CHAPTER XIV
Durkin waited, with the receiver at his ear. Once more the signal-bell shrilled and cluttered its curtly hurried warning. A vague yet nasal and half-impatient voice murmured brokenly out of somewhere to some one: “You’re connected now—go ahead.”
Then came a grating rasp and drone, a metallic click or two, and out of the stillness there floated in to his waiting ear the space-filtered music of an anxious “Hello”—flute-like, mellow, far-away.
It seemed to him there, under the stress of his passing mood, that an incorporeal presence had whispered the word to him. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, the miracle of it all came home to him, the mystery and magic of that tenuous instrument, which could guide, and treasure, and carry in to him through the night the very tone and timbre of that one familiar voice, flashing it so many miles through star-hung forest and hill and valley, threading it on through sleeping towns and turbulent cities, winging it through wind and water unerringly home to his waiting ear.
“Hello!” the anxious contralto was asking again.
“Hello?” cried Durkin, pent in the little bald speaking-closet, yet his face illuminated with a wonderful new alertness. “Hello! Is that you, Frank?”
A ripple of relieved laughter ebbed out of the wire.
“Oh, Jim,” sounded the far-away voice in his ear, sighingly. “It seems so good!”
“Where are you?”
“In Washington, at the Arlington office.”
He chuckled a little, as though the accomplishment of the miracle, the annihilation of so many miles of space, was a matter of his own personal triumph.
“Here we’re talking together through three hundred miles of midnight!” he boasted to her.
“Yes, I know; but I wish it wasn’t so far! Did you recognize my voice there?”
“I’d know that voice in—in Hell!” he answered, with a sudden grim but inadequate earnestness. He had hoped to say something fitting and fine, but, as always seemed to happen to him in such moments, his imagination foundered in the turbulence of his emotions.
“You may have to some day, my poor Orpheus!” she was laughing back at him.
But the allusion was lost on Durkin, and he cut in with a curt, “What’s happened?”
“I want to come home!” It must have been a good night for ’phoning, he felt, as he heard those five cogent words, and an inconsequential little glow suffused him. Not an ohm of their soft wistfulness, not a coulomb of their quiet significance, had leaked away through all their hundreds of miles of midnight travel. It almost seemed that he could feel the intimate warmth of her arms across the million-peopled cities that separated them; and he projected himself, in fancy, to the heart of the far-off turbulence where she stood. There, it seemed to him, she radiated warmth and color and meaning to the barren wastes of life, a glowing and living ember in all the dead ashes of unconcern. And again it flashed through him, as the wistful cadence of her voice died down on the wire, that she was all that he had in life, and that with her, thereafter, he must rise or sink.
“I want to come home,” she was repeating dolefully.
“You’ve got to come, and come quick!”
“What was that?”
“I say, risk it and come,” he called back to her. “Something has happened!”
“Something happened? Not bad news, is it?”
“No—but it will open your eyes, when you hear it!”
“Everything at my end has been done, you know.”
“You mean it came out all right?”
“Not quite all right, but I think it will do. Is it safe for me to tell you something?”
“Yes, anything in reason, I guess.”
“Curry’s men in New Orleans are working against him!”
“Let me add something to that. Green and his men are trying to break Curry, and Curry all the time is laying a mine under every blessed one of them!” and Durkin gave vent to a triumphant chuckle, deep down in his throat.
“Where did you find this out?” the unperturbed and far-away contralto was demanding.
“You could never guess.”
“Talk faster, or this telephoning will break us!” she warned him.
“Oh, I don’t care—it’s worth the money.”
“Hello—Hello! Oh, all right. Go on!”
“You heard about the fire in the Terminal Room of the Postal-Union? No—well, some dago with a torch got a little too careless in a P. U. conduit, and set fire to a cable-splicer’s pot of paraffin down on lower Broadway, not much more than a hundred yards from Wall Street itself. Then the flames caught on the burlap and the insulating grease and stuff round the cables—can you hear me? There was the dickens to pay, and in about ten minutes they looked more like a cart-load of old excelsior than the business wires of a few thousand offices!”
“Yes, go on!”
“Well, it stopped nine thousand telephones, and put over two hundred stock-tickers out of business, and cut off nearly five hundred of the Postal-Union wires, and left all lower New York without even fire-alarm service. That’s saying nothing of the out-of-town wires, and the long distance service,—did you get all that?”
“Perfectly.”
“Well, there’s a lot more to tell, but it will keep—say till Thursday night. You may be able to imagine just what it is, from what I’ve told you; but listen: I think I can open your eyes, when you get here!” he repeated, slowly and significantly.
“All right—even a Great Western wire might have ears, you know!” she warned him.
“Quite so, but how about your Savannah information? There’s nothing new?”
“Nothing. But you saw the newspaper stories?”
“The Herald yesterday said the Secretary of Agriculture had demanded from the Savannah Cotton Exchange the name of a wire-house that bulletined a government crop report thirty minutes ahead of the official release.”
“Yes, that’s Dunlap & Company. They are frantic. They still declare there was no leak, and are fighting it out with the department here at Washington. In the meantime, luckily for us, they are, of course, sending out press-statements saying it was all a coincidence between their firm’s private crop-estimate and the actual government report. I couldn’t give you much of a margin of time to work on.”
“That thirty minutes just gave me time to get in on the up-town quotations. I missed the lower office, of course.”
“Hadn’t we better hold this over?”
“Yes; I rather forgot—it’ll wait until you get here.”
“Then Thursday night, at eight, say, at the Grenoble!”
“No, no; make it nine forty-five—I don’t get away until then.”
“What would the Grenoble people say?”
“That’s so—you had better go to the Ralston. It’s free and easy. Yes, the Ralston,” he repeated. “The Ralston, at nine forty-five, Thursday. Good-bye!”
A moment later he could hear the frantic signal-bell again.
“Hello! Hello! What is it?”
“Hello, New York! Not through yet,” said the tired and nasal voice of the operator.
“You forgot something!” It was the contralto voice this time, reproachful and wounded. Durkin laughed a little as he leaned closer to the mouth-piece of his transmitter.
“Good-bye, dearest!” he said.
“Good-bye, my beloved own!” answered the wire, across its hundreds of miles of star-strewn midnight.
Durkin hung up his receiver with a sigh, and stopped at the office to pay his bill. All that was worth knowing and having, all that life held, seemed withdrawn and engulfed in space. He felt grimly alone in a city out of which all reality had ebbed. It seemed to him that somewhere a half-heard lilt of music had suddenly come to a stop.
A spirit of restless loneliness took possession of him, as he stepped out into the crowded solitudes of Broadway. His thoughts ran back to the day that he had first met Frances Candler, when, half unwillingly joining forces with MacNutt, he had followed that most adroit of wire-tappers to his up-town house. He remembered his astonishment as the door swung back to MacNutt’s secret ring, and Frank stood there in the doorway, looking half timidly out at them, with her hand still on the knob. How far away it seemed; and yet, as the world went, it could be counted in months. He had thought her a mere girl at first, and he recalled how he imagined there had been a mistake in the house number, as he saw the well-groomed figure in black, with its wealth of waving chestnut hair, and the brooding violet eyes with their wordless look of childish weariness. It was only later that he had taken note of the ever betraying fulness of throat and breast, and the touch of mature womanhood in the shadows about the wistful eyes. He remembered, point by point, the slow English voice, with its full-voweled softness of tone, as she answered MacNutt’s quick questions, the warm mouth and its suggestion of impulsiveness, the girlishly winning smile with which she had welcomed him as her partner in that house of underground operating and unlooked-for adventure, the quick and nervous movements of the muscular body that always carried with it a sense of steely strength half-sheathed in softness.
Bit by bit he recalled their tasks and their perils together.
What touched him most, as he paced the odorous, lamp-hung valley of the Rialto, was the memory of this wistful woman’s sporadic yet passionate efforts to lead him back to honesty. Each effort, he knew, had been futile, though for her sake alone he had made not a few unthought of struggles to be decent and open and aboveboard in at least the smaller things of life.
But the inebriation of great hazards was in his veins. They had taken great chances together; and thereafter, he felt, it could be only great chances that would move and stir and hold them. Now he would never be content, he knew, to lounge about the quiet little inns of life, with the memory of those vast adventures of the open in his heart and the thirst for those vast hazards in his veins.
As he turned, in Longacre Square, to look back at that turbulent valley of lights below him, he remembered, incongruously enough, that the midnight Tenderloin was the most thoroughly policed of all portions of the city—the most guarded of all districts in the world. And what a name for it, he thought—the Tenderloin, the tenderest and most delectable, the juiciest and the most sustaining district in all New York, for the lawless egotist, whether his self-seeking took the form of pleasure or whether it took the form of profit!
A momentary feeling of repugnance at what was unlovely in life crept over him, but he solaced himself with the thought that, after all, it was the goodness in bad people and the badness in good people that held the mottled fabric together in its tight-meshed union of contradictions.
Then his spirit of loneliness returned to him, and his thoughts went back to Frances Candler once more. He wondered why it was that her casual woman’s touch seemed even to dignify and concentrate open crime itself. He felt that he was unable, now, to move and act without her. And as he thought of what she had grown to mean to him, of the sustaining sense of coolness and rest which she brought with her, he remembered his first restless night in New York, when he had been unable to sleep, because of the heat in his stifling little bedroom, and had walked the breathless, unknown streets, until suddenly on his face he had felt a cool touch of wind, and the old-time balm of grass and trees and green things had struck into his startled nostrils. It was Central Park that he had stumbled on, he learned later; and he crept into it and fell placidly asleep on one of the shadowy benches.
His memory, as he turned to take a last look down the light-hung cañon of the Rialto, was of the evening that he and his desk-mate, Eddie Crawford, had first driven down that luminous highway, in a taxi, and the lights and the movement and the stir of it had gone to his bewildered young head. For he had leaned out over those titanic tides and exclaimed, with vague and foolish fierceness: “My God, Eddie, some day I’m going to get a grip on this town!”