Broken to the Plow / A Novel

by Charles Caldwell Dobie

CHAPTER V

After the first two weeks Fred Starratt's business venture went forward amazingly. His application for membership in the Insurance Broker's Exchange was rushed through by influential friends and he became, through this action, a full-fledged fire insurance broker. He did not need this formality, however, to qualify him as a solicitor in other insurance lines. There was a long list of free lances, where the only seal of approval was an ability to get the business. Automobile liability, personal accident, marine, life—underwriters representing such insurances shared commissions with any and all who had a reasonable claim to prospective success. Therefore, while he was waiting for his final confirmation from fire-insurance circles he took a flyer at these more liberal forms. There seemed no end to this miscellaneous business which, he came to the conclusion, could be had almost for the asking. And all the time he had fancied that the field was overworked! He mentioned this one day to a seasoned veteran in the brokerage world.

"Writing up policies is one thing," this friend had assured him, emphatically; "collecting the premiums is another matter… If your fire-insurance premiums aren't paid up inside of two months, the policies are canceled. But they let the others drag on until the cows come home. There's nothing so intangible in this world as insurance. And people hate to pay for intangibilities."

Starratt refused to be forewarned. The people he went after were personal friends or gilt-edged business men. They wouldn't deny their obligations when the premiums fell due.

But the greatest rallying point for his business enthusiasm proved to be Hilmer. It seemed that scarcely a day went by that Hilmer did not drop a new piece of business Fred's way. Returning to the office at four o'clock on almost any afternoon, he grew to feel almost sure that he would find Hilmer there, bending over Helen's shoulder as he pointed out some vital point in the contract they were both examining. He was a trifle uneasy at first—dreading the day when Hilmer would approach him on the matter of sharing commissions. It was a generally assumed fact that Kendrick, the man who handled practically all of Hilmer's business, was a notorious rebater—that he divided commissions with his clients in the face of his sworn agreement with the Broker's Exchange not to indulge in such a practice. Obviously, then, Hilmer would not be a man to throw away chances to turn such an easy trick.

Starratt voiced these fears to Brauer.

"Sure he expects a rake-off," Starratt's silent partner had said. "Everybody gets it … if they've got business enough to make it worth while."

"Well, he won't get it from me," Fred returned, decisively. "I've signed my name to an agreement and that agreement will stick if I starve doing it!"

Brauer, disconcerted by his friend's vehemence, merely had shrugged, but at another time he said, craftily:

"If Hilmer wants to break even on the fire business he gives us, why can't we make it up some other way?… There's nothing against giving him all the commissions on that automobile liability policy we placed the other day. We can do what we please with that profit."

Starratt flushed. "Can't you see, Brauer, that the principle is the same?"

"Principle! Oh, shoot!… We're out to make money, not to reform business methods."

Starratt made no further reply, but Brauer's attitude rankled. He began to wish that he hadn't allowed Brauer to go in on his venture. 'But it had taken money … more than he had imagined. They had to put a good deposit down on the office furniture, and the rent was, of course, payable in advance. Then came the fee for joining the Broker's Exchange, and he had to borrow money for his personal expenses in the face of his diminished salary check from Ford, Wetherbee & Co. He realized, too, that the difficulties would scarcely decrease, even in the face of brisk business. The office furnishings would one day have to be met in full, the typewriting machine paid for, the stationery and printing bills settled. During all this time he and Helen would have to live and keep up a decent, not to say prosperous, appearance. Yes, even with Helen saving the price of a stenographer, the problem would not be easy. A day would come finally when he would feel compelled to provide Helen with a fair salary. A man couldn't expect even his own wife to go on pounding a typewriting machine for nothing. What he really hoped was that when things began to run smoothly Helen would retire… He had heard her in the old days voice her scorn of the married woman who went out to earn a salary.

"I wouldn't marry a man who couldn't support me!" she used to blaze.

As a matter of fact, he had felt the same way about it—he felt that way still. It hurt him to think that Helen should be wearing the badge of his inefficiency. And then, deep down, he had a masculine distaste for sharing his workday world with a woman. He liked to preserve the mystery of those hours spent in the fight for existence, because he knew instinctively that battle grounds lost their glamour at close range. His Californian inheritance had fostered the mining-camp attitude toward females—they were one of two things: men's moral equals or men's moral superiors. It was well enough to meet an equal on common ground, but one felt in duty bound to enshrine a superior being in reasonable seclusion.

At first he had been doubtful of Helen's ability to adapt herself to such a radical change. Her performance soon set his mind at rest on that score, but he still could not recover quite from the surprise of her unexpected decision. Indifference, amazement, opposition—nothing seemed able to sway her from her purpose. In the end he had been too touched by her attitude to put his foot down firmly against the move… She got on well with Hilmer, too, he noticed. Usually at the end of one of these late afternoon conferences with their chief patron Fred and Hilmer ended up by shaking for an early evening cocktail at Collins & Wheeland's, just around the corner. Hilmer always saw to it that Fred returned to the office with something for Helen—a handful of ginger-snaps from the free-lunch counter, a ham sandwich, or a paper of ripe olives. Once he stopped in a candy shop on Leidesdorff Street and bought two ice-cream cornucopias. Fred used to shake a puzzled head as he deposited these gastronomic trifles upon Helen's desk as he said:

"I don't get this man Hilmer… One minute he insults you and the next minute he's as considerate as a canteen worker… What's he throwing business my way for?"

Helen, munching a gingersnap, would go on with her laborious typewriting, and return:

"Why look a gift horse in the mouth, Freddie?… Women aren't the only riddles in the world."

"I think he comes to see you," he used to throw out in obvious jest.
"That's the only way I can figure it."

"He's like every man … he wants an audience… I guess Mother Hilmer is tired of hearing him rave."

And so the banter would go on until Fred would pull up with a round turn, realizing quite suddenly that he was talking to his wife and not just to his stenographer.

"He'll be at me one of these days on that commission question, you mark my words," he would venture.

"And what are you going to do?"

"Why, refuse, of course, and lose the business."

"Well, don't cross the bridge till you come to it."

She puzzled him more and more. She seemed disturbed at nothing, and yet she glowed with a leashed restlessness that he could not define.

"It's the strain," he would conclude. "She's putting more into this venture of mine than she's willing to admit… After all, women are amazing… They pull and cling at you and drag you back … and then, all of a sudden, they take the bit in their teeth and you can't hold them in… Who would have thought that Helen…"

And here he would halt, overcome with the soft wonder of it.

Business began to pour in from Brauer and, frankly, Fred was disturbed. He wasn't sure of Brauer's business scruples.

"I wonder if he's promising these people rebates," he said to Helen one day, following an avalanche of new risks.

"Well, you'll know soon enough when he begins to collect the premiums," she replied, indifferently.

"But I don't want to wait until then… They tell me this man Kendrick is getting awfully sore at losing so much of Hilmer's business. He'd like nothing better than to hop on to some irregularity in my methods and get me fired from the Exchange… It takes a thief to catch one, you know."

"Oh, why worry?" Helen almost snapped at him. "If Brauer gets us into a mess we can always throw him out."

Starratt's eyes widened. Where did Helen get this ruthless philosophy? Had it always lain dormant in her, or was this business life already putting a ragged edge upon her finer perceptions? But he made no answer. He had never admitted to Helen that Brauer had insisted upon drawing up a hard-and-fast partnership agreement, and taking his note for half of the money advanced in the bargain. It was one of the business secrets which he decided he would not share with anybody—he had a childish wish to preserve some mystery in connection with his venture against the soft and dubious encroachments of his wife.

"Anyway," Helen went on, "as soon as we get running smoothly we can split. No doubt he'll want to pull out when he sees that he can get along without us… Just now he isn't taking any chances. He's holding down his own job and letting us do all the work and the worrying… Oh, he's German, all right, from the ground up."

Fred had often shared this same hope, although he had never voiced it. When the time came, no doubt Brauer would eliminate himself—for a consideration—and set up his own office. But it amazed him to find how swiftly and completely Helen had figured all these things out. Had her mind always worked so coldly and logically under her rather indifferent surface? He still wondered, too, at her efficiency. Was this a product of her social service with the Red Cross during war times?… Being a man, he couldn't concede that a proper domestic training was a pretty good schooling in any direction. He didn't see any relationship between a perfectly baked apple pie and a neatly kept cash book. He had expected his wife to fall down on the mechanical aspects of typewriting, but he forgot that she had been running a sewing machine since she was fifteen years old. And even in his wife's early childhood people were still using lamps for soft effects and intensive reading. Any woman who knew the art of keeping a kerosene lamp in shape must of necessity find the oiling and cleaning of a typewriting machine mere child's play. He didn't realize the affinities of training. It would never have occurred to him to fancy that because he kept his office desk in perfect order he was qualified to do the same thing with a kitchen stove, or that the method he had acquired as office boy, copying letters in the letterpress, would have stood him in good stead if he suddenly had been called upon to make up his own bed. What he did realize was that the leveling process which goes hand in hand with the mingling of sexes in a workday world was setting in. And he resented it. He wanted to coddle illusion … he had no wish for a world practical to the point of bleakness.

One afternoon Hilmer came in at the usual time with a handful of memoranda. It was a violently rainy day—an early March day, to be exact—the sort that refused to be softened even by the beguilements of California. The rain wind, generally warm and humid, had been chilled in its flight over the snow-piled Sierras, and it had pelted down in a wintry flood, banking up piles of stinging hail between warmer showerings. Fred had decided to forgo his soliciting and stay indoors instead. Hilmer greeted him with biting raillery.

"Well, I should think this was a good day to bag a prospective customer," he flung out as he laid his umbrella aside. "Or is business swamping you?"

Fred tossed back a trite rejoinder. Helen went on pounding her machine … she did not even lift her eyes.

"I've got something for you to-day," Hilmer went on, as he unbound the bundle of papers and sat down beside Fred.

Starratt saw the edge of a blue print in Hilmer's hand. This spelled all manner of possibilities, but he checked a surge of illogical hope. "That's fine," he answered, heartily. "But why didn't you send for me? I could have come over. It's bad enough to take your business without letting you bring it in on a day like this…"

Hilmer made a contemptuous gesture. "Wind and weather never made any difference to me… I've traveled twenty miles in a blizzard to court a girl."

"Oh, when a woman's involved, that's different," Fred laughed back.
"There's nothing as alluring here."

"Well, Mrs. Starratt, what do you say?" Hilmer called out to her.
"Your husband doesn't seem to count you in at all."

Helen was erasing a misspelled word. "Married women are used to that," she retorted, flippantly. "Sometimes it's just as well that they overlook us. We get a chance to play our own hand once in a while."

Everybody laughed, including Fred, but the effort hurt him. There was a suggestion of unpleasant mockery in Helen's tone. She seemed to be hiding her contempt behind a thin veil of acrid humor. And somehow this revelation in the presence of Hilmer stung him.

"I'll bet you can't guess what I've got here," Hilmer began again, tapping the bundle of papers with his ringer.

Starratt shook his head and Hilmer tossed him the blue print.

"Not the insurance on your shipbuilding plant?" escaped Fred, incredulously.

Hilmer crossed his legs and settled back in his chair.

"You said it!" he announced. "And it's all going to you after we've settled one question… I've been bringing you in little odds and ends as I've had them … not enough to matter much one way or another … so I haven't bothered to really get down and talk business. This is a half-million-dollar line and a little bit different. It means about fifteen thousand dollars in premiums, to be exact. You can figure what your commission will be at fifteen per cent, to say nothing of how solid this will make you with the street… Later on there 'll be workmen's compensation, boiler insurance, public liability. It's a pretty nice little plum, if I do say so."

Helen stopped her typing. Fred could feel his lips drying with mingled anticipation and apprehension. He knew just what demand Hilmer intended making.

"The question is," Hilmer continued, "how much of the commission are you going to split up with me?"

Fred shrugged. "You know the rules of the Broker's Exchange as well as
I do, Hilmer. I've pledged myself not to do any rebating."

Hilmer did not betray the slightest surprise at Starratt's reply.
Evidently he had heard something of the same argument before.

"Everybody does it," was his calmly brief rejoinder.

"You mean Kendrick, to be exact… I'm sorry, but I don't see it that way."

"Do you mean that you would rather pass up a half-million-dollar line than share the spoils?"

"It isn't a question of choice, Hilmer. You must know I don't want to lose five cents' worth of business. But there are some things a gentleman doesn't do."

He was sorry once the last remark had escaped him, but Hilmer didn't seem disconcerted by the covert inference.

"Scruples are like laws," Hilmer returned, affably. "I never saw one yet that couldn't be gotten round legitimately."

"Oh yes, you can subscribe to any one of the Ten Commandments with your fingers crossed, if you like that kind of a game. But I don't."

Hilmer moved in his seat with an implication of leave-taking. "Well, every man to his own taste," he said, as he reached for the blue print and proceeded to fold it up.

Starratt leaned toward him. His attitude was strangely earnest.

"Do you really like to participate in a game you know to be unfair,
Hilmer?—dishonest, in fact?"

"Participating? I haven't signed any Broker's Exchange agreement. I'm not breaking any pledge when I accept a share of insurance commission. That's up to the other fellow."

"Ah, but you know that he is breaking faith… And a man that will double cross his associates will double cross you if the opportunity presents itself… Would you put a man in charge of your cash drawer when you knew that he had looted some one else's safe?"

"That's not the same thing," Hilmer sneered. "That is, it's only the same in theory. Practically, an insurance broker couldn't double cross me if he wanted to… I wouldn't put a thief in charge of my cash drawer, but I might make him a night watchman. He'd know all the tricks of the trade."

"Including the secret entrances that those on the outside wouldn't know… A crook wouldn't stay all his life on the night-watchman's job, believe me."

He noticed that Helen was regarding him keenly and her glance registered indulgent surprise rather than disapproval. Hilmer, too, had grown a bit more tolerant. He felt a measure of pride in the realization that he could make his points so calmly and dispassionately, putting this rough-hewn man before him on the defensive. But Hilmer's wavering was only momentary; he was not a man to waste time in argument when he discovered that such a weapon was futile.

"Then I understand you don't want the business?"

"Not on those terms."

Hilmer shrugged.

Helen leaned forward and put out a hand. "Let's see!" she half commanded.

Hilmer gave her the blue print and the package of memoranda. She began to unfold one of the insurance forms, bending over it curiously. Fred was puzzled. He knew that Helen was too unacquainted with insurance matters to have any knowledge of the printed schedule she was studying, yet he had to concede that she was giving a splendid imitation of an experienced hand. Her acting annoyed him. He turned toward Hilmer with an indifferent comment on the weather and the talk veered to inconsequential subjects. Helen continued her scrutiny of the forms.

Finally Hilmer rose to go. Helen made no move to return the memoranda. Fred cleared his throat and even coughed significantly, but Helen was oblivious. Presently Starratt went up to his wife and said, deliberately:

"Hilmer is going … you better give him back his papers."

She turned a glance of startled innocence upon them both. "Oh!" she exclaimed, petulantly. "How disappointing…and just as I was becoming interested… Why don't you men go have your usual drink? I'll be through with them then."

Hilmer gave a silent assent and Fred followed him. There didn't seem to be anything else to do. On the way out they met Hilmer's office boy in the corridor. Hilmer was wanted on a matter of importance at the office. He waved a brief farewell to Fred and left.

Fred went back to his wife. She had abandoned the forms and was lolling in her chair, sucking at an orange.

"Hilmer's been called suddenly to his office on business," he said, brusquely. She turned and faced him. "You'd better put those papers in the safe. I'll take them back myself to-morrow. I can't see what possessed you to insist on looking them over, anyway."

She squeezed the orange in her hand. "Well, when we get ready to handle the business I want to know something about it."

He stared. "Handle the business? You heard what I said, didn't you?"

"Yes, I heard," she said, wearily, and she went on with her orange.

He did not say anything further, but the next morning a telephone message put to rout his resolve to return Hilmer's insurance forms in person.

"I've got to go up Market Street to see a man about some workmen's compensation," he explained to Helen. "You'd better put on your hat and take those things to Hilmer yourself."

She did not answer…

He returned at three o'clock. Helen was very busy pounding away at the typewriter.

"Well, what's all the rush?" he asked.

"I'm getting out the forms on Hilmer's shipping plant," she returned, nonchalantly.

"What do you mean?… Didn't you…"

"No … he's decided to let us handle the business."

"Why … on what grounds?"

She waved a bit of carbon paper in the air. "How should I know? I didn't ask him!"

Her contemptuous indifference irritated him. "You ought to have waited until I got back… You've probably got everything mixed up… It takes experience to map out a big schedule like that."

"Hilmer showed me what to do," she retorted, calmly.

"Then he's been over here?"

"Yes … all morning."

He narrowed his eyes. She went on with her typewriting.

"Well, I'll be damned!" escaped him.

His wife replied with a tripping laugh.

At that moment Brauer came in. "I hear you've got the Hilmer line," he broke out, excitedly. "They say Kendrick is wild… How much did you have to split?"

"Nothing," Starratt said, coldly.

"Nothing?" Brauer's gaze swept from Starratt to Helen and back again.
"How did you land it, then?"

Helen stood up, thrusting a pencil into her hair.

"I landed it, Mr. Brauer," she said, sweetly, tossing her husband a commiserating smile.

Brauer's thin lips parted unpleasantly. "I told you at the start,
Starratt, that a good stenographer would work wonders."

Fred forced a sickly laugh. He wished that Helen Starratt had stayed at home where she belonged.

It had been a long time since the insurance world on California Street had been given such a chance for gossip as the shifting of the Hilmer insurance provided. Naturally, business changes took place every day, but it was unusual to have such a rank beginner at the brokerage game put over so neat a trick. Speculation was rife. Some said that Hilmer was backing the entire Starratt venture, that he, in fact, was Starratt & Co., with Fred merely a salaried man, allowing his name to be used. Others conceded a partnership arrangement. But Kendrick announced in a loud tone up and down the street:

"Partnership nothing! I know Hilmer. He's got too many irons in the fire now. He wouldn't be annoyed with the insurance game. This fellow Starratt is rebating—that's what he is!"

Of course the street laughed. Kendrick's indignation was quite too comic, considering his own reputation. To this argument, those who held to the proprietor and partnership theories replied:

"That may all be, but he wastes an awful lot of time in Starratt's office for a fellow who's so rushed with his other ventures."

It was at this point that a few people raised their eyebrows significantly as they said:

"Well, the old boy always did have a pretty keen eye for a skirt."

It was impossible for Fred Starratt to move anywhere without hearing fragments of all this gossip. During the noon hour particularly it filtered through the midday tattle of business, pleasure, and obscenity—at the Market, at Collins & Wheeland's, at Hjul's coffee house, at Grover's Lunchroom—everywhere that clerks forgathered to appease their hunger and indulge in idle speculations. Sometimes he got these things indirectly through chance slips in talks with his friends, again scraps of overheard conversation reached his ears. Quite frequently a frank or a coarse acquaintance, without embarrassment or reserve, would tell him what had been said. He soon got over protesting. If he convinced anybody that he was getting Hilmer's business without financial concessions, he had to take the nasty alternative which the smirks of his audience betrayed… It would not have been so bad if he could have explained the situation to himself, but any attempt to solve the riddle moved in a vicious circle. He used to long for a simplicity that would make him accept Hilmer's favors on their face value. Why couldn't one believe in friendship and disinterestedness? Perhaps it would have been easier if he had lacked any knowledge of Hilmer's philosophy of life. Starratt couldn't remember anything in the recital of Hilmer's past performance or his present attitude that dovetailed with benevolence… He retreated, baffled from these speculative tilts, to the refuge of a comforting conviction that fortunately no man was thoroughly consistent. Perhaps therein lay the secret of Hilmer's puzzling prodigality—because, boiled down to hard facts, it was apparent that Hilmer was making Starratt & Co. a present of several hundred dollars a year. Sometimes, in a wild flight of conjecture, he used to wonder how far his argument with Hilmer regarding the ethics of being a negative party to another man's dishonesty had been borne home? It seemed almost too fantastic to fancy that he could have put over his rather finely spun business morality in such a brief flash, if at all.

At first he had plunged in too speedily to his venture to formulate many ideals of business conduct, but as he had progressed he found his standards springing to life full grown.

He had been long enough in the insurance business to realize the estimate that average clients had of an insurance broker—they looked upon him as a struggling friend or a poor relation or an agreeable, persuasive grafter, whose only work consisted in talking them into indifferent acceptance of an insurance policy and then pestering them into a reluctant payment of the premium. Of course big business firms recognized a broker's expertness or lack of it, though, quite frequently, as in Hilmer's case, they were more snared by a share in the profits than by the claims of efficiency. But Starratt wanted to succeed merely on his merit. He wanted to teach people to say of him:

"I go to Fred Starratt because he's the keenest, the most reliable man in the field. And for no other reason."

In short, he wished to earn his commission, and not to share it. He wanted to prove to people that an insurance broker was neither a barbered mendicant nor a genial incompetent. Had he known that a conviction of his ability lay at the bottom of Hilmer's sudden change in business tactics he would have been content. As it was, in spite of the impetus this sudden push gave his career he had moments when he would have felt happier without such dubious patronage. As a matter of fact, Hilmer rather ignored him. He brought in his business usually during Fred's absence from the office, and Helen, under his guidance, had everything ready before her husband had time to suggest any line of action. Forms, apportionments, applications—there did not seem to be a detail that Hilmer had overlooked or Helen had failed to execute. Starratt tried not to appear irritated. He didn't like to admit even to himself that he could be small enough to resent his wife's curious efficiency. But he wished she weren't there. One day he said to her, as inconsequentially as he could:

"I really think, my dear, that I ought to be planning to get a woman here in your place… Now that Hilmer's business is reasonably assured, I can afford it… It's too much to ask of you—keeping up your house and doing this, too."

"Well," she shrugged, "we can board if it gets too much for me."

"You know I detest boarding."

"I can hire help, then. Mrs. Finn would come in by the day. But, as a matter of fact, this isn't any more strenuous than my year of the Red Cross work. I managed then; I guess I can manage now."

"But I thought you didn't like business life."

"I'm not crazy about it … but I want to get you started right.
Suppose you got a girl in here who didn't know how to manage Hilmer?"

He checked the retort that rose to his lips… He couldn't help getting the nasty inferences that people on the street threw at him unconsciously or maliciously, but he could help voicing them or admitting them even to himself.

"Is … is Hilmer so hard to manage?" he found himself inquiring.

Helen looked up sharply. "No harder than most men," she answered, slipping easily from the traces of his cross-examination.

His rancor outran his reserve. "I guess I'm vain," he threw out bitterly, "but I'd like to feel that I could land one piece of business without anybody's help."

She laughed indulgently. "Why, Freddie, that isn't nice! You landed Hilmer at the start… Don't you remember that very first line? On his automobile?"

There was something insincere in her tone, in the lift of her eyes, in her cryptic smile. But he smothered such unworthy promptings. It was fresh proof of his own unreasonable conceit. He turned away from his wife in silence, but he was sure that his face betrayed his feelings.

Presently he felt her standing very close to him. He turned about sharply, almost in irritation. Her mouth was raised temptingly. He bent over and kissed her, but he withdrew as swiftly. Her lips left a bitter taste that he could not define.