That Royle Girl/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
Calvin deposited his solitary dish upon the table to which she led him, and which was a small one for two persons only. She had not previously preëmpted it, he observed, for she transferred her own dishes from a nearby table where several other people were dining.
"See you some other time," she said, in parting, to another girl at that table.
"You've a friend with you," Calvin commented.
"Oh, no; we were just speaking."
"You could not have been there more than a moment," he objected.
"If wasn't; we'd just started to speak. Don't worry; not a soul'll know us. That's your chair; sit down or it'll look like I'm trying to make a pick up; then they'll throw us out."
She seated herself and placed a plate and a serving spoon on his side of the table and arranged her chicken pie and rolls and coffee before herself; but Calvin stubbornly stood. He had had no idea of involving himself in anything like this, when he had journeyed uptown to look over this environment of hers. Suppose Ellison or some one else from the state's attorney's office happened to come in, he thought; suppose Elmen saw him, or a newspaper reporter chanced upon him dining in an automat with the girl for whom Ketlar had shot his wife and who was the chief witness against the State!
"I came in here," said Calvin, "merely curiously, without any intention of dining."
"Then what'd you start to buy that pie for?" she questioned, casting him upon the defensive as she had done immediately upon the night when they had met and in every encounter since.
"I must go on," he replied.
"You mean you won't eat with me any more than you would at the hotel," she countered, flushing scarlet and she gathered up her dishes, without another glance at him, and returned to the other table, leaving him on foot behind a chair and before him his beef pie and the plate and the serving spoon which she had placed for him.
He was conscious of eyes upon him. Not eyes of recognition, but amused, half hostile eyes. Several girls snickered and Calvin felt himself flushing hot. With what dignity he could muster, he deserted his absurdly untouched beef pie and strode out to the street; and he hastened away about the business which had brought him to the locality. He proceeded to the side street, upon which Ketlar had lived and where also the Royle girl dwelt, and he walked to the lake with the formal purpose of timing himself over the route which the defense would testify that Ketlar and the Royle girl had taken on the night of the murder.
So, watch in hand, he absorbed himself with the timing and checked it carefully. From the beach, he went to the building in which Adele had been killed and duly he reapproached the Royle girl's home, when her voice surprised him.
"Who's your date with here?"
"Date?" said Calvin, halting as she confronted him in the dim light at the corner of the court. He recollected his watch, and after a glance at it, thrust it into his pocket. "I was doing some timing," he explained.
"Oh! Of Ket and me!" she comprehended immediately. "Mr. Elmen's done that, too. How'd your time work out?"
Of course he did not reply to this. He said, seeing that she was quivering, "I hope you had your supper."
"You figure you spoiled it for me? Don't hate yourself so! You just left us all a three-nickel beef pie and a thirty-dollar laugh. Honestly, some of the girls were going to look at Harold Lloyd alter supper; but you spoiled it for them. They figured he couldn't be half so funny." And she laughed, but almost cried.
"Coming in here?" she asked him, suddenly choking.
"No."
She glanced up at Ket's window, now perpetually dark, and then to her own, also lightless. "Want to time yourself upstairs?"
"No."
"Where will you let me talk to you?"
"You can come to the Criminal Courts building to-morrow morning."
"I won't," she said boldly. 'You come with me now, down to the lake. You can call it timing Ket and me; or you can call it searching for new evidence or fix it up any other way you want to. Come on! I won't ride you any more. I just want to try to explain something to you about Ket and me."
She pulled him by the sleeve and he went beside her down the walk. "I'm not sore that you wouldn't eat with me—how could you, thinking what you do? And knowing what you do," she corrected. "For some of what you know is right. I mean about Dads and mamma—he's a dead-beat and a souse and she's a dope. You've had us all looked up, Mr. Elmen says; you've gathered the goods on us. Well, that night you came to the flat I told you everything in our place was got by fraud, but my clothes, and that Dads was dizzy and mamma was doped; but my clothes were paid for; I paid for 'em myself; and that's true."
She halted, breathless, for they had been hurrying along, as though bound somewhere; when he looked down at her, under the yellow light of a street lamp, he saw her bosom heaving in her intense effort to make him believe her and, unexpectedly, he was caught by a twinge of that pity which had surprised him on the night he waited in her room while she shook at her Dads, who was dizzy, and her mother, who was doped, in endeavor to explain to them that she was arrested.
"Come on now," she said, again pulling at his sleeve. "Will you?"
"All right." And when they walked, she said: "There wasn't what you think between Ket and me; there wasn't. I was just trying to make him a musician, Mr. Clarke—a real musician who'd compose the great music, not jazz. Music we talked—music, Mr. Clarke, not murder, that night in his room. Can't I ever get into your head what Ket was to me?
"Why, before I met him, I was nothing. Can't you guess, from your own report, what life was to me? It'd been dead-beating and dodging sheriffs and being thrown out of flats and hotels, as long as I can remember. Oh, God, it was disgraceful; and I couldn't get out of it. I couldn't figure anything to do but to make my own money and pay what I could. There was nothing ahead for me but more of it until Ket came along."
She stopped and Calvin twinged at her tug on his sleeve.
"When I found that boy I thought I'd have my chance to show something in the world, Mr. Clarke, to make up for the dirty disgrace I'd been through. The boy had big talent; everybody saw it; he was full of it, but turning out just jazz when he might, almost as easy, turn out music. The big music, I mean, Mr. Clarke; the sort of music they play in Orchestra Hall and print programs for. He might be like Mozart! I was telling him that that night we were in his room and you figured we were cooking up to kill Adele. That's what we scrapped over that night, Ket and me. I wouldn't tell him some jazz was great, for it wasn't; and it wasn't what he could do, if he tried.
"I was trying to make him try. You don't believe it, I know; and I don't expect you to," she cried, holding to his sleeve as he pulled it away. "That's not what I wanted to tell you. It's about the jail, Mr. Clarke. I've been to the jail and seen Ket. The jail," she repeated in a whisper of awe, "I'd no idea what it was. It's a terrible place, isn't it?"
"A jail," Calvin replied, "is designed to be a place of punishment."
"Then it certainly makes good—and before a man's found guilty, too. But I'm not kicking on that, Mr. Clarke," she said hastily. "What's the use, to you? I just want you to help me get some books into the jail to Ket, will you?"
"What books?" asked Calvin suspiciously.
"Music books."
"Some of his, you mean?"
"No; some I'm buying him. He hasn't got them; for he'd never buy them for himself. They're books about point and counterpoint—that's musical composition, probably you know."
"I know the terms," said Calvin.
"I didn't; I heard them to-day at Lyon and Healy's where an awful nice man gave me a list of books just made for Ket. I want to get them into the jail, for he'll read 'em there, when he never would outside. He'll try good things over on the piano in there and get interested in composing before he knows it. My trouble's to be sure he gets the books all right. It's not easy to get books into the jail, I hear; they hold them up because prisoners' friends put steel saws in bindings sometimes, I hear, and dope in the back or between pages. So when I saw you in the automat I thought you're just the one to do it for me."
"Oh," said Calvin. "I see; but, you want me to do exactly what?"
"Why buy the books yourself and send them in for me; then there can't be any question, can there? He'll get them and get started to be like Schubert and Wagner and Mozart."
"Like Mozart," murmured Calvin, looking down at her piteously. Her hand had left his sleeve and touched his side. She turned and walked off toward her home while he stood and was twinged again by compassion.
Putting his hand into the side pocket of his coat, his fingers encountered an unexpected object which proved to be three one-dollar bills and a white slip of paper folded about a half dollar.
"Barsoni's Musical Composition, $3.50," Calvin read at the top of the slip as he smoothed her money. On the list were several other books with notations of prices which the Royle girl evidently meant to provide later. "She thinks $3.50 can make him like Mozart," Calvin repeated to himself, with tingling twinges running from his fingers which held her money.
Some one approached, and Calvin closed his hand on her money. "Bunkum!" he warned himself. "Elmen coached her, of course; Elmen thought up that and taught it all to her, and she worked it on me as soon as she saw me. He'd like to see me buying a music book to make a composer of a man I'm trying to hang."
He started after her when he noticed that the man, who had approached, was standing at the dark edge of the sidewalk a few paces away and apparently was awaiting him.
Now the fellow stepped up and said, "Take a good look at George Baretta."
"What?" asked Calvin.
"Take a damn good look at George Baretta," the fellow repeated distinctly in a low, careful tone; and Calvin discerned that he was a young man, short but broad-shouldered. He spoke in a resonant voice, which, together with his mention of Baretta, suggested to Calvin that he was an Italian, but the flatness of his inflection and the lack of accent told that, if of Italian blood, he had learned to talk in Chicago and probably had been born here.
"Who?" asked Calvin.
"Baretta," the fellow again repeated. "Three-G. George. Say, ain't you Clarke of the State's office?"
"Yes," Calvin admitted.
"Then you know Baretta and give him a good once-over," the fellow iterated and backed away a few steps, suddenly turned and hurried off across the street, leaving Calvin to the realization that when he had visited the automat he must have been recognized and that afterwards he had been followed by this short, broad-shouldered young man who had taken advantage of the darkness in order to speak against Baretta.
As the fellow had assumed, Assistant State's Attorney Clarke well knew George Baretta, whom he considered to be one of the most menacing of the mongrel men in Chicago, debasing and debauching American civilization. Baretta bore an Italian patronymic because his father, killed in a knifing several years ago, probably had been predominantly Neapolitan. A huge, florid matron, who invariably appeared in court when Baretta was arraigned and who testified that she was his mother, gave her own birthplace as Livonia, near Riga.
Her son George was tall, florid and, although he testified that he had been born in Chicago only thirty years ago, already he was gray-haired—an evidence of premature aging which popularly was attributed to the pace set in the city dance-halls and the county roadhouses owned or operated by Three-G. George.
The three G's referred to gambling, gin and girls—commodities in which George trafficked spectacularly. Arrest him and witnesses promptly suffered from complete lapse of memory; nor could a witness be justly charged with cowardice because of choosing to recall nothing against Three-G. George.
There had been a willing witness against Baretta, in days before Calvin Clarke came to Chicago; and one evening, when the complainant was driving alone on a city street, another car suddenly appeared beside him, an automatic pistol pumped six shots and the complainant's car crashed to the curb with the enemy of George Baretta dead at the wheel. The State never succeeded in legally connecting the murder with the complaint against Three-G. George; but also the State never succeeded in obtaining another person to give competent evidence against Baretta in any case whatever.
Calvin considered this as he watched the short, broad-shouldered youth hasten away and he knew that, if he overtook him, the fellow would impart nothing more. The man's purpose, probably, merely was to warn the state's attorney that Three-G. George would repay watching at the moment. So Calvin made mental memorandum of it and continued on the same side of the street after the Royle girl.
She had vanished, he thought, until he rediscovered her accompanying a slim young man to the boulevard where her escort purchased tickets for a lurid picture show and ushered her into the theater.
This glimpse of her dispatched Calvin's pity. If she sincerely had felt even a part of what she had pretended, how could she walk away after her appeal to him for Ketlar and immediately pick up another youth and pass, without a pause, to the enjoyment of the thrills and sensations of that film?
Calvin returned to the elevated station with his original opinion of the Royle girl reëstablished. To-night, as before, she had tried to play upon him and trick him.
Joan Daisy did not proceed immediately to the enjoyment of the show with the man whom she had picked up nor had she entered the theater for entertainment. She had seen in her window a light which told that her mother was home and so she had stayed on the street and, when she had met an acquaintance who wanted to take her to a show, she had welcomed the chance to obtain, without cost to herself, a seat where she would be removed from every one in quiet and in darkness.
Of course Calvin could not comprehend this, even if it were told him. When he visited a picture theater, as he did rarely, it was for the definite purpose of viewing, with critical attention, a film which he desired to see. As he had no understanding of the manner of life which made an automat one's dining-room and utilized the sidewalk as a reception hall, so he lacked appreciation of the qualities which might convert a crowded film theater into one's library where a girl who was tired and perplexed might go to be quiet and undisturbed, and where she might sit as though alone with book in hand, to think.
Joan Daisy was seated quietly and, except for an occasional whisper from her escort and an occasional clasp of her hand, to which she made no response, she was undisturbed and the book unrolled before her upon the screen, requiring of her no effort of attention.
It was several minutes before she began even to watch the picture and before she let herself drift from the world of the uncomfortable reality of Ket in jail, of Dads' frauds and mamma's infirmities, into the world of Douglas Fairbanks' marvels, of Mary Pickford's perfections, of Barthelmess and Valentino. It was an exciting but also it was a soothing and encouraging world, where everything always came out happily in the end, where truth was sure to triumph, ambitions be realized, and where a girl's will, backed by a book costing $3.50, could not possibly fail to transform a Ket into a Mozart.
Her friend invited her to a dance-hall, but she begged off and went home, where she found mamma already asleep, under veronal, and Dads out, as usual.
Joan Daisy went immediately to bed and lay repeating to herself the phrases of the program of the concert when Ket's great symphony should be played, hoping to-night to regain her dream, which had been destroyed on that night when the heels of the police clicked in the court and when Mr. Clarke, for the State, had come. But she did not succeed, for Mr. Clarke kept cutting across the vision she summoned. Sometimes he was official and stern, as he was when first he had appeared for the State; sometimes he was "Mr. God-looking" and she hated him; but then he became amazed and bewildered, like a boy, when she had "handed it to him" in the hotel room, while the police stenographer took down the words in which she told him he was a readymade; and then he was flushed and absurd in the automat, where he had begun to buy a beef pie and hadn't gone through with it.
At this her waking memory became distorted by a vivid vagary of dreaming; she laughed, caught the bedclothes closer and so fell asleep.
Calvin was not yet in bed, although he had reached his rooms long before she had returned to hers. He was restless with a new excitement, broken now and then by moments of embarrassment when he thought of his performance in the automat. Not being given to evasion, and least of all to self-evasion, he squarely realized that he had sought the Royle girl and followed her when he found her for his personal desire to be with her; that he had wanted to remain with her longer, and now he wanted to see her again.
He had laid her money, with the list of books, upon his dressing-table, where he spread out the little slip of paper upon which she had written. He was sure that the writing was hers, because she had said that a man had waited upon her at Lyon and Healy's, and this handwriting surely was a girl's; more than that, it was like her—clear, direct, vigorous, individual and feminine. He picked up the slip and imagined the pencil in her slim, white, impulsive fingers. He touched her money and mentally he deducted it from her weekly pay.
Switching off his lights, he raised the window blind and gazed out over the city, at the nightly miracle of three millions of people established upon this shore under the gossamer of the refulgent haze hanging above their gleaming, endless avenues and boulevards and roofs.
He felt, as he gazed up at the towers and looming bulk of the larger buildings, how stupendously this city dwarfed Boston and it recurred to him, as an incredible fact, that at the time when Jeremy Clarke had become a public prosecutor in Boston, there had been no settlement here. Not even the first block-house of Fort Dearborn, which later was to be burnt by the Indians, then had been built. And Jeremy Clarke's name was one of those which stood in the less faded ink upon the later pages of the family record. Calvin knew two women and one man who remembered Jeremy. To think that, in Jeremy's time, there had been nothing here but a sandy beach, a swampy river edged with wild onion grass, and an Indian trail.
The spectacular presence of the immense modern city at times offended Calvin Clarke and antagonized him; it seemed to him that this city ought not to be. He would not have had the lake shore return to be a careening place for Algonquin canoes; he would not have had it return to the village of three quarters of a century ago. He could willingly allow a city to be here, but it ought to be a "western" city, raw, crude, naïve—the city of the fire or, at most, of the pompous, gaudy World's Fair which had brought Calvin's parents to Chicago for their single westward journey and to their enduring, quiet amusement. But here was a midland metropolis, far more vital to America to-day than Boston; the nation's physical center, indeed, the heart of its transportation, and of its commerce the core.
No one, a Clarke or otherwise, to-day could feel amusement at Chicago; and the offense, which Calvin felt, held a large share of fascination which kept him in the city, hate it as he might. For here he moved among people who, though he called them many-bloods and mongrels and despised them, created a current at this dynamo center of national life which made that of people of his own blood, in his own home, feel feeble in comparison.
Why, else, had he remained here? Why, else, had he not found, among girls of his own blood and breeding, a wife, as had his fathers who, generation after generation, had dwelt in the old home beside the Merrimac?
He did not think of himself as having come to Chicago to seek women of another sort; he realized, only, that if he had found a wife from among the cool, constrained, self-contained neighbors in Massachusetts, he would have followed the pattern of his fathers and never come to Illinois. He did not think of himself as having sought for a wife among the flip and cynical or over-sophisticated girls of the Chicago social sets into which he had been introduced; he realized, merely, that none of his partners of the dance clubs had interested him. For none had he stirred with longing, with impatience for the time of meeting again, as he had been roused to-night by that Royle girl.
Not by her, herself, Calvin argued; for she was of the very people he despised, of no blood and no tradition, a vagabond daughter of a dope drinker and a drunkard who lived by fraud. Herself, she had been—Calvin was sure—a consort of Ketlar; and if she had not actually planned the murder of Ketlar's wife, certainly she schemed with Ketlar to save him from punishment. So Calvin denied he wanted her, herself; he would have her qualities in another, her blue, even eyes and her white brow with the lovely shaping behind it; her small, strong hands he would have and her slim, white heels; he would have her quickness and alertness, her spirit, her head up to fight; and he would have her dream which made her imagine that, with a three dollar and fifty cent book, she could transform a jazz band leader in jail and make him a Mozart.
For Calvin had ceased to credit that dream to Elmen. No; it was her own; she could not have feigned what Calvin had seen. It was part of her, though in another part she had been Ketlar's lover and planned the murder with him.
Calvin drew down the blind, shutting away the city; but when he switched on his light, he picked up the paper upon which the Royle girl had written.