Phantom Wires | Page 4

subversive and undermining and unnerving in its very
atmosphere. 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 as
completely as the drop and wings of a playhouse might. Its sense of
casual and careless calm, too, seemed to him only the rest of a spinning
top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant coquetries of attire,
its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape and sea-front, its parade of
corporeal and egotistic pleasures, its primordial 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, its overcrowded and grimly Dionysian

Promenade, its murmurous and alluring restaurants on steep little
boulevards--it was all a blind, Durkin argued with himself, to drape and
smother the cynical misery of the place. Underneath all its flaunting
and waving softnesses life ran grim and hard--as grim and hard as the
solid rock that lay so close beneath its jonquils and violets and its
masking verdure of mimosa and orange and palm.
He hated it, he told himself in his tragic and newborn austerity of spirit,
as any right-minded and clean-living man should hate paper roses or
painted faces. Every foot of it, that night, seemed a muffled and
mediate insult to intelligence. The too open and illicit invitation of its
confectionery-like halls, the insipidly emphatic pretentiousness of the
Casino itself--Durkin could never quite decide whether it reminded him
of a hurriedly finished exposition building or of a child's birthday cake
duly iced and bedecked--the tinsel glory, the hackneyed magnificence,
of its legitimatized and ever-orderly gaming dens, the eternal claws of
greed beneath the voluptuous velvet of indolence--it all combined to fill
his soul with a sense of hot revolt, as had so often before happened
during the past long and lonely days, when he had looked up at the soft
green of olive and eucalyptus and then down at the intense turquoise
curve of the harbor fringed with white foam.
Always, at such times, he had marveled that man could turn one of
earth's most beautiful gardens into one of crime's most crowded haunts.
The ironic injustice of it embittered him; it left him floundering in a sea
of moral indecision at a time when he most needed some forlorn belief
in the beneficence of natural law. It outraged his incongruously
persistent demand for fair play, just as the sight of the jauntily clad
gunners shooting down pigeons on that tranquil and Edenic little
grass-plot at the foot of the Promontory had done.
For underneath all the natural beauty of Monaco Durkin had been
continuously haunted by the sense of something unclean and leprous
and corroding. Under its rouge and roses, at every turn, he found the
insidious taint.
And more than ever, tonight, he had a sense of witnessing Destiny
stalking through those soft gardens, of Tragedy skulking about its regal

stairways.
For it was there, in the midst of those unassisting and enervating
surroundings, he dimly felt, that he himself was to choose one of two
strangely divergent paths. Yet he knew, in a way, that his decision had
already been forced upon him, that the dice had been cast and counted.
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 which still
claimed him as its own. And now all that remained for him was to slip
quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed and gnawed at
his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from the first, had been
too crucial. He might, in time, even find some solacing thought in the
fitness between the act and its environment--here he could fling himself
into an obliterating Niagara, not of falling waters, but of falling men
and women. Yes, it was a stage all prepared and set for the mean and
sordid and ever recurring tragedy of which he was to be the puppet. For
close about him seethed and boiled, as in no other place in the world,
all the darker and more despicable passions of humanity. He inwardly
recalled the types with which his stage was embellished; the fellow
puppets of that gilded and arrogant and idle world, the curled and
perfumed princes, the waxed and watching boulevardiers side by side
with virginal and unconscious American girls, pallid and impoverished
grand dukes in the wake of painted but wary Parisians, stiff-mustached
and mysterious Austrian counts lowering at doughty and indignant
Englishwomen; bejeweled beys and pashas brushing elbows with
unperturbed New England school-teachers astray from Cook's;
monocled thieves and gamblers