story
It might be imagined that a hotel full of authors would be sure to generate some flashes of disagreement, but, for a time at least, everything went on charmingly at Hotel Helicon. True enough, the name of the occupant of room 24 remained a vexatious secret which kept growing more and more absorbing as certain very cunningly devised schemes for its exposure were easily thwarted; but even this gave the[19] gentleman a most excellent excuse for nagging the ladies in regard to feminine curiosity and lack of generalship. Under the circumstances it was not to be expected that everybody should be strictly guarded in the phrasing of speech, still so genial and good-humored was the nameless man and so engaging was his way of evading or turning aside every thrust, that he steadily won favor. Little Mrs. Philpot, whose seven year old daughter (a bright and sweet little child) had become the pet of Hotel Helicon, was enthusiastic in her pursuit of the stranger’s name, and at last she hit upon a plan that promised immediate success. She giggled all to herself, like a high-school girl, instead of like a widow of thirty, as she contemplated certain victory.
“Now do you think you can remember, dear?” she said to May, the child, after having explained over and over again what she wished her to do.
“Yeth,” said May, who lisped charmingly in the sweetest of child voices.
“Well, what must you say?”
“I muth thay: Pleathe write your—your——”
“Autograph.”
“Yeth, your au—to—graph in my album.”
“That’s right, autograph, autograph, don’t forget. Now let me hear you say it.”
“Pleathe write your autograph in my book.”
Mrs. Philpot caught the child to her breast and kissed it vigorously, and not long afterward little May went forth to try the experiment.[20] She was armed with her mother’s autograph album. When she approached her victim he thought he never had seen so lovely a child. The mother had not spared pains to give most effect to the little thing’s delicate and appealing beauty by an artistic arrangement of the shining gold hair and by the simplest but cunningest tricks of color and drapery.
With that bird-like shyness so winning in a really beautiful little girl, May walked up to the stranger and made a funny, hesitating courtesy. He looked at her askance, his smiling face shooting forth a ray of tenderness along with a gleam of shrewd suspicion, as he made out the album in her dimpled little hand.
“Good morning, little one,” he said cheerily. “Have you come to make a call?”
He held out both hands and looked so kindly and good that she smiled until dimples just like her mother’s played over her cheeks and chin. Half sidewise she crept into his arms and held up the book.
“Pleathe write your photograph in my book,” she murmured.
He took her very gently on his knee, chuckling vigorously, his heavy jaws shaking and coloring.
“Who told you to come?” he inquired, with a guilty cunning twinkle in his gray eyes.
“Mama told me,” was the prompt answer.
Again the man chuckled, and, between the shame he felt for having betrayed the child and delight at the success of his perfidy, he grew quite red in the face. He took the autograph album and turned its stiff, ragged-edged leaves, glancing at the names.
“Ah, this is your mama’s book, is it?” he went on.
“Yeth it is,” said May.
“And I must write my name in it?”
“No, your—your——”
“Well what?”
“I don’t ’member.”
He took from his pocket a stylographic pen and dashed a picturesque sign manual across a page.
While the ink was drying he tenderly kissed the child’s forehead and then rested his chin on her bright hair. He could hear the clack of balls and mallets and the creak of a lazy swing down below on the so-called lawn, and a hum of voices arose from the veranda. He looked through the open window and saw, as in a dream, blue peaks set against a shining rim of sky with a wisp of vultures slowly wheeling about in a filmy, sheeny space.
“Mama said I muthn’t stay,” apologized the child, slipping down from his knee, which she had found uncomfortably short.
He pulled himself together from a diffused state of revery and beamed upon her again with his cheerful smile.
She turned near the door and dropped another comical little courtesy, bobbing her curly head till her hair twinkled like a tangle of starbeams[22] on a brook-ripple, then she darted away, book in hand.
Little Mrs. Philpot snatched the album from May, as she ran to her, and greedily rustled the leaves in search of the new record, finding which she gazed at it while her face irradiated every shade of expression between sudden delight and utter perplexity. In fact she could not decipher the autograph, although the handwriting surely was not bad. Loath as she naturally was to sharing her secret with her friends, curiosity at length prevailed and she sought help. Everybody in turn tried to make out the two short words, all in vain till Crane, by the poet’s subtle vision, cleared up the mystery, at least to his own satisfaction.
“Gaspard Dufour is the name,” he asserted, with considerable show of conscious superiority. “A Canadian, I think. In fact I imperfectly recall meeting him once at a dinner given by the Governor General to Lord Rosenthal at Quebec. He writes plays.”
“Another romance out of the whole cloth by the Bourbon æsthete!” whispered the critic. “There’s no such a Canadian as Gaspard Dufour, and besides the man’s a Westerner rather over-Bostonized. I can tell by his voice and his mixed manners.”
“But Mrs. Hope would know him,” suggested the person addressed. “She meets all the Hub literati, you know.”
“Literati!” snarled the critic, putting an end to further discussion.
A few minutes later Mr. Gaspard Dufour came down and passed out of the hotel, taking his way into the nearest ravine. He wore a very short coat and a slouch hat. In his hand he carried a bundle of fishing-rod joints. A man of his build looks far from dignified in such dress, at best; but nothing could have accentuated more sharply his absurd grotesqueness of appearance than the peculiar waddling gait he assumed as he descended the steep place and passed out of sight, a fish basket bobbing beside him and a red kerchief shining around his throat.
Everybody looked at his neighbor and smiled inquisitively. Now that they had discovered his name, the question arose: What had Gaspard Dufour ever done that he should be accorded the place of honor in Hotel Helicon. No one (save Crane, in a shadowy way) had ever heard of him before. No doubt they all felt a little twinge of resentment; but Dufour, disappearing down the ravine, had in some unaccountable way deepened his significance.
IV.
Everybody knows that a mountain hotel has no local color, no sympathy with its environment, no gift of making its guests feel that they are anywhere in particular. It is all very delightful to be held aloft on the shoulder of a giant almost within reach of the sky; but the charm of the thing is not referable to any[24] definite, visible cause, such as one readily bases one’s love of the sea-side on, or such as accounts for our delight in the life of a great city. No matter how fine the effect of clouds and peaks and sky and gorge, no matter how pure and exhilarating the air, or how blue the filmy deeps of distance, or how mossy the rocks, or how sweet the water, or how cool the wooded vales, the hotel stands there in an indefinite way, with no raison d’etre visible in its make-up, but with an obvious impudence gleaming from its windows. One cannot deport one’s self at such a place as if born there. The situation demands—nay, exacts behavior somewhat special and peculiar. No lonely island in the sea is quite as isolated and out of the world as the top of any mountain, nor can any amount of man’s effort soften in the least the savage individuality of mountain scenery so as to render those high places familiar or homelike or genuinely habitable. Delightful enough and fascinating enough all mountain hotels surely are; but the sensation that living in one of them induces is the romantic consciousness of being in a degree “out of space, out of time.” No doubt this feeling was heightened and intensified in the case of the guests at Hotel Helicon who were enjoying the added novelty of entire freedom from the petty economies that usually dog the footsteps and haunt the very dreams of the average summer sojourner. At all events, they were mostly a light-hearted set given over to a[25] freedom of speech and action which would have horrified them on any lower plane.
Scarcely had Gaspard Dufour passed beyond sight down the ravine in search of a trout-brook, than he became the subject of free discussion. Nothing strictly impolite was said about him; but everybody in some way expressed amazement at everybody’s ignorance of a man whose importance was apparent and whose name vaguely and tauntingly suggested to each one of them a half-recollection of having seen it in connection with some notable literary sensation.
“Is there a member of the French institute by the name of Dufour?” inquired R. Hobbs Lucas, the historian, thoughtfully knitting his heavy brows.
“I am sure not,” said Hartley Crane, “for I met most of the members when I was last at Paris and I do not recall the name.”
“There goes that Bourbon again,” muttered Laurens Peck, the critic; “if one should mention Xenophon, that fellow would claim a personal acquaintance with him!”
It was plain enough that Peck did not value Crane very highly, and Crane certainly treated Peck very coolly. Miss Moyne, however, was blissfully unaware that she was the cause of this trouble, and for that matter the men themselves would have denied with indignant fervor any thing of the kind. Both of them were stalwart and rather handsome, the Kentuckian dark and passionate looking, the New Yorker fair, cool and willful in appearance. Miss Moyne had[26] been pleased with them both, without a special thought of either, whilst they were going rapidly into the worry and rapture of love, with no care for anybody but her.
She was beautiful and good, sweet-voiced, gentle, more inclined to listen than to talk, and so she captivated everybody from the first.
