Phantom Wires: A Novel

  Produced by Al Haines

  [Frontispiece: "She turned with a start, though her loss ofself-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 signof 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 ofone worn napoleon showing from its midst. He remembered, suddenly,that it was the third time he had counted that ever-lightening handfulsince partaking of his frugal coffee and rolls that morning. So hedropped the coins back into his pocket, dolefully, one by one, and tookthe deep breath of a man schooling himself to face the unfaceable.

  Then he looked about the room, almost vacuously, as though theold-fashioned wooden bed and the faded curtains and the blank wallsmight 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 intosoft ribbons of silver where the wind rippled its surface, yellowinginto a fluid gold towards the path of the lowering sun, deepening,again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat rim of the sea to thesouthward where the twin tranquilities of sky and water met.

  It was the same unaltering Mediterranean, the same expanse of eternalsapphire that he had watched from the same Riviera window, day in andday out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the sameforlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week byweek 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 gestureof impatience. The movement was strangely like that of a feverishinvalid turning from the ache of an opened shutter.

  Durkin took up the newspaper once more, and unfolded it with listlesslyfebrile fingers. It was the Paris edition of "The Herald," four daysold. Still again, and quite mechanically now, he read the familiaradvertisement. It was the same message, word for word, that had firstcaught his eye as he had sipped his coffee in the little palm-growngarden of the Hotel Bristol, in Gibraltar, nearly three weeks before."Presence of James L. Durkin, electrical expert, essential at office ofStephens & Streeter, patent solicitors, etc., Empire Building, New YorkCity, before contracts can be culminated. Urgent."

  Only, at the first reading of those pregnant words, all the even andhopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenlyerupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, forreturn to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-wideningplans and its obliterating and absolving years of honest labor.

  He would never forget that moment, no matter into what ways or moodslife might lead him. The rhythmic pound and beat of a company ofBritish infantry, swarthy and strange-looking in their neutral-tintedkhaki, marched briskly by on the hard stone road, momentarily fillingthe garden quietnesses with a tumult of noise. A bugle had soundedfrom one of the fortified galleries high above him, had sounded clearlyout across the huddled little town at the foot of the Rock,challenging, uncompromising, thrillingly penetrating, as the paper hadfluttered and shaken in his fingers. He had accepted it, in that firstmoment of unreasoning emotionalism, as an auspicious omen, as the callof his own higher life across the engulfing abysses of the past. Hehad forgotten, for the time being, just where and what he was.

  But that grim truth had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, afterhe had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed tohim a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandishtongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, pastMoorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, infinal and frenzied search of the American Consul.

  He had found the Consulate, at last, on what seemed a back street ofthe Spanish quarter, a gloomy and shabby room or two, with the fadedAmerican flags over the doorway clutched in the carven claws of a stillmore faded eagle. And he had waited for two patient hours, enduringthe suspicious scowls of a lean and hawk-like Spanish housekeeper, todiscover, at the end, that the American Consul had been riding athounds, with the garrison Hunt Club. And when the Consul, having dulychased a stunted little Spanish fox all the way from Legnia toAlgeciras, returned to his official quarters, in Englishriding-breeches and irradiating good spirits, Durkin had seen hisnew-blown hopes wither in the blossom. The Consul greatly regrettedthat his visitor had been kept waiting, but infinitely greater was hisregret that an official position like his own gave him such limitedopportunity for forwarding impatient electrical inventors to theirnative shores. No doubt the case was imminent; he was glad his visitorfelt so confident about the outcome of his invention; he had known aman at home who went in for that sort of thing--had fitted up thelights for his own country house on the Sound; but he himself had neverdreamed such a thing as a transmitting camera, that could telegraph apicture all the way from Gibraltar to New York, for instance, was evena possibility! . . . The Department, by the way, was going to have acruiser drop in at Mogador, to look into the looting of the MethodistMissionary stores at Fruga. There was a remote chance that thiscruiser might call at the Rock, on the homeward journey. But it wasproblematical. . . . And that had been the end of it all, theignominious end. And still again the despairing Durkin was beingconfronted and challenged and mocked by this call to him from half wayround the world. It maddened and sickened him, the very thought of hishelplessness, so Aeschylean in its torturing complications, so ironicin its refinement of cruelty. It stung him into a spirit of blindrevolt. It was unfair, too utterly unfair, he told himself, as hepaced the faded carpet of his cheap hotel-room, and the mild Rivierasunlight crept in through the window-square and the serenely soft andalluring sea-air drifted in between the open shutters.

  It meant that a new and purposeful path had been blazed through thetangled complexities of life for him, yet he could make no move to takeadvantage of it. It meant that the door of his delivery had been swungwide, with its m
ockery of open and honest sunlight, and yet his feetwere to remain fettered in that underworld gloom he had grown to hate.He must still stay an unwilling prisoner in this garden of studiedindolence, this playground of invalids and gamblers; he must stilldawdle idly about these glittering, stagnating squares, fringing acrowd of meaningless foreigners, skulking half-fed and poorly housedabout this opulent showplace of the world that set its appeasingtheatricalities into motion only at the touch of ready gold.

  Durkin remembered, at that moment, that he was woefully hungry. Healso remembered, more gratefully, that the young Chicagoan, the lonelyand loquacious youth he had met the day before in the _cafe_ of the"_Terrasse_," had asked him to take dinner with him, to view thesplendor of "_Ciro's_" and a keeper of the _vestiaire_ in scarletbreeches and silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to the littlebon-bon play-house up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino. He wasto watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate,flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung tremblingon the last silken thread of tortured suspense! Yet it was better thanmoping alone, he told himself. He hated loneliness. And until thelast few weeks he had scarcely known the meaning of the word! Therehad always been that other hand for which to reach, that other shoulderon which to lean! And suddenly, at the sting of the memories thatsurged over him, he went to the window that opened on its world of seaand sunlight, and looked out. His hands clutched the sill, and hisunhappy eyes were intent and inquiring, as they swept the world beforehim 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 aninarticulate wish phrasing itself somewhere in the background of hisclouded brain.

  But as he awoke to the tumult of his emotions, to the intensity of hisattitude, whilst he stood there projecting that vague call out intospace, he turned abruptly away, with the abashment of a reticent mandetected in an act of theatricality, and flung out of the room, downinto the crowded streets of Monte Carlo.