An old year was dying and a young year was about to be born. Along the
blazing stretch of Broadway from Thirtieth street to Columbus circle
seethed and sounded the noisy saturnalia of New Year's Eve.
The street that never sleeps was tonight a human spill-way, churning in
freshet. Between its walls went up the clamor of human throats raised in
talk, in shouts, in song, in laughter and in contest with the blaring of
toy horns, the racket of rattlers and all those discordances that seek
to swell pandemonium to the bursting of ear-drums. Theaters were
disgorging their "big-night" audiences and pedestrians moved in a
congested mass which battalions of traffic officers herded slowly as
dogs herd crowded sheep.
An endless procession was this, in which human entities were molecules,
that crept, elbowing, jamming, laughing along. Holly-wreathed windows
bore, in additional decoration, placards announcing, "This café is open
all night." For this was the city's wild occasion of suspended laws,
when two edicts only hold in the favored points of rendezvous, "Nothing
but wine," and, "Everything goes."
Vendors of paper caps, false mustaches, confetti, balloons and all the
noise-swelling devices ever bred of deviltry, hawked their wares along
the curbs, and the furs of women glittered with atoms of colored paper.
Within the restaurants and cabarets was added to the outer din a
popping of corks, a fanfare of orchestras and the songs of supper guests
at tables and dancers on the floors.
Already a sequence of wild scenes telescoped themselves along the White
Way, but the evening was yet young and would ripen toward fulfilment as
the hours progressed. Its Bacchanalian zenith would be reached after the
million lights of these gilded places had died--like the snuffing of a
single candle--into the five minutes of darkness which heralds the
changing year.
Along the uproarious sidewalks, pressing ragged shoulders to the
richness of ermine and seal, drifted many hopeless derelicts, but
tonight was to be a night of forgetting them, of forgetting everything
save that it was a "large evening" and that life held only the present
clarion of gaiety. The tragedy under this thin crust must be ignored.
Mirth must be crowned; laughter must be enthroned; glasses must sparkle
and clink and such individuals as elected to remain sober must look
indulgently and smilingly on scenes which, at another time, would
require a blush. To blush on Broadway on New Year's Eve would be a
misdemeanor. It doesn't happen.
One splinter of human drift which was carried along on the tide gazed
about out of a chalky face--morphia-stamped. This chip on the churning
eddy bore the name of Paul Burton. He had of course no business there.
For him there was no reasonable prospect of a happy new year. There
still remained a roof--of a sort--to cover him when he went home, which
was not so often as it should be, and he still wore a suit of decent
cut, though of a past fashion, but in its pockets there was no jingle of
coins. Passively Paul had been drawn into the maelstrom of the marching
crowds, yet he was not of its membership. He could not turn in at any
of the doors that blazed with light and invitation. But he had certain
dreams which vaguely recompensed him--and in his pockets was a
hypodermic needle.
At Longacre square, where the swirl and eddy of human currents met and
became a cauldron and whirlpool, he was held up at a crossing, while the
crowd shrunk back on itself, waiting the raised hand of the traffic
policeman.
Finding himself jostled, he glanced languidly over his shoulder. The
needle makes for such languidness at times between its moments of
dreaming and its moments of jumping nerves.
Several men in evening-dress and fur coats surrounded him, and he knew
them all. The face of Norvil Thayre was laughing into his, and he
recognized that an evening well started had painted its flush on the
cheeks of each of them.
"My word, Burton!" laughed the Englishman. "I haven't seen you since the
war of the Roses. How goes it, lad?" Then, even in his heightened gaiety
of mood, Thayre recognized the want and distress which had left their
impress and pallor on this face, and his eyes sobered. With the other
rules of the season he felt that forgetfulness of the past accorded, so
he hastened to add, "You know these fellows. Fall in and hike along with
us. We have a table reserved at Kenley's and it's close to the platform.
I dare say we sha'n't miss many tricks."
A deep embarrassment flooded the face of the outcast. He, who had once
numbered these men among his associates, felt sensitively the pinched
poverty of his present condition and its contrast with their
Persian-lamb collars, otter-lined coats and their white shirt fronts of
evening-dress.
"Thank you," he said gravely, "I'm afraid I can't. Your party is made up
and--and--"
But as he stammered to a pause Thayre slapped him heartily on the back,
and the others, with voices of more advanced inebriety, made it a chorus
of insistence.
"'Twill do you no harm, my lad," declared the Englishman. "'A little
nonsense now and then--' You know the old saw. A bite of mixed grill and
a beaker of bubbles will buck you up, no end."
The musician hesitated, deeply tempted. To sit at table with white
damask and clear glass, and once more to eat such things as they serve
at Kenley's! The idea could not be lightly dismissed. Besides he felt
suddenly giddy and weak. He frequently felt so these days, and if he
accepted he could rest quietly until the vertigo passed.
"I say--of course," Thayre leaned forward and explained in a lowered
voice, "you go as my guest. I'm giving the party tonight."
Ten minutes later, retrieved from the street, Paul Burton sat near the
edge of the cabaret platform in a café where every table had been
reserved long in advance, and from whose doors many eager applicants
were being turned away.
Nearby, too, was the space reserved for dancing, and as Paul drank his
first glass of champagne the bubbles rose and raced merrily through his
thin blood, lifting him out of his squalid reality into an echo world of
irresponsibility. The crowds on the floor were swirling to a delirious
dance tune while above their heads shot up the white arms of women and
the black arms of men, to keep dozens of multi-colored toy balloons
afloat over them.
Like glass balls on a fountain-spray, red and blue and purple spheres
drifted up and down, and confetti showered, and dancers snatched paper
caps from the heads of strangers, and crowned themselves therewith.
Wilder groups danced, not in pairs, but in trios and quartettes with
arms locked around shoulders--and it wanted a half-hour of the changing
year.
Thin ribbons of bright paper volleyed rocket-wise from table to table
and fell in festoons from overhead wires. Dancers forced their way
through showers of breaking strands, and swayed rhythmically on,
trailing broken shreds of kaleidoscopic color.
Like punctuations of sound came the popping of balloons and corks.
Paul Burton's hosts had arrived at the stage of mellow exhilaration, but
over Paul himself, as his eyes met the great clock which was to herald
the eventful moment, fell a sudden shadow of black depression. Another
year to face! He thought of what he had promised to do with this
one--and of what he had done! Those last moments in his music-room rose
to his memory and they carried a penalty which slugged his heart into an
intensity of shame and misery. Paul Burton, sitting there with this thin
semblance of merriment around him, saw himself once again very clearly
for what he was.
Thayre leaned over. "I say, men," he suggested with the enthusiasm of a
new and bright idea sparkling in his eyes, "let's call the head waiter
and have Burton play for us. The management will be jolly well pleased
when they know they're getting the greatest instrumentalist in New
York."
Paul protested, but Thayre was a man of quick action, and a moment
later the waiter had brought the head waiter, and the head waiter had
gone for the manager.
Such patrons as these the manager had every wish to oblige, and he was
by no means unwilling to utilise such an artist as Paul Burton when the
lights came on again and his patrons rose to their feet for the national
anthem.
"Of course," cautioned Thayre, "Mr. Burton doesn't want his name
announced," and even to that restriction, limiting the value of his
extemporaneous "feature," the manager reluctantly acceded.
To live for music and to have no instrument with which to express one's
emotions means a tortured privation of the spirit. Paul Burton, as he
took his seat at the piano, forgot that it was New Year's eve on
Broadway, forgot the lights, the confetti and the toy balloons. He
remembered only that here were keys which unlocked his dream-world of
music, and when he began to play the clamor of the place slowly and
quite unconsciously subsided, and quiet came--not at once, but as a
delirium may soften slowly into sleep under the stroke of a soothing
hand.
When from an outlying table a woman, grown louder of laughter than she
realized, interrupted this quiet, a score of faces turned angrily in her
direction, rebuking her with their glances.
But the music went on and the great crowd which had a few moments before
been abandoning itself to noise and riot now found itself
listening--listening in a sort of rapt trance--with its many gazes
converging on a slender young man. His pallid face and cameo features
seemed exalted and his eyes burned strangely under the dark locks that
fell across his forehead.
They did not hear the first peal of the midnight clock, until the
sudden darkness which that stroke heralded reminded them of the hour.
The place which had blazed with light was now as black as some sea-floor
cavern, and that should have been the signal for a hundred horns and
rattlers and shouts of greeting, and the reaching of hands to meet and
grasp other hands across the tables. But in Kenley's it was quiet except
for those peals of music that came from the platform. At last the
strains ended in silence, and a deep breath passed among the tables as
though from one composite pair of lungs. Then once more the instrument
spoke--spoke with a grotesque inappropriateness for a night that was not
to end till morning--for the notes that sounded across the place were
the opening bars of, "Home, Sweet Home."
There were only a few bars--and after that a loud crash as though a
number of hands had simultaneously fallen, with violence, upon the
keys--and then the lights blazed again from all the opalescent
chandeliers and all the wall brackets.
Instantly from tables near the center two young women, in paper caps,
leaped up from their seats and kissed the men and women of their party.
A wave of greetings swept the place.
Across one end of the room gleamed a huge electric sign, "Happy New
Year"--and lying hunched forward with his face on the keyboard of the
instrument sagged the unmoving figure of Paul Burton.
At once the lights went out again, leaving the place dark, and the voice
of the manager was heard from the platform, a little strained in tone as
he sought to conceal the tragedy which, should it become known, would
end the night's profit for his establishment.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he lied resourcefully, "I hope you will all
keep your seats and indulge the management for a few moments. A fuse has
burned out, but it will at once be remedied. Our pianist, I will add,
has suffered a fainting spell, but is in no danger."
When the lights came on again, the figure at the piano was no longer
there. Just back of the platform was a door used by the cabaret
performers, and through this he had been borne.
But the faintness which had come upon Paul Burton was the faintness of
death, and there were those among the merry-makers who could not forget
the grotesque attitude of which they had caught a glimpse, and who found
subsequent merry-making impossible.
"Notify the coroner," ordered the policeman who had come in from the
corner through a service entrance. "This is a case for him."
The manager bent an ear toward the outer door and recognized that there
had been no resumption of the saturnalian chorus between his walls. "Mr.
Thayre," he commented bitterly to the guest who had followed into the
private room, "your friend there has put New Year's eve on the blink for
my place--this thing costs me thousands."
"Who's the dead man?" demanded the officer bluntly, and when Thayre
replied with two words, "Paul Burton," he gave a long, low whistle of
astonishment. The name of Burton was not yet forgotten in New York.