CHAPTER XXII

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 prompt.i.tude. 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.d 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, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 cla.s.s 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 circ.u.mstance. 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 ma.s.s ... 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 ign.o.ble 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 c.o.c.k crew l.u.s.tily...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 plat.i.tudes 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.

CHAPTER XXIII

As Storch cleared away the primitive evidences of the morning meal and stood before the sink letting a thin trickle of cold water wash clean the cups he said:

"If we get the ten-o'clock boat to Oakland we will be in plenty of time."

Starratt rolled a cigarette. "Ah, then you are going, too!"

"Naturally," Storch replied, as he turned off the water.

Fred began to dress himself carefully. Storch loaned him an indifferent razor. The shaving process was slow but in the end it was accomplished. Fred was amazed at the freshness of his appearance. Only once before in his life had he deliberately sat up all night without either the desire or determination to sleep, and that was on that night which now seemed so remote when he had felt the first budding of Helen's scorn. He recalled that he had been just as alert and clear-minded on the following morning as he was now. And just as uncertain as to what the future held in store.

Storch also made a careful toilet--for him. He rummaged for a clean flannel shirt, combed his reddish beard, dusted off his clumsy boots.

But they were ready much too soon, like a couple of children promptly dressed for an excursion, impatiently awaiting the hour of departure.

Of the two, Storch evinced the more nervousness. He poked into nooks and corners of the room upon all sorts of pretended orderliness. Fred sat and eyed him calmly--smoking cigarette after cigarette. Finally, Storch lifted the kodak case from its hiding place and set it on the center table. Cautiously he pried loose the false top and peered into its depths. There followed a tense moment during which he bent in a close inspection over its fascinating depths. Presently Fred caught a distinct ticking sound, and he knew that Storch had set in motion the clock upon which depended the bomb's explosion at the appointed hour.

But withal he remained curiously unmoved.