Broken to the Plow / A Novel

by Charles Caldwell Dobie

CHAPTER XXIV

He was sitting on a pile of lumber when, an hour later, his thoughts began to run in rational channels again. Before him lay a patch of gray-green bay, flanked on either side by wharves upon which two black-hulled lumber schooners were disgorging their resinous cargo. The strike of the longshoremen was still in progress and the Embarcadero as good as deserted. Armed guards paraded before the entrance to the docks and only occasional idlers sunned themselves and viewed the silent and furtive loading of restive craft straining at their moorings.

He began to wonder dimly whether he had left Storch dead or merely stunned, and, granting either alternative, how definitely this circumstance would halt the plot against Hilmer's life. It was conceivable to him now that Storch might have provided against the possibility of failure, given the role of assassin into the hands of an understudy, to be exact. Suppose Ginger should fail in her warning? Not that he doubted her, but there was a chance that she had been hedged about with all manner of difficulties—perhaps even death. Suddenly with an arresting irrelevance he thought of the child upon Storch's doorstep, hugging her doll close, and as swiftly he remembered the black kodak case upon the center table. He wondered if the child were still sitting there … Perhaps, by this time, a swarm of children were tumbling about the weather-beaten steps. He asked a passer-by the hour. Eleven-thirty! In fifteen more minutes, if the ticking clock within that sinister case performed its function, Storch's dwelling would be tumbling in upon his prostrate body. And, in the face of this, children might be prattling before the threshold. He must go back again!

He jumped to his feet and began to run. In an instant a conflagration of potential disasters leaped up from the spark of the immediate danger. He flew along faster, colliding with irate pedestrians, escaping the wheels of skimming automobiles … Presently the familiar cliff and the tawny path scaling it loomed ahead. He began to climb upward, almost on all-fours, digging his finger nails into the yellow clay in an instinctive effort to pull himself forward. Finally he gained the top … The street, somnolent with approaching noon, was deserted—the child had disappeared. He recovered his whirling senses and looked again. This time he saw that the door of the shack stood open. He took a step forward. A figure loomed in the doorway. He shaded his eyes from the sun's glare and narrowed his lids. It was a woman!

The unexpectedness of this presence overwhelmed him as completely as if he had seen an apparition. For an instant he did not grasp its significance.

Then, in another moment, understanding began to flood in upon him. He felt a great weakness … but he managed to make a trumpet with his hands, calling in a voice that sounded remote:

"Come out! For God's sake, come out!"

He saw the woman start back in a movement of quick confusion, and heard himself call again, this time with muffled agony:

"Ginger!"

There was a tremendous roar … he felt a shower of stones hitting him sharply in the face … He pressed forward … sheets of flame were leaping greedily toward the sky and a string of people poured out into the sun-baked street.

At midnight Fred Starratt, making his way from the outlying districts toward the center of the town, came out of a mental turmoil that had flung him about all day in a series of blind impulses. The air was raucous with the shrill cry of newsboys announcing the details of the morning's sensation. He knew how the journalistic tale would run without bothering to glimpse the headlines. At this time it would be made up for the most part of vague speculations as to who was the prime mover of the enterprise.

The moments following the disaster were now fathomless, but he fancied that he had been outwardly cool, chilled into subconscious calculation by the very violence of the shock … The frenzy had come later when he found himself aboard a ferryboat bound for Oakland. He could not disentangle the mixed impulses which had sent him upon this irrational errand, but he remembered now that a consuming desire to see Hilmer had possessed him. Perhaps an itching for revenge again had sprung into life, perhaps a fury to release a measure of his scorn and contempt, perhaps a mere curiosity to glimpse once more this man whose armor of arrogance remained unpierced … Whatever the urge, it had keyed him to a quivering determination. He had wondered what stupidity possessed him to send Ginger in warning to a man like Hilmer. … With almost psychic power he had created for himself the scene at the depot with Ginger pouring her tremulous message into contemptuous ears. For it was certain that Hilmer had been contemptuous. … Afterward, standing before the north gate of Hilmer's shipyards, a man at his side confirmed his intuitions between irritating puffs from a blackened pipe:

"Nobody can double-cross Hilmer … and they'd better give up trying … He said a launching at noon and it was at noon, you can bet your life on that! … They say a woman tried to scare the old man this morning … He just laughed in her face and came on over."

Almost as the man had finished speaking the crowd surged forward. And in a twinkling Hilmer's machine had swept past, leaving Fred, trembling from head to foot, staring stupidly into a cloud of dust … He had not even glimpsed the occupants! But his failure to achieve whatever vague plan was buffeting him about drove him back to San Francisco. His confused mind had worked with the rational capacity for details which characterizes madness. He knew that Hilmer must wait for the automobile ferry…that the regular passenger boat would reach the other side at least a half hour in advance.

He had been prepared this time for the appearance of Hilmer's car. It came off the boat preceded by a thin line of automobiles, moving slowly. … For a moment he wondered how he would achieve his purpose, and the next thing he knew he had leaped aboard the running board… He remembered long after that his wife had given a cry, that Mrs. Hilmer had stirred ever so slightly, that Hilmer's eyes had widened. Then out of a tense moment of suppressed confusion he had heard his wife's voice floating toward him as she said:

"Ah, then you were not drowned, after all!"

With amazing effrontery he threw open the door and pressed down the emergency seat opposite her.

"No… I swam out of that black pool!"

A slight tremor ran through her. Mrs. Hilmer smiled.

Recalling the scene, he remembered how outwardly commonplace were the moments which followed. Even Hilmer had been surprised into banalities. Fred Starratt might have parted with them but yesterday, for any indications to the contrary, and for an instant he had found all sense of tragedy swallowed up in amazement at the passive tenacity of the conventions.

But sitting there, facing this trio, each busy with his own swift thought, it gradually dawned upon Fred Starratt that now they were afraid of him. Like a captured and blinded Samson he was in a position to bring the temple walls crashing down upon them all. They might elect to be silent, but what a voice he could raise!… He had come out of a chuckling silence to hear Hilmer saying between almost shut teeth:

"I suppose you'll be needing money now, Starratt… Railroad rates have all been raised."

He felt at that moment the same triumph as when Storch had turned the key in its lock… Hilmer always did walk directly to his objective … but there were times when subtleties had more power. He remembered the quiet thrust of his own voice measuring his adversary's expectancy:

"A man in my situation needs nothing, Hilmer … least of all money!"

He never forgot the look of contempt which Hilmer threw at him … but this time it had been a contempt for the unfathomable. Helen's face was white; only Mrs. Hilmer had continued to smile … a set, ghastly, cruel smile of complete satisfaction. And, in the silence which followed, it was Mrs. Hilmer's voice that brought them all back with a start as she said:

"Well, here we are … home again!"

It was the same voice that had broken in upon another tense situation months before with:

"What nice corn pudding this is, Mrs. Starratt…Would you mind telling me how you made it?"

Had they been moving in a circle since that fatal evening, Fred had found himself wondering…or had he merely been dreaming?

The scene which followed had been unforgetable—the chauffeur and Hilmer lifting Mrs. Hilmer into her wheeled chair; Helen Starratt coming forward considerately with a steamer rug for the invalid's comfort; Fred, standing outside the pale of all this activity like a dreamer constructing stage directions for the puppets of his imagination. And out of the almost placid atmosphere of domestic bustle the voice of Mrs. Hilmer again breaking the stillness, this time with a cool and knifelike precision as she said, turning her pale, icy eyes on Helen Starratt:

"My dear, your nurse-girl days are over…We've had you a long time and we can't be too selfish—now that your husband is back!"

Could Fred ever wipe from his memory the startled look which had swept Helen's face as she released her hold on the wheeled chair? Or the diabolical content with which Mrs. Hilmer settled back as she went on slowly, clearly, as if the steady drip of her words fascinated her:

"You wouldn't want to stay here…this is no place for lovers…And, besides, there isn't room for two!"

Helen's hands had fallen inertly at her sides as she stood facing Hilmer, as if waiting for his decision. But he had made no move, he merely had returned her gaze in equal silence. At that moment Mrs. Hilmer's clawlike fingers closed over her husband's mangled thumb with a clutch of triumph and she had turned with a painful twist to dart her venomous scorn at Helen. A fortnight ago the doctors had given Mrs. Hilmer a scant six months of life. But now Fred Starratt knew that she would live as long as her spirits had vengeance to feed upon.

Thus had the door closed upon Hilmer and his crippled gaoler. Already Helen Starratt had gained the street corner. Fred was seized with an impulse to overtake her, but it had died as quickly. There was nothing he could offer … not even a lodging for the night. Instead he had turned and walked briskly in an opposite direction.

* * * * *

As he drew nearer town the cries of the newsboys grew more insistent … so insistent that Fred bought a paper. By this time they had cleared away the charred wreckage of Storch's shack, discovering the secret which its ruins had concealed. He found himself wondering how soon they would link him with the still-born plot which had achieved so much tragedy in spite of its miscarriage. Of Ginger there was little trace. She had been caught up in a winding sheet of flame, a chariot of fire which had swept clean her pitiful and outraged body… Again he saw her face, wistful in the glare of that portentous noon, framed by the outline of Storch's doorway, heard himself call her name in agony, and woke to find only a memory answering him. And there came to him a realization of the terrible beauty of that moment which had released her spirit in white-heated transfiguration.

A sudden pity for the living began to well up within him … for Hilmer in the relentless grip of the harpy who would tear at his content with her scrawny fingers … for Mrs. Hilmer, condemned to feed to the end upon the bitter fruits of hatred … for his wife, drifting to a pallid fate made up of petty adjustments and compromises. Yes … he found himself pitying Helen Starratt most of all. Because he had a feeling that she would go on to the end cloaking her primitive impulses in a curious covering of self-deception. She would never understand … never! She would always be restless, straining at the conventions, but unable or unwilling to pay the price of full freedom. And her remaining days would be spent in a futile pulling at the chains which her own cowardice had forged. She would not even have the memory of bitter-sweet delights.

He came from these musings to discover that his feet had strayed instinctively to the old garden which provoked the memory of his father and mother. But he found it destroyed utterly … its prim beds swept aside to make way for a huge apartment house. The last intangible link which had bound him to his old life had been destroyed.

He turned away, almost with a feeling of relief—the past was forever dead, burying itself in its own tragic oblivion. He climbed higher, to the topmost point of the Hyde Street Hill, up the steps leading to the reservoir. It was another night of provocative perfumes and promissory warmths. He skirted the sun-baked slopes, sown with blossoming alfalfa, and came upon a clump of wind-tortured acacia bushes facing the west. He threw himself down and lay in a sweet physical truce, gazing up at the twinkling sky. He was alone with the night, he had not even a disciple to betray him.

He knew that if he willed it so he could be up and off, forever eluding, forever flaunting the law's ubiquitous presence. The sharp urge for subtle revenge which had come with realization of his power had passed, but he was done with any and all compromises, he had no heart for the decaying fruits of deception.

Would they find him here wrapped in the cool fragrance of the night, or must he go down to them, yielding himself up silently and without bitterness? He had touched life at every point. He could say, now, with Hilmer:

"I know all the dirty, rotten things of life by direct contact!"

Yes, even to murder.

And with Storch he could repeat:

"A man who's been through hell is like a field broken to the plow.
He's ready for seed."

He was ready for seed, so freshly and deeply broken that he had a passion to lie fallow against a worthy sowing.

Presently, enveloped in the perfect and childlike faith which follows revelation, he slept, with his face turned toward the stars. And as he stirred ever so slightly he felt the nearness of two souls. Clearly and more clearly they defined themselves until he knew them for those two erring companions of his misery who had been made suddenly perfect in the crucible of sorrow and sacrifice. They came toward him in a white, silent beauty, until on one side stood Felix Monet and on the other Sylvia Molineaux.

And before him in review passed a motley company of every tragic group that he had ever known—business associates, jailbirds, the inmates of Fairview, Storch's terrible companions. He recognized each group in its turn by their outer trappings. But suddenly their clothes melted and even their flesh dissolved, and he saw nothing but a company of skeletons stripped of all unessentials, and he could no longer mark them apart. And, in a flash, even these unmarked figures crumbled to dust, spreading out like a sunlit plain at noonday. And he saw clouds gather and rain fall and green blades spring up miraculously and blossom succeed blossom. And through it all Felix Monet stood on one side and Sylvia Molineaux on the other.

He awoke to the vigorous prod of a contemptuous boot. A policeman stood over him.

"What are you doing here?" the officer bellowed down at him.

He rose quickly. The sun was bathing the rejuvenated city in a flood of wonderful gold.

"My name is Fred Starratt," he said, quietly. "And I'm wanted for murder … and some other things. You'd better take me down."

The policeman grasped his arm and together they made their way down to the level stretches of the paved street.

They stood for a moment to let a street car swing past. It was crowded with clerks, standing on the running board. Above the warning clang of the bell a voice came ringing out with a note of surprised recognition:

"Hello, Fred Starratt! What's new?"

He made a trumpet with his hands.

"Everything!" he cried back, loudly. "Everything in the world!"