Phantom Wires | Page 5

and princelings, jaded tourists and
skulking parasites--and always the disillusioned and waiting 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 were in
the musky-smelling Promenade by this time, and up past the stands at
the 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, he told
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; and to him it
would never seem gay again.
"Oh, that comes of not speaking the language, you know!" maintained
the other stoutly, and, at the same time, comprehensively.
He was still very young, Durkin remembered. He had toyed with art for
two winters in Paris, so scene by scene he had been able to translate the
little drama that had appeared so farcical and Frenchy to his older
countryman in exile.
Durkin's lip curled a little.
"No--it comes of knowing life!" he answered, with a touch of
impatience. He felt the gulf that separated their two oddly diverse
lives--the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other a
fugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him.
He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some
glib and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer than
truth itself.
"Why," he continued argumentatively, "everything that happened in
that play might happen here, tonight, to you or me!"
"Rubbish!" ejaculated Durkin, brusquely, remembering how lonely he
must indeed 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 course it is.
It's more crowded, more rapid; it holds more romance. We didn'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 uncompromising
in its secret exactions, that he had no heart to theorize about it.
"And a thing isn't romantic just because it's moss-grown!" continued

the child of the studios, warming to his subject. "It's romantic when
we've emotionalized it, when we've felt it, when it's hit home with us,
as it were!"
"If it doesn't hit too hard!" qualified the older man.
"For instance," maintained the young Chicagoan, once more proffering
his cigarette-case to Durkin, "for instance, take that big Mercedes
touring-car with the canopy top, coming down through the crowd there.
You'll agree, at first sight, that such things mean good-bye to the
mounted knight, to chivalry, and all that romantic old horseman
business."
"I suppose so."
"But, don't you see, the horse and armor was only a frame, an
accidental setting, for the romance itself! It's up to date and practical
and sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing thing with a
gasoline engine hidden away in its bowels. It's what we call machinery.
But, supposing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le Duc Somebody, or
Milord So-and-So, or Signor Comte Somebody-Else, with his wife or
his mistress--I say, supposing it held--well, my young sister Alice,
whom I left so sedately contented at Brighton! Supposing it held 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 exasperatingly
smooth smile, "it seems to be holding a very much overdressed young
lady, presumably from the Folies-Bergère or the Olympia."
The younger man, looking back from his place beside him, turned to
listen, confronted by the sudden excited comments of a middle-aged
woman, obviously Parisian, on the arm of a lean and solemn man with

dyed and waxed mustachios.
"You're quite wrong," cried the young Chicagoan, excitedly. "It's
young Lady Boxspur--the new English beauty. See, they're crowding
out to get a glimpse of her!"
"Who's Lady Boxspur?" asked Durkin, hanging stolidly back. He had
seen quite enough of Riviera beauty on parade.
"She's simply ripping. I got a glimpse of her this afternoon in front of
the Terrasse, after she'd first motored over from Nice with old
Szapary!" He lowered his voice, more confidentially. "This Frenchman
here has just been telling his wife that she's the loveliest woman on the
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 midnight
movement of the street, came to