One Wonderful Night | Page 5

and himself threw open the window. Glancing out,
he discovered that he was located in a corner which commanded a
distant glimpse of Broadway. Directly before his eyes, in the topmost
story of a comparatively low building, a lady who had forgotten to
draw the blinds of her flat was apparently indulging in calisthenic
exercises, so Curtis, being a modest man, drew the blind in his own
room, and busied himself with a partial unpacking of his baggage. The
door faced the bed, at a distance of some six feet. A wardrobe occupied
the recess, and the negro, while unstrapping a steel trunk at the foot of
the bed, balanced the bag of golf clubs against the front of the
wardrobe--an action simple enough in itself, but comparable in its after
effects to the setting of a clock attached to a bomb.
Soon afterwards, Curtis dismissed the man, and noticed casually that
the opening of the door caused a pleasant draught of cool air. He wrote
a few letters, dressed, electing for a Tuxedo and black tie, filled a
cigar-case, donned a green Homburg hat, threw an overcoat over his
left arm, picked up the letters, extinguished the lights, and went out.
Again there came that rush of air from the window, and, just as the lock
snapped, a crash from the interior announced the falling of the golf

clubs, probably owing to a swaying of the wardrobe door.
Simultaneously, Curtis realized that he had left the key on the
dressing-table.
It was hardly worth while searching the floor for a chamber-maid: he
decided to inform the civil-spoken clerk, and have the key brought to
the office, at which sapient resolve Puck, who was surely abroad in
New York that night, must have chuckled delightedly. Unhappily, there
were other spirits brooding in the city, spirits before whose deathly
scowls the prime mischief-maker would have fled in terror, and Curtis,
all unwitting, brushed against one of them in the hall. His only
acquaintance, the clerk, was momentarily absent, so he turned to a
bookstall and cigar counter, and bought some stamps. A man who had
been seated in a sort of café, which the news-stand and a flower-stall
partially screened from the main hall, rose hurriedly when he saw
Curtis, and purchased a cigar. In doing so, he touched the young man's
shoulder, and said: "Pardon!"
Curtis turned, and looked into the singularly unprepossessing face of a
swarthy foreigner, a powerfully-built, ungainly person of about his own
age.
"That's all right," said he, licking a stamp.
"I jostled you by accident, monsieur," said the other, in correct French,
though with a quaint accent which Curtis, himself no mean linguist, put
down to a Polish or Czech nationality.
"Ca ne fait rien," he replied civilly, and the stamping of the letters
being completed, he took them to the letter-box.
The stranger, who seemed to be rather puzzled, if somewhat reassured,
dawdled over the lighting of the cigar, and watched Curtis enter the
dining-room. Then he went back to his chair in the café. So much, and
no more, did the youth in charge of the counter observe--not a great
deal, but it went a long way before midnight.
A clock in the hall showed that the hour was five minutes to seven.

Half hoping that Devar might actually put in an appearance a little later,
Curtis gave his hat and coat to a negro, and decided to dine in the hotel.
Evidently, the place still retained its old-time repute as a family and
commercial resort. The family element was in evidence at some of the
tables, while, in the case of solitary diners, each man could have been
labeled Pittsburg, Chicago, or Philadelphia, almost without error, by
those acquainted with the industrial life of the United States.
He ate well, if simply, and treated himself to a small bottle of a noted
champagne. At half-past seven, meaning to give Devar ten minutes'
grace, he ordered coffee and a glass of green Chartreuse. As a
time-killer, there is no liqueur more potent, but, regarded in the light of
subsequent occurrences, it would be hard to say exactly how far the
cunning monkish decoction helped in determining his wayward actions.
Undoubtedly, some fantastic influence carried him beyond those
bounds of calm self-possession within which everyone who knew John
Delancy Curtis would have expected to find him. His subsequent
light-headedness, his placid acceptance of a mad romance as the one
thing that was inevitable, his ready yielding to impulse, his no less
stubborn refusal to return to the beaten path of common sense--these
unlikely traits in a character gifted with the New England dourness of
purpose can only be explained, if at all, as arising from some
unsuspected hereditary streak of knight-errantry brought into sudden
and exotic