Phantom Wires: A Novel

by Arthur Stringer

  CHAPTER XVII

  THE TANGLED SKEIN

  It was the _Slavonia's_ last night at sea. In another twelve hours thepilot would be aboard, Quarantine would be passed, the engines would beslowed down, and the great steamer would be lying at her berth in theNorth River, discharging her little world of life into the scatteredcorners of a waiting continent. Already, on the green baizebulletin-board in the companionway the purser had posted the customarynotice to the effect that the steamer's operator was now in connectionwith New York City, and that wireless messages might be received forall points in Europe and America.

  There was a chill in the air, and to Frances Durkin, sitting besideKeenan on the promenade deck, there seemed something restless andphantasmal and ghostlike in the thin, North Atlantic sunlight, afterthe mellow and opulent gold of the Mediterranean calms. It seemed toher to be a presage of the restless movement and tumult which she feltto be before her.

  She had not been altogether amiss in her predictions of what the pastfortnight would bring forth. She had erred a little, she felt, in herestimate of Keenan's character; yet she had not been mistaken in thecourse of action which he was to pursue.

  For, from the beginning, after the constraint of their first meeting onboard had passed away, he had shown her a direct and open friendlinesswhich now and then even gave rise to a vague and uneasy suspicion inher own mind. This friendliness had brought with it an easier exchangeof confidences, then a seeming intimacy and good-fellowship which, attimes, made it less difficult for Frank to lose herself in her role.

  Keenan, one starlit night under the shadow of a lifeboat amidships, hadeven acknowledged to her the dubiousness of the mission that had takenhim abroad. Later, he had outlined to her what his life had been,telling her of his struggles when a penniless student of the City lawschool, of his early and unsavory criminal-court efforts, and hisunhappy plunge into the morasses of Eighth-ward politics, of hiscampaign against the "Dave Kelly" gang, and the death of his politicalcareer which came with that opposition, of his swinging round to thetides of the times and taking up with bucket-shop work, of his "shark"lawyer practices and his police-court legal trickeries, of his gradualidentification with the poolroom interests and his first gleaning ofgambling-house lore, of his drifting deeper and deeper into this lifeof unearned increment, of his fight with the Bar Association, which wastaken and lost before the Judiciary Committee of Congress, and of hisfinal offer of retainer from Penfield, and private and expert servicesafter the second raid on that gambler's Saratoga house. Frank couldunderstand why he said little of the purpose that took him to Europe.Although she waited anxiously for any word he might let fall on thatsubject, she respected his natural reticence in the matter. He was acriminal, low and debased enough, it was true; but he was a criminal ofsuch apparent largeness of mind and such openness of spirit that hisvery life of crime, to the listening woman, seemed to take on thedignity of a Nietzsche-like abrogation of all civic and social ties.

  Yet, in all his talk, he was open and frank enough in his confession ofattitude. He had seen too much of criminal life to have many illusionsor to make many mistakes about it. He openly admitted that the end ofall careers of crime was disaster--if not open and objective, at leasthidden and subjective. He had no love for it all. But when once,through accident or necessity, in the game, he protested, there was butone line of procedure, and that was to bring to illicit activity thatcontinuous intelligence which marked the conduct of those who stoodready to combat it. Society, he declared, owed its safety to the factthat the criminal class, as a rule, was made up of its leastintelligent members. When criminality went allied with a shrewd mindand a sound judgment--and a smile curled about Keenan's melancholyCeltic mouth as he spoke--it became transplanted, practically, to thesphere and calling of high finance.

  But if the defier of the Establish Rule preferred the simpler order ofthings, he continued, his one hope lay in the power of making use ofhis fellow-criminals, by applying to the unorganized smaller fry of hisprofession some particular far-seeing policy and some deliberatepurpose, and through doing so standing remote and immune, as allcentres of generalship should stand.

  This, he went on to explain, was precisely what Penfield had done, withhis art palaces and his European jaunts and his doling out of politicalpatronage and his prolonged defiance of all the police powers of agreat and active city. He had organized and executed with Napoleoniccomprehensiveness; he had fattened on the daily tribute of lessimaginative subordinates in sin. And now he was fortified behind hisown gold. He was being harassed and hounded for the moment--but theemotional wave of reform that was calling for his downfall would breakand pass, and leave him as secure as ever.

  "Now, my belief is," Keenan told the listening woman, "that if you findyou cannot possibly be the Napoleon of the campaign, it is well worthwhile to be the Ney. I mean that it has paid me to attach myself to aman who is bigger than I am, instead of going through all the dangersand meannesses and hardships of a petty independent operator. It paysme in two ways. I get the money, and I get the security."

  "Then you believe this man Penfield will never be punished?"

  He thought over the question for a moment or two.

  "No, I don't think he ever will. He stands for something that is asactive and enduring in our American life as are the powers arrayedagainst him. You see, the district-attorney's office represents thecentripetal force of society. Penfield stands for the centrifugalforce. They fight and battle against one another, and first one seemsto gain, and then the other, and all the while the fight between thetwo, the struggle between the legal and the illegal, makes up thebalance of everyday life."

  "You mean that we're all gamblers, at heart?"

  "I mean that every Broadway must have its Bowery, that the world canonly be so good--if you try to make it better, it breaks out in a newplace--and the master criminal is a man who takes advantage of thisnervous leakage. We call him the Occasional Offender--and he's themost dangerous man in all society. In other words, the passion, as yousay, for gambling, is implanted in all of us; the thought of some vasthazard, of some lucky stroke of fate, is in your head as often as it isin mine. You tell me you are a hard-working art collector, making adecent living by gadding about Europe picking up knick-knacks. Now,suppose I came to you with a proposal like this: Suppose I told youthat without any greater personal discomfort, without any greaterdanger or any harder work, you might, say, join forces with me and atone play of the game haul in fifty thousand dollars from men who nomore deserve this money than we do, I'll warrant that you'd think overit pretty seriously."

  The woman at his side laughed a little, and then gave a significantlycareless shrug of her small shoulders.

  "Who wouldn't?" she said, and their eyes met questioningly, in theuncertain light.

  "Women, as a rule, are timid," he said at last. "They usually preferthe slower and safer road."

  "Sometimes they get tired of it. Then, too, it isn't always safe justbecause it's slow!"

  It seemed to give him the opening for which he had been waiting. Helooked at her with undisguised yet calculating admiration.

  "I'll wager _you_ would never be afraid of a thing, if you once gotinto it, or wanted to get into it!" he cried.

  She laughed again, a self-confident and reassuring little laugh.

  "I've been through too many things," she admitted simply, "to talkabout being thin-skinned!"

  "I knew as much!"

  "Why do you say that?"

  "I could see it from the first. You've got courage, and you're shrewd,and you know the world--and you've got what's worth all the rest puttogether. I mean that you're a fine-looking woman, and you've neverlet the fact spoil you!"

  There was no mistaking the pregnancy of the glance and question whichshe next directed toward him.

  "Then why couldn't you take me in with you?" she asked, with aquiet-toned solemnity.

  She had the sensations of a skater on treacherously t
hin ice, as shewatched the slow, cautious scrutiny of his unbetraying face. But now,for some reason, she knew neither fear nor hesitation.

  "And what if we did?" he parried temporizingly.

  "Well, what if we did?--men and women have worked together before this!"

  Even in the dim light that surrounded them she could notice the colorgo out of his intent and puzzled face. From that moment, in somemysterious way, she lost the last shred of sympathy for his abject andisolated figure, and yet she was the one, she knew, who had been mostunworthy.

  "And do you understand what it would imply--what it would mean?" heasked slowly and with significant emphasis.

  She could not repress her primal woman's instinct of revolt from thethoughts which his quiet interrogation sent at her, like an arrow. Butshe struggled to keep down the little shudder which woke and stirredwithin her. He had done nothing more than respond to her tacitchallenge. But she feared him, more and more. Until then she hadadvanced discreetly and guardedly, and as she had advanced and takenher new position he had as guardedly fallen back and held his own. Ithad been a strange and silent campaign, and all along it had filledFrank with a sense of stalking and counter-stalking. Now they wereplunging into the naked and primordial conflict of man against woman,without reservations and without indirections--and it left her with avague fear of some impending helplessness and isolation. She had asudden prompting to delay or evade that final step, to temporize andwait for some yet undefined reinforcements.

  "And you realize what it means?" he repeated.

  "Yes," she said in her soft contralto. A feeling of revulsion that wasalmost nausea was consuming her. This, then, she told herself, was thebitter and humiliating price she must pay for her tainted triumph.

  "And would you accept and agree to the conditions--the onlyconditions?" he demanded, in a voice now hatefully tremulous with somerising and controlling emotion. She had the feeling, as she listened,that she was a naked slave girl, being jested over and bidden for onthe auction block of some barbaric king. She felt that it was time toend the mockery; she no longer even pitied him.

  "Listen!" she suddenly cried, "they are beginning to send the wireless!"

  They listened side by side, to the brisk kick and spurt and crackle ofthe fluid spark leaping between the two brass knobs in the littleoperating-room just above where they sat. They could hear itdistinctly, above the drone of the wind and the throb of the enginesand the quiet evening noises of the orderly ship--spitting andcluttering out into space. To the impatient man it was nothing morethan the ripple of unintelligent and unrelated sounds.

  To the wide-eyed and listening woman it was a decorous and coherentmarch of dots and dashes, carrying with it thought and meaning andsystem. And as each word fluttered off on its restless Hertzian wings,like a flock of hurrying carrier-pigeons through the night, the womanlistened and translated and read, word by word.

  "Then we go it together--you and I--for all it's worth!" Keenan wassaying, with his face near hers and his hand on her motionless arm.

  "Listen," she said sharply. "It--it sounds like a bag of lightninggetting loose, doesn't it?"

  For the message which was leaping from the lonely and dipping ship tothe receiving wires at the Highland Heights Station was one that sheintended to read, word by word.

  It was a simple enough message, but as it translated itself intointelligible coherence it sent a creeping thrill of conflicting fearand triumph through her. For the words which sped across space fromkey to installation-pole read:

  "Woman--named--Allen--will--bring--papers--to--P--Field's--downtown--house--I--will--wait--word--from--you--at--Philadelphia--advise--me--of--situation--there--and--wire--D--in--time--Kerrigan."

  It was only then that she was conscious of the theatricalities fromwhich she had emerged, of the man so close beside her, still waitingfor her play-acting word of decision. It was only then, too, that shefully understood the adroitness, the smooth and supple alertness, ofher ever-wary and watchful companion.

  But she rose to the situation without a visible sign of flinching.Taking one deep breath, as though it were a final and comprehensivegulp of unmenaced life, she turned to him, and gazed quietly andsteadily into his questioning eyes.

  "Yes, if you say it, I'm with you now, whether it's for good or bad!"

  "And this is final!" he demanded. "If you begin, you'll stick to it!"

  "To the bitter end!" she answered grimly. And there was something sounemotionally decisive in her tone that he no longer hesitated, nolonger doubted her.