“the gang,” in newspapers sometimes called “the mob”... Tom Halsey’s “mob”...
“God knows I haven’t got anything else.”
“I could go to Tom, watch my chance... he might not expect it of me... he knows I have never carried a gun... I could shoot him, kill him. It would only mean some other man to take his place. They’d get me but I would have got him. I could shoot him, stand over him with a gun in my hand and watch him die.”
She had got the first note from Tom on just such another evening as the one on which Gordon came to her and after reading it and after the waiter who had brought her dinner had left she had decided to go out and to a store to buy a gun. She dressed for that purpose, not in any of the better clothes she still had... her rather expensive wardrobe having been renewed from time to time, but in a special dress she had bought.
It was a little black dress, loose and coming down to her shoe tops and there were a black sunbonnet and cheap black stockings and shoes. She had got the outfit once in a town in Ohio. She had been driving through the town, returning from one of her trips, no liquor in her car and she had gone into a little shabby store.
It wasn’t a store. It was a place where some church women of the town were holding what they called a “rummage sale.” She had been curious and had stopped her car and going into the place had bought the outfit. “It might come in handy,” she had told herself and had been amused at the thought of making herself up in the outfit... something like the fiction women detectives about which she sometimes read in detective magazines... a beautiful young woman, very daring, so rigged out, going into some den of vice, etc., etc.... when she had lived with Gordon, as his wife, he was always keeping magazines about that were filled with such stories.
She had put the outfit on, that evening after she got Tom’s first note, a little amused at herself. “I won’t take the hotel elevator down to the street. I’ll walk down the stairs and so out.”
She had got ready to creep out of the hotel, thinking to go buy a revolver with which to shoot Tom but hadn’t gone.
The hotel was being watched. Her own suite was being watched. No one had told her so. She had the conviction that it was so. There was something in the air that told her.
“There is a trap being set. They are going to try to get all of us, me too. I don’t care much.”
If it were true, what of it? She had thought about that. “Suppose I do have to serve a term in prison? I am in a prison now.”
Even in a prison there might be something. There might be some women in there who would become her friends. She had a terrible need... it growing in her... of something... a relationship... some man or some woman, to whom she could feel close. Just at that time she had... it was she felt the strongest thing in her... the hunger to give.
What?
Herself in some way.
There had been the months and months of loneliness. If she succeeded in shooting, in killing Tom Halsey, it would also be her own end. American gangs were organized in that way, each leader, big-shot or little-big-shot, like Tom, having, inside the gang... the gang organization was not unlike political organizations... there would be some man or group of men in the organization who would revenge the killing of the leader... the killing, if accomplished would be, for her, a kind of giving of herself.
Loneliness.
The loneliness, so pronounced in Kit at that time, was not so unlike the loneliness of many Americans.
Loneliness of the radical in a capitalistic society, of the man who wants to fight it, who does feel in himself a kind of social call...
Immediately the thing called “respectability” gone. Such a one, a Eugene Debs for example, may be the most gentle of men. He becomes in the public mind something dangerous, is pictured as Kit had been pictured, as a dangerous one.
.. The life of the artist in any society.
.. Life of the labor leader and for that matter loneliness also of the lives of successful Americans, even the very rich, the leaders of a capitalistic society:
“Man cannot live by bread alone:
.. The leader, the successful one, in any competitive society having, as an essential to his success, to climb up over the shoulders of others. This or that man, standing in the way, to be swept aside, if need be ruined:
.. His trying to justify it all. “It is a law of nature. The strong must survive. The weak must perish.”
Kit had got herself into a state, had been in a state ever since the killing of Wyagle by Alfred Weathersmythe. It was dark in the room where she sat with Gordon. He had become silent. Already he had told her why he had come to her on that particular evening. His father had sent word to him. “You bring that wife of yours here to me. You do it tonight.” Gordon was afraid to obey. He was afraid not to obey.
He was in a jam, sunk, so he had come to her. His childish mind had built up a new childish idea... that the relationship between them... that never had any reality... could be re-established, made real. They would run away together, go out West. They would get a ranch, raise cattle. He would become something he had seen depicted in the movies, a cowboy... one who knew nothing of cows, had perhaps never been on a horse. He would wear spurs and a ten-gallon hat, have a rope hanging on the pommel of his saddle. He would lasso steers, ride proudly into western towns while she...
She would be a meek and faithful wife to him.
Kit had got out of her chair by the window and was walking up and down the room. She had not slept for several nights. How American her husband was. Her thoughts may not have been so definite. Oh, what have American women not had to stand from American men! She began to laugh and her laughter startled Gordon so that he jumped to his feet. He was half angry. “What are you laughing about?” he asked angrily.
She did not answer. “Sit still,” she said to him. Although there were no lights in the room a little light did come in from the hall through an open transom. “Yes, I guess we’ll get out of here,” she said, and when he did not answer but sat staring at her, an old look, she had long since grown accustomed to seeing on his face, came back. She could see his face dimly in the soft light. It was a look, half fear, half desire to assert something. She went into her bedroom and began packing a small bag, putting into the bag the little cheap black dress and then, coming back into the room where Gordon still sat in silence, she picked up one of the two revolvers he had brought with him. “I guess I’ll take one of these,” she said. He had become very meek. “You hold this and stand where you are,” she said, handing him the little bag. He was like a frightened child. “What are you going to do?” he asked. She did not answer but went out into the hallway leaving him standing in the half darkness in the room. He had put the second revolver in his pocket. “He is the kind of man who will shoot some one if he isn’t watched,” she thought.
She had no definite plan but one was forming in her mind. Tom Halsey wanted her to come to him. All right, she would go. She had a hunch, a feeling. There was something definite about to happen. There would be, in some way, an end to the life she was in. There was in her also a determination, a kind of cold desire. She wanted to face Tom Halsey, in some way pay him out for what he had done to young Weathersmythe and through the boy to herself. She went along a hallway and presently saw a boy in uniform, one of the hotel bellboys. He was one she knew, a boy who had been often to her room, had done many errands for her. He was a slender young fellow with sharp crafty eyes.
She spoke to him sharply. Already she knew what was the situation in the hotel. At least she thought she knew. The manager of the hotel had been making money out of Tom and his crowd. Now he would know that his own situation... if it were true, as she suspected, that there was to be an effort, on the part of the federal men, to close in on them... he would have become frightened. She made a motion with her hand to the bellboy and led him back into her room. “Is the hotel here being watched?” she asked when she had closed the door. Gordon still stood where she had left him. There was still
the frightened look on his face.
The bellboy said it was. Speaking hurriedly he told her that he had been told that both she and Gordon were to be ordered to leave. He had got that straight, he said. They would have been ordered out before but that the leader of the federal men had told the hotel manager that if either Gordon or herself left the hotel secretly he, the manager, would be held responsible.
There had been threats made. The bellboy grinned. The manager of the hotel, one of a chain of hotels, was, he said, frightened. If anything happened to bring the hotel into prominence, as harboring Tom Halsey’s crowd, he would lose his job. The bellboy had got hold of the story. It had been whispered about among the boys. The manager was a man of thirty-five, a tall man with shiny black hair, always kept plastered down tightly on his head, and with a little black mustache. He had always been excessively polite to Kit, fawning on her. “Are you finding everything all right, Mrs. Halsey? Is there anything we can do for you?” A hundred times he had stopped her as she came in at the door of the hotel. He bowed to her. He had long arms and long hands. He was one of the kind of men who are inclined, when speaking to a woman, to caress. He caressed her with his voice, put a hand on her shoulder. “We have but one desire, Mrs. Halsey, to make you feel at home here. We want all of our guests to feel at home.”
With a kind of delight in the situation of his employer the sharp-faced little bellboy was grinning and stowing the ten-dollar bill into his pocket. “All right,” Kit said, smiling at him. “I guess we’ll relieve your boss.”
She made a proposal to the boy. Was there a way for him to get herself and husband out of the place without their being seen? The boy scratching his head. “There is a fifty-dollar bill in it for you.”
“Ouch!” he said, still grinning. For a moment he stood uncertain and then telling her to come and, first opening the door and looking out, led the way down the hall. “You understand we have to take a chance,” he had said and she nodded in approval.
They got safely out of the hotel although Kit thought that their departure was known shortly after they left. The boy led them down back stairs, through hallways... once when they heard the hotel elevator stop at a floor they were on, the boy led them into an unoccupied room, where they stayed concealed for some minutes.
Again they were in what Kit thought was a room where hotel laundry was kept. This on the ground floor. Her husband stood near her in that place and she could feel his body trembling. “What a man!” she thought again. She herself was cool. A kind of coldness and determination had taken possession of her. When they were in the laundry room the boy disappeared and Kit understood that he had gone to make necessary arrangements. He had explained the matter to Kit, ignoring Gordon. “The kid has got Gordon’s number,” she thought... and had suggested that the necessary arrangements would cost some more money. “So he is going to get all he can. The little devil has thought this out as we have been creeping down these stairs.”
“All right,” she had said, smiling at him.
“There will be another fifty when we are in the clear,” she said.
“It is after all Tom’s money. It came from him.”
The boy brought uniforms for them to slip on over their clothes, the white uniform of a cook for Gordon and a blue waitress uniform for Kit and thus arrayed they were led by a back door into an alleyway and, having given the boy his money, they were left there. The uniforms were taken off in the shadow of a brick building that was the hotel garage, Gordon still silent. He trembled so that Kit had to kneel down and pull off the legs of the cook’s trousers. It was the uniform of a fat man. Had Gordon not been so frightened he could have walked out of the trousers.
Kit had a continual inclination to begin laughing. She took Gordon by the hand and led him along the alleyway and into a street and they went along streets Kit had never been in before. There was a street of darkened stores and presently they got into one of factories and before a small house, inside of which she could hear the voices of Negro women, talking and laughing; they found the car Gordon had bought.
There was some difficulty in finding the key, Gordon fumbling nervously in his pocket. He spoke for the first time. “Do you think we will get away? Do you think so?” Kit thought he spoke with the voice of a frightened child and when at last he had found the car key he dropped it in the road and she had to get down and fumble about, running her fingers through the dust of the unpaved street to find it again.
They were in the car and moving. She drove to the edge of town and, then circling the town, made for the road that led to Kate’s house. She thought that Gordon did not know what she was doing. Again he had grown silent. He had taken the gun out of his pocket and it lay in his lap. He sat in silence until she had turned the car into the yard by a roadway that led to the back of Kate’s house... the house as usual was, as seen from the outside, dark and silent... and then, when she had got out of the car, he began to plead with her.
“No. No,” he said... he was still sitting in the car seat... the car was an old one, without side curtains, and he sat in the front seat... he had picked up the gun and held it in his hand... “no, no,” he said, pleading with her... “I did not mean this. I did not mean here.”
Kit did not answer but, reaching up and grasping his coat collar, jerked him out of the seat.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
KIT HAD GOT her limp and frightened husband into Kate’s house. They were in the same room to which they had been shown that first time Kit had come there with Gordon, when she was being inspected by Tom... to see whether or not she would make a fit wife for his son. In spite of a kind of a tenseness in her, that grew after she had half dragged Gordon into the house, he all the time protesting, she had to smile, thinking of herself as such a candidate for wifehood. She kept smiling, the same grim little smile that had been on her lips all evening. Kate had admitted them into the house, Gordon holding the revolver openly in his hand... she thought he was unconscious of it... and she with a hand on the one she had stowed in the pocket of her coat.
They were both armed and that thought also amused Kit. As Kate had shown them into the room Kit had noted that she looked sharply at Gordon, checking his frightened appearance and seeing the gun that hung half limply in his hand. This was in the kitchen, they having entered the house through the kitchen door, and seeing Kate thus sizing up Gordon, Kit had smiled at her but there had been no smile in response and the fact had a little irritated her. She wanted to say something... “Oh, for God’s sake, Kate, have a heart. At least, if you are going to bump me off in this place have a laugh with me.” She said nothing and, led by Kate, they went into the same room in which she had sat with Gordon the first time she came to the house. Kate went back to the kitchen leaving the two sitting on the little couch in the room. “Well, you can go to hell then,” Kit thought.
She did not think afterwards that she was particularly afraid. There are times in life when you accept. She accepted the fact that she might not leave the house alive but within her, like a little spark glowing, there was a hope that she would get a chance at Tom, pay him out, not for what he had done to her... she felt that if she was in a bad spot it was her own doing... but rather for what he had done to the young Weathersmythe.
She didn’t know why that had hit her so hard. It had. It had stayed with her, changed something in her. Now there was in her no illusion about Tom and his occupation.
It wasn’t, she thought, because his occupation was illegal. She thought that had little to do with it. “I guess most any way there is to make a lot of money would be illegal if there were any real laws,” she thought. That night she simply sat and waited, her husband Gordon beside her on the couch. He had slumped down, was white and silent. The gun still hung in his limp hand.
There was a little light in the room, the curtains, as always in that house, tightly drawn, the light coming from a tiny electric light on the wall...
Little green house in Washington, in which, during the Harding a
dministration, men met to divide spoils... they also in the illicit liquor business...
No doubt little houses in Chicago, rooms in hotels where men like Al Capone met their followers.
Kit could hear voices in the next room. They would be coming from the bedroom next to Kate’s kitchen, Tom in there with some of his gang. He would be having his killers about him now...
“There is this woman, this-Kit... she’s out there... she is with that fool son of mine...
“She knows too much. I have told her three or four times to come out here but she hasn’t come.
“Now she is here. We had better clean this up.”
“If it is true that these government men are going to close in on us they will have a hard time convicting us if none of our own crowd squeals on us.”
“But do you think she will squeal?”
“Yes, I think she will.”
It would be simple enough. Tom would have one or two of the killers take care of her. When she was dead, her body thrown into a car, left somewhere far off, along some country road.
“As for that son of mine, I’ll get him out of the country.
“He is a fool, but, after all, he is my son.”
Perhaps the other men in the room looking a little doubtfully at Tom, thinking... “It is that son of his will get us stuck. He is the one who will squeal.” They would say nothing.
Kit was sitting beside Gordon in the dimly lighted room and thinking hard. She thought of the woman Kate, wondering a little. There had been a time when she and Kate had been something near friends. It was an odd thing in women, that faithfulness, willingness utterly to give up self, she felt was in Kate. She was quite sure that Kate would, of her own wish, never hurt any one. “It’s strange... she is at bottom a good woman.
“Will I ever feel as she does, such an utter attachment to some man?”
Kit sat up straight on the couch and looked at her husband. He sat, or rather half lay, on the couch, one arm hanging over the side, the other in his lap, holding to the gun, his face now very pale. In that light it seemed not white but yellowish green. His eyes were closed.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 203
