But here the entrance of the girl herself put a stop to his speech. Yet, troubled in spirit as some currish and unspoken insinuation left him, Durkin breathed no word to the girl herself of what had taken place, imperiously as she demanded to know what Mackenzie had been saying.
On the day following, as MacNutt had arranged, the two paid their first visit to Penfield’s lower house, from which Durkin carried away confused memories of a square-jawed door-keeper—who passed him readily enough, at a word from the girl—of well-dressed men and over-dressed women crowded about a smoke-wreathed, softly lighted room, one side of which was taken up with a blackboard on which attendants were feverishly chalking down entries, jockeys, weights and odds, while on the other side of the room opened the receiving and paying-tellers’ little windows, through which now and then he saw hurrying clerks; of bettors excitedly filling in slips which disappeared with their money through the mysterious pigeon-hole in the wall; of the excited comments as the announcer called the different phases and facts of the races, crying dramatically when the horses were at the post, when they were off, when one horse led, and when another; when the winner passed under the wire; of the long, wearing wait while the jockeys were weighing in, and of the posting of the official returns, while the lucky ones—faded beauties with cigarette-stained fingers, lean and cadaverous-looking “habituals,” stout and flashy-looking professionals, girlish and innocent-looking young women, heavy dowagers resplendent in their morning diamonds,—gathered jubilantly at the window for their money. The vaster army of the unlucky, on the other hand, dropped forlornly away, or lingered for still another plunge.
Durkin found it hard, during each of these brief visits, to get used to the new order of things. Such light-fingered handling of what, to his eyes, seemed great fortunes, unstrung and bewildered him. He had never believed the newspaper story that when the District Attorney’s men had broken open a gambling-house safe a few months before, they had found deposited there a roll of greenbacks amounting to over three-quarters of a million dollars. That story now seemed likely enough. Yet, with him, the loss of even a hundred dollars on a horse, although not his own money, in some way depressed him for the day. Frances Candler picked her winners, however, with studious and deliberate skill, and, though they bet freely, it was not often that their losses, in the end, were heavy.
She had no love for this part of the work; and in this Durkin heartily agreed with her.
“The more I know of track-racing and its army of hangers-on,” he declared to her, “the more I hate it, and everything about it! They say there are over fifty thousand men in the business, altogether—and you may have noticed how they all—the owners and the bigger men, I mean—dilate on their purpose of ‘improving the breed of the thoroughbred’—but to my mind, it’s to improve the breed of rascality!”
He noted her habitual little head-shake as she started to speak.
“Yes, I think more unhappiness, more wrecked lives and characters, more thieves and criminals, really come from the race-track than from all the other evils in your country. It’s not the racing itself, and the spectacular way of your idle rich for wasting their money! No, it’s not that. It’s the way what you call the smaller fry cluster about it, so cruelly and mercilessly ‘on the make,’ as they put it, and infect the rest of the more honest world with their diseased lust for gain without toil. I have watched them and seen them. It is deadly; it stifles every last shred of good out of them! And then the stewards and the jockey clubs themselves try to hide the shameful conditions of things, and drape and hang their veil of lies and hypocrisy and moral debauchery over these buzzing clouds of parasites; and so it goes on! For, indeed, I know them,” she ended, bitterly. “Oh, I know them well!”
Durkin thought of the four great Circuits, Eastern, Southern, Western, and Pacific slope, of the huge and complicated and mysteriously half-hidden gambling machinery close beside each great centre of American population, New York and Washington, Chicago and St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, where duplicity and greed daily congregate, where horses go round and round in their killing and spectacular short-speed bursts, and money flashes and passes back and forth, and portly owners sit back and talk of the royal sport, as they did, Durkin told himself, in the days of Tyre and Rome. But day by day, with the waning afternoon, the machinery comes to a stop, the sacrificial two-year-olds are blanketed and stabled, the grand-stands disgorge their crowds, and from some lower channel of the dark machine drift the rail-birds and the tipsters, the bookmakers and touts, the dissolute lives and the debauched moral sensibilities, the pool-room feeders and attendants in the thick of the city itself, the idlers and the criminals.
The thought of it filled him with a sudden emotional craving for honesty and clean-living and well-being. He rejoiced in the clear sunlight and the obvious respectability of the Avenue up which they were walking so briskly—for about Frances Candler, he had always found, there lurked nothing of the subterranean and morbidly secretive. She joyed in her wholesome exercise and open air; she always seemed to be pleading for the simplicities and the sanities of existence. She still stood tantalizingly unreconciled, in his mind, to the plane of life on which he had found her.
It was one night after a lucky plunge on a 20 to 1 horse had brought him in an unexpected fortune of eighteen hundred dollars, that Durkin, driving past Madison Square through the chilly afternoon of the late autumn, with a touch of winter already in the air, allowed his thoughts to wander back to what seemed the thin and empty existence as a train-despatcher and a Postal-Union operator. As he gazed out on the closed cars and the women and the lights, and felt the warmth of the silent girl at his side, he wondered how he had ever endured those old, colorless days. He marvelled at the hold which the mere spectacular side of life could get on one. He tried to tell himself that he hated the ill-gotten wealth that lay so heavy and huge in his pocket at that moment; and he smothered his last warmth of satisfaction with the phrase which she had used a few days before: “Their diseased lust for gain without toil.” Then he tried to think of the life he was leading, with one figure eliminated; and the blankness of the prospect appalled him.