Phantom Wires | Page 3

splendor of "Ciro's" and a keeper of the vestiaire in scarlet breeches
and silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to the little bon-bon
play-house up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino. He was to
watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate,
flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung
trembling on the last silken thread of tortured suspense! Yet it was
better than moping alone, he told himself. He hated loneliness. And
until the last few weeks he had scarcely known the meaning of the
word! There had always been that other hand for which to reach, that
other shoulder on which to lean! And suddenly, at the sting of the
memories that surged over him, he went to the window that opened on
its world of sea and sunlight, and looked out. His hands clutched the
sill, and his unhappy eyes were intent and inquiring, as they swept the
world before him 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 an
inarticulate wish phrasing itself somewhere in the background of his
clouded brain.
But as he awoke to the tumult of his emotions, to the intensity of his
attitude, whilst he stood there projecting that vague call out into space,
he turned abruptly away, with the abashment of a reticent man detected
in an act of theatricality, and flung out of the room, down into the
crowded streets of Monte Carlo.
CHAPTER II
THE AZURE COAST

As Durkin and the young Chicagoan once more stepped out of the
brilliantly lighted theatre, into the balmy night air, a seductive mingling
of perfumes and music and murmuring voices blew in their hot faces,
like a cooling wave. Durkin was wondering, a little wearily, just when
he could be alone again.
A group of gay and laughing women, with their aphrodisiac rustle of
silk and flutter of lace, floated carelessly past.
"Who are they?" asked the youth.
Durkin half-envied him his illusions and his ingenuousness of outlook;
he was treading a veritable amphitheatre of orderly disordered passions
with the gentle objective stare of a child looking for bright-colored
flowers on a battleground. Durkin wondered if, after all, it was not the
result of his mere quest of color, of his studying art in Paris for a year
or two.
"I wonder who and what they are?" impersonally reiterated the younger
man, as his gaze still followed the passing group to where it drifted and
scattered through the lamp-strewn garden, like a cluster of golden
butterflies.
"Those are the slaves who sand the arena!" retorted Durkin, studying
the softly waving palms, and leaving the other a little in doubt as to the
meaning of his figure.
The younger man sighed; he was beginning to feel, doubtless, from
what different standpoints they looked out on life.
"Oh, well, you can say what you like, but this is the centre of the world,
to my way of thinking!"
"The centre of--putrescence!" ejaculated Durkin. The younger man
began to laugh, with conciliatory good-nature, as he glanced
appreciatively back at the sweetmeat stateliness of the Casino front.
But into the older man's mind crept the impression that they were
merely passing, in going from crowded theatre to open garden and

street, from one playhouse to another. It all seemed to him, indeed,
nothing more than a transition of theatricalities. For that outer
play-world which lay along Monaco's three short miles of marble
stairway and villa and hillside garden appeared to him, in his mood of
settled dejection, as artificial and unnatural and unrelated as the life
which he had just seen pictured across the footlights of the over-pretty
and meringue-like little theatre.
"Well, Monte Carlo's good enough for me, all right, all right!" persisted
the young Chicagoan, as they made their way down the lamp-hung
Promenade. And he laughed with a sort of luxurious contentment,
holding out his cigarette-case as he did so.
The older man, catching a light from the proffered match, said nothing
in reply. Something in the other's betrayingly boyish laugh grated on
his nerves, though he paused, punctiliously, beside his chance-found
companion, while together they gazed down at the twinkling lights of
the bay, where the soft and violet Mediterranean lay under a soft and
violet sky, and the boatlamps were languidly swaying dots of white and
red, and the Promontory stood outlined in electric globes, like a
woman's breast threaded with pearls, the young art-student expressed it,
and the perennial, ever-cloying perfumes floated up from square and
thicket and garden.
There was an eternal menace about it, Durkin concluded. There was
something