CHAPTER XIX
Joan set off, not to a house for none was near, but toward the road; at her feet were dark spots in the snow which she knew were blood, though they looked black in the moonlight, and she followed them till they stopped at the tracks of the automobile. Whom had she shot? she wondered. Baretta, or Frankie Zenn, or some gunman whom she had never seen and who had never seen her or Mr. Clarke or the driver, but who had obeyed a bidding to go to the car in the ditch and kill every one underneath.
The anonymousness of the brutal business, when she thought of it, increased her terror, which shook her with violent spasms of shuddering as she walked. Her neck hurt and her legs twinged when she stepped; she was cold and felt more helpless than she had under the car when the bullets were striking above her. She felt herself utterly at the mercy of any one who might appear, although she had in her hand the reloaded revolver. She knew that she could use it to effect only under such circumstances as already had served her; she knew that the gunmen would not permit such an opportunity again; if they returned, they would certainly kill her, and Mr. Clarke under the car, and the driver, whose name she did not yet know.
Walking between the tracks of the gunmen's car, she discovered that they had driven directly to the road, which was about a hundred yards away, and had swerved to the left just before their wheels had climbed to the concrete. So they had gone toward the city.
The road was empty in that direction, but far away to the northwest was a pair of headlights, so distant that she watched for several seconds before she made sure that they moved, whereupon she retreated toward the wreck, but returned to the road, after a minute, and was rewarded by the sight of the high, broad bulk of a truck in nowise resembling the vehicle of gunmen; so she hid her revolver and stepped to the middle of the road, stopping the truck, which proved to have a crew of two strong men, to whom the weight of a wrecked Ford was no unyielding obstacle.
She sat on the floor of the truck beside Neski, who lay upon a pallet improvised from old burlap and pads, with which the van was provided. Calvin Clarke reclined, propped up by pads, against the side opposite her. An oil lantern swayed and bumped on a hook overhead, giving them light; for the tailboard of the truck was drawn up tightly against the cold and also against the eyes of overtaking cars.
The scurry of tires and the drone of an approaching motor set Joan Daisy shaking with fright; it drew Mr. Clarke's attention to the tailboard; and it interrupted Neski's talk. The car passed and Joan Daisy relapsed to quieter quivering; Mr. Clarke's gaze again rested upon her, while now and then he agreed, monosyllabically, with Neski, who had become voluble of opinion under his pain.
There was no doubt, to Neski's way of thinking, that she had hit the leader of the gunmen, who would be Zenn, if Baretta himself had not been present; otherwise it was Baretta. Upon no alternate theory could Neski account for the prompt abandonment of the field and the failure of the car to return.
"You bumped the bird that was interested, personal," Neski complimented her.
She glanced at Mr. Clarke in the eerie, swaying light and saw that he had no thought for Neski's talk because of his study of her; and whereas, upon the witness stand, she had confronted him and faced him boldly, now she looked away.
"Ain't it so?" Neski appealed to him.
"Probably," he replied; but she knew that he had passed from consideration of what she had done and that he was trying to account for her herself, about whom he had admitted himself wrong, all wrong. He was not Mr. God-looking at all, leaning against the dirty pads and with his right shoulder queerly crumpled and his arm limp; he looked bewildered and boylike, his face cut and streaked with blood and his coat torn; but the boy, whom she saw, plainly was charging responsibility for his disaster and hers and Neski's to his own mistake, which he had acknowledged; neither by word nor bearing did he seek excuse or extenuation for himself.
Joan Royle was not used to seeing one thus call himself to account when affairs went wrong.
"It may require a day to complete the confirmation of the facts," Mr. Clarke said to her. "Besides, to-day is Sunday; but by to-morrow, at the latest, Ketlar will be freed, whatever the jury may report."
"To-morrow," she repeated, and he imagined that she deplored the delay, but actually she was not concerned for Ket, who was in jail, safe and sound and removed from the expedition of this night in which she had ceased to be an antagonist of Calvin Clarke and had made common cause with him.
Neski talked on, but Mr. Clarke and she sat silently facing each other, her back to one side of the truck, his against the opposite. Her feet, in dancing slippers, nearly touched his shoes, and he and she glanced at each other and looked down at their toes, which tossed together when the truck jounced.
She had gained to-night the freedom of Ket and the vindication of her friendship with Ket, for which she had endured insult and humiliation throughout the months since Ket had been jailed, but she sought satisfaction in no renewing of her hours with him; no moment with him made seizure of her soul. She looked down at her silk slippers and Calvin Clarke's blunt boots, and she recalled how he had appeared at first to her when he had come for the People of Illinois to question her, and she, trusting to him, had told him the whole truth, but immediately he had approved the arrest of Ket for murder and had ordered her held as an accomplice.
How she had hated that Mr. Clarke! She did not hate the Calvin Clarke with blood-streaked face and with arm helpless because it had been caught under the back of the seat over which he had bent to press her to the floor of the car; she did not hate the Mr. Clarke who had pleaded, "Down, keep down, Joan Daisy," when he and she were pursued and who had called to her to wait, before she had started to the road, while he acknowledged that he had been wrong, all wrong about her.
She had beaten him and "shown him up" as completely as Oliver, in her long-ago ride to Tut's Temple, had prophesied that she would do, but she felt no joy of triumph over him. Pangs of triumph thrilled her breast, but it was triumph over what she had done with Calvin Clarke and for him in his cause against those who had tried to kill him and her to-night.
The truck slowed and she trembled, drawing nearer to him, as she imagined another meeting with gunmen; but the stop was at sight of a Chicago policeman and in obedience to Mr. Clarke's directions to halt at the first city patrol box.
Calvin arose and, without accepting help either from Joan Royle or the patrolman, he made a report over the police telephone wire, relating who he was, who was with him and what had happened and why. Joan Daisy stood near and, listening, she wondered at his inevasive honesty in description of events exactly as they had occurred and his refraining from coloring them in the least either to excuse himself or claim for himself credit.
"Who was the bird she bumped?" Neski inquired of him, when he returned to the truck; and he answered, "The department hasn't heard yet."
Joan Daisy resumed her place on the floor of the truck, and Mr. Clarke and the patrolman sat opposite her. The report, which had been made, and the presence of the policeman seemed to Joan Daisy to relax the strain under which Calvin Clarke and she had drawn together and they became set-apart persons again. They approached a hospital and she saw Neski making timid experiments to reassure himself as to his injuries. Mr. Clarke spoke not at all to her and had words only for the policeman.
At the hospital Mr. Clarke accompanied Neski to the emergency room after seeing her in charge of a nurse.
"Make sure she's not hurt," he instructed the nurse, avoiding speech with Joan Daisy herself. "Take care of her."
In spite of his new tone, Joan Daisy was reminded of the night when he had given her to Mrs. Hoswick's care to be held for questioning. The nurse bathed her face and brushed her hair and advised her to lie down, as had Mrs. Hoswick; but Joan Daisy could rest no better upon this night than upon that. Her mind, then, had roved restlessly to Ket, accused and arrested for the murder of Adele; now it visited the emergency room, where she imagined Mr. Clarke under surgeon's hands.
The nurse brought a pot of tea, and Joan Daisy was sipping a cup when Mr. Clarke reappeared, and she saw his shoulder drooping and his arm as helpless as before. He had washed his face and brushed his hair, but had not a thing done to his shoulder. Neski had broken ribs and internal injury, probably not dangerous, he said.
"I'm glad," exclaimed Joan Daisy. "What about you?"
"Are you ready to go?" he asked her.
"I? What do you mean?"
"I've a cab at the door," he said, in his quiet, stubborn way. "I'm taking you home."
"Not you!" she cried and, seeing him flush hot, she realized that he mistook her objection. "You've got to have yourself attended to," she explained.
"I will," he promised, "afterwards."
"Now!" she insisted and suddenly, before she knew what she did, she pleaded, "Please, won't you?"
"No," he refused. "Collar bone's broken; nothing much more. People play football with that."
"They don't!"
"Several have," he replied, unanswerably, and she told him, with all the positiveness she could muster, "I'll not leave this place till you're attended to."
"I'll not be attended to until you're home," he replied, and she felt her positiveness no match for his. Moreover, the nurse aided him, saying, "A bit more of a ride, if he's careful, shouldn't matter." And he asked Joan Daisy, "Will you pour me some tea?"
Her hand holding the little pot trembled for her thinking of the hotel room, which she had shared with Mrs. Hoswick and in which she had offered him a cup of coffee, and he had refused it from her. Then there was the automat where she had finished for him the purchase of his beef pie and where she had transferred her dishes to his table, only to see him walk out. So, after starting to pour, her hand became untrustworthy, and she put down the pot.
"You pour it for him, please," she said to the nurse and sank into her chair.
He ignored the cup, which the nurse filled. "You're tired through," he said to Joan Daisy, and his own face was white as he gazed down at her. "You ought to be in bed now. Stay here to-night."
"No," Joan Daisy protested, forgetting his determination. "I'm going home."
"I'll take you."
"Have your tea first," she begged, and she stood waiting until he drank it.
"I wish," he said, when they were alone side by side, in the cab, "you would simply rest."
"It's absolutely impossible."
"Because of me?"
"I shot somebody to-night," she replied. "Maybe I killed him."
"You ought to hope so," said Calvin. "I do."
"Yes; but do you feel sleepy, hoping that? I mean, even if you weren't hurt, would you?"
"No."
"Would you've slept to-night? I mean, if Mr. Oliver hadn't called you and told you about Baretta?"
"I would have expected to."
"Hoping you'd killed Ket?"
"What do you mean?"
"You wanted to have Ket killed; you asked the jury to kill him; so you hoped they'd do it, didn't you?"
"I was wrong, completely wrong in the whole matter."
She was silent for a minute, and he felt her tensely erect beside him and he could see vaguely her clear, pretty profile in the light which streaked through the cab windows.
"Of course you were born and brought up to it," she resumed, startling him.
"To be wrong?"
"To be so frightfully sure you were right. I never saw another human so sure. How could you help it, with Queen Anne's war and John Adams' administration and Antietam forever in you? And you weren't so wrong at that."
Her thoughts were leaping with a restless clarity, swift even for her; she was sustained abnormally by nervous excitement, he realized, and when her hypertension snapped, she would collapse, he thought.
"You mean I was not so wrong about Ketlar?" he asked, stupidly, because of his thinking of her.
"Oh, no; you were wrong about Ket; but you certainly are right about the rest—Chicago and the law and civilization. I told you that evening—it was after the trial of that 'Garian person who'd burned up his store, remember?"
"I remember," said Calvin.
"You and I were in the court-room afterwards. You'd come after some papers."
"I came back to see if you had waited."
"Oh, did you? . . . I told you that I got your idea in the speech you made to the jury about Chicago and the State and the country. I thought I did get it; but I didn't. But I guess I have it now; if I haven't, I'm hopeless.
"You see," she resumed after a minute, "I'd only read in the papers about Baretta and Frankie Zenn and the hold-ups and shootings and bombings all over Chicago. They were just reading matter to me. They weren't to you; you knew; you knew," she repeated and he felt her shaking, "you knew they rode after people in cars and shot to kill—and nobody touched them. You couldn't touch them, for you couldn't find anybody who'd talk. So you got sort of crazy, inside you, to stop the murdering going on; and when you found Adele and the police took you to Ket and me and you caught us both lying, you went after us for all that was in you."
She stopped speaking, though her thoughts leaped on and on, as he could see from her intensity.
The rear wheels of the taxi had tire chains, and as they scraped in the ruts of frozen snow, one became displaced so that a link struck a mudguard and clanked regularly with each whirl of the wheel. He noticed that it set Joan Daisy's head to nodding, and he asked, "Shall I have that chain taken off?"
"No, I like it."
"Like it? Why?"
"It beats time."
"To what?"
"The tune in my head."
"One of Ketlar's?"
For reply she sang softly with marked, thrilling measure the theme of Elgar's great march. "I love it!" she cried. "You've heard it?"
"Yes."
"Didn't it make you want to—do something wonderful?"
"I liked it," he said.
"Like Rimski-Korsakov, too?"
"I don't know much of his music."
"He's another doer! And there's an American named Schelling. They played a great piece of his at the Orchestra! There's a red-headed boy from Michigan who composes music; his name is in the concert program. Sowerby, it is. Of course, he's studied; he's been at the great conservatories. Ket must go to a conservatory; that's what I must try to make him do."
Calvin drew off into his corner of the cab, with his heart thumping jealously. He was taking her, he realized, to the flat above the flat to which Ketlar would return to-morrow.
"We're within a couple of squares of a house of some friends of mine," Calvin said. "Let me take you to them."
"Why?"
"They're near and they can look after you. Some one ought to look after you to-night."
"Why?"
"You're done up."
"I'm not."
"You'll find you are."
"Then I'd better be home, when I find it."
"These are good friends of mine," he urged. "Let me take you to them."
"I want to go home . . . home," she mused. "That's my home, that two-room flat. That's where I live, Mr. Clarke. You never can believe it means anything to me."
"Very well," said Calvin; and she settled into her corner, silently.
At the entrance of the building, wherein was her home, she begged him to return, but he accompanied her upstairs past Ketlar's flat and up the second flight of stairs, upon which he had followed her, on that other night, watching her slim, white heels rising from her slippers.
She unlocked her door, and yet he was loath to leave her. She switched on the light, and he saw that her bed stood in its form of a couch.
"No one's here to help you," he protested.
"Mamma's in there," Joan Daisy said, glancing at the closed door of the bedroom.
"Wake her!" commanded Calvin.
"What for?"
"Wake her!"
Joan Daisy shook her head. "I won't wake her; anyway, I couldn't."
Calvin recollected why she couldn't; he recollected his complete contempt for the man and the woman whom this girl vainly had tried to arouse on the night of her arrest. He glanced at the closed door of the bedroom, wherein he supposed one parent to be sleeping, drugged, and the other, drunk, but his contempt for them lacked its previous completeness. For the woman, however she nullified herself, had borne a daughter who, in this home of a rented room and in other temporary quarters like it, had become not a kept consort of Ketlar and an accomplice to a murder, but a dreamer and a determiner of great things.
Joan Daisy cast off her coat, discovering how nearly done she was when she felt the relief of the weight of it.
"What can I do for you?" Calvin asked, as she stood slender and small in her dancing dress, with shoulders and white arms bare. "Joan Daisy, what will you let me do?"
"You know what I want. It's to have you go along and see to your shoulder."
"I will. But I want to do something for what you did to-night."
"Why? I did it for myself, if you mean the shooting. Don't wait over that."
Calvin stooped and felt, with his strong hand, under the edge of the couch. He had no acquaintance with daybeds, but he understood that they drew out somehow, so he pulled and the couch broadened.
"Good night," he said, straightening.
"You'll see about yourself right away?"
He promised, "Right away," and she went to the door with him. "When you hear who he was, please phone me," she asked.
"I will, if it's not at a time when you'd be asleep."
"I'll not be asleep."
"You must be."
"I can't."
He extended his left hand, and she gave him first her tight hand and then, since their clasps did not meet, she put her left hand in his. "Good night; go to sleep, Joan Daisy," he said, scarcely able to speak for the pulse beat in his throat.
Downstairs, past Ketlar's door, Calvin tramped, driving his mind from to-morrow, when Ketlar would return to her awaiting him with her dream for him, her hands for him—her slender, soft, strong hands both of which Calvin had clasped Her lips would be Ketlar's too; and Calvin let himself imagine no more.
At the cab he turned before giving direction to the driver and looked up at her light. His glance roved about the building, and he was reminded of his feeling of offense at it. He felt none to-night. When he settled himself in the cab, and was driven away, he closed his eyes and was transported, instantly, to the ditch with Joan Daisy Royle beside him. He opened his eyes and saw a building, not that which contained her home, but one of the thousands like it, and he thought of her come from such a building; and in this and in the next perhaps and the next, some one else like her in a two-room, rented flat.
His thought traveled to his own home, to his mother, to the table on Thanksgiving Day with Cousin Harriet and his walk alone in the wood toward Haverhill, where his great, great, great grandmother Selina, Timothy's wife, had fought the Indians after Timothy had fallen. There was no family portrait of Selina and in the family record no personal description of her; so Calvin always had supposed her tall, broad-shouldered and brown-haired like many women of his family and of the type of Melicent Webster. Closing his eyes, he saw the scene in the woods and he saw Selina, a small, quick, dark-haired girl who snatched up the gun and fought.
The taxi swung down Sheridan Road toward the north entrance to Lincoln Park, and the moon shone on a man upon horseback with the horse reared and the man swung over in the saddle rallying and calling to his troops. It was Sheridan stopping the rout on the road from Winchester: "You're going the wrong way, boys! Turn; turn; you're going back!"
In bronze, he rode; eternally there, at the end of the boulevard which bore his name, he rallied and inspired his troops, for all to see who passed in cars and taxis and in motor-busses, too, on the way in and out to Wilson Avenue.
Where the road again turned, stood Abraham Lincoln, the son of Illinois. And who had Calvin Clarke, in all the list of his fathers from Queen Anne's war to Antietam, to equal him? With Schubert and Beethoven, Wagner and Mozart in letters of stone, stood Lincoln in this home of Joan Royle's which was no two-room flat, but was all the city.
What difference that no blood of theirs flowed in her veins? What difference that no brittle Bible recorded physical descent from them? Her soul they had molded and made.