The next morning Fred decided to chance a walk in the open.  He had a vague wish to try his wings again, now that he had grown stronger.  The situation reminded him remotely of Fairview on those first days when Monet and he had attempted to harden their muscles against the day of escape.  But this time he was struggling to free himself from a personality, from an idea.  He must leave Storch and his motley brood as soon as possible; somehow the acid of their ruthless philosophy was eating away the remnants of any inner beauty which had been left him.  At first he had been all revolt, but now there were swift moments in which he asked himself what quarrel he could have with any blows struck at authority.  What had established order done for him?  Acted as a screen for villainy and inconstancy for the most part.

He turned all this over in his mind as he slunk furtively along the water front, trying vaguely to shape a plan of action.  He felt himself to be a very unusual and almost terrible figure, and yet no one paid any heed to him.  His beard had lost its sunburned character and grown jet black, his face, and particularly his hands, were pale to transparence, his eyes burned too brightly in their sunken sockets.  He was not even a ghost of his former self, but rather a sinister reincarnation.  He felt that he was even more forbidding than on that night when he had sent Brauer shivering from his presence.  He doubted whether Brauer would recognize him again, so subtle and marked was the change.  He hardly recognized himself, and the transformation was not solely a matter of physical degeneration.  No, there was something indefinable in the quality of his decline.

He fluttered about the town, at first aimlessly, like a defenseless fledgling thrust before its time from the nest.  He was weak and tremulous and utterly miserable.  Yet he felt compelled to go forward.  He must escape from Storch! He must!

The docks, usually full of bustle, were silent and almost deserted.  Fred questioned a man loafing upon a pile of lumber.  It appeared that a strike of stevedores was the cause of this outward sign of inactivity.  Boats were being loaded quietly, but the process was furtive and sullen.  Occasionally, out of the wide expanse of brooding indolence a knot of men would gather flockwise, and melt as quickly.  There was an ominous quality in the swiftness with which these cloudlike groups congealed and disintegrated.  The sinister blight of repression was over everything—­repressed desires, repressed joys, repressed hatreds.  It was almost as sad as the noonday silence of Fairview.