Felix O'Day
Smith, Francis Hopkinson, 1838-1915
English
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Below is a summary of Felix O'Day
Etext produced by Duncan Harrod
Felix O'Day
By
F. Hopkinson Smith
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.
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