"Like a field broken to the plow!"

There was a terrible beauty in the phrase. Was sorrow the only plowshare that turned the quiescent soul to bountiful harvest? Was it better to reap a whirlwind than to see a shallow yield of unbroken content wither to its sterile end?

He found Ginger's lodgings that night, in a questionable quarter of the town, but she did not respond to his knock upon the door.

"Why don't you try the streets, then?" Mrs. Hilmer's sneer recurred with all its covert bitterness.

The suggestion made him sick. And he had fancied all along that ugliness had lost the power to move him ... that he was prepared for the harsh facts of existence!

He waited an hour upon the street corner, and when she came along finally she was in the company of a man... He grew suddenly cold all over. When they pa.s.sed him he could almost hear his teeth chattering.

They disappeared, swallowed up in the sinister light of a beguiling doorway. He stared for a moment stupidly, then turned and fled, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He realized now that he had reached the heights of bitterest ecstasy and the depths of profound humiliation.

Storch was alone, bending close to the lamp, reading, when Fred Starratt broke in upon him. He did not lift his head.

Fred went softly into a corner and sat down... Finally, after a while, Storch laid his book aside. He gave one searching look at Fred's face.

"Well, have you decided?" he asked, with calm directness.

Fred's hands gave a flourish of resignation. "Yes... I'll do it!" he answered in a whisper.

Storch picked up his book again and went on reading. Presently he lifted his eyes from the printed page as he said:

"We won't have any more meetings here... Things are getting a little too dangerous... How soon will the job be finished?"

Fred rose, shaking himself. "Within two weeks, if it is finished at all!"

He went close to Storch and put a hand upon his shoulder. "You know every bitter thing ... tell me, why does a man love?"

Storch laughed unpleasantly. "To breed hatred!"

Fred Starratt sat down again with a gesture of despair.

CHAPTER XX

From this moment on Fred Starratt's existence had the elements of a sleepwalking dream. He felt himself going through motions which he was powerless to direct. Already Storch and his a.s.sociates were allowing him a certain aloofness--letting him set himself apart with the melancholy arrogance of one who had been chosen for a fanatical sacrifice.

Replying to Storch's question regarding his plans, he said, decidedly:

"I leave all that to you... Give me instructions and I'll act. But I want to know nothing until the end."

"Within two weeks... Is there a special reason why ..."

"Yes ... a very special reason."

Storch turned away. But the next day he said, "Have you that card that Hilmer gave you?"

Fred yielded it up.

Storch smiled his wide, green smile. Fred asked no questions, but he guessed the plans. A spy was to be worked in upon Hilmer.

Every morning now Fred Starratt found a silver dollar upon the cluttered table at Storch's. He smiled grimly as he pocketed the money. He was to have not a care in the world. Like a perfect youth of the ancients marked for a sweet-scented offering to the G.o.ds, he was to go his way in perfect freedom until his appointed time. There was an element of grotesqueness in it all that dulled the edge of horror which he should have felt.

Sometimes he would sally forth in a noonday sun, intent on solitude, but usually he craved life and bustle and the squalor of cluttered foregrounds. With his daily dole of silver jingling in his pocket he went from coffeehouse to coffeehouse or drowsed an hour or two in a crowded square or stood with his foot upon the rail of some emasculated saloon, listening to the malcontents muttering over their draughts of watery beer.

"Ah yes," he would hear these last grumble, "the rich can have their grog... But the poor man--he can get it only when he is dying ...

providing he has the price."

And here would follow the inevitable reply, sharpened by bitter sarcasm:

"But all this is for the poor man's good ... you understand. Men work better when they do not indulge in follies... They will stop dancing next. Girls in factories should not come to work all tired out on Monday morning. They would find it much more restful to spend the time upon their knees."

It was not what they said, but the tone of it, that made Fred Starratt shudder. Their laughter was the terrible laughter of sober men without either the wit or circ.u.mstance to escape into a temperate gayety of spirit. He still sat apart, as he had done at Fairview and again at Storch's gatherings. He had not been crushed sufficiently, even yet, to mingle either harsh mirth or scalding tears with theirs. But he was feeling a pa.s.sion for ugliness ... he wanted to drain the bitter circ.u.mstance of life to the lees. He was seeking to harden himself to his task past all hope of reconsideration.

He liked especially to talk to the cripples of industry. Here was a man who had been blinded by a hot iron bolt flung wide of its mark, and another with his hand gnawed clean by some gangrenous product of flesh made raw by the vibrations of a riveting machine. And there were the men deafened by the incessant pounding of boiler shops, and one poor, silly, lone creature whose teeth had been slowly eaten away by the excessive sugar floating in the air of a candy factory. Somehow this last man was the most pathetic of all. In the final a.n.a.lysis, his calling seemed so trivial, and he a sacrifice upon the altar of a petty vanity. Once he met a man weakened into consumption by the deadly heat of a bakeshop. These men did not whine, but they exhibited their distortions with the malicious pride of beggars. They demanded sympathy, and somehow their insistence had a humiliating quality. He used to wonder, in rare moments of reflection, how long it would take for all this foul seepage to undermine the foundations of life. Or would it merely corrode everything it came in contact with, very much as it had corroded him? Only occasionally did he have an impulse to escape from the terrible estate to which his rancor had called him. At such intervals he would turn his feet toward the old quarter of the town and stand before the garden that had once smiled upon his mother's wooing, seeking to warm himself once again in the sunlight of traditions. The fence, that had screened the garden from the nipping wind which swept in every afternoon from the bay, was rotting to a sure decline, disclosing great gaps, and the magnolia tree struggling bravely against odds to its appointed blossoming. But it was growing blackened and distorted. Some day, he thought, it would wither utterly... He always turned away from this familiar scene with the profound melancholy springing from the realization that the past was a pale corpse lighted by the tapers of feeble memory.

One afternoon, accomplishing again this vain pilgrimage, he found the tree snapped to an untimely end. It had gone down ingloriously in a twisting gale that had swept the garden the night before.

In answer to his question, the man intent on clearing away the wreckage said:

"The wind just caught it right... It was dying, anyway."

Fred Starratt retraced his steps. It was as if the old tree had stood as a symbol of his own life.

He never went back to view the old garden again, but, instead, he stood at midnight upon the corner past which Ginger walked with such monotonous and terrible fidelity. He would stand off in the shadows and see her go by, sometimes alone, but more often in obscene company.

And in those moments he tasted the concentrated bitterness of life.

Was this really a malicious jest or a test of his endurance? To what black purpose had belated love sprung up in his heart for this woman of the streets? And to think that once he had fancied that so withering a pa.s.sion was as much a matter of good form as of cosmic urging! There had been conventions in love--and styles and seasons!

One loved purity and youth and freshness. Yes, it had been as easy as that for him. Just as it had been as easy for him to choose a nice and pallid calling for expressing his work-day joy. He could have understood a feeling of sinister pa.s.sion for Sylvia Molineaux and likewise he could have indulged it. But the snare was more subtle and cruel than that. He was fated to feel the awe and mystery and beauty of a rose-white love which he saw hourly trampled in the grime of the streets. He had fancied once that love was a matter of give and take ... he knew now that it was essentially an outpouring ... that to love was sufficient to itself ... that it could be without reward, or wage, or even hope. He knew now that it could spring up without sowing, endure without rain, come to its blossoming in utter darkness. And yet he did not have the courage of these revelations. He felt their beauty, but it was the beauty of nakedness, and he had no skill to weave a philosophy with which to clothe them. If it had been possible a year ago for him to have admitted so cruel a love he knew what he would have done. He would have waited for her upon this selfsame street corner and shot her down, turning the weapon upon himself. Yes, he would have been full of just such empty heroics. Thus would he have expressed his contempt and scorn of the circ.u.mstance which had tricked him. But now he was beyond so conventional a settlement.

The huddled meetings about Storch's shattered lamp were no more, but in small groups the scattered malcontents exchanged whispered confidences in any gathering place they chanced upon. Fred Starratt listened to the furtive reports of their activities with morbid interest. But he had to confess that, so far, they were proving empty windbags. The promised reign of terror seemed still a long way off.

There were moments even when he would speculate whether or not he was being tricked into unsupported crime. But he raised the question merely out of curiosity... Word seemed to have been pa.s.sed that he was disdainful of all plans for setting the trap which he was to spring.

But one day, coming upon a group unawares in a Greek coffeehouse on Folsom Street, he caught a whispered reference to Hilmer. Upon the marble-topped table was spread a newspaper--Hilmer's picture smiled insolently from the printed page. The gathering broke up in quick confusion on finding him a silent auditor. When they were gone he reached for the newspaper. A record-breaking launching was to be achieved at Hilmer's shipyard within the week. The article ended with a boastful fling from Hilmer to the effect that his plant was running to full capacity in spite of strikes and lockouts. Fred threw the paper to the floor. A chill enveloped him. He had caught only the merest fragments of conversation which had fallen from the lips of the group he had surprised, but his intuitions had been sharpened by months of misfortune. He knew at once what date had been set for the consummation of Storch's sinister plot. He rose to his feet, shivering until his teeth chattered. He felt like a man invested with all the horrid solemnity of the death watch.

CHAPTER XXI

That night Storch confirmed Fred's intuitions. He said, pausing a moment over gulping his inevitable bread and cheese:

"I have planned everything for Sat.u.r.day."