Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: "She turned with a start, though her loss of
self-possession lasted but a moment."]
PHANTOM WIRES
A Novel
BY
ARTHUR STRINGER
Author of "The Wire Tappers," "The Loom of Destiny," etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
Copyright, 1908,
BY ARTHUR STRINGER.
Copyright, 1907,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
All Rights Reserved.
I
_It's the bad that's in the best of us
Leaves the saint so like the rest of us:
It's the good in the darkest curst of us
Redeems and saves the worst of us._
II
_It's the muddle of hope and madness,
It's the tangle of good and badness,
It's the lunacy linked with sanity,
Makes up and mocks Humanity!_
A. S.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE END OF THE TETHER
II. THE AZURE COAST
III. THE SHADOWING PAST
IV. THE WIDENING ROAD
V. THE GREAT DIVIDE
VI. THE WOMAN SPEAKS
VII. OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY
VIII. "FOREIGNERS ARE FOOLS"
IX. THE LARK IN THE RUINS
X. THE TIGHTENING COIL
XI. THE INTOXICATION OF WAR
XII. THE DOORWAY OF SURPRISE
XIII. "THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR"
XIV. AWAKENING VOICES
XV. WIRELESS MESSAGES
XVI. BROKEN INSULATION
XVII. THE TANGLED SKEIN
XVIII. THE SEVERED KNOT
XIX. THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST
XX. THE SPIDER AND THE FLY
XXI. THE PIT OF DESPAIR
XXII. THE ENTERING WEDGE
XXIII. THE WAKING CIRCUIT
XXIV. THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT
XXV. THE RULING PASSION
XXVI. THE CROWN OF IRON
XXVII. THE STRAITS OF CHANCE
XXVIII. THE HUMAN ELEMENT
XXIX. THE LAST DITCH
XXX. ONE YEAR LATER--AN EPILOGUE
PHANTOM WIRES
CHAPTER I
THE END OF THE TETHER
Durkin folded the printed pages of the newspaper with no outward sign
of excitement. Then he took out his money, quietly, and counted it,
with meditative and pursed-up lips.
His eyes fell on a paltry handful of silver, with the dulled gold of
one worn napoleon showing from its midst. He remembered, suddenly,
that it was the third time he had counted that ever-lightening handful
since partaking of his frugal coffee and rolls that morning. So he
dropped the coins back into his pocket, dolefully, one by one, and took
the deep breath of a man schooling himself to face the unfaceable.
Then he looked about the room, almost vacuously, as though the
old-fashioned wooden bed and the faded curtains and the blank walls
might hold some oracular answer to the riddle that lay before him.
Then he went to the open window, and looked out, almost as vacuously,
over the unbroken blue distance of the Mediterranean, trembling into
soft ribbons of silver where the wind rippled its surface, yellowing
into a fluid gold towards the path of the lowering sun, deepening,
again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat rim of the sea to the
southward where the twin tranquilities of sky and water met.
It was the same unaltering Mediterranean, the same expanse of eternal
sapphire that he had watched from the same Riviera window, day in and
day out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the same
forlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week by
week seemed to grow too strong for him. He turned away from the soft,
exotic loveliness of the sea and sky before him, with a little gesture
of impatience. The movement was strangely like that of a feverish
invalid turning from the ache of an opened shutter.
Durkin took up the newspaper once more, and unfolded it with listlessly
febrile fingers. It was the Paris edition of "The Herald," four days
old. Still again, and quite mechanically now, he read the familiar
advertisement. It was the same message, word for word, that had first
caught his eye as he had sipped his coffee in the little palm-grown
garden of the Hotel Bristol, in Gibraltar, nearly three weeks before.
"Presence of James L. Durkin, electrical expert, essential at office of
Stephens & Streeter, patent solicitors, etc., Empire Building, New York
City, before contracts can be culminated. Urgent."
Only, at the first reading of those pregnant words, all the even and
hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenly
erupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, for
return to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-widening
plans and its obliterating and absolving years of honest labor.
He would never forget that moment, no matter into what ways or moods
life might lead him. The rhythmic pound and beat of a company of
British infantry, swarthy and strange-looking in their neutral-tinted
khaki, marched briskly by on the hard stone road, momentarily filling
the garden quietnesses with a tumult of noise. A bugle had sounded
from one of the fortified galleries high above him, had sounded clearly
out across the huddled little town at the foot of the Rock,
challenging, uncompromising, thrillingly penetrating, as the paper had
fluttered and shaken in his fingers. He had accepted it, in that first
moment of unreasoning emotionalism, as an auspicious omen, as the call
of his own higher life across the engulfing abysses of the past. He
had forgotten, for the time being, just where and what he was.
But that grim truth had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after
he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to
him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish
tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past
Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in
final and frenzied search of the American Consul.
He had found the Consulate, at last, on what seemed a back street of
the Spanish quarter, a gloomy and shabby room or two, with the faded
American flags over the doorway clutched in the carven claws of a still
more faded eagle. And he had waited for two patient hours, enduring
the suspicious scowls of a lean and hawk-like Spanish housekeeper, to
discover, at the end, that the American Consul had been riding at
hounds, with the garrison Hunt Club. And when the Consul, having duly
chased a stunted little Spanish fox all the way from Legnia to
Algeciras, returned to his official quarters, in English
riding-breeches and irradiating good spirits, Durkin had seen his
new-blown hopes wither in the blossom. The Consul greatly regretted
that his visitor had been kept waiting, but infinitely greater was his
regret that an official position like his own gave him such limited
opportunity for forwarding impatient electrical inventors to their
native shores. No doubt the case was imminent; he was glad his visitor
felt so confident about the outcome of his invention; he had known a
man at home who went in for that sort of thing--had fitted up the
lights for his own country house on the Sound; but he himself had never
dreamed such a thing as a transmitting camera, that could telegraph a
picture all the way from Gibraltar to New York, for instance, was even
a possibility! . . . The Department, by the way, was going to have a
cruiser drop in at Mogador, to look into the looting of the Methodist
Missionary stores at Fruga. There was a remote chance that this
cruiser might call at the Rock, on the homeward journey. But it was
problematical. . . . And that had been the end of it all, the
ignominious end. And still again the despairing Durkin was being
confronted and challenged and mocked by this call to him from half way
round the world. It maddened and sickened him, the very thought of his
helplessness, so Aeschylean in its torturing complications, so ironic
in its refinement of cruelty. It stung him into a spirit of blind
revolt. It was unfair, too utterly unfair, he told himself, as he
paced the faded carpet of his cheap hotel-room, and the mild Riviera
sunlight crept in through the window-square and the serenely soft and
alluring sea-air drifted in between the open shutters.
It meant that a new and purposeful path had been blazed through the
tangled complexities of life for him, yet he could make no move to take
advantage of it. It meant that the door of his delivery had been swung
wide, with its mockery of open and honest sunlight, and yet his feet
were to remain fettered in that underworld gloom he had grown to hate.
He must still stay an unwilling prisoner in this garden of studied
indolence, this playground of invalids and gamblers; he must still
dawdle idly about these glittering, stagnating squares, fringing a
crowd of meaningless foreigners, skulking half-fed and poorly housed
about this opulent showplace of the world that set its appeasing
theatricalities into motion only at the touch of ready gold.
Durkin remembered, at that moment, that he was woefully hungry. He
also remembered, more gratefully, that the young Chicagoan, the lonely
and loquacious youth he had met the day before in the _café_ of the
"_Terrasse_," had asked him to take dinner with him, to view the
splendor of "_Ciro's_" and a keeper of the _vestiaire_ in scarlet
breeches and silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to the little
bon-bon play-house up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino. He was
to watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate,
flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung trembling
on the last silken thread of tortured suspense! Yet it was better than
moping alone, he told himself. He hated loneliness. And until the
last few weeks he had scarcely known the meaning of the word! There
had always been that other hand for which to reach, that other shoulder
on which to lean! And suddenly, at the sting of the memories that
surged over him, he went to the window that opened on its world of sea
and sunlight, and looked out. His hands clutched the sill, and his
unhappy eyes were intent and inquiring, as they swept the world before
him in a slow and comprehensive gaze.
"_Wherever you wait, wherever you are, in all this wide world, Frank,
come here, to me, now, now, for I want you, need you!_"
His lips scarcely murmured the vague invocation; it was more an
inarticulate wish phrasing itself somewhere in the background of his
clouded brain.
But as he awoke to the tumult of his emotions, to the intensity of his
attitude, whilst he stood there projecting that vague call out into
space, he turned abruptly away, with the abashment of a reticent man
detected in an act of theatricality, and flung out of the room, down
into the crowded streets of Monte Carlo.