That Royle Girl/Chapter 21
CHAPTER XXI
Awakened by the bright dawn of the sunlit day which was to witness the incredible cortège paraded to the honor of George Baretta, Joan started in accordance with recent habit to arouse Dads before she recollected that he had mentioned to her last night that he would not be going to the office this morning. Of course not; for Mr. Max Elmen no longer had a stake in Dads' respectability; no longer had he cause to expend Ket's money in subsidy to the real estate firm which supplied Dads with ostensible employment. Beginning again to-day, business with Dads undoubtedly would be what it had been.
Joan arose to resume the ordinary daily round and to proceed, at the usual hour, to Mr. Hoberg's office; so she lit a burner under the coffeepot and put on an egg to boil; she dressed, breakfasted in the kitchenette, washed the dishes and restored her bed to its aspect of a davenport, without disturbing the silence of the sleepers beyond the bedroom door.
Silent was the room below, as it had been throughout the months of Ket's imprisonment; to-night or next week or never again it might be tenanted by Ket and his wife. Joan Daisy reckoned the alternatives with hardly a pang; no longer was that room endowed with a dream. No longer might Joan Daisy Royle lie between the paid-for linen of her couch and imagine Ket's name in stone beside Mozart's, and hers printed in the account of Ket's achievement in the Orchestra program of the great day his symphony would be played.
Upon a cushion of the couch, as she bent over to push it into place, a tear fell; she stood up, smiling at herself but she gulped a little, too, like a child laying away a book of cherished fairy tales no longer to be believed.
A beat of rhythm ran through her which became the measured, methodical firing of pistol bullets into steel and wood. Thus suddenly, without her conscious will, she returned to the ditch with Calvin Clarke beside her. How is he? Where is he this morning with the sun gleaming upon this city wherein gunmen murder and go free?
She knew, from last night's newspapers, that Frankie Zenn and the others who had been arrested yesterday had been released; but until she purchased a morning paper at the street corner she did not anticipate the pageant which the gunmen arrayed to do honor to their fallen chief.
The phrase was that of the newspaper which proclaimed in enormous headlines the preparations for the parade, of which Joan read with queer, frightened rills of wonder. For the fallen chief was George Baretta, and though there was yet no legal proof of his presence at the ditch, she believed that it was he whom she had shot—he whom thousands of people to-day would honor.
A page pictured a part of the funeral flowers, which might be taken as lavish offerings at the bier of a president. Throughout the evening friends and strangers, men, women and children, filed past with heads bowed, and many a man and woman weeping as they looked upon George Baretta, gun-fighter, gaming-house keeper and overlord of the "gang." In his coffin of ebony and mahogany, metaled with gold and silver, under his bower of orchids and roses, honored he lay—he whom Joan Royle had seen at Tut's Temple, he who, she believed, had led the pursuit after Neski and Mr. Clarke and her, and whom she had shot at the ditch.
She sat in the elevated train, with her paper before her, her head awhirl. Gunmen, gangsters, hi-jackers, sluggers, safe-blowers—so the newspapers plainly named them—gathered not only with impunity but prepared today a great parade. She heard talk of it beside her and discerned that several of the passengers were taking a holiday to view the amazing spectacle. They seemed to have informed themselves where to go and, with never another thought of Mr. Hoberg's office, Joan changed trains and followed the people bound for the funeral pageant.
From the elevated station, where she alighted, Joan descended to a street lined with cars parked, fender to fender. Uniformed traffic police, aided by mounted men and a motorcycle detail, kept open a narrow lane in the center of the street wherein cars crawled, scraping on one another. The walks on both sides were black with crowds skewing and pushing forward in the direction in which heads in all the windows turned. Spectators packed the porches and porch steps and the balconies of the buildings; even upon the roofs, spectators stood. Joan saw thousands and thousands.
"Who are they here for?" she whispered to a man pressed against her in the crowd.
"That's where he lived, ahead," the man answered, in lowered voice.
"Who?"
"The big fellow—Baretta."
So she heard that all this was, indeed, for Baretta, for him whom she believed she had shot; and she gasped.
"Feelin' faint, sister?" the man inquired, with eager solicitude, offering her aid.
She thanked him and worked away from him.
A hand, with the grasp of authority, clasped her wrist and a man, whose features she vaguely recognized, signaled her to follow him out of the crowd.
"Know me?" he asked her, when they halted.
"You watched me for Mr. Clarke once—didn't you?"
"That's right. What are you doin' here? You oughtn't to show yourself here."
"Why not?"
"Somebody'll see you."
"Nobody ever knows me," she denied, but remembered how Baretta and Zenn had known her.
"Come along," he bid, refusing to argue and was leading her further away, when he was stopped by a swelling outcry and sudden disorder in the crowd; he spun about, releasing her, and ran a few steps, when the uproar ceased as quickly as it had begun. "They smashed 'nother camera," he conjectured. 'The photographers sure are makin' 'em mad this mornin'."
"Why?"
"Suppose you was wanted say in Cincinnati or St. Paul, would you hand the papers your pictures? . . . You see how they get excited. Now you get away."
"You're police," said Joan. "Are the State's people here, too?"
"Some."
"Is Mr. Clarke?"
"He's one."
"Where is he?"
With this her escort discerned a solution of his problem of remaining at his post and being rid of her; he signaled a passerby, whom she did not suspect to be of the police. "Tell Mr. Clarke of the State's office—he was un by Baretta's house a minute ago—I've got the Royle girl here."
Calvin had breakfasted alone at his rooms without turning to the column, upon the second page of the newspaper beside his plate, which would have informed him that Joan Royle had not become Ketlar's wife. In the news summary, over which he had glanced, stood the laconic report that Ketlar had married within five hours after his release from jail; and Calvin never imagined that Ketlar had married any other than her who, from the moment of his arrest, had fought for him and finally won his freedom.
The front page was replete with portrayals of the gang "wake" for Baretta and of the gunmen's preparations for this day; and Calvin deliberately confined himself to this subject until word was brought him that Ellison was downstairs. At the last minute before leaving his rooms, Calvin determined to learn of the manner in which Joan Royle and Ketlar had married; and, after he read, he stood with pent breath and eyes closed, bowing his head in gratitude at being able to think of her—not Ketlar's wife. Incredulity alarmed him; he opened his eyes; and there it was, as before. She had parted from Ketlar, who thereupon had married Lola Nesson.
She had parted from Ketlar, under what circumstances? Why?
The newspaper was enigmatic upon this point. Was it that Ketlar had turned from her? Was she still, in heart, his? Calvin recollected, wretchedly, her dream of Ket, as she always named him, and how she had formed her new plan for the conservatory, when she was with Calvin in the cab.
His bell rang and Ellison's voice reminded, "No need of you to come, Clarke; but if you are—"
"Coming," replied Calvin and tore out the strip which told of the marriage, and put it into his pocket, feeling a satisfaction, which his mind discerned to be childish, at carrying with him the printed fact.
Ellison had a car and Calvin got in beside him for the drive to the street of the cortège.
"You sure you ought to come?" Ellison challenged him, before starting. "You don't look so awfully steady."
Calvin was not; he quivered with an uncontrollable dread that Ellison had learned something to refute the account in the paper and would mention it; but when Calvin insisted he was steady, Ellison merely said: "We may be mighty busy or maybe nothing for anybody to do to-day. Some are saying they're going to shoot it out at the graveyard; some say they're all calling quits to-day."
"They," as Calvin well knew, were the gang factions of the late Considine and of the late Baretta. "Of course Zenn knows who got Baretta," chatted Ellison. "But he chalks it against the Considine bunch, figuring Baretta wouldn't have been got if they hadn't squealed. . . . By the way, our friend Ketlar didn't lose much time, did he?"
"No," said Calvin, reasonlessly quivering. "I see he married Lola Nesson at Waukegan."
"Hm," nodded Ellison, without denying it. "And she wasn't even along—was she?—when he drove off after court?"
At half a mile from Baretta's house the traffic was congested, and the newspaper prophecy proved no adequate forecast of the spectacle of the street. Ellison parked his car far from the focal square and Calvin and he proceeded on foot, escorted by police, to a point from which they could observe not only the multitude in the street and in the surrounding windows and upon the roofs, but whence they had view of the endless lines of favored individuals filing in and out of the house.
They could see, in the front windows of Baretta's home and in the house next door, which was requisitioned for display of the overflow of flowers, the heaped-up wreaths and sprays of rose, red, pink, yellow and white; they could hear the measures of Chopin's Marche Funèbre played by a stringed orchestra; then the Dead March from Saul and the voice of a solo tenor.
Calvin thought to himself and soon said aloud to Ellison: "It might be the funeral of the first citizen of the city."
"It is," retorted Ellison. "Ask the man on the street—or on a roof, if you prefer. It's his idea exactly."
"It can't be!"
"Then what's the attraction? Why're they here? We're on business, but they're not."
"Curiosity," argued Calvin against himself as well as against Ellison, who agreed; "there's some of that; but curiosity doesn't fill two houses with flowers for the sake of seeing them; and only some of them came here. Twenty trucks, the boys say, went to the cemetery. Ever see a street crowd in tears from curiosity?"
Not all of the street crowd, not even most of the street crowd, were in tears; but many people were, Calvin saw. Men and women, especially in the line emerging from the house, wept. These people did not believe, Calvin realized, that Baretta was the slayer of Adele Ketlar; they did not consider him one of the men in the car who had fired at the machine in the ditch; undoubtedly they altogether denied his presence at the ditch; yet they must know how he had made himself powerful and rich; any one who knew him must know that he had lived, as he had died, by the gun. Yet here they thronged by thousands to honor him.
By thousands, they bared their heads; and the police, who circulated through the crowd searching the most suspicious characters for pistols and slung shots, desisted momentarily as the coffin was borne to the hearse. Behind the actual bearers marched, in double file, a selected party of men.
"The honorary pall-bearers," whispered Ellison.
"Honorary!"
"Certainly he has them, like all great men. They're listed in the papers; look and see—the real names without aliases."
"That's a joke, Ellison."
"Then this crowd's a joke; the music and flowers aren't there. You haven't got it yet, Calvin. They're burying a big, successful man. . . . Ask the man on the street or on a roof, I say. Get him to tell you why he's here. He'll tell you it's because George Baretta made himself somebody, got power and influence for himself and a mint of money. Now that's the fact; didn't he?"
"But—"
"What is the fact?" insisted Ellison. "Didn't he? So you see exactly what you see."
In the street, the cortège took form, integrating itself from the crowd and drawing away, trailing a procession of motor-cars endless to the limits of sight and sucking in supporting streams from other streets.
Ellison grasped Calvin's left arm with a firm and totally serious pressure as they turned away. "It's not only you and I that have a job before us in this country, Clarke; so have our children's children."
Calvin walked silently with his mind, for the moment, following old, habitual channels extending to the dwindled ranks of Clarkes and Websters and Barlows beside the Merrimac to muster trustworthy recruits to the task; and he considered his mother and Cousin Harriet, Melicent and the Barlow, who was in the Connecticut asylum, and himself.
It was Ellison who looked about and so caught sight of Joan Royle.
She was standing near Ellison's car, where the plain-clothes man had brought her after failing to locate Mr. Clarke in the dispersing crowd. She might have returned by herself to the elevated station, since her escort did not actually detain her, but she wanted to wait for Mr. Clarke, and see how he was affected by the amazing demonstration of this morning.
She stared at the passersby, driven to wonder in her soul whether she and Mr. Clarke were not caught together in some tremendous mistake, whether it could have been George Baretta, whom she had seen in Adele's flat and had shot at the edge of the ditch.
Never had she claimed that she had recognized Baretta at the ditch; it was only that Mr. Clarke had told her it must have been he. But how could it be, when now she had seen Baretta borne away, in the sight of ten thousand, in a hero's cortège?
She saw Mr. Ellison and, at the next second, Calvin Clarke's face, and her doubt dissolved. She took a step and stood on tiptoes for a glimpse of his shoulder.
Mr. Ellison spoke to her and glanced quickly around. Mr. Clarke merely hastened to her, looking at her.
"You've seen it?" she said to him, senselessly. She knew of course that he had seen it.
"How long have you been here?" he asked her.
"I don't know. I guess half an hour."
"Who came with you?"
"Nobody."
"We'll take you back; get into this car."
"I'm going back by the elevated," she opposed him by an instinct which suddenly governed her; and she realized that, suddenly, she was white and he was very white, as he asked, "Why?"
"I want to," she replied, whereupon he turned from her to Ellison and said, "I'm going back with her."
"I'll take you both," offered Ellison.
"I'm going back by the elevated," repeated Joan Daisy, feeling herself queerly unsteady, and therefore speaking more positively.
"I'm going with her," iterated Calvin, also too emphatically, and Ellison gazed from him to her and to him.
"Oh, all right!" said Ellison and looked at her. "It's all right with me!" He pulled off a glove to offer a hand to Calvin. "See you later. I'll report at the office for both of us."
Calvin ignored the remark and the hand, but thereby affronted Ellison not at all. Together they moved away, Joan Daisy Royle and Calvin Clarke, leaving Ellison beside his car.
She was become suddenly seized with strange, possessive pangs when on the stairs to the station some one jostled Calvin Clarke; she wanted with her hands to fend others from him; she wanted with her bare fingers to feel that his shoulder was in place. How had she ever let him accompany her in the cab Sunday morning before he had been bandaged? She could not bear it now.
"Will you tell me where you are going in town?" he asked as they waited upon the platform, facing each other.
"To the office," she told him; and these were their sole words, yet their relations had become amazingly intimate since they had left Ellison on the street. No one upon the platform recognized them and when they boarded the train and some one gave her a seat, Calvin thanked him and clung to the strap before her, looking down at.her and at no one else.
She wished he would take the seat but she dared not suggest it more directly than by accusing herself, saying, "I ought to have gone along with Mr. Ellison."
"What?" asked Calvin, and she flushed hotly and put her hand to the edge of his coat, explaining, "I mean, we ought to have gone in his car."
"No, we oughtn't to have," Calvin denied, accepting with slight emphasis the intimacy of her "we." "I prefer this. Don't you?"
"I like it," admitted Joan Daisy, happily, and looking up at him, she remembered his mother in the garden and the home of his which went back through Antietam and the Revolution for two hundred and fifty years.
"Your mother knows?" she asked him, suddenly.
"What?" he said, startling; and when she did not answer, he repeated, "My mother knows what?"
"How you were hurt," she said; and that was what she intended to say; but it was not all that was in her head. Did his mother know that he was here with Joan Daisy Royle? Of course his mother could not know it, Joan realized; what she meant by this to herself, was, did he know what he was doing, he of the mother in the garden, he of the old home at Clarke's Ferry? So she had made that mention of his mother to remind him of himself before he went further with Joan Daisy Royle.
She must have thus reminded him, she felt sure, but she saw no sign of alteration toward her as he answered, "I telegraphed her that the newspapers exaggerated my injury. I have not written her yet."
Joan looked down from him. Yes; he knew what he was doing; and she knew. He wanted her; and with him to want a girl was to want to marry her; also with him marriage must be a very different affair from what it was to Ket or to Hoberg or to any other man she knew.
She did not look up at him again, but sat very still until they arrived at the station for Mr. Hoberg's office.
She had no wish whatever to go to the office; she could not imagine herself returning even if Mr. Clarke left her; but she arose and he went from the car with her and down to the walk and to the very door of the building before they discussed the matter.
"Don't go in," he begged her.
"Why not?"
"Please don't."
"What will we do?" she asked, with that intimate we on her tongue again.
"We," he took it and repeated it, "we'll walk along."
"Where?"
"I don't know. I don't care much. Do you?" he asked her so humbly that she looked up at him quickly and saw, beyond any doubt, that he knew what he was doing and wanted to do it.
"I don't care," she said, with her breast aflutter.
"Would you like luncheon somewhere?" he asked her.
"At an automat?" she flung at him and struck him so fiery red that she flushed from contrition. "I didn't mean that," she said.
"You should have. I deserved it."
"Do you really want lunch?" she asked.
"No; do you?"
"No."
So Calvin Clarke, of Clarke's Ferry, Massachusetts, and Joan Daisy Royle walked along the city street. He sought, as she very well knew, a place to be alone with her, but he was totally untrained in the technique of obtaining privacy for a girl with himself in the city. Her home would not do; for Dads and mamma would be there; and he could not suggest a house of his friends, as he had the other night. So they passed block after block until they came to the lake-front park at the Art Institute.
It was a pay day and not yet noon, so he realized that within must be many rooms where no one wandered. "Come in here, Joan Daisy," he asked, and with trembling fingers he paid their admission.
Old articles and paintings, reminders of the past, surrounded him as he walked with Joan Royle to a remote and empty room. He could not possibly forget the past of his people, she thought; yet here he was alone with her, and his meaning was to ask her to marry him.
He did not know how to go about it. He did not do as Ket or Hoberg or any one else would have done. He stood, with his hat in his hand, and it was his one good hand, speaking to her; and she did not hear what he said for her watching his eyes. Sometimes she looked at his hair which was soft and brown, as she always had noticed, and now it was become amazingly tempting to her touch. She had never wanted to touch a man's forehead and hair; never Ket's and never Hoberg's; the idea, in contrast, repelled her; but she wanted to touch Calvin Clarke's hair; and still unsatisfied, and more so than before, was her need to feel his shoulder.
He was repeating something over which he was very serious; it was how he had taken her east with him, to his home, when he had gone away in November. He wanted her to believe this because he said part of him—"people call it the heart; my heart, Joan, must always have known what you were. . . . I came back to the court that night to see you. . . I went to the automat to see you. . . I've kept, I've kept . . ."
He dropped his hat and fumbled in an inner pocket for a folded bit of paper.
"See," he pleaded.
"What is it?" And as he fumbled with one hand to open it, she helped him. At his touch burning blood flowed in her fingers, and she saw that the paper was only a scrap upon which she had written a list of books for Ket beginning, "Barsoni, $3.50."
"Where'd you get that?" she asked.
"I kept it."
"Why?"
"It meant you to me—your dream, even when I didn't let myself believe it,—your will, you."
"It was silly," she said. "Just my dream of Ket. What was there to it?"
"Can you ever get such a dream of me?"
"Oh, my God!" she cried, seizing him with both her hands. "Think of comparing you and Ket! . . . Kiss me! Kiss me!"
"I mean to marry you, if you will. I mean to marry you!"
"Never mind. . . . I mean, of course I want you to. . . . But never mind, kiss me. . . . How soft your hair is? . . . Does it hurt your shoulder . . ."
Calvin brought Joan home to her flat so late in the evening that mamma already was in bed and unwakably asleep, but not late enough for Calvin to see Dads; for Dads had resumed his usual habits.
Finding lights out when he returned, he entered quietly; but Joan heard him and sat up, excitedly. "I'm awake, Dads."
"Just awake?" asked Dads, after gazing at her. He was sober to-night.
"Dads, come here. I'm going to marry Calvin Clarke."
"Hm!" said Dads. "Hm. Hm, little Joan. . . . Well, I thought so. . . . We'll be going to Cleveland, your mamma and I. We'll be out of the State."
"No, Dads. No."
"Not when you're married. I mean afterwards, Joan. I'll be going along the same, Joan—and I'm not one to live on a State's attorney. Told your mamma?"
She had not; but Calvin was then engaged in telling his. He was writing with great patience with his left hand, and he spent half the remaining hours of the night at his letter; for it was no easy and simple message he had to send his mother. He knew, indeed, that however carefully he explained, he could never make her understand what had happened to him here when she read his letter upon the hooded bench under the beams which were old when Massachusetts was a colony.
THE END