The Portal of Dreams. Charles Buck
a figure which I recognized. It could be no other figure, for no other figure that I had ever seen could walk with the same triumphant and lissome grace. Again the face was turned away from me, and about her hat floated a confusing cloud of veil. But she had been there within a few feet and possibly had even heard my surly responses to her request for assistance. Possibly she had seen my wriggling feet while I, who would have esteemed it the greatest possible privilege to have assisted her in any way, had lain there surrounded by dust and profanity. I was seized with a mad impulse to run after her, but I knew that the return of my iron signified that their tire-mending was finished and they were on their journey.
My own repairs were not finished, and I stood there with streaks of grease across my face, caked with dust and by no means presenting the appearance with which a man might hope to appear acceptable in the eyes of divinity. Aunt Sarah and her bevy of young intellectuals, I found, had withdrawn to the greater comfort of a near-by road-house, and could give me no information, while Flannery's description was on the whole, unsatisfactory. The idiot had not asked her name, and in answer to all my questions could only assure me vaguely that the young lady was "a peach." One thing he had noticed. The car, which had passed us a quarter of an hour before was a large blue touring car, of high horse-power. It is strange what details impress certain minds and what goes unseen. So again I had missed my chance, and the incident had not served to reconcile me to my serfdom.
Several days later I had succeeded in gaining a brief leave of absence from my duties as courier, and was spending an interval of sadly needed rest.
I had the hope that the unknown girl and her party would be stopping for a while in one of the closely grouped towns along the coast: Nice, Cannes, Mentone, Monte Carlo – it mattered little which one it might be. If she was in any of these, I should eventually find her, and I haunted the dazzling whiteness of the Boulevard des Anglais, with a buoyant pulse beat of expectancy. At any moment I might again catch a glimpse of her in a shop or café, and if I did, I meant that it should be more than a glimpse, and that she should not again escape until I had at least seen her face. I spent most of my time wondering what she was like. Would the full view bring a greater sense of fascination or the pang of disillusionment? It might be that when I saw her I should find myself harshly awakened from a dream, but at all events, there would be certainty, and an end to the tantalizing sense of following a will-o'-the-wisp which constantly eluded. She gave me one very anxious afternoon. I had been taking a horseback ride near town when I came upon a wrecked and empty automobile. The physical facts showed clearly what had happened. The car had evidently skidded while speeding, in an effort to turn out for some passing vehicle, and had tried to climb a stone wall. There must have been a very ugly moment, as the twisted front wheels and crumpled hood attested. What frightened me was the fact that it was a large, blue touring car of the same sort, if not identical, with the one described by Flannery. I was commencing my ride when I saw it, but I turned back at once to town and began an investigation. I finally learned that the chauffeur for a local garage had taken a party of his own friends for a joy ride, and that the expedition had come to summary grief. My effort to trace the history of that particular car for a week or two past resulted in nothing. I was informed that it had been hired many times and to many unrecorded persons, usually for the afternoon or day.
Several nights later I was sitting at a roulette table in Monte Carlo's Cercle des Etrangers. I had fallen in with a coterie of chance acquaintances, who for some reason held faith in my luck and insisted upon my crowding into a vacant place at the wheel. My function was to submit to the issue of fortune not only my own stack of louis d'or, but also the considerable purse that they had raised among them.
My table was near the center of the main salle, and at my elbows crowded the little party of men and women whose interests hung upon my success or failure. It was the same old scene; the same old life that one sees year after year in this chief cathedral of the gods of chance. Men and women from both hemispheres stood or sat in the tense absorption of eyes riveted on dancing ball and whirling disc. At my right was a regally gowned woman whose delicate features were now as hard as agate and whose eyes were avid. At my left was a saturnine Spaniard who smiled indifferently, but who did not know his cigar had died to a stale coldness. I was experiencing the sense of disillusionment which invariably comes to me afresh when I enter the Casino of Monaco. I always ascend the stairs of the palace which the principality-supporting syndicate has provided for its patrons with a mild elation of expectancy. I always take my place at the tables with the realization of disappointment. The sparkle of jewels is there; sometimes the beauty is there, but the spirit that rules is not a spirit of gaiety; and the glitter of eyes makes me forget the diamonds. The cold lust of greed flashes in the hard brightness of set faces.
Between the droning announcements of the croupier insidious thoughts force themselves. I think of the management's efficient ambulance services; of the exhaustive arrangements by which unknown patrons may be promptly identified; and the sinister discoveries of the beach. These things were in my mind now as the stack of gold pieces at my front alternately piled and dwindled under a fitful sequence of petty losses and gains.
I may have been at the table an hour when I began to have the insistent feeling of someone in particular standing at my back. Of course, there were many people behind me. Besides my own party was the crowd of idle onlookers as well as others who were impatiently waiting to seize upon vacant places about the board.
And yet, just then I could not turn my head. My system involved leaving the winnings upon the table for three successive spins of the wheel. I had played a group of numbers in the black, cautiously avoiding the alluring perils of the greater odds, and twice my little pile of louis d'or had drawn in its prize money. On the third spin we stood to lose the entire amount of our augmented stake or see our pile swell commandingly. While I waited for the croupier to close the betting and touch the button, I twisted my head backward, to determine whose presence in the throng had so subtly announced itself to my consciousness. But the barrier of faces that pressed close against my chair cut off all who stood further back. The wheel raced; the ball danced madly about its rim; the crowd stood bating its breath; and the scattered piles of gold lay in doubt on the green baize diagram.
It was over. The croupier sang out the winning number, column and combinations. The rake was extended to push over to me a fairly imposing pile of French gold. I was conscious of coming in for more than my individual share of interest. Luck had been with me, and at Monte Carlo, the lucky man is the man of moment. But the sense of some personality above the many personalities was now borne in upon me with irritating force. I was impatient to rise and push back my chair and look about me, but as I attempted to do so, the men and women whose capital I had increased raised a chorus of remonstrance. I reluctantly resumed the place which I had been about to abdicate and once more laid out my stake. This time I pushed the entire pile out onto the green cloth in a pyramid on the black. I knew if I lost it they would willingly surrender my services. Even at that cost I wanted freedom.
For, in the moment that I had been standing there, I had caught a glimpse of a retreating figure, which disappeared through the door, almost at the instant that my eyes identified it. It was the figure of a woman in evening-dress, or rather, I should say, of the woman in evening-dress. There was the same graceful majesty of bearing, the same slim grace – and the same averted face. But because I wished to leave the table fortune pursued me. Spin after spin doubled, tripled, quadrupled my swelling pile of money. Finally I told them that I would remain for three more tests of chance – but no more. I could hardly abandon these enthused men and women without warning, but as soon as I had fulfilled the obligation, I rose, and I fear there was more of precipitate haste than of courtesy in my manner of shouldering my way through the press of onlookers, to the door and the wonderful embroidery of flower beds before the casino. Eyes followed me, for my luck had held and I was a momentary sensation. It was still early, as hours go in a place where the major activity belongs to night life, and for two hours I haunted the cafés and boulevards without result. The next day proved equally fruitless, but that night, as I was idling with my after-dinner cigar, along the Boulevard de Condemine, I saw strolling at some distance ahead of me, a young man and a girl. It was she, and I had only to hasten my steps to overtake and see her. I could guess that the man with her was a Frenchman. The cut of his clothes and the jaunty swagger of his bearing were distinctively Gallic. My imagination could read the title "fortune hunter" as though