Broken to the Plow Part 23

The inmates of Ward 6, from whom Fred had stood aloof, welcomed him warmly. He was at a loss to know why until Monet explained.

"It's the cigarettes."

"Ah, then you distributed them here? I thought they went to the other poor devils."

The youth turned a wistful glance toward him. "I knew you'd get over to this place finally ... and I wanted them to like you..."

Fred fell silent over the implied rebuke.

The dormitories were large and light and airy and scrupulously clean, but the usual inst.i.tutional chill pervaded everything... Yet, for a season, Fred Starratt found all discrimination smothered in his reaction to normal sights and sounds. But, after a day or two, the same human adaptability that had made him accept the life in Ward 1 as a matter of course rose to the new environment and occasion. Presently his critical faculty flooded back again--almost for the first time since his arrest. And he knew instinctively that he was standing again on surer ground. He began to wonder, for instance, just what the commonwealth was doing for these human derelicts which it shed such facile tears over... He knew, of course, what it had done in his case.

It had given him three indifferent meals, vaccinated him, put him through a few stereotyped quizzes to a.s.sure itself that he was neither insane nor criminal, and finally moved him on to a less trying but an equally vacuous existence. He used to wonder just what tortures the others had endured during that week of probation in Ward 1, which, in nearly every case, so far as he could learn, included the experience of the bull pen. For, after all, these other men were physically shaken from excess--weak, spent, tremulous. He had been through mental tortures, but, at least, his body and soul had had some fitness for the strain upon him. How close did the winds of madness come to snapping clean these empty reeds ... how many were broken utterly? He asked Monet.

"Lots of them go under," Felix Monet had returned. "I think I came very near it myself... I remember that first night I spent alone in Ward One... I'd been three weeks without a drop of anything to drink.

Cut off, suddenly, like that!" He made a swift gesture. "And all at once I found myself in a madhouse. I actually knocked my head against the wall that night... And, in the morning, came the bull pen... They knew I wasn't insane. My record--everything--proved that! ... When I protested, their excuse was that everyone was equal here ... there were no favorites. ... More lies in the name of equality! The thing doesn't exist--it never has existed. Nothing is equal, and trying to make it so produces h.e.l.l. They're always trying to level ... level.

They want to strip you of everything but your flock mind. Ah yes, timid sheep make easy herding!"

For the first time Fred Starratt saw Monet quivering with unleashed conviction, and he glimpsed the hidden turbulence of spirit which churned under the placid surface.

"After a while," Monet went on, "when I got almost to the snapping point, they sent me to Ward Six. You know how it is--like a clear, cold plunge ... it wakes you up... There's a method in it all. They know that after a week in h.e.l.l you find even purgatory desirable."

"And yet, once you got away, you traveled the same road that had brought you here in the first place... Was the game worth the candle?"

"It was an escape while it lasted, even though it did lead me to prison again... But isn't that where escape always leads? The world is a good deal like Fairview--a rule-ridden inst.i.tution on a larger scale... We escape for a time in our work, in our play, in our loves, but the tether's pretty short. ... And finally, one day, death swings the door open and we go farther afield."

"To another inst.i.tution with a little more garden s.p.a.ce?" Fred queried, pensively.

Monet shrugged. "Perhaps... Who knows?"

There followed another week of idleness, and one day, as Fred Starratt was dawdling in the sun, Harrison came up to him and said:

"The head waiter in the dining room at Ward Six goes out to-morrow.

Would you like his job?"

"Like it?" Fred found himself echoing, incredulously. "Can I begin at once ... now?"

Harrison chuckled with rare good nature. "Well, to-morrow, anyway.

Just report in the kitchen after breakfast."

He could hardly wait for the next morning to come. He bungled things horribly at first. It looked easy enough from the side lines--bringing in the plates of steaming food, doling out sugar for the tea, pa.s.sing the dishpan about at the end of the meal for the inmates to yield up their knives and forks. But after the first day Fred was swept with a healing humility. It was necessary for even the humblest occupation to be lighted with flickerings of skill.

He liked setting the table best, especially in the morning after the breakfast crowd had gone. Then the sun was not yet too hot for comfort and the long dining room was bathed in a golden mist. In a corner near one of the windows a canary hopped blithely about its bobbing cage and released its soul in a flood of song. He would begin by laying the plates first, inverted, in long, precise rows. Then carefully he would group the knives and forks about them. Not only carefully, but slowly, so that the task might not be accomplished too readily. And all the time his thoughts would be flying back and forth ... back and forth, like a weaver's shuttle. At first these thoughts would pound harshly; but gradually, under the spell of his busy hands, he would find his mental process growing less and less painful, until he would wake up suddenly and find that he had been day dreaming, escaping for a time into a heaven of forgetfulness.

Toward the end of the month a crew was picked among the inmates of Ward 6 to man a construction camp a few miles to the north where the state was building a dam. Clancy was among the number, and Fordham and Wainright, junior. Monet was offered the choice of a.s.sisting Fred Starratt in the dining room or going out with the kitchen staff to camp. He chose the dining-room job.

The only personal news from the outside world came to Fred in a weekly letter from Helen, which arrived every Sat.u.r.day night. He used to tear the envelopes open viciously and read every word with cold disdain. He never thought of answering one ... indeed, many a time he had an impulse to send them back unopened. But curiosity always got the better hand. Not that he found her news of such moment, but her dissimulation fascinated him. She never chided him for not replying ... she never complained ... but every line was flavored with the self-justification of all essential falseness. She was playing a game with herself as completely as if she had written the letters and then scribbled her own name upon the envelope. She was looking forward to the day when she could say:

"I did my duty ... I helped start him in business ... I saved him from jail ... I wrote him a letter every week, in spite of the fact that he never answered me... What more would you have a woman do?"

What more, indeed? How completely he read her now! Yes, even between the lines of her nonchalant gossipings he could glimpse her soul in all its intricate completeness. Her letters were salt on his deadened wound. Perhaps that was why he did not return them unopened. He felt vaguely that it would be a shameful thing to be ultimately sealed to indifference.

But one Sat.u.r.day night two letters were put into his hand. He read the strange one first.

I have not written you before because I had no news for you.

Yesterday I pa.s.sed Hilmer's house and saw your wife wheeling Mrs. Hilmer up and down the sidewalk. Some day when I get a chance I shall speak to Mrs. Hilmer.

I am living in a lodging house on Turk Street. My name is Sylvia Molineaux. You will find my address below. Write and tell me what you want. And always remember that I am here watching.

GINGER.

CHAPTER XV

Toward the middle of the following week Fred answered Ginger's letter.

But his phrases were guarded and his description of life at the hospital full of studied distortion. He knew quite well that every letter which left the inst.i.tution was opened and censored, but, with certain plans lying fallow in his brain, he had a method back of the exaggerated contentment he pictured. He had a feeling that Ginger would not be misled altogether. She knew the deceitful bravado of life too well and, according to her own report, something of the existence he was leading in the bargain. He found himself curiously willing to take anything from her hand that was in her power to supply. He felt no sense of awkwardness, no arrogant pride, no irritating obligation.

She had become for him one of the definite, though unexplainable, facts of existence which he accepted with all the simplicity of a child of misfortune.

She answered promptly, sending cigarettes and tobacco and a pipe. But her letter was devoid of news---except that she had pa.s.sed Hilmer's again and found Helen wheeling Mrs. Hilmer back and forth in the sunshine at the appointed hour. But, as time wore on, it transpired that this seemingly innocent pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing of the Hilmer house carried unmistakable point. Presently, to Mrs. Hilmer, basking in the sun and deserted for a moment, Ginger had nodded a brief good-morning.

There followed other opportunities for even more prolonged greetings until the moment when Ginger had boldly carried on a short conversation in the coldly calm presence of Helen Starratt. Helen must have known Ginger. It was inconceivable that any woman, under the circ.u.mstances, could have forgotten. But either indecision or a veiled purpose made her a.s.sume indifference, and Ginger's progress was registered in a short sentence at the end of a brief scrawl which said:

To-day I took a book out and read to Mrs. Hilmer for an hour in the sunshine.

And later another statement forwarded this curious drama with pregnant swiftness:

Yesterday, I told Mrs. Hilmer about you.

Fred read this sentence over and over again. To what purpose did Ginger discuss him with Mrs. Hilmer? ... Surely not altogether in the name of entertainment.

Meanwhile, summer died, hot and palpitant and arid to the end. And autumn came gently with cool, foggy mornings and days of sunshine mellowed like old gold. Fred Starratt rose in rapid succession to the position of pantryman, head waiter to the attendants, a.s.sistant bookkeeper in the office. He was given more and more freedom. Indeed, between the working intervals, undisturbed by even a formal surveillance, he and Monet fell to taking walks far afield. He found the shorter days more tolerable. With dusk coming on rapidly, it was easier to accept the inflexible rule that required everyone to be in bed and locked up by seven o'clock.

New faces made their appearance in Ward 6, old ones vanished. Clancy made a get-away sometime in September just before the construction camp broke up. Fordham tried also, but was unsuccessful, and got a month in the bull pen for his pains. These adventures stirred everyone to vague restlessness. Fred began to speculate on chances, talking them over with Monet. But the boy seemed listless and depressed, without enthusiasm for anything. He brooded a great deal apart.

Finally one day Fred asked him what was troubling him.

"I miss my music," he said, briefly.

Fred prodded further. His need was, of course, for a violin.

"We'll write Ginger," Fred decided at once.

It had seemed quite a matter of course until he sat down with pen in hand and then he had a feeling that this last demand was excessive. He fancied she would achieve it someway, and he was not mistaken. The violin came and, everything considered, it was not a bad one. Monet's joy was pathetic. Fred wrote back their thanks. "How did you manage it?" he asked.

Her reply was brief and significant: "You forget I know all kinds of people."

From the moment the violin arrived Monet was a changed man. Suddenly he became full of nervous reactions to everything about him. He lost all his sluggish indifference, he talked of flight now with fascinating ardor.