Storch smiled evilly. "Going to start plunging on that capital your wife threw your way yesterday?… Well, well, you've got more initiative than I thought… But, one piece of advice, my friend—the easiest way to walk into a trap is to suddenly try to change your habits … to rush headlong in an opposite direction. You'd better stay here awhile and bluff it out. They'd gobble you in one mouthful."
Fred made no reply. Indeed, the meal was finished in silence.
Presently Storch's disciples began to drift in. The meeting lasted almost until midnight. They were all at fever heat, strung tensely by Storch's unerring pressure. At the last moment the man who had previously put the question concerning Hilmer prodded Storch again.
Storch fixed Fred suddenly with a gaze that pierced him through. A silence fell upon the room. Fred could feel every eye turned his way. He rose with a curious fluttering movement of escape.
"There's one man in this room who has earned the honor of getting Hilmer, if any man has," Storch said, finally, in an extraordinarily cool and biting voice. "Losing a wife isn't of any great moment … but to be laughed at—that's another matter."
The silence continued. Fred Starratt sat down again… Shortly after this the gathering broke up. Storch went to sleep immediately. Fred blew out the light. But he did not throw himself upon his couch this time. Instead he opened the door softly and crept out.
A bright moon was riding high in the sky. He went swiftly down the lane and stood for a moment upon the edge of the cliff which plunged down toward the docks. The city seemed like a frozen bit of loveliness, waiting to be melted to fluid beauty by the fires of morning. He must leave Storch at once, forever! He turned for a backward glimpse of the house that had sheltered and almost entrapped him. A figure darted in front of the lone street lamp and retreated instantly.Shadowed!Storch was right!
Suddenly Fred began to whistle—gayly, loudly, with unquestionable defiance. Then slowly, very slowly, he went back into the house and closed the door… Storch was snoring contentedly.
The next afternoon Fred Starratt took the fifty-cent piece that he had earned as flunky to his wife and spent every penny of it in a cheap barber shop on the Embarcadero. He emerged with an indifferently trimmed beard and his hair clipped into a semblance of neatness. He felt better, in spite of his tattered suit and gaping footgear. Hilmer's card was still in his pocket.
His plans were hazy, nebulous, in fact. He was not quite sure as to his next move. It seemed useless to attempt to flee from Storch's shelter. He had no money and scarcely strength enough to tackle any job that would be open to him. Even if he elected to become a strike breaker he would have to qualify at least with brawn. The prospect of snaring a berth from Hilmer had a certain fascination. It would be interesting to stare defiantly at his enemy at close range, to speak with him again man to man, to lure him into further bravados. And then, if Storch's plans for Hilmer had any merits… He stopped short, a bit frightened at the realization that the idea had presented itself to him with such directness… He had a sudden yearning to talk to some human being who would understand. If he could only see Ginger!
He had a feeling that somehow she must have experienced every exaltation and every degradation in the calendar. Tenderness and passion and the gift of murder itself were ever the mixed language of the street. He remembered the gesture he first had made to her almost timid advances toward helping him. He had been outwardly polite, but inwardly how scornful of her suggestions! And once he even had hesitated to let her carry a message to his wife! Now he was ready to stand or fall upon the bitter fruits of her experience. He felt, curiously, on common ground with her. And yet there were certain intangibilities he had never attempted to make positive. Somehow the mere fact of her existence had enveloped him like warm currents of air which he could feel, but not visualize. But at this moment he felt the need of a contact more personal. Suddenly, out of a clear sky, it came to him that Mrs. Hilmer could tell him something of Ginger's whereabouts. Mrs. Hilmer? Well, why not? The more he thought the idea over the more it appealed to him. He ended by turning his steps in the direction of the Hilmer home.
The maid who opened the door eyed him with more curiosity than caution, and her protests that Mrs. Hilmer could see no one seemed rather tentative and perfunctory. Fred had a curious feeling that she was demanding a more or less conventional excuse for admitting him, and in the end he flung out as a chance:
"Tell Mrs. Hilmer I have a message from Sylvia Molineaux."
The girl's pale-blue eyes sparkled with a curious glint of humor, and without further protest she went away, and came back as swiftly with an invitation for him to step inside. There was something inexplainable about this maid who veiled her eagerness to admit him with such transparencies. Even a fool would scarcely have left so forbidding a character to dawdle about the living room while she went to fetch her mistress.
He had expected to find this room changed, and yet he was not prepared for quite the quality of familiarity which it possessed. Most of the old Hilmer knickknacks had been swept aside, their places taken by bits that had once enlivened the Starratt household. Here was a silver vase that he had bought Helen for an anniversary present, and there a Whistler etching that had been their wedding portion. His easy-chair was in a corner, and Helen's music rack filled with all the things she used to play for his delight. And on the mantel, in a silver frame, his picture, with a little bowl of fading flowers before it… He went over and picked it up. Instinctively he glanced in the mirror just in front of him…Dead … quite dead!No wonder his wife put flowers before this photographic shrine… For a moment he had a swooning hope that he had misjudged her … that he had misread everybody … that they had done everything for him that they thought was best. But he emerged from this brief deception with a shuddering laugh… He would not have cared so much if his wife had swept him from her life completely … but to trample on him and still use his shadow as a screen—this was too much! What really pallid creatures these women of convention were! How little they were prepared to risk anything! He could almost hear the comments that Helen inspired:
"Poor Helen Starratt! She has had an awful time!… I don't know what she would have done without the Hilmers… She's so devoted to Mrs. Hilmer… I do think it's lovely that they can be together."
He felt that he could have admired a Helen Starratt with the courage of her primitive instincts. As it was, he was ashamed to own that he experienced even rancor at her pretenses.
He heard the sound of a wheeled chair coming toward the living room and he made a pretense of staring aimlessly into the street. Presently a sepulchral voice broke the silence. He turned—Mrs. Hilmer was leaning forward in her chair, regarding him attentively, while the maid stood a little to one side. He had expected to come upon a huddle of blond plumpness, an inanimate mass of forceless flesh robbed of its bovine suavity by inactivity. What he saw was a body thin to emaciation and a face drawn into a tight-lipped discontent. The old curves of flesh had melted, displaying the heaviness of the framework which had supported them. The eyes were restless and glittering, the once-plump hands shrunken into claws.
"You … you have a message from Sylvia Molineaux?"
She tossed the question toward him with biting directness. Could it be possible that this was the same woman who had purred so contentedly over a receipt for corn pudding somewhat over a year ago?
He moved a step nearer. "Yes … but it is private."
The maid made a slight grimace and put her hand protectingly upon Mrs.Hilmer's chair. Mrs. Hilmer shifted about impatiently.
"Never mind, Hilda," she snapped out. "I am not afraid."
The maid shrugged and departed.
"I have wanted to see her," Mrs. Hilmer went on, coldly. "But who could I send? … Few people understand her life."
"Ah, then you have guessed?"
"Guessed? … She has told me everything."
A shade of bitter malice crept into her face—the malice of a woman who has learned truths and is no longer shocked by them. Fred Starratt put his hat aside and he went up close to her.
"I lied to get in here," he said, quickly. "I am looking for SylviaMolineaux myself."
"Why don't you try the streets, then?" she flung out, venomously.
He felt almost as if an insult had been hurled athim. He searched Mrs. Hilmer's face. Something more than physical pain had harrowed the woman before him to such deliberate mockery.
"You, too!" he cried. "How you must have suffered!"
She gave a little cackling laugh that made him shudder. "What about yourself?" she queried. "You do not look like a happy man."
"Would you be … if … Look at me closely, Mrs. Hilmer! Have you ever seen me before?"
He bent toward her. She took his face between her two clawlike fingers. Her eyes were points of greedy flame.
When she finally spoke her voice had almost a pensive quality to it.
"You might have been Fred Starratt,once," she said, evenly.
He rose to his feet.
"I knew you were not dead," he heard her saying. "And I don't think she felt sure, either… Ah, how I have worried her since that day! Every morning I used to say: 'I dreamed of your husband last night. He was swimming out of a black pool … a very black pool.'"
She chuckled at the memory of her sinister banter. So Helen Starratt did not have everything her own way! There were weapons which even weakness could flourish.
"Where has she gone?" he asked, suddenly.
"South, for a change… I've worried her sick with my black pool. Whenever the doorbell would ring I would say as sweetly as I could, 'What if that should be your husband?' I drove her out with just that… You've come just the right time to help. It couldn't have been planned any better."
She might have been Storch, masquerading in skirts, as she sat there casting significantly narrow glances at him. He wondered why he had come. He felt like a fly struggling from the moist depths of a cream jug only to be thrust continually back by a ruthless force. Was everybody bent on plunging him into the ultimate despair? He moved back with a poignant gesture of escape.
"You mustn't count on me, Mrs. Hilmer!" he cried, desperately. "I'm nothing but a poor, spent man. I've lost the capacity for revenge."
She smiled maliciously. "You see me here—helpless. And yet, in all these months I've prayed for only one thing—to have strength enough one day to rise in this chair and throw myself upon them both… Oh, but I should like to kill them!… You talk about suffering … but do you know what it is to feel the caress of hands that are waiting to lay hold of everything that was once yours?… I have six months more to live. The doctor told me yesterday… Six months more, getting weaker every day, until at last—"
She brought her hands up in a vigorous flourish, which died pitifully. He felt a contempt for his impotence. He dropped into a seat opposite her.
"Tell me about it … all … from the beginning," he begged.
She opened the floodgates cautiously at first … going back to the day when it had come upon her that she was a stranger in her own house. … Hilmer's moral lapses had never affronted her. She knew men—or her father, to be exact, and his father before him. They were as God made them, no better and no worse. Perhaps she had never admitted it, but she would no doubt have felt a contempt for a man without the capacity for truant inconstancies. But she had her place from which it was inconceivable that she could be dislodged. … On that day when she had realized that this position was threatened she had been put to one of two alternatives—open revolt or deceitful acceptance. She had chosen the latter. In the end her choice was justified, for she had begun to undermine Helen Starratt's content with subtle purring which dripped a steady pool of disquiet.
"She hasn't abandoned herself yet," she said, moving her claws restlessly. "She's too clever for that… She wantsmyplace. Hilmer's like all men—he won't have a mistress for a wife… And she never would be any man's mistress while she saw a chance for the other thing … she's too—"
She broke off suddenly, unable to find a word inclusive enough for all the contempt she wished to crowd into it. He was learning things. She could have ignored a frank courtesan with disdainful aloofness, but discreetly veiled wantonness made her articulate. When she mentioned Ginger her voice took a soft pity, mixed with certain condescension. She was sympathetic, but there were still many things she could not understand.
"She used to come and pass me every morning," Mrs. Hilmer explained, "and your wife would look at her from head to foot. One day I said, 'Who is that woman?' … 'How should I know?' she answered me. And I knew from her manner that she was lying. The next day I spoke deliberately. After that it was easy… She is a strange girl. She would come and read me such beautiful things and then go away tothat! … 'How is it possible for one woman to be so good and so bad?' I asked her once. And all she said was, 'How would you have us—all devil or all saint?' … During all this your wife said nothing. When shewouldsee Sylvia Molineaux coming down the street she would wheel my chair into a quiet corner and walk calmly into the house… One day Sylvia Molineaux spoke of you. She told me the whole story and in the end she said: 'I don't come here altogether to be kind to you … I come here to worry her. You cannot imagine how I hate her!' The next morning I said to Helen Starratt, 'Did you know that Sylvia Molineaux was a friend of your husband?' She had to answer me civilly. There was no other way out. But after that I said, whenever I could, 'Sylvia Molineaux tells me this,' or, 'Sylvia Molineaux tells me that.' And I would give her the tattle of Fairview… I know she could have strangled me, because she smiled too sweetly. But she made no protest, no comment. She merely walked into the house whenever Sylvia Molineaux appeared. But it worried her—yes, almost as much as that black pool from which I had you swimming every morning… And so it went on until the day after word had come that you had been drowned. I had not seen Sylvia for some days. She came down the street at the usual time. Helen was still up in her room … the maid had wheeled me out. She said nothing about what had happened. But she looked very pale as she opened her book to read to me. In the midst of all this your wife came out and stood for a moment upon the landing. We looked up. She was in black. I gave one glance at Sylvia. She closed her book with a bang and suddenly she was on her feet. 'Black!Black!' she cried out in a loud voice. 'Howcanyou!' Your wife grew pale and walked quickly back into the house. Sylvia's face was dreadful. 'I can't trust myself to come here again!' she said, turning on me fiercely. 'Fancy,shecan wear black. The hussy … the…' No, I shall not repeat what else she said… But when she had finished I caught her hand and I said: 'Come back and kill her! Come back and kill her, Sylvia Molineaux!' She gave a cry and left me. I have not seen her since."
He sat staring at the wasted figure before him. Who would have thought, seeing her in a happier day, that she could quiver with such red-fanged energy! After all, she was more primitive even than Ginger. She was like some limpid, prattling stream swollen to sudden fury by a cloudburst of bitterness.
He was recalled from his scrutiny of the terrible figure before him by the sound of her voice, this time dropping into a monologue which held a half-musing quality. Hilmer was puzzling her a bit. She could not quite understand why a man accustomed to hew his way without restraint should be possessing his soul in such patience before Helen Starratt's provocative advances and discreet retreats. Either she was unable or unwilling to fathom the fascination which a subtle game sometimes held for a man schooled only in elemental approaches toward his goal. Was he enthralled or confused or merely curious? And how long would he continue to give his sufferance scope? How long would he pretend to play the moth to Helen Starratt's fitful flamings? Mrs. Hilmer, raising the question, answered it tentatively by a statement that held a curious mixture of hope and fear.
"Hilmer's going south himself next week… On business, hesays."She laughed harshly. "I wonder if they both think me quite a fool! …If he succeeds this time she's done for!"
Fred Starratt stirred in his seat.
"Don't deceive yourself," he found himself saying, coldly; "whatever else my wife is, she's no fool… Remember, she wrote me a letter every week. She looks over her cards before she plays them…A few months more or less don't—"
He broke off, suddenly amazed at his cruelty. Mrs. Hilmer's expression changed from arrested exultation to fretful appeal.
"I have only six months to live," she wailed. "If I could walk just for a day…an hour…five minutes!"
She covered her face in her hands.
"What do you expectmeto do?" he asked, helplessly, with a certain air of resignation.
She took her fingers from her eyes. A crafty smile illumined her features. "How should I know? …What do men do in such cases?…She will be gone two weeks. I pray God she may never enter this house again. But that is in your hands."
He felt suddenly cold all over, as if she had delivered an enemy into his keeping. She still loved Axel Hilmer…loved him to the point of hatred. What she wished for was his head upon a charger. With other backgrounds and other circumstances crowding her to fury she would have danced for her boon like the daughter of Herodias. As it was, she sat like some pagan goddess, full of sinister silences, impotent, yet unconquered.
And again Storch's prophetic words swept him:
"Like a field broken to the plow!"
There was a terrible beauty in the phrase. Was sorrow the only plowshare that turned the quiescent soul to bountiful harvest? Was it better to reap a whirlwind than to see a shallow yield of unbroken content wither to its sterile end?
* * * * *
He found Ginger's lodgings that night, in a questionable quarter of the town, but she did not respond to his knock upon the door.
"Why don't you try the streets, then?" Mrs. Hilmer's sneer recurred with all its covert bitterness.
The suggestion made him sick. And he had fancied all along that ugliness had lost the power to move him … that he was prepared for the harsh facts of existence!
He waited an hour upon the street corner, and when she came along finally she was in the company of a man… He grew suddenly cold all over. When they passed him he could almost hear his teeth chattering. They disappeared, swallowed up in the sinister light of a beguiling doorway. He stared for a moment stupidly, then turned and fled, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He realized now that he had reached the heights of bitterest ecstasy and the depths of profound humiliation.
Storch was alone, bending close to the lamp, reading, when FredStarratt broke in upon him. He did not lift his head.
Fred went softly into a corner and sat down… Finally, after a while,Storch laid his book aside. He gave one searching look at Fred's face.
"Well, have you decided?" he asked, with calm directness.
Fred's hands gave a flourish of resignation. "Yes… I'll do it!" he answered in a whisper.
Storch picked up his book again and went on reading. Presently he lifted his eyes from the printed page as he said:
"We won't have any more meetings here… Things are getting a little too dangerous… How soon will the job be finished?"
Fred rose, shaking himself. "Within two weeks, if it is finished at all!"
He went close to Storch and put a hand upon his shoulder. "You know every bitter thing … tell me, why does a man love?"
Storch laughed unpleasantly. "To breed hatred!"
Fred Starratt sat down again with a gesture of despair.
From this moment on Fred Starratt's existence had the elements of a sleepwalking dream. He felt himself going through motions which he was powerless to direct. Already Storch and his associates were allowing him a certain aloofness—letting him set himself apart with the melancholy arrogance of one who had been chosen for a fanatical sacrifice.
Replying to Storch's question regarding his plans, he said, decidedly:
"I leave all that to you… Give me instructions and I'll act. But I want to know nothing until the end."
"Within two weeks… Is there a special reason why …"
"Yes … a very special reason."
Storch turned away. But the next day he said, "Have you that card thatHilmer gave you?"
Fred yielded it up.
Storch smiled his wide, green smile. Fred asked no questions, but he guessed the plans. A spy was to be worked in upon Hilmer.
Every morning now Fred Starratt found a silver dollar upon the cluttered table at Storch's. He smiled grimly as he pocketed the money. He was to have not a care in the world. Like a perfect youth of the ancients marked for a sweet-scented offering to the gods, he was to go his way in perfect freedom until his appointed time. There was an element of grotesqueness in it all that dulled the edge of horror which he should have felt.
Sometimes he would sally forth in a noonday sun, intent on solitude, but usually he craved life and bustle and the squalor of cluttered foregrounds. With his daily dole of silver jingling in his pocket he went from coffeehouse to coffeehouse or drowsed an hour or two in a crowded square or stood with his foot upon the rail of some emasculated saloon, listening to the malcontents muttering over their draughts of watery beer.
"Ah yes," he would hear these last grumble, "the rich can have their grog… But the poor man—he can get it only when he is dying … providing he has the price."
And here would follow the inevitable reply, sharpened by bitter sarcasm:
"But all this is for the poor man's good … you understand. Men work better when they do not indulge in follies… They will stop dancing next. Girls in factories should not come to work all tired out on Monday morning. They would find it much more restful to spend the time upon their knees."
It was not what they said, but the tone of it, that made Fred Starratt shudder. Their laughter was the terrible laughter of sober men without either the wit or circumstance to escape into a temperate gayety of spirit. He still sat apart, as he had done at Fairview and again at Storch's gatherings. He had not been crushed sufficiently, even yet, to mingle either harsh mirth or scalding tears with theirs. But he was feeling a passion for ugliness … he wanted to drain the bitter circumstance of life to the lees. He was seeking to harden himself to his task past all hope of reconsideration.
He liked especially to talk to the cripples of industry. Here was a man who had been blinded by a hot iron bolt flung wide of its mark, and another with his hand gnawed clean by some gangrenous product of flesh made raw by the vibrations of a riveting machine. And there were the men deafened by the incessant pounding of boiler shops, and one poor, silly, lone creature whose teeth had been slowly eaten away by the excessive sugar floating in the air of a candy factory. Somehow this last man was the most pathetic of all. In the final analysis, his calling seemed so trivial, and he a sacrifice upon the altar of a petty vanity. Once he met a man weakened into consumption by the deadly heat of a bakeshop. These men did not whine, but they exhibited their distortions with the malicious pride of beggars. They demanded sympathy, and somehow their insistence had a humiliating quality. He used to wonder, in rare moments of reflection, how long it would take for all this foul seepage to undermine the foundations of life. Or would it merely corrode everything it came in contact with, very much as it had corroded him? Only occasionally did he have an impulse to escape from the terrible estate to which his rancor had called him. At such intervals he would turn his feet toward the old quarter of the town and stand before the garden that had once smiled upon his mother's wooing, seeking to warm himself once again in the sunlight of traditions. The fence, that had screened the garden from the nipping wind which swept in every afternoon from the bay, was rotting to a sure decline, disclosing great gaps, and the magnolia tree struggling bravely against odds to its appointed blossoming. But it was growing blackened and distorted. Some day, he thought, it would wither utterly… He always turned away from this familiar scene with the profound melancholy springing from the realization that the past was a pale corpse lighted by the tapers of feeble memory.
One afternoon, accomplishing again this vain pilgrimage, he found the tree snapped to an untimely end. It had gone down ingloriously in a twisting gale that had swept the garden the night before.
In answer to his question, the man intent on clearing away the wreckage said:
"The wind just caught it right… It was dying, anyway."
Fred Starratt retraced his steps. It was as if the old tree had stood as a symbol of his own life.
He never went back to view the old garden again, but, instead, he stood at midnight upon the corner past which Ginger walked with such monotonous and terrible fidelity. He would stand off in the shadows and see her go by, sometimes alone, but more often in obscene company. And in those moments he tasted the concentrated bitterness of life. Was this really a malicious jest or a test of his endurance? To what black purpose had belated love sprung up in his heart for this woman of the streets? And to think that once he had fancied that so withering a passion was as much a matter of good form as of cosmic urging! There had been conventions in love—and styles and seasons! One loved purity and youth and freshness. Yes, it had been as easy as that for him. Just as it had been as easy for him to choose a nice and pallid calling for expressing his work-day joy. He could have understood a feeling of sinister passion for Sylvia Molineaux and likewise he could have indulged it. But the snare was more subtle and cruel than that. He was fated to feel the awe and mystery and beauty of a rose-white love which he saw hourly trampled in the grime of the streets. He had fancied once that love was a matter of give and take … he knew now that it was essentially an outpouring … that to love was sufficient to itself … that it could be without reward, or wage, or even hope. He knew now that it could spring up without sowing, endure without rain, come to its blossoming in utter darkness. And yet he did not have the courage of these revelations. He felt their beauty, but it was the beauty of nakedness, and he had no skill to weave a philosophy with which to clothe them. If it had been possible a year ago for him to have admitted so cruel a love he knew what he would have done. He would have waited for her upon this selfsame street corner and shot her down, turning the weapon upon himself. Yes, he would have been full of just such empty heroics. Thus would he have expressed his contempt and scorn of the circumstance which had tricked him. But now he was beyond so conventional a settlement.
The huddled meetings about Storch's shattered lamp were no more, but in small groups the scattered malcontents exchanged whispered confidences in any gathering place they chanced upon. Fred Starratt listened to the furtive reports of their activities with morbid interest. But he had to confess that, so far, they were proving empty windbags. The promised reign of terror seemed still a long way off. There were moments even when he would speculate whether or not he was being tricked into unsupported crime. But he raised the question merely out of curiosity… Word seemed to have been passed that he was disdainful of all plans for setting the trap which he was to spring. But one day, coming upon a group unawares in a Greek coffeehouse on Folsom Street, he caught a whispered reference to Hilmer. Upon the marble-topped table was spread a newspaper—Hilmer's picture smiled insolently from the printed page. The gathering broke up in quick confusion on finding him a silent auditor. When they were gone he reached for the newspaper. A record-breaking launching was to be achieved at Hilmer's shipyard within the week. The article ended with a boastful fling from Hilmer to the effect that his plant was running to full capacity in spite of strikes and lockouts. Fred threw the paper to the floor. A chill enveloped him. He had caught only the merest fragments of conversation which had fallen from the lips of the group he had surprised, but his intuitions had been sharpened by months of misfortune. He knew at once what date had been set for the consummation of Storch's sinister plot. He rose to his feet, shivering until his teeth chattered. He felt like a man invested with all the horrid solemnity of the death watch.
That night Storch confirmed Fred's intuitions. He said, pausing a moment over gulping his inevitable bread and cheese:
"I have planned everything for Saturday."
Fred cut himself a slice of bread. "So I understand," he said, coldly.
"Who told you?"
"Your companions are great gossips … and I have ears."
The insolence in Fred's tone made Storch knit his brows.
"Well, knowing so much, you must be ready for details now," he flung out.
Fred nodded.
Storch lighted his pipe and glowered. "The launching is to take place at noon. Hilmer has planned to arrive at the yards promptly at eleven forty-five at the north gate. Everything is ready, down to the last detail."
"Including the bomb?" Fred snapped, suddenly.
"Including the bomb," Storch repeated, malevolently, caressing the phrase with a note of rare affection. "It is the most skillful arrangement I have seen in a long time … in a kodak case. By the way … are you accurate at heaving things?… You are to stand upon the roof of a row of one-story stores quite near the entrance and promptly at the precise minute—"
"Ah, a time bomb!"
"Naturally."
"And if Hilmer should be late?"
"He is always on time… And, besides, there is a special reason. He wants the launching accomplished on the stroke of noon."
"And if he comes too early?"
"Impossible. He went south last week … you knew that, of course. And he doesn't get into San Francisco until late that morning. He is to be met at Third and Townsend streets and go at once to Oakland in his machine… There will be four in the party … perhaps six."
Fred Starratt stood up slowly, repressing a desire to leap suddenly to his feet. He walked up and down the cluttered room twice. Storch watched him narrowly.
"Six in the party?" Fred echoed. "Any women?"
Storch rubbed his palms together. "There may be two … providing your wife comes back with him… Mrs. Hilmer sent for her."
"Mrs. Hilmer!"
Storch smiled his usual broad smile, exhibiting his green teeth.
"She developed a whim to attend the launching… Naturally she wished herdearestfriend with her."
Fred Starratt sat down. He was trembling inwardly, but he knew instinctively that he must appear nonchalant and calm. He guessed at once that it would not do for him to betray the fact that suddenly he realized how completely he had been snared. Yet his trepidation must have communicated itself, for Storch leaned forward with the diabolical air of an inquisitor and said:
"Does it matter in the least whether there is one victim or six?"
Fred managed to reply, coolly, "Not the slightest … but I have been thinking in terms of one."
Storch smiled evilly. "That would have been absurd in any case. There are always a score or so of bystanders who …"
"Yes, of course, of course. Just so!" Fred interrupted.
Storch laid his pipe aside and drained a half-filled glass of red wine standing beside his plate.
"I think I've turned a very neat trick," he said, smacking his lips in satisfaction. "It's almost like a Greek tragedy—Hilmer, his wife, and yours in one fell swoop, and at your hand. There is an artistic unity about this affair that has been lacking in some of my other triumphs."
Fred rose again, and this time he turned squarely on Storch as he asked:
"How long have you and Mrs. Hilmer been plotting this together?"
Storch's eyes widened in surprise. "You're getting keener every moment… Well, you've asked a fair question. I planted that maid in the house soon after I knew the story."
"After the fever set me to prattling?"
"Precisely."
Fred Starratt stood motionless for a moment, but presently he began to laugh.
Storch looked annoyed, then rather puzzled. Fred took the hint and fell silent. For the first time since his escape from Fairview he was experiencing the joy of alert and sharpened senses. He had ceased to drift. From this moment on he would be struggling. And a scarcely repressed joy rose within him.
That night Fred Starratt did not sleep. His mind was too clear, his senses too alert. He was like a man coming suddenly out of a mist into the blinding sunshine of some valley sheltered from the sea.
"Does it matter in the least whether there is one victim or six?"
He repeated Storch's question over and over again. Yes, it did matter—why, he could not have said. But even in a vague way there had been a certain point in winging Hilmer. Hilmer had grown to be more and more an impersonal effigy upon which one could spew forth malice and be forever at peace. He had fancied, too, that Hilmer was his enemy. Yet, Hilmer had done nothing more than harry him. It was Storch who had captured him completely.
It was not that Storch was unable to discover a score of men ready and willing to murder Hilmer, but he was finding an ironic diversion in shoving a weary soul to the brink. He liked to confirm his faith in the power of sorrow and misery and bitterness … he liked to triumph over that healing curse of indifference which time accomplished with such subtlety. He took a delight in cutting the heart and soul out of his victims and reducing them to puppets stuffed with sawdust, answering the slightest pressure of his hands. How completely Fred Starratt understood all this now! And in the blinding flash of this realization he saw also the hidden spring that had answered Storch's pressure. Storch may have been prodding for rancor, but he really had touched the mainspring of all false and empty achievement—vanity.
"Losing a wife isn't of such moment … but to be laughed at—that is another matter!"
The words with which Storch had held him up to the scorn of the crowd swept him now with their real significance. He had been afraid to seem uncourageous.
Thus also had Mrs. Hilmer prodded him with her sly "What do men do in such cases?"
Thus, also, had the terrible realization of his love for Sylvia Molineaux been turned to false account with a wish to still the stinging wounds of pride forever.
He had made just such empty gestures when he had battled for an increase in salary, using Hilmer's weapons instead of his own, and again when he had committed himself to Fairview with such a theatrical flourish. He had performed then, he was performing now, with an eye to his audience. And his audience had done then, and was doing now, what it always did—treated him with the scorn men feel for any and all who play down to them.
Already Storch was sneering with the contempt of a man too sure of his power. He would not have risked the details of his plan otherwise. And deep down Fred Starratt knew that the first duty to his soul was to be rid of Storch at any cost—after that, perhaps, it would not matter whether he had one or six or a hundred victims marked for destruction. He was afraid of Storch and he had now to prove his courage to himself.
It was at the blackest hour before dawn that this realization grew to full stature. He raised himself upon his elbow, listening to the heavy breathing of Storch. He rose cautiously. Now was his chance. He would escape while his conviction was still glistening with the freshness of crystallization. Moving with a catlike tread toward the door, he put his hand upon the knob. It turned noisily. He heard Storch leap to his feet. He stood quite still until Storch came up to him.
"Go back to bed … where you belong!" Storch was commanding, coolly, with a shade of menace in his voice.
He shuffled back to his couch. He was no longer afraid of Storch, but a certain craftiness suddenly possessed him.
Presently he heard a key turn and he felt himself to be completely in the hands of his jailer. Yet the locked door became at once the symbol of both Storch's strength and weakness. Storch was determined to have either his body or his soul. And, at that moment, Fred Starratt made his choice.
Next morning Storch was up early and bustling about with unusual clatter.
"Get up!" he cried, gayly, to Fred. "Do you realize this is Friday?…There are a thousand details to attend to."
Fred pretended to find Storch's manner infectious. He had never seen anyone so eager, so thrilling with anticipation.
"I've got to buy you a new outfit complete," Storch went on, filling the coffeepot with water. "And you must be shaved and shorn and made human-looking again. Rags are well enough to wrap discontent in … but one should have a different make-up for achievement… What was the matter last night?"
"Oh, a bit of panic, I guess," Fred returned, nonchalantly. "But I'm all right this morning."
Storch rubbed his hands in satisfaction, and he smiled continually.
They went out shortly after nine o'clock and in San Francisco's embryo ghetto at McAllister and Fillmore streets they bought a decent-looking misfit suit and a pair of second-hand shoes, to say nothing of a bargain in shirts. A visit to a neighboring barber followed. Storch permitted Fred to enter the shop alone, but he stood upon the corner and waited.
When the barber finished, Fred was startled. Standing before the mirror he gazed at his smooth-shaven cheek again and trembled. It was like a resurrection. Even Storch was startled. Fred caught a suggestion of doubt in the gaze his jailer threw at him. It was almost as if Storch said:
"You are not the man I thought you."
After that Fred had a sense that Storch watched him more narrowly. Impulses toward forcing the issue at once assailed Fred, but he was too uncertain as to the outcome. He decided that the safest thing was to wait until the very last moment, trying to prolong the issue until it would be too late for Storch to lay other plans.
They went back to the shack for a bite of lunch. After they had eaten, Fred put on his new clothes. He felt now completely cut off from the cankerous life which had been so deliberately eating its way into his philosophy. Could it be possible that clothes did in some mysterious way make the man? Would his unkempt beard and gaping shoes and tattered clothing have kept him nearer the path of violence?
A little after three o'clock in the afternoon a man came to the door and handed Storch a carefully wrapped package. They did not exchange a word. Storch took the package and stowed it away in a corner, covering it with a ragged quilt.
"That is the bomb!" flashed through Fred's mind.
From that moment on this suggestive corner of the room was filled with a mysterious fascination. It was like living on the edge of a volcano.
Later in the day he said to Storch:
"Are you sure the maker of that bomb was skillful?"
Storch bared his green teeth.
"One is sure of nothing!" he snapped back.
Fred tried to appear nonchalant. "Aren't you rather bold, having this thing delivered in broad daylight?"
"What have we to fear?"
"I thought we were being watched."
Storch threw back his head and roared with laughter. "Youhave been watched … if that's what you mean. I never believe in taking any unnecessary chances."
Fred made no reply. But a certain contempt for Storch that hitherto had been lacking rose within him. He had always fancied certain elements of bigness in this man in spite of his fanaticism. Suddenly he was conscious that his silence had evoked a subtle uneasiness in Storch. At this moment he laughed heartily himself as he rose from his seat, slapping Storch violently on the back as he cried:
"Upon my word, Storch, you're a master hand! No matter what happens now, at least I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that I was perfectly stage-managed."
They kept close to the house until nearly midnight. At a few moments to twelve Storch drew a flask of smuggled brandy from his hip pocket.
"Here, take a good drink!" he said, passing the bottle to Fred.
Fred did as he was bidden. Storch followed suit.
"Would you like a turn in the open?" Storch inquired, not unkindly.
"Yes," Fred assented.
They put on their hats. When they were outside Storch made a little gesture of surrender. "You lead … I'll follow," he said, indulgently.
The night was breathless—still touched with the vagrant warmth of an opulent April day. The spring of blossoming acacias was over, but an even fuller harvest of seasonal unfolding was sweeping the town. A fragrant east wind was flooding in from the blossom-starred valleys, and vacant lots yielded up a scent of cool, green grass. A soul-healing quality released itself from the heavily scented air—hidden and mysterious beauties of both body and spirit that sent little thrills through Fred Starratt. He had never been wrapped in a more exquisite melancholy—not even during the rain-raked days at Fairview. He knew that Storch was by his side, but, for the moment, this sinister personality seemed to lose its power and he felt Monet near him. It was as it had been during those days upon Storch's couch with death beckoning—the nearer he approached the dead line, the more distinctly he saw Monet. To-night his vision was clouded, but a keener intuition gave him the sense of Monet's presence. He knew that he was standing close to another brink.
For a time he surrendered completely to this luxury of feeling, as if it strengthened him to find stark reality threaded with so much haunting beauty. But he discovered himself suddenly yearning for the poetry of life rather than the poetry of death. He wanted to live, realizing completely that to-morrow might seal everything. He was not afraid, but he was alive, very much alive—so alive that he found himself rising triumphant from sorrow and shame and disillusionment.
He came out of his musings with a realization that Storch was regarding him with that puzzled air which his moods were beginning to evoke. And almost at the same time he was conscious that their feet were planted upon that selfsame corner past which Ginger walked at midnight. He put a hand on Storch's shoulder.
"Let us wait here a few moments," he said. "I am feeling a little tired."
A newsboy bellowing the latest edition of the paper broke an unusual and almost profound stillness.
"There doesn't seem to be many people about to-night," Fred observed, casually.
Storch sneered. "To-day is Good Friday, I believe… Everyone has grown suddenly pious."
Fred turned his attention to the windows of a tawdry candy shop, filled with unhealthy-looking chocolates and chromatic sweets. He was wondering whether Ginger would pass again to-night. His musings were answered by the suggestive pressure of Storch's hand on his.
"There's a skirt on the Rialto, anyway," Storch was saying, with disdain.
Fred kept his gaze fixed upon the candy-shop window. He was afraid to look up. Could it be that Ginger was passing before him, perhaps for the last time? He caught the vague reflection of a feminine form in the plate-glass window. A surge of relief swept him—at least she was alone!
"She's looking back!" Storch volunteered.
Fred turned. The woman had gained the doorway of the place where she lodged and she was standing with an air of inconsequence as if she had nothing of any purpose on her mind except an appreciation of the night's dark beauty. He looked at her steadily … ItwasGinger!
She continued to stand, immobile, wrapped in the sinister patience of her calling. Fred could not take his eyes from her.
"She's waiting for you," Storch said.
Fred smiled wanly.
"Do you want to go? … If you do I'll wait—here!"
Fred tried to conceal his conflicting emotions. He did not want to betray his surprise at Storch's sudden and irrational indiscretion.
"Well, if you don't mind," he began to flounder, "I'll—"
Storch gave him a contemptuous shove. "Go on … go on!" he cried, almost impatiently, and the next moment Fred Starratt found himself at Ginger's side… For an instant she stood transfixed as she lifted her eyes to his.
"Don't scream!" he commanded between his locked lips. "I don't want that man to know that—"
She released her breath sharply. "Shall we go in?" she whispered.
He nodded. Storch was pretending to be otherwise absorbed, but Fred knew that he had been intent on their pantomime.
Her room was bare, pitifully bare, swept clean of all the tawdry fripperies that one might expect from such an environment and circumstance. She motioned him wearily to an uncompromising chair, standing herself with an air of profound resignation as she leaned against the cheaply varnished bureau.
"Is this the first time—" she began, and stopped short.
"No … I've watched you every night for nearly two weeks."
"What was the idea?" she threw out, with an air of banter.
He stood up suddenly. "I wanted to see how much Icouldstand," he answered.
She closed her eyes for a moment … her immobility was full of tremulous fear and hope.
"Ah!" she said, finally. "So you did care, after all!"
"Yes … when it was too late."
She crossed over to him, putting one wan finger on his trembling lips in protest. She did not speak, but he read the thrilling simplicity of her silence completely. "Love is never too late!" was what her eloquent gesture implied.
He thrust her forward at arm's length, searching her eyes. "You are right," he said, slowly. "And yet it can be bitter!"
She released herself gently. "You shouldn't have watched me like that … it wasn't fair."
"I didn't think you would ever know… And that first night I didn't intend to watch … not really. After that it got to be habit… You've no idea the capacity for suffering an unhappy man can acquire."
She took off her hat and flung it on the bed. "What made you follow me to-night?"
"You came out of a clear sky … when I needed you most … as you have always done… I didn't think I could ever escape that man waiting for me below—not even for an instant… To-morrow, at this time, I may be dead … or worse."
"Dead?"
"To-morrow, at noon, I'm scheduled to blow up Axel Hilmer… There will be five others in the party … my wife and his among them."
Her body was rigid … only her lips moved. "You are going to do it?"
"No."
She passed a fluttering hand over her forehead. "But you spoke of death…"
He smiled bitterly. "Either I shall be dead—or the man waiting for me on the street corner… I shall not tell him my decision until the last moment. I don't want to give him the chance to work in an understudy or complete the job himself… Will you go to Hilmer to-morrow and warn him?… He arrives from the south at the Third and Townsend depot somewhere around eleven o'clock. Advise him to postpone the launching. And have the approaches to the shipyards combed for radicals… Let them watch particularly for a man with a kodak on the roof of the stores opposite the north gate."
She picked up her hat quickly. "I'll go out now and warn the police … indirectly. I have ways, you know."
He put out a restraining hand. "No … that's risky. My friend Storch has spies everywhere. He's giving me a little rope here … he may be waiting just to see how foolishly I use it. If you lie low until to-morrow there will be less of a chance of things going wrong… Besides, I owe this man something. He's fed and sheltered me. I'm going to give him an even break. You would do that much, I'm sure."
She threw her arms suddenly about him. "Let me go down to him," she whispered. "Perhaps I can persuade him. Maybe he'll go away, then, and leave you in peace."
He stroked her hair. "No, I can't escape him now. Sooner or later he would get me. You don't understand his power. All my life I've dodged issues. But now I've run up against a stone wall. Either I scale it or I break my neck in the attempt."
She shivered as if his touch filled her with an exquisite fear as she drew away.
"I'm wondering if you are quite real," she said, wistfully. "Sometimes I've thought of you as dead, and, again, it didn't seem possible… Always at night upon the street I've really looked for you. In every face that stared at me I had a hope that your eyes would answer mine… I think I've looked for you all my life… It isn't always necessity that drives a woman to the streets… Sometimes it is the search for happiness… I suppose you can't understand that…"
"I understand anything you tell menow!"
She went over to him again and took his hand. "Youarereal, aren't you?… Because I couldn't bear it … if I were to wake up and find this all a dream… Nothing else matters … nothing in my whole life … but this moment. And when it is over nothing will ever matter … again."
He sat there stroking her hand foolishly. There were no words with which to answer her… Presently she put her lips close to his and he kissed her, and he knew then that only a woman who had tasted the bitter wormwood of infamy could put such purity into a kiss. How many times she must have hungered for this moment! How many times must she have felt her soul rising to her lips only to find it betrayed!
He loved her for her words and he loved her for her silence. Once he would have sat waiting passionately for her to defend herself. He would have been tricked into believing that any course of actioncouldbe justified. But she brought no charges, she placed no blame, she offered no excuse. "It isn't always necessity that drives a woman to the streets!" It took a great soul to be that honest. She might have reproached him, too, for his neglect of her—for his fear to take his happiness on any terms. But all she had said was, "You shouldn't have watched me like that … it wasn't fair."
He rose, finally, shaking himself into the world of reality again.
"I must be going now," he said, quietly. "Storch will begin to be impatient."
She picked a gilt hairpin from the floor. "Let me see if I've got everything straight. To-morrow at eleven o'clock I am to see Hilmer and tell him to postpone the launching. And to watch at the north gate for a man with a kodak… And then?"
He reached for his hat. "If you do not hear from me you might come and look me up. I'll be at Storch cottage on Rincon Hill … at the foot of Second Street. Anyone about can tell you which house is his."
Her lips were an ashen gray. "You mean you'll be there …dead?"
"If you are afraid …"
"Afraid!" She drew herself up proudly.
"Well … there is danger for you, too… I should have thought of that!"
"You do not understand even now." She went and stood close to him. "Iloveyou … can't you realize that?"
He felt suddenly abashed, as if he stood convicted of being a cup too shallow to hold her outpouring.
"Good-by," he whispered.
She closed her eyes, lifting her brow for his waiting kiss. The heavy perfume of her hair seemed to draw his soul to a prodigal outpouring. He found her lips again, clasping her close.
"Good-by," he heard her answer.
And at that moment he felt the mysterious Presence that had swept so close to him on that heartbreaking Christmas Eve at Fairview.
Storch was standing at the lodging-house door when Fred stepped into the street.
"Well, what now?" Storch inquired, with mock politeness.
"Let's go home!" Fred returned, emphatically.
Almost as soon as the phrase had escaped him he had a sense of its grotesqueness. Home! Yes, he had to admit that he felt a certain affection for that huddled room which had witnessed so much spiritual travail. Somehow its dusty rafters seemed saturated with a human quality, as if they had imprisoned all the perverse longings and bitter griefs of the company that once sat in the dim lamplight and chanted their litany of hate. He never really had been a part of this company … he never really had been a part of any company. At the office of Ford, Wetherbee & Co., at Fairview, at Storch's gatherings, he had mingled with his fellow-men amiably or tolerantly or contemptuously, as the case might be, but never with sympathy or understanding. He knew now the reason—he always had judged them, even to the last moment, using the uncompromising foot rule of prejudice, inherent or acquired. In the old days he had thought of these prejudices as standards, mistaking aversions for principles. He had tricked his loves, his hates, his preferences in a masquerade of pretenses … he had labels for everybody and he pigeonholed them with the utmost promptitude. A man was a murderer or a saint or a bricklayer, and he was nothing else. But at this moment, standing in the light-flooded entrance to Ginger's lodgings, waiting for Storch to lead him back to his figurative cell, he knew that a man could be a murderer and a saint and a bricklayer and a thousand other things besides. And if he were to sit again about that round table of violence and despair he felt that, while he might find much to stir hatred, he would never again give scope to contempt.
"You want to go home, eh?" Storch was repeating, almost with a note of obscene mirth. "Well, our walk has been quieting, at all events."
Fred Starratt said nothing. He was not in a mood for talk. But when they were inside the house again, with the cracked lamp shade spilling a tempered light about the room, he turned to Storch and said, quietly:
"I sha'n't go to sleep to-night, Storch… You throw yourself on the couch; I've kept you from it long enough."
Storch made a movement toward the door.
"Don't bother to lock it … I'm not going to run away. I'm not quite a fool! I know that if I did try anything like that I wouldn't get farther than the edge of the cliff."
Storch gave him a puzzled glance. Fred could see that he was uncertain, baffled… But in the end he turned away from the unlocked door with a shrug.
Fred Starratt smiled with inner satisfaction. He was glad that he had come back to give Storch that "even break." It was something of an achievement to have compelled Storch's faith in so slight a thing as a literal honesty.
But Storch didn't take the couch. He threw his coat aside and crept into his wretched pile of quilts on the floor, as he said:
"You may want to snatch forty winks or so before the night is over."
There was a warm note in his voice, a bit of truant fatherliness that added an element of grotesqueness to the situation. He might have used the same words and tone to a son about to take the highroad to fortune on the morrow. Or to a lad determined to start upon a sunrise fishing trip, and impatient of the first flush of dawn. After all, it took great simplicity to approach the calamitous moments of life through the channels of the commonplace.
Presently Storch was snoring with the zest which he always brought to sleep. The night air had chilled the room past the point of comfort and the lamp seemed to make little headway with its thin volume of ascending warmth. Fred wrapped himself in a blanket and sat half shivering in the gloom. At first, detached and unrelated thoughts ran through his brain, but gradually his musing assumed a coherence. To-morrow, at this time, he might be either a hunted murderer or a victim himself of Storch's desperation. In any case, he would be furnishing the text for many a newspaper sermon. How eagerly they would trace his downfall, sniffing out the salacious bits for the furtive enjoyment of the chemically pure! For there would be salacious bits. Had he not spent the preceding night in the company of a fallen woman? One by one the facts would be brought out, added to and subtracted from, until the whole affair was a triumph of the transient story-teller art, unrelieved by the remotest flash of understanding. They would interview his former employers first. Mr. Ford would say:
"A steady, conscientious, faithful employee until he became bitten with parlor radicalism."
And Brauer, rather frightened, yet garrulous, would add, for want of anything better:
"An honest partner until he began hitting the booze."
There would be his wife, too. "I did all I could. Stood by him to the last … even when I discovered that there was another woman."
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 toThe Literary Digestand 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.
At a black hour, before the first greenish glow was quickening the east, he tiptoed and stood gazing down at Storch. He had never seen a face more placid and untroubled. He felt that any man must have an extraordinary sense of self-righteousness to yield so completely to serenity in the face of deliberate crime. But Storch was of the stuff of which all fanatics were made. Ends to him always justified means. Of such were the Inquisitors of Spain, the Puritans of the Reformation, the radicals of to-day. They had neither doubts nor fears nor pity, and the helmets of their faith were a screen behind which they hid their overweening egotism. They were ever seeking to entrap humanity and humanity was forever in the end eluding them. And if Hilmer were the eternal questioner made flesh, the gamekeeper beating the furtive birds from the brush, this man Storch was the eternal hunter, at once patient and relentless for his quarry.
And now the hunter slept with a smile on his lips. Of what could he be dreaming? Was it possible to dream of smile-fashioning themes with potential destruction within a stone's throw? In a corner of this room, in a well-packed square case, reposed the force that, once set in motion at the proper or miscalculated moment, could hurl both Storch and Fred Starratt to eternity, and yet Storch slept undisturbed. Well, was not the broader canvas of life full of just such profound faith or profound indifference? Did not society itself sleep with the repressed hatreds of the submerged waiting their appointed season? And while new worlds flew flaming from the wheel of creation, and old ones died in an eye's twinkling, did not the race dream on contemptuous of the changes which lurked in the restless heavens? Yes, the meanest coward in existence had his innate courage and there was a note of bravery in life on any terms.
Fred stood before Storch's sleeping form a long time, and all manner of impulses stirred him. There was even a moment when it came to him that he might fall upon his gaoler while he slept and achieve a swift freedom. And every ignoble murder of legend or history beckoned him with the hands of red expediency. He ended by going to the door and opening it cautiously as he had done the night before. But this time the operation was more skillful and no warning click disturbed the slumberer. He crept out into the night, down the cliff's edge, looking back for the betraying shadow of a hidden spy. But there seemed to be nothing to block his freedom. A virginal moon was languishing upon the western rim of hills…a solitary cock crew lustily…occasional footfalls floated up from the paved streets below…a cart rumbled in the gloom. All these noises of the night were extraordinarily friendly…like the smothered murmurings of a youth escaping from the chains of sleep in pleasant dreaming.