Phantom Wires: A Novel
Page 25
CHAPTER XXV
THE RULING PASSION
Beyond that first involuntary little cry of terror Frances Durkinuttered no sound, as she found herself in the hooded tonneau, wedged inbetween MacNutt and Keenan. That first outcry, indeed, had beenunwilled and automatic, the last reactionary movement of an overtriedand exhausted body.
A wave of care-free passivity now seemed to inundate her. She made noattempt to struggle; she nursed no sense of open resentment against hercaptors. The battery of her vital forces was depleted and depolarized.She experienced only a faintly poignant sense of disappointment, ofindeterminate pique, as she realized that she was no longer a freeagent. Leaning back in the cushioned gloom, inert, impassive, with hereyes half-closed, she seemed to be drifting through an eddying veil ofgray. The voices so close beside her sounded thin and far off. Animpression of unreality clung to her, an impression that she wasfloating through an empty and rain-swept world from which all life andwarmth had withered.
"It's not _her_ I want--it's Durkin!" MacNutt was saying, with an oath,as they swung around the corner into the blinking and serried lights ofEighth avenue. "It's that damned groundhog I'm goin' to dig out yet!"
"Well, you can't go back _there_ after him!" protested Keenan.
"Can't I? Well, I'm goin' back, and I'm goin' to get that man, and I'mgoin' to fry him in his own juices!"
He pushed the woman's inert weight away from him, and leaned out fromunder the cape, with a sharp word or two to Penfield's chauffeur. Thenhe suddenly whistled and waved his arm.
"What are you doing that for?" Keenan demanded of him.
Keenan had caught the drooping figure, and was making an effort tosupport it. His face, for some unknown reason, was almost as colorlessas the face that lay so passively against his rain-soaked shoulder.
"I'm goin' back!" declared MacNutt.
"Is it worth while--now?" demurred the other.
"I'm goin' to get my hooks on Durkin, even if I have to wade throughevery raidin' gang in the precinct!"
"And then what?" deprecated Keenan.
"Then I'll meet you at Penfield's house, uptown, and the show will cometo a finish!"
"And what am I expected to do?" demanded Keenan, impatiently. For theapproaching four-wheeler had come to a standstill beside them, andMacNutt was already out in the rain.
"You take care o' _that_!" he pointed a contemptuous finger toward themotionless woman, "and mighty good care!"
"But how's all this going to help us out?"
"I'll show you, when the time comes. Here's the key for Penfield'shouse. You'll find it nice and quiet and secluded there, and if I _do_bring Durkin back with me, by heaven, you'll have the privilege o'seein' a lurid end to this uncommonly lurid game!"
He tossed the key into the tonneau. Keenan picked it up in silence.
They heard the clatter of the horses' hoofs on the wet asphalt, thesharp closing of the cab door, the rattle of the wheel-tires across thesteel car-tracks, and he was gone. A moment later they were dipping upthe avenue between two long rows of undulating lights, with the raindrifting in on their faces.
Then Keenan turned and looked down at the woman beside him. Duringseveral minutes of unbroken silence Frank nursed the dim consciousnessof his keen and scrutinizing glance. But her mind seemed encaged in abody that was already dead; she had neither the will nor the power tolook up at him.
Then, with no warning word or gesture, he stooped down and kissed heron her heavy red mouth.
At any other time, she knew, she would have fought against thattainting touch; every drop of red blood in her body would have risen tocombat it. But now she neither repulsed it nor responded to it. Sheseemed submerged and smothered in a tide of terrible indifference. Sheeven found herself weighing the meaning of that affront to all that wasnot ignoble in her.
She even caught at it, with an inward gasp of enlightenment. It meantmore than she had at first seen. It brought a new scene to theshifting drama; it meant a new turn to the hurrying game. It meantthat if she only waited, and could be wise and wary and calculating,she still might hug to her breast some tattered hope for the impendingend.
She knew that Keenan was still watching her; she knew that he was, insome manner, being torn between contending feelings, that someobliterating impulse was falling between him and that grim concert offorces of which he was a member. It was the shadow of passion fallingacross the paths of duty--it was the play and the problem as old as theworld.
And what was she, then? That was the question she asked herself, witha little sobbing gasp--what was she, trading thus, even in thought, onher bruised and wearied body? What had she fallen to, what was it thathad deadened all that was softer and better and purer within her, thatshe could thus see slip away from her the last solace and dignity ofher womanhood?
There, she told herself bitterly, lay the degradation and the ultimatedanger of the life she had led. It was there that the grimmer tragedycame into her career. The surrender of ever greater and greaterhostages to expediency, the retreat to ever meaner and meanerinstruments of activity, the gradual induration of heart and soul, thedesperate and ever more desperate search for self-deceivingextenuations, for self-blinding condonement, for pitiful and distortingself-propitiation--in these lay the inward corruption, more implacablyand more terribly tragic than any outward blow! She had once deludedherself with the thought that a life of crime might lose at least halfof its evil by losing all of its grossness. She had even consoledherself with the thought that it was the offender against life who sawdeepest into life. It was but natural, she had always argued withherself, that the thwarted consciousness, that the erring and sufferingheart, should yield deeper insight into the dark and complicated rangesof spiritual truth than could the soul forever untried and unshaken.The tempted and troubled heart, from its lonely towers of unhappiness,must ever see further into the meaning of things than could thosecomfortably normal and healthy souls who suffered little because theyventured little. She had ventured much, and she had lost much. Shehad thought to hold some inmost self aloof and immune. She had dreamedthat some inward irreproachability of thought, some light-hearted tactof open conduct, might leave still untainted that deeper core ofthought and feeling which she had long thought of as conscience, whilesome deceiving and sophistical transmutation of values whispered to heradroitly that in some way all good might be bad, and that all bad mightin some way be good.
But that, she now knew, was a mockery. She was the sum of all that shehad thought and acted. She was a disillusioned and degraded andunscrupulous woman, steeped in enormities so dark that it appalled andsickened her even to recall them. She was only the empty and corrodedshell of a woman, all that once aspired and lived and hoped in hereaten away by the acid currents of that underground world into whichshe had fallen.
Yet rather than it should end in that slow and mean and sordid innertragedy of the spirit, she told herself fiercely, she would fling openher last arsenal of passion and come to her end in some ironic blaze ofglory that would at least lend sinister radiance to a timelessly baseand sorry eclipse. So she lay back in Keenan's clasp quiescently,unresistingly, but watchfully. For she knew that the end, whatever itmight be, was not far away.