But once down on the sidewalk he caught her shaking hand in his, and ran with her, ran desperately and madly, until the rattle and clatter of a bell broke on his ear. It was a patrol-wagon rumbling round from the Avenue on the east. He would have turned back, but at the curb in front of the Van Schaick mansion already a patrolman stood, rapping for assistance.
In his dilemma Durkin dropped breathlessly down an area stairs, feeling the limp weight of the woman on his body as he fell. To Frances herself it seemed like the effortless fall in a nightmare; she could remember neither how nor when it ended, only she had the sensation of being pulled sharply across cold flagstones. Durkin had dragged her in under the shadow of the heavy brownstone steps, behind a galvanized iron garbage can, hoping against hope that he had not been noticed, and silently praying that if indeed the end was to come it might not come in a setting so sordid and mean and small.
A street cat, lean and gaunt and hungry-looking, slunk like a shadow down the area-steps. The eyes of the two fugitives watched it intently. As it slunk and crept from shadow to shadow it suddenly became, to the worn and depressed Durkin, a symbol of his own career, a homeless and migratory Hunger, outlawed, pursued, unresting, a ravenous and unappeased purloiner of a great city’s scraps and tatters.
The soft pressure of Frank’s arm on his own drove the passing thought from his mind. And they sat together on the stone slabs, silently, hand in hand, till the patrol-wagon rattled past once more, and the street noises died down, and hastily opened windows were closed, and footsteps no longer passed along the street above them.
Then they ventured cautiously out, and, waiting their chance, sauntered decorously toward the corner. There they boarded a passing car, bound southward and crowded to the doors with the members of a German musical club, who sang loudly and boisterously as they went.
It seemed the most celestial of music to Durkin, as he hung on a strap in their midst, with Frank’s warm body hemmed in close to him, and the precious weight of it clinging and swaying there from his arm.
Suddenly he looked down at her.
“Where are you going tonight?” he asked.
Their eyes met. The tide of abandonment that had threatened to engulf him slowly subsided, as he read the quiet pain in her gaze.
“I am going back to the Ralston,” she said, with resolute simplicity.