It was a full minute before the door swung open; and the unlooked-for
wait in some way keyed the younger man’s curiosity up to the snapping
point. As it finally opened, slowly, he had the startled vision of a
young woman, dressed in sober black, looking half timidly out at them,
with her hand still on the knob. As he noticed the wealth of her waving
chestnut hair, and the poise of the head, and the quiet calmness of the
eyes, that appeared almost a violet-blue in contrast to the soft pallor
of her face, Durkin felt that they had made a mistake in the house
number. But, seeing MacNutt step quickly inside, he himself awkwardly
took off his hat. Under the spell of her quiet, almost pensive smile, he
decided that she could be little more than a mere girl, until he noticed
the womanly fullness of her breast and hips and what seemed a languid
weariness about the eyes themselves. He also noted, and in this he felt
a touch of sharp resentment, the sudden telepathic glance that passed
between MacNutt and the woman; a questioning flash on her part, an
answering flash on the other’s. Then she turned to Durkin, with her
quiet, carelessly winning smile, and held out her hand,—and his heart
thumped and pounded more drunkenly than it had done with all MacNutt’s
bootlegger’s gin. Then he heard MacNutt speaking, quietly and evenly, as
though talking of mere things of the moment.
“This is Mr. Jim Durkin; Durkin, this is Miss Frances Candler. You
two’re going to have a lot o’ trouble together, so I guess you’d better
get acquainted right here—might as well make it Frank and Jim, you two,
for you’re going to see a mighty good deal of one another!”
“All right, Jim,” said the woman, girlishly, in a mellow, English
contralto voice. Then she laughed a little, and Durkin noticed the
whiteness of her fine, strong incisors, and straightway forgot them
again, in the delicious possibility that he might hear that soft
laughter often, and under varied circumstances. Then he flushed hot and
cold, as he felt her shaking hands with him once more. Strangely
sobered, he stumbled over rugs and polished squares of parquetry, after
them, up two flights of stairs, listening, still dazed, to MacNutt’s
hurried questions and the woman’s low answers, which sounded muffled and
far away to him, as though some impalpable wall separated them from him.
A man by the name of Mackenzie, Durkin gathered from what he could hear
of their talk, had been probing about the underground cable galleries
for half a day, and had just strung a wire on which much seemed to
depend. They stopped before a heavy oak-panelled door, on which MacNutt
played a six-stroked tattoo. A key turned, and the next moment a
middle-aged man, thin-lipped, and with blue veins showing about his
temples, thrust his head cautiously through the opening. The sweat was
running from his moist and dirt-smeared face; a look of relief came over
his features at the sight of the others. Durkin wondered just why he
should be dressed in the peaked cap and blue suit of a Consolidated Gas
Company inspector.
The room into which they stepped had, obviously, once been a
sewing-room. In one corner still stood the sewing-machine itself, in the
shadow, incongruously enough, of a large safe with combination lock.
Next to this stood a stout work-table, on which rested a box relay and a
Bunnell sounder. Around the latter were clustered a galvanometer, a 1-2
duplex set, a condenser, and a Wheatstone bridge of the Post-Office
pattern, while about the floor lay coils of copper wire, a pair of
lineman’s pliers, and a number of scattered tools. Durkin’s trained eye
saw that the condenser had been in use, to reduce the current from a
tapped electric-light wire; while the next moment his glance fell on a
complete wire-tapping outfit, snugly packed away in an innocent enough
looking suit-case. Then he turned to the two men and the woman, as they
bent anxiously over the littered table, where Mackenzie was once more
struggling with his instrument, talking quickly and tensely as he tested
and worked and listened.
“Great Scott, Mack, it’s easy enough for you to talk, but it was fool’s
luck, pure fool’s luck, I ever got this wire up! First, I had forty feet
of water-pipe, then eighty feet o’ brick wall, then over fifty feet of
cornice, and about twice as much eave-trough, hangin’ on all the time by
my eyelashes, and dog-sick waitin’ to be pinched with the goods on! Hold
on, there—what’s this?”
The sounder had given out a tremulous little quaver; then a feeble click
or two; then was silent once more.
“Lost it again!” said Mackenzie, under his breath.
“Let me look over that relay a minute!” broke in Durkin. It was the type
of box-relay usually used by linemen, with a Morse key attached to the
base-board; and he ran his eye over it quickly. Then, with a deft
movement or two he released the binding of the armature lever screws,
and the next moment the instrument felt the pulse of life, and spoke out
clearly and distinctly. Mackenzie looked up at the newcomer, for the
first time, with an actual and personal interest.
“That’s the trick, all right!” he said, with an admiring shake of the
head.
“Listen,” Durkin cried, gleefully, however, holding up a finger. “That’s
Corcoran, the old slob! He’s sending through the New Orleans returns!”
And he chuckled as he listened with inclined ear.
“That’s Corcoran, same old slob as ever!” And still again he chuckled, a
little contemptuously, with the disdain of the expert for the slovenly
sender. He remembered, with a touch of pride, his own sending three
years before at the Kansas City Telegraphers’ Convention, and the little
cheer that broke from the audience in the great hall as he left the test
table. It was not at his mere speed they had cheered, for he could do
little more than forty-five words a minute, but because, as the chairman
had later said, it was so clean-cut and neat and incisive—“as pure as a
Rocky Mountain trout stream!”
“There they are!” said Mackenzie.
The four silent figures leaned a little closer over the clicking
instrument of insensate brass—leaned intent and motionless, with
quickened breathing and dilated nostrils and strangely altering faces,
as though they were far from a quiet little back sewing-room, and were
indeed beholding vast issues and participating in great efforts.
“We’ve got ’em, at last!” said MacNutt, quietly, mopping his face and
pacing the little room with feverish steps.
“Yes, we’ve got ’em!” echoed Mackenzie, jubilantly.
Frances Candler, the woman, said nothing. But Durkin could feel her
breath playing on the back of his neck; and when he turned to her he
could see by her quick breathing and widened pupils that she, too, had
been reading the wire. And again he wondered, as he looked at her wide
forehead and those warm yet firm lips in which he could see
impulsiveness still waywardly lurking, how she ever came to such a
place. To Durkin—who had heard of woman bookies and sheet-writers and
touts in his day—she seemed so soft, so flower-like, in her pale
womanhood, that she still remained to him one of the mysteries of a
mysterious day.
The woman saw the play of the quicker thought on his face, and the
impetuous warmth in his eyes as he gazed up at her, still half-timidly.
And seeing it, she looked quickly away.
“No goo-gooin’ there, you folks,” broke in MacNutt, brusquely. As he was
turning hurriedly away he looked back for a hesitating moment, from
Durkin to the woman, and from the woman to Durkin again. If he was about
to say anything further on the point to them, he changed his mind before
speaking, and addressed himself once more to Mackenzie.
“Now, Mack, we’ve got to get a move on! Get some of that grime off, and
your clothes on, quick!” Then he turned back to the other two at the
operating table.
“I’ve certainly got a couple o’ good-lookers in you two, all right, all
right!” he said, Durkin thought half mockingly. “But I want you to get
groomed up, Durkin, so’s to do justice to that Fifth Avenue face o’
yours! Better get rigged out complete, before trouble begins, for you’re
goin’ to move among some lot o’ swell people. And you two’ve got to put
on a lot o’ face, to carry this thing through.”
Durkin laughed contentedly, for his eyes had just been following the
line of the woman’s profile.
“Remember,” continued MacNutt, crisply, “I want you two to do the swell
restaurants—in reason, of course, in reason!—and drive round a good
deal, and haunt the Avenue a bit, and push through the Waldorf-Astoria
every day or two, and drop in at Penfield’s lower house whenever you get
word from me. You’d better do the theatres now and then, too—I want you
to be seen, remember,—but always _together_! It may be kind o’ hard,
not bein’ able to pick your friend, Durkin, but Frank knows the ropes,
and how much not to spend, and what to fight shy of, and who to steer
clear of—and I guess she can explain things as you go along.”
He turned back once more, from the doorway.
“Now, remember,—don’t answer that ’phone unless Mack or me gives the
three-four ring! If she rings all night, don’t answer! And ‘Battery
Park,’ mind, means trouble. When you’re tipped off with that, get the
stuff in the safe, if you can, before you break away. That’s all, I
guess, for now!” And he joined the man called Mack in the hall, and
together they hurried downstairs, and let themselves out, leaving Durkin
and his quiet-eyed colleague alone.
He sat and looked at her, dazed, bewildered, still teased by the veil of
unreality which seemed to sway between him and the world about him. It
seemed to him as though he were watching a hurrying, shifting drama from
a distance,—watching it as, in his early days in New York, he used to
watch the Broadway performances from his cramped little gallery seat.
“Am I awake?” he asked weakly.
Then he laughed recklessly, and turned to her once more, abstractedly
rubbing his stubbled chin, and remembering to his sudden shame that he
had gone unshaved for half a week. Now that MacNutt was away he hoped to
see her in her true light. Some mere word or posture, he thought, would
brush the entire enigma away.
“_Am_ I awake?” he repeated, pushing his hand up through his hair. He
was still watching her for some betraying touch of brazenness. He could
be more at ease with her, he felt, when once she had reconciled herself
with her uncouth surroundings, through the accidental but inevitable
touch of vulgarity which was to establish what she really was.
“Yes; it is all very real!” she laughed quietly, but restrainedly. For
the second time he noticed her white, regular teeth, as she hurried
about, straightening up the belittered room.
During his narrow and busy life Durkin had known few women; never before
had he known a woman like this one, with whom destiny had so strangely
ordained that he should talk and drive and idle, work and watch and
plot. He looked once more at her thick, tumbled chestnut hair, at the
soft pallor of her oval cheek, and the well-gowned figure, as she
stooped over a condenser,—wondering within himself how it would all
end, and what was the meaning of it.
“Well, this certainly does beat me!” he said, at last, slowly, yet
contentedly enough.
The young woman looked at him; and he caught a second glimpse of her
wistfully pensive smile, while his heart began to thump, in spite of
himself. He reached out a hesitating hand, as though to touch her.
“What is it?” she asked, in her mellow English contralto.
“I don’t exactly know,” he answered, with his hand before his eyes. “I
wish you’d tell me.”
She came and sat down in a chair before him, pushing back her tumbled
hair with one hand, seeming to be measuring him with her intent gaze.
She appeared in some way not altogether dissatisfied with him; it seemed
almost as if she had taken his face between her two hands, and read it,
feature by feature.
“I hardly know where to begin,” she hesitated. “I mean, I don’t know how
much they’ve explained to you already. Indeed, there’s a great deal I
don’t understand myself. But, of course, you know that we have tapped
Penfield’s private wire.”
He nodded an assenting head toward the little brass sounder.
“And, of course, you are able to judge why. He gets all the race returns
at the club house, and then sends them on by private ’phone to his other
two pool-rooms. He has to do it that way, now that New York is not so
open, and ever since the Postal-Union directors pretended to cut out
their sporting service.”
Durkin knew all this, but he waited for the sake of hearing her voice
and watching the play of her features.
“Every track report, you know, comes into New York by way of the race
department of the Postal-Union on lower Broadway. There, messenger boys
hurry about with the reports to the different wire-operators, who wire
the returns to the company’s different subscribers. Penfield, of course,
is really one of them, though it’s not generally known.”
“And always most astutely denied,” scoffed Durkin.
“Many things are astutely denied, nowadays, when a great deal of money
comes out of them,” she said, wearily.
“But what have you and I to do with all this?” he broke in.
“Quite enough! You see, there’s a delay of fifteen minutes, naturally,
in getting a result to the pool-rooms. That gives us our chance; so, we
hold up the message here, ’phone it at once over to MacNutt’s rooms,
three doors from Penfield’s, and, when he has had time to drop in, as it
were, and place his money, we send through our intercepted message.”
“Then Penfield has no idea who or what MacNutt is?”
“He knows him only as a real estate agent with a passion for plunging, a
great deal of money, and—and—” The girl shrugged a rounded shoulder,
flushed a little, and did not finish.
“And you know him as—?” suggested Durkin.
“That lies outside the area of essential information,” she answered,
with her first show of animation.
“But you?” Durkin persisted. She met his eyes, but she refused to deal
with his cross-questioning. He was still waiting for that betraying sign
which was to conjure away the enigma. Yet he rejoiced, inwardly, at the
thought that it had not come.
“Both you and I shall have to drop in, on certain days, and do what we
can at Penfield’s lower house, while Mackenzie is doing the Madison
Avenue place. We’ve been going there, on and off, for weeks now, getting
ready for—for this!”
“Then MacNutt’s been working on this scheme for a long while?”
“Yes, this house has been rented by the month, furnished, just as you
see it, simply because it stood in about the right place. We have even
lost a few hundred dollars, altogether, in Penfield’s different places.
But, in the end, the three of us are to hit Penfield together, on a
ragged field, when there’s a chance for heavy odds. But, of course, we
can do it only once!”
“And then what?” asked Durkin.
Again the girl shrugged a shoulder.
“Penfield’s patrons are all wealthy men,” she went on, in a sort of
pedagogic explicitness. “The betting, particularly at the upper house,
is always very heavy. A book of a hundred thousand dollars is common
enough; sometimes it goes up to two or three hundred thousand. So, you
see, it all depends on our odds. MacNutt himself hopes to make at least
a hundred thousand. But then he has worked and brooded over it all so
long, I don’t think he sees things quite clearly now!”
It was her first shadow of reflection on their chief, and Durkin caught
up the cue.
“He seems sharp enough still, to leave you and me here, to take all the
risk in a raid,” he protested.
“Yes,” she assented, with the touch of weariness that came into her
voice at times. “He is shrewd and sharp—shrewder and sharper than you
would dare believe.”
“And of course you understand your risk, now, here, from this moment
on?”
“Yes, I quite understand it,” she answered, with unbetraying evenness of
voice.
His fingers were toying nervously with a little magnetic “wire finder.”
“How in heavens did _you_ ever get mixed up with—with—in this sort of
thing?” Durkin at last demanded, exasperated into the immediate
question. He turned on her quickly, as he asked it, and the eyes of the
two met, combatively, for a moment or two. It was the girl who at last
looked away.
“How did _you_?” she asked, quietly enough. She was strangely unlike any
woman bookie he had seen or heard of before.
“Oh, me,—I’m different!” he cried, deprecatively. For some subtle
reason she went pale, and then flushed hot again.
“You’re—you’re not MacNutt’s wife?” he asked her, almost hopelessly.
She moved her head from side to side, slowly, in dissent, and got up and
went to the window, where she gazed out over the house-tops at the
paling afternoon.
“No, I’m not his wife,” she said, in her quiet contralto.
“Then why won’t you tell me how you got mixed up in this sort of thing?”
“It’s all so silly and so commonplace,” she said, without turning to
look at him.
“Yes?” he said, and waited.
She wheeled about and wrung out with a sudden passionate “Oh, what’s the
good of all this! I am here tapping wires, and you are here doing the
same. Neither of us belongs at this sort of work, but—but, we’re here!”
“Can’t you tell me?” he asked, more gently, yet inwardly more dogged.
“Yes, I _shall_ tell you,” she answered him, at last. “It began, really,
six years ago when my mother died, in London, and my father went to
pieces, went pitifully to pieces, and had to give up his profession as a
barrister. I felt sorry for him, and stayed with him, through his months
of drunkenness, and his gradual downfall. He started a little office for
genealogical research—as we called it—digging up pretentious
alliances, and suitable ancestors for idle and wealthy nobodies. This
was bad enough, but little by little it degenerated into a sort of
next-of-kin agency, and wrung its money from the poor, instead of the
rich!”
She paused for a moment, before she went on, gazing at the man before
her in grim and terrible candor, steeled with the purpose to purge her
soul of all she had to say, and have it over and done with.
“But I stayed with father, through it all. I told myself I could live it
down, the squalor, and the meanness, and the deceits, and even the
drunkenness—I stayed with him because I pitied him. Even then he was a
brilliant man. And I would have worked and fought for him to the end,
only, at last, he wanted me to pose as a claimant for an estate then in
chancery. _That_ I would not and could not do. I went to Reading, and
became an invalid’s companion. Then, after father’s death—after his
horrible death—his older brother, at Oxford, offered to give me a home.
He was an old man, a curate with five daughters, and I felt, then, that
it would be unjust. So I answered an advertisement in a London paper,
and came to America to be a governess in a New York family, in the house
of a diamond importer named Ottenheimer. At the end of my first week
there my mistress unjustly suspected me of—Oh, I can’t explain it all
to you here, but she was a vulgar and unscrupulous woman, and said I was
too good-looking to be a governess, and discharged me without even a
reference. I was penniless in two weeks, and would gladly have crept
back to my uncle in Oxford, if I had been able. Then, when I was almost
starving, I was glad enough to become the secretary of an investment
company, with an office in Wall Street. They had trouble with the
Post-Office department in Washington, and then the police raided the
office, for it turned out to be nothing more than a swindling
scheme. . . . And then, oh, I don’t know, I seemed to drift from one
thing to another, until I was the English heiress in a matrimonial
bureau, and a French baroness in some foreign litigation scheme. But all
the time I was only waiting to get enough money to creep back to Oxford.
I kept telling myself that in a few weeks more I should be able to
escape. I kept dreaming of it, until Oxford seemed to grow into a sort
of sanctuary. But things went on and on, and still I waited.”
“And then what?” demanded Durkin, startled at the rising note of
self-hate in her feverish declamation.
“Then, at last, I thought I had escaped into honesty, even in America.
But it was the same as before. I met MacNutt!”
“And then what?” Durkin’s customarily careless shoulders were very
upright.
“Oh, first it was a woman’s get-rich-quick concern in Chicago; then a
turf-investment office in St. Louis; then a matrimonial bureau of our
own, until the police put a stop to it because of the post-office
people; then it was chasing the circuit for a season; and, finally, this
wire-tapping scheme!”
She looked at him, weary-eyed, hiding nothing, smiling hopelessly.
“They write to me, from time to time,” she went on, more quietly, but
none the less tragically. “My uncle’s parish is just outside Oxford, a
quiet little high-walled place full of flowers and birds. But he is
getting very old, and there are six of them, five girls, and Albert, the
youngest. Some day I shall go back and live with them—only, in some
way, I grow more and more afraid to face them. So I search for excuses
to send them money and gifts. They think I’m still a governess here, and
I write lying letters to them, and tell them things out of my own head,
things quite false and untrue! So, you see, I’ve been nothing but
cowardly—and—and wicked, from the first!”
“And is that all?” demanded Durkin, not trusting himself to show one jot
of feeling.
“Yes,” she answered, drearily; “I think that is all.”
“But you’re—you’re too good for all this!” he cried impetuously,
indignantly. “Why don’t you break away from it, at once?”
“I’m going to,—some day! I’ve always waited, though, and everything has
dragged on and on and on, and I’ve been half afraid of MacNutt—he’s the
type of man, you know, who never forgives a person—and half-afraid of
myself. But, some day—”
“Oh, I know what it’s like,” cried Durkin, drawn toward her, strangely
nearer to her, in some intangible way. She read the sudden look on his
face, and blushed under it, almost girlishly, once more.
“I want to rest, and be quiet, and live decently, away from the world,
somewhere,” she said dreamily, as though speaking only to herself.
Durkin walked to the window where she stood, checked himself, strode
back to the relay on the work-table, and looked at the huddled
instruments, absently.
“So do I,” he said, earnestly, with his heels well apart.
“Do you?” she asked. He went over to where she stood.
“Yes, and I mean to,” he declared, determinedly, turning with her to
look at the gathering twilight of the city, and then lapsing into
awkward silence once more.