Broken to the Plow. Charles Caldwell Dobie
brief emphasis.
She cast a look at him, half despair and half admiration. He pointed to the door. She went.
Hilmer laughed and regained the living room. Starratt hesitated.
"I guess I'd better pick up the mess," he said, with an attempt at nonchalance.
Nobody made any reply. He bent over the litter. Above the faint tinkle of shattered porcelain dropping upon the lacquered tray he heard his wife's voice cloying the air with unpleasant sweetness as she said:
"Oh yes, Mr. Hilmer, you were telling us about the time you fought a man with a dirk knife … for a half loaf of bread."
CHAPTER II
When the Hilmers left, about half past eleven, Starratt went down to the curb with them, on the pretext of looking at Hilmer's new car. It proved to be a very late and very luxurious model.
"Is it insured?" asked Starratt, as he lifted Mrs. Hilmer in.
"What a hungry bunch you insurance men are!" Hilmer returned. "You're the fiftieth man that's asked me that."
Starratt flushed. The business end of his suggestion had been the last thing in his mind. He managed to voice a commonplace protest, and Hilmer, taking his place at the wheel, said:
"Come in and talk it over sometime … Perhaps you can persuade me."
Starratt smiled pallidly and the car shot forward. He watched it out of sight. Instead of going back into the house he walked aimlessly down the block. He had no objective beyond a desire to kill the time and give Helen a chance to retire before he returned. He wasn't in a mood for talking.
It was not an unusual thing for him to take a stroll before turning in, and habit led him along a beaten path. He always found it fascinating to dip down the Hyde Street hill toward Lombard Street, where he could glimpse both the bay and the opposite shore. Then, he liked to pass the old-fashioned gardens spilling the mingled scent of heliotrope and crimson sage into the lap of night. There was something fascinating and melancholy about this venerable quarter that had been spared the ravages of fire … overlooked, as it were, by the relentless flames, either in pity or contempt. There had been marvelous tales concerning this section's escape from the holocaust of 1906, when San Francisco had been shaken by earthquake and shriveled by flames. One house had been saved by a crimson flood of wine siphoned from its fragrant cellar, another by pluck and a garden hose, a third by quickly hewn branches of eucalyptus and cypress piled against the outside walls as a screen to the blistering heat. Trees and hedges and climbing honeysuckle had contributed, no doubt, to the defense of these relics of a more genial day, but the dogged determination of their owners to save their old homes at any cost must have been the determining factor, Starratt had often thought, as he lingered before the old picket fences, in an attempt to revive his memories of other days. He could not remember, of course, quite back to the time when the Hyde Street hill had been in an opulent heyday, but the flavor of its quality had trickled through to his generation. This was the section where his mother had languished in the prim gloom of her lamp-shaded parlor before his father's discreet advances. The house was gone … replaced by a bay-windowed, jig-sawed horror of the '80s, but the garden still smiled, its quaint fragrance reënforced at the proper season by the belated blossoms of a homesick and wind-bitten magnolia. He was sure, judged by present-day standards, that his mother's old home must have been a very modest, genial sort of place … without doubt a clapboard, two-storied affair with a single wide gable and a porch running the full length of the front. But, in a day when young and pretty women were at a premium, one did not have to live in a mansion to attract desirable suitors, and Fred Starratt had often heard his mother remind his father without bitterness of the catches that had been thrown her way. Not that Starratt, senior, had been a bad prospect matrimonially. Quite the contrary. He had come from Boston in the early '70s, of good substantial family, and with fair looks and a capacity for getting on. Likewise, a chance for inside tips on the stock market, since he had elected to go in with a brokerage firm. And so they were married, with all of conservative San Francisco at the First Unitarian Church to see the wedding, leavened by a sprinkling of the very rich and a dash of the ultrafashionable. Unfortunately, the inside tips didn't pan out … absurd and dazzling fortune was succeeded by appalling and irretrievable failure. Starratt, senior, was too young a man to succumb to the scurvy trick of fate, but he never quite recovered. Gradually the Starratt family fell back a pace. To the last there were certain of the old guard who still remembered them with bits of coveted pasteboard for receptions or marriages or anniversary celebrations … but the Starratts became more and more a memory revived by sentiment and less and less a vital reality.
Fred Starratt used to speculate, during his nocturnal wandering among the shadows of his parents' youthful haunts, just what his position would have been had these stock-market tips proved gilt edged. He tried to imagine himself the master of a splendid estate down the peninsula—preferably at Hillsboro—possessed of high-power cars and a string of polo ponies … perhaps even a steam yacht … But these dazzling visions were not always in the ascendant. There were times when a philanthropic dream moved him more completely and he had naïve and varied speculations concerning the help that he could have placed in the way of the less fortunate had he been possessed of unlimited means. Or, again, his hypothetical wealth put him in the way of the education that placed him easily at the top of a stirring profession.
"If I'd only had half a chance!" would escape him.
This was a phrase borrowed unconsciously from his mother. She was never bitter nor resentful at their profitless tilt with fortune except as it had reacted on her son.
"You should have gone to college," she used to insist, regretfully, summing up by implication his lack of advancement. At first he took a measure of comfort in her excuse; later he came to be irritated by it. And in moments of truant self-candor he admitted he could have made the grade with concessions to pride. There were plenty of youths who worked their way through. But he always had moved close to the edge of affluent circles, where he had caught the cold but disturbing glow of their standards. He left high school with pallid ideals of gentility, ideals that expressed themselves in his reasons for deciding to enter an insurance office. Insurance, he argued, was a nice business, one met nice people, one had nice hours, one was placed in nice surroundings. He had discovered later that one drew a nice salary, too. Well, at least, he had had the virtue of choosing without a very keen eye for the financial returns.
Ten years of being married to a woman who demanded a nice home and nice clothes and a circle of nice friends had done a great deal toward making him a little skeptical about the soundness of his standards. But his moments of uncertainty were few and fleeting, called into life by such uncomfortable circumstances as touching old Wetherbee for money or putting his tailor off when the date for his monthly dole fell due. He had never been introspective enough to quite place himself in the social scale, but when, in his thought or conversation, he referred to people of the better class he unconsciously included himself. He was not a drunken, disorderly, or radical member of society, and he didn't black boots, or man a ship, or sell people groceries, or do any of the things that were done in overalls and a soft shirt, therefore it went without saying that he belonged to the better class. That was synonymous with admitting that one kept one's ringer nails clean and used a pocket handkerchief.
Suddenly, with the force of a surprise slap in the face, it had been borne in upon him that he was not any of the fine things he imagined. He was sure that his insolent guest, Hilmer, had not meant to be disagreeable at the moment when he had said:
"Stiffening the backbone of the middle class is next to impossible!"
"The middle class"! The phrase had brought up even Helen Starratt with a round turn. One might have called them both peasants with equal temerity. No, Hilmer had not made that point consciously, and therein lay its sting.
To-night, as he accomplished his accustomed pilgrimage to the tangible