Читать книгу The Wire Tappers - Stringer Arthur - Страница 5

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More than once, during the feverish, kaleidoscopic days that followed, Durkin found himself drawing aside to ask if, after all, he were not living some restless dream in which all things hung tenuous and insubstantial. The fine linen and luxury of life were so new to him that in itself it half intoxicated; yet, outside the mere ventral pleasures of existence, with its good dinners in quiet cafés of gold and glass and muffling carpets, its visits to rustling, dimly-lighted theatres, its drives about the open city, its ever-mingled odors of Havana and cut flowers,—there was the keener and more penetrating happiness of listening to the soft English voice of what seemed to him a bewilderingly beautiful woman.

She was that, at least to him; and Durkin was content to let the world think what it liked. He found work to be done, it is true,—rigorous and exacting work while it lasted, when the appointed days for holding up Penfield’s despatches came around. But the danger of it all, for some reason, never entered his mind, as he sat over his instrument, reading off the horses to the woman at his side, who, in turn, repeated them over the telephones, in cipher, to MacNutt and Mackenzie; and then, when the time allowance had elapsed, cutting in once more and sending on the intercepted despatches, even imitating to a nicety the slip-shod erratic volubility of Corcoran’s “blind send.”

Once only did a disturbing incident tend to ruffle the quiet waters of Durkin’s strange contentment. It was one afternoon when Mackenzie had been sent in to make a report, and had noticed certain things to which he did not take kindly, Durkin thought.

“I’m not saying anything,” he blurted out, when they were alone, “but don’t you let that woman make a fool of you!”

“You shut up about that woman!” retorted Durkin, hotly. Then, imagining he saw some second and deeper meaning in the other’s words, he caught him by the lapel of the vest, and held him against the wall.

“You are saying something, you hound! What do you mean by that, anyway?” he cried, with a white face. The man against the wall could see that a word would bring the onslaught, but he was used to trouble of that sort, and many a keener menace. So he only laughed contemptuously, with his shoulders up, as he pulled the other’s fingers from his throat.

“You damned lobster, you!” he said, going off on the safer tack of amiable profanity. Then feeling himself free once more, his old bitter audacity proclaimed itself.

“You fool, you, don’t you know that woman’s been—”

But here the entrance of the girl herself put a stop to his speech. Yet, troubled in spirit as some currish and unspoken insinuation left him, Durkin breathed no word to the girl herself of what had taken place, imperiously as she demanded to know what Mackenzie had been saying.

On the day following, as MacNutt had arranged, the two paid their first visit to Penfield’s lower house, from which Durkin carried away confused memories of a square-jawed door-keeper—who passed him readily enough, at a word from the girl—of well-dressed men and over-dressed women crowded about a smoke-wreathed, softly lighted room, one side of which was taken up with a blackboard on which attendants were feverishly chalking down entries, jockeys, weights and odds, while on the other side of the room opened the receiving and paying-tellers’ little windows, through which now and then he saw hurrying clerks; of bettors excitedly filling in slips which disappeared with their money through the mysterious pigeon-hole in the wall; of the excited comments as the announcer called the different phases and facts of the races, crying dramatically when the horses were at the post, when they were off, when one horse led, and when another; when the winner passed under the wire; of the long, wearing wait while the jockeys were weighing in, and of the posting of the official returns, while the lucky ones—faded beauties with cigarette-stained fingers, lean and cadaverous-looking “habituals,” stout and flashy-looking professionals, girlish and innocent-looking young women, heavy dowagers resplendent in their morning diamonds,—gathered jubilantly at the window for their money. The vaster army of the unlucky, on the other hand, dropped forlornly away, or lingered for still another plunge.

Durkin found it hard, during each of these brief visits, to get used to the new order of things. Such light-fingered handling of what, to his eyes, seemed great fortunes, unstrung and bewildered him. He had never believed the newspaper story that when the District Attorney’s men had broken open a gambling-house safe a few months before, they had found deposited there a roll of greenbacks amounting to over three-quarters of a million dollars. That story now seemed likely enough. Yet, with him, the loss of even a hundred dollars on a horse, although not his own money, in some way depressed him for the day. Frances Candler picked her winners, however, with studious and deliberate skill, and, though they bet freely, it was not often that their losses, in the end, were heavy.

She had no love for this part of the work; and in this Durkin heartily agreed with her.

“The more I know of track-racing and its army of hangers-on,” he declared to her, “the more I hate it, and everything about it! They say there are over fifty thousand men in the business, altogether—and you may have noticed how they all—the owners and the bigger men, I mean—dilate on their purpose of ‘improving the breed of the thoroughbred’—but to my mind, it’s to improve the breed of rascality!”

He noted her habitual little head-shake as she started to speak.

“Yes, I think more unhappiness, more wrecked lives and characters, more thieves and criminals, really come from the race-track than from all the other evils in your country. It’s not the racing itself, and the spectacular way of your idle rich for wasting their money! No, it’s not that. It’s the way what you call the smaller fry cluster about it, so cruelly and mercilessly ‘on the make,’ as they put it, and infect the rest of the more honest world with their diseased lust for gain without toil. I have watched them and seen them. It is deadly; it stifles every last shred of good out of them! And then the stewards and the jockey clubs themselves try to hide the shameful conditions of things, and drape and hang their veil of lies and hypocrisy and moral debauchery over these buzzing clouds of parasites; and so it goes on! For, indeed, I know them,” she ended, bitterly. “Oh, I know them well!”

Durkin thought of the four great Circuits, Eastern, Southern, Western, and Pacific slope, of the huge and complicated and mysteriously half-hidden gambling machinery close beside each great centre of American population, New York and Washington, Chicago and St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, where duplicity and greed daily congregate, where horses go round and round in their killing and spectacular short-speed bursts, and money flashes and passes back and forth, and portly owners sit back and talk of the royal sport, as they did, Durkin told himself, in the days of Tyre and Rome. But day by day, with the waning afternoon, the machinery comes to a stop, the sacrificial two-year-olds are blanketed and stabled, the grand-stands disgorge their crowds, and from some lower channel of the dark machine drift the rail-birds and the tipsters, the bookmakers and touts, the dissolute lives and the debauched moral sensibilities, the pool-room feeders and attendants in the thick of the city itself, the idlers and the criminals.

The thought of it filled him with a sudden emotional craving for honesty and clean-living and well-being. He rejoiced in the clear sunlight and the obvious respectability of the Avenue up which they were walking so briskly—for about Frances Candler, he had always found, there lurked nothing of the subterranean and morbidly secretive. She joyed in her wholesome exercise and open air; she always seemed to be pleading for the simplicities and the sanities of existence. She still stood tantalizingly unreconciled, in his mind, to the plane of life on which he had found her.

It was one night after a lucky plunge on a 20 to 1 horse had brought him in an unexpected fortune of eighteen hundred dollars, that Durkin, driving past Madison Square through the chilly afternoon of the late autumn, with a touch of winter already in the air, allowed his thoughts to wander back to what seemed the thin and empty existence as a train-despatcher and a Postal-Union operator. As he gazed out on the closed cars and the women and the lights, and felt the warmth of the silent girl at his side, he wondered how he had ever endured those old, colorless days. He marvelled at the hold which the mere spectacular side of life could get on one. He tried to tell himself that he hated the ill-gotten wealth that lay so heavy and huge in his pocket at that moment; and he smothered his last warmth of satisfaction with the phrase which she had used a few days before: “Their diseased lust for gain without toil.” Then he tried to think of the life he was leading, with one figure eliminated; and the blankness of the prospect appalled him.

With a sudden impetuous motion he caught up her hand, where it lay idly in her lap, and held it close. She tried to draw it away, but could not.

“Everything seems so different, Frank, since I’ve known you!” he said, a little huskily.

“It’s different with me, too!” she all but whispered, looking away. Her face, in the waning light, against the gloom of the dark-curtained taxi-cab, looked pale, and, as he had so often felt, almost flower-like.

“Frank!” he cried in a voice that started her breathing quickly. “Won’t you—won’t you marry me?”

She looked at him out of what seemed frightened eyes, with an unnatural and half-startled light on her pale face.

“I love you, Frank, more than I could ever tell you!” he went on, impetuously. “You could walk over me, you could break me, and do what you like with me, and I’d be happy!”

“Oh, you don’t know me, you don’t know me!” she cried. “You don’t know what I’ve been!” And some agony of mind seemed to wrench her whole body.

“I don’t care what you’ve been—I know what you are! You’re the woman I’d give my life for—I’d lay it down, without a thought, for you! And, good Lord, look at me! Don’t you think I’m bad enough myself—and a hundred times more weak and vacillating than you! I love you, Frank; isn’t that enough?”

“No!” she mourned, “it’s not enough!”

“But you’ve got to be loved, you want to be loved, or you wouldn’t have eyes and a mouth like that! It’s the only thing, now, that can make life worth while!”

She let him catch her up to his shoulder and hold her there, with her wet cheek against his; she even said nothing when he bent and kissed her on the lips, though her face grew colorless at his touch.

“I do love you,” she sighed weakly. “I do love you! I do!” and she clung to him, childishly, shaken with a sob or two, happy, yet vaguely troubled.

“Then why can’t we get away from here, somewhere, and be happy?”

“Where?” she asked.

“Anywhere, where there’s daylight and honesty and fair play!”

“There’s MacNutt!” she cried, remembering, opening her drooping eyes to grim life again. “He’d—he’d—” She did not finish.

“What’s he to us?” Durkin demanded. “He hasn’t bought our souls!”

“No, but we have to live—we have to work and pay as we go. And he could stop everything!”

“Let him interfere,” cried the other, fiercely. “I’ve never been afraid of him! I’m as good a fighter as he is, by heaven! Just let him interfere, and he’ll find his filthy money isn’t everything!”

The woman at his side was silent. “I only wish I had a few of his thousands,” added Durkin, more humbly.

She looked up quickly, with the flash of some new thought shadowed on her white face.

“Why shouldn’t we?” she cried, half bitterly. “We have gone through enough for him!”

“And it’s all rottenness, anyway,” assuaged Durkin. “The Postal-Union directors themselves, who feed MacNutt and all his fry,—they make over four million a year out of their pool-room service! And one of them is a pillar of that church we passed, just above the Waldorf!”

“No, it’s not that,” she hesitated. She had long since grown afraid of that ancient sophistry.

“But why shouldn’t we?” he persisted.

“Then we might go away somewhere,” she was saying dreamily, “away to England, even! I wonder if you would like England? It always seems so much of yesterday there, to me. It’s always tomorrow over here. But at home everything doesn’t seem to live in the future, as we do now. I wonder if you would like England?”

“I’d like any place, where you were!”

“He’s always been a welcher with the people he uses. He will be a welcher with you—yes, and with me, some day, I suppose.”

She turned to Durkin with a sudden determination. “Would you risk it, with me?”

“I’d risk anything for you!” he said, taking her hand once more.

“We have a right to our happiness,” she argued, passionately. “We have our life, all our life, almost—before us! And I’ve loved you, Jim,” she confessed, her gloved fingers toying with a button on his sleeve, “from the first day MacNutt brought you up!”

Then a silence fell over her, and he could see the reflection of some strange conflict going on in her mind. Although he could perceive the unhappiness it brought to her, he could in no wise surmise the source of it, so that when she spoke again, the suddenness of her cry almost startled him.

“Oh, why didn’t I know you and love you when I was a young and heart-free girl, singing and laughing about my quiet home? Why couldn’t love have come to me then, when all my heart and life were as white as the plain little cambric gown I wore—when I was worthy of it, and could have received it openly, and been glad of it!”

He could not follow her, but, lover-like, he tried to kiss away her vague fears and scruples. In this effort, though, he found her lips so cold and lifeless, that he drew away from her, and looked at her in wonder.

“Is it too late?” he implored, persistently.