The Portal of Dreams

by Charles Neville Buck

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 manuscript 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 accumulation of unimportant things. Old advertisements 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.

"Hello," he said, "how long have you been gone?"

"Little less than a year."