The Wire Tappers

by Arthur Stringer

“Good-bye, my beloved own!” answered the wire, across its hundreds of miles of star-strewn midnight.

Durkin hung up his receiver with a sigh, and stopped at the office to pay his bill. All that was worth knowing and having, all that life held, seemed withdrawn and engulfed in space. He felt grimly alone in a city out of which all reality had ebbed. It seemed to him that somewhere a half-heard lilt of music had suddenly come to a stop.

A spirit of restless loneliness took possession of him, as he stepped out into the crowded solitudes of Broadway. His thoughts ran back to the day that he had first met Frances Candler, when, half unwillingly joining forces with MacNutt, he had followed that most adroit of wire-tappers to his up-town house. He remembered his astonishment as the door swung back to MacNutt’s secret ring, and Frank stood there in the doorway, looking half timidly out at them, with her hand still on the knob. How far away it seemed; and yet, as the world went, it could be counted in months. He had thought her a mere girl at first, and he recalled how he imagined there had been a mistake in the house number, as he saw the well-groomed figure in black, with its wealth of waving chestnut hair, and the brooding violet eyes with their wordless look of childish weariness. It was only later that he had taken note of the ever betraying fulness of throat and breast, and the touch of mature womanhood in the shadows about the wistful eyes. He remembered, point by point, the slow English voice, with its full-voweled softness of tone, as she answered MacNutt’s quick questions, the warm mouth and its suggestion of impulsiveness, the girlishly winning smile with which she had welcomed him as her partner in that house of underground operating and unlooked-for adventure, the quick and nervous movements of the muscular body that always carried with it a sense of steely strength half-sheathed in softness.

Bit by bit he recalled their tasks and their perils together.

What touched him most, as he paced the odorous, lamp-hung valley of the Rialto, was the memory of this wistful woman’s sporadic yet passionate efforts to lead him back to honesty. Each effort, he knew, had been futile, though for her sake alone he had made not a few unthought of struggles to be decent and open and aboveboard in at least the smaller things of life.

But the inebriation of great hazards was in his veins. They had taken great chances together; and thereafter, he felt, it could be only great chances that would move and stir and hold them. Now he would never be content, he knew, to lounge about the quiet little inns of life, with the memory of those vast adventures of the open in his heart and the thirst for those vast hazards in his veins.

As he turned, in Longacre Square, to look back at that turbulent valley of lights below him, he remembered, incongruously enough, that the midnight Tenderloin was the most thoroughly policed of all portions of the city—the most guarded of all districts in the world. And what a name for it, he thought—the Tenderloin, the tenderest and most delectable, the juiciest and the most sustaining district in all New York, for the lawless egotist, whether his self-seeking took the form of pleasure or whether it took the form of profit!

A momentary feeling of repugnance at what was unlovely in life crept over him, but he solaced himself with the thought that, after all, it was the goodness in bad people and the badness in good people that held the mottled fabric together in its tight-meshed union of contradictions.

Then his spirit of loneliness returned to him, and his thoughts went back to Frances Candler once more. He wondered why it was that her casual woman’s touch seemed even to dignify and concentrate open crime itself. He felt that he was unable, now, to move and act without her. And as he thought of what she had grown to mean to him, of the sustaining sense of coolness and rest which she brought with her, he remembered his first restless night in New York, when he had been unable to sleep, because of the heat in his stifling little bedroom, and had walked the breathless, unknown streets, until suddenly on his face he had felt a cool touch of wind, and the old-time balm of grass and trees and green things had struck into his startled nostrils. It was Central Park that he had stumbled on, he learned later; and he crept into it and fell placidly asleep on one of the shadowy benches.

His memory, as he turned to take a last look down the light-hung cañon of the Rialto, was of the evening that he and his desk-mate, Eddie Crawford, had first driven down that luminous highway, in a taxi, and the lights and the movement and the stir of it had gone to his bewildered young head. For he had leaned out over those titanic tides and exclaimed, with vague and foolish fierceness: “My God, Eddie, some day I’m going to get a grip on this town!”