Storch rubbed his hands together, flashing a look at Fred.
"No… There's an option on Hilmer!" he cried, gleefully.
Fred tried to ignore the implication, but all night the suggestion burned itself into his brain. So some one was to get Hilmer, after all! Well, why not? Hilmer liked men with guts enough to fight—rabbit drives were not to his taste… Among all the names brought up and discussed at these sinister gatherings about Storch's round table Hilmer's stood out as the ultimate prize. No one spoke a good word for him and yet Fred had to admit that the revilings were flavored with a certain grudging respect. He was an open and consistent tyrant, at any rate.
An option on Hilmer! What a trick Storch had for illuminating phrases! … And his divinations were uncanny. Why should he assume that Hilmer was in any way bound up in Fred Starratt's life?
The next morning Fred decided to chance a walk in the open. He had a vague wish to try his wings again, now that he had grown stronger. The situation reminded him remotely of Fairview on those first days when Monet and he had attempted to harden their muscles against the day of escape. But this time he was struggling to free himself from a personality, from an idea. He must leave Storch and his motley brood as soon as possible; somehow the acid of their ruthless philosophy was eating away the remnants of any inner beauty which had been left him. At first he had been all revolt, but now there were swift moments in which he asked himself what quarrel he could have with any blows struck at authority. What had established order done for him? Acted as a screen for villainy and inconstancy for the most part.
He turned all this over in his mind as he slunk furtively along the water front, trying vaguely to shape a plan of action. He felt himself to be a very unusual and almost terrible figure, and yet no one paid any heed to him. His beard had lost its sunburned character and grown jet black, his face, and particularly his hands, were pale to transparence, his eyes burned too brightly in their sunken sockets. He was not even a ghost of his former self, but rather a sinister reincarnation. He felt that he was even more forbidding than on that night when he had sent Brauer shivering from his presence. He doubted whether Brauer would recognize him again, so subtle and marked was the change. He hardly recognized himself, and the transformation was not solely a matter of physical degeneration. No, there was something indefinable in the quality of his decline.
He fluttered about the town, at first aimlessly, like a defenseless fledgling thrust before its time from the nest. He was weak and tremulous and utterly miserable. Yet he felt compelled to go forward. He must escape from Storch! He must!
The docks, usually full of bustle, were silent and almost deserted. Fred questioned a man loafing upon a pile of lumber. It appeared that a strike of stevedores was the cause of this outward sign of inactivity. Boats were being loaded quietly, but the process was furtive and sullen. Occasionally, out of the wide expanse of brooding indolence a knot of men would gather flockwise, and melt as quickly. There was an ominous quality in the swiftness with which these cloudlike groups congealed and disintegrated. The sinister blight of repression was over everything—repressed desires, repressed joys, repressed hatreds. It was almost as sad as the noonday silence of Fairview.
Fred slunk along in deep dejection. He wanted the color and life and bustle of accomplishment. A slight activity before one of the docks beguiled him from his depression. A passenger steamer was preparing for its appointed flight south and a knot of blue-coated policemen maintained a safe path from curb to dock entrance. Here was a touch of liveliness and gayety—the released laughter of people bent on a holiday, hopeful farewells called out heartily, taxicabs dashing up with exaggerated haste. He was warming himself at the flame of this genial pageant, when an opulent machine came rolling up to the curb. A sudden surge of arrivals had pressed into service every available porter, and the alighting occupants, a man and a woman, stood waiting for some one to help them with their luggage. Fred stared with impersonal curiosity. Then, as instinctively, he fell back. The man was Axel Hilmer and the woman was Helen Starratt! His shrinking movement must have singled him out for attention, because a policeman began to hustle him on, and the next instant he was conscious that Hilmer was calling in his voice of assured authority:
"Here, there, don't send that man away! I need some one to help me with these grips. This lady has got to catch the boat!"