The Firefly of France | Page 4

the Hotel St. Ives seems, as I look back on it, an odd
spot to have served as stage wings for a melodrama, pure and simple.
Yet a melodrama did begin there. No other word fits the case. The inns
of the Middle Ages, which, I believe, reeked with trap-doors and
cutthroats, pistols and poisoned daggers, offered nothing weirder than
my experience, with its first scene set beneath this roof. The food there
is superperfect, every luxury surrounds you, millionaires and traveling
princes are your fellow-guests. Still, sooner than pass another night
there, I would sleep airily in Central Park, and if I had a friend seeking
New York quarters, I would guide him toward some other place.
It was pure chance that sent me to the St. Ives for the night before my
steamer sailed. Closing the doors of my apartment the previous week
and bidding good-bye to the servants who maintained me there in
bachelor state and comfort, I had accompanied my friend Dick Forrest
on a farewell yacht cruise from which I returned to find the first two
hotels of my seeking packed from cellar to roof. But the third had a free
room, and I took it without the ghost of a presentiment. What would or
would not have happened if I had not taken it is a thing I like to
speculate on.
To begin with, I should in due course have joined an ambulance section
somewhere in France. I should not have gone hobbling on crutches for
a painful three months or more. I should not have in my possession four
shell fragments, carefully extracted by a French surgeon from my
fortunately hard head. Nor should I have lived through the dreadful
moment when that British officer at Gibraltar held up those papers,
neatly folded and sealed and bound with bright, inappropriately
cheerful red tape, and with an icy eye demanded an explanation beyond
human power to afford.
All this would have been spared me. But, on the other hand, I could not

now look back to that dinner on the Turin-Paris /rapide/. I should never
have seen that little, ruined French village, with guns booming in the
distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and
over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would
now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should
never have met the most beautiful-- Well, all clouds have silver linings;
some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I
stopped at the St. Ives; not in the least!
At any rate, there I was at eight o'clock of a Wednesday evening in a
restaurant full of the usual lights and buzz and glitter, among women in
soft-hued gowns, and men in their hideous substitute for the same.
Across the table sat my one-time guardian, dear old Peter Dunstan,--
Dunny to me since the night when I first came to him, a very tearful,
lonesome, small boy whose loneliness went away forever with his
welcoming hug,--just arrived from home in Washington to eat a
farewell dinner with me and to impress upon me for the hundredth time
that I had better not go.
"It's a wild-goose chase," he snapped, attacking his entree savagely.
Heaven knows it was to prove so, even wilder than his dreams could
paint; but if there were geese in it, myself included, there was also to be
a swan.
"You don't really mean that, Dunny," I said firmly, continuing my
dinner. It was a good dinner; we had consulted over each item from
cocktails to liqueurs, and we are both distinctly fussy about food.
"I do mean it!" insisted my guardian. Dunny has the biggest heart in the
world, with a cayenne layer over it, and this layer is always thickest
when I am bound for distant parts. "I mean every word of it, I tell you,
Dev." Dev, like Dunny, is a misnomer; my name is Devereux
--Devereux Bayne. "Don't you risk your bones enough with the
confounded games you play? What's the use of hunting shells and
shrapnel like a hero in a movie reel? We're not in this war yet, though
we soon will be, praise the Lord! And till we are, I believe in
neutrality--upon my soul I do."

"Here's news, then!" I exclaimed. "I never heard of it before. Well, your
new life begins too late, Dunny. You brought me up the other way. The
modern system, you know, makes the parent or guardian responsible
for the child. So thank yourself for my unneutral nature and for the war
medals I'm going to win!"
Muttering something about impertinence, he veered to another tack.
"If you must do it," he croaked, "why sail for Naples instead of for
Bordeaux? The Mediterranean