“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.”
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.
