Part 80

“Dined at the Wards', and then took Elizabeth home.”

“How is she?”

“She's all right.”

“And there's no news?”

He knew her very well, and he saw then that she was laboring under suppressed excitement.

“What's the matter, mother? You're worried about something, aren't you?”

“I have something to tell you. We'd better go inside.” He followed her in, unexcited and half smiling. Her world was a small one, of minor domestic difficulties, of not unfriendly gossip, of occasional money problems, investments and what not. He had seen her hands tremble over a matter of a poorly served dinner. So he went into the house, closed the terrace window and followed her to the library. When she closed the door he recognized her old tactics when the servants were in question.

“Well?” he inquired. “I suppose--” Then he saw her face. “Sorry, mother. What's the trouble?”

“Wallie, I saw Dick Livingstone in Chicago.”

XXXVI

During August Dick had labored in the alfalfa fields of Central Washington, a harvest hand or “working stiff” among other migratory agricultural workers. Among them, but not entirely of them. Recruited from the lowest levels as men grade, gathered in at a slave market on the coast, herded in bunk houses alive with vermin, fully but badly fed, overflowing with blasphemy and filled with sullen hate for those above them in the social scale, the “stiffs” regarded him with distrust from the 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 utter exhaustion. There were times when he felt that it would be better to return at once to Norada and surrender, for that he must do so eventually he never doubted. It was as well perhaps that he had no time for brooding, but he gained sleep at the cost of superhuman exertion all day.

A feeling of unreality began to obsess him, so that at times he felt like 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 level of the others, to unite himself again with the crowd, to feel again the touch of elbows, the sensation of fellowship. The primal instinct of the herd asserted itself, the need of human companionship of any sort.

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.”