Phantom Wires | Page 8

secret unrest--it was, he knew, the
hounds of habit whimpering from their kennels. "No one was ever
reformed," he had once confided to Frances, "by simply being turned
out to grass!" So it was then that they had tried to drug their first rising
doubts with the tumult of incessant travel and change. His wife had
lured him to secluded places, she had struggled to interest him in a
language or two, she had planned quixotic courses of reading--as
though a man such as he might be remolded by a few months of
modern authors!--and carried him off to centres of gaiety--as though
the beat of Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could drive that
inmost fever out of his blood!
He endured Aix-les-Bains and its rheumatics, with their bridge-whist
and late dinners and incongruous dissipations, for a fortnight. Then
they fled to the huddled little hotels and pensions of the narrow and
dark wooded valley of Karlsbad, under skies which Frank declared to
be bluer than the blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins from
India and royalty from Austria and audacious young duchesses from
Paris and students from Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable
strangers from all the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed to
Durkin they were at last alone. He confided this feeling to his wife, one
tranquil morning after they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled
cups, at the spring where the comely, rubber-garmented native girls
caught and doled out the biting hot spray of the geyser. They were
seated at the remoter end of the glass-covered Promenade, and a band
was playing. Something in the music, for once, had saddened and
dispirited Frank.
"Alone?" she had retorted. "Who is ever alone?"
"Well, our wires are down, for a little while, anyway!" laughed Durkin,
as he sipped the hot salt water from the china cup. It reminded him, he
had said, of all his past sins in epitome. Frank sighed wearily, and did
not speak for a minute or two.
"But, after all," she said at last, in a meditative calmness of voice,
"there are always some sort of ghostly wires connecting us with one

another, holding us in touch with what we have been and done, with
our past, and with our ancestors, with all our forsaken sins and
misdoings. No, Jim, I don't believe we are ever alone. There are always
sounds and hints, little broken messages and whispers, creeping in to us
along those hidden circuits. We call them Intuitions, and sometimes we
speak of them as Character, and sometimes as Heredity, and weakness
of will--but they are there, just the same!"
The confession of that mood was a costly one, for before the week was
out they had, in some way, wearied of the sight of that daily procession
of nephritics and neurotics, and were off again, like a pair of homeless
swallows, to the Rhine salmon and the Black Forest venison of Baden.
From there they fled to the mountain air of St. Moritz, where they were
frozen out and driven back to Paris--but always spending freely and
thinking little of the vague tomorrow. Durkin, indeed, recognized that
taint of improvidence in his veins. He was a spendthrift; he had none of
the temperamental foresight and frugality of his wife, who reminded
him, from time to time, and with ever-increasing anxiety, of their
ever-melting letter of credit. But, on the other hand, she stood ready to
sacrifice everything, in order to build some new wall of interest about
him, that she might immure him from his past. She still planned and
schemed to shield him, not so much from the world, as from himself.
Yet he had seen, almost from the first, that their pursuit of contentment
was born of their common and ever-increasing terror of the future.
Each left unuttered the actual emptiness and desolation of life, yet each
nursed the bitter sting of it. Day by day he had put on a bold face,
because he had long since learned how poignantly miserable his own
misery could make her. And, above all things, he hated to see her
unhappy.
CHAPTER IV
THE WIDENING ROAD
Under the softly-waving palms of that midnight garden, Durkin relived
their feverish past, month by remembered month, until they found the
need of money staring them in the face. He reviewed each increasing

dilemma, until, eventually, he had left her in her squalid Paris pension
with her music pupils and the last eighty francs, while he clutched at
the passing straw of an exporting house clerkship in Marseilles. The
exporting house, which was under American guidance, had flickered
and gone out ignominiously, and week by desperate week each new
promise of honest work seemed to wither into a chimera at his feverish
touch. He had been told of