Broken to the Plow Part 37

The cry of a belated newsboy floated through the open front door.

Storch went out and bought a paper, flinging a section of it at Fred.

A thickly headlined account of the launching at the Hilmer yards occupied chief place on the first page of the local news section.

There was a picture of the hull that had been put through on schedule time in spite of strikes and lockouts, and another one of Hilmer, and a second photograph of a woman. Fred looked twice before he realized that the face of his wife was staring up at him from the printed sheet. Helen Starratt was to be the s.h.i.+p's sponsor and there was a pretty and touching story in this connection. It had always been Mrs.

Hilmer's ambition to christen a seagoing giant, and she had been chosen to act as G.o.dmother to a huge oil-tanker only a year before, but a serious accident had laid her low. Now, though she was unable to perform the rite herself, she had intrusted her part to her faithful friend, Mrs. Starratt. It was to be done by proxy, as it were, with Mrs. Hilmer carried to the grand stand, where she was to repeat the mystic formula, giving the s.h.i.+p a name at the moment when Helen Starratt brought the foaming bottle of champagne cras.h.i.+ng against the vessel's side. The whole article, even down to this obvious dash of "sob stuff," was at once Hilmer's challenge to the strikers and his appeal to the gallery. There was a certain irony in realizing that all these carefully planned effects had been seized upon for Hilmer's own undoing. He was working in the dark, very much as Fred Starratt had worked during those heartbreaking months when he had battled for place in the business world. Then Hilmer had held him in the palm of his hand. Now the situation was reversed--he held Axel Hilmer's fate in his own keeping, and it was his finger that would spin the wheel of destiny. Any fool could demand an eye for an eye; so much for so much was the cut-and-dried morality of the market place. It took a poet to bestow a wage out of all proportion to the workday, to turn the cheek of humility to the blows of arrogance, to commend the extravagant gift of the magdalene. And it was the poetry of life, after all, which counted. Fred Starratt knew that now. A year ago he had thought of poetry as strings of high-sounding words which produced a pleasant mental reaction, something abstract and exotic. He had never fancied that poetry was a thing to be seen and understood and lived, and that such common things as bread and wine and love and hatred were shot through with the pure gold of mystery. Once, if he had been moved to magnanimity it would have been through an impulse of weak and bloodless sentimentality ... now he had risen to generosity on the wings of a supreme indifference, a magnificent contempt for unessentials, a full-blooded understanding. Not that he had achieved a cold and pallid philosophy ... a system of lukewarm expediencies. He could still be swept by gusts of feeling ... he could even risk his life to preserve it.

He turned the pages of the newspaper over mechanically, reading word upon word which held not the slightest meaning. He felt Storch's eyes upon him, drawn, no doubt, by a mixture of subtle doubts and vague appraisals. His thoughts flew to Ginger. What was she doing at this moment? Was there any chance of _her_ failure? For answer another question shaped itself: Had she _ever_ failed? Yet, this time she was beset with dangers. And in his imagination he saw her treading the thin ice of destiny with the same glorified contempt which lured him to the poetical depths of life... And again Monet was at his side...

vague, mysterious, impalpable, the essence of things unseen but hoped for, the solved riddle made spirit, the vast patience of eternity realized. And still Storch's restless eyes were fixed upon him.

Presently he heard Storch's voice coming to his ears out of a friendly dusk:

"It's nine-thirty...I guess we had better be moving."

He did not stir at first...he merely sat staring at Storch, very much as a man waking suddenly and not yet alive to the precise details of his environment. "Moving...where?" he finally inquired.

Storch crumpled the newspaper in his hand viciously. "Come...you've been dreaming!" he flung out. "That's dangerous!"

Fred braced himself in his chair. "I'm not going," he said, quietly.

"I've changed my mind!"

Storch's mouth widened, not in a smile this time, but in a vicious snarl. He took out a cheap watch from his pocket, glanced at it, and put it back.

"It's just twenty-five minutes to ten," he said, quietly. "I'll give you five more minutes."

Fred put both his arms upon the cluttered table, leaning forward, as he answered:

"Nothing can alter my decision now, Storch... You should have known better than to have counted on one of my sort...In the end, you see, my standards _have_ shackled me."

"Counted on your sort!" Storch laughed back, sarcastically. "Do you suppose for one moment that I ever count on anyone?... I like a game of chance ... that's why I chose you. I like to triumph in spite of a poor hand ... and you have been in some ways the poorest deal I've ever risked a play on. But if I'd gotten you I'd have chuckled to my dying day ... even in spite of the fact that it would have shattered all my theories. I catch my fish upon the lowest and highest tides ...

slack water never yields much."

He was rising to his feet. His face was a placid mask, but his voice dripped venom. Fred matched his movements with equal quiet.

"Still you did have hopes for me," Fred threw at him in grim raillery.

"I may have been the poorest prospect, but I have been the most uncertain also... You might just as well admit that."

He saw Storch's eyes widen at the arrogance of this unexpected thrust.

"Slack water is always uncertain," Storch replied, "unless you know which turn in the tide is to follow."

They stood gazing at each other for a fraction of time, which seemed eternity. And in that swift and yet prolonged exchange of glances Fred Starratt read Storch's purpose completely...

There followed a moment of swift action in which Storch made a clipt movement toward his hip pocket, and in a trice Fred Starratt felt himself bear quickly down upon the shattered lamp, grasp it firmly in his two hands, and bring it cras.h.i.+ng against Storch's upflung forehead.

He was not conscious of seeing Storch crumple over, but he felt a thud shake the cluttered room to its foundations... He went over quietly and closed the open door. Then he put on his hat. Storch lay quite still and an ugly red pool was already luring flies to a crimson feast. The floor was covered with bits of shattered gla.s.s glistening in the sun.

Presently he opened the door again. A child had crept up to the doorstep and sat prattling to her tattered doll. He stepped aside so as not to disturb her, shut the door with a sharp bang, and walked swiftly to the edge of the cliff. But this time he plunged down. He looked back once. Not a soul followed him.

CHAPTER XXIV

He was sitting on a pile of lumber when, an hour later, his thoughts began to run in rational channels again. Before him lay a patch of gray-green bay, flanked on either side by wharves upon which two black-hulled lumber schooners were disgorging their resinous cargo.

The strike of the longsh.o.r.emen was still in progress and the Embarcadero as good as deserted. Armed guards paraded before the entrance to the docks and only occasional idlers sunned themselves and viewed the silent and furtive loading of restive craft straining at their moorings.

He began to wonder dimly whether he had left Storch dead or merely stunned, and, granting either alternative, how definitely this circ.u.mstance would halt the plot against Hilmer's life. It was conceivable to him now that Storch might have provided against the possibility of failure, given the role of a.s.sa.s.sin into the hands of an understudy, to be exact. Suppose Ginger should fail in her warning?

Not that he doubted her, but there was a chance that she had been hedged about with all manner of difficulties--perhaps even death.

Suddenly with an arresting irrelevance he thought of the child upon Storch's doorstep, hugging her doll close, and as swiftly he remembered the black kodak case upon the center table. He wondered if the child were still sitting there ... Perhaps, by this time, a swarm of children were tumbling about the weather-beaten steps. He asked a pa.s.ser-by the hour. Eleven-thirty! In fifteen more minutes, if the ticking clock within that sinister case performed its function, Storch's dwelling would be tumbling in upon his prostrate body. And, in the face of this, children might be prattling before the threshold.

He must go back again!

He jumped to his feet and began to run. In an instant a conflagration of potential disasters leaped up from the spark of the immediate danger. He flew along faster, colliding with irate pedestrians, escaping the wheels of skimming automobiles ... Presently the familiar cliff and the tawny path scaling it loomed ahead. He began to climb upward, almost on all-fours, digging his finger nails into the yellow clay in an instinctive effort to pull himself forward. Finally he gained the top ... The street, somnolent with approaching noon, was deserted--the child had disappeared. He recovered his whirling senses and looked again. This time he saw that the door of the shack stood open. He took a step forward. A figure loomed in the doorway. He shaded his eyes from the sun's glare and narrowed his lids. It was a woman!

The unexpectedness of this presence overwhelmed him as completely as if he had seen an apparition. For an instant he did not grasp its significance.

Then, in another moment, understanding began to flood in upon him. He felt a great weakness ... but he managed to make a trumpet with his hands, calling in a voice that sounded remote:

"Come out! For G.o.d's sake, come out!"

He saw the woman start back in a movement of quick confusion, and heard himself call again, this time with m.u.f.fled agony:

"Ginger!"

There was a tremendous roar ... he felt a shower of stones. .h.i.tting him sharply in the face ... He pressed forward ... sheets of flame were leaping greedily toward the sky and a string of people poured out into the sun-baked street.

At midnight Fred Starratt, making his way from the outlying districts toward the center of the town, came out of a mental turmoil that had flung him about all day in a series of blind impulses. The air was raucous with the shrill cry of newsboys announcing the details of the morning's sensation. He knew how the journalistic tale would run without bothering to glimpse the headlines. At this time it would be made up for the most part of vague speculations as to who was the prime mover of the enterprise.

The moments following the disaster were now fathomless, but he fancied that he had been outwardly cool, chilled into subconscious calculation by the very violence of the shock ... The frenzy had come later when he found himself aboard a ferryboat bound for Oakland. He could not disentangle the mixed impulses which had sent him upon this irrational errand, but he remembered now that a consuming desire to see Hilmer had possessed him. Perhaps an itching for revenge again had sprung into life, perhaps a fury to release a measure of his scorn and contempt, perhaps a mere curiosity to glimpse once more this man whose armor of arrogance remained unpierced ... Whatever the urge, it had keyed him to a quivering determination. He had wondered what stupidity possessed him to send Ginger in warning to a man like Hilmer. ... With almost psychic power he had created for himself the scene at the depot with Ginger pouring her tremulous message into contemptuous ears. For it was certain that Hilmer had been contemptuous. ... Afterward, standing before the north gate of Hilmer's s.h.i.+pyards, a man at his side confirmed his intuitions between irritating puffs from a blackened pipe:

"n.o.body can double-cross Hilmer ... and they'd better give up trying ... He said a launching at noon and it _was_ at noon, you can bet your life on that! ... They say a woman tried to scare the old man this morning ... He just laughed in her face and came on over."

Almost as the man had finished speaking the crowd surged forward. And in a twinkling Hilmer's machine had swept past, leaving Fred, trembling from head to foot, staring stupidly into a cloud of dust ...

He had not even glimpsed the occupants! But his failure to achieve whatever vague plan was buffeting him about drove him back to San Francisco. His confused mind had worked with the rational capacity for details which characterizes madness. He knew that Hilmer must wait for the automobile ferry...that the regular pa.s.senger boat would reach the other side at least a half hour in advance.

He had been prepared this time for the appearance of Hilmer's car. It came off the boat preceded by a thin line of automobiles, moving slowly. ... For a moment he wondered how he would achieve his purpose, and the next thing he knew he had leaped aboard the running board...

He remembered long after that his wife had given a cry, that Mrs.

Hilmer had stirred ever so slightly, that Hilmer's eyes had widened.

Then out of a tense moment of suppressed confusion he had heard his wife's voice floating toward him as she said:

"Ah, then you were not drowned, after all!"

With amazing effrontery he threw open the door and pressed down the emergency seat opposite her.

"No... I swam out of that black pool!"

A slight tremor ran through her. Mrs. Hilmer smiled.

Recalling the scene, he remembered how outwardly commonplace were the moments which followed. Even Hilmer had been surprised into ba.n.a.lities. Fred Starratt might have parted with them but yesterday, for any indications to the contrary, and for an instant he had found all sense of tragedy swallowed up in amazement at the pa.s.sive tenacity of the conventions.