THE WIDENING ROAD
Under the softly-waving palms of that midnight garden, Durkin relived
their feverish past, month by remembered month, until they found the
need of money staring them in the face. He reviewed each increasing
dilemma, until, eventually, he had left her in her squalid Paris
pension with her music pupils and the last eighty francs, while he
clutched at the passing straw of an exporting house clerkship in
Marseilles. The exporting house, which was under American guidance,
had flickered and gone out ignominiously, and week by desperate week
each new promise of honest work seemed to wither into a chimera at his
feverish touch. He had been told of a demand for electrical experts at
Tangier, and had promptly worked his passage to that outlandish
sea-port on a Belgian coasting-steamer, only to find a week's
employment installing a burglar-alarm system in the ware-house of a
Liverpool shipping company. In Gibraltar, a week or two longer, he had
been able to supply his immediate wants through assisting in the
reconstruction of a moving-picture machine, untimely wrecked on the
outskirts of Fez by Moorish fanatics who had believed it to be the
invention of the Evil One.
It was at Gibraltar, too, that his first mocking hopes for some renewal
of life had come to him, along with the vague hint that his
transmitting camera had at last been recognized, and perhaps even
marketed. But escape from that little seaport had been as difficult as
escape from gaol. He had finally effected a hazardous and
ever-memorable migration from Algeciras to Cimiez, but only by acting
as chauffeur for a help-abandoned, gout-ridden, and irritable-minded
ex-ambassador to Persia, together with a scrupulously inattentive
trained nurse, who, apparently, preferred diamonds to a uniform, and
smuggled incredible quantities of hand-made lace under the tonneau
seat-cushions. And then he had found himself at Monte Carlo, still
waiting for word from Paris, fighting against a grim new temptation
which, vampire-like, had grown stronger and stronger as its victim
daily had grown weaker and weaker.
For along the sea-front, one indolent and golden afternoon, he had
learned that an American yacht in the harbor was sending ashore for a
practical electrician, since a defective generator had left its cabins
of glimmering white and gold in sudden darkness. Durkin, after a brief
talk with the second officer, had been taken aboard the tender and
hurried out to where the lightless steamer rocked and swung at her
anchor chain in the intense turquoise bay. He had hoped, at first,
that he was approaching his ship of deliverance, that luck was favoring
the luckless and at last the means of his escape were at hand. So he
asked, with outward unconcern, just what the yacht's course was. They
were bound for Messina, the second officer had replied, and from there
they went on to Corfu for a couple of weeks, and then on to Ragusa.
He went on board and looked over the armature core. It was of the
slotted drum type, he at once perceived, built up of laminations of
soft steel painted to break up eddy currents, and as he tested the soft
amber mica insulation about the commutators of hard-rolled copper, he
knew that the defective generator could be repaired in three-quarters
of an hour. But certain scraps of talk that came to his ears amid the
clink of glasses, from one of the shadowy saloons, had stung into vague
activity his old, irrepressible hunger for the companionship of his own
kind, his own race.
It was uncommonly pleasant, he had told himself as he had caught the
first drone of the lowered, confidential voices, to hear the old home
talk, and even broken snatches of old home interests. As he explored
the ship and minutely examined automatic circuit-breaker and
switchboard and fuse, he even made it a point to see that his
explorations took him into the pantry-like cabin next to the saloon
from which these droning voices drifted. As he gave apparently
studious and unbroken attention to a stretch of defective wiring, he
was in fact making casual mental note of the familiar tones of the
distant voices, listening impersonally and dreamily to each question
and answer and suggestion that passed between that quietly talking
group. One of the talkers, he soon found, was a Supreme Court judge on
his vacation, equable and deliberative in his occasional query or view
or criticism; another was apparently a secret agent from the office of
the New York district-attorney, still another two were either Scotland
Yard men or members of some continental detective bureau--this Durkin
assumed from their broad-voweled English voices and their seemingly
intimate knowledge of European criminal procedure. The fifth man he
could in no way place. But it was this man who interrupted the others,
and, apparently taking a slip of paper from some inside pocket or some
well-closed wallet, read aloud a list which, he first explained, had
been secured from some undesignated safe on the night of a certain raid.
"Three hundred and twenty shares of National Bank of Commerce," read
the voice methodically, the reader checking off each item, obviously,
as he went along. "One certificate of forty-seven shares of United
States Steel Preferred; two certificates of one hundred shares each of
Erie Railroad First Preferred; eighteen personal cheques, with names
and amounts and banks attached; seven I. O. U.'s, with amounts and
dates and initials."
"Probably worthless, from our point of view!" interposed a voice.
The dreaminess suddenly went out of Durkin's eyes, as he listened.
"Postal-Union Telegraph bonds, valued at $102,345," went on the reading
voice, and again the interrupting critic remarked: "Which, you see, we
may regard as very significant, since it both obviously and inferably
demonstrates that the telegraph company and the poolrooms are compelled
to stand together!"
Durkin followed the list, with inclined head and uplifted hands,
forgetting even his simulation of work, until the end was reached.
"In all, you see, one quarter of a million dollars in negotiable
securities, if we are to rely on this memorandum, which, as I stated
before, ought to be authentic, for it was taken from the Penfield safe
the night of the first raid."
Durkin started, as though the circuit with which his fingers absently
toyed had suddenly become a live wire.
"Penfield!" The word sent a little thrill through his body.
Penfield--the very name was a challenging trumpet to him. But again he
bent and listened to the drone of the nearby voices.
"And Keenan, you say, is in Genoa?" asked one of the Englishmen.
"If he's not there now he will be during the week," answered the
American.
"You're sure of that?"
"All I know is that our Milan man secured duplicates of his cables.
Three of them were in cipher, but he was able to make reasonably sure
of the Genoa trip!"
"It would be rather hard to get at him, _there_!"
"But if he strikes north, as you say, and goes first to Liverpool, and
gets home by the back door, as it were, by taking a steamer to Quebec
or Montreal----"
"That's a mere blind!"
"But why say that?"
"Because he's too wise to stride British territory, before he unloads.
It's not a mere matter of stopping the transfer of this stock, or
whether or not all of it is negotiable. What we want is tangible and
incriminating evidence. The signatures of those cheques are----"
That was the last word that came to Durkin's ears, for at that moment a
steward, with a tray of glasses, hurried into the pantry. His
suspicious eye saw nothing beyond a busy electrician replacing a
switchboard. But before the intruding steward had departed the second
officer was at Durkin's elbow, overlooking his labors, and no further
word or hint came to the ears of the listener.
But he had heard enough. The flame had been applied to the dry acreage
of his too arid and idle existence. He had remained passive too long.
It was change that brought chance. And even though that change meant
descent, it would, after all, be only the momentary dip that preceded
the upward flight again. And as he gazed thoughtfully landward, where
Monte Carlo lay vivid and glowing under the sheltering Alpes-Maritimes,
like a golden lizard sunning itself on a shelf of gray rock, he felt
within him a more kindly and comprehensive feeling for that
flower-strewn arena of vast hazards. It was, after all, the great
chances of life that made existence endurable. Its only anodyne lay in
effort and feverish struggle. And his chance for work had come!
Half an hour later he was rowed ashore, with a good Havana cigar
between his teeth and three good English sovereigns in his pocket. As
he made his way up to his hotel he could feel some inner part of him
still struggling and shrinking back from the enticing avenue of
activity which his new knowledge was opening up before him.
He smiled, now, a little grimly, as he sat under the rustling palms and
thought of those old, unnecessary scruples. He had been holding
himself to a compact which no longer existed. And, all along, he had
been regarding himself as the weakling, the vacillator, when it was he
who had held out the longest! He had even, in those earlier hesitating
moments, consolingly recalled to his mind how Monsieur Blanc's modestly
denominated Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et Cercle des Étrangers
made it a point to proffer a railway ticket to any impending wreck,
such as himself, who might drift like a stain across its roads of
merriment, or leave a telltale blot upon one of its perennially
beautiful and ever-odorous flower-beds. But now, as he reviewed those
past weeks of hesitation and inward struggle, a sense of relapse crept
over him. As he recalled the picture of the clear-cut profile between
the floating purple curtains, a vague indifference as to the final
outcome of things took possession of him.
He almost exulted in the meaning of the strange meeting, which, one
hour before, had seemed to bring the universe crashing down about his
head. Then, as his plans and thoughts took more definite shape, his
earlier recklessness merged into an almost pleasurable sense of relief
and release, of freedom after confinement. He felt incongruously
grateful for the lash that had awakened him to even illicit activity;
life, under the passion for accomplishment, under the zest for risk and
responsibility, seemed to take on its older and deeper meaning once
more. It was, he told himself, as if the foreign tongue which he had
so wearily heard on every side of him, for so long, had suddenly
translated itself into intelligibility, or as if the text beneath the
pictures in those ubiquitous illustrated papers from Paris, which he
had studied so blankly and so blindly, had suddenly become as plain as
his own English to him.
But his moment of exaltation, his mood of careless emancipation, was a
brief one. He was no longer alone in life. His bitterness of heart
had blinded him to obligations. He had not yet fathomed the mystery of
Frank's appearance. He had not yet even made sure of her relapse.
Above all, he had not put forth a hand to help her in what might be an
inexplicable extremity. The morning could still bring some word from
her. He himself would spend the day in search of her. He would have
to proceed guardedly, but he would leave no stone unturned. It was
not, he told himself, that he was giving fate one last chance to treat
more kindly with him. It was, rather, that all his natural being
wanted and reached out for this woman who had first taught him the
meaning and purpose of life. . . . His mind went back, suddenly, to
one afternoon, months before, at Abbazia, when they had come up from
sea-bathing in the Adriatic. He had leaned down over her, to help her
up the Angiolina bath steps, wet and slippery with sea-water. The
mingled gold and chestnut of her thick hair was dank and sodden with
brine, the wistful face that she turned up to him was pinched and
colorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a sudden, as she
leaned heavily on his arm, a presaging apparition out of the dim
future, an adumbration of her own body grown frail and old, looking up
to him for help, calling forlornly to him for solace. And in that
impressionable moment his heart had gone out to her, in a burst of pity
that seemed deeper and stronger than love itself.