The Wire Tappers

by Arthur Stringer

CHAPTER XX

As she slowly wakened in response to the call that had been left at the hotel office, Frances wondered, with the irrelevancy of the mental machinery’s first slow movements, if Durkin, at that precise moment, was still sleeping in his own bed and room in his own distant part of the city. For his awakening, she felt, would be sure to be a gray and disheartening one. It would be then, and then only, that the true meaning of their defeat would come home to him. She wondered, too, if he was looking to her, waiting for her to help him face the old-time, dreaded monotony of inactive and purposeless life.

“Oh, poor Jim!” she murmured again, under her breath.

She hoped, as she waked more fully to her world of realities, that he at least was still sleeping, that he at any rate was securing his essential rest of nerve and body,—for some heavy dregs of her own utter weariness of the previous night still weighed down her spirits and ached in her limbs.

She had always boasted that she could sleep like a child. “I make a rampart of my two pillows, and no worries ever get over it!” Yet she now felt, as she waited for a lingering last minute or two in her warm bed, that, if fortune allowed it, she could lie there forever, and still be unsatisfied, and cry for one hour more.

But she had already made her rigorous plans for the day, and time, she knew, was precious. After her bath she at once ordered up an ample breakfast of fruit and eggs and coffee and devilled mutton chops—remembering, as she religiously devoured her meat, that Durkin had always declared she was carnivorous, protesting that he could tell it by those solid, white, English teeth of hers.

Then she dressed herself simply, in a white shirt-waist and a black broadcloth skirt, with a black-feathered turban-hat draped with a heavy traveling veil. This simple toilet, however, she made with infinite care, pausing only long enough to tell herself that today, as never before, appearances were to count with her. Yet beyond this she brushed every thought away from her. She kept determinedly preoccupied, moving feverishly about the room, allowing space for no meditative interludes, permitting herself never to think of the day and what it was to hold for her.

Then she hurried from her room, and down into the street, and into a taxi, and through the clear, cool, wintry sunlight drove straight to the Guilford, an apartment hotel, where Sunset Bryan, the race-track plunger, made his home when in New York.

The Guilford was one of those ultra-ornamented, over-upholstered, gaudily-vulgar upper Broadway hotels, replete with marble and onyx, with plate glass and gilt and outward imperturbability, where a veneer of administrative ceremonial covered the decay and sogginess of affluent license. It was here, Frances only too well knew, that Little Myers, the jockey, held forth in state; it was here that an unsavory actress or two made her home; that Upton Banaster, the turf-man, held rooms; that Penfield himself had once lived; it was here that the “big-ring” bookmakers, and the more sinister and successful rail-birds and sheet-writers and touts foregathered; it was here that the initiated sought and found the court of the most gentlemanly blacklegs in all New York.

All this she knew, and had known beforehand; but the full purport of it came home to her only as she descended from her taxi-cab, and passed up the wide step that led into the sickeningly resplendent lobby.

Then, for the second time in her career, she did a remarkable and an unexpected thing.

For one moment she stood there, motionless, unconscious of the tides of life that swept in and out on either side of her. She stood there, like an Alpine traveller on his fragile little mountain bridge of pendulous pine and rope, gazing down into the sudden and awful abysses beside her, which seemed to open up out of the very stone and marble that hemmed her in. For at one breath all the shrouded panoramic illusions of life seemed to have melted before her eyes. It left her gaping and panting into what seemed the mouth of Hell itself. It deluged her with one implacable desire, with one unreasoning, childlike passion to escape, if only for the moment, that path which some day, she knew, she must yet traverse. But escape she must, until some newer strength could come to her.

She clenched and unclenched her two hands, slowly. Then she as slowly turned, where she stood, re-entered her taxi-cab, and drove back to her own rooms once more. There she locked and bolted her door, flung from her hat and gloves and veil, and fell to pacing her room, staring-eyed and rigid.

She could not do it! Her heart had failed her. Before that final test she had succumbed, ignominiously and absolutely. For in one moment of reverie, as she faced that hostelry of all modern life’s unloveliness, her own future existence lay before her eyes, as in a painted picture, from day to day and year to year. It had been branded on her consciousness as vividly as had that picture of a far different life, which had come to her behind the ivy-covered walls of her uncle’s parsonage. It was a continuous today of evil, an endless tomorrow of irresolution. Day by day she was becoming more firmly linked to that ignoble and improvident class who fed on the very offal of social activity. She was becoming more and more a mere drifting derelict upon the muddy waters of the lower life, mindless and soulless and purposeless. No; not altogether mindless, she corrected herself, for with her deeper spiritual degradation, she felt, she was becoming more and more an introspective and self-torturing dreamer, self-deceiving and self-blighting—like a veritable starving rat, that has been forced to turn and nibble ludicrously at its own tail.

Yet why had she faltered and hesitated, at such a moment, she demanded of herself. This she could not fully answer. She was becoming enigmatic, even to herself. And already it was too late to draw back—even the tantalizing dream of withdrawal was now a mockery. For, once, she had thought that life was a single straight thread; now she knew it to be a mottled fabric in which the past is woven and bound up with the future, in which tangled tomorrows and yesterdays make up the huddled cloth. She writhed, in her agony of mind, at the thought that she had no one to whom to open her soul. This she had always shrunk from doing before Durkin (and that, she warned herself, was an ill omen) and there had been no one else to whom she could go for comradeship and consolation. Then she began making excuses for herself, feebly, at first, more passionately as she continued her preoccupied pacing of the floor. She was only one of many. Women, the most jealously guarded and the most softly shrouded women had erred. And, after all, much lay in the point of view. What was criminality from one aspect, was legitimate endeavor from another. All life, she felt, was growing more feverish, more competitive, more neuropathic, more potentially and dynamically criminal. She was a leaf on the current of the time.

And her only redemption now, she told herself, was to continue along that course in a manner which would lend dignity, perhaps even the glorified dignity of tragedy itself, to what must otherwise be a squalid and sordid life. Since she was in the stream, she must strike out for the depths, not cringe and whimper among the shallows. By daring and adventuring, audaciously, to the uttermost, that at least could still lend a sinister radiance to her wrong-doing. That alone could make excuse for those whimpering and snivelling sensibilities which would not keep to the kennel of her heart.

Yet it was only the flesh that was weak and faltering, she argued—and in an abstracted moment she remembered how even a greater evil-doer than she herself had buoyed her will to endure great trial. “That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold,” she repeated to herself, inspirationally, as she remembered the small medicine-flask of cognac which she carried in her toilet bag.

She hated the thought of it, and the taste of it,—but more than all she hated the future into which she dare no longer look. As she medicined her cowardice with the liquor she could not help marvelling at the seeming miracle, for, minute by minute, with each scalding small draught, her weak-heartedness ebbed away. She knew that later there would be stern exaction for that strength, but she had her grim work to do, and beggars can not always be choosers.

Then she gathered up her veil and hat and gloves, and once more made ready for her day’s enterprise. The pith-ball had passed from its period of revulsion to its period of attraction.