Storch was standing at the lodging-house door when Fred stepped into
the street.
"Well, what now?" Storch inquired, with mock politeness.
"Let's go home!" Fred returned, emphatically.
Almost as soon as the phrase had escaped him he had a sense of its
grotesqueness. Home! Yes, he had to admit that he felt a certain
affection for that huddled room which had witnessed so much spiritual
travail. Somehow its dusty rafters seemed saturated with a human
quality, as if they had imprisoned all the perverse longings and
bitter griefs of the company that once sat in the dim lamplight and
chanted their litany of hate. He never really had been a part of this
company ... he never really had been a part of any company. At the
office of Ford, Wetherbee & Co., at Fairview, at Storch's gatherings,
he had mingled with his fellow-men amiably or tolerantly or
contemptuously, as the case might be, but never with sympathy or
understanding. He knew now the reason--he always had judged them, even
to the last moment, using the uncompromising foot rule of prejudice,
inherent or acquired. In the old days he had thought of these
prejudices as standards, mistaking aversions for principles. He had
tricked his loves, his hates, his preferences in a masquerade of
pretenses ... he had labels for everybody and he pigeonholed them with
the utmost promptitude. A man was a murderer or a saint or a
bricklayer, and he was nothing else. But at this moment, standing in
the light-flooded entrance to Ginger's lodgings, waiting for Storch to
lead him back to his figurative cell, he knew that a man could be a
murderer and a saint and a bricklayer and a thousand other things
besides. And if he were to sit again about that round table of
violence and despair he felt that, while he might find much to stir
hatred, he would never again give scope to contempt.
"You want to go home, eh?" Storch was repeating, almost with a note of
obscene mirth. "Well, our walk has been quieting, at all events."
Fred Starratt said nothing. He was not in a mood for talk. But when
they were inside the house again, with the cracked lamp shade spilling
a tempered light about the room, he turned to Storch and said,
quietly:
"I sha'n't go to sleep to-night, Storch... You throw yourself on the
couch; I've kept you from it long enough."
Storch made a movement toward the door.
"Don't bother to lock it ... I'm not going to run away. I'm not quite
a fool! I know that if I did try anything like that I wouldn't get
farther than the edge of the cliff."
Storch gave him a puzzled glance. Fred could see that he was
uncertain, baffled... But in the end he turned away from the unlocked
door with a shrug.
Fred Starratt smiled with inner satisfaction. He was glad that he had
come back to give Storch that "even break." It was something of an
achievement to have compelled Storch's faith in so slight a thing as a
literal honesty.
But Storch didn't take the couch. He threw his coat aside and crept
into his wretched pile of quilts on the floor, as he said:
"You may want to snatch forty winks or so before the night is over."
There was a warm note in his voice, a bit of truant fatherliness that
added an element of grotesqueness to the situation. He might have used
the same words and tone to a son about to take the highroad to fortune
on the morrow. Or to a lad determined to start upon a sunrise fishing
trip, and impatient of the first flush of dawn. After all, it took
great simplicity to approach the calamitous moments of life through
the channels of the commonplace.
Presently Storch was snoring with the zest which he always brought to
sleep. The night air had chilled the room past the point of comfort
and the lamp seemed to make little headway with its thin volume of
ascending warmth. Fred wrapped himself in a blanket and sat half
shivering in the gloom. At first, detached and unrelated thoughts ran
through his brain, but gradually his musing assumed a coherence.
To-morrow, at this time, he might be either a hunted murderer or a
victim himself of Storch's desperation. In any case, he would be
furnishing the text for many a newspaper sermon. How eagerly they
would trace his downfall, sniffing out the salacious bits for the
furtive enjoyment of the chemically pure! For there would be salacious
bits. Had he not spent the preceding night in the company of a fallen
woman? One by one the facts would be brought out, added to and
subtracted from, until the whole affair was a triumph of the transient
story-teller art, unrelieved by the remotest flash of understanding.
They would interview his former employers first. Mr. Ford would say:
"A steady, conscientious, faithful employee until he became bitten
with parlor radicalism."
And Brauer, rather frightened, yet garrulous, would add, for want of
anything better:
"An honest partner until he began hitting the booze."
There would be his wife, too. "I did all I could. Stood by him to the
last ... even when I discovered that there was another woman."
The authorities at Fairview would doubtless add their note to the
general chorus:
"An exceptional patient. He seemed to have planned deliberately to get
our confidence and then betray it... He was directly responsible for
Felix Monet's death. Without his influence Monet would never have
thought of escape."
And in summing up, the police would declare:
"A bad actor from the word go. One of the sort who reach a certain
point in respectability and then run amuck. A danger to the community
because of his brains."
But what of Hilmer? Fred Starratt had a feeling that Hilmer would be
discreet to a point of silence.
He could see every printed phrase as plainly as if he were reading it
all himself. How many times in the old days had he not perused some
such story over his morning coffee, thanking himself unconsciously
that he was not as other men! How perfectly and smugly he had played
the Pharisee for his own delight and satisfaction! He had not bothered
then to cry his virtues aloud in the market place or to thank God
publicly for his salvation. No, he was too self-sufficient to take the
trouble to advertise his worthiness.
To-night he was on the brink of disaster, and yet he found himself
shuddering at the colorless fate to which his complacence might have
condemned him. To have gone on forever in a state of drowsy
contentment ... to have been surrounded on all sides by the thunderous
cataracts of life and caught only the pretty significance of rainbows
through the spray ... to have remained untouched by any and every
primitive impulse and feeling--he could not now imagine anything more
tragic. And yet, to-morrow, people would hold up the desirability of
his former estate, pointing to him in warning for the soft-armed
profit of an oncoming generation. He saw himself as he might have
been, going on to the end of time in the service of Ford, Wetherbee &
Co., rising from map clerk to counter man, to special agent, perhaps
even to a managership, writing sharp or conciliatory letters to agents
according to their importance, trimming office expense and shaving
salaries, heckling green office boys, and, his workday ended, going
home to _The Literary Digest_ and Helen, fresh from the triumphs of
the golf links or the card table. Yes, no doubt Helen would have
matched his own rise in fortune with equal gentility. Perhaps he might
have taken an hour between office closing and dinner to wield a golf
club himself ... bringing back a desirable guest to dinner or
proposing through the telephone to Helen that they dine at the Palace
or St. Francis... Yes, even at best his imagination could not do more
with the material in hand. Indeed, he knew that he had crowded the
very most that was possible on so small a canvas.
This, then, had been his unconscious life plan, his unvoiced fate.
Thus had he sketched it hazily, as a teller of tales sketches the plot
of a story, such and such a sum being the total of all the characters
and circumstances. But as he had gone on developing it, suddenly a new
character had appeared to change the final figures--a wrench thrown
into the wheel of continuity ... a wrench that bore the name of Axel
Hilmer... He felt no bitterness now for the man. Had he ever felt it?
Axel Hilmer had long ceased to be a living personality to Fred
Starratt. Instead, he had taken on almost the significance of a
strange divinity ... an eternal questioner. At their very first
meeting he had started the ferment in Fred Starratt's soul with the
directness of his interrogations. He was not a man who declared his
own faiths ... he merely asked you to prove yours. The questions he
had asked Fred Starratt on that first night had been insignificant in
themselves. Why was it ridiculous for a butcher to want an eight-hour
day? Why should one have the firm's interest at heart? And yet the
sparks from such verbal flint stones had kindled a revolt that had
wrecked Fred Starratt's complacence.
One's sight becomes strengthened to destructive ideas by gradual
perception. And ideas of any kind are destructive flashed on
consciousness unawares. Fred had thought at first that Hilmer had but
opened his eyes to things standing in his range of vision, when, as a
matter of fact, Hilmer had merely loaned him his spectacles.
Everything he had seen from that first moment had been through
Hilmer's medium. A wise man would have proceeded slowly, building
himself up for the struggle. But Fred Starratt had had all the wistful
enthusiasm of a fool seeking to achieve power overnight. Yes, only a
fool could have been ashamed of his heritage. And when Hilmer had
placed him calmly in the ranks of the middle class the wine of content
had turned suddenly sour. A year ago his efforts were being directed
at escape from so contemptuous a characterization; to-night he was
content to acknowledge the impeachment and find a pride in the
circumstance. And, as he sat there shivering in the gloom of Storch's
cracked lamp, he had a vision of this scorned company to which he
unquestionably belonged, sterile and barren in the glare of accepted
standards, broken gradually by the plowshare of disillusionment and
harrowed to great potentialities by a deeper sense of their faiths and
needs. Yes, he had a conviction that what could take place in one soul
could take place in the soul of the mass ... he had not changed his
standards so much as he had proved them. The shape and color and
perfume of love and loyalty and faith had not been altered for him,
but he could discover their blossoming among the shadowy places.
At a black hour, before the first greenish glow was quickening the
east, he tiptoed and stood gazing down at Storch. He had never seen a
face more placid and untroubled. He felt that any man must have an
extraordinary sense of self-righteousness to yield so completely to
serenity in the face of deliberate crime. But Storch was of the stuff
of which all fanatics were made. Ends to him always justified means.
Of such were the Inquisitors of Spain, the Puritans of the
Reformation, the radicals of to-day. They had neither doubts nor fears
nor pity, and the helmets of their faith were a screen behind which
they hid their overweening egotism. They were ever seeking to entrap
humanity and humanity was forever in the end eluding them. And if
Hilmer were the eternal questioner made flesh, the gamekeeper beating
the furtive birds from the brush, this man Storch was the eternal
hunter, at once patient and relentless for his quarry.
And now the hunter slept with a smile on his lips. Of what could he be
dreaming? Was it possible to dream of smile-fashioning themes with
potential destruction within a stone's throw? In a corner of this
room, in a well-packed square case, reposed the force that, once set
in motion at the proper or miscalculated moment, could hurl both
Storch and Fred Starratt to eternity, and yet Storch slept
undisturbed. Well, was not the broader canvas of life full of just
such profound faith or profound indifference? Did not society itself
sleep with the repressed hatreds of the submerged waiting their
appointed season? And while new worlds flew flaming from the wheel of
creation, and old ones died in an eye's twinkling, did not the race
dream on contemptuous of the changes which lurked in the restless
heavens? Yes, the meanest coward in existence had his innate courage
and there was a note of bravery in life on any terms.
Fred stood before Storch's sleeping form a long time, and all manner
of impulses stirred him. There was even a moment when it came to him
that he might fall upon his gaoler while he slept and achieve a swift
freedom. And every ignoble murder of legend or history beckoned him
with the hands of red expediency. He ended by going to the door and
opening it cautiously as he had done the night before. But this time
the operation was more skillful and no warning click disturbed the
slumberer. He crept out into the night, down the cliff's edge, looking
back for the betraying shadow of a hidden spy. But there seemed to be
nothing to block his freedom. A virginal moon was languishing upon the
western rim of hills...a solitary cock crew lustily...occasional
footfalls floated up from the paved streets below...a cart rumbled in
the gloom. All these noises of the night were extraordinarily
friendly...like the smothered murmurings of a youth escaping from the
chains of sleep in pleasant dreaming.
A swarm of platitudes surging through his brain urged him to flight.
But in the end self-esteem gave him his final cue, and he knew in a
flash how futile would be any truce with cowardice. A locked door
would have justified escape, but in the face of an unlatched threshold
there was only one course conceivable.
Fred Starratt went back and wrapped himself in his blanket. Toward
daylight Storch arose and filled a pot with coffee. But neither spoke
a word.