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Updated: June 28, 2025
His musings were answered by the suggestive pressure of Storch's hand on his. "There's a skirt on the Rialto, anyway," Storch was saying, with disdain. Fred kept his gaze fixed upon the candy-shop window. He was afraid to look up. Could it be that Ginger was passing before him, perhaps for the last time? He caught the vague reflection of a feminine form in the plate-glass window.
As it was, she sat like some pagan goddess, full of sinister silences, impotent, yet unconquered. And again Storch's prophetic words swept him: "Like a field broken to the plow!" There was a terrible beauty in the phrase. Was sorrow the only plowshare that turned the quiescent soul to bountiful harvest?
Suddenly with an arresting irrelevance he thought of the child upon Storch's doorstep, hugging her doll close, and as swiftly he remembered the black kodak case upon the center table. He wondered if the child were still sitting there ... Perhaps, by this time, a swarm of children were tumbling about the weather-beaten steps. He asked a passer-by the hour. Eleven-thirty!
"Come...you've been dreaming!" he flung out. "That's dangerous!" Fred braced himself in his chair. "I'm not going," he said, quietly. "I've changed my mind!" Storch's mouth widened, not in a smile this time, but in a vicious snarl. He took out a cheap watch from his pocket, glanced at it, and put it back. "It's just twenty-five minutes to ten," he said, quietly. "I'll give you five more minutes."
Already Storch and his associates were allowing him a certain aloofness letting him set himself apart with the melancholy arrogance of one who had been chosen for a fanatical sacrifice. Replying to Storch's question regarding his plans, he said, decidedly: "I leave all that to you... Give me instructions and I'll act. But I want to know nothing until the end."
And in his imagination he saw her treading the thin ice of destiny with the same glorified contempt which lured him to the poetical depths of life... And again Monet was at his side... vague, mysterious, impalpable, the essence of things unseen but hoped for, the solved riddle made spirit, the vast patience of eternity realized. And still Storch's restless eyes were fixed upon him.
Every morning now Fred Starratt found a silver dollar upon the cluttered table at Storch's. He smiled grimly as he pocketed the money. He was to have not a care in the world. Like a perfect youth of the ancients marked for a sweet-scented offering to the gods, he was to go his way in perfect freedom until his appointed time.
"I may have been the poorest prospect, but I have been the most uncertain also... You might just as well admit that." He saw Storch's eyes widen at the arrogance of this unexpected thrust. "Slack water is always uncertain," Storch replied, "unless you know which turn in the tide is to follow." They stood gazing at each other for a fraction of time, which seemed eternity.
Waleh's Brazil. Official Letter of Hon. Mr. Ward, from Mexico. Dr. Dickson's Mitigation of Slavery. Franklin on The Peopling of Countries. Ramsay's Essay. Botham's Sugar Cultivation in Batavia. Marsden's History of Sumatra. Coxe's Travels. Dr. Anderson's Observations on Slavery. Storch's Political Economy. Adam Smith. J. Jeremies' Essays. Here, gentlemen, the issue is tendered.
But now he was beyond so conventional a settlement. The huddled meetings about Storch's shattered lamp were no more, but in small groups the scattered malcontents exchanged whispered confidences in any gathering place they chanced upon. Fred Starratt listened to the furtive reports of their activities with morbid interest. But he had to confess that, so far, they were proving empty windbags.
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