Durkin

“ For out of the quiet and shadowy south side of the street, where it had been silently patrolling under lowered speed, swerved and darted a wine-colored, surrey-built touring car with a cape top. Durkin recognized it at a glance; it was Penfield's huge machine. Its movement, as it swung in toward the startled woman, seemed like the swoop of a hawk. It appeared to stop only for a moment, but in that moment two men leaped from the wide-swung tonneau door. When they clambered into it once more Durkin saw that Frank was between them. And one of the men was MacNutt, and the other Keenan. ”

“ Durkin looked up and listened to the soft rustling of the palm branches. The bray of a distant band saddened him with an unfathomable sense of homesickness. Through an air that seemed heavy with languid tropicality, and the waiting richness of life, he caught the belated glimmer of lights and the throb and murmur of string music. ”

“ Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submerge himself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of those outwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain.
He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment, and his cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit, or that of the wild animal sorely hurt in body. Before he could face life again, he felt, he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric of some new and factitious faith. ”

“ Durkin caught her arm, and listened, intently, watching the little appearing and disappearing green spark, spelling off the words with narrowing eyes.
"They're talking with the station up on the mainland. Do you hear what it is? Can't you make it out?"
It was, of course, the Continental, and not the Morse, code, and it was not quite the same as stooping over and listening to the crisp, incisive pulsations of a "sounder." But Frank heard and saw and pieced together enough of the message to clutch, in turn, at Durkin's arm, and wait with quickened breath for the answering spark-play. ”

“ At first, she could not grasp it, as she lay there moaning with pain; and then it, too, came to her, in a flash. It was Durkin. He was coming back; and they were waiting there, waiting to trap him. Again, she told herself that she must keep her head, and be cool. She looked at the five men in the room; three of them, she knew, were plain-clothes men from the Central Office, the other two were Doogan's agents. If Durkin came while they were still there—and now he could not be long!—they would let him in, and say nothing, and there they would have him, like a rat in a trap. ”

“ But the allusion was lost on Durkin, and he cut in with a curt, “What’s happened?”
“I want to come home!” It must have been a good night for ’phoning, he felt, as he heard those five cogent words, and an inconsequential little glow suffused him. Not an ohm of their soft wistfulness, not a coulomb of their quiet significance, had leaked away through all their hundreds of miles of midnight travel. ”

“ Durkin repeated his command.
"Furniture-moving is not my vocation!" answered Keenan, folding his arms.
As Durkin sprang forward, there was no mistaking his meaning.
"I'll count ten," he said, white-lipped. "Unless the table goes out, you go out!" And he began counting, silently, numeral by numeral.
"Well, if you insist!" said Keenan, with a shrug.
Even as Keenan, at the menace of his reiterated command to hurry, threw open the guard door, Durkin was wondering, in his feverish activity of mind, just how soon MacNutt's next move would come, and just how and where he would strike. ”

“ As these thoughts ran through Durkin’s busy mind, some vague idea of the power which reposed in his own knowledge of how great the current was to become, and just what turn it was to take, once more awakened in him. He had none of that romantic taint, he prided himself, which somewhere or at some time invariably confused the judgment of the gambler and the habitual criminal—for they, after all, he often felt, were in one way essentially poets in spirit, though dreamers grown sour through stagnation. ”

“ Once there, Durkin edged round by the wall, squeezed himself unceremoniously out, until, at last, he came to the brass railing guarding the edge of the spectator’s gallery. Then he took a deep breath, and gazed down at the sea of commotion that boiled and eddied at his feet.
It was one mad tumult of contending forces, a maelstrom of opposing currents. Seldom was there a lull in that hundred-throated delirium, where, on raised steps about a little circular brass railing, men shouted and danced and flung up their hands and raced back and forth through a swarming beehive of cotton-hunger. ”

“ For, as the last of the demurely noisy groups made their way through the deepening twilight to the different hotels and cafés that already spangled the hillsides with scattering clusters of light, Durkin coolly removed his shoes, twisted and knotted his two bath towels into a stout rope, securely tied back his heavy French window-shutter of wood with one of his sheets, and having attached his improvised rope to the base of the shutters, swung himself deftly out. ”

“ Then he held the lamp closer to her face. He nursed no illusions about women. Frances Durkin knew that for years now he had made them his tools and his accomplices, never his dictators and masters. But as he looked into the pale face, with the shadowy, almost luminous violet eyes, and the soft droop of the full red lips, and the still girlish tenderness of line about the brow and chin, and then at the betraying fulness of throat and bosom, the mockery died out of his smile. ”

“ Frances Candler, keeping watch on the up-town wires, had caught the first inkling of this relieving news. After a passionate hour of talk and pleading from Durkin, and after twelve long hours of unbroken sleep, much of her spirit of rebelliousness had passed away, and she had unwillingly and listlessly taken up the threads of what seemed to her a sadly tangled duty once more.
But with the advent of Curry’s climactic message her old, more intimate interest in the game gradually awoke. By daylight she had sent word down to Durkin, who, about that time, was having quite trouble enough of his own. ”

“ In that agonized and hurried and yet lucid-thoughted summing up of ultimate values Durkin realized that it would be useless to resist what was immediately before him. He was too shaken and weak for any crude battle of brute strength against brute strength. With his wounded hand, which even then sent throbbing spears of pain from finger-tip to shoulder, and with his bruised and weary and stiffened body, he knew that any test of strength in the muscular and ape-like arms of MacNutt was out of the question. ”

“ Durkin had forgotten both his hunger and his weariness as he mounted the stairs to his up-town apartment, where, he knew, Frances was waiting for him. He decided, in his playful reaction of mood, to take her by surprise. So he slipped his pass-key silently into the door-lock and was about to fling the door wide when the unexpected sound of voices held him motionless, with his hand still on the knob.
It was Frank herself speaking.
“Oh, Mack, don’t come between him and me now! It’s all I’ve got to live for—his love! I need it—I need him!” ”

“ He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some glib and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer than truth itself.
"Why," he continued argumentatively, "everything that happened in that play might happen here, tonight, to you or me!"
"Rubbish!" ejaculated Durkin, brusquely, remembering how lonely he must indeed have been thus to attach himself to this youth of the studios. But he added, as a matter of form: "You think, then, that life today is as romantic as it once was?" ”

“ Instead of an imaginary projection of himself he saw only a ridiculous wooden doll sprawled akimbo on a toy stove.
Shaking with rage, Durkin set the house down, swung about, and gripped his stepson savagely by the wrist.
"Just pretending, were you?" he muttered. "Just waiting for me to come out here, and pat you on the back."
Robert tried to break free. Sick with fear, he tugged and twisted, but Durkin had stronger fingers than a demon, and a deeper understanding of how a frightened boy could make a fool of a man by using his smallness as a cloak.
"You too, Emily," Durkin said. "Come here. ”

“ So her passenger list, which included, outside of Frank and Durkin, only a consumptive Welsh school-teacher and a broken-down clergyman from Birmingham, who kept always to his cabin, was in danger of no over-close scrutiny, either from the Neapolitan Guardie Municipali on the one hand, or from any private agents of Keenan and Penfield on the other.
Even one short day of unbroken idleness, indeed, seemed to make life over for both Frank and Durkin. Steeping themselves in that comfortable sense of security, they drew natural and easy breath once more. ”

“ It was one night after a lucky plunge on a 20-to-1 horse had brought him in an unexpected fortune of eighteen hundred dollars that Durkin, driving up Fifth avenue through the waning afternoon of the early Winter with Mame at his side, allowed his thoughts to wander back to his thin and empty existence as a Postal Union operator. As he gazed out on the carriages and the women and the lights, and felt the warmth of the girl at his side, he wondered how he had ever endured that old, colorless life. ”

“ Robert said.
For an instant the man and the two children stood with the doll house between them. They were each aware that they had started a game that must be played out now to the bitter end, no matter how frightening it became.
"We'll soon know!" Durkin said.
Durkin bent swiftly, and without glancing at the children, picked up the house, and raised it until the ground floor windows were on a level with his eyes.
He stared in.
Children do not self-consciously engage in gruesome pranks—even when they hate. ”

“ Men bowed before a new faith and a new creed, and that faith and creed lay compactly in three pregnant words: Twenty Cent Cotton.
Yet this magnetic and spectacular bull leader, Durkin felt, was infinitely wiser and craftier than any of those he led. Curry, at heart, knew and saw the utter hopelessness of his cause; he realized that he was only toying and trifling with a great current that in the end, when its moment came, would sweep him and his followers away like so many chips. ”

“ It surprised him a little, as he held her, to find that the woman was not inebriate.
"I want this woman!" cried Durkin, and at the sound of his voice MacNutt leaned forward from the shadows of the half-closed carriage, and the eyes of the two men met, in one pregnant and contending stare. ”

“ In the doorway stood MacNutt. His eyes were staring, his bullock head thrown back, bewildered at the sudden change that one sweep of an arm had brought to the scene.
As Durkin edged craftily round, with his back to the side wall, so that his eye commanded the silent trio before him, Frank made a movement to draw away from Keenan, who stood grotesquely petrified, his lean jaw fallen, the melancholy Celtic face touched more with wonder than with fear.
"Don't move!" commanded her husband, as he saw the motion. "Stay where you are!" ”

“ At twenty minutes to eleven, slipping off his shoes, Durkin climbed cautiously through the transom opening out on the roof. Creeping as carefully from chimney-tier to chimney-tier, he found himself face to face with a roof-fence of sharpened iron rods. ”

“ The Slavonia was well down the Adriatic before Keenan was seen on deck. Both Frank and Durkin, by that time, had met in secret more than once, and had talked over their predicament and decided on a plan of action.
"Whatever you do," Durkin warned her, "don't let Keenan suspect who I am! Don't let him get a glimpse of you with me. My part now has got to be what you'd call 'armed neutrality.' If anything unforeseen turns up—and that can only be at Palermo or Gibraltar—I'll be watching near by to come to your help in some way—but, whatever you do, don't let Keenan suspect this!" ”

“ He stood there for a moment or two, his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes, rocking comfortably back and forth on his heels, enigmatically and indolently watching the floor which his reappearance had first reanimated and then thrown into sudden confusion.
Durkin, in turn, watched the leader closely, breathlessly, waiting for the beginning of the end. He saw Curry suddenly throw away his toothpick and signal to a bent and pale-haired floor broker, who shot over to his leader’s side, exchanged a whispered word or two with him, and then shot back to the brass railing. ”

“ She had promised that there should be no complaining and no hesitations from her; and Durkin knew she would adhere to that promise, to the bitter end.
She went to him, and clung to him, a little hungrily. There seemed something passionate in her very denial of passion. For when he lifted her drooping head, with all its wealth of chestnut shot through with paler gold, and gazed at her upturned face between his two hands, with a little cry of endearment, she shut her mouth hard, on a sob.
"You're back—and safe?" he asked. ”

“ 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. ”