OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY
Durkin was pacing up and down the small room in his stockinged feet,
looking at her, from time to time, with a detached, but ever studiously
alert glance. Then he came to a stop, and confronted her. The memory
of the night before, in the Promenade, with the sudden glimpse of her
profile against the floating automobile curtain, came back to his mind,
with a stab of pain.
"But what has all this to do with Lady Boxspur?" he suddenly demanded,
wondering how long he should be able to have faith in that inner,
unshaken integrity of hers which had passed through so many trials and
survived so many calamities. But she hurried on, as though unconscious
of both his tone and his attitude.
"That has more to do with the next-of-kin agency. I left it out, of
course, but if you _must_ know it now, and here, I can tell you in a
word or two."
"One naturally wants to know when one's wife ascends into the
aristocracy!"
"And a Mercedes touring car as well! But, oh, Jim, surely you and I
don't need to go back to all that sort of thing, at this stage of the
game," she retorted wearily. She felt wounded, weighed down with a
perverse sense of injury at his treatment, of injustice at his
coldness, even in the face of the incongruous circumstances under which
they had met.
But she went on speaking, resolutely, as though to purge her soul, for
all time, of explanation and excuse.
"That next-of-kin agency was a dingy little office up two dingy stairs
in Chancery Lane. For a few days their work seemed bearable enough,
though it hurt me to see that all their income was being squeezed out
of miserably poor people--always the miserably poor, the submerged
souls with romantic dreams of impending good fortune, which, of course,
always just escaped them. That, I could endure. But when I found that
the agency was branching out, and was actually trying to present me for
inspection as a titled heiress, in sore need of a secret and immediate
marriage, I revolted, at once. Then they calmly proposed that I embark
for America, as some sort of bogus countess--and while they were still
talking and debating over what mild and strictly limited extravagances
they would stand for, and just what expenses they would allow, I
bolted! But their scheming and plotting had given me the hint, for I
knew, if the worst came to the worst, I would not be altogether under
the thumb of Lord Boxspur. So when I came South from Paris I simply
assumed the title--it simplified so many things. It both gave me
opportunities and protected me. If, to gain my ends and to reconnoitre
my territory, I became the occasional guest--remember, Jim, the most
discreet and guarded guest!--of Count Anton Szapary--who carried a
hundred thousand crowns away from the Vienna Jockey Club a month or two
ago--you must simply try to make the end justify the means. I was
still trying to get in touch with you. One of his automobiles was
always politely placed at my disposal. It was a chance, well, scarcely
to be missed. For, you see, it was my intention to meet His Highness,
the Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff, under slightly different
circumstances than would prevail if he and his valet should quietly
step through that door at the present moment!"
She laughed, a little bitterly, with a reckless shrug of the shoulders.
Durkin, nettled by the sound of tragedy in her voice, did not like the
sound of that laugh. Then, as he looked at her more critically, he saw
that she was white and worn and tired. But it was the words over which
she had laughed which sent him abruptly hurrying into the next room
with a lighted match, to read the hour from the little Swiss clock
above the cabinet.
"If we're after anything here we've got to get it!" he said, with
conscious roughness. "It's later than I thought."
"Very well," she answered, quietly enough.
Then she turned to him, as he waited with his hand on the bedroom
light-button, before switching it off.
"You need never be afraid that I will bother you with any more of my
hesitations, and scruples, and half-timid qualms, as I once did. All
that is over and done with. I feel, now, that we're both in this sort
of work from necessity, and not by accident. It has gripped and
engulfed us, now, for good."
He raised a hand to stop her, stung to the quick by the misery and
bitterness of her voice, still asking himself if it was not only the
bitter cry of love for some neglectful love's reply. But she swept on,
abandonedly.
"There's no use quibbling and fighting against it. We've got to keep
at it, and wring out of it what we can, and always go back to it, and
bend to it, and still keep at it, to the bitter end!"
"Frank, you mustn't say this!" he cried.
"But it's truth, pure truth. We're only going to live once. If we
can't be happy without doing the things we ought not to do--then we'll
simply _have to be criminals_. But I want my share of the joy of
living--I want my happiness! I want _you_! I lost you once, and
almost forever, by hoping it could be the other way--but it's too late!"
"Frank!" he pleaded.
"I want you to see where we are," she said, with slow and terrible
solemnity. "If I am to be saved from it, now, or ever again, _you_
must do it--_you--you_!"
She drew herself together, with a little shiver.
"Come," she said, "we've got our work to do!"
He looked at her white face for one moment, in silence, bewildered, and
then he snapped shut the button.
"We had better look through the safe at once," she went on
apathetically. Something in her tone, if not her words themselves, as
she had spoken, sent a wave of what was more than startled misery
through her husband. He once more felt, although he felt it vaguely,
the note of impending tragedy which she was so premonitarily sounding.
It brought to him a dim and hurried vision of that far-off but
inevitable catastrophe which lay, somewhere, at the end of the road
they were traveling. Their only hope and solace, it seemed to him,
must thereafter lie in feverish and sustained activity. They must lose
themselves in the dash and whirl of daring moments. And it was not
from pleasure or from choice, now; it was to live. They must act or
perish; they must plot and counterplot, or be submerged. Yet he would
do what he could to save himself, as she, in turn, must do what she
could for herself--if they came to the end of their rope.
A minute later they were bending together over the contents of the
dismantled safe. He was striking matches. By this time they were both
on their knees.
"You run through these papers, while I see what can be done with the
despatch box," he whispered to her. Then he put the little package of
vestas between them, so they might work by their own light. From time
to time the soft spurt of the lighting match broke the silence, as
Frank hurriedly ran her eye over the different packets, and as
hurriedly flung them back into the safe.
It was a relief to Durkin to think that he at least had someone beside
him who could read French. Busy as he was, he incongruously recalled
to his mind how he once used to study the little printed announcements
in his hotel rooms, wondering, ruefully, if the delphic text meant that
lights and fires were extra, and if baths must be paid for, and vainly
trying to discover what his last basket of wood might cost.
Yes, he told himself, he was a hunter out of his domain. He would
always feel intimidated and insecure in this land of aliens and
unknowns. He even sympathetically wondered who it was that had said:
"Foreigners are fools!" Then a sudden, irrational, inconsequential
sense of gratitude took possession of him, as he felt and heard the
woman at work so close beside him. There was a feeling of
companionship about it that made the double risk worth while.
"There's nothing here!" Frank was saying, under her breath.
"Then it _must_ be the box!" he told her.
Durkin knew it was already too late to file and fit a skeleton key.
His first impulse was to bury the box under a muffling pile of bedding
and send a bullet or two through the lock. But his wandering eye
caught sight of a Morocco sheath-knife above them on the wall, and a
moment later he had the point of it under the steel-bound lid, and as
he pried it flew open with a snap.
He waited, listening, and lighting matches, while Frank went through
the papers, with nervous and agile fingers, mumbling the inscriptions
as she hurriedly read and cast them away from her.
"I thought so!" she said at last, crisply.
The packet held half a dozen blueprints, together with some twelve or
fourteen sheets of plans and specifications, on tinted "flimsy."
Durkin noticed they were drawn up in red and black ink, and that at the
bottom of each document were paragraphs of finely-penned,
scholarly-looking writing. One glance was enough for them both.
Frank refolded them and caught them together with a rubber band. Then
she thrust them into the bosom of her dress. Both rose to their feet,
for both were filled with the selfsame sudden passion to get into the
open once more.
"That must go back, now!" whispered Frank, for Durkin was stooping down
again, over the leather bag that held the napoleons.
"Thank heaven," he answered gratefully, "it's not _that_!"
"Not _yet_!" she whispered back, bitterly, as she heard the chink and
rattle of metal in the darkness. But some day it might be.
Then she heard another sound, which caused her to catch quickly at
Durkin's arm. It was the sound of a key turning in the lock, followed
by an impatient little French oath, and the weight of a man's body
against the resisting door. Then the oath was repeated, and a second
key was turned, this time in the nearer door.
"It's Pobloff!" she whispered.
She had felt the almost galvanic, precautionary response of Durkin's
body; now she could hear his whispered ejaculation as he clutched at
her and thrust her back.
"_You_ must get away, quick, whatever happens," he said hurriedly.
There was a second tremor and rattle of the door; it might come in at
any moment.
"Don't think of me," she whispered. "It's _you_!"
"But, my God, how'll you get out of this?" he demanded, in a quick
whisper. He was trying to force her back into the little anteroom.
"No, no; don't!" she answered him. "I can manage it--more easily than
you!"
"But how?"
He was still crowding and elbowing her back, as though mere retreat
meant more assured safety.
"No, _no_!" she expostulated, under her breath. "I can shift for
myself. It's _you_--you must get away!"
She was forcing the packet from her bosom into his hands.
"Take care of these, quick! Now here's the window ready. Oh, Jim, get
away while you've got the chance!"
"I can't do it!" he protested.
"You _must_, I tell you. I wouldn't lie to you! On my honor, I
promise you I'll come out of this room, unharmed and free! But quick,
or we'll both lose!"
Even in that moment of peril the thought that she was still ready to
face this much for him filled his shaken body with a glow that was more
keenly exhilarating than wine itself. There was no time for words or
demonstration: the action carried its own eloquence.
He was already halfway through the opened window, but he turned back.
"Do you care, then?" he panted.
He could hear the quick catch of her breath.
"Good or bad, I love you, Jim! You know that! Now, hurry, oh, hurry!"
He caught her hand in his--that was all there was time for--while with
his free hand Durkin thrust the packet down into his pocket.
"If it turns out wrong--I mean if anything should happen to me, go
straight to the Embassy with them, in Rome. Good-bye!"
"Ah, then you _do_ expect danger!" he retorted, already back at the
window again.
"No--no!" she whispered, resolutely, barring his ingress. "Hurry!
Good-bye!"
"Good-bye," he whispered, as he slipped down on his hands and knees and
crawled along the balcony, like a cat, through the darkness.
Then the woman closed the window, and waited.