CHAPTER XXVI
Durkin’s first feeling, incongruously enough, once he was out in the open air, was a ravenous sense of hunger. Through all that busy day his only meal had been a hasty and half-eaten breakfast.
His second thought was at once both to submerge and sustain himself in one of those Broadway basement restaurants where men perch on seats and gulp down meals over a seat-fringed counter.
Then he thought of Frances, of her anxiety, of her long waiting, and he tried to tell himself, valiantly enough, that another hour would make little difference, and that they would take their dinner in state and at their ease, at the Beaux-Arts, or at the Ritz, or perhaps even at the St. Regis.
The thought of her gave a sudden, warm glow to the gray flatness of life, born of his hunger and weariness. He pictured her, framed in the gloom of the open doorway, in answer to his knock, the slender oval of her face touched with weariness, her shadowy, brooding, violet eyes grown suddenly alert, even her two warm, woman’s arms open, like a very nest, to receive and hold him, and her motherly young shoulder to shield him. He laughed to himself as he remembered the time that he had described her as the victim of an “ingrowing maternal instinct”—she had always seemed so ready to nurture and guard and cherish. She was a woman, he said to himself—with a sudden, strange foreboding of he knew not what—who ought to have had children. She was one of those deeper and richer natures, he knew, who would always love Love more than she could love men.
“What is electricity?” he had asked her one quiet night, touched into wonder for the familiar miracle, as they bent together over their relay, while an operator five hundred miles away was talking through the darkness. “We live and work and make life tenser with it, and do wonders with it, but, after all, who knows what it is?”
He remembered how the great, shadowy eyes had looked into his face. “And what is love?” she had sighed. “We live and die for it, we see it work its terrible wonders; but who can ever tell us what it is?”
Durkin had forgotten both his hunger and his weariness as he mounted the stairs to his up-town apartment, where, he knew, Frances was waiting for him. He decided, in his playful reaction of mood, to take her by surprise. So he slipped his pass-key silently into the door-lock and was about to fling the door wide when the unexpected sound of voices held him motionless, with his hand still on the knob.
It was Frank herself speaking.
“Oh, Mack, don’t come between him and me now! It’s all I’ve got to live for—his love! I need it—I need him!”