That Royle Girl/Chapter 1
THAT ROYLE GIRL
CHAPTER I
Joan Daisy Royle was on her way home from the office, where she had been kept at work throughout the evening, although it was Saturday. She was barely twenty years old, and she was so pleasing a person that Hoberg, who had caused her to be detained, had insisted that he should escort her to her flat; but she had refused him, as she habitually did, and alone she reached the corner of Sheridan Boulevard and Wilson Avenue just as the display lights on both sides of the street were extinguished.
It was late for her to be on her way from work, but the sight of the simultaneous snuffing-out of street lamps was, to her, an ordinary incident; she knew it to be the city's manner of tolling twelve. It marked midnight; that was all. Joan Daisy paid no attention to it nor to the progressive darkening of the shop-windows at her elbow, and upon the opposite side of the road, as clock mechanisms switched off the lights which had been reflected upon shows of extravagant gowns and of fantastic shoes, of perfumes in crystal bottles, of face-powders and paquets, of silk stockings, lingerie, laces and the like appurtenances to woman's beauty and habiliment.
Hotels were left agleam; and the wide windows of a resplendent refectory glowed with the tints of shaded lights upon its many gay tables where midnight couples eyed one another over sherbets and cakes and chocolate. The fires of a grill flickered upon a further pane. Young men emerged from, and others vanished into, suddenly discovered doorways. Dance music beat its moaning measure.
Joan Daisy went on, in her lively fashion, beside the boulevard which becomes, at this point, the highway for a neighborhood as remarkable as any in America; but she thought nothing whatever about its extraordinary attributes. She could not think of them as unusual; they composed the commonplaces of her life; and it never entered her head that any one would find them strange and astonishing. She lived here. She had not long lived here; no one had. Impermanency is in the air of the quarter.
The situation is upon the shore of Lake Michigan some five miles north of the aggregations of great gray buildings which a traveler customarily calls to mind when he thinks of the tremendous city in the center of America. In physical location, this new neighborhood is part of the city; but no locality could feel less affinity for the Chicago of the wheat elevators, of the cattle and hog and sheep markets, of the endless railroad yards, of the blast furnaces and factories spread over the enormous, smoky reaches of the west and south and southwest "sides" which were settled and built by the first two millions of people.
The city of the third million knows little of these; it keeps itself beyond hearing of the clangor; and the haze hangs far away. The merchants of the sunny, agreeable streets, feeling their distinction and seeking to denote it, have called the new city "the uptown"; its thieves, more poetic and far more sensitive to essentials, speak of it as "Little Paris."
Its citizens, who are young, breakfast in cafeterias, lunch at automats, dine in gardens or at cabarets and hotels where is dancing. Man meets girl on the boulevard and courts her in a taxicab and in the dark of motion picture theaters. A hotel room makes a home; a mansion is an apartment of one room, two or three, with bed built in a door, kitchenette in a cubby and the whole rented, with precarious delightfulness, for three months or, recklessly, for six.
A girl living here naturally looks out for herself; and Joan Daisy, as she proceeded toward her home, knew that she would be accosted or not just as she pleased. She did not please; and, as men loitered by, she knew exactly what to do. She went on with the same lilt in her step, neither gazing at the men nor making a point of avoiding them. She merely showed them that they were out of her mind; and they were. As a matter of fact, she was watching her shadow as she went along; for now that the brighter street-lamps were extinguished, the moon was casting an image of her upon the walk.
The glow from the posts which remained alight, somewhat confused her shadow made by the moon; but she soon turned into an avenue to the east which was darkened and where her shadow consequently became sharp and distinct as it accompanied her at her side.
Not only her shadow but the moon itself began to follow her, skimming in the sky over the roofs of the apartments and hotels on the south side of the street, halting whenever she stopped to gaze at it and then keeping pace with her, step by step, past chimney, past coping and parapet of the roofs.
No men happened to be loitering on this street, which was built up solidly from the boulevard to its end at the shore of the lake about a thousand feet away. Most of the buildings presented straight walls to the sidewalk, but a few fronted, not directly upon the street, but upon long, narrow courts cut back from the walk.
Joan Daisy lived in one of these—an ornate and impressive structure on the north side of the street. It had several doors upon its court, each a core for a cluster of rooms and suites which were identified only by their position in relation to the entrances and to the lighted windows in tiers over each door where the stairways ascended.
Joan Daisy glanced immediately at a window on the second floor, just beyond the second stairway, to see whether by any chance Fred Ketlar was in his flat. She knew it was hardly possible, at this hour; and his window was dark. Her window, which was directly above his, also was dark, as she expected it to be. Many another, besides the windows in the tiers over the entrances, was alight at this midnight; but Joan Daisy had no interest in them. She turned and gazed again at the moon while she reckoned how long it would be before Fred Ketlar would come. Hours, she realized; but she did not go in. She played with the moon, pulling it to and fro behind an opposite chimney. She made it follow her for a few paces back toward the boulevard; then she set off in the other direction past the court of several doors, drawing the moon with her all the way to the end of the street and to the smooth, silvery sands of the lake.
There she lost control of the moon which floated far away from her in the midst of the wide, calm, star-specked sky.
Joan Daisy went along the street at the edge of the beach until she found a gate in the fence between the sand and the sidewalk and she stepped upon the shore and dropped down, with her legs under her. She drew off her gloves, sifting the dry, cool sand through her slim, white fingers.
Still she was alone. This was a beach used by bathers and there were bath-houses near; the apparatus of swings and benches stood in the sands and there were posts with life-lines strung in the water; but bath-houses, benches and swings, the beach and the water all were deserted on this calm, October midnight. The moon tipped them with glistening gray and they stood quiet for their silvering, except the water which flecked duller and brighter as it lapped its complaint at the shore.
Joan Daisy relaxed in dreamy reverie, gazing to the south along the shore line which crept out and out in its long, leisurely curve under the moon and twinkled with the night-lights of millions of people asleep. Here and there were gleaming spots where many persons were still awake and dancing and clapping their hands for an encore each time the music ceased.
She aroused and searched the twinkling for the gleam of the Echo Garden where Fred Ketlar played; and she set to humming, softly, swaying a little to the rhythm of the tune as she imagined Fred Ketlar's blond head tossing to the lively measure of his music.
She pictured, pleasantly, his strong, well-formed hands hurrying over the piano keys as he improvised his surprising, reckless cadenzas. She thought of him leaping up and seizing a violin and, with the loss of hardly a measure, conducting the dance by the swing of his young, agile body as he flourished his bow across the strings. Next he would snatch up a trombone or saxophone and play and play to his applause.
Joan Daisy deliberately constrained the stir in her breast; she gazed out at the lake and at the stars which brought the sparkling bowl of the sky down to the distant, even edge of the water. She smoothed the sand before her and, picking up pebbles, she laid them after a pattern of a patch of the sky.
Arising without spoiling her pattern, she returned to the walk beside the beach and she went along, glancing up at a large building in sight from the shore.
Most of its windows were dark, but as she approached a light went on within a room on the first floor. The blind was up and Joan Daisy looked in and saw a man and girl standing close together in the room.
The man stepped to the window and drew down the blind and Joan Daisy recognized him as Fred Ketlar. She halted, staring up at the window.
She had recognized the girl, who was Adele, his wife. This was Adele's apartment; and Joan Daisy told herself that she ought to be glad that he was with his wife; but she moved away without any gladness and went to the street, down which she had drawn the moon, without even a glance at the moon.
When she reached the big building in which she lived, she entered the court and was going to the second door when a young man stepped from a shadow and eagerly hailed her, "Jo!"
"Why, Ket!" she cried and started back, with her heart racing.
"Look here! Where you been?" he demanded, seizing her arm with his strong, impulsive fingers.
"Why, Ket!" she cried again in her excitement from her belief that she had seen him, only a minute or two ago, in his wife's apartment near the lake. Jo was trying to reckon how he could have run here ahead of her, without having passed her on the street; and she reckoned that he could not have done it and consequently that it could not have been he whom she had seen with Adele.
"You been down to the lake," Ket accused her, jealously. "Who was you down there with?"
"Nobody, Ket."
"Then what was you doing down there?"
"What's it to you?" she retorted with too much heat, and she shook off his grasp.
He laughed with satisfaction at his ability to stir her; and he caught her hand and held it.
"What you been doing to-night?" he amended his question.
"Working."
"Where?"
"Office."
"Oh; Hoberg kept you again. He come home with you?"
"No; I wouldn't let him; but he kept me awful late. I just got home a few minutes ago."
"Come on in," he bid, and then, feeling how she trembled, he asked, "What are you scared of me for?"
"I'm not."
"What's scaring you, then?"
"Nothing," she protested; for she would not tell him what she had seen in the flat by the lake.
He had no hint of it, she thought; then she wondered. It was Saturday night and he had left his orchestra early. Why had he?
"How did you happen to hop home, Ket?" she asked.
"Me?" said Ket. "I wanted to get to you."
"To me, Ket? Why?"
"I got somethin' good—somethin' wonderful, Jo. So I turned the gang over to Henny and come to show you," Ket replied, grandly. The gang was the orchestra which this boy of twenty-four years owned, managed and conducted. Henny was his assistant and much older than the manager. "I got to steppin' on a new trot," the boy went on, enthusiastically. "Jo, it's a riot. Got the moan of it 'bout ten o'clock when I was tramplin' on the Danube Blues and I blew it on the sax for the encore while Henny jazzed the old Blues. Honest, they wouldn't let me sit down."
He pulled her through the door which was the common entrance to his apartment and to hers; and still holding to her, he led her up the stairs.
"Here's how it went. It's a zizz," he asserted confidently and hummed loudly, waving time with his free hand and with the other squeezing her wrist at the beat of the marked measure. "Like it?" he asked her.
"I don't know," she replied and displeased him.
"Listen to me play it!" he commanded her and he held her with one hand while with the other he unlocked his door. He threw it wide open and touched an electric button inside and gave her a pull, swinging her into the room with him; and he slammed shut the door.
He flung off his hat with a flourish and swept a hand over his wavy, light hair. It was almost flaxen, it was so light; and it grew thick and attractively on his gay, handsome head.
Women adored his hair and his gray eyes, which were clear and boyish and rather large. He had distinct, even brows and dark, long lashes. His nose was straight and slender but not weak; his lips, although full enough, were weak but he had the knack of holding them boldly and he had an attractive turn of talent in his chin. His skin was of the vivid, smooth pinkness which often goes with flaxen hair, and it added to his air of vigor and vitality which tremendously attracted women to him.
Of course he knew he attracted them; he knew he was very good looking and was frankly conscious of it. He always glanced at himself when he came before a glass and he gave a great deal of thought to his appearance. His clothes were the best he could buy and he never was seen in a suit after it had ceased to look new. Light brown became him and the suit which he wore to-night was one of several, of different shades of tan, which he possessed.
His wife Adele, who lived in the apartment nearer the lake, was five or six years older than he, having married him when he was nineteen. They had a daughter, born in the same year, and his wife had kept the little girl, since she and her husband had been living in separate apartments. He paid the upkeep of both, supporting his wife and child extravagantly, as he could easily afford to do, since he had an income, not only from his dance orchestra, which he had made one of the most popular in the city, but also from a dozen orchestra and saxophone records and from four dance numbers, of his own composition, which were selling in sheets. The total brought in an amazing income for a boy of twenty-four to earn of himself.
Naturally, he thought very well of himself when he had, together with much money, a quick and easy fame and when women of all ages beset him with endearments.
His walls were cluttered with girls' photographs which had been given him inscribed in over-black flourishes or in childish-looking handwriting, "To dearest Fred," and "To a darling boy," or "From Fred's own Amy," or "Lola" or "May."
They bestowed upon him silver and gold cigarette boxes, flasks and cocktail shakers and crystal decanters, which he left standing about on his table and desk.
These served him, now, as proofs of his power over women and raised his assurance in dealing with the girl who was with him.
He had no gift from her among his trophies and no likeness of her for his wall. She did not let him ravish her lips whenever he cared to, nor could he take her into his arms as he wished. She prevented him with a quick positiveness which would have required him to completely overpower her, before he could have his way. So he always desisted, calling her "crazy particular" and declaring that she knew she was "wild over" him.
She never replied to this, either in agreement or denial.
"I'm crazy over you," he often declared hotly and he re-announced it now.
"About me too, Ket?" she asked him, looking up with her blue eyes serious at first and then twinkling with an amusement which made her lips doubly provoking.
Why did he waste so much time and thought on a twenty-five-a-week stenographer, he wondered, when she would offer him nothing and when other girls, as good looking and twice as swell, were waiting to give him all? He looked her over and tried to tell himself that she was just one more little blue-eyed, black-haired girl with a slender, pretty figure and a lively way; and that she was just "playing" him; nothing more; but he cried out, in spite of himself:
"There's not one in the bunch like you!" And after he had again admitted it, her unlikeness to the others stirred him the more.
It lay in the look of her steady, thoughtful eyes; it was in the shaping of her head, which was not merely pretty, but was very lovely in the line of her brow and in the modeling behind it. She had an exquisiteness which he encountered in no one else.
No other had hands like hers, so smooth and small-boned. Strong little hands, hers were, with a definite clasp in them, very pleasant to feel.
"Play it, Ket," she reminded him.
"What?" he asked; and he recollected and turned to his piano.
It was an instrument of the type denoted as baby grand and, like all the other furnishings of the room, it was new and of the best. Also, as the girl was thinking, although it had cost more than a thousand dollars, it undoubtedly had been paid for, as everything else in the flat had been paid for, in full and by cash.
Her knowledge of this fact gave her a feeling of personal comfort in this large, lavish room where she could look at and touch and use handsome things and feel sure that the possessor had paid for them.
There was a big, upholstered couch, convertible into a bed, which was similar to one upstairs upon which she slept; and she sat down upon it, thinking, appreciatively, "This is paid for." And, looking at Ket, she thought how he honestly earned his money; she saw what a boy he was and her bosom thrilled. Then she looked away at his wall and the photographs which covered it.
Ket cleared a violin case, a flute and a couple of photographs, in silver frames, from the top of his piano and opened it in a professional way. He struck the keys, with his resonant, singing touch, making his notes march with an awakening, inspiriting tread of time which thrilled the girl again. She leaned forward tapping with her toe on his thick, expensive and paid-for rug.
Suddenly he broke off and swung about, catching her with a glow in her eyes. "You like it!" he cried with delight. "It's great! Ain't it—ain't it great?"
"I do like it, Ket," she replied.
"Ain't it great—great?" he insisted.
"It's—good, Ket."
"Good!" he repeated and instantly angered at the faintness of her praise. "It's a knock-out, I tell you. It got 'em all to-night. And it got you, just now, Jo! I saw you. It's going to be a big hit!"
She flushed as she faced him and closed her lips tightly and her eyes did not waver. She stared straight at him, but hardly seeing him for her thinking about him; and he knew she would scarcely hear, if he assailed her again.
No one else ever became so intent in thought over him. He did not understand it, but he realized that it was over him, and consequently he liked it.
She was recollecting, as she gazed at him, the extraordinary handicaps which he had been obliged to overcome before he could accomplish anything at all. His mother had been a manicurist, serving men in a hotel barbershop. Ket never had mentioned his father; and likely enough, his mother had never told the boy of his father. Ket's memories were of his mother and himself alone, sleeping in a stuffy attic room in the hotel. When he was very small, he was given a gray and brass-buttoned uniform and had become a page, importantly announcing in the lobby and dining-rooms the names of patrons wanted on the telephone and carrying cards on a small shiny tray.
When he became taller and stronger, the manager made him a bell-boy and Ket picked up his first smattering of music by strumming on the restaurant piano, when scrub-women were washing the floor and the table-tops in the dingy hours of dawn. He had begged the loan of band instruments and made himself a musician. Oh, the boy had done wonderfully well, when one thought of this.
"It is good, Ket," she repeated and tried to speak more enthusiastically, but she was still short of satisfying him.
"What's the matter with it?" he demanded.
"You can do a lot better, Ket!"
"What's the matter with you?" he scorned her. "This is a lot better. It was a riot, I tell you. They stamped and yelled."
"You always make 'em stamp and yell," she retorted.
"Not with other people's stuff; when I play mine, I do."
"That's what I was saying; you always do."
"What's the matter with it, then? What more do you want?" he cried crossly.
"More, Ket, because you can do it."
"I've done it!" he insisted. "This is a pip—a pip, Jo, I tell you. It's way out of the class of anything I've done before. I don't care a damn what you say," he flung at her and arose and walked angrily, on his heels, away from her.
She straightened and sat back, flushed and warm and with her lips atremble as she followed him with her gaze. Why must she try to spur him, she wondered. Why could not she, like the other girls, open her arms for his kiss and clasp? Why must she care so much, and keep him away from her?
He halted before his wall, papered with photographs of his flatterers, of the girls and women who cried "wonderful" and "great" at whatever he did because they cared about nothing but pleasing him so that he would like them and kiss them. He glanced from face to smirking face of his gallery and turned his back to them and gazed at Jo; and the exquisiteness of her, the clear, lovely line of her forehead and face and the quivering lips, which would not cheaply flatter him, stirred him to wish to justify himself.
"I think I've done damn well," he said, injuredly, but no longer accusing her. "With the chance I've had."
"Oh, you have, Ket!"
"Here I come home early to catch you and play that to you, because it was a riot at the Echo and it's the biggest thing I've done; and all you say is, 'It's rotten.'"
"I didn't."
"You did."
"Did you come home to play it to me, Ket?"
"I've just told you I did," he repeated, softening. "I thought you'd like it."
"And I do."
"You don't—enough," he corrected and picked up the decanter which happened to be nearest and which held sherry. He poured two wine glasses full and made peace offering.
"Here, Jo."
She took her glass and drank; he emptied his and proffered the decanter, and after she had said, "No, thanks," twice, he poured himself another glass and drank it. He extracted a cigarette from one of his gold gift boxes and tossed it to her.
She lit it and drew a few puffs, then she put it down.
"What brand you want?" he asked, watching her and reaching for another box.
"That was mine; but it hurts my throat to-night. Had to read back specifications, nearly steady, for three hours to Hoberg."
"Did you, kid?" Ket asked, with sympathy as ready as his previous crossness, and he drew appreciatively on his cigarette.
"What if I get tired or hoarse?" she retorted. "There's nothing in me. I can type and spell some and catch mistakes, when I make 'em, and read back specifications. I can hold my job or get another, if I want."
"You mean," said Ket, with quick suspicion, "Hoberg's getting fresher?"
"I didn't say so. I wasn't thinking about him. I was saying, there's nothing I can ever do that's ever going to matter in the world; but you, Ket, you—you can do anything with yourself! Anything, Ket! It's in you; in here," she tapped her breast. "And you can get it out, if you'd just really get to work—to work, Ket," she repeated and again she angered him.
"Me get to work!" he mocked her. "I'm a bum, I suppose. I just loaf all the time. No one ever sees me up or at anything. I manage my band in my sleep and write my music at meals, eh?"
"Work!" she repeated, stoutly. "If you went to work, you'd show 'em all up, Ket."
"I'll show up Irving Berlin with 'Teasing Tears.' That's what I'll call the new one, 'Teasing Tears.'"
"Irving Berlin!" she cried. "Ket, I mean, if you wanted to, you could get after musicians like—like—"
"Like who?"
"The ones the Chicago Orchestra plays and the papers talk about."
"Hmhm. Don't they talk about me?"
"Ket, I mean you might be like Mozart and Beethoven!"
"Mozart, bunk!" he retorted, but his face burned fiery red. "If Mozart was me, he'd look funny tryin' to pay my rent, wouldn't he? And keepin' a wife and a four-year-old in another flat. I'd be a bum, that's what I'd be. They was bums, broke all the time. I've read about them." He plumped himself down beside her on the couch and immediately she arose.
"Good night, Ket," she said.
"Where you goin'?"
"Up to bed."
"Why the rush?" he objected, jumping to grasp her, but she opened the door and was out before he could prevent her. However, he overtook her on the floor above.
"Come on back, Jo," he urged; but she unlocked her door and he followed her into her home.
The plan of the large room was identical with his. It was almost square and with a single, wide window set in a shallow bay overlooking the court. In addition to the entrance door, there was another to a coat closet and a third which opened upon a short passage to a bathroom and a bedroom beyond it and to a cubby of a kitchenette.
The door to the passage was open and the light from the front room penetrated to the bedroom and through its open door and showed that a bed within was occupied.
"They're in," Ket complained, as he observed this. "Come down stairs again."
"Just mother," Jo said and quietly closed the bedroom door. "She won't wake."
"The old man'll be drilling in any minute."
"He won't bother."
"He will me," Ket declared. "Come on downstairs; I want to talk to you."
"We can talk here, Ket."
"We can't. Come on, kid. I'm crazy about you and you are about me. Then what's the matter. . . ."
She turned from him deliberately. Of course she was fully aware of what he wanted but she let it arouse no offense within her. She opened the coat-closet and stood in the doorway with her back to him, raised both her hands to her hat, and, carefully taking it off, laid it upon a shelf.
He caught his breath as he watched her hands and discerned the pretty slenderness of her body when her arms were outstretched and raised.
"I'm crazy about you, kid; and I'm so lonely!" he cried, appealingly.
She laughed and was glad for his ridiculous word, lonely! He, with women everywhere, lonely! She thought of the clutter of pictures on his wall and her shoulders shook.
"What you laughing at?" he demanded.
"You, Ket; you're so funny," she replied, without turning about.
"What's so funny?"
"Why, you feeling lonely, Ket."
He jerked down the window blind. "I am lonely," he stuck to his declaration. "I'm lonely as hell."
"You needn't be, Ket."
"Why needn't I be? Turn around here."
"You've got a wife, Ket," she reminded and, as she did so, she recollected what she had seen through the window near the lake.
"I wouldn't have if she'd let me loose," Ket retorted. "But she wants to hang on. Is Adele the big trouble with you?"
"No."
"What is? The rest of 'em? Aren't you going to turn around?"
She did not answer, and she did not turn, and he commanded: "Come out here. I want you. There's nobody like you. The whole raft of the rest aren't you. You come out here or I'll—"
He started for her and she spun about, catching at the door to close it and, as he rushed at her with his arms out, one of his arms went outside the door, one went inside and he struck his forehead on the door's edge.
He dropped at the bump and sat on the floor dizzily and swore at her as blood welled from the broken skin.
"Oh, Ket, Ket!" she cried miserably, and she ran to the bathroom for a towel and water and brought them just as he was getting to his feet. He refused any aid from her and strode to the bathroom and washed.
When he emerged, the blood was staunched and he was holding himself with dignity.
In the large room, which was furnished not unlike his own, an elaborate radio set stood on a table and he went to this and twisted the dials.
"You want to get a station?" she asked.
"What d'you suppose I'm doin'?"
"Western stations'll be the only ones going now," she suggested pleasantly, ignoring his bad temper. "Kansas City or Fort Worth and Los Angeles."
He tuned to one of them searching for something of his own to restore his self-importance; strains of music sounded.
"What're they playing, Ket?" she asked, as they listened.
"Something punk. Nothing of mine," he replied with scorn and twisted the dial so that the music ceased. With a dignity which refused further words with her, he departed.
At the door, which he had left ajar, she stood listening for the closing of his door below; but she heard nothing until, by way of her window, she caught the sound of steps on the walk in the court. She ran to the window and in the moonlight she saw Ket leave the building.
He turned toward the lake and she started at the idea that he might be on his way to his wife's apartment, where half an hour ago she had seen Adele and the young man who was not Ket but was like him; and she knew that Ket must not be allowed to choose this hour of this night to visit his wife.
Jo ran downstairs and out to the walk where she saw him proceeding toward the shore, but he seemed to have no purpose in his step; and she did not run after him. It was not likely, she realized, that he was going to Adele; he seemed to be merely walking off his bad temper.
He turned the corner and, in spite of her decision of the moment before, Jo began running to catch him; but in a moment she stopped, knowing that if he were bound for Adele's apartment, she was too late to prevent him; and if he were not, the worst thing she could do would be to show fear of his going there.