CHAPTER IX
When Calvin received report of her hour with Elmen, he learned merely that Joan Daisy Royle had visited the lawyer; for the plain-clothes man, who watched her, had not ventured to follow into Elmen's office. However, the bare report of her call was enough for Calvin. He knew, now, that her course of coaching was commenced.
He knew, too, that Ketlar was being coached whenever Elmen entered the jail and procured for his client the right of secret conference with attorney which the law assures every accused person.
To Calvin, this meant that Ketlar and the Royle girl were being drilled and rehearsed, as though for theatrical parts, in order to make such appearance and to swear to such testimony at the trial as Elmen believed would prove most effective. Gone was any opportunity for the State to catch Ketlar and the Royle girl in further contradictions.
"The Royle girl," Calvin habitually said, when referring to her, utilizing the common phrase of the newspapers. Occasionally a news column printed her entire name, Joan Daisy Royle, or mentioned her, familiarly, as Joan Daisy; but the dignity of "Miss Royle" was not now to be extended to her; so the newspapers, forbidden by their own convention from referring to a girl, slurringly, simply as "Royle," resorted to the three words.
Upon his tongue, they roused in Calvin subtle excitements; and he became conscious of purposely repeating the derogatory phrase for the peculiar stir it whipped within him. As "the Royle girl," he referred to her severely in a letter to his mother which he wrote on Friday night, not waiting until Sunday. He argued with himself that he wrote to acknowledge quince jelly just received and that he naturally had mentioned the case; but when the letter was mailed, he knew that he had attained a satisfaction from again condemning the Royle girl. It was undeniable to himself—as undeniable as the fact that, after he had turned out his reading lamp beside his bed, he switched on the light again to examine, once more, a very small crescent mark on his wrist.
Not feeling sleepy, he set to arranging to-morrow's work in his mind and soon discovered that he was devising and inventing plausible excuses either for summoning that Royle girl to his office or for seeking her, when he had no real reason at all. But now it was four days since he had seen her and, if he did nothing about it, he might not see her again until the time of the trial.
Calvin Clarke brought himself to a realization of his occupation and reached for a book; but, although he forced himself to read, he failed utterly to banish the extraordinary mood which was come upon him.
He arose and walked about his room. "This is loneliness," he said to himself, with a puzzled surprise. "I suppose this is loneliness," he repeated with interested rebuke of this unique and discreditable sensation. For loneliness was, of course, a weakness; it was a lack of self-sufficiency, a dependence upon others.
Calvin Clarke was very used to being alone; in fact, he had lived all his life essentially alone, having been born the only child of his generation in the cool, severe, perfectly ordered old homestead beside the Merrimac. His mother's arms, when she had held him to her breast, had clasped him constrainedly; self-control had come in his suckling.
His earliest memories were of himself, not lonely, but alone; his image of himself in childhood was of awakening, alone, in the large, cool, white room which was his and from the windows of which he could look out upon the tall elms and drooping willows and the placid river. He knew that there must have been a period when his mother or a maid had come to his room to bathe and dress him, but Calvin carried no recollection of the epoch. Always, so far as he could remember, he had been self-dependent and had done for himself; always he had known that he must keep within him his passion to cry, to bristle with anger or bow in grief, to betray triumph or admit disappointment or to give way to feelings of affection.
Other boys might do all these things, as other mothers might cuff and scold, kiss and hug their boys alternately and irresponsibly. His mother, of course, never had slapped Calvin in all his life; and never once, lips on his, had she kissed him. Her kiss was a touch of her lips on his forehead, usually, or sometimes upon his cheek; and when he kissed her, always her cheek was offered. He could not remember that ever he had kissed his father or his father him; and he could not imagine his father striking him for any reason whatsoever.
His boyhood association with his father consisted chiefly of serious, perfectly planned expeditions in company with a somewhat embarrassed parent who most inconsistently purchased confections which Calvin ordinarily was forbidden to eat between meals and who started out to talk to Calvin on the train, but who soon compromised by buying for himself "The Atlantic Monthly," and for Calvin, "The Youth's Companion." One journey was, of course, to Lexington and Concord; another was to Harvard Yard, where his father showed Calvin the room in Hollis which had been his—own and which was later to be Calvin's when he was in Harvard College; at another time, they visited Beacon Hill and the State House and the Shaw Memorial, where Calvin read for himself the thrilling Latin, "Omnia Relinquit, Servare Rem Publicam." They went to Old North Church, of course; to Bunker Hill and to the harbor into which was tipped the tea; and they supped, afterwards, in solemn state of two at the Touraine Hotel.
Calvin always called them "great" days, but they did not make him more at ease with his father. He thought he was perfectly at ease with his mother; at least he felt able to tell her a good deal of what came into his mind and bothered him, but he did not actually bring many of his troubles to her. instead, he tried to work them out himself by referring to the principles with which she had supplied him.
"What do you think about this yourself, Calvin?" she customarily asked him, when he had appealed to her; and when he took thought and answered, she almost invariably said, "Exactly. You knew it within yourself." So, naturally, he referred more and more to himself, and less to her; and he knew that it pleased her to have him leave home alone, head up and with eyes dry, to start at Phillips' Academy.
He roomed with a boy who cried, one night, from homesickness.
"I guess you'd feel bad, too," said the boy, defending himself, "if you lived more'n ten miles away."
Calvin made no reply, but wondered what difference fifty or ten miles made and what good it did to cry for your mother. He imagined his mother finding him in tears for her!
He entered, as had his father, fully into the activities of the school and "made" the track team; and with half of his class from the academy, he passed on into Harvard, where he rowed as had his grandfather, Calvin Clarke. Of course, he "made" one of the first tens of "The Institute of 1776," "Dicky" and "The Pudding" and lived, at last, exactly as had his father and grandfather before him, in the room in Hollis looking down the Yard.
In all this course, so long prepared for him and so long anticipated, and in the path which he since had followed, never had he been disturbed by any doubt that his education had been the best obtainable; never had he imagined that any one could feel actual contempt for the influences which had made him. They might, through envy, feign contempt, but they could not actually feel it, he would have thought; but that Royle girl had—she who had challenged him, with that strange thrill in her voice, as to his right to speak for the State; she who had called him a "ready-made," not to be compared to Ketlar, and who had meant it; she who had set his heart to throbbing when she clasped his wrist and who had cut the mark in his skin.
Of course, she did not know what was behind him, he considered; and even if some one told her, she would be incapable of evaluating traditions and training utterly strange to her. She merely had cried out an hysterical contempt for him as an educated man who had had advantages denied to her and her friends.
Calvin imagined himself admitting to his mother that he had let that girl disturb him at all; and he imagined his mother's amazement at him.
Thus he sought to dismiss, finally, any thought of that Royle girl; but when he was in bed, with the light out again, he recalled that she had not yet made application at the jail for a visit to Ketlar and he wondered why. Was it because she did not want to or because Elmen might have told her to delay?
In either case, she was likely to appear soon, perhaps to-morrow, and so she would pass the Criminal Courts building on her way to the jail and, as likely as not, come up to the state's attorney's suite afterwards. Who knew?
Joan Daisy, having obtained permission from Elmen, did visit the jail on the next afternoon; she passed the steel door by which visitors, one by one, are admitted after inspection through a small, barred peep-pane, and she took her place in the queue of felons' friends shifting forward, singly, each to report the name of the prisoner he desired to see, his own name and his connection with the prisoner. Then, if it was found that his name was on the list approved for the prisoner, a card was issued.
Upon the list approved for Ket was Joan Daisy's name; so she obtained her pass, entered the elevator and was lifted, in company with two men and four women and a child, to a floor where the guard announced, "This is Ketlar's; and Cribben's, too."
One of the women, and the most miserable-looking, evidently was for Cribben, for she and Joan Daisy stepped out together; and the elevator, rising, left them shut in a small, tile-floored space completely enclosed by thick steel bars and gratings. A high, barred window to the west admitted a shaft of the sunlight of the cool, October afternoon; and Joan Daisy gazed up at the light thus shining between the bars and upon steel bars; bars and barriers, locks and gratings, guards everywhere.
A guard inspected Joan Daisy's card and also that of the woman who had come to see Cribben; and he swung back a section of the steel barrier, admitting them into a sort of corridor, barred behind and screened in front by a closely woven brattice of steel, painted white and pierced by small, square holes about a pencil's girth in size.
Voices spoke and the odor of sweat and tobacco smoke was on the steam-heated air, but at first Joan Daisy saw no one but the guards and her miserable companion who had come for Cribben. Joan Daisy did not realize that she had reached the visiting screen and that, on the other side, was a "bull pen"; but Cribben's friend had visited before, so she did not hold back with an air of expectancy. Immediately she pressed her nose against the grating, matched two of the little holes to her eyes and looked in.
Joan Daisy watched her with surprise and glanced at the guard, who took her look for question as to whether she might do the same. "Go ahead," bid the guard, smiling; and Joan Daisy pressed her nose to the grating, gazed through two holes and gasped.
A second grating, identical to that which pressed hard and cool against her brow, paralleled the first. It was pierced by identical holes placed opposite so that Joan Daisy, by staring straight ahead, could see through both screens, and after her pupils became adjusted to the dimness beyond, she discerned the outlines of the bull-pen and the figures of some of the prisoners. A yellow flare attracted her as some one struck a match; she heard separate voices and the shuffling of feet on the cement floor.
The enclosure, into which she looked, and in which the match-flare burned brightly, was long and low and narrow. She could not see clearly enough to discern the precise plan of the place; she saw, merely, that immediately beyond the second screen was an open space, at present occupied only by a guard; beyond him were bars again and beyond these bars, and leaning against them, were prisoners; for these bars formed the end of the "bull-pen."
The ceiling of the pen was so low that a tall man easily could touch it with raised arm; the walls of the pen stood five or six paces apart, and were sheer and straight, of solid steel.
Joan Daisy could not see the structure of these walls which were, in reality, the ends of cells built in solid blocks on both sides. The cells joined one another without door or hinge of any sort; but the east end of each cell, in the block to the east, was a barred grating which communicated to a barred corridor within the eastern wall of the building; the west end of each of the cells to the west also was a grating; the backs of the two blocks of cells confronted each other and were the walls which Joan Daisy saw.
In the back of each cell was a small, steel, sliding door through which the occupants of the cells were turned into the bull-pen; then the doors behind them were closed to form the continuous blank, dark walls against which some of the prisoners leaned, standing, while they gossiped in whispers and guffawed. Some sat on the cement floor, backs to the steel walls, while they read papers under the yellow electric lights required in the middle of the pen; but most of the men crowded to the bars at the end where was daylight and where, beyond the bars and the double steel screen, might be friends to speak to them.
A lock clicked, steel clanged and Joan Daisy saw two figures shadow the visiting screen.
"Here I am, Jan," cried the miserable woman who had come for Cribben.
"Hello, Sadie," replied a low, inflectionless voice on the other side.
Through her holes in the screen, Joan Daisy spied flaxen hair and a patch of white skin; gray eyes, queerly separated by strips of white-painted steel, stared at her. "Hello, Ket," she whispered, trying desperately to make her voice cheerful.
He did not answer. At Joan Daisy's elbow, Cribben's Sadie chattered excitedly and she crept away along the screen, Cribben following her on the other side, sullenly replying to her, now and then.
"Ket, I'm Jo," said Joan Daisy, pleadingly.
"Don't I know it?" he returned. "Ain't I breaking my neck to see you?"
She lifted herself to tiptoes and thrust her finger-tips into the little holes and pulled up to increase her height.
"Watch your step!" he warned her, sarcastically.
"Why?"
"Somebody'll figure you're trying to slip me a saw or dope or dynamite or something."
"Oh!" she said. "That's why they've got this."
"That's why," replied Ket, "so you can't. Fat chance."
"Ket, how are you? You're well?"
"Well, I ain't sick in bed. . . . Bed," he repeated the word bitterly. "It's a cot, kid, between one on top of me and one underneath. I've got the middle one; we're three in the cell. All night there, kid, between two"—his voice lowered to a whisper which Joan Daisy hardly could hear—"burglars. By God, you hardly can move. I gotta lie there in the dark all night and mosta the day, when they shove the chow into the cells. They shove it in on a plate on the floor under the bottom bar; you inhale it or stick in your fingers. They don't take a chance slipping anybody a knife and fork.
"Then all you gotta do is clean your cell and keep from scrappin' till they turn you out in the bull-pen. This's the big time, kid. You've come right at it. When we get real wild we play 'How many fingers up?' We got a ball, too—a soft ball to bat with your arm or fist. No wood bat for the bull-pen. Then back to the cell with your bunkies and nothin' to do; by God, nothin' to do, day and night, dark and light. Dark—damn the dark, the way it smells and snores. Damn the dark—"
"Ket!" cried Joan Daisy.
"What?"
"I didn't know what this was."
"When you stuck me here, you mean."
"Oh, Ket, I'm so sorry!"
"Swell time to be sorry. Anyway, what's your trouble? You ain't in it."
"Ket, you mustn't—"
"Yea," growled Ket, remembering Elmen's admonitions. "We mustn't scrap."
"We mustn't, Ket!" she pleaded and her voice through the screen softened him.
"I know you did your best, kid. Didn't I tell Elmen all right to send you along?"
"Oh!" she breathed, relaxing her clutch of the screen as she comprehended that the reason Elmen had forbidden her to visit Ket was that he had not wanted to see her.
"Kid," whispered Ket, gazing through at her, "that was some kiss!"
"What?" she said, meeting his gray eyes in wonder at the way his bitter rebuke of her could give way, so suddenly, to this desire for her which he could satisfy only with his eyes and by summoning his memory of his hot embrace and his ravish of her lips when he had seized her at the door on the night the police arrested him.
Through the holes in the screen, he saw her face plainly enough to be sure that she remembered and he strengthened his memory to himself by repeating, "Some kiss, kid."
"Yes," she replied, but did not summon within her the sensation of his embrace. She stared at him, thinking, "He's still Ket." And she let go of the screen, feeling more cheerful; she took a more general view through the holes and, peering into the bull-pen, now she noticed a shape which resembled a piano.
"Ket, is there a piano in there?" she asked.
"It's a bum box," he said. "But you can beat it."
"They let you play it?"
"Let me?" retorted Ket, with a touch of his old arrogance. "They damn near tear my clothes off to make me, when playin's allowed. It's not in the bull-pen; it's behind bars outside for entertainers; so I'm let out sometimes at night to play to the boys in the cells."
"That's fine, Ket."
"Remember," asked Ket, "remember 'Teasing Tears' which you told me was so rotten?" he tantalized her deliberately. "Well, it goes great in the jail anyway. I think I'll change the name to the 'Jail Jazz.' I've timed it better, too. Like this. 'Tum-dada-dum da dada da dum,'" he tongued, thumping the time also with his fingers on the screen.
Joan Daisy stepped back a pace to thrill by herself at the inspiration which at that second had seized her.
"Like that better?" Ket demanded, ceasing to thrum.
"Yes; a lot."
"You weren't listenin' to it at all!" he accused her.
"I was. . . . I mean I was thinking about you, Ket! I get it all better now!" she exclaimed thrillingly.
"What better?"
"This, you're having to go to jail, Ket, when you didn't do anything. But it's going to make you, don't you see?"
"Make me what?"
"A great musician; that's what it's for. Ket, that's what it must be for!"
"What must be for what?"
"Your trouble, Ket, to make you great! That's the way Wagner became great—through trouble. They banished him, I read in a program; and Schubert—he almost starved. Ket, Ket—this is your trouble, that's what it is, to make you great!"
She clung again to the screen trying, as if by touch, to impart to him the hope which had inspired her and which seemed suddenly to mitigate the terrible accusation against Ket and herself and the degrading wretchedness of this imprisonment.
"Ket, you'll be freed!" she cried. "And you'll be great, when you come out; or you can be great! I'll bring you books, Ket, lessons on composing and the great pieces of music. You can study them here; it'll give you just what you want to do. You can learn just what you need to know and work it out in prison, as lots of the great men have—in prison. There's something about that, Ket, that helps!"
But her words were as helpless to reach him as her two hands held from him by the double, steel screen.
"There's something about what that helps?" Ket demanded.
"Being in prison."
"Helps who?" retorted Ket.
"The person, Ket."
"Me, you mean. Well, anybody's welcome to the help I'm gettin' here. You make me tired. Say, have you been over to the Echo?"
"No."
"You're lyin'."
"I've been by, Ket, but I didn't go in."
"If knew you were lyin'. Why? Who's name's in the lights now?"
Joan Daisy recoiled from the screen and did not answer so Ket pursued with, "Henny's, isn't it? Don't try to lie to me. I know. I seen the Echo ads in the paper. It's Henny's Dance Orchestra now—mine," he ended bitterly.
"Ket, I'll bring you the books," she tried to comfort him. "Don't bother about the Echo. They'll want you back fast enough when you come out; but you'll not want to go back. You'll not want to!"
"So Weigal thinks I ain't comin' back," Ket whispered, not hearing her. "That's Weigal for you. And I made that bird! He had a back yard beer-garden when I begun to play for him. I built that ball-room for that bird and the dirty pup pulls down my name when I get into trouble and lights up Henny's—Henny's."
"Ket!" pleaded Joan Daisy.
"Cut that stuff," commanded Ket. "It makes me sick." He stepped from the screen; a moment later a lock clicked, steel clanged and Joan Daisy knew that he had returned to the bull-pen.
A few paces away, along the screen, Cribben's Sadie was still chattering to her man. Other women were there, peering through the holes and talking. Joan Daisy dropped back to give another her place and a guard escorted her to the elevator.
It was a few minutes before this abrupt termination of Joan Daisy's visit with Ket that Calvin Clarke left his office in the Criminal Courts building and turned the corner toward the jail, where he encountered a plain-clothes man, attached to the state's attorney's office, who was one of the officers detailed to the collection of additional evidence for the prosecution of Ketlar.
Calvin of course did not speak to the man who, upon recognizing Mr. Clarke, carelessly sauntered by and without turning his head gave the information, "She's inside."
Although he continued past the jail, Calvin completely forgot the errand which had been his excuse for going on foot in that direction and, although he succeeded in recollecting it after he had reached the second block, he went no further, but turned back and, as he reapproached the jail, he pretended to search in the leather portfolio, which he carried, to make it appear that he had forgotten an important paper. But he might have spared himself this bit of pretense, because the plain-clothes man, for whose benefit it was enacted, had disappeared.
This must mean that the Royle girl had come out and, reckoning that she probably had gone to the street car line, Calvin hastened to Clark Street, where he saw her standing on a corner waiting for a car.
At the distance of half a block, she was unmistakable; her slender figure would be unmistakable, Calvin thought, at any distance at which she could be seen at all.
Even when she stood almost motionless on the corner, her posture and the lift of her head evinced a spirit which, in spite of him, set Calvin's pulses to prickling.
A car approached and halted; quickly she stepped up and was lost upon the rear platform, as a man ran from a cigar-store and boarded the car at the front. The fellow was the same who had spoken to Calvin before the jail, and Calvin imagined the man working his way rearward in the car to keep an unsuspected eye upon that small, spirited figure.
Calvin returned, thoughtfully, to his office where he ventured casually to Ellison: "Does it seem to you that we're getting much on the Royle girl?"
"We're getting nothing at all; that is, nothing more," replied Ellison promptly. "Plenty of past, apparently, but an eminently proper present. Discretion only faintly suggests the spirit of Joan Daisy Royle's doings in these days. She means to save Ketlar, if she has to watch herself every second until the trial's over; so you'll see no slip from her until the verdict's in."
"Then it's rather a waste of time to observe her."
"That's what I'd say."
Consequently, surveillance of the Royle girl was relaxed with a resultant effect upon Calvin Clarke which surprised him on that evening, when he was engaged in an affair which had nothing to do with the Ketlar case and which should not have suggested the Royle girl.
Calvin, in fact, was a guest at a dinner-dance at a fashionable little bandbox of a dance-club patronized by families described in the newspapers as most "exclusive."
Of course nobody in Chicago who knew Calvin Clarke excluded him. Every hostess who was acquainted with him was careful to send him a card when she was to entertain, and usually the hostesses telephoned him, also, urging him to come. Being a young man from Harvard, a bachelor and of a family two hundred and fifty years in America, naturally he was sought after in a city where a lineage is ancient if it can be traced back to "the fire" of 1871 and where a family which antedates the World's Fair, held in 1893, is deemed old and established.
Calvin declined most of his invitations and thereby became more ardently sought, especially by people who understood him so slightly that they felt he snubbed them. Calvin consciously snubbed no one; he merely followed a consistent rule which forbade him to attend entertainments that demanded late hours of him on weekdays.
He knew several of those who inhabited the pretentious mansions and apartments of the Lake Shore Drive and the adjoining streets known as "the gold coast." Since most of the men had gone east to college, Calvin shared with them many associations, but he felt little in common with them beyond college experiences.
They had much more money than the nomads inhabiting the brick-and-mortar encampments of the flat-buildings further north along the shore and they thought of themselves as a much more stable people. But few indeed had dwelt in the same house for as much as thirty years and most of them had abandoned, well within twenty, the brown stone monstrosities which their fathers had founded on west side streets which now were preempted by a ghetto population, or had deserted marble mansions on "old" Prairie Avenue and Calumet, on the south side, before the incursions of mulattoes.
Accordingly Calvin thought of the impressive, new mansions and apartments of the Drive as temporary and expedient, merely; here they were to-day, where might they be to-morrow? He felt that these people lacked roots in the land and in that stratum deeper than the soil—in long-respected traditions and long-practiced habits and customs of duty and responsibility and self-restraint.
They occupied places which kept them constantly in the public eye and made their doings of importance as patterns to many, many others; and most conspicuously, they pursued pleasure. Instead of setting an example of self-control and self-denial and respect for law, together with a devotion to duty which would help to establish an orderly, strong society, they displayed extravagance, laxness and self-indulgences; in their city, which was become a byword for murders and lawlessness exceeding the crimes of any like population in civilization, they entertained one another with bootleg liquor and danced until dawn.
Formally they praised the old, strict, frugal New England tradition but, on the younger lips, this commendation became almost mocking.
"You're Calvin Clarke of the historic home way down east, I believe," a débutante commented, as she started to dance with him.
Calvin replied, "My home's in Massachusetts."
"Ancestors shot up by the noble aborigine on the same spot where the matutinal beans are still baked, and all that, I understand. It must be marvelous, Mr. Clarke. Arthur Todd is absolutely rhapsodic about it—and your mother. Will she come to Chicago?"
"No," replied Calvin, quite positively. "I don't think so."
"Well, of course the stern and simple is strictly the one and only, if you can do it and don't weaken."
"One and only what?" asked Calvin.
"Life; what'd you suppose? You pack it with you, I understand from Arthur."
"With me?" said Calvin.
"Hours and habits and all that. Except when there's a murder on hand, you go to bed, I understand, as though you were rowing Yale to-morrow."
Calvin danced without comment.
"Of course there's absolutely no money in the state's attorney's office, compared to corporation law, but you must get a compensating kick, at times," she suggested. "When that Ketlar case came up, for instance. Arthur says the police called you at his place and you dashed down in time to view the body and find the principals still in pajamas."
Calvin remained silent.
"Come on, tell me," his partner invited, pressing her soft body closer to him. "There must have been a pile that never got into the papers. You found them in his flat, didn't you?"
"No," denied Calvin, shortly. "She was upstairs—with her mother."
"But she'd been in his flat."
"Yes."
"And just after he'd shot his wife!"
"No," objected Calvin again.
"Why, he certainly shot his wife!"
"But the Royle girl didn't go to his flat afterwards."
"What did they do?"
"That," said Calvin, "is the chief issue of the trial." And, as he terminated the discussion, he realized that he had been defending the Royle girl against this girl in his arms.
She reminded him somewhat of the Nesson girl for her trick of obtruding her body; and he thought, contrastingly, how little had the Royle girl, whom he had found in pajamas, obtruded her form. To recall his first encounter with her, was to recollect her spirit, her blue eyes and white brow and her dark hair, and her head up in challenge to him. Of course, he thought too of her slender figure and her slim white heels but not of her displaying them.
It was thus, by considering her contrast to this girl, with whom he danced, that he became stirred to question the complete correctness of his opinion of Joan Daisy Royle's character; and it was then that he determined to make another visit uptown.
This notion amazingly tantalized him during the next days and led him, on Tuesday evening, to travel by elevated train to the Wilson Avenue station, whence he debouched at six o'clock amid the typists and file clerks, shop-girls and mannequins, hair-dressers, fitters, tailors, shoe clerks, automobile salesmen, barbers, realtors, draftsmen, demonstrators, insurance agents, accountants and the others, who had finished downtown their toils for the day and were returning home.
Each girl and each man must be bound, eventually, to some such home as the Royle girl's, Calvin thought; and he remembered how he had asked her, when in her sleeping-room, where was her home and she had replied, with surprise, "You're in it."
So each of these people, when she or he arrived at a small four-walled space in one of these flat-buildings or one of these hotels, would say, "I'm home." No wonder that, after leaving the station, their feet lagged and they lingered, picking up acquaintances on the street; no wonder they idled before window displays and lounged in lobbies, examining the programs of picture plays.
Of course many sauntered into restaurants, of which establishments the district furnished an incredible number and variety. Some imitated old inns and spread tables with cloths at which diners sat in quiet, orderly manner and were served in old fashion; some provided tables but no service except a hurried dishing out of dinner which the patron himself bore, on a tray, to his place. There were cafeterias which dispensed not only with waiters but also with tables, furnishing only wide-arm chairs for the diner's evening board. Still, visible and tangible servers filled the bowls and plates and punched the paper checks.
Then there were the automats where the evolution from the family, gathered about the board in an American home, had gone so far that the prospective diner merely entered and wandered along a marble and metal and glass wall, peering in at dishes behind little locked doors which one might open, by pushing a nickel or several nickels into a slot; whereupon one abstracted the dish, transported it to a table, sat down and ate, and then, if unsatisfied, walked along the wall again, nickel in hand.
Most of all, the automat annoyed Calvin; it seemed to him a symbol of complete disintegration of families; further than this, destruction of the home could not go.
He had learned, from reports made of the Royle girl's habits, that she frequently dined at this place and he passed it, studying it with wonder. He returned toward it and, as he approached, he saw a slender, alert girl in blue disappear through the doorway. Though he had merely a glimpse of her, Calvin did not mistake her; she was the Royle girl; and no one watched her to-night.
Calvin hesitated and then strode by the window. She seemed to be alone, in the sense that none of the people beside her were acquaintances; and she was moving slowly along the wail, inspecting the little, lidded compartments. Halting, Calvin saw her thrust in a coin and draw out a dish which seemed to be some sort of baked affair with a crust on top; with another coin, she lifted a second metal and glass lid and procured rolls; then she placed herself, cup and saucer on her tray, in a queue of people procuring coffee or chocolate from measured jets set to squirting by coins thrust into the wall.
Calvin returned to the door and stepped in, though such an act was no part of the plan which had brought him uptown; and now, having no plan at all, he followed the line of people, who were exchanging larger coins for nickels, and armed with the passports of the place, he moved, mechanically, to the wall.
A small, blue baking dish, brownly crusted over, exhibited itself behind a locked glass lid. "Beef pie; three nickels," read the inscription beside it; and Calvin Clarke performed one of the few utterly irrational and wasteful acts of his life. Conscious that people on both sides were peering at him with amusement, he suddenly thrust in a nickel and then, realizing that he did not want the pie, he moved on.
"Go back there and put in two more nickels or somebody else will," said the Royle girl's lively, pleasant voice and, looking around, Calvin saw her beside him.
"What?" he asked, but she did not delay to repeat. She went to the compartment of the beef pie and, blocking off another patron, she thrust in two nickels in deft succession, twisted the handle, procured the pie and proffered it.
"Here's your pie, Mr. Clarke."
Calvin stared stupidly at the brown crust and, counting off two of the coins in his hand, he solemnly exchanged them with her for the pie.
"Now what else do you want? I'd better get it for you," she offered, looking up at him with her steady, blue eyes alight.
"I don't want anything else, thanks," said Calvin stolidly.
"Where are you sitting, Mr. Clarke?"
"What?"
"Where are you going to eat that?"
He glanced, vaguely, over the tables. "There," he replied, indefinitely.
"That's where I am; so come on. Sit down. Here's your fork," she said, selecting one for him. "Sure you don't want anything else?"
"Sure," replied Calvin, positively.
"Don't worry," she whispered. "They don't know me here; nor you, any more than on the street. I want to talk to you. You're just the one I want. Put your pie down here."