The war offered him the necessary excuse to escape from the narrowness of a life at which he chafed after three years in Cambridge.
The armistice had found him at St. Mihiel, and seven weeks later he was back in his native place, wearing a wound stripe, to find that his mother had died only a fortnight before of pneumonia. The practice of Safford & Dillon had dwindled to nothing; and, owing to the debts which his mother had been obliged to incur by reason of his absence abroad, her estate yielded less than a hundred dollars. He spent the afternoon at the cemetery, and that evening took the train for New York, with forty dollars in his pocket and a kit bag containing all his earthly possessions.
There he had tramped the streets for weeks in a vain endeavour to find an opening as a law clerk in some office of standing, sleeping in Mills hotels and Bowery lodging-houses, often more exhausted and worse fed than at any time while at the front. It was during this period that he acquired that sympathy for the outcasts who so often found themselves in the clutches of the law, which had led him, in default of other work, to undertake the defence of criminals in the police court. Here his ability, quickness, and above all, his pugnacity had quickly secured for him a following, and before long he was able to open a small office of his own. Meantime, however, his qualities as a fighter and his power of persuasive speech had attracted the attention of Ignatius O’Hara, of the well-known criminal firm of Hoyle & O’Hara, who had suggested a “connection,” with an intimation that in due course he might expect to be admitted to the firm.
There were no junior partners in Hoyle & O’Hara, and young Dillon gladly accepted the offer. From that moment his days, and generally his nights, had been crammed with every sort of experience—a practical training for an all-round trial lawyer such as, in all probability, he could have gained in no other way. Soon, under the astute coaching of O’Hara, he was defending most of the criminal cases in which the firm was retained; and gradually O’Hara withdrew in favour of the younger man, whose courage and almost Quixotic honesty made him a formidable rival of the most experienced prosecutors.
“The boy’s a wonder!” he used to say to Hoyle, after some unexpected acquittal. “I wish I knew how he does it!” O’Hara never perceived that the reason for Hugh’s success lay in his love of truth and his passion for justice to the under dog. He only knew, to use his own words, that Dillon “got there.” To Hoyle & O’Hara he was an invaluable acquisition—giving, to paraphrase Pooh-Bah, an air of respectability to an otherwise bald and unconvincing craftiness of which he personally had no suspicion. And, lest in some unexpected manner he might be lost to them, O’Hara persuaded his young associate to share his humble lodgings on Franklin Street, even though that necessitated thereafter relegating Quirk, who also dwelt there, to the sofa by the stove. Hence Hugh’s sudden translation to Castle Devens had been all the more dazzling. Had it not been for Moira, instead of risotto de volaille à l’orientale, Hugh would probably have been eating sausages and bacon off a tin plate in O’Hara’s kitchen.
Three hours later as, reclining in the Devens limousine, Hugh was whirled back to Franklin Street, he still told himself that it could not have happened. The truth of what old Lawyer Safford had said to him had been demonstrated: “You never can tell who is coming around the corner, Hughey!” And this couldn’t possibly have happened in any other city in the world.
The chauffeur had made Union Square in eleven minutes via Park Avenue, and now, after a moment’s pause to allow the crowd from the neighbouring movie house to cross, they swept on into the comparative darkness of Lafayette Street, where the only illumination was the entrance to Cesare Conti’s Restaurant and the big clock on the façade of a new building at Great Jones Street. The blocks whipped by like telegraph poles past a car window. Would he ever ride in a limousine of his own? There was Police Headquarters again. And the office of the Corriere della Sera—there was Canal Street—and just beyond it the Criminal Court Building and the Tombs!
The chauffeur stopped the car by the fire house, opened the door and thrust in his head.
“What number Franklin Street did you say, sir?”
“No matter,” answered Hugh, starting to get out. “It’s just around the corner. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”
“Oh, no, sir!—I’ll take you!” The chauffeur touched his astrakan cap.
Hugh sank back.
“Eighty-seven and a half, then!”
The car swept round the Tombs under the Bridge of Sighs and across Centre Street, hovered uncertainly at the Chinese laundry, and came to a stop in front of “Pallavachini’s Italian Table d’Hôte for Ladies and Gentlemen.”
“This is it,” Hugh informed him. “Much obliged! Have a cigarette? Good night!”
“Good—night!” echoed the chauffeur, staring after his passenger as the latter disappeared into the side doorway. Then to himself: “What ever will she be doing next!”
CHAPTER III
Mrs. Clayton watched the motor containing Moira Devens and Hugh Dillon disappear in the uptown traffic of Lafayette Street, then tightened the chinchilla about her throat, and walked to the Worth Street subway station. Never before had she found it so hard to adhere to the letter of the contract which she had executed more for the girl’s best good than for her own financial benefit.
As she felt her way down the iron staircase leading to the lower level the past arose as from an open grave. “Clayton”—the magic word—stared at her from a hoarding on the landing, and for a moment her heart fluttered. Could she have dreamed those last terrible ten years? If she only had! She strained her eyes at the billboard, but they refused to focus even upon that huge type. There was no need. The face below the name was that of a jolly-jowled pianist with a leonine mane!
The lights swam in the tunnel, but she managed to follow the pushing crowd into the train and clutch swaying at a strap. It was not so long ago that with her own brougham and snappy pair of bays she would have scorned the thought of putting foot to sidewalk. Only twenty years! Had she not been one of the most famous divas of the age? The operatic world had been at her feet. Only Ellie Yaw could rival her high F.
Forty-second Street! A pock-marked foreigner who had been sitting just in front of her arose and forced his way past. She followed the smell of garlic and rank tobacco in his wake, and climbed the stairs to the street. She had been a fool to go down there and get herself all stirred up! Besides, she had broken her word. Suppose O’Hara had told Richard on her, and the monthly check had stopped? It would have been Ward’s Island! The morgue! The Potter’s Field for hers!
“Careful, madam!”
A policeman had taken her by the elbow and was piloting her through the tangle of vehicles. He had been in his cradle when she had made her début as Cio Cio San at the Metropolitan in 1901. Had she given him her name, the chances were that he would not have remembered who she was. Sic transit gloria——!
Eileen Clayton continued eastward toward the river, passing in course the gleaming windows of cafeterias, cheap movie palaces, and still cheaper cigar stores, until she reached the region of shabby respectability achieved through the accommodation of “paying guests.” Her hotel, the Blackwell, had once been popular with the theatrical profession, upon whom it had lost its hold by reason of the management’s insistence upon a ridiculously prompt payment of bills, and it was now in that stage of metamorphosis between habitability and collapse where it was useless to spend money on repairs. Outsiders could still get dinner at the Blackwell for eighty-five cents, which meant that they could really eat for a dollar net; and, as an added lure,