The Portal of Dreams Part 10

I glanced impatiently at the card and called for eggs.

"I haven't been nibbling at life this time," I retorted with some touch of asperity.

"I didn't instruct you to gluttonize," he reminded me.

I gave him only a partial history. Even the revised version of my adventures, which I had by this time learned to tell glibly enough to conceal the fact that I was omitting the major part, was sufficiently beyond the rut of things to beguile a half-hour in the eventless walls of a Manhattan club. But my table-companion eyed me with his customary and disquieting sharpness, and finally fell into his old habit of diagnosis.

"Something is lying heavily on your mind, Deprayne," he announced, "and it's not merely the memory of cannibals and exposure. Dangers of that sort become pleasant reminiscences when we view them through the retrospective end of the gla.s.ses. There's something else. What is it?"

I laughed at him over my raised coffee-cup. This was one man above all others in whom I should not confide the facts. He would promptly have prescribed a sanatorium.

"Nonsense!" I scoffed, and just as I said it a bell-boy arrived at the table with a telegram on a small silver tray.

"A message for Mr. Deprayne."

I was totally unable to control the violent start that caused the cup to drop on the tablecloth with a crash, and doubtless made my face momentarily pale. My effort at regained composure did not escape the doctor. I saw his eyes narrow and heard him murmur, "Nerves. Shaken nerves."

I took the telegram, calmly enough. I had had my moment of excitement and was again calm. I even held the missive unopened as the dining-room boys spread a clean napkin over the coffee stains. Then with a murmur of apology I tore the end and drew out the blank. I don't think the doctor detected the disgust of perusal.

"Have just arrived from Florida. If in town call and see me. Aunt Sarah."

Aunt Sarah was one of those disquieting persons who loathe telephones and note-paper. Her city messages came by wire with the insistence of commands.

The end was that the doctor decided I must get my mind active, and after vainly trying to bully me back into literary effort he took a new tack.

"Are you too surly and apathetic to combine a small service to friends with the augmenting of your own fortunes?" he demanded, and before I could reply he fell into the discussion of a matter which just now lay at the front of his interests. There was a Kentuckian in town, with glowing projects for fortune reaping along the ridges of the c.u.mberlands. He was not a mere promoter, but a man of large means and ability, who was also much the gentleman. His present scheme of things required the enlistment of additional capital, and he had come to men who had interested the doctor as well as themselves. The Kentuckian had suggested, however, that before committing themselves in the matter they send one of their own number with him to look over the options. None of the others, as it happened, could go. Here, declared the doctor, was my opportunity to try the novelty of useful occupation.

The man, whose name was Weighborne, was to lunch with him. Would I meet him and talk it over, and if I was favorably impressed accompany him to the Kentucky mountains?

We were sitting by a Fifth Avenue window as he outlined the matter with persuasiveness. The sky was drear with the ash gray of autumn. 'Busses, motors and taxis were trailing along in the same old hopeless monotony.

At the thought of remaining here I sickened. Until a letter or message could arrive from Keller I could do little, and this trip would take only ten days or two weeks. I now inferred that Keller had awaited the next steamer. If that were so there would still be the six days at sea.

At all events Kentucky is on the telegraph lines. His word could follow me there without loss of time. Then he had said, "the loveliest girl in Dixie." South of Mason and Dixon's line I might be closer to my discoveries when the name arrived. But above all that, I must fill in the time of waiting with some sort of action. There in the hills I should at least be away from the scenes which, in the few hours since my return, had begun to spell insufferable _ennui_. Yes, I said I would meet Mr. Weighborne. Why not?

Having promised to be on hand at two o'clock, I began a strange quest that came to nothing. In Times Square and Park Row I spent several dusty hours running through newspaper files, and going back to dates five and six years old. I was hunting for a pictorial section of the same general style as that which bore the portrait. I found one or two printed with a like make-up on similar paper, but not even of the exact size, and although I followed these through the Sundays of several years, I came in the end only to the conclusion that the paper had been printed outside of New York.

Weighborne impressed me. In physique and mind and energy he was big and virile. One could glance at him in his carelessly correct clothes and know that he would be equally at home in drawing-room or saddle. The Kentuckian had to cut short his visit with us, since he was leaving the same day for the South, and what talk we had was limited in its scope.

Yet his personality charmed me and compelled admiration. He was that type of man who escaped the preliminaries with which the average promoter of large schemes must convince his hearers. His own bearing and breadth carried with it an a.s.surance of trustworthiness and energy. His steady gray eyes had a compelling and purposeful clarity, and I could not help thinking as we talked what such a companions.h.i.+p would have meant in those other days of loneliness and danger. Weighborne was the sort of fellow one would like to have at his back in difficulties. I agreed to meet him in Lexington three days hence and accompany him to the properties which he hoped to develop.

There was a minor element of personal risk, he warned me. We should perhaps encounter the dislike of certain men who were of the feudist type. He spoke lightly of this feature, but as a matter concerning which it was only the part of fairness to inform me.

Later in the day while glancing over the papers I came upon the announcement that a new play was to have its premiere that evening at a Broadway house, and in the name of the author, I found my interest piqued. Bob Maxwell was an old friend. He had fought a long fight for success and had found the G.o.ddess cold and offstanding. We had been fellows in literary aspiration, and he had been, when I last saw him, still floundering for support in the unstable waters of newspaperdom. If his play succeeded, he was made. I tried vainly to reach him by 'phone, and went that evening to the theater to lend my applause.

From the unpainted side of the stage-sets I listened to the salvoes of handclapping that were waves lifting him to success.

When at last the ordeal was over and my friend's triumph a.s.sured, he led me along the whitewashed walls to the star's dressing room. In response to his rapping, the door opened on a scene of confusion. The young woman whom the coming of this night had made a star turned upon us, from her make-up mirror, a triumphantly flushed face.

The place was aglow with elation. The spirit of success showed even in the movements of the quiet little French maid as she gathered and stored the beribboned linen which still littered the green-room. Grace Bristol herself took a quick, impulsive step forward and placed a grateful hand on each of the author's shoulders. For me, when I was presented, she had only a hurried nod of greeting.

"Thank G.o.d, Bobby!" she exclaimed with a half-hysterical catch in her throat. "Thank G.o.d, it's over. My knees were knocking so while I was waiting for my entrance cue that I wanted to run away and hide."

"I know," he said. "I was watching you. You were green under the paint, Grace."

"If you'd spoken to me just then, I'd have screamed and had spasms," she laughed, "but now--" she pointed victoriously to a maze of roses on her dresser--"there are the flowers that glow under gla.s.s, tra-la! You wrote me the bulliest part I ever played, old pal. You made me a star." I had come to-night simply to congratulate. I had known something of my friend's struggles and I wished to be among those who were there to say "well done." My own thoughts were coursing in channels far away from the life of theaters and green-rooms, where this young woman, undeniably pretty, beyond doubt talented, was enjoying her moment of high triumph.

In her delight was that hysterical touch which stamps moments of reaction. She had been through the ordeal of a "first night" and now she knew that the experiment was successful. Bobby too must have had the same exaltation, though his masculine nature did not break so frankly into emotion. I felt that I was the extra person, entirely superfluous, so I murmured some good-night and started to leave the place. But my friend stopped me.

"I want to talk with you later, old man," he said, and I remained to be, as it developed, catapulted into a new discovery.

Bobby helped Miss Bristol into her coat and the two of us gathered up as many of the flowers as we could carry and made our way with her through the stage-entrance and out into the street. As we hailed a taxi' at the curb, the night life of never-sleeping places was racing at full tide along Broadway, and swirling in an eddy about Longacre Square. It bore on its crest its gay flotillas of pleasure--and its drift of derelicts.

To me it pointed all the miserable morals of contrast.

"Where to?" inquired Bobby. "Do you show yourself in triumph at Rector's grill, or go home to dream of applauding thousands?"

The lady shrugged her shapely shoulders.

"Me for the hay!" she announced with prompt decisiveness. "Jump in, boys," she invited in afterthought. "I may as well drive you down to your rooms and drop you first. I need a breath of air to quiet my nerves."

Out of the garish color and clangor of Broadway, we swept into the tempered quiet of Fifth Avenue, stretching ghostlike between the twin threads of electric opals.

"We must both be pretty tired," he suggested when Was.h.i.+ngton Arch loomed ahead. "We haven't spoken since Herald Square."

"I'm too happy to talk," she answered. "For ten pretty rough years I've been building for to-night." She sighed contentedly, then went on, "I began about the usual way ... musical comedy ... in tights ... carrying a spear. My first promotion was to the front row. I wasn't fool enough to kid myself into the notion that it was because I was a Melba or a Fiske. If I used to go to my hall bedroom every night and cry myself to sleep it was n.o.body's business but my own." She must have felt Maxwell's eyes on her, for her voice took on a note of the defiant as she added, "And if I didn't always go straight to my hall bedroom, maybe that was my own business too." She seemed to be reviewing her struggle as she leaned restfully back against the cus.h.i.+ons with to-night's roses in her lap. Her lids drooped contentedly. "But to-night," she added, "well, to-night I felt all that was paid for and the receipt signed. How do you feel, Bobby?"

"Glad it's over," said the man. "I'm tired."

"It hasn't been just exactly a snap for you either," she sympathetically conceded. "When I first knew you, you were haunting Park Row for a cheap job, and getting canned by office boys. It's been a long way, we've come, boy, but we kept plugging when the going was bad, and now, thank G.o.d, we've arrived."

The taxi' drew up before the door of the house where Maxwell had his quarters. It was a dingy building which has harbored under its roof the beginnings of a half-dozen literary reputations.

"Bobby," said the young woman suddenly, "have you any Scotch in your rooms?"

He reflected.

"I believe there's some Bourbon left in the bottle," he admitted.

"'Twill have to do," she said with a grimace. "I believe I'll climb the steps and have a highball. We ought to toast the piece, you know. It's been good to us."

"I thought you were too tired," suggested the author in surprise. "We might have stopped where they had champagne."

"I didn't want wine. But I need a quiet little chat to work off this nervousness."

In his sitting-room Bobby announced, "I've got to pack. I'm leaving in the morning. Deprayne will entertain you with traveler's tales."

Miss Bristol paused with her hands raised and her hatpins half drawn.

Her face, for a moment, clouded.

"Where are you going?"

"Out west for a month or two."