Phantom Wires: A Novel, Page 3

  CHAPTER III

  THE SHADOWING PAST

  Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submergehimself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of thoseoutwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain.

  He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment, andhis cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit, orthat of the wild animal sorely hurt in body. Before he could face lifeagain, he felt, he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric ofsome new and factitious faith.

  But as intelligence slowly emerged from the mist and chaos of utterbewilderment, as reason crept haltingly back to her seat, his firstblind and indeterminate rage fell away from him. His first black andblinding clouds of suspicion slowly subsided before practical andorderly question and cross-question. Thought adjusted itself to itsnew environment. Painfully, yet cautiously, he directed his ceaselessartillery of interrogation toward the outer and darker walls ofuncertainty still so blankly confronting him.

  It was not that he had been consumed by any direct sense of loss, ofdeprivation. It was not that he had feared open and immediatetreachery. If a rage had burned through him, at the sudden andstartling sight of his own wife thus secretly masquerading in anunknown role, it was far from being a rage or mere jealousy anddistrust.

  They had, in other days, each passed through questionable and perilousexperiences. Both together and alone they had adventured unwillinglyalong many of the more dubious channels of life. They had surrenderedto temptation; they had sown and reaped and suffered, and become wearyof it. They had struggled slowly yet stoically up towardsrespectability; they had fought for fair-dealing; they had entered acompact to stand by each other through that long and bitter effort tobe tardily honest and autumnally aboveboard.

  What now so disturbed and disheartened him was the sudden sense ofsomething impending, the vague apprehension of some momentous andfar-reaching intrigue which he could not even foreshadow. And it wasframing itself into being at a time when he had most prayed for theiruntrammelled freedom, when he had most looked for their ultimateemancipation from the claws of that too usurious past.

  But, above all, what had brought about the sudden change? Why had noinkling of it crept to his ears? Why was she, the passionate pleaderfor the decencies of life whom he had last watched so patiently andheroically imparting the mastery of the pianoforte to seven littleEnglish children in a squalid Paris _pension_, now lapsing back intothe old and fiercely abjured avenue of irresponsibility? Why had sheweakened and surrendered, when he himself, the oldtime weakling of thetwo, had clung so desperately to the narrow path of rectitude? Andwhat was the meaning and the direction of it all? And what would itlead to? But why, above all, had she kept silent, and given him nowarning?

  Durkin looked up and listened to the soft rustling of the palmbranches. The bray of a distant band saddened him with an unfathomablesense of homesickness. Through an air that seemed heavy with languidtropicality, and the waiting richness of life, he caught the belatedglimmer of lights and the throb and murmur of string music. It carriedin to him what seemed the essential and alluring note of all theexistence he had once known and lived. Yet day by day he had foughtback that sirenic call. It had not always been an open victory--theweight of all the past lay too heavily upon him for that--but for _her_sake he had at least vacillated and hesitated and temporized, waitingand looking for that final strength which would come with her firstwistful note of warning, or with her belated return to his side.

  Yet here was Opportunity lying close and thick about him; here Chancehad laid the board for its most tempting game. In that way, as theyoung Chicagoan had said, they stood in the centre of the world. Buthe had turned away from those clustering temptations, he had leftunbroken his veneer of honorable life, for her sake--while she herselfhad surrendered, unmistakably, irrevocably, whatever strange form thesurrender might even at that moment be taking.

  All he could do, now, was to wait until morning. There would surely besome message, some hint, some key to the mystery. While everythingremained so maddeningly enigmatic, he raked through the tangled past insearch of some casual seed of explanation for that still undecipheredpresent.

  He recalled, period by period, and scene by scene, his kaleidoscopicpast career, his first fatal blunder as a Grand Trunk telegraphoperator, when one slip of the wrist brought a gravel train head-oninto an Odd Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dismissal from therailroad, and his unhappy flight to New York, his passionate struggleto work his way up once more, his hunger for money and even a few weeksof leisure, that his long dreamed of photo-telegraphy apparatus mightbe perfected and duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in thePostal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial racing-return or twountil he and his outside confederate had been able to make theirillicit wagers, then his official ostracism, and his wanderingstreet-cat life, when, at last, the humbling and compelling pinch ofpoverty had turned him to "overhead guerrilla" work and the dangers andvicissitudes of a poolroom key-operator. He recalled his chancemeeting with MacNutt, the wire-tapper, and their partnership ofprivateer forces in that strange campaign against Penfield, the alertand opulent poolroom king, who had seemed always able to defy theefforts and offices of a combative and equally alert district-attorney.

  Most vividly and minutely of all, he reviewed his first meeting withFrances Candler, and the bewilderment that had filled him when hediscovered her to be an intimate and yet a reluctant associate withMacNutt in his work--a bewilderment which lasted until he himself grewto realize how easy was the downward trend when once the first falsestep had been made.

  He brought back to mind their strange adventures and perils and escapestogether, day by day and week by week, their early interest that hadripened into affection, their innate hatred of that underground life,which eventually flowered into open revolt and flight, their impetuousmarriage, their precipitate journey from the shores of America.

  Then came to him what seemed the bitterest memories of all. It was thethought of that first too fragile happiness which slowly but implacablymerged into discontent, still hidden and tacit, but none the lessevident. That interregnum of peace had been a Tantalus-like taste of adraught which he all along knew was to be denied him. Yet, point bypoint, he recalled their first quiet and hopeful weeks in England, whentheir old ways of life seemed as far away as the America they had leftbehind, when they still had unbounded faith in themselves and in thefuture. Just how or where fell the first corroding touch he couldnever tell. But in each of them there had grown up a secret unrest--itwas, he knew, the hounds of habit whimpering from their kennels. "Noone was ever reformed," he had once confided to Frances, "by simplybeing turned out to grass!" So it was then that they had tried to drugtheir first rising doubts with the tumult of incessant travel andchange. His wife had lured him to secluded places, she had struggledto interest him in a language or two, she had planned quixotic coursesof reading--as though a man such as he might be remolded by a fewmonths of modern authors!--and carried him off to centres of gaiety--asthough the beat of Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could drivethat inmost fever out of his blood!

  He endured Aix-les-Bains and its rheumatics, with their bridge-whistand late dinners and incongruous dissipations, for a fortnight. Thenthey fled to the huddled little hotels and _pensions_ of the narrow anddark wooded valley of Karlsbad, under skies which Frank declared to bebluer than the blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins from Indiaand royalty from Austria and audacious young duchesses from Paris andstudents from Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable strangers fromall the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed to Durkin they were atlast alone. He confided this feeling to his wife, one tranquil morningafter they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled cups, at thespring where the comely, rubber-garmented native girls caught and doledout the biting hot spray of the geyser. They were seated at theremoter end of the glass-covered Promenade, and a band was playing
.Something in the music, for once, had saddened and dispirited Frank.

  "Alone?" she had retorted. "Who is ever alone?"

  "Well, our wires are down, for a little while, anyway!" laughed Durkin,as he sipped the hot salt water from the china cup. It reminded him,he had said, of all his past sins in epitome. Frank sighed wearily,and did not speak for a minute or two.

  "But, after all," she said at last, in a meditative calmness of voice,"there are always some sort of ghostly wires connecting us with oneanother, holding us in touch with what we have been and done, with ourpast, and with our ancestors, with all our forsaken sins and misdoings.No, Jim, I don't believe we are _ever_ alone. There are always soundsand hints, little broken messages and whispers, creeping in to us alongthose hidden circuits. We call them Intuitions, and sometimes we speakof them as Character, and sometimes as Heredity, and weakness ofwill--but they are there, just the same!"

  The confession of that mood was a costly one, for before the week wasout they had, in some way, wearied of the sight of that dailyprocession of nephritics and neurotics, and were off again, like a pairof homeless swallows, to the Rhine salmon and the Black Forest venisonof Baden. From there they fled to the mountain air of St. Moritz,where they were frozen out and driven back to Paris--but alwaysspending freely and thinking little of the vague tomorrow. Durkin,indeed, recognized that taint of improvidence in his veins. He was aspendthrift; he had none of the temperamental foresight and frugalityof his wife, who reminded him, from time to time, and withever-increasing anxiety, of their ever-melting letter of credit. But,on the other hand, she stood ready to sacrifice everything, in order tobuild some new wall of interest about him, that she might immure himfrom his past. She still planned and schemed to shield him, not somuch from the world, as from himself. Yet he had seen, almost from thefirst, that their pursuit of contentment was born of their common andever-increasing terror of the future. Each left unuttered the actualemptiness and desolation of life, yet each nursed the bitter sting ofit. Day by day he had put on a bold face, because he had long sincelearned how poignantly miserable his own misery could make her. And,above all things, he hated to see her unhappy.