FANCY GRAY ACCEPTS
The rain had come in a vigorous downpour, washing away the mantle of dust that had so long lain over the city. The storm finally settled down to a steady pelting of heavy drops, lightened occasionally to mild, drizzling showers, only to be resumed with greater violence toward night. Every one was glad for the flushing the town received. There was a novelty and excitement about the rain, a relief after the parched, monotonous months of cloudless skies. Men and women walked the streets smiling, the women especially; for that free, fearless gaiety, the almost abandoned good nature of San Francisco girls, was not to be quenched.
On Thursday evening, Fancy Gray, to all appearance her old, gay self, smiling as if she had never a care in the world, went down to Fulda's to dine with Blanchard Cayley.
In a city of restaurants, Fulda's restaurant was unique. The Pintos had discovered the place, and by their own efforts had made it. Maxim and the artists of the quarter had gained Fulda's consent to a new scheme of decoration, a plan so mad and impudent that the room was now a show-place for visitors. The walls were covered with cartoons and sketches as incongruously placed, perhaps, as the embossed pictures on a bean-pot, but what was lacking in art was made up for by a bizarre, esoteric humor that was the perpetual despair of the uninitiated.
Maxim's chief contribution, a huge cartoon with caricatured portraits of his friends, had the place of honor; it was a superb piece of low comedy in crayons. Beyond this the sketches became more grotesque, the inscriptions more cryptic. Quotations from Rabelais, from Brantome, from Chesterton, Whistler and Wilde were scattered here and there, mingling with fiery burlesques of Bohemians, Philistines, lobsters and artists. No one, not even the authors, knew the point of most of these jokes well enough to explain them intelligibly, and it was this baffling suggestiveness which drew patrons to the restaurant and kept its charm piquant. One saw at each table new-comers with questioning faces pointing to legends in Greek and Esperanto and Yiddish, and wondering at the inscrutable accompaniment of illustration. It was a sort of mental and artistic hash spread upon the walls. The humor grew fiercer as one's eyes rose to the ceiling. There, a trail of monstrous footprints, preposterous, impossible, led, with divagations, to a point above the central table which was always reserved for the Pintos. To crown this elaborate nonsense, they had drawn a frieze below the cornice with panels containing the names of the frequenters of the place, alternated with such minor celebrities as Plato, Browning and Nietzsche.
In a larger city, such a place would have had a temporary vogue, and then, after having been "discovered" by reporters and artists, have sunk into the desuetude of impecunious rural diners-out, one of the places of which one says: "Oh, you should have seen it two years ago." But San Francisco is of that fascinating size, half-way between town and city, and of that interesting age where the old is not quite forgotten and the new not quite permanently instated,—it is, above all, so delightfully isolated that it need not ape the East. Though it has outgrown some of its Western crudities, it is significant that such a restaurant as Fulda's could become and remain a resort for the gathering of the cleverest spirits in town. It had already achieved that reputation; it was patronized by the arts. The visitors, for the most part, either did things or wanted to. One was apt to know almost everybody there. If one didn't know Mr. Smith, one's friend did; or one knew Mr. Smith's friend.
To this place entered Fancy Gray, drifter, the day after the materializing séance, in a new, blue mackintosh and a pert but appropriate hat. She nodded, to Felix, at the counter, and, following underneath the trail of footprints on the ceiling, came, jovially as ever, to the central table. Dougal, Elsie and Benton were sitting at the far end of it. Dougal sprang up with a grin.
"Come and sit down quickly and tell us all about it!" he exclaimed. "What happened after we left?"
She sat on the side of a chair without removing her coat, and gave them her ever-ready smile. "Say, you didn't raise a rough house or anything, did you? I thought it would be a case for the coroner before you got through. If I'd known you were going to be there I wouldn't have been in the cast. Wasn't it awful? Madam Spoll was pretty badly burned, I hear."
"I hope I'll never have to see anything as horrible as that again," said Benton. "But I did what I could. I hope she'll recover."