Broken to the Plow / A Novel

by Charles Caldwell Dobie

As Fred Starratt listened day after day to their chatter he withdrew more and more from any mental contact with them. And yet there were times when he felt a longing to pour out his grief into the ears of understanding… He knew that Monet was waiting for his story, but pride still held him in its grip… After all, there was a ridiculous side to his plight. When a man permitted himself to be blindfolded he could not quarrel at being pushed and shoved and buffeted… How absurd he must have seemed to Watson on that day when he had announced so dramatically:

"I said I'd stand by Mrs. Starratt's decision. And I'm a man of my word!"

How much a man would endure simply for the sake of making a fine flourish! He had thought himself heroic at that moment, poor, empty fool that he was, when he really had been the victim of cowardice. A brave man would have cried:

"I said I'd stand by Mrs. Starratt's decision, but I'm not quite an idiot!"

One other topic flamed these poor souls, seeking to kindle a warmth of sympathy for their failures. When the lamentations ceased, they talked of flight. Fred Starratt sat mentally apart and listened. Everybody had a plan. They discussed prospects, previous attempts, chances for failure. Fred learned, among other things, that the search for escaped nationals did not extend much beyond the environs of Fairview. If a man from Ward 6 made a good get-away he held his freedom, unless his kinsfolk constituted themselves a pack of moral bloodhounds. He realized now that there was nothing as relentless as family pride. It was not so much the alcoholic excess that was resented, but the fact that it led to unkept linen and dirty finger nails and, by the same token, to neighborhood scorn. Concern for a man's soul did not send him to Fairview… But was anybody really concerned for a man's soul? … Why should they be? … He ended by quarreling only with the pretense.

Escape! Escape! To get back to the world that they were forever reviling! Like men in the grip of some wanton mistress who could bring them neither happiness nor heroics, either in her company or away from her. Take Fordham, for instance, a lean, purple-faced clerk, who had been sent up for the third time by his wife after two sensational escapes. He hadn't disturbed her, looked her up, gone near her, in fact. But he had laid up alongside an amber-filled bottle in a moldy wine shop somewhere near the Barbary coast. Yes, he had achieved it even in the face of prohibition. And she had got wind of it. Folks had seen him, red-eyed and greasy-coated and bilious-hued, emerging from his haunt in some harsh noon that set him blinking, like a startled owl. Well, she couldn't quite have that, you know! She couldn't have her husband making a spectacle of himself, sinking lower and lower in the hell of his own choosing. No! Far better to pick out a hell for him … a hell removed discreetly from the gaze of the scornful. … And there was Wainright, who, like Monet, had a father. He had married a Runway Girl of the Bearcat Follies … the sort that patters down from the stage to imprint carmine kisses and embarrassment upon the shining pate of the first old rounder that has an aisle seat. Well, father could not have that, either. He was impatient with the whole performance. Indeed, a less impatient man would have waited and watched Wainright, junior, wind himself in the net which his own hands had set. Instead, he went to the trouble of digging a pit for his son which hastened the inevitable, but did not cure the folly… Wainright had escaped, too, quite casually, one fine spring day when he had been sent out to the barn to help milk the cows. The Runway Girl, in need of publicity, had telegraphed the details to her press agent, following receipt of her husband's letter telling of his exploit. A Runway Girl whose husband-lover broke jail, so to speak, for her, had professional assets that could not be gainsaid.

And so the story was flashed on the front page of every newspaper in the country, with the result that father dug another pit.

And so tale succeeded tale. Fred grew to accept most of them with large dashes of salt. Not that he doubted the broader strokes with which the effects were achieved, but he mistrusted that many of the finer shadings had been discreetly painted out. He was learning that there was nothing so essentially untruthful as a studied veracity… Had not he tricked himself with just such carefully heightened details? What he had mistaken for a background of solid truth had proved nothing but pasteboard scenery flooded with a semblance of reality achieved by skillful manipulation of spotlights. He had been satisfied with the illusion because he had wished for nothing better. And at this moment he was more desolate than any in this sad company, because he seemed the only one who had lost the art of escaping into a world of lies. He had no more spotlights to manipulate. He sat in a gloomy playhouse and he heard only confused voices coming from the stage. He was not even sorry for himself. Whether he was sorry for others he could not yet determine.

One afternoon at the close of the first week, as he was walking back to Ward 1 with Monet, following one of these inevitable experience meetings, he turned to the youth and said:

"You have been here three times now. Have you never thought of escape?"