Phantom Wires: A Novel

by Arthur Stringer

  CHAPTER II

  THE AZURE COAST

  As Durkin and the young Chicagoan once more stepped out of thebrilliantly lighted theatre, into the balmy night air, a seductivemingling of perfumes and music and murmuring voices blew in their hotfaces, like a cooling wave. Durkin was wondering, a little wearily,just when he could be alone again.

  A group of gay and laughing women, with their aphrodisiac rustle ofsilk and flutter of lace, floated carelessly past.

  "Who are _they_?" asked the youth.

  Durkin half-envied him his illusions and his ingenuousness of outlook;he was treading a veritable amphitheatre of orderly disordered passionswith the gentle objective stare of a child looking for bright-coloredflowers on a battleground. Durkin wondered if, after all, it was notthe result of his mere quest of color, of his studying art in Paris fora year or two.

  "I wonder who and what they are?" impersonally reiterated the youngerman, as his gaze still followed the passing group to where it driftedand scattered through the lamp-strewn garden, like a cluster of goldenbutterflies.

  "Those are the slaves who sand the arena!" retorted Durkin, studyingthe softly waving palms, and leaving the other a little in doubt as tothe meaning of his figure.

  The younger man sighed; he was beginning to feel, doubtless, from whatdifferent standpoints they looked out on life.

  "Oh, well, you can say what you like, but this is the centre of theworld, to _my_ way of thinking!"

  "The centre of--putrescence!" ejaculated Durkin. The younger man beganto laugh, with conciliatory good-nature, as he glanced appreciativelyback at the sweetmeat stateliness of the Casino front. But into theolder man's mind crept the impression that they were merely passing, ingoing from crowded theatre to open garden and street, from oneplayhouse to another. It all seemed to him, indeed, nothing more thana transition of theatricalities. For that outer play-world which layalong Monaco's three short miles of marble stairway and villa andhillside garden appeared to him, in his mood of settled dejection, asartificial and unnatural and unrelated as the life which he had justseen pictured across the footlights of the over-pretty andmeringue-like little theatre.

  "Well, Monte Carlo's good enough for me, all right, all right!"persisted the young Chicagoan, as they made their way down thelamp-hung Promenade. And he laughed with a sort of luxuriouscontentment, holding out his cigarette-case as he did so.

  The older man, catching a light from the proffered match, said nothingin reply. Something in the other's betrayingly boyish laugh grated onhis nerves, though he paused, punctiliously, beside his chance-foundcompanion, while together they gazed down at the twinkling lights ofthe bay, where the soft and violet Mediterranean lay under a soft andviolet sky, and the boatlamps were languidly swaying dots of white andred, and the Promontory stood outlined in electric globes, like awoman's breast threaded with pearls, the young art-student expressedit, and the perennial, ever-cloying perfumes floated up from square andthicket and garden.

  There was an eternal menace about it, Durkin concluded. There wassomething subversive and undermining and unnerving in its veryatmosphere. It gave him the impression of being always under glass.It made him ache for the sting and bite of a New England north-easter.It screened and shut off the actualities and perpetuities of life ascompletely as the drop and wings of a playhouse might. Its sense ofcasual and careless calm, too, seemed to him only the rest of aspinning top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessantcoquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape andsea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, itsprimordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank,exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and,above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, itsovercrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluringrestaurants on steep little boulevards--it was all a blind, Durkinargued with himself, to drape and smother the cynical misery of theplace. Underneath all its flaunting and waving softnesses life rangrim and hard--as grim and hard as the solid rock that lay so closebeneath its jonquils and violets and its masking verdure of mimosa andorange and palm.

  He hated it, he told himself in his tragic and newborn austerity ofspirit, as any right-minded and clean-living man should hate paperroses or painted faces. Every foot of it, that night, seemed a muffledand mediate insult to intelligence. The too open and illicitinvitation of its confectionery-like halls, the insipidly emphaticpretentiousness of the Casino itself--Durkin could never quite decidewhether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished exposition building orof a child's birthday cake duly iced and bedecked--the tinsel glory,the hackneyed magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderlygaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath the voluptuous velvetof indolence--it all combined to fill his soul with a sense of hotrevolt, as had so often before happened during the past long and lonelydays, when he had looked up at the soft green of olive and eucalyptusand then down at the intense turquoise curve of the harbor fringed withwhite foam.

  Always, at such times, he had marveled that man could turn one ofearth's most beautiful gardens into one of crime's most crowded haunts.The ironic injustice of it embittered him; it left him floundering in asea of moral indecision at a time when he most needed some forlornbelief in the beneficence of natural law. It outraged hisincongruously persistent demand for fair play, just as the sight of thejauntily clad gunners shooting down pigeons on that tranquil and Edeniclittle grass-plot at the foot of the Promontory had done.

  For underneath all the natural beauty of Monaco Durkin had beencontinuously haunted by the sense of something unclean and leprous andcorroding. Under its rouge and roses, at every turn, he found theinsidious taint.

  And more than ever, tonight, he had a sense of witnessing Destinystalking through those soft gardens, of Tragedy skulking about itsregal stairways.

  For it was there, in the midst of those unassisting and enervatingsurroundings, he dimly felt, that he himself was to choose one of twostrangely divergent paths. Yet he knew, in a way, that his decisionhad already been forced upon him, that the dice had been cast andcounted. He had been trying to sweep back the rising sea with a broom;he had been trying to fight down that tangled and tortuous past whichstill claimed him as its own. And now all that remained for him was toslip quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed andgnawed at his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from thefirst, had been too crucial. He might, in time, even find somesolacing thought in the fitness between the act and itsenvironment--here he could fling himself into an obliterating Niagara,not of falling waters, but of falling men and women. Yes, it was astage all prepared and set for the mean and sordid and ever recurringtragedy of which he was to be the puppet. For close about him seethedand boiled, as in no other place in the world, all the darker and moredespicable passions of humanity. He inwardly recalled the types withwhich his stage was embellished; the fellow puppets of that gilded andarrogant and idle world, the curled and perfumed princes, the waxed andwatching _boulevardiers_ side by side with virginal and unconsciousAmerican girls, pallid and impoverished grand dukes in the wake ofpainted but wary Parisians, stiff-mustached and mysterious Austriancounts lowering at doughty and indignant Englishwomen; bejeweled beysand pashas brushing elbows with unperturbed New England school-teachersastray from Cook's; monocled thieves and gamblers and princelings,jaded tourists and skulking parasites--and always the disillusioned andwaiting women.

  "That play got on your nerves, didn't it?" suddenly asked the lazy,half-careless voice at his side. Durkin and the young Chicagoan werein the musky-smelling Promenade by this time, and up past the stands atthe sea-front the breath of the Mediterranean blew in their faces,fresh, salty, virile.

  "This whole place gets on my nerves!" said Durkin testily. Yes, hetold himself, he was sick of it, sick of the monotony, of the idleness,of the sullen malevolence of it all. It was gay only to the eyes; andto him it would never seem gay again.

  "Oh, that comes of
not speaking the language, you know!" maintained theother stoutly, and, at the same time, comprehensively.

  He was still very young, Durkin remembered. He had toyed with art fortwo winters in Paris, so scene by scene he had been able to translatethe little drama that had appeared so farcical and Frenchy to his oldercountryman in exile.

  Durkin's lip curled a little.

  "No--it comes of knowing _life_!" he answered, with a touch ofimpatience. He felt the gulf that separated their two oddly diverselives--the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other afugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him.He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some gliband ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer than truthitself.

  "Why," he continued argumentatively, "everything that happened in thatplay might happen here, tonight, to you or me!"

  "Rubbish!" ejaculated Durkin, brusquely, remembering how lonely he mustindeed 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?"

  "_Mon Dieu_!" cried the other. "Look at Monte Carlo here! Of courseit is. It's more crowded, more rapid; it holds _more_ romance. Wedidn't put it all off, you know, with doublet and hose!"

  "No, of course not," answered Durkin absently. Life, at that moment,was confronting him so grimly, so flat and sterile and uncompromisingin its secret exactions, that he had no heart to theorize about it.

  "And a thing isn't romantic just because it's moss-grown!" continuedthe child of the studios, warming to his subject. "It's romantic whenwe've emotionalized it, when we've _felt_ it, when it's hit home withus, as it were!"

  "If it doesn't hit too hard!" qualified the older man.

  "For instance," maintained the young Chicagoan, once more profferinghis cigarette-case to Durkin, "for instance, take that big Mercedestouring-car with the canopy top, coming down through the crowd there.You'll agree, at first sight, that such things mean good-bye to themounted knight, to chivalry, and all that romantic old horsemanbusiness."

  "I suppose so."

  "But, don't you see, the horse and armor was only a frame, anaccidental setting, for the romance itself! It's up to date andpractical and sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing thingwith a gasoline engine hidden away in its bowels. It's what we callmachinery. But, supposing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le DucSomebody, or Milord So-and-So, or Signor Comte Somebody-Else, with hiswife or his mistress--I say, supposing it held--well, my young sisterAlice, whom I left so sedately contented at Brighton! Supposing itheld my young sister, running away with an Indian rajah!"

  "And you would call that romance?"

  "Exactly!"

  Durkin turned and looked at the approaching car.

  "While, as a matter of fact," he continued, with his exasperatinglysmooth smile, "it seems to be holding a very much overdressed younglady, presumably from the Folies-Bergere or the Olympia."

  The younger man, looking back from his place beside him, turned tolisten, confronted by the sudden excited comments of a middle-agedwoman, obviously Parisian, on the arm of a lean and solemn man withdyed and waxed mustachios.

  "You're quite wrong," cried the young Chicagoan, excitedly. "It'syoung Lady Boxspur--the new English beauty. See, they're crowding outto get a glimpse of her!"

  "Who's Lady Boxspur?" asked Durkin, hanging stolidly back. He had seenquite enough of Riviera beauty on parade.

  "She's simply ripping. I got a glimpse of her this afternoon in frontof the _Terrasse_, after she'd first motored over from Nice with oldSzapary!" He lowered his voice, more confidentially. "This Frenchmanhere has just been telling his wife that she's the loveliest woman onthe Riviera today. Come on!"

  Durkin stood indifferently, under the white glare of the electric lamp,watching the younger man push through to the centre of the roadway.The slowly-moving touring-car, hemmed in by the languid midnightmovement of the street, came to a full stop almost before where hestood. It shuddered and panted there, leviathan-like, and Durkin sawthe sea breeze sway back the canopy drapery.

  He followed the direction of the excited young Chicagoan's gaze,smilingly, now, and with a singularly disengaged mind.

  He saw the woman's clear profile outlined against the floating purplecurtain, the quiet and shadowy eyes of violet, the glint of thechestnut hair that showed through the back-thrust folds of the whitesilk automobile veil swathing the small head, and the nervous,bird-like movement of the head itself.

  He did not move; there was no involuntary, galvanic reaction; no suddengasp and flame of wonder. He simply held his cigarette still poised inhis fingers, half-way to his lips, with the minutest relaxing of thesmile that still hovered about them, while a dull and ashen graynesscrept into his face, second by waiting second.

  It was not until his eyes met hers that he took three wavering andundecided steps toward her.

  With a silent movement--more of warning than of fright, he afterwardtold himself--she pressed her gloved fingers to her lips. What herintent eyes meant to say to him, in that wordless, telepathic message,Durkin could not guess; all thought was beyond him. But in a moment ortwo the roadway cleared, the car shook and plunged forward, thefloating curtains fluttered and trailed behind.

  Durkin turned blindly, and pushed and ran and dodged through thelanguidly amazed promenaders, following after that sudden andbewildering vision, as after his last hope in life. But the fine,white, limestone Riviera dust from the fading car's tire-heels, and theburnt gases from its engines, were all the road held for him, as itundulated off into hillside quietnesses.

  He heard the young Chicagoan calling after him, breathless and anxious.But he ran on until he came to a side street, shadowed with gardenwalls and villas and greenery. Slipping into this, he immured himselfin the midnight silences, to be alone with the contending forces thattore at him.

  If his companion was right, and such things as this made up Romance,then, after all, the drama of life had lost none of its bewilderment.For the woman he had seen between the floating purple curtains was hisown wife.