[Illustration: He tore at them, mad with rage.]
Once it was considered adequate to combat wickedness with fear, but methods change. It has come to seem wiser, if less orthodox, to urge that heaven is fair instead of insisting first that hell is so foul. And so perhaps it would be well for a change to bear less heavily upon the wages of sin, and extol, just a little, the wages of virture. For too constant insistence upon an evil thing is sure to breed doubt in the mind of one who is in the habit of thinking at all. It did in Cecille's. If it be so true, so inevitable, so frightful, surely it should be self-evident now and then, instead of a mere matter of report. And beautiful generalization, never anything but vague, becomes noticeable after a time, questionable. The things of glory in this world are not so tediously many that they will not bear once or twice the telling. Why not refuse, for once, to blink the facts, even though they may not be suitably sordid? Why not go into detail, once in a while, if the prospect is as fair as they would have one fancy?
This story does, I hope. It would be honester that way.
It is not easy to account for the intimacy which existed between those two girls. It is doubtful if either of them could have done much to account for it. Pressed for an explanation, Felicity Brown, it is true, might have essayed an answer of sorts. "Oh, Cele's kind of a nut," she might have declared, "but she's a good scout," or something equally unsatisfactory. But Cecille, unless urged, quite likely wouldn't have made any answer at all. Then, "I don't know," she would have murmured. And in the face of such gravity her inquisitor must surely have sought a different topic.
Yet the intimacy was a fact,—one of those odd facts which life persists in producing. They had shared an apartment (that is a nice compliment, that phrase, applied to their sitting-room, bedroom and bath) for almost a year, continuing in a state of amiability possible only between two people so widely separated in ideals and hopes that there could never be a clash. There had never been much companionship, however. Now and then they ate one meal together, an early dinner for Cecille and a late breakfast for Felicity, at six o'clock in the evening. For Cecille's working day was over before Felicity's began. But there had been no intimacy of the spirit. And yet each knew the soul of the other as well as though it had been a meal sack which could be turned inside out, exposing every seam to scrutiny.
Felicity Brown belonged to the Midnight Roof Club's famous Aero Octet. That is, of course, a needless bit of information, presumptuous even to the initiate, for everybody knows her, almost everybody. She was the third from the left, the one in new-grass green, with balloons pendant from the scalloped corners of her short, stiff-wired skirt—black balloons like huge dull pearls. The one with the smile. Yes, I know that the others smiled, too, constantly, provocatively; but sometimes the set of their lips was likely to seem anything but the curl of mirth. But not Felicity's.
It never lost its challenge. And her dancing was like that, tireless, serenely abandoned, the essence of knowing grace. Half-pagan, half-divine, Denby, the young cover artist, badly smitten, once put it with striking unoriginality. And with exceeding inaccuracy, too. For there are all too many who will insist that the pagan portion rather over-balanced the rest. But her sheer vitality was amazing.
An unobserving person, still seeking the key to their intimacy, could easily blunder upon the old bromide and repeat that a pretty woman invariably prefers a plain one for a foil. But he would have to be a very blind fool indeed. For Felicity Brown's beauty, perfect enough under the spot of the Midnight Club's miniature stage, became a less flawless thing in contrast with Cecille. Perhaps that sounds far-fetched. Perhaps, having seen Felicity for yourself, you are inclined to smile and shrug. Nevertheless it is so.
Not one of a million Denbys would ever have called Cecille half-pagan or divine in any degree. He wouldn't have noticed her, even, unless his attention had been pointedly called that way. And if another, contemplating her with an eye not greedy of the flesh alone, had finally hit upon the word poignant to describe the hungry youth of her, the odd little tilt of her head, the soft and eager promise in swelling line of hip and breast, Denby himself most certainly would have murmured absently:
"Poignant. Yes—yes, poignant. Quite so—quite so!"
And yawned.
For she did not challenge instantly, as did Felicity. A man might look at her a long time before her perfection smote him. It usually happened that way; it happened exactly like that to Perry Blair. He looked at her many, many times before he saw with seeing eyes and realized how shyly precious and flagrantly bold girlhood like hers could be.
Her smile was not as ready as that of the girl who danced. And it had become a little strained, a little edged, before the end. But it never lost its freshness. It was always as shining as fine rain at dawn. And the inquiry in her eyes was not part calculation. They were more wistful, less expectant maybe. But they were steady. And gray as a November sea.
Once, remarking the incongruity of their names, Cecille repeated her own with a shade of scorn and provoked from her companion one of the few personalities in which she ever indulged.
"Cecille Manners!" she drawled. "Cecille Manners—gown-fitter's assistant! With a name like that I should be in a Broadway chorus."
It happened late one evening. Cecille was half undressed for bed. And Felicity, busy at the mirror, turned an instant to follow with a dispassionate eye the slight, knickered figure crossing the room.
"With a figure like that, you mean," she amended. "It's plain stingy to keep it under cover. Think of the thousands who are panting to pass over three-fifty per, just to sit out front and give it the up and down!"
Nor did the girl at the mirror see the raw flush which her cool comment brought to Cecille's face, nor would she have understood it had she seen. That one's privacy, one's physical fastidiousness, could be affronted by mere words, would have astounded her. Fastidiousness carried that far—fastidiousness of any sort—was incomprehensible to Felicity. But she found the topic momentarily of interest.
"It is kind of stagy," she pursued it. "Your own?"
"Naturally."
Cecille's crispness was lost upon her. They could never have quarreled. And Cecille had found a dressing-gown and hugged it tight around her knees.
"Oh, not necessarily," Felicity said, abstractedly judicious. "Take me for instance. I tried out four or five before I was inspired with the one I'm wearing now. And a couple of them woulda knocked you dead, take it from me. But the Vere de Vere stuff is bla now. Too phony. There's no class to that kind of a monicker any more. And, believe me, you can't afford to overlook any bets, nowadays; you got to have class in everything. Something simple—something demure, that's what they want. You got to be a lady."
And perhaps that is the best explanation, after all, of Felicity's cultivation of the other girl. One cannot of oneself acquire breeding, but it is possible to study technique. And I think Cecille's reason for sticking to Felicity to the very end is clear too. Once, before things happened, she was one of those people who believed in the inevitable dark river, or swift oblivion, or an agony of remorse. Believed pathetically.
I think Felicity Brown served her as a fearsome revelation of life stripped to its rawest essentials,—a demonstration of shattering truths which she would never have believed had she not stood by, looking on. It held her as a snake's eye holds a bird, fascinated, in deadly peril.
But they got on together. And as an economic arrangement it left nothing to be desired. Cecille sewed well and was paid twenty-two fifty a week. For her appearance in the Aero Octet Felicity received, at the beginning, forty-five. This may astonish some. It shouldn't.
"I don't pay my girls much." So Fiegenspann, the proprietor of the Roof Club, bluntly advised her, after she had passed his scrutiny and been pronounced unusual enough even for the Aero Octet. "I don't have to. Because the opporchoonities here are big—very big. And I like my girls to be sociable. It makes business."
Felicity knew then that she had finally found the right man—the right market. She appreciated his frankness and reciprocated.
"I get you," she said, "and forty-five it is. And I'm sociable, or I can be, if sufficiently persuaded. Only let's be clear about that point right now, at the start. You can send Opporchoonity's card in whenever he calls and I'll be pleased to meet him. But he mustn't crawl up to the curb in any Decrepid Four—understand? He's got to be hitting on twelve."
Fiegenspann understood. He nodded his heavy head. He began to see, then and there, that Felicity Brown was going to add another page to the Roof Club's history. He even essayed a compliment.
"My clientele is of all the world," he said. "And you—you look expensif."
"I am," said Felicity. "No pikers need apply."
And with that business conference between Felicity and Fiegenspann began the revelation which during the months that followed Cecille watched in a kind of stricken suspense that must, it seems, have been childish anticipation in the beginning of the pitiless blast which would complete the other's sure destruction.
Since the day when freakish chance had thrown them together she had had no illusions concerning Felicity's ultimate destiny. It had surprised her not that Felicity was traveling the road, but that she had not long since arrived. She had not learned then how coolly Felicity herself had selected that destiny and taken it in hand. She had not surmised with what dispassionate judgment she had husbanded her resources, once the route was chosen.
And she wouldn't believe the evidence of her own eyes and ears, at first. It never happened this way—it couldn't! Such things were the black fruit of one reckless moment; of nameless impulses; of bitter betrayal. Someone had written something like that. One more unfortunate, rashly importunate—that was it. She couldn't remember the rest. And then her suspense, which was half fearsome expectancy, was overwhelmed by a thought which really frightened her.
If all that they had taught her wasn't so; if all that she had accepted so blindly wasn't the literal truth, inexorable for every individual (life was a too bitterly personal thing for her to concern herself with a doctrine which, accurate in the main, could be shrugged aside when it failed in isolated cases) then all the rest, all that she had clung to just as blindly, could be a lie. And if it was—if it was—
The thought struck at all she knew, all she had, her creed and code and hope of to-morrow.
Felicity when she burst in with the news that she had landed Fiegenspann did a wild can-can up and down the room. She danced as no one else ever saw her dance, in a surrender to exultation that was wanton savagery. But her mood passed quickly. The next moment, like an implacable campaigner, she was summing up the excellences of her latest step.
"Now you watch me!" she said. "Now you watch my dust!"
It was cold-blooded; it was as passionless as chess. And it was about then that Cecille began to draw nearer and nearer in spirit, like a bird hypnotized by a snake. The simile is hectic, I know. But it was like that.
She tried to hold aloof. She used to wonder why she had not packed her bag that night and got out. She used to shiver when she remembered Felicity's dance. One couldn't touch pitch and not be denied. There were, it seemed, an overwhelming number of such proverbs, and most of them forbidding.
But she stayed on. More than that, she found herself after a time stammering a question concerning each new cavalier as he appeared. And each time Felicity's answer was unbelievably unconcerned and laconic.
"Nothing doing," she'd say. "He's hard boiled."
Familiarity breeds complacency oftener than contempt. But it was neither the one nor the other which forced Cecille to ask, over and over again. Once Felicity surprised in her eyes the light that invariably accompanied the question.
"You're a queer kid," she added that time, after the usual answer. "I sure don't get you."
Later she thought she had solved it.
"Don't you worry, Cele," she reassured her. "When the fall comes you'll hear the crash. I'll slip you the returns a little ahead of time so that you can get out from under."
"It—it wasn't that," protested Cecille quickly.
She wondered why she didn't pack up and get out.
But she was still there another night when Felicity finally came home again with every lithe line of her body pulsing triumph. She was even sitting up, which was unusual. An unusual occurrence accounted for it.
In the beginning Felicity had tried to share with the other girl those prospects who, for one reason or another, were of no importance.
"Come on along," she often urged. "These guys mean nothing in my young life except a dinner. And you needn't worry. Believe me, you'll be shown the same respect as if you were out with your maiden aunt. They know I'm refined and won't stand for anything else. And it'll do you good."
Cecille did go, once. So far as her escort was concerned she found that Felicity had spoken the truth. He was innocuous. He was, indeed, quite entirely unaware of her presence most of the evening. That did not displease her. She found him little stupider than a swain of the same age might have been in her own home town, even though his name did appear in heavy block type in the Social Register. But she went only once. She made a mistake. She had that day helped to costume a sister of one of the men. She happened now to mention that sister's prettiness.
The man looked her in the eye, coldly, for a prolonged moment.
"Let's leave my sister out of it," he said at length deliberately.
And Cecille's cheeks were still pale from his tone when they arrived back at the apartment.
"That was a bad crack you made," Felicity told her then.
"I—I didn't know."
"They don't like to discuss their own womenfolks with girls like us."
"Oh!"
The exclamation was little more than a whisper.
"But no harm done," airily. "He has to depend on the old man for his bank-roll. I just thought I'd tip you off."
She didn't go again. She stopped wanting to go anywhere, even to the movies, for quite a while. And then, just at eleven one night, while Felicity was before the mirror preparing to go to work and wondering where Cecille could be, the latter came quietly in. Felicity hardly marked her entrance until she dropped suddenly into a chair and began to laugh. It was the laugh which made Felicity turn so sharply. She had had experience with that shrill note in women's voices and knew what it could mean. Such breakdowns were ugly to handle.
She flung sharply round.
"What's tickling you?" she barked harshly. "Shoot! Let's have it. Cut that, now!"
It stayed the slighter girl's hysteria.
"I've been—I've been to a dance," she gurgled.
Felicity gave her no foolish respite.
"Well, I don't get it," she rapped on. "Maybe I'm English. Where's the joke?"
"A—a dance over at the Central Palace, given for Worthy Working Girls—"
"That's funnier! But go ahead. Snap into it! Don't let it drag—don't let it drag—"
It seemed a potent cure.
"I went because I saw in the paper that Mrs. Schuyler Driggs was going to be among the patronesses to receive."
The hysterical giggle was gone from Cecille's voice. She shut tight her teeth and raised her chin. Felicity felt that it was safe now to remain silent. And she was right, partly right. She only failed to realize that Cecille was all too calm.
"I'm sorry, Felicity," the latter apologized meekly. "But I couldn't help it. I thought I'd laugh and cry and scream, right on the street, before I could get here. But I held on. Shall I finish?"
"Mrs. Schuyler Driggs has just made her entrance—"
"Yes. She was in the shop this morning." The recital seemed simple and orderly now. "I helped to fit her. I usually do. She's never very cordial, but this morning she was—oh, she was a beast! She nagged and nagged and nagged, until I got nervous. I couldn't help it. I got worse and worse, until I stuck a pin into her. Not just a scratch." The gurgle threatened. "But deep—deep!"
"If you go off again," promised Felicity, "I'll dump that pitcher of water over you."
"I won't. I stuck the pin into her, and she—she grunted. And then—I never saw anyone grow so furious. She turned purple. I'm not sure that she didn't strike at me.
"'You did that on purpose,' she grated at me. Grated, that's the only word that describes it. 'You fool! You damned clumsy little fool!'"
Felicity waited until it was evident that she would have to speak.
"Well?" she asked then in a voice grown hard. "What did you say? What was the snappy come-back?"
"I couldn't think of anything to say, not just then—"
"Folks like you usually can't," said Felicity drily. "They think of a knock-out a half an hour too late. But not me. Language comes easy to me in a spot like that, language that I can't use regular without getting pinched, and I'm generous with it."
"I was a little more than a half hour late in having my say," Cecille admitted. "But I had it. I saw the announcement of the dance in the afternoon paper and her name, and I decided to go. I don't know why; that is, I didn't—not until she recognized me. Then I knew! She was shaking hands with me and telling me to have a good time. She was just passing me on to the next in line, when she blinked at me, like that—she's fat—and stopped me.
"'Haven't I seen you somewhere before, my dear?' she asked. 'You seem somehow very familiar.'
"Then I knew why I'd come. And I let her have it!
"'You have,' I was just as throaty as she was. 'And I should be,'—meaning familiar. 'At ten-thirty o'clock this morning when I stuck a pin into you, fitting that gown you have on, you cursed me. If I remember accurately you called me a damned clumsy little fool.'"
"—seven—eight—nine—ten!" chanted Felicity joyously. "And out! What did she do?"
And then, quite without any warning at all, came the break. It was like the shattering of brittle glass.
Cecille rocked to crazy mirth.
"She had them put me out!" she shouted. "She called the matron and had her put me out! She said the language I'd used before her was positively vicious. She said I'd—contaminate—those—worthy—working girls!"
And it took Felicity almost three-quarters of an hour to bring her round. In one brief interval of calm she managed to slip to the telephone and call a taxi. The rest of the time she spent on her knees beside the girl in the chair crooning softly. And she never knew that most of the words she set to her soothing, extemporaneous tune would have contaminated anybody, most of all Mrs. Schuyler Driggs herself.
At eleven-thirty, when Cecille was crying comfortably, she rose. And seeing that her work was well done, she became brisk.
"I'll get a bawling out from Fiegenspann," she said, and ran to a window. "Thank God, that taxi's here. And now you'd better get to bed. Maybe hereafter you'll know better than to mix it with somebody outa your class. You oughta known in the first place that perfect ladies have got it all over girls like us, before we start. They've got everything fixed, the judges and the referee, before you step into the ring."
She ran out—and flashed back.
"Don't get me wrong, Cele." For one reason or another she hurried it. "I ain't got time to explain just what I meant to say, but there's one thing I didn't mean. Don't get me wrong. If you ain't a lady, then I'm the Prince of Wales."
That was the second time Cecille heard it.
"A girl like us."
After a time her sobs subsided until they were no more than long, unsteady breaths. But she stayed at the window, staring down into the street. Once she dug the knuckles of one fist into her eyes and wistfully shook her head.
"I wonder," she whispered. "I wonder."
CHAPTER V
CHAMPION! CHAMPION!
Perry Blair, champion lightweight of the world, stood on the corner of Broadway and Forty-fourth Street, deep in contemplation of a quaint phase of our present-day democracy.
It was a fertile spot for such moralizing, albeit somewhat exposed for one attempting philosophy in a fall-weight overcoat. For nowhere in all this world could one hope to come upon a crowd better schooled in the rules of hero-worship, American-style, than this eleventh-hour mob which was pouring like tide-rips from side-street theaters into the city's main thoroughfare.
Much has been written, of a distinctly pathetic flavor, concerning the case of a king without a throne. From days immemorial such hapless figures have been somehow invested by historians with a melancholy glamour; and yet this appears to be true only of those royal individuals who came by their thrones in the easiest way—that of inheritance. The kings of high endeavor who have won to the pinnacle by force of their own stoutness of heart—in other words the popular idols of a fickle public, who have scarce begun to get acquainted with the dizzy uncertainty of their pedestals before the pedestal be rudely removed from beneath them—rarely find the world inclined to melancholy interest in their plight. Ridicule is the commonest manifestation of any interest whatsoever, ridicule and an unfathomable contempt.
For some time Perry Blair had been finding this hard to understand. The adulation had been so overwhelming at first, so whole-hearted and seeming sincere one brief year before. Why, even six months back he could not have stood there thus, a tenth as long, before the copper name-shield of the Claridge, without collecting about him a fawning, favor-hunting throng so dense, so tenacious, and troublesome to traffic that it would have brought the officer from his place beside the surface-car tracks, caustic-tongued, to investigate and disperse it. Nor would that officer have ordered them to move on, six months before, once he had discovered what monarch it was who held informal court there. He would have paused for a bluff joke or two himself, a knowing word of importance, before returning to loose his indignation upon some luckless wight of a family man, self-conscious and clumsy in what is known as a tin lizzie.
They had hailed him so noisily, so elatedly, press and public alike. That the latter had fawned and flattered should have warned him what to expect, later on, but it did not. The greater wonder is that it did not go to his head a little. It seemed it couldn't help but do that.
It had been so sudden. Mediocrity one day, and obscurity. Mediocrity—and then world's champion, and the fierce white light which beats upon a throne! Of course there had been some to sneer. Here and there one had arisen to point out that Fanchette, the man whom he had whipped in one round, had been but a shell of a man, champion in name only, for a long, long time. They said the victory proved nothing. They said that Perry Blair had just been lucky, that was all; lucky in being selected as the one least calculated to damage Fanchette after a whole year in which the latter had steadfastly refused to fight. Lucky in having that fox, Devereau, for a manager, cunning enough to decoy Fanchette into the ring.
But in the main they swarmed to his standard. The king was dead. And he had lingered tediously, at that.
The newspapers welcomed Perry avidly. Fanchette as a subject for copy had long been profitless as a sucked orange. Here again was the novelty of newness and a personality of exceeding richness and color. Or at least so ran report. No crack men had been sent out to cover the affair. That such an astounding thing as the rise of a new champion threatened had been foreseen by few. In the East Perry Blair had been little known and reckoned a third-rater. But those who had been West to see the bout which ended so suddenly brought back fragments which put a nice edge upon the imaginations of the sporting editors. And immediately, when in reality there was no need, had begun the well-known process of gilding the lily.
They featured his out-of-doors life; the romance of the country boy again. They dwelt upon his modesty, his extreme reticence, his hardihood and rigid habit of clean living. They twanged all the strings that had ever sounded before in honor of other champions. And Broadway—that certain ring which can give you off-hand the exact poundage of Nelson when he met Gans, or the fastest time in which the Futurity has ever been run, or the name of the latest female whose intimate measurements have just been declared by one of a half dozen greatest living artists to be a reproach to the Venus de Milo, all without wrinkling its forehead in thought—that portion of Broadway, to use its own expression, ate it up.
And yet when Perry Blair came East an odd thing happened. When he came East and they found that every word which they had read with such approval was the literal truth, and not just the industry of an astute press-agent, they were nonplused. Even suspicious, I believe. And outraged in the end.
It must have been a shock to them to find in Perry Blair a sportsman, when they had expected a dead game sport. They had been waiting to lay at his feet (at a price) the spoils due a conqueror, spoils neither savory nor shining, but those which other champions had demanded and relished, until they waked to find themselves champion no more. And when Blair ignored these things they distrusted him.
From the outset his reticence, which had been lauded, nettled them. By some obscure process of reasoning it convicted him of conceit, a mean and stingy conceit, unpardonable even among those to whom self-esteem was as natural as the drawing of breath. Eternal poseurs themselves, they adjudged his modesty a pose, yet somehow could not forgive it. And his decency bred hatred in a few.
The growth of antagonism was too slow, too intricate, to be retraced here. It is effect and not cause with which we are concerned. And one instance alone will serve to show, how finally was wrecked that popularity which had been so swiftly created. One interview between Perry and Devereau explains it well.
The reply which Perry Blair made to the invitation sent him several months after his arrival in Manhattan, by Pig-iron Dunham, is still verbal currency upon the Tenderloin. Conversational small change, to be sure, but still in circulation.
Dunham had bidden him to one of his famous little dinners. Infamous? Well, it's all in the point of view. Some of them have been spoken of warmly by those who have attended, though guardedly.
Perry Blair was more outspoken.
"Tell Dunham," he directed the messenger who had brought the invitation quite privately, "tell Dunham that if it had to be one or the other I'd chose to dine decently with a four-footed hog, in a trough."
The messenger, one of many who believed that Pig-iron Dunham, having amassed millions in the industry which had given him his name, was a philanthropist in spending it so liberally, thought to have heard wrong. So Perry repeated again for him the message with something added for emphasis. This time he believed his ears and bore it as nearly intact as possible to Dunham. And when, hours later it came word for word to Devereau, the latter turned pale. For many days he had been hearing rumors disturbing to his ideas of managerial authority, but had laid them to jealousy. He believed them now. He sought out Blair.
"Listen!" He plunged strongly in. He thought he knew when to tread softly, when to brow-beat. "Listen, kid! You've pulled a boner. A'course I shoulda wised you up earlier about Dunham but I thought you were on. I thought everybody was. But you can't treat Pig-iron this way. Why—why—why he—he's—"
What he had wanted to say was that Dunham, Benevolent Patron of the Street, was not accustomed to having his favors rebuffed so crudely, but he couldn't quite manage it. So he fell back upon earnest repetition.
"You can't treat him like this!"
"Can't?" asked Perry Blair. "I just have."
Devereau didn't like that tone. He was just discovering a lot of things about his light-weight champion which he didn't like. But he kept his temper. He was famed for that. Famed for his oily smoothness under provocation.
"Sure! Your mistake—and my fault. But it ain't too late to square it," he said. "You just send over word that you'll be pleased to death to be at his dinner, and it'll still be all right. I'll square it. And don't you worry. You won't be bored. Pig-iron's dinners are—now—well—" He closed an obscene lid. "A good time will be had by all! And Pig-iron will be pleased to have you there. Pig-iron, he likes to entertain the latest celebrities."
Blair's voice made him start.
"He can't entertain me," said Perry. "Not a little bit."
And suddenly with that Devereau was suave no longer. He leaped up and thumped upon a desk. He slitted his pale eyes.
"Say, what d'yuh think you are?" he raved. "Talking to me like that!"
Blair did not attempt to shout him down, and yet he made himself heard.
"Not Pig-iron Dunham's man," he answered. "Nor yet yours. Are you thinking to tell me how I shall talk?"
Devereau could not have told why his rage was so red. Why he hated the other so swiftly. But he mastered his voice. He had seen something like this coming, not so unpleasant, however, or so difficult to handle. He had imagined when the time came they would talk it over, amicably, like good business men. But that was out of the question now. It had always been out of the question, but he'd realized that tardily. But they'd have it out. There could be no better time.
"No?" he drawled. "No?" Sarcasm lent his words a sing-song quality.
"No? Not Dunham's man? Not mine? Well-well! Ha-ha!"
And then, savagely:
"So that's it! It's true, heh? They been trying to tell me so for weeks, all up and down the line, and I been telling 'em they'd got you wrong. The swelled head, is it? But pardon me, Mr. Blair. Who am I to speak thus to the world's champion? Delusions of grandeur, I should say. Pardon my coarseness!" Sudden laughter split wide his lips.
"Champion!" he bawled. "World's champion! Oh, my Gawd!"
Perry sat silent and watched him. Little by little he recognized that this was not acting. This was real. He waited and watched.
"So you been followin' the papers, Mr. Blair," chanted Devereau. Having struck this vein of satire and found it rich he followed it up. "Full of lovely reading these days, now aren't they?"
That was not so; not as it was meant. Perry had found the columns devoted to himself singularly flat and devoid of interest. There was only one item, in fact, which never failed. Only one which he always read, the daily quotation on livestock. But he kept quiet. His eyes alone were attentive.
"So you've been reading the papers!" Mincingly Devereau went back and picked it up. "Well-well! Ha-ha!" But hard after came again that half-blind, half-incoherent rage.
"Listen, now, you! You listen! Listen, and I'll give you an interview that's never been put on any press."
And he gave it to him, briefly, coldly. He repeated substantially what the carpers had said at the time Perry won the title.
"Champion?" he said. "Sure—because I made you champion. Because Fanchette wouldn't a'stepped into the ring with Jimmy Montague, or Jigger Holliday; no, nor even old Kid Fall. I know, believe me I know, because I tried him with all of 'em. Not for the purse that was offered. He wasn't looking to commit suicide at bargain prices.
"But you? He'd take a chance on you. Sure he would. Who the hell was Perry Blair, anyway? He knew that Montague'd cut him to pieces. Holliday'd have tore off his lid. So I swung him to you.
"And why? Because I thought you'd listen to reason. Oh, you don't believe it. Ask Dunham. Are you still such a hick that you don't know he was behind that match? Why, he's behind 'em all—nine tenths of 'em. His bankroll is."
"Whose right hand was it put Fanchette but?" asked Perry mildly.
"Pah!" slurred Devereau. "Pah! I coulda done it myself."
But Blair's quietness fooled him.
"I'm not saying that it wasn't convincing." He thought it time to placate. "It was neat. I've gave you credit. Sure! You looked great. You looked like a world-beater, in there against Fanchette. But that's just what I'm trying to get at. Oh, Dunham and I talked it over before anybody in this burg knew you were alive. That's what I'm trying to get at. You been crabbin' your own act; you been making it hard for yourself. You gotta play it up now. You gotta work different.
"Nowadays a champ has just two outs. He's got to be a glad hand artist, or a bruiser. That covers it. He's either got to be so popular that they don't care much who he fights, so long as he's a good showman, or he's got to take them all on as they come. All the hard ones, and the harder the better, till one of 'em puts him to sleep."
Devereau's voice acquired a whine, the plaintive note of a man whose sincere best efforts have gone unappreciated.
"And I had it all figured out. I been doing all the headwork for you. I figured how we'd sidestep Montague and Holliday—all the tough birds—just as long as we could stall 'em off. And pick up a nice piece of change. Your share'd be enough so's you'd not need to worry. And we'd made a great start. They were dead sick of Fanchette. The papers were wild for somebody new. And they put you over better'n we could have done it ourselves.
"But you gotta work different. They liked you at first. They ain't so dead sure they give a damn about you now. You gotta be a good boy. More of a mixer. The crowd has been waitin' a long time for you to loosen up and slip 'em a piece of news that can be cashed. And they're getting sulky. A'course that's my fault too. I admit it. But it couldn't be helped. There wasn't much you coulda tipped 'em off to, but you shoulda stalled 'em along. You should have promised 'em something when the time was right. But it's right now, now that you're matched with Hughie. You can tell 'em just how to get aboard. It's time, before some of 'em get good and sore, and begin to holler for you to meet Montague."
"I can whip Montague," said Perry. "Holliday I'm not so sure of. But Montague I can whip, the best day he ever stood in shoes."
It maddened Devereau again. Just when he was beginning to congratulate himself that his work was good.
"You can't lick him," he choked. "You couldn't lick him even if he was handcuffed and shackled to a ball and chain." He tossed aloft his arms.
"Champion! You, champion! Oh, my Gawd!"
He strode across the room. But he came back swiftly to the boy who had not moved in his chair.
"Get this now!" he barked. He was done with talk. Done with argument.
"Get this, because when I'm finished this time, I'm through. I've got my coin in this thing and so has Dunham. And we're going to drag down what we put in with a little something for interest. We're going to get ours, and then you can fight Montague and be damned—or Holliday. You can go throw your nice new title into the gutter as soon as you please, for all of me, and try being first prize sucker of the world for a change. But first I get mine. How I hate a fool!"
"You're fighting Hughie Gay a week from Saturday. All right. Hughie's a set-up. I saw to that. You can pick 'em yourself hereafter. But right now your orders is to let Hughie stay the distance. A week from Saturday. Is that clear? Have you got that—sure?"
Blair sat silent. It is strange how silence will fool a man like Devereau. He made one last try for peace.
"And if you behave; if you're a good boy maybe we're going to forget we had this little misunderstanding. There's others besides Hughie just as soft. But if you're dead set on finding out who is boss; if you want to know whether you're Dunham's man or not, why just cross them orders. Pig-iron's got ten thousand on that fight—ten thousand that you don't win by a knock-out, if you win at all. And if you cost him that ten—Well, just dump it, if you want to see!"
"I fight on the level," said Perry, "or I don't fight at all."
"Then you don't fight at all," said Devereau.
Blair held him a long time with an eye that was chill. His voice was quieter than before, if that were possible.
"I have sat here and taken talk from you, you vermin, that I'd take from no man, because I could figure no other way. They know, downstairs, that you are up here with me. If I kill you they will hang me, and I do not choose to hang for one like you. If I laid a finger on you, that would be assault, and you and your friends would swear me into jail. That would be high card for you. It would fill your hand. So I must sit here idle. But some day, maybe, I'm going to come upon you with no circumstances to hinder. And if I do I'm going to change you. You do not please me, as you are. Some day I hope to alter you so that you will be a curio, even to your own best friends.… Get out!"
The chill eye had frightened Devereau. It heartened him to hear that he was safe.
"We'll put you out on the street," he snarled. "You'll be standing on a corner, wondering what it's all about!"
"Get out!"
Devereau got.
CHAPTER VI
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.
CHAPTER VII
AS WILLOWS BUD IN SPRING
Cecille was still up, staring out of the window, when Felicity and Perry Blair came in that night. Perry stayed but a moment, only long enough to promise that he would come again. Then he was gone. And Felicity was standing before the other girl, every line of her pulsing triumph.
"Not him!" Cecille cried. She could not have understood the triumph better had Felicity explained with a torrent of words.
"Oh, not him!" with quick, unthinking horror. "He—he's only a boy."
"Who?" demanded Felicity blankly.
"Mr—Mr. Blair."
Felicity's laugh was staccato.
"Him? Good Lord, no. Dunham!" She fairly sang it. "Dunham. Pig-iron Dunham. I knew if I waited I'd cop. Now watch me. Watch my dust!"
Cecille wondered why she didn't pack her bag and get out. But she didn't. She stayed. And later, a little timidly, she inquired about Blair.
"Perry Blair?" Felicity with a racing tongue had been describing how Dunham led her away from the near-accident.
"Perry? Oh, he's a prize-fighter. Light-weight champion, or he was for a minute or so. He wouldn't play the game when he had his chance, I guess, so Dunham and the bunch broke him. Something like that. I never did hear the inside stuff. But they say he was a bust anyway—just a morning-glory—and didn't know his luck. But do I? Did I play the game to-night? Did I pass up Pig-iron and his limousine to come home in a flat-wheeled trolley with my hero, who's already made him sore once? Oh, didn't I though! I guess I'm crazy!"
Cecille recoiled a little from that.
A prize-fighter. A bruiser. A plug-ugly. But—but—why, that wasn't possible. And if your idea of such a one is what Cecille's once was, neither will he fill your eye.
Just a kid. Hamilton had hit it off aptly at that. Level-eyed and diffident of tongue, with only a hint of his hidden bodily perfection lurking in breadth of shoulder and slenderness of waist.
A prize-fighter! Cecille fell asleep wondering how soon he would come again. As to whether he would come at all she was never for a moment in doubt. Once she had watched his eyes follow Felicity across the room she knew. But she hadn't felt sorry for him as Hamilton had. She felt sorry for herself and bitter against Perry. For the time she hated him.
Nor did she have to wonder long. Perry came the next night and escorted Felicity to the Roof. And the next. And next. Then Felicity realized that it would not be good policy to make Dunham sulk. Indeed she knew her luck. Indeed she played the game. The third evening she left Perry at home with Cecille.
