Charles Caldwell Dobie

“ It was not the shock and sadness of death that had sent Fred Starratt for a moment stark mad into the storm and freedom, but rather an ecstasy of loneliness ... a yearning to match daring with daring.
And now he was home again, in his own gray-green city, lying beneath tattered quilts in a hovel, with the selfsame February sun that had once pricked him to a spiritual adventure flooding in upon him! He rose and threw open the door. The soft noontide air floated in, displacing the fetid atmosphere. He looked about the room searchingly. ”

“ He was learning what every man learns sooner or later—to play the hand that is dealt, even in the face of a losing game.
Deep within him he found two opposing currents struggling for mastery—one an overwhelming tide of disillusionment, the other a faith in things hitherto withheld. Against the uncloaked figures of Helen Starratt and Hilmer loomed Ginger and Monet. Did life always yield compensations, if one had the wit to discern them? ”

“ Fred Starratt grew to envy even the wretches who were permitted to carry swill to the pigs. There once had been a time in his life when ambition had pricked him with a desire for affluent ease... He had been grounded in the religious conviction that work had been wished upon a defenseless humanity as a curse. He still remembered his Sabbath-school stories, particularly the scornful text with which the Lord had banished those two erring souls from Eden. Henceforth they were to work! To earn their bread by the sweat of their brows! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Fred gave a little gesture of resignation.
"You know perfectly well that I'm not built to betray the man who gives me shelter."
"Oh, I'm not sheltering you for love!"
"You have some purpose, of course. I understand that. But you're wasting time."
"Well, I'll risk it... I know well enough you're not a man easily won to an abstract hatred... But a personal hatred very often serves as good a turn... Everything is grist to my mill."
"A personal hatred?" echoed Fred.
Storch blew out the light.
"You're duller than I thought," he called through the gloom.
Fred turned his face away and tried to sleep. ”

“ And, to a man, they were furiously in favor of prohibition with all the strength of their weak, dog-in-the-manger souls. Like every human being, they hated what they abused. They wanted to play the game of life with failure eliminated, and the god that they fashioned was a venerable old man who had the skill to worst them, but who genially let them walk away with victory.
As Fred Starratt listened day after day to their chatter he withdrew more and more from any mental contact with them. ”

“ Helen Starratt's slenderness had still a virginal quality and she knew every artifice that heightened this effect. To-day she was a trifle startled at quite the lengths she had gone to strike a note of sophisticated youth. She had long since ceased dressing consciously for her husband, and dressing for other women was more a matter of perfect detail than attempted beguilement. She was curious, she told herself, to see whether a man like Hilmer would be impressed by feminine artifice... Did a black silk gown, with spotless lace at wrist and throat, spell the acme of Hilmer's ideal of womanhood? ”

“ The waitress came tripping back with Starratt's order. Fred fell to.
Presently Fred finished. He rose deliberately, taking time to brush every crumb from his lap. At the door he reached for a whisk broom and wielded it conspicuously. He could not have said whether bravado or contempt was moving him to such flamboyant dawdling. Or was he merely trying to persuade himself that he had nothing to fear in any case? He stepped out into a shower of noonday sunshine flooding through a rift in the high fog of a July morning in San Francisco. ”

“ No, Hilmer had not made that point consciously, and therein lay its sting.
To-night, as he accomplished his accustomed pilgrimage to the tangible shrine of his ancestors, and stood leaning against the gate which opened upon the garden that had smiled upon his mother's wooing, he determined once and for all to establish his position in life... Did he belong to the middle class, and, granting the premises, was it a condition from which one could escape or a fixed heritage that could neither be abandoned nor denied? ”

“ He had been long enough in the insurance business to realize the estimate that average clients had of an insurance broker—they looked upon him as a struggling friend or a poor relation or an agreeable, persuasive grafter, whose only work consisted in talking them into indifferent acceptance of an insurance policy and then pestering them into a reluctant payment of the premium. Of course big business firms recognized a broker's expertness or lack of it, though, quite frequently, as in Hilmer's case, they were more snared by a share in the profits than by the claims of efficiency. ”

“ One night after the others had left Fred said to him:
"Do you realize what you are doing? ... You are working up these men to a frenzy. Some morning we shall wake to find murder done."
"How quickly you are learning," Storch answered, flinging his coat aside.
"Are you fair?" Fred went on, passionately. "If you have your convictions, why not risk your own hide to prove them? Why make cats'-paws of the others?"
Storch took out his pipe and lighted it deliberately. "Prospective martyrs are as plentiful as fish in a net," he answered. "Of what good is the sea's yield without fishermen? ”

“ And, besides, what had Fred Starratt to offer in the way either of skill or brawn?... He grew to know the meaning of impotence. No, he was a creature of the paved streets, and to the paved streets he returned as swiftly as his feet and his indifferent fortune could carry him. Besides, he had grown hungry for familiar sights and faces, and perhaps, down deep, curiosity had been the mainspring of his return. Even bitter ties have a pull that cannot always be denied. At Fairview the presence of Monet had held him almost a willing captive. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ Most of them were vine clad and brightened with beds of scarlet geraniums, but the house before which Storch halted rose uncompromisingly from the sun-baked ground without the charity of a covering. Storch turned the key and threw the door open, motioning Fred to enter. Fred did as he was bidden and found himself in a cluttered room, showing harshly in the light streaming in from a near-by street lamp. The air was foul with stale tobacco, refuse, and imprisoned odors of innumerable greasy meals and the sweaty apparel of men who work with their hands. ”

“ It was Ford's final summary, the unconscious patronage, the quiet, assured insolence of his words, which gave Starratt his irrevocable cue.
"We rather look to men like you, Starratt," Mr. Ford was saying, his voice suave to the point of insincerity, "to tide us over a crisis. Just now, when the laboring element is running amuck, it's good to feel that the country has a large percentage of people who can be reasonable and understand another viewpoint except their own... After everything is said and done, in business a man's first loyalty is to the firm he works for." ”

“ 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. ”

“ He tried fantastically to picture the effect upon the others—the momentary cowardice and braveries that such an event would call into life. For a few brief moments certain personalities and acts would stand out sharply glorified, like grains of dust dancing in the slanting rays of the sun. Then, the angle of yellow light restored to white normality, the whirling particles would drift back into their colorless oblivion.
For a moment he had a taste of desire for unspringing power. If he could but be the wind to shake these dry reeds of custom into a semblance of life!... ”