The Breaking Point (33 page)

But he failed miserably, as Jud Clark could never have failed. He could
not drink with them. He could not sink to their level of degradation.
Their oaths and obscenity sickened and disgusted him, and their talk of
women drove him into the fresh air.

The fact that he could no longer drink himself into a stupor puzzled
him. Bad whiskey circulated freely among the hay stacks and bunk houses
where the harvest hands were quartered, and at ruinous prices. The men
clubbed together to buy it, and he put in his share, only to find that
it not only sickened him, but that he had a mental inhibition against
it.

They called him the "Dude," and put into it gradually all the class
hatred of their wretched sullen lives. He had to fight them, more than
once, and had they united against him he might have been killed. But
they never united. Their own personal animosities and angers kept them
apart, as their misery held them together. And as time went on and his
muscles hardened he was able to give a better account of himself. The
time came when they let him alone, and when one day a big shocker fell
off a stack and broke his leg and Dick set it, he gained their respect.
They asked no questions, for their law was that the past was the past.
They did not like him, but in the queer twisted ethics of the camp they
judged the secret behind him by the height from which he had fallen, and
began slowly to accept him as of the brotherhood of derelicts.

With his improvement in his physical condition there came, toward the
end of the summer, a more rapid subsidence of the flood of the long
past. He had slept out one night in the fields, where the uncut alfalfa
was belled with purple flowers and yellow buttercups rose and nodded
above him. With the first touch of dawn on the mountains he wakened to a
clarity of mind like that of the morning. He felt almost an exaltation.
He stood up and threw out his arms.

It was all his again, never to lose, the old house, and David and Lucy;
the little laboratory; the church on Sunday mornings. Mike, whistling
in the stable. A wave of love warmed him, a great surging tenderness. He
would go back to them. They were his and he was theirs. It was at first
only a great emotion; a tingling joyousness, a vast relief, as of one
who sees, from a far distance, the lights in the windows of home. Save
for the gap between the drunken revel at the ranch and his awakening to
David's face bending over him in the cabin, everything was clear. Still
by an effort, but successfully, he could unite now the two portions of
his life with only a scar between them.

Not that he formulated it. It was rather a mood, an impulse of
unreasoning happiness. The last cloud had gone, the last bit of mist
from the valley. He saw Haverly, and the children who played in its
shaded streets; Mike washing the old car, and the ice cream freezer on
Sundays, wrapped in sacking on the kitchen porch. Jim Wheeler came back
to him, the weight of his coffin dragging at his right hand as he helped
to carry it; he was kneeling beside Elizabeth's bed, and putting his
hand over her staring eyes so she would go to sleep.

The glow died away, and he began to suffer intensely. They were all lost
to him, along with the life they represented. And already he began to
look back on his period of forgetfulness with regret. At least then he
had not known what he had lost.

He wondered again what they knew. What did they think? If they believed
him dead, was that not kinder than the truth? Outside of David and Lucy,
and of course Bassett, the sole foundation on which any search for him
had rested had been the semi-hysterical recognition of Hattie Thorwald.
But he wondered how far that search had gone.

Had it extended far enough to involve David? Had the hue and cry died
away, or were the police still searching for him? Could he even write
to David, without involving him in his own trouble? For David, fine,
wonderful old David—David had deliberately obstructed the course of
justice, and was an accessory after the fact.

Up to that time he had drifted, unable to set a course in the fog, but
now he could see the way, and it led him back to Norada. He would not
communicate with David. He would go out of the lives at the old house as
he had gone in, under a lie. When he surrendered it would be as Judson
Clark, with his lips shut tight on the years since his escape. Let them
think, if they would, that the curtain that had closed down over his
memory had not lifted, and that he had picked up life again where he
had laid it down. The police would get nothing from him to incriminate
David.

But he had a moment, too, when surrender seemed to him not strength but
weakness; where its sheer supineness, its easy solution to his problem
revolted him, where he clenched his fist and looked at it, and longed
for the right to fight his way out.

When smoke began to issue from the cook-house chimney he stirred, rose
and went back. He ate no breakfast, and the men, seeing his squared jaw
and set face, let him alone. He worked with the strength of three men
that day, but that night, when the foreman offered him a job as pacer,
with double wages, he refused it.

"Give it to somebody else, Joe," he said. "I'm quitting."

"The hell you are! When?"

"I'd like to check out to-night."

His going was without comment. They had never fully accepted him, and
comings and goings without notice in the camp were common. He rolled up
his bedding, his change of under-garments inside it, and took the road
that night.

The railroad was ten miles away, and he made the distance easily. He
walked between wire fences, behind which horses moved restlessly as he
passed and cattle slept around a water hole, and as he walked he faced a
situation which all day he had labored like three men to evade.

He was going out of life. It did not much matter whether it was to be
behind bars or to pay the ultimate price. The shadow that lay over him
was that he was leaving forever David and all that he stood for, and a
woman. And the woman was not Elizabeth.

He cursed himself in the dark for a fool and a madman; he cursed the
infatuation which rose like a demoniac possession from his early life.
When that failed he tried to kill it by remembering the passage of time,
the loathing she must have nursed all these years. He summoned the image
of Elizabeth to his aid, to find it eclipsed by something infinitely
more real and vital. Beverly in her dressing-room, grotesque and yet
lovely in her make-up; Beverly on the mountain-trail, in her boyish
riding clothes. Beverly.

Probably at that stage of his recovery his mind had reacted more quickly
than his emotions. And by that strange faculty by which an idea often
becomes stronger in memory than in its original production he found
himself in the grip of a passion infinitely more terrible than his
earlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, of
Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitter
jealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of road
to the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination of
the impulse to go to her, and of final surrender.

In Spokane he outfitted himself, for his clothes were ragged, and with
the remainder of his money bought a ticket to Chicago. Beyond Chicago he
had no thought save one. Some way, somehow, he must get to New York.
Yet all the time he was fighting. He tried again and again to break
away from the emotional associations from which his memory of her was
erected; when that failed he struggled to face reality; the lapse of
time, the certainty of his disappointment, at the best the inevitable
parting when he went back to Norada. But always in the end he found his
face turned toward the East, and her.

He had no fear of starving. If he had learned the cost of a dollar in
blood and muscle, he had the blood and the muscle. There was a time, in
Chicago, when the necessity of thinking about money irritated him, for
the memory of his old opulent days was very clear. Times when his temper
was uncertain, and he turned surly. Times when his helplessness brought
to his lips the old familiar blasphemies of his youth, which sounded
strange and revolting to his ears.

He had no fear, then, but a great impatience, as though, having lost
so much time, he must advance with every minute. And Chicago drove him
frantic. There came a time there when he made a deliberate attempt
to sink to the very depths, to seek forgetfulness by burying one
wretchedness under another. He attempted to find work and failed, and he
tried to let go and sink. The total result of the experiment was that
he wakened one morning in his lodging-house ill and with his money gone,
save for some small silver. He thought ironically, lying on his untidy
bed, that even the resources of the depths were closed to him.

He never tried that experiment again. He hated himself for it.

For days he haunted the West Madison Street employment agencies. But the
agencies and sidewalks were filled with men who wandered aimlessly
with the objectless shuffle of the unemployed. Beds had gone up in the
lodging-houses to thirty-five cents a night, and the food in the cheap
restaurants was almost uneatable. There came a day when the free morning
coffee at a Bible Rescue Home, and its soup and potatoes and carrots at
night was all he ate.

For the first time his courage began to fail him. He went to the
lakeside that night and stood looking at the water. He meant to fight
that impulse of cowardice at the source.

Up to that time he had given no thought whatever to his estate, beyond
the fact that he had been undoubtedly adjudged legally dead and his
property divided. But that day as he turned away from the lake front, he
began to wonder about it. After all, since he meant to surrender himself
before long, why not telegraph collect to the old offices of the estate
in New York and have them wire him money? But even granting that they
were still in existence, he knew with what lengthy caution, following
stunned surprise, they would go about investigating the message. And
there were leaks in the telegraph. He would have a pack of newspaper
hounds at his heels within a few hours. The police, too. No, it wouldn't
do.

The next day he got a job as a taxicab driver, and that night and every
night thereafter he went back to West Madison Street and picked up one
or more of the derelicts there and bought them food. He developed
quite a system about it. He waited until he saw a man stop outside an
eating-house look in and then pass on. But one night he got rather
a shock. For the young fellow he accosted looked at him first with
suspicion, which was not unusual, and later with amazement.

"Captain Livingstone!" he said, and checked his hand as it was about to
rise to the salute. His face broke into a smile, and he whipped off his
cap. "You've forgotten me, sir," he said. "But I've got your visiting
card on the top of my head all right. Can you see it?"

He bent his head and waited, but on no immediate reply being
forthcoming, for Dick was hastily determining on a course of action, he
looked up. It was then that he saw Dick's cheap and shabby clothes, and
his grin faded.

"I say," he said. "You are Livingstone, aren't you? I'd have known—"

"I think you've made a mistake, old man," Dick said, feeling for his
words carefully. "That's not my name, anyhow. I thought, when I saw you
staring in at that window—How about it?"

The boy looked at him again, and then glanced away.

"I was looking, all right," he said. "I've been having a run of hard
luck."

It had been Dick's custom to eat with his finds, and thus remove from
the meal the quality of detached charity. Men who would not take money
would join him in a meal. But he could not face the lights with this
keen-eyed youngster. He offered him money instead.

"Just a lift," he said, awkwardly, when the boy hesitated. "I've been
there myself, lately."

But when at last he had prevailed and turned away he was conscious that
the doughboy was staring after him, puzzled and unconvinced.

He had a bad night after that. The encounter had brought back his
hard-working, care-free days in the army. It had brought back, too,
the things he had put behind him, his profession and his joy in it, the
struggles and the aspirations that constitute a man's life. With them
there came, too, a more real Elizabeth, and a wave of tenderness for
her, and of regret. He turned on his sagging bed, and deliberately put
her away from him. Even if this other ghost were laid, he had no right
to her.

Then, one day, he met Mrs. Sayre, and saw that she knew him.

Wallie stared at his mother. His mind was at once protesting the
fact and accepting it, with its consequences to himself. There was
a perceptible pause before he spoke. He stood, if anything, somewhat
straighter, but that was all.

"Are you sure it was Livingstone?"

"Positive. I talked to him. I wasn't sure myself, at first. He looked
shabby and thin, as though he'd been ill, and he had the audacity to
pretend at first he didn't know me. He closed the door on me and—"

"Wait a minute, mother. What door?"

"He was driving a taxicab."

He looked at her incredulously.

"I don't believe it," he said slowly. "I think you've made a mistake,
that's all."

"Nonsense. I know him as well as I know you."

"Did he acknowledge his identity?"

"Not in so many words," she admitted. "He said I had made a mistake, and
he stuck to it. Then he shut the door and drove me to the station. The
only other chance I had was at the station, and there was a line of
cabs behind us, so I had only a second. I saw he didn't intend to admit
anything, so I said: 'I can see you don't mean to recognize me, Doctor
Livingstone, but I must know whether I am to say at home that I've seen
you.' He was making change for me at the time—I'd have known his hands,
I think, if I hadn't seen anything else-and when he looked up his face
was shocking. He said, 'Are they all right?' 'David is very ill,' I
said. The cars behind were waiting and making a terrific din, and a
traffic man ran up then and made him move on. He gave me the strangest
look as he went. I stood and waited, thinking he would turn and come
back again at the end of the line, but he didn't. I almost missed my
train."