The ghostly day faded and night settled in. Fitful snorings and groans and incoherent mutterings broke the stillness. At intervals a man near the door would jump to his feet, proclaiming the end of the world. Sometimes his paroxysm was brief, but again he would keep up his leaping and solemn chanting until he fell to the floor in sheer exhaustion… Gradually even he became quiet, and nothing was audible except heavy breathing and the sound of the watchman in the corridor as he passed by regularly, flashing his light into the room through the slits in the door.
Fred Starratt did not close his eyes.
CHAPTER XIII
The first week passed in an inferno of idleness. Fred Starratt grew to envy even the wretches who were permitted to carry swill to the pigs. There once had been a time in his life when ambition had pricked him with a desire for affluent ease… He had been grounded in the religious conviction that work had been wished upon a defenseless humanity as a curse. He still remembered his Sabbath-school stories, particularly the scornful text with which the Lord had banished those two erring souls from Eden. Henceforth they were to work! To earn their bread by the sweat of their brows! He had a feeling now that either God had been tricked into granting a boon or else the scowl which had accompanied the tirade had been the scowl that a genial Father threw at his children merely for the sake of seeming impressive. At heart the good Lord must have had only admiration for these two souls who refused to be beguiled by all the slothful ease of Eden, preferring to take their chances in a world of their own making… And he began to question, too, either the beauty or contentment of the heaven which offered the vacuous delights of idleness. It seemed, perhaps, that the theologians had mixed their revelations, and that the paradise they offered so glibly was really a sinister hell in disguise.
After the first day the sights which had sent shudders through him gradually began to assume the inevitability of custom. Even the vision of the Weeping Willow, sorrowing at death withheld, failed to shake him. The third night he slept undisturbed in the lap of frenzy and madness. There was something at once pathetic and sublime in his adaptability to the broken suits of fortune. He was learning what every man learns sooner or later—to play the hand that is dealt, even in the face of a losing game.
Deep within him he found two opposing currents struggling for mastery—one an overwhelming tide of disillusionment, the other a faith in things hitherto withheld. Against the uncloaked figures of Helen Starratt and Hilmer loomed Ginger and Monet. Did life always yield compensations, if one had the wit to discern them? In the still watches of the night, when some fleeting sound had waked him, he used to think of Ginger as he had thought when a child of some intangible and remote vision that he could sense, but not define. Would he ever see her again? Suddenly, one night, he realized that he did not even know her name… And Monet, who slept so quietly upon the cot next to him—what would he have done without his companionship? He used to raise himself on his elbow at times and look in the ghostly light of morning at Monet's face, white and immobile, the thin and shapely lips parted ever so slightly, and marvel at the bland and childlike faith that was the basis of this almost breathless and inaudible sleep. Fred had made friendships in his life, warm, hand-clasping, shoulder-thumping friendships, but they had been of gradual unfolding. Never before had anyone walked full-grown into his affections.
On the third afternoon, sitting in the thick shade of a gracious tree, Monet had told Fred something of his story. He was of mixed breed—French and Italian, with a bit of Irish that had made him blue-eyed, and traces of English and some Dutch. A brood of races that were forever at war within him. And he had been a musician in the bargain, and this in the face of an implacable father who dealt in hides and tallow. There had been all the weakness and flaming and naïveté of a potential artist ground under the heel of a relentless sire. His mother was long since dead. The father had attempted to force the stream of desire from music to business. He had succeeded, after a fashion, but the youth had learned to escape from the dull pain of his slavery into a rosy and wine-red Eden. … Three times he had been sent to Fairview "to kick the nonsense out of him!" to use his father's words. He was not embittered nor overwhelmed, but he was passive, stubbornly passive, as if he had all a lifetime to cross words with Monet, senior. It was inevitable that he would win in the end. He was a child … he always would be one … and childhood might be cowed, but it was never really conquered. He was gentle, too, like a child, and sensitive. Yet the horrors which surrounded him seemed to leave him untroubled. It could not be that he was insensible to ugliness, but he rose above it on the wings of some inner beauty… Once Fred Starratt would have felt some of the father's scorn for Felix Monet—the patronizing scorn most men bring to an estimate of the incomprehensible. What could one expect of a fiddler? Yes, he would have felt something worse than scorn—he would have been moved to tolerance.
The only other man in Ward 1 who was sane was Clancy, the newspaper reporter. But in the afternoons the knot of rational inmates from the famous Ward 6 herded together and exchanged griefs. Fred Starratt sat and listened, but he felt apart. Somehow, most of the stories did not ring quite true. He never had realized before how eager human beings were to deny all blame. To hear them one would fancy that the busy world had paused merely to single them out as targets for misfortune. And the more he listened to their doleful whines the more he turned the searching light of inquiry upon his own case. In the end, there was something beyond reserve and arrogance in the reply he would make to their direct inquiries:
"What brought me here? … Myself!"
But his attitude singled him out for distrust. He was incomprehensible to these burden shifters, these men who had been trained to cast their load upon the nearest object and, failing everything else, upon the Lord… They were all either drug users or victims of drink. And, to a man, they were furiously in favor of prohibition with all the strength of their weak, dog-in-the-manger souls. Like every human being, they hated what they abused. They wanted to play the game of life with failure eliminated, and the god that they fashioned was a venerable old man who had the skill to worst them, but who genially let them walk away with victory.