Broken to the Plow Part 22

CHAPTER XIII

The first week pa.s.sed in an inferno of idleness. Fred Starratt grew to envy even the wretches who were permitted to carry swill to the pigs.

There once had been a time in his life when ambition had p.r.i.c.ked him with a desire for affluent ease... He had been grounded in the religious conviction that work had been wished upon a defenseless humanity as a curse. He still remembered his Sabbath-school stories, particularly the scornful text with which the Lord had banished those two erring souls from Eden. Henceforth they were to work! To earn their bread by the sweat of their brows! He had a feeling now that either G.o.d had been tricked into granting a boon or else the scowl which had accompanied the tirade had been the scowl that a genial Father threw at his children merely for the sake of seeming impressive. At heart the good Lord must have had only admiration for these two souls who refused to be beguiled by all the slothful ease of Eden, preferring to take their chances in a world of their own making... And he began to question, too, either the beauty or contentment of the heaven which offered the vacuous delights of idleness. It seemed, perhaps, that the theologians had mixed their revelations, and that the paradise they offered so glibly was really a sinister h.e.l.l in disguise.

After the first day the sights which had sent shudders through him gradually began to a.s.sume the inevitability of custom. Even the vision of the Weeping Willow, sorrowing at death withheld, failed to shake him. The third night he slept undisturbed in the lap of frenzy and madness. There was something at once pathetic and sublime in his adaptability to the broken suits of fortune. He was learning what every man learns sooner or later--to play the hand that is dealt, even in the face of a losing game.

Deep within him he found two opposing currents struggling for mastery--one an overwhelming tide of disillusionment, the other a faith in things. .h.i.therto withheld. Against the uncloaked figures of Helen Starratt and Hilmer loomed Ginger and Monet. Did life always yield compensations, if one had the wit to discern them? In the still watches of the night, when some fleeting sound had waked him, he used to think of Ginger as he had thought when a child of some intangible and remote vision that he could sense, but not define. Would he ever see her again? Suddenly, one night, he realized that he did not even know her name... And Monet, who slept so quietly upon the cot next to him--what would he have done without his companionship? He used to raise himself on his elbow at times and look in the ghostly light of morning at Monet's face, white and immobile, the thin and shapely lips parted ever so slightly, and marvel at the bland and childlike faith that was the basis of this almost breathless and inaudible sleep. Fred had made friendships in his life, warm, hand-clasping, shoulder-thumping friendships, but they had been of gradual unfolding.

Never before had anyone walked full-grown into his affections.

On the third afternoon, sitting in the thick shade of a gracious tree, Monet had told Fred something of his story. He was of mixed breed--French and Italian, with a bit of Irish that had made him blue-eyed, and traces of English and some Dutch. A brood of races that were forever at war within him. And he had been a musician in the bargain, and this in the face of an implacable father who dealt in hides and tallow. There had been all the weakness and flaming and _navete_ of a potential artist ground under the heel of a relentless sire. His mother was long since dead. The father had attempted to force the stream of desire from music to business. He had succeeded, after a fashion, but the youth had learned to escape from the dull pain of his slavery into a rosy and wine-red Eden. ... Three times he had been sent to Fairview "to kick the nonsense out of him!" to use his father's words. He was not embittered nor overwhelmed, but he was pa.s.sive, stubbornly pa.s.sive, as if he had all a lifetime to cross words with Monet, senior. It was inevitable that he would win in the end. He was a child ... he always would be one ... and childhood might be cowed, but it was never really conquered. He was gentle, too, like a child, and sensitive. Yet the horrors which surrounded him seemed to leave him untroubled. It could not be that he was insensible to ugliness, but he rose above it on the wings of some inner beauty...

Once Fred Starratt would have felt some of the father's scorn for Felix Monet--the patronizing scorn most men bring to an estimate of the incomprehensible. What could one expect of a fiddler? Yes, he would have felt something worse than scorn--he would have been moved to tolerance.

The only other man in Ward 1 who was sane was Clancy, the newspaper reporter. But in the afternoons the knot of rational inmates from the famous Ward 6 herded together and exchanged griefs. Fred Starratt sat and listened, but he felt apart. Somehow, most of the stories did not ring quite true. He never had realized before how eager human beings were to deny all blame. To hear them one would fancy that the busy world had paused merely to single them out as targets for misfortune.

And the more he listened to their doleful whines the more he turned the searching light of inquiry upon his own case. In the end, there was something beyond reserve and arrogance in the reply he would make to their direct inquiries:

"What brought me here? ... Myself!"

But his att.i.tude singled him out for distrust. He was incomprehensible to these burden shifters, these men who had been trained to cast their load upon the nearest object and, failing everything else, upon the Lord... They were all either drug users or victims of drink. And, to a man, they were furiously in favor of prohibition with all the strength of their weak, dog-in-the-manger souls. Like every human being, they hated what they abused. They wanted to play the game of life with failure eliminated, and the G.o.d that they fashioned was a venerable old man who had the skill to worst them, but who genially let them walk away with victory.

As Fred Starratt listened day after day to their chatter he withdrew more and more from any mental contact with them. And yet there were times when he felt a longing to pour out his grief into the ears of understanding... He knew that Monet was waiting for his story, but pride still held him in its grip... After all, there was a ridiculous side to his plight. When a man permitted himself to be blindfolded he could not quarrel at being pushed and shoved and buffeted... How absurd he must have seemed to Watson on that day when he had announced so dramatically:

"I said I'd stand by Mrs. Starratt's decision. And I'm a man of my word!"

How much a man would endure simply for the sake of making a fine flourish! He had thought himself heroic at that moment, poor, empty fool that he was, when he really had been the victim of cowardice. A brave man would have cried:

"I said I'd stand by Mrs. Starratt's decision, but I'm not quite an idiot!"

One other topic flamed these poor souls, seeking to kindle a warmth of sympathy for their failures. When the lamentations ceased, they talked of flight. Fred Starratt sat mentally apart and listened. Everybody had a plan. They discussed prospects, previous attempts, chances for failure. Fred learned, among other things, that the search for escaped nationals did not extend much beyond the environs of Fairview. If a man from Ward 6 made a good get-away he held his freedom, unless his kinsfolk const.i.tuted themselves a pack of moral bloodhounds. He realized now that there was nothing as relentless as family pride. It was not so much the alcoholic excess that was resented, but the fact that it led to unkept linen and dirty finger nails and, by the same token, to neighborhood scorn. Concern for a man's soul did not send him to Fairview... But was anybody really concerned for a man's soul?

... Why should they be? ... He ended by quarreling only with the pretense.

Escape! Escape! To get back to the world that they were forever reviling! Like men in the grip of some wanton mistress who could bring them neither happiness nor heroics, either in her company or away from her. Take Fordham, for instance, a lean, purple-faced clerk, who had been sent up for the third time by his wife after two sensational escapes. He hadn't disturbed her, looked her up, gone near her, in fact. But he had laid up alongside an amber-filled bottle in a moldy wine shop somewhere near the Barbary coast. Yes, he had achieved it even in the face of prohibition. And she had got wind of it. Folks had seen him, red-eyed and greasy-coated and bilious-hued, emerging from his haunt in some harsh noon that set him blinking, like a startled owl. Well, she couldn't quite have that, you know! She couldn't have her husband making a spectacle of himself, sinking lower and lower in the h.e.l.l of his own choosing. No! Far better to pick out a h.e.l.l for him ... a h.e.l.l removed discreetly from the gaze of the scornful. ...

And there was Wainright, who, like Monet, had a father. He had married a Runway Girl of the Bearcat Follies ... the sort that patters down from the stage to imprint carmine kisses and embarra.s.sment upon the shining pate of the first old rounder that has an aisle seat. Well, father could not have that, either. He was impatient with the whole performance. Indeed, a less impatient man would have waited and watched Wainright, junior, wind himself in the net which his own hands had set. Instead, he went to the trouble of digging a pit for his son which hastened the inevitable, but did not cure the folly... Wainright had escaped, too, quite casually, one fine spring day when he had been sent out to the barn to help milk the cows. The Runway Girl, in need of publicity, had telegraphed the details to her press agent, following receipt of her husband's letter telling of his exploit. A Runway Girl whose husband-lover broke jail, so to speak, for her, had professional a.s.sets that could not be gainsaid.

And so the story was flashed on the front page of every newspaper in the country, with the result that father dug another pit.

And so tale succeeded tale. Fred grew to accept most of them with large dashes of salt. Not that he doubted the broader strokes with which the effects were achieved, but he mistrusted that many of the finer shadings had been discreetly painted out. He was learning that there was nothing so essentially untruthful as a studied veracity...

Had not he tricked himself with just such carefully heightened details? What he had mistaken for a background of solid truth had proved nothing but pasteboard scenery flooded with a semblance of reality achieved by skillful manipulation of spotlights. He had been satisfied with the illusion because he had wished for nothing better.

And at this moment he was more desolate than any in this sad company, because he seemed the only one who had lost the art of escaping into a world of lies. He had no more spotlights to manipulate. He sat in a gloomy playhouse and he heard only confused voices coming from the stage. He was not even sorry for himself. Whether he was sorry for others he could not yet determine.

One afternoon at the close of the first week, as he was walking back to Ward 1 with Monet, following one of these inevitable experience meetings, he turned to the youth and said:

"You have been here three times now. Have _you_ never thought of escape?"

Monet shrugged. "Yes ... in a way. But I'm no great hand at doing things alone."

They walked on in silence. Finally Fred spoke.

"Suppose you and I try it sometime? ... It will give us something to think about... But we'll go slow. It will just be a game, you understand."

Monet's eyes lit up and his breath came quickly between his parted lips. "You're splendid to me!" he cried. "But the others--you seem to hate them. Why?"

Fred kicked a fallen branch out of his path. "They whine too much!" he muttered.

The boy was right, he _did_ hate them!

At the office he found that a package had come for him in the mail, and a letter. Both had been opened by the authorities. He read the letter first. It was from Helen. She had heard that cigarettes were a great solace to men in his situation, and so she had sent him a large carton of them. She expressed the hope that everything was going well, and she filled the rest of her letter with gossip of the Hilmers. Mrs.

Hilmer was a little better and she was wheeling her out on fine days just in front of the house. The nurse had gone and she was doing everything. But these people had been so good to her! What else was there left to do? She ended with a restrained dignity. She offered neither sympathy nor reproaches. Fred had to concede that it was a master stroke of implied martyrdom. He flung the letter into the nearest wastebasket. He had an impulse to do the same thing with the cigarettes, but the thought of Monet's pleasure in them restrained him. He took the package to the dormitory. Monet had gone up before him.

Fred threw his burden on Monet's bed. The youth gave a low whistle of delight.

"Pall Malls!" he cried, incredulously. "Where did you get them?"

"They came from my wife."

"Oh! ... Don't you want any of them?"

"No."

At the smoking hour Fred saw Monet take out his pitiful little bag of cheap tobacco and roll the usual cigarette.

"What? ... Aren't you smoking Pall Malls?" he asked, with a shade of banter in his voice.

Monet shook his head. "I don't want them, either... What shall we do?

Give them to the others?"

Fred stared through a sudden mist. "Why--yes. Just whatever you like."

That night, when everyone else was asleep, Fred Starratt told Felix Monet his story...

CHAPTER XIV

One morning, at the beginning of the second week of Fred Starratt's stay at Fairview, as he and Monet were swinging back to lunch after a brisk walk, they received orders to fall in line with the inmates of Ward 6.

"Things will be better now," Monet said, with his usual air of quiet rea.s.surance.

And so it proved.

Fred's first introduction was to the dining room. It was not an extraordinary place, and yet Fred gave a little gasp as he entered it and stood staring almost foolishly at the tables set with clean linen.

Three of its sides were made up almost entirely of windows, before which the shades were drawn to shut out the hot noonday sun, and its floor of polished hardwood glistened even in the subdued light. They sat down in the first seats that came to hand, and it was not until some cold meat was pa.s.sed that Fred discovered a knife and fork at his place. The meat was neither choice nor dainty, but somehow just the fact of this knife and fork gave it extraordinary zest. Later on, small pats of b.u.t.ter were circulated and a spoonful of sugar apiece for the tea. And once again he listened to people talk while they ate ... heard a subdued, but sane, laugh or two... There was a smoking room also, not overlarge, but adequate.