The Breaking Point

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  XXXVI

  During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of CentralWashington, a harvest hand or "working stiff" among other migratoryagricultural workers. Among them, but not entirely of them. Recruitedfrom the lowest levels as men grade, gathered in at a slave market onthe coast, herded in bunk houses alive with vermin, fully but badly fed,overflowing with blasphemy and filled with sullen hate for those abovethem in the social scale, the "stiffs" regarded him with distrust fromthe start.

  In the beginning he accepted their sneers with a degree of philosophy.His physical condition was poor. At night he ached intolerably,collapsing into his wooden bunk to sleep the dreamless sleep of utterexhaustion. There were times when he felt that it would be betterto return at once to Norada and surrender, for that he must do soeventually he never doubted. It was as well perhaps that he had no timefor brooding, but he gained sleep at the cost of superhuman exertion allday.

  A feeling of unreality began to obsess him, so that at times he feltlike a ghost walking among sweating men, like a resurrection into life,but without life. And more than once he tried to sink down to the levelof the others, to unite himself again with the crowd, to feel again thetouch of elbows, the sensation of fellowship. The primal instinct of theherd asserted itself, the need of human companionship of any sort.

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

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

  They called him the "Dude," and put into it gradually all the classhatred of their wretched sullen lives. He had to fight them, more thanonce, and had they united against him he might have been killed. Butthey never united. Their own personal animosities and angers kept themapart, as their misery held them together. And as time went on and hismuscles hardened he was able to give a better account of himself. Thetime came when they let him alone, and when one day a big shocker felloff 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 theyjudged the secret behind him by the height from which he had fallen, andbegan slowly to accept him as of the brotherhood of derelicts.

  With his improvement in his physical condition there came, toward theend of the summer, a more rapid subsidence of the flood of the longpast. He had slept out one night in the fields, where the uncut alfalfawas belled with purple flowers and yellow buttercups rose and noddedabove him. With the first touch of dawn on the mountains he wakened to aclarity 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, whistlingin the stable. A wave of love warmed him, a great surging tenderness. Hewould go back to them. They were his and he was theirs. It was at firstonly a great emotion; a tingling joyousness, a vast relief, as of onewho sees, from a far distance, the lights in the windows of home. Savefor the gap between the drunken revel at the ranch and his awakening toDavid's face bending over him in the cabin, everything was clear. Stillby an effort, but successfully, he could unite now the two portions ofhis life with only a scar between them.

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

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

  He wondered again what they knew. What did they think? If they believedhim 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 himhad 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 diedaway, or were the police still searching for him? Could he even writeto David, without involving him in his own trouble? For David, fine,wonderful old David--David had deliberately obstructed the course ofjustice, and was an accessory after the fact.

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

  But he had a moment, too, when surrender seemed to him not strength butweakness; where its sheer supineness, its easy solution to his problemrevolted him, where he clenched his fist and looked at it, and longedfor the right to fight his way out.

  When smoke began to issue from the cook-house chimney he stirred, roseand went back. He ate no breakfast, and the men, seeing his squared jawand set face, let him alone. He worked with the strength of three menthat 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, andcomings and goings without notice in the camp were common. He rolled uphis bedding, his change of under-garments inside it, and took the roadthat night.

  The railroad was ten miles away, and he made the distance easily. Hewalked between wire fences, behind which horses moved restlessly as hepassed and cattle slept around a water hole, and as he walked he faced asituation 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 bebehind bars or to pay the ultimate price. The shadow that lay over himwas that he was leaving forever David and all that he stood for, and awoman. And the woman was not Elizabeth.

  He cursed himself in the dark for a fool and a madman; he cursed theinfatuation 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 imageof Elizabeth to his aid, to find it eclipsed by something infinitelymore real and vital. Beverly in her dressing-room, grotesque and yetlovely in her make-up; Beverly on the mountain-trail, in her boyishriding clothes. Beverly.

  Probably at that stage of his recovery his mind had reacted more quicklythan his emotions. And by that strange faculty by which an idea oftenbecomes stronger in memory than in its original production he foundhimself in the grip of a passion infinitely more terrible than hisearlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, ofElizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitterjealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of roadto the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination ofthe impulse to go to her, and of final surrender.

  In Spokane he outfitted himself, for his clothes
were ragged, and withthe remainder of his money bought a ticket to Chicago. Beyond Chicago hehad 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 breakaway from the emotional associations from which his memory of her waserected; when that failed he struggled to face reality; the lapse oftime, the certainty of his disappointment, at the best the inevitableparting when he went back to Norada. But always in the end he found hisface turned toward the East, and her.

  He had no fear of starving. If he had learned the cost of a dollar inblood and muscle, he had the blood and the muscle. There was a time, inChicago, when the necessity of thinking about money irritated him, forthe memory of his old opulent days was very clear. Times when his temperwas uncertain, and he turned surly. Times when his helplessness broughtto his lips the old familiar blasphemies of his youth, which soundedstrange and revolting to his ears.

  He had no fear, then, but a great impatience, as though, having lostso much time, he must advance with every minute. And Chicago drove himfrantic. There came a time there when he made a deliberate attemptto sink to the very depths, to seek forgetfulness by burying onewretchedness under another. He attempted to find work and failed, and hetried to let go and sink. The total result of the experiment was thathe wakened one morning in his lodging-house ill and with his money gone,save for some small silver. He thought ironically, lying on his untidybed, 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 theagencies and sidewalks were filled with men who wandered aimlesslywith the objectless shuffle of the unemployed. Beds had gone up in thelodging-houses to thirty-five cents a night, and the food in the cheaprestaurants was almost uneatable. There came a day when the free morningcoffee at a Bible Rescue Home, and its soup and potatoes and carrots atnight was all he ate.

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

  Up to that time he had given no thought whatever to his estate, beyondthe fact that he had been undoubtedly adjudged legally dead and hisproperty divided. But that day as he turned away from the lake front, hebegan to wonder about it. After all, since he meant to surrender himselfbefore long, why not telegraph collect to the old offices of the estatein New York and have them wire him money? But even granting that theywere still in existence, he knew with what lengthy caution, followingstunned surprise, they would go about investigating the message. Andthere were leaks in the telegraph. He would have a pack of newspaperhounds at his heels within a few hours. The police, too. No, it wouldn'tdo.

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

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

  He bent his head and waited, but on no immediate reply beingforthcoming, for Dick was hastily determining on a course of action, helooked up. It was then that he saw Dick's cheap and shabby clothes, andhis 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 hiswords carefully. "That's not my name, anyhow. I thought, when I saw youstaring 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 hardluck."

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

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

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

  He had a bad night after that. The encounter had brought back hishard-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, thestruggles and the aspirations that constitute a man's life. With themthere came, too, a more real Elizabeth, and a wave of tenderness forher, and of regret. He turned on his sagging bed, and deliberately puther away from him. Even if this other ghost were laid, he had no rightto her.

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