Produced by Dagny; John Bickers
THE FIREFLY OF FRANCE
by Marion Polk Angellotti
TO
THE MEMORY OF
THE HEROIC GUYNEMER
“THE ACE OF THE ACES”
PREPARER’S NOTE
This text was prepared from a 1918 edition,
published by The Century Co., New York.
THE FIREFLY OF FRANCE
CHAPTER I
ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS
The restaurant of 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 is full of those pirate fellows. You
read the papers--the headlines anyway; you know it as well as I. It’s
suicide, no less! Those Huns sank the _San Pietro_ last week. I say,
young man, are you listening? Do you hear what I’m telling you?”
It was true that my gaze had wandered near the close of his harangue.
I like to look at my guardian; the fine old chap, with his height and
straightness, his bright blue eyes and proud silver head, is a sight for
sore eyes, as they say. But just then I had glimpsed something that was
even better worth seeing. I am not impressionable, but I must confess
that I was impressed by this girl.
She sat far down the room from me. Only her back was visible and a
somewhat blurred side-view reflected in the mirror on the wall. Even so
much was, however, more than welcome, including as it did a smooth white
neck, a small shell-like ear, and a mass of warm, crinkly, red-brown
hair. She wore a rose-colored gown, I noticed, cut low, with a string of
pearls; and her sole escort was a staid, elderly, precise being, rather
of the trusted family-lawyer type.
“I haven’t missed a word, Dunny,” I assured my vis-a-vis. “I was just
wondering if Huns and pirates had quite a neutral sound. You know I have
to go via Rome to spend a week with Jack Herriott. He has been pestering
me for a good two years--ever since he’s been secretary there.”
Grumbling unintelligible things, my guardian sampled his Chablis; and I,
crumbling bread, lazily wishing I could get a front view of the girl in
rose-color, filled the pause by rambling on.
“Duty calls me,” I declared. “You see, I was born in France. Shabby
treatment on my parents’ part I’ve always thought it; if they had
hurried home before the event I might have been President and declared
war here instead of hunting one across the seas. In that case, Dunny,
I should have heeded your plea and stayed; but since I’m ineligible for
chief executive, why linger on this side?”
He scowled blackly.
“I’ll tell you what it is, my boy,” he accused, with lifted forefinger.
“You like to pose--that’s what is the matter with you! You like to act
stolid, matter-of-fact, correct; you want to sit in your ambulance and
smoke cigarettes indifferently and raise your eyebrows superciliously
when shrapnel bursts round. And it’s all very well now; it looks
picturesque; it looks good form, very. But how old are you, eh, Dev?
Twenty-eight is it? Twenty-nine?”
“You should know--none better--that I am thirty,” I responded. “Haven’t
you remembered each anniversary since I was five, beginning with a
hobby-horse and working up through knives and rifles and ponies to the
latest thing in cars?”
Dunny lowered his accusing finger and tapped it on the cloth.
“Thirty,” he repeated fatefully. “All right, Dev. Strong and fit as an
ox, and a crack polo-player and a fair shot and boxer and not bad with
boats and cars and horses and pretty well off, too. So when you look
bored, it’s picturesque; but wait! Wait ten years, till you take on
flesh, and the doctor puts you on diet, and you stop hunting chances to
kill yourself, but play golf like me. Then, my boy, when you look stolid
you won’t be romantic. You’ll be stodgy, my boy. That’s what you’ll be!”
Of all words in the dictionary there is surely none worse than this one.
The suggestions of stodginess are appalling, including, even at best,
hints of overweight, general uninterestingness, and a disposition to sit
at home in smoking-jacket and slippers after one’s evening meal. As my
guardian suggested, my first youth was over. I held up both my hands in
token that I asked for grace.
“_Kamerad_!” I begged pathetically. “Come, Dunny, let’s be sociable.
After all, you know, it’s my last evening; and if you call me such
names, you will be sorry when I am gone. By the way, speaking of
Huns--it was you, the neutral, who mentioned them,--does it strike you
there are quite a few of them on the staff of this hotel? I hope they
won’t poison me. Look at the head waiter, look at half the waiters
round, and see that blond-haired, blue-eyed menial. Do you think he saw
his first daylight in these United States?”
The menial in question was a uniformed bellboy winding in and out among
tables and paging some elusive guest. As he approached, his chant grew
plainer.
“Mr. Bayne,” he was droning. “Room four hundred and three.”
I raised a hand in summons, and he paused beside my seat.
“Telephone call for you, sir,” he informed me.
With a word to my guardian, I pushed my chair back and crossed the room.
But at the door I found my path barred by the _maitre d’hotel_, who, at
the sight of my progress, had sprung forward, like an arrow from a bow.
“Excuse me, sir. You’re not leaving, are you?” The man was actually
breathing hard. Deferential as his bearing was, I saw no cause for the
inquiry, and with some amusement and more annoyance, I wondered if he
suspected me of slipping out to evade my bill.
“No,” I said, staring him up and down; “I’m not!” I passed down the hall
to the entrance of the telephone booths. Glancing back, I could see
him still standing there gazing after me; his face, I thought, wore a
relieved expression as he saw whither I was bound.
The queer incident left my mind as I secluded myself, got my connection,
and heard across the wire the indignant accents of Dick Forrest, my
former college chum. Upon leaving his yacht that morning, I had promised
him a certain power of attorney--Dick is a lawyer and is called a
good one, though I can never quite credit it--and he now demanded in
unjudicial heat why it had not been sent round.
“Good heavens, man,” I cut in remorsefully, “I forgot it! The thing
is in my room now. Where are you? That’s all right. You’ll have it by
messenger within ten minutes.” Hastily rehooking the receiver, I bolted
from my booth.
In the restaurant door against a background of paneled walls the _maitre
d’hotel_ still stood, as if watching for my return. I sprang into an
elevator just about to start its ascent, and saw his mouth fall open and
his feet bring him several quick steps forward.
“The man is crazy,” I told myself with conviction as I shot up four
stories in as many seconds and was deposited in my hall.
There was no one at the desk where the floor clerk usually kept vigil,
gossiping affably with such employees as passed. The place seemed
deserted; no doubt all the guests were downstairs. Treading lightly on
the thick carpet, I went down the hall to Room four hundred and three,
and found the door ajar and a light visible inside.
My bed, I supposed, was being turned down. I swung the door open, and
halted in my tracks. With his back to me, bent over a wide-open trunk
that I had left locked, was a man.
Stepping inside, I closed the door quietly, meanwhile scrutinizing my
unconscious visitor from head to foot. He wore no hotel insignia--was
neither porter, waiter, nor valet.
“Well, how about it? Anything there suit you?” I inquired affably, with
my back against the door.
Exclaiming gutturally, he whisked about and faced me where I stood quite
prepared for a rough-and-tumble. Instead of a typical housebreaker of
fiction, I saw a pale, rabbit-like, decent-appearing little soul. He
was neatly dressed; he seemed unarmed save for a great ring of assorted
keys; and his manner was as propitiatory and mild-eyed as that of any
mouse. There must be some mistake. He was some sober mechanic, not a
robber. But on the other hand, he looked ready to faint with fright.
“_Mein Gott_!” he murmured in a sort of fishlike gasp.
This illuminating remark was my first clue.
“Ah! _Mein Herr_ is German?” I inquired, not stirring from my place.
The demand wrought an instant change in him--he drew himself up, perhaps
to five feet five.
“Vat you got against the Germans?” he asked me, almost with menace. It
was the voice of a fanatic intoning “Die Wacht am Rhein”--of a zealot
speaking for the whole embattled _Vaterland_.
The situation was becoming farcical.
“Nothing in the world, I assure you,” I replied. “They are a simple,
kindly people. They are musical. They have given the world Schiller,
Goethe, the famous _Kultur_, and a new conception of the possibilities
of war. But I think they should have kept out of Belgium, and I feel the
same way about my room--and don’t you try to pull a pistol or I may feel
more strongly still.”
“I ain’t got no pistol, _nein_,” declared my visitor, sulkily. His
resentment had already left him; he had shrunk back to five feet three.
“Well, I have, but I’ll worry along without it,” I remarked, with
a glance at the nearest bag. As targets, I don’t regard my
fellow-creatures with great enthusiasm and, moreover, I could easily
have made two of this mousy champion of a warlike race. Illogically,
I was feeling that to bully him was sheer brutality. Besides this, my
dinner was not being improved by the delay.
“Look here,” I said amiably, “I can’t see that you’ve taken anything.
Speak up lively now; I’ll give you just one chance. If you care to tell
me how you got through a locked door and what you were after, I’ll let
you go. I’m off to the firing line, and it may bring me luck!”
Hope glimmered in his eyes. In broken English, with a childlike
ingenuousness of demeanor, he informed me that he was a first-class
locksmith--first-glass he called it--who had been sent by the management
to open a reluctant trunk. He had entered my room, I was led to infer,
by a mistake.
“I go now, _ja_?” he concluded, as postscript to the likely tale.
“The devil you do! Do you take me for an utter fool?” I asked, excusably
nettled, and stepping to the telephone, I took the receiver from its
hook.
“Give me the manager’s office, please,” I requested, watching my
visitor. “Is this the manager? This is Mr. Bayne speaking, Room four
hundred and three. I’ve found a man investigating my trunk--a foreigner,
a German.” An exclamation from the manager, and from the listening
telephone-girl a shriek! “Yes; I have him. Yes; of course I can hold
him. Send up your house detective and be quick! My dinner is spoiling--”
The receiver dropped from my hand and clattered against the wall. The
little German, suddenly galvanized, had leaped away from the trunk, not
toward me and the door beyond me, but toward the electric switch. His
fingers found and turned it, plunging the room into the darkness of the
grave. Taken unaware, I barred his path to the hall, only to hear him
fling up the window across the room. Against the faint square of light
thus revealed, I saw him hang poised a moment. Then with a desperate
noise, a moan of mixed resolve and terror, he disappeared.