Broken to the Plow / A Novel

by Charles Caldwell Dobie

The authorities at Fairview would doubtless add their note to the general chorus:

"An exceptional patient. He seemed to have planned deliberately to get our confidence and then betray it… He was directly responsible for Felix Monet's death. Without his influence Monet would never have thought of escape."

And in summing up, the police would declare:

"A bad actor from the word go. One of the sort who reach a certain point in respectability and then run amuck. A danger to the community because of his brains."

But what of Hilmer? Fred Starratt had a feeling that Hilmer would be discreet to a point of silence.

He could see every printed phrase as plainly as if he were reading it all himself. How many times in the old days had he not perused some such story over his morning coffee, thanking himself unconsciously that he was not as other men! How perfectly and smugly he had played the Pharisee for his own delight and satisfaction! He had not bothered then to cry his virtues aloud in the market place or to thank God publicly for his salvation. No, he was too self-sufficient to take the trouble to advertise his worthiness.

To-night he was on the brink of disaster, and yet he found himself shuddering at the colorless fate to which his complacence might have condemned him. To have gone on forever in a state of drowsy contentment … to have been surrounded on all sides by the thunderous cataracts of life and caught only the pretty significance of rainbows through the spray … to have remained untouched by any and every primitive impulse and feeling—he could not now imagine anything more tragic. And yet, to-morrow, people would hold up the desirability of his former estate, pointing to him in warning for the soft-armed profit of an oncoming generation. He saw himself as he might have been, going on to the end of time in the service of Ford, Wetherbee & Co., rising from map clerk to counter man, to special agent, perhaps even to a managership, writing sharp or conciliatory letters to agents according to their importance, trimming office expense and shaving salaries, heckling green office boys, and, his workday ended, going home to The Literary Digest and Helen, fresh from the triumphs of the golf links or the card table. Yes, no doubt Helen would have matched his own rise in fortune with equal gentility. Perhaps he might have taken an hour between office closing and dinner to wield a golf club himself … bringing back a desirable guest to dinner or proposing through the telephone to Helen that they dine at the Palace or St. Francis… Yes, even at best his imagination could not do more with the material in hand. Indeed, he knew that he had crowded the very most that was possible on so small a canvas.

This, then, had been his unconscious life plan, his unvoiced fate. Thus had he sketched it hazily, as a teller of tales sketches the plot of a story, such and such a sum being the total of all the characters and circumstances. But as he had gone on developing it, suddenly a new character had appeared to change the final figures—a wrench thrown into the wheel of continuity … a wrench that bore the name of Axel Hilmer… He felt no bitterness now for the man. Had he ever felt it?

Axel Hilmer had long ceased to be a living personality to Fred Starratt. Instead, he had taken on almost the significance of a strange divinity … an eternal questioner. At their very first meeting he had started the ferment in Fred Starratt's soul with the directness of his interrogations. He was not a man who declared his own faiths … he merely asked you to prove yours. The questions he had asked Fred Starratt on that first night had been insignificant in themselves. Why was it ridiculous for a butcher to want an eight-hour day? Why should one have the firm's interest at heart? And yet the sparks from such verbal flint stones had kindled a revolt that had wrecked Fred Starratt's complacence.

One's sight becomes strengthened to destructive ideas by gradual perception. And ideas of any kind are destructive flashed on consciousness unawares. Fred had thought at first that Hilmer had but opened his eyes to things standing in his range of vision, when, as a matter of fact, Hilmer had merely loaned him his spectacles. Everything he had seen from that first moment had been through Hilmer's medium. A wise man would have proceeded slowly, building himself up for the struggle. But Fred Starratt had had all the wistful enthusiasm of a fool seeking to achieve power overnight. Yes, only a fool could have been ashamed of his heritage. And when Hilmer had placed him calmly in the ranks of the middle class the wine of content had turned suddenly sour. A year ago his efforts were being directed at escape from so contemptuous a characterization; to-night he was content to acknowledge the impeachment and find a pride in the circumstance. And, as he sat there shivering in the gloom of Storch's cracked lamp, he had a vision of this scorned company to which he unquestionably belonged, sterile and barren in the glare of accepted standards, broken gradually by the plowshare of disillusionment and harrowed to great potentialities by a deeper sense of their faiths and needs. Yes, he had a conviction that what could take place in one soul could take place in the soul of the mass … he had not changed his standards so much as he had proved them. The shape and color and perfume of love and loyalty and faith had not been altered for him, but he could discover their blossoming among the shadowy places.