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Updated: June 28, 2025
And suddenly, in the intensity of his concentration, he felt a swooning sense of nonexistence, as if his inner consciousness had detached itself someway from the egotism of the flesh and stood apart, watching... He was recalled by Storch's voice. He shuddered slightly and turned his face toward his questioner. "I didn't hear what you said," escaped him. Storch leaned forward.
He had moments of consciousness when he sensed Storch's figure moving in a sort of mist, flashing a green smile through the gloom. He saw other figures, too -Helen Starratt, swathed in clinging black; Hilmer, displaying his mangled thumb; Monet with eyes of gentle reproach; and Ginger, very vague and very wistful.
The next day he decided to crawl out of bed and begin to win back his strength. He couldn't lie there forever sharing Storch's roof and crust. But the effort left him exhausted and he was soon glad to fling himself back upon the couch. Each succeeding day he felt a little stronger, until the time came when he was able to drag himself to the open door and sit in the sunshine.
It was something of an achievement to have compelled Storch's faith in so slight a thing as a literal honesty. But Storch didn't take the couch. He threw his coat aside and crept into his wretched pile of quilts on the floor, as he said: "You may want to snatch forty winks or so before the night is over."
And almost at the same time he was conscious that their feet were planted upon that selfsame corner past which Ginger walked at midnight. He put a hand on Storch's shoulder. "Let us wait here a few moments," he said. "I am feeling a little tired." A newsboy bellowing the latest edition of the paper broke an unusual and almost profound stillness.
He had caught only the merest fragments of conversation which had fallen from the lips of the group he had surprised, but his intuitions had been sharpened by months of misfortune. He knew at once what date had been set for the consummation of Storch's sinister plot. He rose to his feet, shivering until his teeth chattered.
Storch's tone was kind to a point of softness, and yet, later, when he bent over the couch with a steaming glass in his hand Fred experienced a sharp revulsion. "I dreamed all last night," Fred said, almost defiantly, "that this room was a cobweb and that you were a huge spider, dangling on a thread." "And you were the fly, I suppose," Storch replied, sneeringly.
And before him in review passed a motley company of every tragic group that he had ever known business associates, jailbirds, the inmates of Fairview, Storch's terrible companions. He recognized each group in its turn by their outer trappings.
And, as he sat there shivering in the gloom of Storch's cracked lamp, he had a vision of this scorned company to which he unquestionably belonged, sterile and barren in the glare of accepted standards, broken gradually by the plowshare of disillusionment and harrowed to great potentialities by a deeper sense of their faiths and needs.
So some one was to get Hilmer, after all! Well, why not? Hilmer liked men with guts enough to fight rabbit drives were not to his taste... Among all the names brought up and discussed at these sinister gatherings about Storch's round table Hilmer's stood out as the ultimate prize.
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