It was answered, and the next moment the Blond Head hovered, as it were, on the window-sill. It looked like a bird whose cage door has been opened after years of captivity, and who flutters on the threshold, not daring to advance into the free air.
I advanced my head boldly, and caught the Blond Head on the wing. It was retreating after the usual fashion, and with the usual rapidity, when I shot it with the word—
“Stay!”
It fluttered for an instant, and then remained still.
“We are neighbors,” I remarked to the Blond Head. It was a truism, I know, but still it was a remark. After all, what does it matter what you say to most women, so that what you say is a remark?
“So I perceive,” answered the Head, still fluttering a little. “May I have the honor of knowing—” I commenced.
“Certainly,” interrupted the Blond Head, “I am Rosamond.”
“The fair Rosamond, I see,” I interposed, in my gallantest manner.
“Yes,” replied Rosamond, with wonderful naivete, “fair perhaps, but very unhappy.”
“Unhappy! How? Can I relieve you—be of any service?”
A glance of suspicion was shot at me from a pair of large, lustrous blue eyes.
“Are you not one of his satellites?” asked the Blond Head.
“I a satellite?” I answered indignantly—“I am no one’s satellite—unless indeed it be yours,” I added; “for I would gladly revolve round so fair a planet.”
“Then you are not a friend of Count Goloptious?”
“No. I never saw him until last night. He brought me to this hotel, where I have been bewildered by enchantments.”
“All my doing! all my doing!” cried Rosamond, wringing her hands.
“How your doing?” I inquired, with some astonishment.
“I am the artist—the fatal, the accursed artist. It was I who painted, I who modelled.”
“Painted, modelled what?”
“Hush! you can save me, perhaps. I will see you again today. Is not the Eye watching you?”
“I have magnetized it.”
“Good! you are a clever fellow,” and Rosamond’s eyes sparkled. “You must help me to escape.”
“From what?”
“I will tell you—but quick shut your window. Count Golop-tious is coming.”
The Blond Head gave me a sweet smile, and retreated. I did likewise, and closed my window. The next moment my door opened, and Count Goloptious entered.
VII / THREE COLUMNS A DAY.
Count Goloptious entered. He seemed somewhat agitated, and banged the door loudly. The shock dispelled the magnetic slumber of the Sentinel Eye, which suddenly opened its heavy lid and glared around with an expression which seemed to say, “I’d like to catch anybody saying that I have been asleep!”
“Sir,” said the Count, “you have been misconducting yourself.”
“I? Misconducting myself! What do you mean, Count Goloptious?”
“You have been singing love-songs, sir. In a tenor voice, too. If you were a bass I would not so much care, but to sing tenor—it’s infamous!”
The blue goggles of the Count seemed to scintillate with anger as he glared at me.
“What the devil is the meaning of all this mystery?” I demanded angrily, for I really was getting savage at the incomprehensibility of everything that surrounded me. “What do your infernal eyes and hands and ears and mouths mean? If you are a nightmare, why don’t you say so, and let me wake up? Why can’t I sing love-songs if I like—and in a tenor voice, if I like? I’ll sing alto if I choose. Count Goloptious.”
“It is not for you to penetrate the mysteries of the Hotel de Coup d’OEil, sir,” answered the Count. “You have enjoyed its hospitalities, and you can go. You have sung tenor songs, sir. You know, as well as I, the influence of the tenor voice upon the female heart. You are familiar with the history of the opera, sir. You have beheld penniless Italians, with curled mustaches, and with no earthly attraction except a peculiar formation of the windpipe, wreck the peace of the loveliest of our females. There is a female in this vicinity, sir. A poor, weak-minded girl, who has been placed under my guardianship, and who is crazy on the subject of music. You have been singing to her, sir. Yes, with that accursed mellifluous voice of yours—that vocal honey in which you tenors administer the poison of your love—with that voice, sir, you are endeavoring to destroy the peace of mind of my ward. You have slept here, sir. You can go now.”
“I have not the slightest intention of going now, Count Goloptious. This hotel suits me admirably well. It has certain little drawbacks to be sure. It is not pleasant to be always overlooked and overheard in one’s privacy.” Here I pointed to the Ear and the Eye. “But still one can grow accustomed to that, I suppose. By the way, I should like some breakfast.”
My coolness took the Count completely by surprise. He stared at me without being able to utter a word. The fact was, that the Blond Head had bewitched me. Those clouds of golden hair that enfolded the wondrous oval of her face like a continual sunset had set my heart on fire. Never, never would I quit that hotel, unless I bore her with me. She had hinted at misfortune in our brief interview. She was a captive—a captive of the false Count, who now pretended that he was her guardian. Meshed in the countless spells and enchantments that surrounded her, she was helpless as those fair creatures we read of in the Arabian Nights. I would be her rescuer. I would discover the charm before which the bonds should melt. It was Andromache and Perseus and the sea-monster over again, in the year 1858. The Count, it is needless to say, was the monster. I had no Medusan shield, it is true, but I felt powerful as Perseus, for all that. My blond Andromache should be saved.
“So you won’t go, eh?” said Goloptious, after a long silence.
“No.”
“You had better.”
“This is a hotel. I have a right to accommodation here as long as I pay for it. Hotels belong to the public, when the public has money.”
“I know I can’t force you to go, but I don’t think, young sir, that you will be able to pay for your board.”
“How much do you charge here, by the day?”
“Three columns a day.”
“Three what?”
“Three columns a day.”
“I have heard of pillar dollars, but hang me if I ever heard of money that was called columns.”
“We don’t take money in pay at the Hotel de Coup d’OEil. Brain is the only currency that passes here. You must write me three columns of the best literary matter every day; those are our terms for this room. We have rooms higher up which rent for less. Some go as low as a paragraph. This is a four-column room usually, but you can have it for three.”
Was the fellow laughing at me? His countenance was perfectly serious the whole time he was speaking. He talked as deliberately as if he had been a simple hotel clerk talking to a traveller, who was about pricing rooms. The whole thing struck me so comically that I could not refrain from a smile. I determined to carry the thing out in the Count’s own vein.
“Meals are of course included?” I said inquiringly.
“Certainly, and served in your own room.”
“I don’t think the apartment dear,” I continued, inspecting my chamber with a critical eye. “I’ll take it.”
“Very good”; and I saw a gleam of gratified malice shoot through the Count’s great blue goggles.
“Now,” said I,” perhaps you will inform me, Count Goloptious, why a few moments since you were so anxious to get rid of me, and why now you so tranquilly consent to my remaining an inmate of the Hotel de Coup d’OEil?”
“I have my reasons,” said the Count, mysteriously. “You have now taken a room in the Hotel de Coup d’OEil; you will never quit it unless with my consent. The Eye shall watch you, the Ear shall hear you, the Hands shall detain you, the Mouths shall betray you; work is henceforth your portion. Your brain is my property; you shall spin it out as the spider his web, until you spin out your life with
it. I have a lien on your intellect. There is one of my professions which I omitted in the catalogue which I gave you on our first meeting—I am a Publisher!”
VIII / THE BLOND HEAD.
This last speech of the Count’s, I confess, stunned me. He was then a publisher. I, who for years had been anxiously keeping my individuality as an author intact, who had been strenuously avoiding the vortex of the literary whirlpool of which the publisher is the center, who had resisted, successfully, the absorbing process by which that profession succeeds in sucking the vitals out of the literary man, now suddenly found myself on the outer edge of the maelstrom, slowly but surely revolving towards the central funnel which was to swallow me.
An anticipation of unknown misfortunes seemed to overwhelm me. There was something sternly prophetic in the last tones of Goloptious’s voice. He seemed to have had no turtle in his throat for several days. He was harsh and strident.
I determined to consult with the Blond Head in my extremity. It would, at least, be a consolation to me to gaze into those wondrous blue eyes, to bask in the sunshine of that luminous hair.
I raised my window, and hummed a bar of Com’e Gentil. In a moment the adjoining window was raised, and out came the Blond Head. The likeness to the weather-toy existed no longer: both our heads were out together.
“You have seen Goloptious,” said the Blond Head. “What did he say?”
“Excuse me from continuing the conversation just at this moment,” I replied. “I have forgotten something.”
I had. The Ear and the Eye were in full play—one watching, the other listening. Such witnesses must be disposed of, if I was to hold any secret conversation with Rosamond. I retired therefore into my chamber again, and set to work to deliberately magnetize the eye. That organ did not seem to relish the operation at all, but it had no resource. In a few moments the film overspread it, and it closed. But what was to be done with the ear? I could not magnetize that. If, like the king in Hamlet, I had only a little poison to pour into it, I might deafen it forever. Or, like the sailors of Ulysses, when passing the island of the Sirens—ah! Ulysses!—that was the idea. Stop up the ear with wax! My bedroom candle was not all burned out. To appropriate a portion of that luminary, soften it in my hands, and plaster it over the auricular organ on my door was the work of a few moments. It was a triumph of strategy. Both my enchanted guardians completely entrapped, and by what simple means!
I now resumed my out-of-window conversation with Rosamond with a feeling of perfect security.
“I have seen Goloptious,” I said, in reply to her previous question, “and am now a boarder in the Hotel de Coup d’OEil.”
“Great heavens, then you are lost!” exclaimed Rosamond, shaking her cloudy curls at me.
“Lost! How so?”
“Simply that you are the slave of Goloptious. He will live on your brains, until every fiber is dried up. You will become a mental atrophy—and, alas! worse.”
“What do you mean? Explain, for Heaven’s sake. You mystify me.
“I cannot explain. But we must endeavor to escape. You are ingenious and bold. I saw that by the manner in which you overcame the Sentinel Eye by magnetism. This hotel is a den of enchantments. I have been confined here for over a year. My profession is that of a sculptor, and I have been forced to model all those demon hands and mouths and ears with which the building is so thickly sown. Those weird glances that strike through the countless corridors from the myriad eyes are of my painting. Those ten thousand lips that fill this place with unearthly murmurs are born of my fingers. It is I, who, under the relentless sway of Goloptious, have erected those enchanted symbols of which you are the victim. I knew not what I did, when I made those things. But you can evade them all. We can escape, if you will only set your ingenuity to work.”
“But, really, I see nothing to prevent our walking down stairs.”
“There is everything. You cannot move in this house without each motion being telegraphed. The Hands that line the staircase would clutch your skirts and hold you firm prisoner, were you to attempt to leave.”
“The Hands be—dished!” I exclaimed.
At this moment there came a knock. I hastily drew my head in, and opened my door. I beheld the Hand of the night before, pleadingly extended; and at the same moment a running fire of murmurs from the Mouths informed me that he wanted the gold ring I had promised him. It was evident that this infernal hand would dun me to all eternity, unless he was paid.
I rushed to the window in my despair.
“Rosamond! fair Rosamond!” I shouted. “Have you got a gold ring?”
“Certainly,” answered the Blond Head, appearing.
“Stretch as far as you can out of your window and hand it to me.”
“Alas, I cannot stretch out of the window.”
“Why not?”
“Do not ask me—oh! do not ask me,” answered the Blond Head, with so much anguish in her tones that I inwardly cursed myself for putting so beautiful a creature to pain.
“But,” I continued, “if I reach over to you with a pair of tongs, will you give it to me?”
“O, with pleasure!” and the Blond Head smiled a seraphic smile.
A pair of tongs being adjacent, a plain gold ring was quickly transferred from Rosamond’s slender finger to my hand. With much ceremony I proceeded to place it on the smallest finger of the Hand, not being able, however, to get it farther than the first joint. Even this partial decoration seemed however to meet with approval, for the ten thousand hands commenced applauding vigorously, so much so that for a moment I fancied myself at the opera.
“Good heavens!” I thought, “what a claque these hands would make!”
There was one thing, however, that puzzled me much as I reentered my room.
Why was it that Fair Rosamond could not lean out of the window? There was some mystery about it, I felt certain. I little thought in what manner or how soon that mystery was to be solved.
IX / ROSAMOND MAKES A GREEN BIRD.
No sooner was my debt to the Hand thus satisfactorily acquitted, than, in the elation of the moment at having for the first time in my life paid a debt on the appointed day, I immediately applied my lips to the Ear on the inside, and communicated my desire for some pens, ink, and paper. In an incredibly short space of time, the Hands, doubtless stimulated by the magnificence of my reward, passed a quantity of writing materials up the stairs, and in a few moments I was at work on my three columns, being determined from that time not to fall into arrears for my board.
“It is of the utmost importance,” I thought, “that I should be unfettered by pecuniary liabilities, if I would rescue Rosamond from the clutches of this vile Count. I feel convinced of being able to baffle all his enchantments. Yes, Hands, ye may close, Ears, ye may listen, Eyes, ye may watch, Mouths, ye may scream the alarm, but I will deceive ye all! There is no magician who can out-conjure the imagination of man.”
Having mentally got rid of this fine sentence, I set myself regularly to work, and in a short space of time dashed off a stunning article on the hotel system of England as contrasted with that of America. If that paper was ever printed, it must have astonished the reader; for written as it was, under the influence of the enchantments of the Hotel de Coup d’OEil, it mixed up the real and the ideal in so inextricable a manner, that it read somewhat like a fusion of alternate passages from Murray’s guide-book and the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Such as it was, however, it being finished, I folded it up and sent it by the Hand, with my compliments to Count Goloptious, begging that he should at the same time be informed that I was hungry, and wanted my breakfast. My message whirred along the ten thousand Mouths, and faded away down into the hall below
I had scarcely reentered my apartment when I heard the Blond Head open the window, and commence singing a strange wild sort of recitative, evidently with the view of attracting my attention. I listened, and found that it ran thus:—
Rosamond sings: “I have a bird, a bird, w
ho was born today.
“Today the sunshine entered him through his eyes; his glittering wings rustled in the breath of the warm noon, and he began to live.
“He is merry and bold and wise, and is versed in the mysteries that are sung by the Unseen Spirits.
“Yet he knows not the mystical joys of the silently growing forests.
“No egg ever contained him.
“No down, white and silken, ever sheltered him from the cold.
“No anxious, bright-eyed mother ever brought him the oily grain of the millet to eat, or sat on the neighboring tree-tops, singing the holy hymns of maternal love.
“He never heard the sonorous melodies of the trees, when the wind with rushing fingers strikes the various notes of the forest, and Ash and Oak, Alder and Pine, are blent in the symphonic chords of the storm.
“Ten white fingers made him.
“The great sun—too far away to know what it was doing—hatched him into life, and in the supreme moment when his little heart just commenced to beat, and his magical blood to ebb and flow through the mystic cells of his frame, his maker cast from her lips, through his gaping golden bill, a stream of song, and gifted him with voice.
“This is the bird, bold and merry and wise, who will shake my salvation from his wings.
“Ah! until the hour of my delivery arrives, he shall be fed daintily on preserved butterflies, and shall scrape his bill on a shell of pearl!”
1 opened my window as the last words of this strange song died away, and I had scarcely done so when a bright green bird, with an orange bill and cinnamon-colored legs, flew from Rosamond’s window into my room, and perched on the table, It was a charming bird. Its shape was somewhat like that of the mockingbird—long, slender body, piquant head, and sweeping tail. Its color was of the most dazzling green, and its feathers shone like satin.
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