Broken to the Plow Part 19

Fred Starratt flung down the brush. "Why don't you call it by its right name? ... I'm told it's an insane asylum."

Watson stared and then came forward with a little threatening gesture.

"You better not start any rough-house, Starratt--at the eleventh hour!" he admonished, with a significant warmth.

Fred turned slowly, breaking into a laugh. "Rough-house?" he echoed.

"Don't be afraid. ... I've got to the curious stage now. I want to see the whole picture." He reached for his hat. "I'm ready ... let's go."

A half hour later Fred Starratt was booked at the detention hospital.

They took away his clothes and gave him a towel and a nightgown and led him to a bathroom... Presently he was shown to his cell-like room.

Overhead the fading day filtered in ghostly fas.h.i.+on through a skylight; an iron bed stood against the wall. There was not another stick of furniture in sight.

He crawled into his bed and the attendant left him, switching on an electric light from the outside. A nurse with supper followed shortly--a bowl of thin soup and two slices of dry bread. Fred Starratt lifted the bowl to his lips and drank a few mouthfuls. The stuff was without flavor, but it quenched his burning thirst... After a while he broke the bread into small bits--not only because he was hungry, but because he was determined to eat this bitter meal to the last crumb. When he had finished he felt mysteriously sealed to indifference.

The nurse came in for the tray and he asked her to switch off the light. He lay for hours, open-eyed, in the gloom, while wraithlike memories materialized and vanished as mysteriously. Somehow the incidents of his life nearest in point of time seemed the remotest.

Only his youth lay within easy reach, and his childhood nearest of all. He was traveling back ... back ... perhaps in the end

oblivion would wrap him in its healing mantle and he would wait to be made perfect and whole again in the flaming crucible of a new birth... Gradually the mists of remembrance faded, lost their outline ... became confused, and he slept.

He awoke with a s.h.i.+ver. A piercing scream was curdling the silence.

From the other side of the thin part.i.tion came shrieks, curses, mad laughter. He heard the heavy tramp of attendants in the hallway ...

doors quickly opened and slammed shut. ... There followed the sounds of scuffling, the reeling impact of several bodies against the wall ... then blows of shuddering softness, one last shriek ... dead silence!

He sat up in bed--alive and quivering. Was this the rebirth that the swooning hours had held in store for him? ... Quickly life came flooding back. Indifference fell from him. In one blinding flash his new condition was revealed. His life had been a futile compromise. He had sowed pa.s.sivity and he had reaped a barren harvest of negative virtues. He would compromise again, and he would be pa.s.sive again, and he would bow his neck to authority ... but from this moment on he would wither the cold fruits of such enforced planting in a steadily rising flame of understanding. He knew now the meaning of the word "revelation."

CHAPTER XI

They kept Fred Starratt in bed for two weeks, and one morning when the sun was flooding through the skylight with soul-warming radiance they brought him his clothes and he knew that the prologue to the drama of his humiliation was over. He crawled to his feet and looked down upon his body wasted by days of enforced idleness and fasting. He dropped back upon the bed, exhausted. The sun, striking him squarely, gradually flamed him with feeble energy. He straightened himself and dressed slowly.

When he had finished the sun still poured its golden shower into the room. He rose to his feet and lifted his chilled hands high to receive its blessing. He felt the blood tingle through his transparent fingers.

In the next room he heard the tramping of feet and a feeble curse or two. He dropped his hands and sat down again. The nurse came in with his breakfast.

"The man next door?" he asked. "Is he leaving to-day, too?"

"Yes."

"Where does he go?"

"To Fairview."

A memory of that first night with its piercing terror sent a s.h.i.+ver through him.

"They brought him in the same day I came," he ventured, half musingly.

"At the beginning he made a lot of noise, but lately..."

She set the tray down upon the bed. "They had to put him in a strait-jacket," she said, significantly. "He's quite hopeless. He tried to kill his wife and his child ... and he set fire to the home.

He's an Italian."

"Yes ... so I was told."

The nurse departed and he drank the cup of muddy coffee on the tray.

He laid the cup down and sat staring at the square cut in the center of the thick oak door leading into the corridor. Presently he heard the swish of a woman's skirt pa.s.sing the opening, followed by the pattering footsteps of childhood. There came the sound of soft weeping ... the swis.h.i.+ng skirt pa.s.sed again, and the pattering footsteps died away. The nurse returned.

"The Italian's wife and child have just been here," she said. "They let the woman look for the last time at her husband through the hole in the door."

Fred put his head between his hands. "He tried to murder her and yet she came to see him," he muttered, almost inaudibly. "I dare say he abused her in his day, too."

The woman gave him a sharp glance. "You're married, aren't you?"

He looked up suddenly, reading the inference in her question. "Yes ...

but my wife won't come..."

The nurse left the room and he put his face in his hands again. The sun was traveling swiftly. He s.h.i.+fted his position so that he could get the full benefit of its warmth. He thought that he had banished the memory of Helen Starratt forever, but he found his mind re-creating that final scene with her in all its relentless bitterness... She had come that day to salve her conscience ... to pay her t.i.the to form and respectability ... perhaps moved to fleeting pity. He had seen through every word, every gesture, every glance. Her transparency was loathsome. Why did he read her so perfectly now? Was it because she felt herself too secure for further veilings, or had his eyes been suddenly opened?

She was not flaming nor reckless nor consumed utterly; instead, there was a complacent coolness about her, as if pa.s.sion had drawn every warmth within her for its own consummation. She had still her instincts in the leash of calculation, going through the motions of conventionality. The lifted eyebrows and curling lip which she had directed at Ginger's departing figure were not inconsistent.

Dissimulation was such an art with her that it was unconscious.

He had asked her only one question:

"And how is Mrs. Hilmer?"

Even now he shuddered at the completeness with which her words betrayed her.

"There is no change ... we are simply waiting."

He had turned away from this crowning disclosure. _Waiting_? No wonder she could veil her desire in such disarming patience! He had intended asking her plans. Now it was unnecessary. And he had thought at once of that last night when he had called at Hilmer's, remembering the sprawling magazine on the floor, the bowl of wanton flowers upon the mantelshelf, the debonairly flung mandarin skirt clinging to the piano--these had been the first marks of conquest.

As she was leaving she had said, "I shall see you again, of course."

In spite of its inconsistency he had sensed a certain habitual tenderness in her voice, as if custom were demanding its due. And, for a moment, the old bond between them touched him with its false warmth.

But a swift revulsion swept him.

"Why bother?" he had thrown back at her.

"You mean you don't want me to come?"

"Yes, just that!"

He had taken her breath away, perhaps even wounded her, momentarily, but she had recovered herself quickly. Her smile had been full of the smug satisfaction of one who has washed his hands in public self-justification.

She had left soon after that pa.s.sage at arms, achieving the grace to dispense with the empty formality of either a kiss or a farewell embrace... He remembered how he had flung up the window as if to clear the room of her poisonous presence...

To-day, sitting upon his narrow bed, instinctively following the patch of yellow sunlight as it gilded the gloom, he felt that the maniac next door had the better part. Of what use was reason when it ceased to function except in terms of withering unbelief?