The Wire Tappers

by Arthur Stringer

CHAPTER XXVII

Often, in looking back on those terrible, phantasmal days that followed, Frances Candler wondered how she had lived through them.

Certain disjointed pictures of the first night and day remained vividly in her memory; unimportant and inconsequential episodes haunted her mind, as graphic and yet as vaguely unrelated as the midday recollection of a night of broken sleep and dream.

One of these memories was the doctor’s hurried question as to whether or not she could stand the sight of a little blood. A second memory was Durkin’s childlike cry of anguish, as she held the bared arm over the sheet of white oilcloth, pungent-odored with its disinfectant. Still another memory was that of the rattle of the little blackened bullet on the floor as it dropped from the jaws of the surgical forceps. A more vague and yet a more pleasing memory was the thought that had come to her, when the wound had been washed and dressed and hidden away under its white bandages, and Durkin himself had been made comfortable on the narrow couch, that the worst was then over, that the damage had been repaired, and that a week or two of quiet and careful nursing would make everything right again.

In this, however, she was sadly mistaken. She had even thought of shyly slipping away and leaving him to sleep through the night alone, until, standing over his bed, she beheld the figure that had always seemed so well-knit and self-reliant and tireless, shaking and trembling in the clutch of an approaching chill. It seemed to tear her very heartstrings, as she gave him brandy, and even flung her own coat and skirt over him, to see him lying there so impotent, so childishly afraid of solitude, so miserably craven, before this unknown enemy of bodily weakness.

As the night advanced the fever that followed on Durkin’s chill increased, his thirst became unappeasable, and from the second leather couch in the back room, where she had flung herself down in utter weariness of nerve and limb, she could hear him mumbling. Toward morning she awakened suddenly, from an hour of sound sleep, and found Durkin out of bed, fighting at his bedroom mantelpiece, protesting, babblingly, that he had seen a blood-red mouse run under the grate and that at all hazard it must be got out.

She led him back to bed, and during the five days that his fever burned through him she never once gave herself up to the luxury of actual sleep. Often, during the day and night, she would fling herself down on her couch, in a condition of half-torpor, but at the least word or sound from him she was astir again.

Then, as his mind grew clearer, and he came to recognize her once more, her earlier sense of loneliness and half-helpless isolation crept away from her. She even grew to take a secret pleasure in giving him his medicine and milk and tablets, in dressing his wound, day by day, in making his pillow more comfortable, in sending the colored hall-boy out after fruit and flowers for him, and in all those duties which broke down the last paling of reserve between them.

And it was a new and unlooked for phase of Frances Candler that Durkin slowly grew to comprehend. The constraint and the quietness of everything seemed to have something akin to a spiritualizing effect on each of them, and it was not long before he waited for her coming and going with a sort of childish wistfulness. Her tenderness of speech and touch and look, her brooding thoughtfulness as she sat beside him, seemed to draw them together more closely than even their old-time most perilous moments had done.

“We’re going to be decent now, aren’t we, Frank?” he said, quietly and joyously one morning.

But there were times when his weakness and stagnation of life and thought gave rise to acute suffering in both of them, times when his imprisonment and his feebleness chafed and galled him. It was agony for her to see him in passionate outbursts, to be forced to stand helplessly by and behold him unmanned and weeping, sometimes when his nervous irritability was at its worst, wantonly and recklessly blaspheming at his fate.

This sinfulness of the flesh she set down to the pain which his arm might be giving him and the unrest which came of many days in bed. As he grew stronger, she told herself, he would be his old, generous-minded and manly self once more.

But Durkin gained strength very slowly. A rent-day came around, and rather than remind him of it Frances slipped out, on a rainy afternoon, and pawned her rings to get money for the payment.

It was as she was creeping shamefaced out of the pawnshop that she looked up and caught sight of a passing automobile. It was a flashing sports-model with a lemon-colored body, and in it, beside a woman with lemon-colored hair, sat MacNutt, gloved, silk-hatted and happy-looking.

At first she beheld the two with an indeterminate feeling of relief. Then a hot wave of resentment swept over her, as she watched them drive away through the fine mist. A consuming sense of the injustice of it all took possession of her, as her thoughts went back to the day of the theft, and she remembered what a little and passing thing Durkin’s money would be to MacNutt, the spender, the prodigal liver, while to her and to Durkin it had meant so much! She knew, too, that he would soon be asking about it; and this brought a new misery into her life.

It was, indeed, only a day or two later that he said to her:

“Do you know, I’m glad we didn’t take that girl’s money—the Van Schaick girl, I mean. It was all our own from the first!”

Frances did not answer.

“She was a decent sort of girl, really, wasn’t she?” he asked again, once more looking up at her.

“I wish I had a woman like that for a friend,” Frances said, at last. “Do you know, Jim, it is years and years since I have had a woman friend. Yes, yes, my beloved own, I know I have you, but that is so different.”

He nodded his head sorrowfully, and stretched out his hand for hers.

“You’re better than all of ’em!” he said fondly.

They were both silent for several minutes.

“We’re going to be decent now, aren’t we, Frank?” he went on at last, quietly, joyously.

“Yes, Jim, from now on.”

“I was just thinking, this town has got to know us a little too well by this time. When we start over we’ll have to migrate, I suppose.” Then he smiled a little. “We ought to be thankful, Frank, they haven’t got us both pinned up by the Bertillon system, down at Headquarters!”

“I’d defy Bertillon himself to find you,” she laughed, “underneath that two weeks’ beard.”

He rubbed his hand over his stubbled chin, absent-mindedly.

“Where shall we go, when we migrate?” he asked, not unhappily.

She gazed with unseeing eyes through the window, out over the house-top.

“I know a little south of England village,” she said, in her soft, flute-like contralto, “I know a little village, nestling down among green hills, a little town of gardens and ivy and walls and thatches, in a country of brooks and hawthorn hedges—a little village where the nightingales sing at night, and the skylarks sing by day, and the old men and women have rosy faces, and the girls are shy and soft-spoken—”

“But we’d die of loneliness in that sort of place, wouldn’t we?”

“No, Jim, we should get more out of life than you dream. Then, in the winter, we could slip over to Paris and the Riviera, or down to Rome—it can be done cheaply, if one knows how—and before you realized it you would be used to the quiet and the change, and even learn to like it.”

“Yes,” he said wearily. “I’ve had too much of this wear-and-tear life—even though it has its thrill now and then. It’s intoxicating enough, but we’ve both had too much of this drinking wine out of a skull. Even at the best it’s feasting on a coffin-lid, isn’t it?”

She was still gazing out of the window with unseeing eyes.

“And there is so much to read, and study, and learn,” Durkin himself went on, more eagerly. “I might get a chance to work out my amplifier then, as I used to think I would, some day. If I could once get that sort of relay sensitive enough, and worked out the way I feel it can be worked out, you would be able to sit in Chicago and talk right through to London!”

“But how?” she asked.

“I always wanted to get a link between the cable and the ordinary Morse recorder, and I know it can be done. Then—who knows—I might in time go Lee De Forest one better, and have my amplifier knock his old-fashioned electrolytic out of business, for good.”

Then he fell to talking about wireless and transmitters and conductors, and suddenly broke into a quiet chuckle of laughter.

“I don’t think I ever told you about the fun we had down in that Broadway conduit. It was after the fire in the Subway and the Postal-Union terminal rooms. A part of the conduit roof had been cleared away by the firemen. Well, while we were working down there a big Irish watering-cart driver thought he’d have some fun with us, and every time he passed up and down with his cart he’d give us a shower. It got monotonous, after the fourth time or so, and the boys began to cuss. I saw that his wagon was strung with metal from one end to the other. I also knew that water was a good enough conductor. So I just exposed a live wire of interesting voltage and waited for the water-wagon. The driver came along as bland and innocent-looking as a baby. Then he veered over and doused us, the same as ever. Then the water and the wire got together. That Irishman gave one jump—he went five feet up in the air, and yelled—oh, how he yelled!—and ran like mad up Broadway, with a policeman after him, thinking he’d suddenly gone mad, trying to soothe him and quiet him down!”

And Durkin chuckled again, at the memory of it all. The sparrows twittered cheerily about the sunlit window-sill. The woman did not know what line of thought he was following, but she saw him look down at his bandaged arm and then turn suddenly and say:

“What a scarred and battered-up pair we’d be, if we had to keep at this sort of business all our lives!”

Then he lay back among the pillows, and closed his eyes.

“I say, Frank,” he spoke up unexpectedly, “where are you taking care of that—er—of that money?”

Her hands fell into her lap, and she looked at him steadily. Even before she spoke she could see the apprehension that leaped into his colorless face.

“No, no; we mustn’t talk more about that today!” she tried to temporize.

“You don’t mean,” he cried, rising on his elbow, “that anything has happened to it?”

He demanded an answer, and there was no gain-saying him.

“There is no money, Jim!” she said slowly and quietly. And in as few words as she could she told him of the theft.

It was pitiable, to her, to see him, already weak and broken as he was, under the crushing weight of this new defeat. She had hoped to save him from it, for a few more days at least. But now he knew; and he reviled MacNutt passionately and profanely, and declared that he would yet get even, and moaned that it was the end of everything, and that all their fine talk and all their plans had been knocked in the head forever, and that now they would have to crawl and slink through life living by their wits again, cheating and gambling and stealing when and where they could.

All this Frances feared and dreaded and expected; but desperately and forlornly she tried to buoy up his shattered spirits and bring back to him some hope for the future.

She told him that he could work, that they could live more humbly, as they had once done years before, when she had taught little children music and French, and he was a telegraph agent up at the lonely little Canadian junction-station of Komoka, with a boarding-house on one side of him and a mile of gravel-pit on the other.

“And if I have you, Jim, what more do I want in life?” she cried out, as she turned and left him, that he might not see the misery and the hopelessness on her own face.

“Oh, why didn’t you let me kill him!” he called out passionately after her. But she did not turn back, for she hated to see him unmanned and weeping like a woman.