XIII
Themost casual onlooker could gauge the fluctuations of the Ravenal fortunes by any one of three signs. There was Magnolia Ravenal’s sealskin sacque; there was Magnolia Ravenal’s diamond ring; there was Gaylord Ravenal’s malacca cane. Any or all of these had a way of vanishing and reappearing in a manner that would have been baffling to one not an habitué of South Clark Street, Chicago. Of the three, the malacca stick, though of almost no tangible value, disappeared first and oftenest, for it came to be recognized as an I O U by every reputable Clark Street pawnbroker. Deep in a losing game of faro at Jeff Hankins’ or Mike McDonald’s, Ravenal would summon a Negro boy to him. He would hand him the little ivory-topped cane. “Here—take this down to Abe Lipman’s, corner Clark and Monroe. Tell him I want two hundred dollars. Hurry.” Or: “Run over to Goldsmith’s with this. Tell him a hundred.”
The black boy would understand. In ten minutes he would return minus the stick and bearing a wilted sheaf of ten-dollar bills. If Ravenal’s luck turned, the cane was redeemed. If it still stayed stubborn, the diamond ring must go; that failing, then the sealskin sacque. Ravenal, contrary to the custom of his confrères, wore no jewellery; possessed none. There were certain sinister aspects of these outward signs, as when, for example, the reigning sealskin sacque was known to skip an entire winter.
Perhaps none of these three symbols was as significant a betrayal of the Ravenal finances as was Gay Ravenal’s choice of a breakfasting place. He almost never breakfasted at home. This was a reversion to one of the habits of his bachelor days; was, doubtless, a tardy rebellion, too, against the years spent under Mrs. Hawks’ harsh régime. He always had hated thoseCotton Blossomnine o’clock family breakfasts ominously presided over by Parthy in cap and curl papers.
Since their coming to Chicago Gay liked to breakfast between eleven and twelve, and certainly never rose before ten. If the Ravenal luck was high, the meal was eaten in leisurely luxury at Billy Boyle’s Chop House between Clark and Dearborn streets. This was most agreeable, for at Billy Boyle’s, during the noon hour, you encountered Chicago’s sporting blood—political overlords, gamblers, jockeys, actors, reporters—these last mere nobodies—lean and somewhat morose young fellows vaguely known as George Ade, Brand Whitlock, John McCutcheon, Pete Dunne. Here the news and gossip of the day went round. Here you saw the Prince Albert coat, the silk hat, the rattling cuffs, the glittering collar, the diamond stud of the professional gamester. Old Carter Harrison, Mayor of Chicago, would drop in daily, a good twenty-five-cent cigar waggling between his lips as he greeted this friend and that. In came the brokers from the Board of Trade across the way. Smoke-blue air. The rich heavy smell of thick steaks cut from prime Western beef. Massive glasses of beer through which shone the pale amber of light brew, or the seal-brown of dark. The scent of strong black coffee. Rye bread pungent with caraway. Little crisp round breakfast rolls sprinkled with poppy-seed.
Calories, high blood pressure, vegetable luncheons, golf, were words not yet included in the American everyday vocabulary. Fried potatoes were still considered a breakfast dish, and a meatless meal was a snack.
Here it was, then, that Gay Ravenal, slim, pale, quiet, elegant, liked best to begin his day; listening charmingly and attentively to the talk that swirled about him—talk of yesterday’s lucky winners in Gamblers’ Alley, at Prince Varnell’s place, or Jeff Hankins’ or Mike McDonald’s; of the Washington Park race track entries; of the new blonde girl at Hetty Chilson’s; of politics in their simplest terms. Occasionally he took part in this talk, but like most professional gamblers, his was not the conversational gift. He was given credit for the astuteness he did not possess merely on the strength of his cool evasive glance, his habit of listening and saying little, and his bland poker face.
“Ravenal doesn’t say much but there’s damned little he misses. Watch him an hour straight and you can’t make out from his face whether he’s cleaning up a thousand or losing his shirt.” An enviable Clark Street reputation.
Still, this availed him nothing when funds were low. At such times he eschewed Billy Boyle’s and breakfasted meagrely instead at the Cockeyed Bakery just east of Clark. That famous refuge for the temporarily insolvent was so named because of the optical peculiarity of the lady who owned it and who dispensed its coffee and sinkers. This refreshment cost ten cents. The coffee was hot, strong, revivifying; the sinkers crisp and fresh. Every Clark Street gambler was, at one time or another, through the vagaries of Lady Luck, to be found moodily munching the plain fare that made up the limited menu to be had at the Cockeyed Bakery. For that matter lacking even the modest sum required for this sustenance, he knew that there he would be allowed to “throw up a tab” until luck should turn.
Many a morning Gaylord Ravenal, dapper, nonchalant, sartorially exquisite, fared forth at eleven with but fifty cents in the pocket of his excellently tailored pants. Usually, on these occasions, the malacca stick was significantly absent. Of the fifty cents, ten went for the glassy shoeshine; twenty-five for a boutonnière; ten for coffee and sinkers at the Cockeyed Bakery. The remaining five cents stayed in his pocket as a sop to the superstition that no coin breeds no more coins. Stopping first to look in a moment at Weeping Willy Mangler’s, or at Reilly’s pool room for a glance at the racing chart, or to hear a bit of the talk missed through his enforced absence from Boyle’s, he would end at Hankins’ or McDonald’s, there to woo fortune with nothing at all to offer as oblation. But affairs did not reach this pass until after the first year.
It was incredible that Magnolia Ravenal could so soon have adapted herself to the life in which she now moved. Yet it was explicable, perhaps, when one took into consideration her inclusive nature. She was interested, alert, eager—and still in love with Gaylord Ravenal. Her life on the rivers had accustomed her to all that was bizarre in humanity. Queenie and Jo had been as much a part of her existence as Elly and Schultzy. The housewives in the little towns, the Negroes lounging on the wharves, the gamblers in the river-front saloons, the miners of the coal belt, the Northern fruit-pickers, the boatmen, the Southern poor whites, the Louisiana aristocracy, all had passed in fantastic parade before her ambient eyes. And she, too, had marched in a parade, a figure as gorgeous, as colourful as the rest.
Now, in this new life, she accepted everything, enjoyed everything with a naïveté that was, perhaps, her greatest charm. It was, doubtless, the thing that held the roving Ravenal to her. Nothing shocked her; this was her singularly pure and open mind. She brought to this new life an interest and a curiosity as fresh as that which had characterized the little girl who had so eagerly and companionably sat with Mr. Pepper, the pilot, in the bright cosy glass-enclosed pilot house atop the oldCreole Belleon that first enchanting trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans.
To him she had said, “What’s around that bend? . . . Now what’s coming? . . . How deep is it here? . . . What used to be there? . . . What island is that?”
Mr. Pepper, the pilot, had answered her questions amply and with a feeling of satisfaction to himself as he beheld her childish hunger for knowledge being appeased.
Now she said to her husband with equal eagerness: “Who is that stout woman with the pretty yellow-haired girl? What queer eyes they have! . . . What does it mean when it says odds are two to one? . . . Why do they call him Bath House John? . . . Who is that large woman in the victoria, with the lovely sunshade? How rich her dress is, yet it’s plain. Why don’t you introduce me to——Oh! That! Hetty Chilson! Oh! . . . Why do they call him Bad Jimmy Connerton? . . . But why do they call it the Levee? It’s really Clark Street, and no water anywhere near, so why do they call it the Levee? . . . What’s a percentage game? . . . Hieronymus! What a funny word! . . . Mike McDonald? That! Why, he looks like a farmer, doesn’t he? A farmer in his Sunday-best black clothes that don’t fit him. The Boss of the Gamblers. Why do they call his place ‘The Store’? . . . Oh, Gay darling, I wish you wouldn’t. . . . Now don’t frown like that. I just mean I—when I think of Kim, I get scared because, how about Kim—I mean when she grows up? . . . Why are they called owl cars? . . . But I don’t understand why Lipman lets you have money just for a cane that isn’t worth more than ten or twenty . . . How do pawnbrokers . . . Mont Tennes—what a queer name! . . . Al Hankins? Oh, you’re joking now. Really killed by having a folding bed close up on him! Oh, I’ll never again sleep in a . . . Boiler Avenue? . . . Hooley’s Theatre? . . . Cinquevalli? . . . Fanny Davenport? . . . Derby Day? . . . Weber and Fields? . . . Sauterne? . . . Rector’s? . . .”
Quite another world about which to be curious—a world as sordid and colourful and crude and passionate and cruel and rich and varied as that other had been.
It had taken Ravenal little more than a year to dissipate the tidy fortune which had been Magnolia’s share of Captain Andy’s estate, including theCotton Blossominterest. He had, of course, meant to double the sum—to multiply it many times so that the plump thousands should increase to tens—to hundreds of thousands. Once you had money—a really respectable amount of it—it was simple enough to manipulate that money so as to make it magically produce more and more money.
They had made straight for Chicago, at that period the gamblers’ paradise. When Ravenal announced this step, a little look of panic had come into Magnolia’s eyes. She was reluctant to demur at his plans. It was the thing her mother always had done when her father had proposed a new move. Always Captain Andy’s enthusiasm had suffered the cold douche of Parthy’s disapproval. At the prospect of Chicago, the old haunts, congenial companions, the restaurants, the theatres, the races, Ravenal had been more elated than she had ever seen him. He had become almost loquacious. He could even be charming to Mrs. Hawks, now that he was so nearly free of her. That iron woman had regarded him as her enemy to the last and, in making over to Magnolia the goodish sum of money which was due her, had uttered dire predictions, all of which promptly came true.
That first year in Chicago was a picture so kaleidoscopic, so extravagant, so ridiculous that even the child Kim retained in her memory’s eye something of its colour and pageantry. This father and mother in their twenties seemed really little older than their child. Certainly there was something pathetically childish in their evident belief that they could at once spend their money and keep it intact. Just a fur coat—what was that! Bonnets. A smart high yellow trap. Horses. The races. Suppers. A nursemaid for Kim. Magnolia knew nothing of money. She never had had any. On theCotton Blossommoney was a commodity of which one had little need.
On coming to Chicago they had gone directly to the Sherman House. Compared with this, that first visit to Chicago before Kim’s birth had been a mere picnic jaunt. Ravenal was proud of his young wife and of his quiet, grave big-eyed child; of the nursemaid in a smart uniform; of the pair of English hackneys which he sometimes allowed Magnolia to drive, to her exquisite delight. Magnolia had her first real evening dress, cut décolleté; tasted champagne; went to the races at the Washington Park race track; sat in a box at Hooley’s; was horrified at witnessing the hootchie-kootchie dance on the Midway Plaisance at the World’s Fair.
The first fur coat was worthy of note. The wives of the well-to-do wore sealskin sacques as proof of their husband’s prosperity. Magnolia descended to these later. But the pelts which warmed her during that first winter of Chicago lake blasts and numbing cold had been cunningly matched in Paris, and French fingers had fashioned them into a wrap.
Ravenal had selected it for her, of course. He always accompanied her on her shopping trips. He liked to loll elegantly at ease like a pasha while the keen-eyed saleswomen brought out this gown and that for his expert inspection. To these alert ladies it was plain to see that Magnolia knew little enough about chic attire. The gentleman, though—he knew what was what. Magnolia had been aghast at the cost of that first fur coat, but then, how should she know of such things? Between them, she and Parthy had made most of the costumes she had worn in herCotton Blossomdays, both for stage and private use. The new coat was a black astrakhan jacket; the fur lay in large smooth waves known as baby lamb. Magnolia said it made her feel like a cannibal to wear a thing like that. The salesladies did not smile at this, but that was all right because Magnolia had not intended that they should. The revers and cuffs were of Russian sable, dark and rich and deep; and it had large mutton-leg sleeves—large enough to contain her dress sleeves comfortably, with a little expert aid in the way of stuffing. “Stuff my sleeves in,” was one of the directions always given a gentleman when he assisted a lady with her wrap.
This royal garment had cost——“Oh, Gay!” Magnolia had protested, in a low shocked voice (but not so low that the sharp-eared saleswomen failed to hear it)—“Oh, Gay! I honestly don’t think we ought——”
“Mrs. Potter Palmer,” spoke up the chief saleswoman in a voice at once sharp and suave, “has a coat identically similar. They are the only two of the kind in the whole country. To tell you the truth, I think the sable skins on this garment of madam’s are just a little finer than Mrs. Palmer’s. Though perhaps it’s just that madam sets it off better, being so young and all.”
He liked her to wear, nestling in the rich depths of the sable revers, a bunch of violets. For the theatre she had one of those new winged bonnets, representing a butterfly, cunningly contrived of mousseline de soie wired and brilliantly spangled so that it quivered and trembled with the movements of her head and sparkled enchantingly. Kim adored the smell of the violet-scented creature who kissed her good-night and swept out, glittering. The impression must have gone deep, deep into the childish mind, for twenty years later she still retained a sort of story-book mental picture of this black-haired creamy mother who would come in late of a winter afternoon laughing and bright-eyed after a drive up Grand Boulevard in the sleigh behind the swift English hackneys. This vision would seem to fill the warm room with a delightful mixture of violets, and fur, and cold fresh air and velvet and spangles and love and laughter. Kim would plunge her face deep into the soft scented bosom.
“Oh, Gay, do see how she loves the violets! You won’t mind if I take them off and put them here in this glass so she—— No, you mustn’t buy me any fresh ones. Please! I wish she didn’t look quite so much like me . . . her mouth . . . but it’s going to be a great wide one, like mine. . . . Oh, Bernhardt! Who wants her little girl to look like Bernhardt! Besides, Kim isn’t going to be an actress.”
At the end of a year or so of this the money was gone—simply gone. Of course, it hadn’t been only the hackneys, and the races, and the trap, and the furs, and the suppers and the theatres and dresses and Gay’s fine garments and the nurse and the hotel. For, as Ravenal explained, the hackneys hadn’t even been pure-blooded, which would have brought them up to one thousand each. He had never been really happy about them, because of a slight blot on their family escutcheon which had brought them down to a mere six hundred apiece. This flaw was apparent, surely, to no one who was not an accredited judge at a horse show. Yet when Ravenal and Magnolia on Derby Day joined the gay stream of tallyhos, wagonettes, coaches, phaetons, tandems, cocking carts, and dog-carts sweeping up Michigan Avenue and Grand Boulevard toward the Washington Park race track he was likely to fall into one of his moody silences and to flick the hackneys with little contemptuous cuts of the long lithe whip in a way that only they—and Magnolia—understood. On such occasions he called them nags.
“Ah! That off nag broke again. That’s because they’re not thoroughbreds.”
“But, Gay, you’re hurting their mouths, sawing like that.”
“Please, Nola. This isn’t a Mississippi barge I’m driving.”
She learned many things that first year, and saw so much that part of what she saw was mercifully soon forgotten. You said Darby Day, very English. You pretended not to mind when your husband went down to speak to Hetty Chilson and her girls in their box. For that matter, you pretended not to see Hetty Chilson and her girls at all, though they had driven out in a sort of private procession of victorias, landaus, broughams, and were by far the best-dressed women at the races. They actually set the styles, Gay had told her. Hetty Chilson’s girls wore rich, quiet, almost sedate clothes; and no paint on their faces. They seemed an accepted part of the world in which Gaylord Ravenal moved. Even in the rough life of the rivers, Magnolia had always understood that women of Hetty Chilson’s calling simply did not exist in the public sense. They were not of the substance of everyday life, but were shadows, sinister, menacing, evil. But with this new life of Magnolia’s came the startling knowledge that these ladies played an important part in the social and political life of this huge sprawling Mid-western city. This stout, blonde, rather handsome woman who carried herself with an air of prosperous assurance; whose shrewd keen glance and hearty laugh rather attracted you—this one was Hetty Chilson. The horsewomen you saw riding in the Lincoln Park bridle path, handsomely habited in black close-fitting riding clothes, were, likely as not, Hetty Chilson’s girls. She was actually a power in her way. When strangers were shown places of interest in Chicago—the Potter Palmer castle on Lake Shore Drive, the Art Museum, the Stockyards, the Auditorium Hotel, the great mansions of Phil Armour and his son on Michigan Avenue, with the garden embracing an entire city block—Hetty Chilson’s place, too, was pointed out (with a lowering of the voice, of course, and a little leer, and perhaps an elbow dug into the ribs). A substantial brick house on Clark Street, near Polk, with two lions, carved in stone, absurdly guarding its profane portals.
“Hetty Chilson’s place,” Gay explained to his wide-eyed young wife, “is like a club. You’re likely to find every prominent politician in Chicago there, smoking and having a sociable drink. And half the political plots that you read about in the newspapers later are hatched at Hetty’s. She’s as smart as they make ’em. Bought a farm, fifteen acres, out at Ninetieth and State, for her father and mother. And she’s got a country place out on the Kankakee River, near Momence—about sixty miles south of here—that’s known to have one of the finest libraries in the country. Cervantes—Balzac—rare editions. Stable full of horses—rose garden——”
“But, Gay dear!”
You saw Hetty driving down State Street during the shopping hour in her Kimball-made Victoria, an equipage such as royalty might have used, its ebony body fashioned by master craftsmen, its enamel as rich and deep and shining as a piano top. Her ample skirts would be spread upon the plum-coloured cushions. If it was summer the lace ruffles of her sunshade would plume gently in the breeze. In winter her mink coat swathed her full firm figure. One of her girls sat beside her, faultlessly dressed, pale, unvivacious. Two men in livery on the box. Harness that shone with polished metal and jingled splendidly. Two slim, quivering, high-stepping chestnuts. Queen of her world—Chicago’s underworld.
“But, Gay dear!”
“Well, how about France!”
“France?”
“How about the women you used to read about—learned about them in your history books, for that matter, at school? Pompadour and Maintenon and Du Barry! Didn’t they mix up in the politics of their day—and weren’t they recognized? Courtesans, every one of them. You think just because they wore white wigs and flowered silk hoops and patches——”
A little unaccustomed flush surged over Magnolia’s pallor—the deep, almost painful red of indignation. She was an inexperienced woman, but she was no fool. These last few months had taught her many things. Also the teachings of her school-teacher mother had not, after all, been quite forgotten, it appeared.
“She’s a common woman of the town, Gaylord Ravenal. All the wigs and patches and silks in the world wouldn’t make her anything else. She’s no more a Du Barry than your Hinky Dink is a—uh—Mazarin.”
It was as though he took a sort of perverse pleasure in thus startling her. It wasn’t that she was shocked in the prim sense of the word. She was bewildered and a little frightened. At such times the austere form and the grim visage of Parthenia Ann Hawks would rise up before her puzzled eyes. What would Parthy have said of these unsavoury figures now passing in parade before Magnolia’s confused vision—Hetty Chilson, Doc Haggerty, Mike McDonald, “Prince” Varnell, Effie Hankins? Uneasy though she was, Magnolia could manage to smile at the thought of her mother’s verbal destruction of this raffish crew. There were no half tones in Parthy’s vocabulary. A hussy was a hussy; a rake a rake. But her father, she thought, would have been interested in all this, and more than a little amused. His bright brown eyes would have missed nothing; the little nimble figure would have scampered inquisitively up and down the narrow and somewhat sinister lane that lay between Washington and Madison streets, known as Gamblers’ Alley; he would have taken a turn at faro; appraised the Levee ladies at their worth: visited Sam T. Jack’s Burlesque Show over on Madison, and Kohl & Middleton’s Museum, probably, and Hooley’s Theatre certainly. Nothing in Chicago’s Levee life would have escaped little Captain Andy, and nothing would have changed him.
“See it all, Nollie,” he had said to her in the oldCotton Blossomdays, when Parthy would object to their taking this or that jaunt ashore between shows. “Don’t you believe ’em when they say that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Biggest lie ever was. See it all and go your own way and nothing’ll hurt you. If what you see ain’t pretty, what’s the odds! See it anyway. Then next time you don’t have to look.”
Magnolia, gazing about her, decided that she was seeing it all.
The bulk of the money had gone at faro. The suckers played roulette, stud poker, hazard, the bird-cage, chuck-a-luck (the old army game). But your gambler played faro. Faro was Gaylord Ravenal’s game, and he played at Hankins’—not at George Hankins’ where they catered to the cheap trade who played percentage games—but at Jeff Hankins’ or Mike McDonald’s where were found the highest stakes in Chicago. Faro was not a game with Ravenal—it was for him at once his profession, his science, his drug, his drink, his mistress. He had, unhappily, as was so often the case with your confirmed gambler, no other vice. He rarely drank, and then abstemiously; smoked little and then a mild cigar, ate sparingly and fastidiously; eschewed even the diamond ring and shirt-stud of his kind.
The two did not, of course, watch the money go, or despair because it would soon be gone. There seemed to be plenty of it. There always would be enough. Next week they would invest it securely. Ravenal had inside tips on the market. He had heard of a Good Thing. This was not the right time, but They would let him know when the magic moment was at hand. In the meantime there was faro. And there were the luxurious hotel rooms with their soft thick carpets, and their big comfortable beds; ice water tinkling at the door in answer to your ring; special dishes to tempt the taste of Mr. Ravenal and his lady. The sharp-eyed gentleman in evening clothes who stood near the little ticket box as you entered the theatre said, “Good-evening, Mr. Ravenal,” when they went to Hooley’s or McVicker’s or the Grand Opera House, or Kohl and Castle’s. The heads of departments in Mandel’s or Carson Pirie’s or even Marshall Field’s said, “I have something rather special to show you, Mrs. Ravenal. I thought of you the minute it came in.”
Sometimes it seemed to Magnolia that theCotton Blossomhad been only a phantom ship—the rivers a dream—a legend.
It was all very pleasant and luxurious and strange. And Magnolia tried not to mind the clang of Clark Street by day and by night. The hideous cacophony of noise invaded their hotel apartment and filled its every corner. She wondered why the street-car motormen jangled their warning bells so persistently. Did they do it as an antidote to relieve their own jangled nerves?Pay-pes! MO’nin’pay-pes! Crack! Crack! Crackcrackcrack! The shooting gallery across the street. Someone passing the bedroom door, walking heavily and clanking the metal disk of his room key. The sound of voices, laughter, from the street, and the unceasing shuffle of footsteps on stone. Whee-e-e-e-e! Whoop-a! Ye-e-eow! A drunkard. She knew about that, too. Part of her recently acquired knowledge. Ravenal had told her about Big Steve Rowan, the three-hundred-pound policeman, who, partly because of his goatee and moustache, and partly because of his expert manipulation of his official weapon, was called the Jack of Clubs.
“You’ll never see Big Steve arrest a drunk at night,” Gay had explained to her, laughing. “No, sir! Nor any other Clark Street cop if he can help it. If they arrest a man they have to appear against him next morning at the nine o’clock police court. That means getting up early. So if he’s able to navigate at all, they pass him on down the street from corner to corner until they get him headed west somewhere, or north across the bridge. Great system.”
All this was amusing and colourful, perhaps, but scarcely conducive to tranquillity and repose. Often Magnolia, lying awake by the side of the sleeping man, or lying awake awaiting his late return, would close her stinging eyelids the better to visualize and sense the deep velvet silence of the rivers of her girlhood—the black velvet nights, quiet, quiet. The lisping cluck-suck of the water against the hull.
Clang! MO’nin’pay-pes! Crack! E-e-eee-yow!
And then, suddenly, one day: “But, Gay dear, how do you mean you haven’t one hundred dollars? It’s for that bronze-green velvet that you like so much, though I always think it makes me look sallow. You did urge me to get it, you know, dear. And now this is the third time they’ve sent the bill. So if you’ll give me the money—or write a check, if you’d rather.”
“I tell you I haven’t got it, Nola.”
“Oh, well, to-morrow’ll do. But please be sure to-morrow, because I hate——”
“I can’t be any surer to-morrow than I am to-day. I haven’t got a hundred dollars in the world. And that’s a fact.”
Even after he had finished explaining, she did not understand; could not believe it; continued to stare at him with those great dark startled eyes.
Bad luck. At what? Faro. But, Gay—thousands! Well, thousands don’t last for ever. Took a flyer. Flyer? Yes. A tip on the market. Market? The stock market. Stock? Oh, you wouldn’t understand. But all of it, Gay? Well, some of it lost at faro. Where? Hankins’. How much? What does it matter?—it’s gone. But, Gay, how much at faro? Oh, a few thousands. Five? Y-y-yes. Yes, five. More than that? Well, nearer ten, probably.
She noticed then that the malacca cane was gone. She slipped her diamond ring off her finger. Gave it to him. With the years, that became an automatic gesture.
Thus the change in their mode of living did not come about gradually. They were wafted, with Cinderella-like celerity, from the coach-and-four to the kitchen ashes. They left the plush and ice water and fresh linen and rich food and luxurious service of the Sherman House for a grubby little family hotel that was really a sort of actors’ boarding house, on the north side, just across the Clark Street bridge, on Ontario Street. It was, Ravenal said, within convenient walking distance of places.
“What places?” Magnolia asked. But she knew. A ten minutes’ saunter brought you to Gamblers’ Alley. In the next fifteen years there was never a morning when Gaylord Ravenal failed to prove this interesting geographical fact.
XIV
The Ravenalreverses, if they were noticed at all in Gamblers’ Alley, went politely unremarked.
There was a curious and definite code of honour among the frequenters of Chicago’s Levee. You paid your gambling debts. You never revealed your own financial status by way of conversation. You talked little. You maintained a certain physical, sartorial, and social standard in the face of all reverses. There were, of course, always unmistakable signs to be read even at the most passing glance. You drew your conclusions; made no comment. If you were seen to breakfast for days—a week—two weeks—at the Cockeyed Bakery, you were greeted by your confrères with the same suavity that would have been accorded you had you been standing treat at Billy Boyle’s or the Palmer House. Your shoe might be cracked, but it must shine. Your linen might be frayed, but it must be clean. Your cheeks were perhaps a trifle hollow, but they must be shaven and smell pleasantly of bay rum. You might dine at Burkey and Milan’s (Full Meal 15c.) with ravenous preliminary onslaughts upon the bread-and-butter and piccalilli. But you consumed, delicately and fastidiously, just so much and no more of the bountiful and rich repast spread out for your taking at Jeff Hankins’ or at Mike McDonald’s. Though your suit was shabby, it must bear the mark of that tailor to the well-dressed sporting man—Billy McLean. If you were too impecunious for Hetty Chilson’s you disdained the window-tapping dives on Boiler Avenue and lower Clark Street and State; the sinister and foul shanties of Big Maud and her ilk. You bathed, shaved, dressed, ate, smoked with the same exotic care when you were broke as when luck was running your way. Your cigar was a mild one (also part of the code), and this mild one usually a dead one as you played. And no one is too broke for one cigar a day. Twelve o’clock—noon—found you awake. Twelve o’clock—midnight—found you awake. Somewhere between those hours you slept the deep sweet sleep of the abstemious. You were, in short, a gambler—and a gentleman.
Thus, when the Ravenals moved, perforce, from the comfort of the Sherman to the threadbare shabbiness of the Ontario Street boarding house, there was nothing in Gaylord Ravenal’s appearance to tell the tale. If his cronies knew of his financial straits, they said nothing. Magnolia had no women friends. During the year or more of their residence in Chicago she had been richly content with Kim and Gay. The child had a prim and winning gravity that gave her a curiously grown-up air.
“Do you know, Gay,” Magnolia frequently said, “Kim sometimes makes me feel so gawky and foolish and young. When she looks at me after I’ve been amused about something, or am enthusiastic or excited or—you know—anyway, she looks at me out of those big eyes of hers, very solemn, and I feel—— Oh, Gay, you don’t think she resembles—that is—do you think she is much like Mama?”
“God forbid!” ejaculated Ravenal, piously.
Kim had been Magnolia’s delight during the late morning hours and the early afternoon. In company with the stolid nurse, they had fared forth in search of such amusement as the city provided for a child brought up amidst the unnatural surroundings of this one. The child had grown accustomed to seeing her nurse stand finger on lips, eyes commanding silence, before the closed door of her parents’ room at ten in the morning—at eleven, even—and she got it into her baby head that this attitude, then, was the proper and normal one in which to approach the closed door of that hushed chamber. Late one morning Magnolia, in nightgown and silken wrapper, had opened this door suddenly to find the child stationed there, silent, grave-eyed, admonitory, while in one corner, against the door case, reposed the favourite doll of her collection—a lymphatic blonde whose eyes had met with some unfortunate interior mishap which gave them a dying-calf look. This sprawling and inert lady was being shushed in a threatening and dramatic manner by the sternly maternal Kim. There was, at sight of this, that which brought the quick sting of tears to Magnolia’s eyes. She gathered the child up in her arms, kissed her passionately, held her close, brought her to Ravenal as he lay yawning.
“Gay, look at her! She was standing by the door telling her doll not to make any noise. She’s only a baby. We don’t pay enough attention to her. Do you think I neglect her? Standing there by the door! And it’s nearly noon. Oh, Gay, we oughtn’t to be living here. We ought to be living in a house—a little house where it’s quiet and peaceful and she can play.”
“Lovely,” said Gay. “Thebes, for example. Now don’t get dramatic, Nola, for God’s sake. I thought we’d finished with that.”
With the change in their fortunes the English nurse had vanished with the rest. She had gone, together with the hackneys, the high smart yellow cart, the violets, the green velvets, the box seats at the theatre, the champagne. She, or her counterpart, never returned, but many of the lost luxuries did, from time to time. There were better days to come, and worse. Their real fortune gone, there now was something almost humdrum and methodical about the regularity of their ups and downs. There rarely was an intermediate state. It was feast or famine, always. They actually settled down to the life of a professional gambler and his family. Ravenal would have a run of luck at faro. Presto! Rooms at the Palmer House. A box at the races. The theatre. Supper at Rector’s after the theatre. Hello, Gay! Evening, Mrs. Ravenal. Somebody’s looking mighty lovely to-night. A new sealskin sacque. Her diamond ring on her finger. Two new suits of clothes for Ravenal, made by Billy McLean. A little dinner for Gay’s friends at Cardinal Bemis’s famous place on Michigan Avenue. You couldn’t fool the Cardinal.
He would ask suavely, “What kind of a dinner, Mr. Ravenal?”
If Gay replied, “Oh—uh—a cocktail and a little red wine,” Cardinal Bemis knew that luck was only so-so, and that the dinner was to be good, but plainish. But if, in reply to the tactful question, Gay said, magnificently, “A cocktail, Cardinal; claret, sauterne, champagne, and liqueurs,” Bemis knew that Ravenal had had a real run of luck and prepared the canvasbacks boiled in champagne; or there were squabs or plover, with all sorts of delicacies, and the famous frozen watermelon that had been plugged, filled with champagne, put on ice for a day, and served in such chunks of scarlet fragrance as made the nectar and ambrosia of the gods seem poor, flavourless fare indeed.
Magnolia, when luck was high, tried to put a little money by as she had instinctively been prompted to do during those first months of their marriage, when they still were on theCotton Blossom. But she rarely had money of her own. Gay, when he had ready cash, was generous—but not with the handing over of the actual coin itself.
“Buy yourself some decent clothes, Nola; and the kid. Tell them to send me the bill. That thing you’re wearing is a terrible sight. It seems to me you haven’t worn anything else for months.” Which was true enough. There was something fantastic about the magnificence with which he ignored the reason for her not having worn anything else for months. It had been, certainly, her one decent garment during the lean period just passed, and she had cleaned and darned and refurbished to keep it so. Her experience in sewing during the oldCotton Blossomdays stood her in good stead now.
There were times when even the Ontario Street hotel took on the aspect of unattainable luxury. That meant rock bottom. Then it was that the Ravenals took a room at three dollars a week in a frowzy rooming house on Ohio or Indiana or Erie; the Bloomsbury of Chicago. There you saw unshaven men, their coat collars turned up in artless attempt to conceal the absence of linen, sallying forth, pail in hand, at ten or eleven in the morning in search of the matutinal milk and rolls to accompany the coffee that was even now cooking over the gas jet. Morning was a musty jade on these streets; nothing fresh and dewy and sparkling about her. The ladies of the neighbourhood lolled huge, unwieldy, flaccid, in wrappers. In the afternoon you saw them amazingly transformed into plump and pinkly powdered persons, snugly corseted, high-heeled, rustling in silk petticoats, giving out a heady scent. They were friendly voluble ladies who beamed on the pale slim Magnolia, and said, “Won’t you smile for me just a little bit? H’m?” to the sedate and solemn-eyed Kim.
Magnolia, too, boiled coffee and eggs over the gas jet in these lean times. Gravely she counted out the two nickels that would bring her and Kim home from Lincoln Park on the street car. Lincoln Park was an oasis—a life-giving breathing spot to the mother and child. They sallied forth in the afternoon; left the gas jet, the three-dollar room, the musty halls, the stout females behind them. There was the zoo; there was the lake; there was the grass. If the lake was their choice it led inevitably to tales of the rivers. It was in this way that the background of her mother’s life was first etched upon Kim’s mind. The sight of the water always filled Magnolia with a nostalgia so acute as to amount to an actual physical pain.
The childish treble would repeat the words as the two sat on a park bench facing the great blue sea that was Lake Michigan.
“You remember the boat, don’t you, Kim?”
“Do I?” Kim’s diction was curiously adult, due, doubtless, to the fact that she had known almost no children.
“Of course you do, darling. Don’t you remember the river, and Grandma and Grandpa——”
“Cap’n!”
“Yes! I knew you remembered. And all the little darkies on the landing. And the band. And the steam organ. You used to put your hands over your ears and run and hide, because it frightened you. And Jo and Queenie.”
“Tell me about it.”
And Magnolia would assuage her own longing by telling and retelling the things she liked to remember. The stories, with the years, became a saga. Figures appeared, vanished, reappeared. The rivers wound through the whole. Elly, Schultzy, Julie, Steve; the man in the box with the gun; the oldCreole Belleand Magnolia’s first trip on the Mississippi; Mr. Pepper and the pilot house; all these became familiar and yet legendary figures and incidents to the child. They were her Three Bears, her Bo-peep, her Red Riding Hood, her Cinderella. Magnolia must have painted these stories with the colour of life itself, for the child never wearied of them.
“Tell me the one about the time you were a little girl and Gra’ma locked you in the bedroom because she didn’t want you to see the show and you climbed out of the window in your nightie . . .”
Kim Ravenal was probably the only white child north of the Mason and Dixon line who was sung to sleep to the tune of those plaintive, wistful Negro plantation songs which later were to come into such vogue as spirituals. They were the songs that Magnolia had learned from black Jo and from Queenie, the erstwhile rulers of theCotton Blossomgalley. Swing Low Sweet Chariot, she sang. O, Wasn’t Dat a Wide River! And, of course, All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Kim loved them. When she happened to be ill with some childhood ailment, they soothed her. Magnolia sang these songs, always, as she had learned to sing them in unconscious imitation of the soft husky Negro voice of her teacher. Through the years of Kim’s early childhood, Magnolia’s voice might have been heard thus wherever the shifting Ravenal fortunes had tossed the three, whether the red-plush luxury of the Sherman House, the respectable dulness of the family hotel, or the sordid fustiness of the cheap rooming house. Once, when they were living at the Sherman, Magnolia, seated in a rocking chair with Kim in her arms, had stopped suddenly in her song at a curious sound in the corridor. She had gone swiftly to the door, had opened it, and had been unable to stifle a little shriek of surprise and terror mingled. There stood a knot of black faces, teeth gleaming, eyes rolling. Attracted by the songs so rarely heard in the North, the Sherman House bell boys and waiters had eagerly gathered outside the closed door in what was, perhaps, as flattering and sincere a compliment as ever a singer received.
Never did child know such ups and downs as did this daughter of the Chicago gambler and the show-boat actress. She came to take quite for granted sudden and complete changes that would have disorganized any one more conventionally bred. One week she would find herself living in grubby quarters where the clammy fetid ghost of cabbage lurked always in the halls; the next would be a gay panorama of whisking waiters, new lace petticoats, drives along the lake front, ice cream for dessert, front seats at the matinée. The theatre bulked large in the life of the Ravenals. Magnolia loved it without being possessed of much discrimination with regard to it. Farce, comedy, melodrama—the whole gamut as outlined by Polonius—all held her interested, enthralled. Ravenal was much more critical than she. You saw him smoking in the lobby, bored, dégagé. It might be the opening of the rebuilt Lincoln Theatre on Clark near Division, with Gustave Frohman’s company playing The Charity Ball.
“Oh, Gay, isn’t it exciting!”
“I don’t think much of it. Cheap-looking theatre, too, isn’t it? They might better have left it alone after it burned down.”
Kim’s introduction to the metropolitan theatre was when she was taken, a mere baby, to see the spectacle America at the Auditorium. Before she was ten she had seen everyone from Julia Marlowe to Anna Held; from Bernhardt to Lillian Russell. Gravely she beheld the antics of the Rogers Brothers. As gravely saw Klaw and Erlanger’s company in Foxey Quiller.
“It isn’t that she doesn’t see the joke,” Magnolia confided to Ravenal, almost worriedly. “She actually doesn’t seem to approve. Of course, I suppose I ought to be glad that she prefers the more serious things, but I wish she wouldn’t seem quite so grown-up at ten. By the time she’s twenty she’ll probably be spanking me and putting me to bed.”
Certainly Magnolia was young enough for two. She was the sort of theatre-goer who clutches the hand of her neighbour when stirred. When Ravenal was absent Kim learned to sustain her mother at such emotional moments. They two frequently attended the theatre together. Their precarious mode of living cut them off from sustained human friendships. But the theatre was always there to stimulate them, to amuse them, to make them forget or remember. There were long afternoons to be filled, and many evenings as Ravenal became more and more deeply involved in the intricacies of Chicago’s night world.
There was, curiously enough, a pendulum-like regularity about his irregular life. His comings and goings could be depended on almost as though he were a clerk or a humdrum bookkeeper. Though his fortunes changed with bewildering rapidity, his habits remained the same. Indeed, he felt these changes much less than did Magnolia and Kim. No matter what their habitation—cheap rooming house or expensive hotel—he left at about the same hour each morning, took the same leisurely course toward town, returned richer or poorer—but unruffled—well after midnight. On his off nights he and Magnolia went to the theatre. Curiously, they seemed always to have enough money for that.
Usually they dwelt somewhere north, just the other side of the Chicago River, at that time a foul-smelling and viscid stream, with no drainage canal to deodorize it. Ravenal, in lean times, emerging from his dingy hotel or rooming house on Ontario or Ohio, was as dapper, as suave, as elegant as that younger Ravenal had been who, leaning against the packing case on the wharf at New Orleans, had managed to triumph over the handicap of a cracked boot. He would stand a moment, much as he had stood that southern spring morning, coolly surveying the world about him. That his viewpoint was the dingy front stoop of a run-down Chicago rooming house and his view the sordid street that held it, apparently disturbed his equanimity not at all. On rising he had observed exactly the same niceties that would have been his had he enjoyed the services of a hotel valet. He bathed, shaved, dressed meticulously. Magnolia had early learned that the slatternly morning habits which she had taken for granted in theCotton Blossomwives—Julie, Mis’ Means, Mrs. Soaper, even the rather fastidious Elly—would be found inexcusable in the wife of Ravenal. The sternly utilitarian undergarments of Parthy’s choosing had soon enough been done away with, to be replaced with a froth of lace and tucks and embroidery and batiste. The laundering of these was a pretty problem when faro’s frown decreed Ohio Street.
Ravenal was spared these worrisome details. Once out of the dingy boarding house, he could take his day in his two hands and turn it over, like a bright, fresh-minted coin. Each day was a new start. How could you know that you would not break the bank! It had been done on a dollar.
Down the street Ravenal would stroll past the ship chandlers’ and commission houses south of Ontario, to the swinging bridge that spanned the slimy river. There he would slacken his already leisurely pace, or even pause a moment, perhaps, to glance at the steamers tied up at the docks. There was an occasional sailboat. A three-masted schooner,The Finney, a grain boat, was in from up North. Over to Clark and Lake. You could sniff in the air the pleasant scent of coffee. That was Reid & Murdock’s big warehouse a little to the east. He sometimes went a block out of his way just to sniff this delicious odour. A glittering shoeshine at the Sherman House or the Tremont.
“Good-morning, George.”
“Mawnin’ Mist’ Ravenal! Mawnin’! Papah, suh?”
“Ah—n-n-no. No. H’m!” His fifty cents, budgeted, did not include the dispensing of those extra pennies for theTimes-Herald, theInter-Ocean, or theTribune. They could be seen at McDonald’s for nothing. A fine Chicago morning. The lake mist had lifted. That was one of the advantages of never rising early. Into the Cockeyed Bakery for breakfast. To-morrow it would be Boyle’s. Surely his bad luck would break to-day. He felt it. Had felt it the moment he opened his eyes.
“Terrapin and champagne to-morrow, Nola. Feel it in my bones. I woke up with my palm itching, and passed a hunchback at Clark and Randolph last night.”
“Why don’t you let me give you your coffee and toast here this morning, Gay dear? It’ll only take a minute. And it’s so much better than the coffee you get at the—uh—downtown.”
Ravenal, after surveying his necktie critically in the mirror of the crazy little bureau, would shrug himself into his well-made coat. “You know I never eat in a room in which I have slept.”
Past the Court House; corner of Washington reached. Cut flowers in the glass case outside the basement florist’s. A tapping on the glass with a coin, or a rapping on the pavement with his stick—if the malacca stick was in evidence. “Heh, Joe!”
Joe clattering up the wooden steps.
“Here you are, sir. All ready for you. Just came in fresh.” A white carnation. Ravenal would sniff the spicy bloom, snap the brittle stem, thrust it through the buttonhole of his lapel.
A fine figure of a man from his boots to his hat. Young, handsome, well-dressed, leisurely. Joe, the Greek florist, pocketing his quarter, would reflect gloomily on luck—his own and that of others.
Ravenal might drop in a moment at Weeping Willy Mangler’s, thence to Reilly’s pool room near Madison, for a look at the racing odds. But no matter how low his finances, he scorned the cheaper gambling rooms that catered to the clerks and the working men. There was a great difference between Jeff Hankins’ place and that of his brother, George. At George’s place, and others of that class, barkers stood outside. “Game upstairs, gentlemen! Game upstairs! Come in and try your luck! Ten cents can make you a millionaire.”
At George Hankins’ the faro checks actually were ten cents. You saw there labouring men with their tin dinner pails, their boots lime-spattered, their garments reeking of cheap pipe tobacco. There, too, you found stud poker, roulette, hazard—percentage games. None of these for Ravenal. He played a gentleman’s game, broke or flush.
This game he found at Mike McDonald’s “The Store.” Here he was at home. Here were excitement, luxury, companionship. Here he was Gaylord Ravenal. Fortune lurked just around the corner. At McDonald’s his credit always was good for enough to start the play. On the first floor was the saloon, with its rich walnut panelling, its great mirrors, its tables of teakwood and ivory inlay, its paintings of lolling ladies. Chicago’s saloons and gambling resorts vied with each other in rich and massive decoration. None of your soap-scrawled mirrors and fancy bottle structures for these. “Prince” Varnell’s place had, for years, been famous for its magnificent built-in mantel of Mexican onyx, its great marble statue of the death of Cleopatra, its enormous Sèvres vases.
The second floor was Ravenal’s goal. He did not even glance at the whirling of the elaborately inlaid roulette wheels. He nodded to the dealers and his greeting was deferentially returned. It was said that most of these men had come of fine old Southern families. They dressed the part. But McDonald himself looked like a farmer. His black clothes, though well made, never seemed to fit him. His black string tie never varied. Thin, short, gray-haired, Mike McDonald the Boss of the gamblers would have passed anywhere for a kindly rustic.
“Playing to-day, Mr. Ravenal?”
“Why, yes. Yes, I thought I’d play a while.”
“Anything we can do to make you comfortable?”
“Well—uh—yes——”
McDonald would raise a benevolent though authoritative hand. His finger would summon a menial. “Dave, take care of Mr. Ravenal.”
Ravenal joined the others then, a gentleman gambler among gentleman gamblers. A group smartly dressed like himself, well groomed, quiet, almost elegant. Most of them wore jewellery—a diamond scarf pin, a diamond ring, sometimes even a diamond stud, though this was frowned on by players of Ravenal’s class. A dead cigar in the mouth of each. Little fine lines etched about their eyes. They addressed each other as “sir.” Thank you, sir. . . . Yours I believe, sir. . . . They were quiet, quiet. Yet there was an electric vibration in the air above and about the faro table. Only the dealer seemed remote, detached, unmoved. An hour passed; two, three, four, five. The Negro waiters in very white starched aprons moved deferentially from group to group. One would have said that no favouritism was being shown, but they knew the piker from the plunger. Soft-voiced, coaxing: “Something to drink, suh? A little whisky, suh? Cigar? Might be you’d relish a little chicken white meat and a bottle of wine?”
Ravenal would glance up abstractedly. “Time is it?”
“Pushin’ six o’clock, suh.”
Ravenal might interrupt his game to eat something, but this was not his rule. He ate usually after he had finished his play for the day. It was understood that he and others of his stamp were the guests of McDonald or of Hankins. Twenty-five-cent cigars were to be had for the taking. Drinks of every description. Hot food of the choicest sort and of almost any variety could be ordered and eaten as though this were one’s own house, and the servants at one’s command. Hot soups and broths. Steaks. Chops. Hot birds. You could eat this at a little white-spread table alone, or with your companions, or you could have it brought to you as you played. On long tables in the adjoining room were spread the cold viands—roast chickens, tongue, sausages, cheese, joints of roast beef, salads. Everything about the place gave to its habitués the illusion of plenty, of ease, of luxury. Soft red carpets; great prism-hung chandeliers; the clink of ice; the scent of sappy cigars and rich food; the soft slap-slap of the cards; the low voices of the dealers. It was all friendly, relaxed, soothing. Yet when the dealer opened the little drawer that was so cleverly concealed under his side of the table—the money drawer with its orderly stacks of yellow-backs, and green-backs and gold and silver—you saw, if your glance was quick and sharp enough, the gleam of still another metal: the glittering, sinister blue-gray of steel.
A hundred superstitions swayed their play. Luck was a creature to be wooed, flattered, coaxed, feared. No jungle voodoo worshipper ever lent himself to simpler or more childish practices and beliefs than did these hard-faced men.
Sometimes Ravenal left the faro table penniless or even deeper in Mike McDonald’s debt. His face at such times was not more impassive than the bucolic host’s own. “Better luck next time, Mr. Ravenal.”
“She’s due to turn to-morrow, Mike. Watch out for me to-morrow. I’ll probably clean you.”
And if not to-morrow, to-morrow. Luck must turn, sooner or later. There! Five hundred! A thousand! Five thousand! Did you hear about Ravenal? Yes, he had a wonderful run. It happened in an hour. He walked out with ten thousand. More, some say.
On these nights Ravenal would stroll coolly home as on losing nights. Up Clark Street, the money in neat rolls in his pocket. There were almost no street robberies in those simpler Chicago days. If you were, like Ravenal, a well-dressed sporting looking man, strolling up Clark Street at midnight or thereabouts, you were likely to be stopped for the price of a meal. You gave it as a matter of course, unwrapping a bill, perhaps, from the roll you carried in your pocket.
They might be living in modest comfort at the Revere House on Clark and Austin. They might be living in decent discomfort at the little theatrical boarding house on Ontario. They might be huddled in actual discomfort in the sordid room of the Ohio Street rooming house. Be that as it may, Ravenal would take high-handed possession, but in a way so blithe, so gay, so charming that no one could have withstood him, least of all his wife who, though she knew him and understood him as well as any one could understand this secretive and baffling nature, frequently despised him, often hated him, still was in love with him and always would be.
The child would be asleep in her corner, but Magnolia would be wide awake, reading or sewing or simply sitting there waiting. She never reproached him for the hours he kept. Though they quarrelled frequently it was never about this. Sometimes, as she sat there, half dozing, her mind would go back to the rivers and gently float there. An hour—two hours—would slip by. Now the curtain would be going down on the last act. Now the crowd staying for the after-piece and concert would be moving down to occupy the seats nearer the stage. A song number by the ingénue, finishing with a clog or a soft-shoe dance. The comic tramp. The character team in a patter act, with a song. The after-piece now; probably Red Hot Coffee, or some similar stand-by. Now the crowd was leaving. The band struck up its last number. Up the river bank scrambled the last straggler. You never threw me my line at all. There I was like a stuck pig. Well, how did I know you was going to leave out that business with the door. Why’n’t you tell me? Say, Ed, will you go over my song with me a minute? You know, that place where it goes TUM-ty-ty TUM-ty-ty TUM-TUM-TUM and then I vamp. It kind of went sour to-night, seemed to me. A bit of supper. Coffee cooked over a spirit lamp. Lumps of yellow cheese, a bite of ham. Relaxation after strain. A daubing with cold cream. A sloshing of water. Quieter. More quiet. Quiet. Darkness. Security. No sound but that of the river flowing by. Sometimes if she dozed she was wakened by the familiar hoot of a steamer whistle—some big lake boat, perhaps, bound for Michigan or Minnesota; or a river barge or tug on the Chicago River near by. She would start up, bewildered, scarcely knowing whether she had heard this hoarse blast or whether it was only, after all, part of her dream about the river and theCotton Blossom.
Ravenal coming swiftly up the stairs. Ravenal’s quick light tread in the hall.
“Come on, Nola! We’re leaving this rat’s nest.”
“Gay, dear! Not now. You don’t mean to-night.”
“Now! It’ll only take a minute. I’ll wake up the slavey. She’ll help.”
“No! No! I’d rather do it myself. Oh, Gay, Kim’s asleep. Can’t we wait until morning?”
But somehow the fantastic procedure appealed tremendously to her love of the unexpected. Packing up and moving on. The irresponsible gaiety of it. The gas turned high. Out tumbled the contents of bureau drawers and boxes and trunks. Finery saved from just such another lucky day. Froth and foam of lace and silk strewn incongruously about this murky little chamber with its frayed carpet and stained walls and crazy chairs. They spoke in half whispers so as not to wake the child. They were themselves like two children, eager, excited, laughing.
“Where are we going, Gay?”
“Sherman. Or how would you like to try the Auditorium for a change? Rooms looking out over the lake.”
“Gay!” Her hands clasped as she knelt in front of a trunk.
“Next week we’ll run down to West Baden. Do us good. During the day we can walk and drive or ride. You ought to learn to ride, Nola. In the evening we can take a whirl at Sam Maddock’s layout.”
“Oh, don’t play there—not much, I mean. Let’s try to keep what we have for a little while.”
“After all, we may as well give Sam a chance to pay our expenses. Remember the last time we were down I won a thousand at roulette alone—and roulette isn’t my game.”
He awoke the landlady and paid his bill in the middle of the night. She did not resent being thus disturbed. Women rarely resented Gaylord Ravenal’s lack of consideration. They were off in a hack fetched by Ravenal from the near-by cab stand. It was no novelty for Kim to fall asleep in the dingy discomfort of a north side rooming house and to wake up amidst the bright luxuriousness of a hotel suite, without ever having been conscious of the events which had wrought this change. Instead of milk out of the bottle and an egg cooked over the gas jet, there was a shining breakfast tray bearing mysterious round-domed dishes whose covers you whipped off to disclose what not of savoury delights! Crisp curls of bacon, parsley-decked; eggs baked and actually bubbling in a brown crockery container; hot golden buttered toast. And her mother calling gaily in from the next room, “Drink your milk with your breakfast, Kim darling! Don’t gulp it all down in one swallow at the end.”
It was easy enough for Kim to believe in those fairy tales that had to do with kindly sprites who worked miracles overnight. A whole staff of such good creatures seemed pretty regularly occupied with the Ravenal affairs.
Once a month there came a letter from Mrs. Hawks. No more and no less. That indomitable woman was making a great success of her business. Her letters bristled with complaint, but between the lines Magnolia could read satisfaction and even a certain grim happiness. She was boss of her world, such as it was. Her word was final. The modern business woman had not yet begun her almost universal battle against the male in his own field. She was considered unique. Tales of her prowess became river lore. Parthy Ann Hawks, owner and manager of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre, strong, erect, massive, her eyebrows black above her keen cold eyes, her abundant hair scarcely touched with gray, was now a well-known and important figure on the rivers. She ran her boat like a pirate captain. He who displeased her walked the plank. It was said that the more religious rivermen who hailed from the Louisiana parishes always crossed themselves fearfully at her approach and considered a meeting with theCotton Blossoma bad omen. The towering black-garbed form standing like a ship’s figurehead, grim and portentous, as the boat swept downstream, had been known to give a really devout Catholic captain a severe and instantaneous case of chills and fever.
Her letters to Magnolia were characteristic: