BROKEN TO THE PLOW

CHAPTER I

Toward four o’clock in the afternoon Fred Starratt remembered that he had been commissioned by his wife to bring home oyster cocktails for dinner.  Of course, it went without saying that he was expected to attend to the cigars.  That meant he must touch old Wetherbee for money.  Five dollars would do the trick, but, while he was about it, he decided that he might as well ask for twenty-five.  There were bound to be other demands before the first of the month, and the hard-fisted cashier of Ford, Wetherbee & Co. seemed to grow more and more crusty over drafts against the salary account.  If one caught him in a good humor it was all right.  Usually a risque story was the safest road to geniality.  Starratt raked his brains for a new one, to no purpose.  Every moment of delay added greater certainty to the conviction that he was in for a disagreeable encounter.  At four o’clock Wetherbee always began to balance his cash for the day and he was particularly vicious at any interruptions during this precise performance.  What in the world had possessed Helen to give this absurd dinner party to two people Starratt had never met?  At least she might have put the thing off until pay day, when money was more plentiful.

How did others manage?  Starratt asked himself.  Because there was a small minority in the office who received their full month’s salary without a break during the entire year.  Take young Brauer, for instance.  He got a little over a hundred a month and yet he never seemed short.  He dressed well, too—­or neatly, to be nearer the truth; there was no great style to his make-up.  Of course, Brauer was not married, but Starratt could never remember a time, even before he took the plunge into matrimony, when he was not going through the motions of smoothing old Wetherbee into a good-humored acceptance of an IOU tag.  Starratt did not think himself extravagant, and it always had puzzled him to observe how free some of his salaried friends were with their coin.  Only that morning his wife had reflected his own mood with exaggerated petulancy when she had said: 

“I’m sure I don’t know where all the money goes!  We don’t spend it on cafes, and we haven’t a car, and goodness knows I only buy what I have to when it comes down to clothes.”

What she had to!  He thought over the phrase not with any desire to put Helen in the pillory, but merely to uncover, if possible, the source of their economic ills.

In days gone by, when his mother was alive, he had heard almost the same remark leveled at his father: 

“Well, I suppose some people could save on our income.  But we’ve got to be decent—­we can’t go about in rags!”

He knew from long experience just the sort his mother had meant by the term “some people.”  Brauer was a case in point.  Mrs. Starratt always spoke of such as he with lofty tolerance.