'll give you one
tip, Brauer. Never get an anarchist sore at you... _They_ haven't
anything to lose, either."

He had never seen such pallor as that which shook the color from
Brauer's face. He decided not to torment him further.

He had established a sense of the unfathomable for the present and
future terror of his trembling little ex-partner. His revenge, so far
as Brauer was concerned, was complete. He had not the slightest wish
to see Brauer again.

He let his hands close once more tightly about Brauer's puny wrists.

"Remember ... you have not seen me. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Not a living soul ... you are not to even suggest that ... otherwise
... well, I am living with an anarchist, and a word to the wise ..."

He turned abruptly and left his companion standing on the street
corner, staring vacantly after him.

Instinctively his footsteps found their way to Storch's shack. A light
was glimmering inside. Fred beat upon the door. It swung open quickly,
revealing Storch's greenish teeth bared in a wide smile of
satisfaction.

"Come in ... come in!" Storch cried out gayly. "Have a good day?"

"Excellent!" Fred snapped back, venomously. "I learned, among other
things, that I am legally dead."

Storch rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. "A clean slate! Do
you realize how wonderful it is, my man, to start fresh?"

Fred threw himself into a chair. He felt tired. Sharp, darting pains
were stabbing his eyes. "I think I'm going to be ill!" he said, with
sudden irrelevance.

Storch lighted the oil stove. "Crawl into bed and I'll get you
something hot to drink!"

Storch's tone was kind to a point of softness, and yet, later, when he
bent over the couch with a steaming glass in his hand Fred experienced
a sharp revulsion.

"I dreamed all last night," Fred said, almost defiantly, "that this
room was a cobweb and that you were a huge spider, dangling on a
thread."

"And you were the fly, I suppose," Storch replied, sneeringly.

The next instant he had touched Fred's forehead gently, almost
tenderly, but his eyes glittered beneath their shaggy brows with an
insane ferocity... Fred took the glass. He was too ill to care much
one way or the other.




CHAPTER XVIII


Next morning Fred Starratt knew that he was too ill to rise. Then
everything became hazy. He had moments of consciousness when he sensed
Storch's figure moving in a sort of mist, flashing a green smile
through the gloom. He saw other figures, too---Helen Starratt, swathed
in clinging black; Hilmer, displaying his mangled thumb; Monet with
eyes of gentle reproach; and Ginger, very vague and very wistful.
There were times when the room seemed crowded with strange people who
came and went and gesticulated, people gathering close to the dim lamp
which Storch lighted at nightfall.

The visions of Monet were a curious mixture of shadow and reality.
Sometimes he seemed very elusive, but, again, his face would grow
clear to the point of dazzling brightness. At such moments Fred would
screen his eyes and turn away, only in the end to catch a melting
glimpse of Monet fading gradually with a gesture of resignation and
regret. But slowly the outlines of Monet grew less and less tangible
and the personality of Storch more and more shot through with
warm-breathed vitality, and the strange company that gathered at dusk
about the lamp became living things instead of shadows. Yet it took
him some time to realize that these nightly gatherings at Storch's
were composed of real flesh and blood.

At first he was content to lie in a drowse and listen to the
incoherent babblings of these nocturnal visitors, but, as he grew
stronger, detached bits of conversation began to impress themselves
upon him. These people had each some pet grievance and it remained for
Storch to pick upon the strings of their discontents with unerring
accuracy. At about eight o'clock every night the first stragglers
would drift in, reinforced by a steady stream, until midnight saw a
room stuffed with sweating humanity releasing their emotions in a
biting flood of protests. They protested at everything under the
sun--at custom, at order, at work, at play, at love, at life itself.
And Storch, for the most part silent, would sit with folded arms,
puffing at his pipe, a suggestion of genial malice on his face,
throwing out a phrase here and there that set the pack about him
leaping like hungry dogs to the lure of food. In confused moments Fred
Starratt fell to wondering whether he really had escaped from
Fairview, whether the forms about him were not the same motley
assembly that used to gather in the open and exchange whines. The
wails now seemed keyed to howls of defiance, but the source was
essentially the same.