The Portal of Dreams Part 9

For a long time he stood musing over the recital. He had seen enough of life's grotesqueries to understand it. Finally he asked:

"Will you read me some of your diary?"

I took him to my cabin and for an hour he listened while I read the hastily scrawled pages that I had set down. Of course I read them with a certain diffidence because it had occurred to me that certain phases might strike a man living in civilization as the vagaries of a brain touched with sun and isolation. Indeed, I was surrept.i.tiously watching his face from time to time as a man might watch a jury box when he is on trial for lunacy, but I was rea.s.sured to find there no politely veiled judgment against my sanity.

"It's decidedly interesting," he said at last, "though it's one of the things we would rule out as too improbable to believe if we didn't happen to know it was true. In the first place I have been reliably informed by many expert witnesses that the South Seas have long since given up their last secrets as to undiscovered islands."

"I was also convinced of that," I admitted, "until I was cast up on one.

I am now prepared to believe there are many others. Whenever I live six months in a place I am ready to admit its existence."

He refilled and lighted his pipe, then he said, "I don't want to invade private precincts, but after hearing that I'd like to see the portrait.

May I?"

I delved into the mate's chest, and unwrapped the newspaper page.

For some moments he gazed at it, and I began to wonder whether it held the same magic infatuation for every one else that it did for me. His expression was enigmatical and his voice, when he spoke at last, was puzzled.

"It's very hackneyed," he said, "but we must go on saying it. The world is an extremely small place."

"What do you mean?" I demanded.

He was still looking at the picture and he spoke reflectively as though I had not been present.

"The loveliest girl in Dixie. They all said so."

"In Dixie," I echoed eagerly, "Do you mean you know her?"

"I've danced with her a dozen times," he answered, "and yet I can't say I know her. I remember that all the men were paying court, and I fancy I should have been smitten like the rest except that my wife had just accepted me, and I had only one pair of eyes."

"For G.o.d's sake," I said very quietly, "let me have all that you know about her--name--address."

"It was four years ago," he explained. "We were all at Bar Harbor. She was visiting at one of the cottages there. I was so engrossed with my own courtship that other girls, even this wonderful one, didn't count with me. I don't know where she lived, except that she was from the South. Her name was Frances." He broke off and an expression of extreme vexation clouded his face.

"I know her first name," I urged him. "It's the surname I need."

"Yes," he responded, "of course. Her surname was----" Again he halted and an embarra.s.sed flush spread over his cheeks and forehead. Then he spoke impulsively. "You must bear with me. It's ludicrous, but the name has slipped me. It's just at the tip of my tongue, yet I can't call it.

This thing is inexcusable, but ever since that first trip to the Islands I've been subject to it. Names which I know perfectly, elude me--sometimes for a few moments, sometimes for weeks."

"Can't you remember it," I demanded insistently, "if you cudgel your brain? I don't care how mercilessly you cudgel it. I must know."

He nodded. "I quite understand. It has slipped me. I shall remember it by morning, but--" his voice became graver.

"But what?" I inquired.

"I'm afraid it's too late to help you. We heard just before leaving the place that she was to marry some man at home. It hadn't been formally announced, but I think it was quite definite."

I suppose he said good-night and that I replied. I don't remember his leaving the stateroom. I recall standing some time later alone on the deck and seeing a white-clad officer tramping the bridge. His noiseless feet seemed to be treading upon me. The one honeymoon couple on our pa.s.senger-list pa.s.sed and halted to comment on the rare quality of the air and the splendid softness of the stars. The little bride laughed delightedly. "Oh, Mr. Deprayne," she enthused, "it was under skies like this that Stevenson wrote,

"'The world is so full of a number of things, That I feel we should all be as happy as kings.'"

I smiled. "Yes," I murmured, "a number of things. Possibly too many things."

There was running through my memory a pa.s.sage from the diary written by the unknown girl. It was one of those pa.s.sages that had stuck in my memory through the shipwreck and the island days, a note of optimism which I had liked, partly because it was rather too imaginative to be accepted as fact. Now it mocked me.

"It's not just to-day's wonderful things that make life fair," she had written, "but it's knowing that there is to be a to-morrow, and that that same to-morrow will be lovelier than to-day. I know (I can't say why unless it's just that some voice keeps singing it to my heart), that some day he will come walking into my life as into a place where he has the right to be and our lives will after that be one life. That is the to-morrow I am waiting for."

CHAPTER XIV

THE "ASH-TRASH LADY"

But when we parted at Honolulu the name was still eluding Keller's memory and I had to continue on my way uninformed.

I was at first all for breaking my journey and remaining with him until some flash of memory should bring back the one word I needed, but he pointed out to me that little would be gained by this course. I think he was, in fact, so sensitive as to the mental quirk which had survived his attack that the idea of a man's shadowing him, waiting for him to remember, was unwelcome and would have taxed his self-respect. I felt bound to regard his whim, inasmuch as he promised that if I would wait a while, two or three weeks at the most, he would arm me with information.

Even if his memory continued to play truant, a word with his wife, when he met her, would set him straight, and he would at once communicate with me.

At all events, as we shook hands, looking out across the sapphire bay, we both pretended that the lapse of his memory was a trivial thing. I did not affect indifference for its subject, but I a.s.sured him that inasmuch as I had still some days of voyage ahead of me it was quite probable that the name might come to his memory again before I landed in 'Frisco, and I made him promise that if such was the case he would cable the important surname to the St. Francis. There was still the bare chance, he reminded me, that the rumored engagement had not after all resulted in marriage. He fell back on those adages calculated to convey last hope to the forlorn, and since there was nothing else to be done I accepted his lame comfort in the spirit that prompted it. Possibly now that I had before me the prospect of learning the ident.i.ty of the lady I really welcomed a few days of uncertainty. At least while they lasted I should have the shred of possible hope and could be shaping my resolution to face the answer. Long after one has told himself that there is no longer a chance of hope he none the less clings to a shred, and when I arrived at the hotel St. Francis and inquired for a cablegram, I think that relief outweighed disappointment as the clerk ran through the miscellaneous sheaf of messages and shook his head. "I don't find anything," he said, and strange as it may seem, I felt like a reprieved man who still faces dreaded news but has not actually received it.

Before that breakfast at the club my life had been merely prefatory; a sum of dilute emotions. At Harvard I had taken my degree and won my "H"

on the gridiron. Since then I had gone through my days just missing every goal. There had been little even of innocuous flirtation and nothing of grand pa.s.sion.

I had tried to paint, and my masters discovered promise which came to nothing. I adventured into the practise of law and went briefless. I essayed music without distinction. I finally decided that my genius was seeking its goal along mistaken avenues. It should be mine to move men and women to smiles and tears by the magic of pen and ink and printed word. But the editors were on duty. They received my a.s.saults on a phalanx of blue pencils. They flung me back, defeated and unpublished.

Perhaps had I fallen in love, it might have been different. Had some woman kindled the sleeping fires in me I might not have remained an extinct volcano of a man. Perhaps, so energized, I might have incited juries to tears--and verdicts. Possibly I might have stormed the editorial outposts and set my banner of ma.n.u.script at the forefront of literature. Be that as it may, I had heretofore never loved.

Now I did. Now I was the most quaintly tortured of men; wholly, unqualifiedly and to the depths, stirred by the worship of a woman I had never seen. Moreover she was probably some other man's wife and the mother of his children.

She had come to me over the sea, bringing with her my destiny. She had smiled on me and saved me. She had taken tribute of my soul. Now it was ended. I had worshiped her among crags of coral, under the dome of a volcano. I had come to think of her as a splendid and vivid orchid which a man might hope to wear very proudly at the heart of his life. To what end had the Fates lured me into this cul-de-sac?

I made the rest of the journey in a fog of sullen misery, and emerged, at its end, from the Pennsylvania station a morose and hopeless man. As a taxicab bore me to my club I felt a tremendous suspense. Doubtless there was a message there. If Keller's memory had flashed back to him, as memory sometimes does, the name in which I was so vitally interested, information should have arrived before me in New York. Since it had not intercepted me in San Francisco I judged that the blank had not, up to that time been filled. Supposing that he had remained in Hawaii a week, he would have left there a day after I arrived in 'Frisco, and then for the six days at sea I should hardly expect him to communicate with me.

But I had stopped two days in the coast city, arranging financial affairs by telegraph, since I had landed stripped of everything but my chest and my borrowed clothes.

I had also crossed the continent, and by this time he should also have arrived in the States, unless his sailing had been again delayed. Of course I recognized that he had many things close to his own heart, but this service to me involved only the asking of a single question, which his wife could answer in one word. I was sure that he would not prove laggard in the matter, and so I braced myself at the door of the Club to receive tidings which might put hope to death, or might by bare possibility, give it new life.

And yet my mail held only the acc.u.mulation of unimportant things. Old advertis.e.m.e.nts and invitations and bills, many of which had come while I was out there at the edge of things.

Could it be, I asked myself, that Keller had forgotten me, too? Had it been possible that the card upon which I had so carefully written my address had been misplaced? I had been willing to put off the moment at San Francisco. Now I found myself eagerly impatient for the answer.

In the breakfast-room I encountered the doctor, who was dallying over a cup of coffee and a morning paper. He glanced up and for a moment his eyes lingered.

"h.e.l.lo," he said, "how long have you been gone?"

"Little less than a year."

"You went away a youngish sort of man and you return with distinguished white temples." He summarized. "There must be a story locked up in you."