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