FELIX O'DAY

Chapter I



Broadway on dry nights, or rather that part known as the Great White
Way, is a crowded thoroughfare, dominated by lofty buildings, the
sky-line studded with constellations of colored signs pencilled in fire.
Broadway on wet, rain-drenched nights is the fairy concourse of the
Wonder City of the World, its asphalt splashed with liquid jewels afloat
in molten gold.

Across this flood of frenzied brilliance surge hurrying mobs, dodging
the ceaseless traffic, trampling underfoot the wealth of the Indies,
striding through pools of quicksilver, leaping gutters filled to the
brim with melted rubies--horse, car, and man so many black silhouettes
against a tremulous sea of light.

Along this blinding whirl blaze the playhouses, their wide
portals aflame with crackling globes, toward which swarm bevies of
pleasure-seeking moths, their eyes dazzled by the glare. Some with heads
and throats bare dart from costly broughams, the mountings of their
sleek, rain-varnished horses glittering in the flash of the electric
lamps. Others spring from out street cabs. Many come by twos and threes,
their skirts held high. Still others form a line, its head lost in
a small side door. These are in drab and brown, with worsted shawls
tightly drawn across thin shoulders. Here, too, wedged in between shabby
men, the collars of their coats muffling their chins, their backs to the
grim policeman, stand keen-eyed newsboys and ragged street urchins, the
price of a gallery seat in their tightly closed fists.

Soon the swash and flow of light flooding the street and sidewalks
shines the clearer. Fewer dots and lumps of man, cab, and cart now cross
its surface. The crowd has begun to thin out. The doors of the theatres
are deserted; some flaunt signs of "Standing Room Only." The cars still
follow their routes, lunging and pausing like huge beetles; but much of
the wheel traffic has melted, with only here and there a cab or truck
between which gold-splashed umbrellas pick a hazardous way.

With the breaking of the silent dawn, shadowed in a lonely archway or
on an abandoned doorstep the wet, bedraggled body of a hapless moth is
sometimes found, her iridescent wings flattened in the mud. Then for a
brief moment a cry of protest, or scorn, or pity goes up. The passers-by
raise their hands in anger, draw their skirts aside in horror, or kneel
in tenderness. It is the same the world over, and New York is no better
and, for that matter, no worse.


On one of these rain-drenched nights, some ten years or more ago, when
the streets were flooded with jewels, and the sky-line aflame, a man in
a slouch hat, a wet mackintosh clinging to his broad shoulders, stood
close to the entrance of one of the principal playhouses along this
Great White Way. He had kept his place since the doors were opened, his
hat-brim, pulled over his brow, his keen eye searching every face that
passed. To all appearances he was but an idle looker-on, attracted by
the beauty of the women, and yet during all that time he had not moved,
nor had he been in the way, nor had he been observed even by the door
man, the flap of the awning casting its shadow about him. Only once had
he strained forward, gazing intently, then again relaxed, settling into
his old position.