FELICITY CROSSES BROADWAY
And Perry Blair _had_ wanted to see. He hadn't listened to reason. He
hadn't been a good boy. His bout with Gay was a repetition of that
with Fanchette, the former title-holder. A brief half minute of
boxing, a feint--and Gay on the canvas for the count of ten.
He had wanted to see. He had been consumed with desire to see. And it
had happened quickly.
The victory failed to raise a second wave of adulation, even a ripple,
in fact. Instead it was received oddly with scarcely any comment at
all. Even the papers had but little to say, and that little
noncommittal. For there were rumors. Devereau and Pig-iron Dunham had
done some preliminary work in anticipation of the worst. And after the
worst had come to be they went to work in earnest.
It was Devereau, Blair's own manager--ex-manager, the day after the Gay
bout--who gave out the interview announcing the severance of business
relations with the champion. There were reasons, he said, but he was
not explicit. He left them veiled at first, purposely obscure.
What was the use of discussing it? Blair was a fluke champion anyway.
Everybody knew that. Chance had made him, chance which had been
luckless for Jimmy Montague. Montague, he said, had been selected as
the logical man to meet Fanchette, the man whose record entitled him to
the choice, long before any word of the proposed match had been given
to the public. But Fanchette, after his prolonged inactivity, had
demurred at meeting, immediately, so formidable an opponent. So they
had selected Blair, merely as a work-out for the title-holder. And the
unforeseen had happened. Fanchette had proved to be through.
Anyone--anyone could have whipped him.
But what about Gay? That was the natural question and they asked it.
Blair had disposed of him, also in the first round.
But to that Devereau made no answer, no verbal answer, at least. He
did not point out that Hughie was a set-up, a second-rater. No,
indeed. He shrugged his shoulders--shrugged them almost audibly.
"I had nothing to do with it," he said. "Absolutely. Ask Blair about
it. I've quit him."
Pig-iron Dunham, who paid the bills, and Devereau who was cunning, did
just what the latter had promised they would do. In a few short months
they put Perry Blair, light-weight champion of the world, out on the
sidewalk.
It can't be done? It is done every day, in politics. It needs only a
practiced hand.
For a day or two following Devereau's unsatisfactory laconism nothing
developed. And then a bombshell exploded. Hughie Gay made a
statement. He took oath, solemn oath (and cheap, too, for it cost
Dunham but two hundred dollars), that he had sold out. Blair had
realized that he was no champion; he had feared even him, Gay. So
before the fight Blair had paid him well to throw it. And he had done
so.
Thus, you see, they learned logically why Devereau had quit Perry.
Devereau was square. Sure! This proved it. You said it! They
understood perfectly those eloquent shoulder shrugs now. And they
raised a righteous clamor. Perry Blair denied the charge, and offered
to meet Gay again, anywhere, for any charity. And they replied, with
equal logic, that every reputable club in the country should bar him
thenceforth.
In a short interview, not as unsatisfactory as Devereau's, Pig-iron
Dunham broke a rule and talked for publication.
"It is the sort of thing which has given a bad name to a clean and
manly sport in this state," he said. "I sincerely trust, however, that
all true lovers of the squared circle will put the blame where it
belongs."
And in the meantime his paid mouthpieces parroted everywhere the words
in which they had been drilled. He has no punch at all, they said; he
can't hit. He has no science, they said; he is slow as a freight. He
has not the fighter's heart. He's yellow--yellow! And that word stuck.
The clique which had rated his reticence stingy was eager to believe.
They needed no persuading. So no throngs gathered round him any more.
Those who had fawned passed by on the far side of the street, lest
crudely he recall past accommodations. And, passing, they smiled. And
the public, that public to which a world's champion was something
picturesque at which to crane the neck, if they recognized him at all
now, had to concentrate to remember what it was that they had read
lately about him. Crooked? That was bad. Not clever enough to get
away with it? That was worse. Yellow? Well, that was unpardonable in
any man. And they hardly hid their contempt.
After a few fruitless attempts Perry gave up trying to find a new
manager and sought bouts for himself. He found them, but on such terms
that they were always impossible. He challenged Jimmy Montague, which
was a bad tactical error, but he had been just a little panicky at
first. He challenged Montague who was being hailed as the logical
title-holder, and in so doing seemed tacitly to admit that he realized
the claim was good.
Montague ignored him.
He challenged Holliday, and he was afraid of Holliday, too. And
Holliday made game of him noisily.
"What'll it get me to fight you?" he wanted to know. "If I stub me toe
and fall down, somebody'll raise a yelp that you bought me off. Not
me! Us girls has got to be careful. Besides, I'm looking for a battle
with the real champ."
It can't be done? Oh, they did it.
The night that Cecille Manners had hysterics and Felicity was hurrying
because she knew that Fiegenspann would "bawl her out" if she was very
late, Perry Blair had been standing from eleven o'clock until a quarter
to twelve on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, too proud
to turn the collar of his light coat up against the winter cold, too
broke to buy a heavy one. He'd almost decided to hunt a job, anything
that would bring enough to take him back home. The Dream? Girl o'
Mine? It hurt his throat to think of these,--made him blink his eyes.
So they had undermined him.
He was standing on a corner wondering what it was all about. But in
that last three-quarters of an hour he had achieved something at least,
a terse sentence that must, it seems, epitomize the sentiments of every
idol who ever shared his predicament, every king who ever lacked a
throne.
He nodded his head over it, and voiced it pensively.
"It's a great world," he muttered, "if you don't weaken."
Then he saw that she would very likely be killed if someone didn't do
something about it besides shout. He weighed the chances, in an
infinitesimal fraction of a second, and decided they were such that any
good gambler could scarcely ignore. So he bunched his muscles and
sprang.
Felicity's taxi had met a traffic tie-up at Forty-seventh Street which
made further direct advance impossible. In obedience to her plain
request for haste the driver had tried it to the west, found that way
cut off, and so detoured to the east. When, however, he wriggled up to
Broadway on Forty-fourth Street he had met with no better luck.
Here was a din of horns, of racing motors, of harried traffic police.
But not much chance of progress. So Felicity paid him and stepped off
the running-board into the thick of it to have a try on foot at the
very moment when the nearest officer thought to have it cleared.
He raised an arm and roared, bull-voiced:
"Come on there, now!"
And promptly the drivers of the two cars which had been at the heart of
the snarl, like key logs in a jam, both heckled, both in the wrong and
filled with unsaid things, trod harshly upon their accelerators.
Wire-wheeled sedan and lemon-tinted limousine, up-town bound and
cross-town bound, they leaped simultaneously forward, as Felicity
stepped between.
Bystanders screamed so efficiently that their shrill tumult drowned the
wail of overtaxed brakedrums. But that would have helped Felicity
little. Nor could the brakes, for that matter. The lunging start had
been too strong, the space too short to stop in.
Perry Blair, about whom those who screamed had heard something
unpleasant--oh, yes, yellow!--lanced down the narrowing aisle between
radiator and fenders. He struck Felicity like a vicious tackler yet
did not go down, but leaped again. As the cars crunched together they
slithered through the crowd, across the walk, against a wall, into a
heap. And the fall hurt Perry a little, even accustomed as he was to
the taking of blows yieldingly. He was slow to rise. The girl was
quickly up.
"Last down!" she gasped, but her exclamation was somewhat pallid like
her wit. "Hold 'em, Yale!"
Then, while she still faltered, uncertain, shaken, the occupant of the
lemon-tinted limousine came swiftly to her. He was a great hulk of a
man, yet light on his feet with that nimbleness which seems often
astonishing in huge people.
"Let me put you in my car, Miss Brown," he begged, "and set you safely
across. Not badly bruised, I trust?"
She gave him a flash of a glance and gasped again, but this time
inaudibly. His ease with her name did not surprise her. He'd seen her
often enough to know that. But this, she realized, was the first time
that she had really been impressed upon him. Not too steadily,
therefore, that she might need assistance, she let him help her back
across the sidewalk, to the car, and thus away. Pig-iron Dunham? Of
course. Knowing Felicity there is small cause to wonder that she went
without even remembering to thank her rescuer.
He was getting up now, the target of few eyes. Most of those who
lingered at all were staring after Dunham, Felicity and the lemon
limousine. And Perry was congratulating himself, even while with an
odd, detached expression he watched them go, that he had damaged but
little his clothing, when a hand fell on his sleeve.
Perry turned to find a reporter, Hamilton by name, peering at him
quizzically.
"Forgot to thank you, did she?" he laughed. "Oh, well, better come
along over to the Roof with me and watch her caper, and give her
another chance."
Perry didn't know whether he liked Hamilton or not, but he didn't
instinctively distrust him.
"Who is she?" he asked.
"You really don't know?"
"I don't know many girls in this town."
"Hm-m-m," said Hamilton. "Thought everybody knew her. Felicity Brown.
Aero Octet." And he repeated his invitation.
"She'll want to thank you for preventing damage to life or limb." He
couldn't have said exactly what made him voice the rest, unless it was
the way the boy's eyes had followed her.
"And believe me, damage to life or limb, it would have been an equal
catastrophe to Felicity. Come on along."
Perry hung back.
"Don't you know," he hesitated, "that you can lose your reputation just
from being seen talking to me?"
Hamilton laughed again. He saw, however, that Perry's mind was not
upon what he was saying. And who shall say when fancy first was bred?
Not you--or I--or even Hamilton. But the latter might have hazarded a
shrewd guess. And a man, it would seem, has a little excuse for
falling in love with a girl with Felicity's looks, whose life he just
has saved.
"Come along," urged Hamilton. "I want to hear about that mess. I've
been six months in Mexico." But he eyed the boy with deeper curiosity
as they crossed Broadway.
"Who was the man?"
Perry spoke just once to ask that question, before they left the
white-lit street for the elevator.
"Dunham."
Yet somehow Hamilton was sure that the other had known all along. And
the quizzical eyes became malicious. If the boy was falling in love
with Felicity he anticipated with glee unholy complications. Dunham's
alacrity at the scene of the accident no man could underestimate.
Pig-iron Dunham didn't, indiscriminately, beg young ladies to let the
limousine bear them across Broadway in safety, or anywhere else, for
that matter.
And yet, some hours later, when he had left Perry Blair waiting for
Felicity at the mouth of the alley which ran back to the Roof's stage
door, Hamilton found himself with little relish for the complications
which he had so wisely foreseen. Perry's story of the trouble with
Devereau and Dunham he had had in full, and believed. He had wanted to
do something and realized that there was not much which he could do.
And now this. It was funny--but it wasn't so damned funny either.
Why, the kid was just--well, just a kid. And Felicity had been sweet
to him. Very sweet and simple, in spite of his own none too well
curbed sarcasm. Under Dunham's eye--because she knew that Dunham's eye
was always upon her--she had sat long at their table, a slim thing in
new-grass green, so prettily grateful that she suggested pink sashes
and dimity. And Felicity wasn't a pink-sash-and-dimity girl. Hamilton
knew that. But did Perry Blair? Just a kid! Dammitt! But nobody,
not even a kid, had any right monkeying with Broadway, or Felicity, if
he couldn't take care of himself.
Yet Hamilton, after he had said good-night, lingered a while. And
again--immediately--something which he had anticipated came to pass.
The lemon limousine was waiting at the curb. And Dunham stepped out of
it, again with his preposterous nimbleness, when Felicity appeared. He
stood holding wide the door. But the girl gave him only a nice little
nod. She slipped her hand happily into the crook of Perry's arm.
Hamilton had a glimpse of Pig-iron Dunham's face.
"Hooked!" he exclaimed. "Hooked!"
But he had a good look at Perry Blair's too, as the pair passed.
"Dammitt!" he snapped. "Dammitt!" And yet folks wondered why a chap
who knocked around this city hunting news sometimes drank more than was
good for him.