CHAPTER III
More than once, during the feverish, kaleidoscopic days that followed, Durkin found himself drawing aside to ask if, after all, he were not living some restless dream in which all things hung tenuous and insubstantial. The fine linen and luxury of life were so new to him that in itself it half intoxicated; yet, outside the mere ventral pleasures of existence, with its good dinners in quietcafésof gold and glass and muffling carpets, its visits to rustling, dimly-lighted theatres,its drives about the open city, its ever-mingled odors of Havana and cut flowers,—there was the keener and more penetrating happiness of listening to the soft English voice of what seemed to him a bewilderingly beautiful woman.
She was that, at least to him; and Durkin was content to let the world think what it liked. He found work to be done, it is true,—rigorous and exacting work while it lasted, when the appointed days for holding up Penfield’s despatches came around. But the danger of it all, for some reason, never entered his mind, as he sat over his instrument, reading off the horses to the woman at his side, who, in turn, repeated them over the telephones, in cipher, to MacNutt and Mackenzie; and then, when the time allowance had elapsed, cutting in once more and sending on the intercepted despatches, even imitating to a nicety the slip-shod erratic volubility of Corcoran’s “blind send.”
Once only did a disturbing incident tend to ruffle the quiet waters of Durkin’s strange contentment. It was one afternoon when Mackenzie had been sent in to make a report, and had noticed certain things to which he did not take kindly, Durkin thought.
“I’m not saying anything,” he blurted out, when they were alone, “but don’t you let that woman make a fool of you!”
“You shut up about that woman!” retorted Durkin, hotly. Then, imagining he saw some second and deeper meaning in the other’s words, he caught him by the lapel of the vest, and held him against the wall.
“Youaresaying something, you hound! What do you mean by that, anyway?” he cried, with a white face. The man against the wall could see that a word would bring the onslaught, but he was used to trouble of that sort, and many a keener menace. So he only laughed contemptuously, with his shoulders up, as he pulled the other’s fingers from his throat.
“You damned lobster, you!” he said, going off on the safer tack of amiable profanity. Then feeling himself free once more, his old bitter audacity proclaimed itself.
“You fool, you, don’t you know that woman’s been—”
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.
With a sudden impetuous motion he caught up her hand, where it lay idly in her lap, and held it close. She tried to draw it away, but could not.
“Everything seems so different, Frank, since I’ve known you!” he said, a little huskily.
“It’s different with me, too!” she all but whispered, looking away. Her face, in the waning light, against the gloom of the dark-curtained taxi-cab, looked pale, and, as he had so often felt, almost flower-like.
“Frank!” he cried in a voice that started her breathing quickly. “Won’t you—won’t you marry me?”
She looked at him out of what seemed frightened eyes, with an unnatural and half-startled light on her pale face.
“I love you, Frank, more than I could ever tell you!” he went on, impetuously. “You could walk over me, you could break me, and do what you like with me, and I’d be happy!”
“Oh, you don’t know me, you don’t know me!” she cried. “You don’t know what I’ve been!” And some agony of mind seemed to wrench her whole body.
“I don’t care what you’ve been—I know what youare! You’re the woman I’d give my life for—I’d lay it down, without a thought, for you! And, good Lord, look at me! Don’t you think I’m bad enough myself—and a hundred times more weak and vacillating than you! I love you, Frank; isn’t that enough?”
“No!” she mourned, “it’s not enough!”
“But you’ve got to be loved, you want to be loved, or you wouldn’t have eyes and a mouth like that! It’s the only thing, now, that can make life worth while!”
She let him catch her up to his shoulder and hold her there, with her wet cheek against his; she even said nothing when he bent and kissed her on the lips, though her face grew colorless at his touch.
“I do love you,” she sighed weakly. “I do love you! I do!” and she clung to him, childishly, shaken with a sob or two, happy, yet vaguely troubled.
“Then why can’t we get away from here, somewhere, and be happy?”
“Where?” she asked.
“Anywhere, where there’s daylight and honesty and fair play!”
“There’s MacNutt!” she cried, remembering, opening her drooping eyes to grim life again. “He’d—he’d—” She did not finish.
“What’s he to us?” Durkin demanded. “He hasn’t bought oursouls!”
“No, but we have to live—we have to work and pay as we go. And he could stop everything!”
“Let him interfere,” cried the other, fiercely. “I’ve never been afraid of him! I’m as good a fighter as he is, by heaven! Justlethim interfere, and he’ll find his filthy money isn’t everything!”
The woman at his side was silent. “I only wish I had a few of his thousands,” added Durkin, more humbly.
She looked up quickly, with the flash of some new thought shadowed on her white face.
“Whyshouldn’twe?” she cried, half bitterly. “We have gone through enough for him!”
“And it’s all rottenness, anyway,” assuaged Durkin. “The Postal-Union directors themselves, who feed MacNutt and all his fry,—they make over four million a year out of their pool-room service! And one of them is a pillar of that church we passed, just above the Waldorf!”
“No, it’s not that,” she hesitated. She had long since grown afraid of that ancient sophistry.
“But why shouldn’t we?” he persisted.
“Then we might go away somewhere,” she was saying dreamily, “away to England, even! I wonder if you would like England? It always seems so much of yesterday there, to me. It’s always tomorrow over here. But at home everything doesn’t seem to live in the future, as we do now. I wonder if you would like England?”
“I’d like any place, where you were!”
“He’salways been a welcher with the people he uses. He will be a welcher with you—yes, and with me, some day, I suppose.”
She turned to Durkin with a sudden determination. “Would you risk it, with me?”
“I’d risk anything for you!” he said, taking her hand once more.
“We have a right to our happiness,” she argued, passionately. “We have our life, all our life, almost—before us! And I’ve loved you, Jim,” she confessed, her gloved fingers toying with a button on his sleeve, “from the first day MacNutt brought you up!”
Then a silence fell over her, and he could see the reflection of some strange conflict going on in her mind. Although he could perceive the unhappiness it brought to her, he could in no wise surmise the source of it, so that when she spoke again, the suddenness of her cry almost startled him.
“Oh, why didn’t I know you and love you when I was a young and heart-free girl, singing and laughing about my quiet home? Why couldn’t love have come to me then, when all my heart and life were as white as the plain little cambric gown I wore—when I was worthy of it, and could have received it openly, and been glad of it!”
He could not follow her, but, lover-like, he tried to kiss away her vague fears and scruples. In this effort, though, he found her lips so cold and lifeless, that he drew away from her, and looked at her in wonder.
“Isit too late?” he implored, persistently.
CHAPTER IV
For all the calm precision with which Frances Candler had planned and mapped out a line of prompt action with Durkin, she was shaken and nervous and unstrung, as she leaned over the sounder, breathlessly waiting for the rest of the day’s returns to come through on Penfield’s wire.
Durkin, with two thousand dollars of his own and an additional eight hundred from her, had already plunged his limit at Penfield’s lower house, on the strength of her tip over the ’phone. There was still to be one final hazard, with all he held; and at five o’clock they were to meet at Hartley’s restaurant, and from there escape to a new world of freedom and contentment. But the fear of MacNutt still hung over her, as she waited—fear for certain other things besides their secret revolt on the very eve of their chief’s gigantic coup. For she knew what MacNutt could be when he was crossed. So she leaned and waited and watched, listening with parted lips, wishing it was all over with, torn by a thousand indefinite fears.
Then, to her sudden terror, Mackenzie called her up sharply.
“Is that you, Frank?” he cried.
“Yes; whatis it, Mack?” she asked back, calmly enough, but with quaking knees.
“Doogan’s men are watching me here—they’ve got on to something or other. Cut this wire loose from outside, and get your ’phone out of sight. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t cut in on Penfield’s wire. I’ve just tipped off MacNutt—he’s off his dip, about it all. Look out for yourself, old girl!” he added, in a different tone of voice.
She rang off, feverishly, and vowed passionately that shewouldlook out for herself. Catching up a pair of pliers, she cut the telephone wire from the open window, leaving two hundred feet of it to dangle forlornly over the little back house-courts. Then she ran to the door and locked and bolted it, listening all the while for the wire to speak out to her.
A minute later MacNutt himself rang up, and asked for Durkin. She made a movement as though to drop the receiver, and leave her presence unbetrayed; but the other had already heard her mellow “Hello?” of inquiry.
“What areyoudoing there?” he demanded, with a startled unsavory oath.
She tried to stammer out an adequate excuse, but he repeated his challenge. There was a moment’s pregnant pause. Then he hissed one ugly word over the wire to the listening woman. Mackenzie had been hinting to him of certain things; now, he knew.
He did not wait even to replace the receiver. While she still stood there, in the little sewing-room, white and dazed, he was in a swaying taxi, rattling and pounding nearer her, block by block.
He let himself in with his own pass-key, and raced up the long stairs, his face drawn, and a dull claret tinge. He found the door closed and bolted; he could hear nothing from within but the muffled clicking of the sounder as it ticked out the later New Orleans returns.
He paused for a moment, panting, but no answer came to his pound on the panels. He could spell out, in the dead silence, the names of the horses going over the wire.
“Open this door, by God, or I’ll kill you!” he cried, in a frenzy, throwing the weight of his huge body against it in vain.
He seized an old-fashioned walnut arm-chair from the next room, and forced it, battering-ram fashion, with all his strength, against the oak panels. They splintered and broke, and under the second blow fell in, leaving only the heavier cross-pieces intact.
Quite motionless, waiting over the sounder, bent the woman, as though she had neither seen nor heard. “White Legs————Yukon Girl————Lord Selwyn”————those alone were the words which the clicking brass seemed to brand on her very brain. In three seconds she stood before the telephone, at the other end of which she knew Durkin to be waiting, alert for the first sound and movement. But she saw the flash of something in the hand of the man who leaned in through the broken panel, and she paused, motionless, with a little inarticulate cry.
“Touch that ’phone, you welcher, and I’ll plug you!” the man was screaming at her. His lip was hanging loose on one side, and his face, now almost a bluish purple, was horrible to look at.
“I’ve got to do it, Mack!” she pleaded, raising one hand to her face. He flung out a volley of foul names at her, and deliberately trained his revolver on her breast. She pondered, in a flash of thought, just what chance she would have at that distance.
“Mack, you wouldn’t shootme, after—after everything? Oh, Mack, I’ve got to send this through! I’ve got to!” she wailed.
“Stop!” he gasped; and she knew there was no hope.
“You wouldn’t shoot me, Mack?” she hurried on, wheedlingly, with the cunning of the cornered animal; for, even as she spoke, the hand that hovered about her face shot out and caught up the receiver. Her eyes were on MacNutt; she saw the finger compress on the trigger, even as her hand first went up.
“Jim!” she called sharply, with an agony of despair in that one quick cry. She repeated the call, with her head huddled down in her shoulders, as though expecting to receive a blow from above. But a reverberation that shook shreds of plaster from the ceiling drowned her voice.
The receiver fell, and swung at full length. The smoke lifted slowly, curling softly toward the open window.
MacNutt gazed, stupefied, at the huddled figure on the floor. How long he looked he scarcely knew, but he was startled from his stupor by the sound of blows on the street door. Flinging his revolver into the room, he stumbled down the heavily carpeted stairs, slunk out of a back door, and, sprawling over the court-fence, fell into a yard strewn with heavy boxes. Seeing a nearby door, he opened it, audaciously, and found himself in a noisy auction-room filled with bidders. Pushing hurriedly through them, he stepped out into the street, unnoticed.
When the wounded woman had made sure that she was alone—she had been afraid to move where she lay, fearing a second shot—with a little groan or two she tried to rise to her knees. She felt that there might still be time, if she could only crawl to the ’phone. But this, she found was beyond her strength. The left sleeve of her waist, she also saw, was wet and sodden with blood. She looked at it languidly, wondering if the wound would leave a scar. Already she could hear footsteps below, and again and still again she struggled to shake off her languor, and told herself that she must be ready when Durkin came, that he, at least, must not be trapped. She, as a mere pool-room stenographer, had little to fear from the law. But as she tried, with her teeth and her free arm, to tear a strip from her skirt, the movement, for all her tight-lipped determination, was too much for her. She had a faint memory of hearing footsteps swarming about her, and then of ebbing and pulsing down through endless depths of what seemed to her like eider-downed emptiness.
When she came to, one of Doogan’s men was leaning over her, with a glass of water in his hand. She could feel some of it still wet on her chin and waist-collar. She looked up at him, bewildered, and then from him to the other four men who stood about her. Then the events of the afternoon came back to her.
She closed her eyes again, vaguely wondering if some teasing, indeterminate mishap, which she could not quite remember, had yet come about. At first, she could not grasp it, as she lay there moaning with pain, the breeze from the open window blowing on her face. Then the truth came to her in a flash.
It was Durkin. He was coming back; and they were watching there, waiting to trap him. Again she told herself that she must keep her head, and be cool.
Without moving her head, she let her roving eyes take in the five men about her in the room; three of them, she knew, were plain-clothes men from the Central Office, the other two were Doogan’s agents. If Durkin came while they were still there—and now hecouldnot be long!—they would let him in, and of course say nothing, and there they would have him, like a rat in a trap.
She grew hysterical, and cried out to them that she was dying, yet waiting all the time for the sound of Durkin’s step, trying to think how she might save him. At last, to her sudden joy, she remembered that he was to bring from her rooms her own handbag, filled with a few things she had gathered up to take away with her. He would surely carry that bag in with him when he came; that was her salvation.
She fell to shrieking again that she was dying, demanding shrilly why her doctor had not come. Through her cries, her alert ears heard the sound of voices at the street-door. It was Durkin, at last; he had spoken a word or two with the two plain-clothes men, who, she knew, would readily enough let him pass.
“Doctor!” she screamed, as she heard his steps on the stair. “Doctor! I’m dying, doctor! Are you never coming!”
She wondered, in her agony of mind and body, if he would be fool enough not to understand.Wouldhe be fool enough?
Doogan’s agents and the three plain-clothes men gathered about her silently, as they saw the intruder hurry in and drop on his knee beside the woman. “Is it you, doctor?” she wailed, with chattering teeth, shaking with an on-coming chill.
Durkin, in his dilemma, did not dare to look away from her face. He was blindly trying to grope his way toward what it all meant. The others stood above him, listening, waiting for the least word. One of them moved to the open window, and closed it.
He bent lower, trying to read the dumb agony in the woman’s face. Then another of the men went to the door, to guard it. Durkin could see the shoes and trousers-legs of the others, up to the knee. Each pair of boots, he noticed inconsequently, had a character and outline of their own. But still his frantic brain could not find the key to the enigma.
Then, out of the chaos and the disorder of the chattering of her teeth, seemed to come a hint, a whisper. She was sounding the double “i” of the operator about to “send”—she was trying to catch his attention, to tell him something, in Morse. He bent still closer, and fumbled artfully with the sleeve, wet and sodden with her warm blood.
He read the signal, as she lay there with chattering teeth: “All up—Get away quick—these are police—meet you in London—hotel Cecil—in two months—hurry.”
“Where—write?” he implored her, by word of mouth, covering the question by shifting his busily exploring fingers from the wounded left shoulder to the right.
She closed her eyes. “C-N,” she answered. She repeated it, in the strange Morse, weakly, and then fainted dead away.
Durkin dropped the sleeve he was carefully turning up. He looked at the men about him with a sudden towering, almost drunken madness of relief, a madness which they took for sudden rage.
“You fools, you,” he called at them. “You fools, couldn’t you see it—this woman’s dying! Here, you, quick—compress this artery with your thumb—hard, so! You, you—oh, I don’t carewhoyou are—telephone for my instruments—Doctor Hodgson, No. 29 West Thirtieth!”—luckily he remembered a throat doctor Frank had once consulted there—“and get me a sheet off one of the beds, quick!”
He tossed his hat into the hall, jerked up his cuffs, almost believing, himself, in the part he was acting.
“Water—where’ll I get a water-tap?” he demanded, feverishly, running to the door. Outside the room, he suddenly kicked his hat to the foot of the back-stairs. He caught it as it rebounded from the second step, and bolted noiselessly up the stairway, never turning or looking back until he had gained the roof. There he crept, cat-like, across half-a-dozen houses, and slipped down the first fire-escape that offered.
At the third window, which was open, a stalwart Irish house-maid barred his progress. He told her, hurriedly, he was a fire-escape inspector for the City Department. Seeing that she doubted his word, he thrust a five dollar bill in her hand. She looked at it, laughed cynically—and time, he felt, was worth so much to him!—looked out at him again dubiously, and then in silence led him through the passage and down to the street-door.
As he turned hurriedly into Madison Avenue, toward the Grand Central station, he heard the clang of a bell, and saw an ambulance clatter down the street. Then, to make sure of it, he repeated her message to himself: “Hotel Cecil—two months—C-N.”
For a moment or two the “C-N” puzzled him. Then he remembered that only the day before he had been telling her the episode of the Charleston earthquake, how every wire was “lost” after the final shock, and how every operator for hundreds of miles about, during the next day of line-repairing, kept calling “C-N” until an answer finally came from the debris of the dead city.
Through some trick of memory, he then knew, she had recalled the Morse signal for that southern city, in her emergency. There had been no time for thought, no chance for even momentary deliberation. “Charleston!” From that day the very name took on a newer and stranger meaning. He knew that during weeks of loneliness and wandering it would be the one city toward which his eyes and his heart would turn.
CHAPTER V
“Tomorrow for the States—for me England, and Yesterday,”—murmured Frances Candler as she stood at her window looking down over the tangle and tumult of the Strand. “For me, England and Yesterday!” she repeated, and it was not until she had said the lines twice over that she remembered how she had first copied them into her day-book, during her early homesick weeks in New York.
It was the lassitude of her week at sea, and the loneliness of her second week in a London hotel, she told herself, that had brought about the change. If there were deeper and more dormant reasons, she was content to let sleeping dogs lie. But she did not deceive herself as to the meaning of the move. It was more than flight; it was surrender. It was, indeed, the bitter and desperate remedy for a bitter and desperate condition. For, inappositely, on the very brink of what seemed the waiting and widening vista of all her life, she had decided to go back to Oxford and her uncle’s home.
The steps that led to this determination were no longer clear to her questioning mind. She was also able, hour by brooding hour, to pile up against it ever new objections. But she clung to it blindly, with a forlorn tenacity of spirit that swept aside all momentary issues and all dread of the future. For out of that seeming defeat, she contended, she would wring her belated and her inner victory, even while her active imagination, playing lambently ahead of dragging reality, showed her how painful would be that return to old conditions and outgrown surroundings.
For a woman who has known the world to go back to such a roof is always a sign and a confession of defeat. Yet the sweep of her aggressive young mind, once made up, flung blindly aside each half-accumulated bar of indecision.
But was it fair to them?—she suddenly demanded of herself, as she pictured the scenes and the faces that would confront her, the gentle and mild-mannered women, the venerable and upright-hearted curate, so jealous of equity and honor, with his unbending singleness and narrowness of outlook. And as she asked this question each familiar figure seemed to stalk grimly from its muffling childhood memories and confront her, a challenging sentinel at the very threshold of that quiet little home which she had dreamed as always open to her, as always a harbor of ultimate refuge.
But now, could she face the unspoken deceit, the daily attrition of it, month after month and year after year? For clearly she foresaw what her life would be, from sunrise to sunset, from youth to old age, from the moment the quiet parsonage gate closed between her and the outer world. She foresaw it plainly, as distinctly and indelibly as though it had been set down in black and white before her eyes—the long and narrow and grimly defined path leading from a narrow and weather-beaten gate to a still narrower open grave. In summer time, in the quiet grounds behind the shielding gray walls, there would be the Provence roses to tend and the border-flowers to cut and trim, the sedate visiting and receiving, the frugal jam-making, the regular Bible-readings and the family prayers, the careful mending and remaking, the hemming of the clerical old-fashioned white cravats, the lonely cawing of the rooks through the quiet mornings and the long afternoons. And in the winter there would be the woollen jackets and cough mixtures to distribute throughout the parish, the stockings to be knit for the workhouse children, the long, silent games of chess in the mullion-windowed study, the lettering and numbering of the new books for the parish lending library, the pathetically threadbare suit of respectable broadcloth to press and repair, the summer linens and serges to be made over, the discussions of impending Disestablishment and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, the languid flow of life within doors and the gentle diversions of life without, punctuated by long Sundays, in gloomy high-partitioned pews with faded crimson cushions.
“Oh, it is useless! It is too late, now!” she cried, hopelessly, as she paced the floor, and the weight of her past life hung heavy upon her. The roots of it lay too deep, she told herself, to be torn out. She was already too tainted with the dust of that outer world, too febrile, too passionately avid of movement and change. The contrast was too great. They would make it too hard for her, too rigidly exacting. For what didtheyknow of the dark and complicated and compelling currents of the real world, lapped in their gentle backwaters of old-world clerical life, secluded and sheltered and untried! She would still have been one of them, if her paths had been theirs, if she had only breathed the quiet air they breathed!
“It is too hard!” she moaned, in her misery. The test of life itself was so crucial—that was the thought that kept recurring to her—the ordeal by fire was foredoomed to be so exacting! All their old lessons and creeds, which she had once chimed so innocently and so cordially, now seemed to fall empty and enigmatic on her older and wiser heart. They seemed to solve none of her imminent problems. Their mysticism only bewildered her. And she sat amid the roar of London, idle and sick at heart, unhearing and unseeing.
“I will do it!” she at last said aloud. “It will be my punishment!” She could no longer demand so much of life. She looked on existence, now, with older and disillusioned eyes. For what she had taken she must stand ready to pay. It would be her penance and penalty for past transgressions. And it would have to be borne; it was obligatory. It was not happiness or well-being that was at stake, she argued, in that new mood of amendment; it was something vast and undying and eternal within her, something that came before happiness itself, something she had seen her defiant and broken and dying father ignore and surrender and suffer for.
While this new expiatory passion was still warm in her blood, she packed her boxes, soberly, and then as soberly wrote to Durkin. It was not a long letter, but she spent much time and thought in its composition. In it, too, she seemed to cast off her last vestige of hesitation. For she felt that the very note of impersonality in its unnatural stiffness of phrasing was a new means of support. It was a support as clumsy and retarding as a child’s walking-chair, but she was willing enough to catch at it, whimsically, in those first tottering steps of renunciation.
“My Dear Jim,” she began, after much hesitation, and with many long and thoughtful pauses as she wrote, “it will surprise you, I know, but I have decided to go back to Oxford—to the Oxford I have so often told you about. Do not think it is only cruelty on my part, or cowardice, or self-interest. I have thought over everything long and carefully. And it has led, always led, to one end—that end is: neither you nor I must go on leading the lives we have been leading! It will hurt me, and it will hurt you, I believe, to break the ties that time has made. But there is, today, all the width of the Atlantic between us—and it is there, I think, that I am the coward. For it is only this that makes it possible for me to do what I’m doing. With you, I would bend to your will; here it will be easier. Now, above all things, both you and I must learn not to look on ourselves as beings apart from the rest of the world. If we have ever been enemies of society we must learn not to remember it—for it is this feeling, I know, which holds the key of our undoing. I have often wondered and looked to see in what ways I reproduced the atavistic conditions of the primitive woman—for they say that we evil doers are only echoes out of the past—but I’m going to do it no more. We are both of us ill-fitted for the things and the deeds we have drifted into. They make us suffer too much. It is work that should fall to souls dwarfed and stunted and benumbed. We are not morbid and depraved and blind; we have intelligence and feeling. We have only been unhappy and unlucky, let’s say. So now we must fight along and wait for better luck, as you used to put it. We are not what they call ‘recidivists.’ We are not abnormal and branded; we must fight away the deadly feeling that we are detached from the rest of the world, that mankind is organized and fighting against us, that we are the hunted, and all men the hounds! What we have done, we have done. But I know that we were both initiated into wrong-doing so quietly and so insidiously that the current caught us before we knew it. Yet I feel that I have none of the traits of the Female Offender, though in my anxiety and crazy search for causes and excuses I have even taken my cephalic index and tested my chromatic perception and my tactile sensitiveness and made sure that I responded normally to a Faraday current! Yes, we are both too normal to succeed happily in the ways we began. . . . I shall miss you, but I shall always love you. Oh, Jim, pray for me; as I, daily, shall pray for you! I can’t write more now. Go back to your work, though it means being hungry and lonely and unhappy, fight out the problem of your amplifier, and struggle along with your transmitting camera, until you accomplish something we can both take pride in and be happy over! Sometime, later, when I write, I shall be able to explain everything more fully. . . . I was eleven days in the hospital, and crossed on theNieuw Amsterdam. There will always be a scar—but a very small one—on my arm. That will be the only reminder. Good-bye, dear Jim, and God bless and keep you, always, in the right.”
She read over the letter, slowly, dispassionately, and fought back the temptation to write further, to fling more of her true feeling into it. That, at best, would be only a cruel kindness.
As she folded and sealed the letter she felt that she was sealing down many years of her past youth. She already felt that she had passed over some mysterious Great Divide, that some vast morainic loop already walled her back from her former existence. And then, as a sudden, rushing sense of her isolation swept over her, she broke down, in that very hour of her ironic triumph, and wept miserably, passionately, hopelessly.
Her misery clung to her all that day, until, late in the afternoon, she caught the first glimpse of Oxford from her compartment window. At one touch it carried her back to the six long years of her girlhood, for she had been little more than a child when first taken from the dubious care of her father—and the happiest stretch of her life had been lived within sound of Oxford’s tranquil bells.
It had been her first plan, when she left the train, to take a carriage and drive leisurely through the old university town. It would be her one hour of freedom, before crossing that final Rubicon; it was only, she protested, a human enough hesitation before the ultimate plunge. Vividly and minutely she remembered the town, as she had seen it from the familiar hills, wrapt in sunlight and purplish shadows by day, lying cool and dark and tranquil under the summer moon by night, steeped in the silences and the soft mistiness of the river valley, with here and there a bell tinkling and a roof glimmering through the gloom. She even used to say she found a strange comfort in the number of these bells and in the thought of their wakefulness throughout the night. But now, through some underground circuit of memory, they carried her thoughts back to the clanging brilliance of Broadway at midnight, to the movement and tumult and press of light-hearted humanity. And by contrast, they now seemed to her to toll lugubriously. The quiet city about her seemed tainted with antiquity, autumnal, overshadowed by the grayness of death. It almost stifled her. She had forlornly hoped that the calm beauty of that town of bells and towers would still fall as a welcome balm on her torn feelings. But she had changed—oh, how she had changed! It was not, she told herself, the mere fruit of physical exhaustion. Her one desire on that day, indeed, was to reach that condition of bodily weariness which would render her indifferent to all mental blows. It was only her past, whimpering for its own.
She still felt the sheer need of fatigue to purge away that inner weariness that had settled over her soul, so on second thoughts she turned homeward, and went on foot, through the paling English afternoon. Often, as a girl, she had walked in over the neighboring hills; and there seemed something more in keeping with her return to go back alone, and quietly. And as she walked she seemed to grow indifferent to even her own destiny. She felt herself as one gazing down on her own tangled existence with the cool detachment of a mere spectator. Yet this was the landscape of her youth, she kept telling herself, where she had first heard nightingales sing, where she had been happy and hopeful and looked out toward the unknown world with wide and wondering eyes. But the very landscape that once lay so large and alluring now seemed cramped and small and trivial. It seemed like a play-world to her, painted and laid out and overcrowded, like the too confining stage-scene of a theatre.
The afternoon was already late when the familiar square tower of the church and the gray walls of the parsonage itself came into view. She gazed at them, abstracted and exalted, and only once she murmured: “How different, oh, how different!”
Then she opened the gate of that quiet home, slowly and deliberately, and stepped inside. The garden was empty.
One great, annihilating sponge-sweep seemed to wipe five long years, and all their mottled events, from her memory. Then as slowly and deliberately she once more closed the gate. The act seemed to take on that dignity attaching to the ceremonial, for with that movement, she passionately protested to herself, she was closing the door on all her past.
CHAPTER VI
It was one week later that Frances Candler wrote her second letter to Durkin. She wrote it feverishly, and without effort, impetuous page after page, until she came to the end. Then she folded and sealed it, hastily, as though in fear that some reactionary sweep of hesitation might still come between her and her written purpose.
“I was wrong—I was terribly wrong,” was the way in which she began her letter. “For as I told you in my cable,I am coming back. It is now all useless, and hopeless, and too late. And I thought, when I was once away from you, that it would be easy to learn to live without you. But during these last few weeks, when I have been so absolutely and so miserably alone, I have needed and cried for you—oh, Jim, how I have needed you! I have learned, too, how even an inflexible purpose, how even a relentless sense of duty, may become more sinister than the blindest selfishness. It was cruel and cowardly in me—for as you once said, we must now sink or swim together. I forgot that you, too, were alone, that you, too, needed help and companionship, even more than I. And I had thought that morality and its geography, that mere flight from my misdoings meant that they were ended, that here in some quiet spot I could be rid of all my past, that I could put on a new character like a new bonnet, that life was a straight and never-ending lane, and not a blind mole-run forever winding and crossing and turning on itself! I thought that I could creep away, and forget you, and what I had been, and what I had lived through, and what had been shown to me. But the world is not that easy with us. It defeats us where we least expect it; it turns against us when we most need it. I had always dreamed that my uncle’s high-walled home at Oxford could be nothing but a place of quiet and contentment. I had always thought of it as a cloister, into which I could some day retire, and find unbroken rest and a solemn sort of happiness. Then came the revelation, the blow that cut the very ground from under my feet.Theyhad their troubles and their sorrows, as well as I. Life could hang as dark for them as it hung for me. My cousin Albert, a mere boy, reading for the Bar in London, had a friend in the City named Singford. I will try to tell you everything as clearly and as briefly as possible. Young Singford is rather a black sheep, of an idle and wealthy family. He involved Albert in a stock-gambling scheme—oh, such a transparent and childish scheme, poor boy!—and Albert, in despair, went to his father. He had to have money to cover his losses; it would be paid back within the month. His father, the soul of uprightness, borrowed the money from what was, I think, the Diocesan Mission Fund, in the belief that it would be promptly repaid. Then came the crash. I found them broken and dazed under it, helpless, hopeless, bewildered. It was so new to them, so outside their every-day life and experience! I went straight to London, and hunted up my cousin, who was actually talking about shooting himself. I found that young Singford, who had been sent down from Balliol, had blindly plunged with Albert on some foolish Texas Oil enterprise. I needn’t tell you more, except that the whole sum was not quite two hundred pounds. But it meant Albert’s giving up his study, and my uncle’s disgrace. I straightened it out for the poor boy—it all seemed so easy and natural and commonplace formypractised hand!—and I believe I brought some little peace and comfort back to that crushed and despairing household. But it all means, of course, that now I’ll have to go back to America. Still, whatever I may have to go through, or whatever happens to me, I shall always have the consolation of knowing that I made that one small sacrifice and did that one small kindness. But from the first I saw that my sanctuary was no longer a sanctuary. And when I saw that I should really have to go back, I was almost glad. The very thought of it seemed to give a new zest to life. I had been trying to tell myself that my future there would not be empty and lonely. But all along, in my secret heart of hearts, I knew better. I could not close my eyes to anticipation; I could not shut activity out of my life. It seemed suddenly to people all my lonely future with possibilities, that first thought of going back. And then there wasyou. Yes, I believe all along that it was you I wanted. I tried to argue myself away from the feeling that I was deserting you, but I knew it was true. It was this feeling that saved me, that made me feel almost elated, when I saw that fate was once more flinging me into the life from which I had been fighting to escape. You don’t know what the very word ‘America’ now means to me—it’s like the shrill of a call-bell, it’s like the double ‘i’ of our operating days, warning us to be ready! I want to go home; and home, now, is where you are. I can’t entomb myself yet—I am too young. I want to live, Jim, I want to live! Those feverish years must have left some virus in my veins, some virus of recklessness and revolt. And there is so much to do, so many things are challenging us, waiting for us. I can not be satisfied with memories, and Yesterday. I want Tomorrow, and You! It may be blind, and wrong, and wicked—but, oh, Jim, the wires are all down between my head and my heart!”