Phantom Wires | Page 2

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