Durkin sat at the restaurant table, smoking, his watch in his hand. It
was already seven minutes to four. As the seventh minute slipped into
the sixth, and the sixth into the fifth, some first vague sense of
impending disaster stole over him.
“Is this seat taken, sir?”
It was a waiter speaking, with a short, florid man at his heels.
“Yes,” said Durkin, quietly, “I’m expecting a lady—in five minutes.”
The florid man bowed. The waiter said “Yes, sir,” tipped the chair
against the table edge, and went on in search of a seat.
Durkin smoked hard once more, relishing the touch of irony in it all. He
did not, naturally enough, explain that the lady he was expecting had
made the engagement three thousand miles away from the table at which he
sat and at which he was to meet her precisely on the stroke of four.
Such things were theatrical, and unnecessary; besides, one had to allow
for accidents. And once more, with a puzzled brow, he took up his paper
and looked through the _Majestic’s_ passenger list, still involuntarily
cast down by a wayward sense of possible calamity.
He imagined some dark coalition of forces against him, obscurely
depressed, for the moment, by the shadow of some immense, seemingly
impassive, and yet implacable animosity of eternal rule toward the
accidental revolter. The same vague feeling had possessed him that
infelicitously happy day when, after abandoning his operator’s key, he
had become an “overhead guerrilla.” Still later it had come to him, from
time to time, as, dazzled by the splendor of that vast hazard which had
ended in such disastrous triumph, he had revolted against MacNutt, and
preyed on the preyer himself. He had begun to feel, and he had felt,
from that time forward, that he was existing under a series of
conditions other than those of the men about him. He was no longer one
of them. He was out of the fold. He carried the taint of the pariah. He
was, henceforth, however he might try, as Frances Candler had warned
him, to muffle or forget it, a social anomaly.
To the consciousness of this he applied his customary balm, which lay in
the thought that now the older creeds and ethics of life had crumbled
away. The spirit which dominated America today, he felt, was that of the
business man’s code of morals; it was the test, not of right, but of
might, as it flowered in intelligence and craftiness. And that first
dubious victory, of his own, he argued with himself, had been one of
intelligence—should not victory, then, always be with the alerter head
and the warier hand? And this vague and mysterious enemy whose
emissaries, even though relentless, were always so temptingly
dull—would they not always meet and clash, and the battle be to the
strong?
A woman, dressed in black, with a dark veil caught up around the rim of
her hat, pushed her way through the crowded restaurant toward the table
in the corner. She might have passed for a mere girl, but for the heavy
shadows about the weary-looking, violet eyes and the betraying fullness
of her soberly gowned figure. She glanced at the clock, and smiled a
little, with her calm, almost pensive lips, as she placed a pearl-gloved
hand on the back of the tilted chair.
“I am on time, you see,” she said, quietly in her soft contralto, as she
sank into the chair with a contented sigh, and began drawing off her
gloves. “It is precisely four o’clock.”
Outwardly she appeared at ease, well-poised and unruffled. Only the
quick rise and fall of her bosom and the tremulousness of her hands gave
any sign of her inner agitation.
“Why—Frank!” cried Durkin, with eloquent enough inadequacy, his face
paling a little, for all his own assumption of easy fortitude. He
continued to look at her, a sudden lump in his throat choking back the
hundred stampeding words that seemed clamoring to escape. He noticed, as
he had so often noticed before, how rapid and easy were her movements,
and how, through all her softness, she impressed one with a sense of her
great muscular agility.
For one wavering moment she let her eyes lose their studied calmness,
and, inwardly surrendering, gazed at him recklessly, abandonedly, with
her very soul in her face.
“Is it safe here?” she murmured, as she drew her chair up.
He nodded. “As safe as anywhere,” he was on the point of replying, but
did not speak the words.
“Dearest!” she whispered to him, with her eyes still on his face, and
her back to the crowded room.
He tried to seize her ungloved hand in his, but she drew him up with a
sudden monitory “Hsssssh!” Then he, too, remembered, and they took up
their rôle of outward indifference once more.
“I had to come back, you see!” she confessed, with what seemed a shamed
and mournful shake of the head.
“Something told me you would, all along, even after your first letter. I
saw it, as surely as I see you now!”
“Oh, Jim, what I wrote you was true!—it showed me that we can’t bury
our past, in a day, or a week or a month! It’s made me afraid of myself
and taught me how weak I am!”
And again she looked at him, across the quiet but abysmal gulf of her
reawakening despair.
“But there is just where we make ourselves so unhappy—we’re so afraid
about being afraid! Life without some fear—what is it?”
“Oh, I am without defence!” she lamented, indeterminately and
inconsequently. She sighed again, and still again gazed into his face
with her shadowy and unhappy and seemingly hungry eyes. Then, with a
sudden abandoning uptoss of her reckless hands, that seemed to fling
both solemnity and memory from her, she laughingly declared that it was
already too late to cry over spilt milk. Yet the sound of her careless
laughter fell, in some way, more lugubriously on Durkin’s ear than had
all her earlier lamentation.
“But _why_ did you ever write that first letter?” he persisted.
She knew she could not explain, satisfactorily. “It was the result of
being lonesome, let’s say, and perhaps being morbid, after my illness!”
Durkin called the waiter and gave him an order, puffing his cigar with
assumed unconcern, while the woman murmured across the table to him:
“You look quite foreign, with that magnificent Vandyke! And, by the way,
how do you like my English bang?”
“Why, it’s dyed!” said Durkin, for the first time missing the sunny
glint in the familiar crown of chestnut.
“Jim,” said the woman, in lower tones, sobering again, “there’s trouble
ahead, already!”
She drew her chair a little closer, and leaned forward, with her elbows
on the table and her chin in her hands. Durkin lighted another cigar,
and lounged toward her with the same careless pose, his face alert with
new and different interest.
“MacNutt?”
“No, not him, thank heaven!”
“You don’t mean Doogan’s men?”
“Not so loud, dear! No, not Doogan’s men, either. It’s nothing like
that. But tell me, quickly, has anything gone wrong over here?”
“Not a thing—except that you were away!”
“But hasn’t _anything_ happened since I saw you?”
“Nothing worth while—no. It’s been so dull, so deadly dull, I all but
jumped back into the old game and held up a Charleston pool-room or two!
Five whole weeks of—of just waiting for you!”
She caught up her veil, where a part of it dropped down from her
hat-rim, and smiled her wistfully girlish smile at him. Then she glanced
carefully about her; no one seemed within earshot.
“Yes, I know. It seemed just as long to me, dearest. Only, because of
several things, _I_ had to jump into something. That’s what I must tell
you about—but we can’t talk here.”
“Then we’ll have William call a taxi?”
She nodded her assent.
“We can talk there without having some one hanging over our shoulders.”
“Do you know,” she went on, as she watched the waiter push out through
the crowded, many-odored room, “I often think I must have lived through
the ordinary feelings of life. I mean that we have already taken such
chances together, you and I, that now only a big thing can stir me into
interest. I suppose we’ve exhausted all the every-day sensations.”
“Yes, I know the feeling,” said Durkin, through his cigar-smoke. “I
suppose it’s really a sort of drunkenness with us now. I couldn’t go
back to the other things, any more than I could go back to—to stogies.
All this last four weeks of hanging about I have felt like—oh, like a
sailor who has pounded round every strange sea in the world, and has
come home to be told not to go out of his own back yard.”
“That’s how I felt, towards the last, in London, with nothing to do,
nothing to think about, or plan, or live for. I got so I nearly screamed
every time I faced the four dull walls of that hotel room. But, you see
we have both fallen back on the wrong sort of stimulant. After all, what
I wrote you in that letter _was_ true! Neither of us two should ever
have been evil-doers. I am too—too much like other women, I suppose.
And you’re too thin-skinned and introspective—too much of a twentieth
century Hamlet. You should never have tapped a wire; and I should never
have been a welcher and robbed MacNutt. You ought to have gone on being
a nice, respectable young train-despatcher, with a row of geraniums in
front of your station window; and I ought to be a prim little
branch-office telegrapher in one of those big Broadway hotel corridors,
in a little wire cage, between the news-stand and the cigar-counter.
Then we should both have a lot still to look for and to live for.”
She broke off inconsequently, and gazed out through the
lightly-curtained window, to where a street piano was throbbing out the
waltz-tune of _Stumbling_.
“Do you remember our first days together?—the music and theatres and
drives! Oh, what a happy four weeks they were!” And she gazed at him
dreamily, as she hummed the tune of _Stumbling_ in her throaty,
low-noted contralto, ending with a nonchalant little laugh, as she
looked up and said, “But here’s our taxi, at last!”
In the half-light of the taxi-cab, as they turned into Fifth Avenue, and
swung up toward Central Park, she let her tired body rest against his
shoulder, with her arm clinging to him forlornly. There was a minute or
two of silence, and then putting her face up to him, she said, with a
sudden passionate calmness:
“Kiss me!”
He felt the moist warmth of her capitulating lips, the clinging weight
of her inert body, and, deep down within his own consciousness he knew
that, if need be, he could die for her as the purest knight might have
died for some old-world lady of spotless soul and name.
Yet after all, he wondered, as he held her there, were they so
irretrievably bad? Was it not only their game, this life they had
drifted into?—their anodyne, their safeguard against exhausted desires
and the corroding idleness of life?
She must intuitively have felt what was running through his mind, as she
slipped away from him, and drew back into her own corner of the
taxi-cab, with a new look of brooding melancholy in her shadowy eyes.
“If I were ignorant and coarse, and debased, then I could understand it.
But I’m not! I have always wanted to be honest. From the first I have
longed to be decent.”
“You _are_ honest, through and through,” he protested. “You are as
strong and true as steel.”
She shook her head, but he caught her in his arms, and she lay there
half-happy again.
“Oh, Frank, for the twentieth time,” he pleaded, “won’t you marry me?”
“No, no, no; not till we’re honest!” she cried, in alarm. “I wouldn’t
dare to, I couldn’t, until then.”
“But we’re only what we have been. We can’t change it all in a day, can
we—especially when there is so much behind?”
“I want to be decent,” she cried, in a sort of muffled wail. “No, no; I
can’t marry you, Jim, not yet. We may not be honest with other people,
but we _must_ be honest with ourselves!”
One of the policemen directing the street-traffic at Forty-Second Street
glanced in at them, through the misty window, and smiled broadly. It
seemed to remind her of other worlds, for she at once sat up more
decorously.
“Time! Time! we are losing time—and I have so much to tell you.”
“Then give me your hand to hold, while you talk.”
She hesitated for a half-laughing moment, and then surrendered it.
“Now, tell me everything, from the first!”