The Portal of Dreams

For a long while the girl held him in a steady scrutiny. They had both forgotten me, silent in my corner. Her cheeks paled a little, and when finally she reiterated her old question, her steady voice betrayed the training of strong effort.

"Who is she?"

"Listen, Grace," he said. "I've got to talk to some one. You have come here, so you let yourself in for it… Ten years ago I was reporting on a paper for a few dollars a week. It was a long way from Broadway. There was a dusty typewriter and dirty walls decorated with yellowed clippings – but … There was wild young ambition and all of life ahead. That was living."

"Who was she?" insistently repeated the actress, when he paused.

"What can it matter how big a play one writes," demanded the author, "if he presents it to an empty house? The absence of one woman can make any house empty for any man. I'd give it all, to hear her say once more – " He broke off in abrupt silence.

"To hear her say what, Bobby?" prompted Grace Bristol, softly.

"Well," he answered with a miserable laugh, "something she used to say."

"I suppose, Bobby – " the girl spoke very slowly, and a little wistfully, too – "I suppose it wouldn't do any good to – to hear any one else say it?"

He shook his head.

"Do you remember, Grace," he went on, "the other evening, when we were sitting in the café at the Lorillard and the orchestra in another room was playing 'Whispering Angels'? The hundred noises of the place almost drowned it out, yet we were always straining our ears to catch the music – and when there came a momentary lull, it would swell up over everything else. That's how it is with this – and sometimes it swells up and slugs one – simply slugs one, that's all." He broke off and laughed again. "I guess I'm talking no end of rot. You probably don't understand."

She raised her face and spoke with dignity.

"Why don't I understand, Bobby? Because I'm a show-girl?"

My old friend's voice was contrite in its quick apology.

"Forgive me, Grace – of course I didn't mean that. You're the cleverest woman on Broadway."

She laughed. "I'm said to be quite an emotional ash-trash," she responded.

It seemed inconceivable that Maxwell should miss the note of bitter misery in her voice; yet, blinded by his own quarrel with Fate, he passed into the next room oblivious of all else.

She crossed to the table which lay littered with the confusion of his untidy packing, and took up a shirt that he had left tumbled. She carefully folded it, then with a surreptitious glance over her shoulder to make sure that she was not observed, she tore a rose from her belt and, holding it for an impulsive moment against her breast, dropped it into the bag. My face was averted, but through a mirror I saw the pitiful pantomime. From the table she turned and stood gazing off through his window, with her face averted. From my seat I could also catch some of the detail that the window framed. Below stretched Washington Square, almost as desolately empty as in those days when, instead of asphalt and trees and fountain, it held only the many graves of the pauper dead. The arch at the Avenue loomed stark and white and the naked branches of a sycamore were like skeleton fingers against the garish light flung from an arc lamp. The girl had thrown up the sash and stood drinking in the cold air, though she shivered a little, and forgetful of my presence clenched her hands at her back.

From the bedroom, to which Bobby had withdrawn, drifted his voice in the melancholy tune and words of one of Lawrence Hope's lyrics:

"Less than the dust beneath thy chariot wheels – "

The girl at the window turned with a violent start and her exclamation broke passionately from lips, for the moment trembling.

"For God's sake, Bobby, don't!"

"What's the matter with my singing?" demanded his aggrieved voice from beyond the door.

She forced a laugh.

"Oh, nothing," she said carelessly enough, "only when anybody pulls one of those Indian Love Lyrics on me, I pass."

He returned a moment later to find her still standing by the window. At last she turned back to the room and took up her hat. She lifted it to her head as though it were very heavy, and her arms very tired.

"I guess, Bobby, I'll be running along," she announced.

"Grace," he said earnestly, "it's good to know that from this time on you are a star."

She laughed.

"Yes, isn't it?" she answered. "I'm a real ash-trash now. No – don't bother to see me down. Mr. Deprayne will put me into the taxi'."

Outside the threshold she paused to thrust her head back into the room, and to laugh gaily as she shouted in the slang of the street:

"Oh, you Galahad!"

But her eyes were swimming with tears.

As I climbed the creaking stairs again, I was pondering the question of contentment. Here were three of us. One had raked success out of the fire of failure and had written what promised to be the season's dramatic sensation. One had earned the right to read her name, nightly, in Broadway's incandescent roster. I myself had been preserved from cannibal flesh-pots. All of us were seemingly brands snatched from the burning, and all of us were deeply miserable. I wondered if the fourth was happy; the woman who had once said to Maxwell the things he now vainly longed to hear? And She – the lady I had never seen; what of her?

I found the author gazing off with a far-away reminiscence which was mostly pain. The taxi' was whirring under the arch, but he had already forgotten it and its occupant.

"Do you want to unbosom yourself, Bobby?" I questioned.

He shook his head.

"To you?" he inquired with a smile. "You're a woman-hater."

But a moment later he came over and laid his hand affectionately on my shoulder, fearing he had offended me.

"I guess, old man," he explained, "there's no balm in post-mortems. I loved her, that's all, and I still do."

"She married?" I inquired.

"She is now Mrs. William Clay Weighborne of Lexington. It's a prettier name than Fanny Maxwell, and looks better on a check. I was number three, that's all."

"Mrs. Who?" I repeated, in astonishment. "You don't mean the wife of W. C. Weighborne?"

"Why?" he asked suddenly. "Is the gentleman an acquaintance of yours?"

"Since this morning, yes. He is even a business associate."

"How you birds of a financial feather do flock around the same pabulum," he coolly observed.

"I was rather well impressed with him," I admitted idiotically enough. "He seemed a very decent sort of chap."

Maxwell lighted a cigarette. His voice was a trifle unenthusiastic as he replied.

"So I am informed."

A few days later I arrived at Lexington and Weighborne, who met me at the station with his car, announced that I was to go to his home on the Frankfort turnpike. But at this arrangement I balked. Despite a certain curiosity to see his wife, the lady who had left such a melancholy impress on the heart of my friend, there were considerations which outweighed curiosity. My own peculiar afflictions bore more heavily on me than those of my acquaintances and I had no yearning for the effort of socializing.

So Weighborne protestingly drove me to the Ph[oe]nix, and armed me with a visitor's card to the Lexington Union Club. I could see that he was deeply absorbed. His mind was so tensely focused on coal and timber development that it was difficult for him to think of other matters. My apathy lagged at the prospect of following his untiring energy over hours of close application to detail. I would put it off until to-morrow. Yet I had hardly taken my seat at table in the dining-room of the Ph[oe]nix, when a page called me to the telephone booth and Weighborne's voice came through the transmitter.

"Hullo, old man, did I drag you away from food? Sorry, but there are some papers here I'd like mighty well to have you look over. I might bring them in, but if you don't mind running out it would be better."

Of necessity I assented.

"I'll have my chauffeur call for you at 8:30," he arranged, "and meanwhile I'll be getting things into shape here. By the way" – his voice took on a reassuring note – "you sidestepped my rooftree this evening, and I gathered that you were not in the mood for meeting people."

I murmured some insincere assurance to the contrary, which did not beguile him.

"We shall have the house quite to ourselves," he said. "All the family are flitting off to a dance at the Country Club."

An hour later his car turned in at a stone gate, and up a long maple-lined avenue. From the windows of a generously broad, colonial mansion came a cheery blaze of light, throwing shadows outward from the tall white columns at the front. I could not help thinking of Maxwell's lodgings in Washington Square, and reflecting that, all prejudice aside, the flower of his worship had not chosen so badly in transplanting herself here.

Weighborne met me at the entrance of a hall over which hung the charm of ripe old portraits and wainscoted walls. Furnishings of unostentatious elegance made the place a delight. We passed into a large library where a wide hearth dispensed the cheer of blazing logs and our feet sunk deep in Persian rugs.

Yet even here, although instinctively hospitable, my host was plainly immersed in thoughts of coal and timber, for as soon as he had done the honors he plunged me into a litter of statistics.

I, poor business man that I was, had, time after time, to force my mind back from its undisciplined straying. As he talked of coal veins, I would find myself thinking of coral reefs. When he enlarged upon advances in timber tracts I would be seeing in my memory a circle of mahogany-skinned pigmies squatting silently about a portrait spiked to a sailor's chest with a pair of Damascus daggers.

At last Weighborne began sorting through the papers for some misplaced and necessary memorandum. He crossed the room to a desk at one corner which he found locked, and his ejaculation was one of deep annoyance.

"My wife has locked the desk and Heaven only knows where she has put the key," he complained. "I'll have to call the Country Club and ask her."

His words must have carried to the next room, for at once a voice answered. It was a richly musical contralto, and at its first syllable my heart stood still, and the room commenced to whirl about me. I had never heard it and yet I had heard it – singing in a wilderness of coral and orchids. Surely after all the big, little doctor was right, I was becoming a lunatic.

"Billy," called the voice, "you needn't 'phone. I'm here. I'll unlock it."

My host turned in surprise and walked over to the door.

"Hullo, Frances!" he exclaimed. "Didn't you go to the Club?"

"I had a headache," replied the voice. "I sent the others off, and stayed at home. I'll come in just a moment."

I stood waiting, my pulses pounding turbulently. Had my host not been just then dedicated to a single idea he must have noticed my pallor and wondered at the fascination with which I came to my feet and stood gazing at the door.

And as I gazed she appeared on the threshold, the blaze from the logs lighting her and throwing a nimbus about her hair of gold and honey. I placed both my hands on the top of the table and braced myself as a man may do when the executioner whispers the warning "ready!"

She might have stepped from the picture herself. Again she was in evening dress, which clung to her in soft lines of unspeakable grace. At her throat hung a string of pearls – the same pearls – and as she paused and our eyes met, I could have sworn that her muscles grew momentarily taut, and her lips twitched in a gasp. She put out one hand and steadied herself against the door jamb; then with the gracious recognition of a half-smile for a guest not yet duly presented, she went over and unlocked the desk.

I stood looking after her. I was conscious of a numbness of spirit – a sickening of hopelessness. The question was answered. The Frances of my Island, the Frances of Maxwell's heartbreak, the Frances who had married my business associate, were, by a monstrous sequence of hideous circumstances and coincidence, one and the same. She stood ten feet and twenty sky depths away from me.

CHAPTER XVI

AN INTERVIEW AND A CRISIS

As I stood there all immediate things were apparitions seen vague and distorted through a chaos of wild emotion. I had assumed that for an experimenter in the unexpected I could qualify as tried and seasoned. Now it seemed that all prior assaults upon my equanimity had been mere kindergarten exercises in control.

Weighborne, still too self-absorbed to see that worlds were crumbling in his library, turned suddenly to us with an apologetic laugh.

"Frances," he said, "forgive me, I entirely forgot to present our guest." Even then he did not present me, but turned to me to add, "We've talked of you so much here, Mr. Deprayne, that I had overlooked the fact that introductions were in order. I'm the unfortunate type of one idea at a time. After all, I hope you'll feel that, having crossed the threshold you are one of us, and that further formalities may be dispensed with." Then as I bowed, somewhat incoherently mumbling my acknowledgments, he turned his back upon the room and busied himself again with the rubbish that claimed his interest at the desk.

I wanted to leap for his throat. I, who had presented her as a goddess to a people under skies that rose from the ocean and dipped again to the ocean, needed no presentation. The casual fashion of his amenities was in itself an affront.

Of course all this was insanely unfair to my host, and even while my thoughts seethed in this unamiable vortex – so strong is the grip of artificial conventions – I was attempting to smile with the agreeable inanity of a drawing-room smirk.

But as she stood there I could read in her face also the record of the strange agitation that had evidenced itself at the door. Her spirit too was in equinox. The lips I knew so well, though only in one expression, were now grave and a little drawn, and her eyes held a wild questioning, as though my coming brought a startling riddle.

In a moment she was again the perfectly poised mistress of herself. She came over and offered her hand and as I took it she met my eyes smiling, though she must have read in them the rising hunger of a man for a woman – a hunger which in me was so poignant that my soul was the soul of a wolf. The touch of her fingers electrified me and the tremor of my own hand, before I withdrew it, must have telegraphed whatever my pupils failed to mirror.

That wordless message told her how my sanity reeled on the brink of seizing her and holding her in wild defiance of this man, across the room, whose name she bore.

"I won't interrupt business," she was saying with perfect serenity. "But later I hope to see you again."

I bowed. "I hope so," I answered politely, while a wave of anger swept me.

She would not interrupt! She who had snapped all the thread of life and let my soul go plunging down the abysses.

She would not interrupt!

The grandfather clock against the wall stood at nine twenty-four. At nine twenty I had been stolidly puffing one of Weighborne's Havanas and listening to his disquisitions on courts of appeals decisions and squatters' rights. The cigar which I had dropped on an ash-tray at the first sound of her voice still held its ash and sent up a thin spiral of smoke. It had outlived me.

My host plunged afresh into his papers. He might as well have been reading me ukases from the Romonoff Czar in the undiluted Russian. But as the clock ticked off the half-hour I seemed to freeze out of the eruptive and into the glacial stage. I felt my lips drawing into a stiff smile. I even contrived to nod my head in sedulous and ape-like agreement when he raised interrogative eyes to mine. So rapidly had my volcanic lava of spirit hardened to clinkers that when the telephone called him to a barn, where some accident had befallen a thoroughbred colt, I was able to turn a conventionally masklike countenance on Frances, who came to chat with me till his return. She sat in a great leather chair, and I, standing on the hearth, looked down on her, braced for whatever might develop. I was resolved to make amends for my self-revelation of a half-hour ago; I should at least prove myself the capable mummer; yet I found that I was fettered by an unaccustomed silence.

There was only one topic on which I could find words for talk with this woman and that topic was forbidden. She, too, for some unaccountable reason, seemed hampered by a diffidence which her bearing told me was foreign to her normal nature. So, for a while, our conversation lagged and faltered and fell into fitful fragments and puerile tatters, while my gaze devoured her. There was no flaw in the perfection of her beauty from the coils of her amber and honey hair to the white satin toe of her small slipper. I had given opulent scope to my painter's fancy in those island days and had imagined her, in the color of life, as a being expressed in the souls of orchids. Now I realized, with a terrible yearning, that I had not done her justice.

Step by step I went back over the record of the last year and found it painfully distinct and clear. I had, with my imagination built a house of cards which had tottered. I had been lonely and morbid and had pretended a picture was a woman. It had come to mean a great deal – clay idols have come to mean immortal gods to poor creatures who have had no better deities. I had told myself that the finger of Destiny had traced through my life a thread of gold linking my life to hers. After all it had been nothing more than a series of inconceivable coincidences. I had no more part in her cosmos than in that of any woman whose photograph I might have admired in a miscellaneous collection. It behooved me to scourge out of my brain the mischievous chimeras I had harbored there. As for her momentary excitement – the something vague and deep and disturbed in her pupils as she stood at the door and later when we touched hands; that was only the psychic realization that this guest of her husband was staring at her out of insanely wild eyes.

I started to speak, then halted, perplexed over a ridiculous point. How should I address her? On the island I had called her Frances, and now I could no more compel my rebellious tongue to frame the title "Mrs. Weighborne" than I could have forced it to utter an epithet. So I said nothing at all.

"You are a great traveler, aren't you, Mr. Deprayne?" she suggested when the silence had begun to be oppressive.

I had always been accounted a talkative man. One could read in her face that she had the wit to sparkle in conversation like champagne in cut glass, yet under the constraint that had settled over us, we labored as platitudinously as a knickerbockered boy and a school-girl entertaining her first caller.

"I have traveled a little," I answered.

"And encountered unusual adventures?"

"No – just traveled."

"Billy says," she went on as graciously as though I had not rebuffed every conversational advance, "that you were shipwrecked in the south seas and wounded by savages."

"Billy!" My bruised consciousness flinched under the familiarity of the title and I fell back upon shameless churlishness.

"A nigger stuck me with a spear," I admitted shortly.

She glanced quickly up with perplexity. Her eyes seemed to read that I was not at heart a boor and her graciousness remained impervious to my ruffianism.

"I wish," she said slowly, "you would tell me about it, or are you one of the men who tell women only empty and pretty things?"

There was a vagrant hint of wistfulness in the tone of the question. I wondered if she had been fed, like the girl of our diary, too much on sweetmeats, and wanted a more nutritious fare.

"It wouldn't interest you," I apologized, melting at once to penitence. Then for a moment came a wild up-sweep of emotion. It was one of those impulses which master men and, when the trend is violent, make the eyes swim with blood and the hand rise to murder. With me it swept to sentiment, and carried me uncontrollably in its undertow.

"I wish," I said with an intensity which must have carried a note of wildness, "I wish to God I were back on that island now!"

The perplexed questioning of her eyes steadied me again into self-command.

"I crave your pardon," I said with a disingenuous laugh. "It's the call of the wild."

"Perhaps I understand something of that call," was her enigmatical reply.

I wondered. Could she understand? This woman with the perfect drawing-room poise; this creature of exquisite art? Even if I were absolutely free to tell her the whole story, from Suez to the Golden Gate, how much and how little would it mean to her? Could she comprehend a passion fired with no touch of the physical, painted horizon-wide against a canvas of cobalt sky? Perhaps not, but I wished as I had never wished any other thing that I might have been privileged to learn.

Her personality, even in silence, wove an aura of subtle magic about her. She wore at her breast several hot-house orchids. They were pale and exotic, quick wilting and artificial. Already the edges of their petals were curling and darkening. Was she like them? Could she have carried her splendid shoulders with the same grace through jungles and over mountains? Could she bloom with the wild splendor of those other orchids in the sterner environment of God's great out-of-doors?

She smiled as she questioned me.

"You are sceptical of my power to understand things, aren't you?"

"I was wondering," I answered, "just what you meant by it."

"I meant," she said slowly, as her eyes clouded again with that wistfulness which had a few moments before cost me my self-control, "that civilized women lead even narrower lives than civilized men. Maybe they feel even more strongly than men the longing for wider, freer things."

"But in these times," I inanely suggested, struggling to maintain the pretense of conversation, "woman has a full measure of liberty."

She tossed her head with an airy contempt for my reasoning and bent her eyes for a moment on the tip of her satin slipper. "About as much as a canary in a cage," she announced, "and we are expected to sing joyously for our cuttle bone and hemp seed. I wonder that it never seems to occur to you men that we women may want something more than that; that we may not be satisfied after all to hear affectionate things chirped through the cage wires – that even human canaries may be able to conceive of some horizon broader than a window-sill with a pot or two of geraniums to give it color."

I loved this woman. Why in all conscience did my heart leap almost triumphantly at the hint that she was restive in captivity? Was it merely because it was not I who was her captor? Was it jealousy feeding on the crumbs of a misery shared? There was a long silence.

She had been toying as she talked with a slender gold chain, and under an involuntary emphasis of her fingers it had given way. She was now trying to close the broken link with her teeth. I stepped forward and, without realizing that I was doing it, caught her hand in my restraining fingers. She looked up quickly.

"I beg your pardon," I said hastily, "but don't bite that with your teeth."

"If I bite it at all," she replied with impervious logic, "I must bite it with my teeth."

I took it from her and began the simple work of repair. The contact of my fingers had left me vibrating, and as I bent my face over the chain, my hands were trembling.

"Why," she demanded in a soft voice, leaning back and clasping her hands behind her head, "won't you tell me the story of your island?" Into the question crept a teasing note of whimsical insistence.

"Because," I answered, "there is a part of it which I couldn't tell you – and without that there is nothing to tell."

"Will you tell me some other time when you know me better?" she inquired as naively as a little girl, pleading for a favorite fairy tale.

At every turn she flashed a new angle of herself to view. At one moment she was impressively regal, at the next an appealing, coaxing child; at one instant her eyes hinted at heart-hunger and at the next her lips knew no curves but those of laughter.

And yet there was a thing about it all that hurt and disappointed me. With nothing tangible, there was still, in a subtle way, much which was sheer coquetry of eye and lip. It was invitation. Why did she challenge me to forbidden things so easy to say, so impossible to unsay? She must know that from the moment I saw her I had stood at a crisis; and that this was true only because I loved her. Such things need no words for their telling.