XVII
Theknell had sounded for the red brick house with the lions guarding its portals. The Chicago soot hung like a pall over it. The front steps sagged. Even the stone lions had a mangy look. The lemon-water sunshine of a Chicago winter day despoiled the dwelling of any sinister exterior aspect. That light, filtering through the lake mist, gave to the house-front the look of a pock-marked, wrinkled, and evil old hag who squats in the market place with her face to the sun and thinks of her purple past and does not regret it. It was half-past one. Magnolia Ravenal had figured this out nicely. That part of Clark Street would be astir by now. As she approached the house on Clark, near Polk, her courage had momentarily failed her, and she had passed it, hurriedly. She had walked a block south, wretchedly. But the feel of the bills in her bag gave her new resolve. She opened the handbag to look at them, turned and walked swiftly back to the house. She rang the bell this time, firmly, demandingly; stood looking down at its clean-scrubbed doorstep and tried to ignore the prickling sensation that ran up and down her spine and the weak and trembling feeling in her legs. The people passing by could see her. She was knocking at Hetty Chilson’s notorious door, and the people passing by could see her: Magnolia Ravenal. Well, what of it! Don’t be silly. She rang again.
The door was opened by a Negro in a clean starched white house coat. Magnolia did not know why the sight of this rather sad-eyed looking black man should have reassured her; but it did. She knew exactly what she wanted to say.
“My name is Mrs. Ravenal. I want to speak to Hetty Chilson.”
“Mis’ Chilson is busy, ma’am,” he said, as though repeating a lesson. Still, something about the pale, well-dressed, earnest woman evidently impressed him. Of late, when he opened the door there had been frequent surprises for him in the shape of similar earnest and well-dressed young women who, when you refused them admittance, flashed an official-looking badge, whipped out notebook and pencil and insisted pleasantly but firmly that he make quite sure Miss Chilson was not in. “You-all one them Suhveys?”
Uncomprehending, she shook her head. He made as though to shut the door, gently. Magnolia had not spent years in the South for nothing. “Don’t you shut that door on me! I want to see Hetty Chilson.”
The man recognized the tone of white authority. “Wha’ you want?”
Magnolia recovered herself. After all, this was not the front door of a home, but of a House. “Tell her Mrs. Gaylord Ravenal wants to speak to her. Tell her that I have one thousand dollars that belongs to her, and I want to give it to her.” Foolishly she opened her bag and he saw the neat sheaf of bills. His eyes popped a little.
“Yes’m. Ah tell huh. Step in, ma’am.”
Magnolia entered Hetty Chilson’s house. She was frightened. The trembling had taken hold of her knees again. But she clutched the handbag and looked about her, frankly curious. A dim hallway, richly carpeted, its walls covered with a red satin brocade. There were deep soft cushioned chairs, and others of carved wood, high-backed. A lighted lamp on the stairway newel post cast a rosy glow over the whole. Huge Sèvres vases stood in the stained-glass window niches. It was an entrance hall such as might have been seen in the Prairie Avenue or Michigan Avenue house of a new rich Chicago packer. The place was quiet. Now and then you heard a door shut. There was the scent of coffee in the air. No footfall on the soft carpet, even though the tread were heavy. Hetty Chilson descended the stairs, a massive, imposing figure in a black-and-white patterned foulard dress. She gave the effect of activity hampered by some physical impediment. Her descent was one of impatient deliberateness. One hand clung to the railing. She appeared a stout, middle-aged, well-to-do householder summoned from some domestic task abovestairs. She had aged much in the last ten years. Magnolia, startled, realized that the distortion of her stout figure was due to a tumour.
“How do you do?” said Hetty Chilson. Her keen eyes searched her visitor’s face. The Negro hovered near by in the dim hallway. “Are you Mrs. Ravenal?”
“Yes.”
“What is it, please?”
Magnolia felt like a schoolgirl interrogated by a stern but well-intentioned preceptress. Her cheeks were burning as she opened her handbag, took out the sheaf of hundred-dollar bills, tendered them to this woman. “The money,” she stammered, “the money you gave my—you gave my husband. Here it is.”
Hetty Chilson looked at the bills. “I didn’t give it to him. I loaned it to him. He said he’d pay it back and I believe he will. Ravenal’s got the name for being square.”
Magnolia touched Hetty Chilson’s hand with the folded bills; pressed them on her so that the hand opened automatically to take them. “We don’t want it.”
“Don’t want it! Well, what’d he come asking me for it for, then? I’m no bank that you can take money out and put money in.”
“I’m sorry. He didn’t know. I can’t—we don’t—I can’t take it.”
Hetty Chilson looked down at the bills. Her eyeglasses hung on the bodice of her dress, near the right shoulder, attached to a patent gold chain. This she pulled out now with a businesslike gesture and adjusted the eyeglasses to her nose. “Oh, you’re that kind, huh?” She counted the bills once and then again; folded them. “Does your husband know about this?” Magnolia did not answer. She looked dignified and felt foolish. The very matter-of-factness of this world-hardened woman made this thing Magnolia had done seem overdramatic and silly. Hetty Chilson glanced over her shoulder to where the white-coated Negro stood. “Mose, tell Jule I want her. Tell her to bring her receipt book and a pen.” Mose ran up the soft-carpeted stairs. You heard a deferential rap at an upper door; voices. Hetty turned again to Magnolia. “You’ll want a receipt for this. Anyway, you’ll have that to show him when he kicks up a fuss.” She moved ponderously to the foot of the stairway; waited a moment there, looking up. Magnolia’s eyes followed her gaze. Mose had vanished, evidently, down some rear passage and stairway, for he again appeared mysteriously at the back of the lower hall though he had not descended the stairway up which he had gone a moment before. Down this stair came a straight slim gray-haired figure. Genteel, was the word that popped into Magnolia’s mind. A genteel figure in decent black silk, plain and good. It rustled discreetly. A white fine turnover collar finished it at the throat. Narrow cuffs at the wrist. It was difficult to see her face in the dim light. She paused a moment in the glow of the hall lamp as Hetty Chilson instructed her. A white face—no, not white—ivory. Like something dead. White hair still faintly streaked with black. In this clearer light the woman seemed almost gaunt. The eyes were incredibly black in that ivory face; like dull coals, Magnolia thought, staring at her, fascinated. Something in her memory stirred at sight of this woman in the garb of a companion-secretary and with a face like burned-out ashes. Perhaps she had seen her with Hetty Chilson at the theatre or the races. She could not remember.
“Make out a receipt for one thousand dollars received from Mrs. Gaylord Ravenal. R-a-v-e-n-a-l. Yes, that’s right. Here; I’ll sign it.” Hetty Chilson penned her name swiftly as the woman held the book for her. She turned to Magnolia. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to be at the bank at two. Jule, give this receipt to Mrs. Ravenal. Come up as soon as you’re through.”
With a kind of ponderous dignity this strange and terrible woman ascended her infamous stairway. Magnolia stood, watching her. Her plump, well-shaped hand clung to the railing. An old woman, her sins heavy upon her. She had somehow made Magnolia feel a fool.
The companion tore the slip of paper from the booklet, advanced to Magnolia and held it out to her. “One thousand dollars,” she said. Her voice was deep and rich and strange. “Mrs. Gaylord Ravenal. Correct?” Magnolia put out her hand, blindly. Unaccountably she was trembling again. The slip of paper dropped from her hand. The woman uttered a little exclamation of apology. They both stooped to pick it up as the paper fluttered to the floor. They bumped awkwardly, actually laughed a little, ruefully, and straightening, looked at each other, smiling. And as Magnolia smiled, shyly, she saw the smile on the face of the woman freeze into a terrible contortion of horror. Horror stamped itself on her every feature. Her eyes were wild and enormous with it; her mouth gaped with it. So the two stood staring at each other for one hideous moment. Then the woman turned, blindly, and vanished up the stairs like a black ghost. Magnolia stood staring after her. Then, with a little cry, she made as though to follow her up the stairway. Strangely she cried, “Julie! Julie, wait for me!” Mose, the Negro, came swiftly forward. “This way out, miss,” he said, deferentially. He held the street door open. Magnolia passed through it, down the steps of the brick house with the lions couchant, into the midday brightness of Clark Street. Suddenly she was crying, who so rarely wept. South Clark Street paid little attention to her, inured as it was to queer sights. And if a passer-by had stopped and said, “What is it? Can I help you?” she would have been at a loss to reply. Certainly she could not have said, “I think I have just seen the ghost of a woman I knew when I was a little girl—a woman I first saw when I was swinging on the gate of our house at Thebes, and she went by in a long-tailed flounced black dress and a lace veil tied around her hat. And I last saw her—oh, I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure. It might not——”
Clark Street, even if it had understood (which is impossible), would not have been interested. And presently, as she walked along, she composed herself. She dabbed at her face with her handkerchief and pulled down her neat veil. She had still another task to perform. But the day seemed already so old. She was not sleepy, but her mind felt thick and slow. The events of the past night and of the morning did not stand out clearly. It was as if they had happened long ago. Perhaps she should eat something. She had had only that cup of coffee; had eaten almost nothing the night before.
She had a little silver in her purse. She counted it as it lay next to the carefully folded thousand-dollar receipt signed in Hetty Chilson’s firm businesslike hand. Twenty-five—thirty-five—forty—fifty—seventy-three cents. Ample. She stopped at a lunch room on Harrison, near Wabash; ate a sandwich and drank two cups of coffee. She felt much better. On leaving she caught a glimpse of herself in a wall mirror—a haggard woman with a skin blotched from tears, and a shiny nose and with little untidy wisps of hair showing beneath her hat. Her shoes—she remembered having heard or read somewhere that neat shoes were the first requisite for an applicant seeking work. Furtively and childishly she rubbed the toe of either shoe on the back of each stocking. She decided to go to one of the department-store rest rooms for women and there repair her toilette. Field’s was the nicest; the Boston store the nearest. She went up State Street to Field’s. The white marble mirrored room was full of women. It was warm and bright and smelled pleasantly of powder and soap and perfume. Magnolia took off her hat, bathed her face, tidied her hair, powdered. Now she felt less alien to these others about her—these comfortable chattering shopping women; wives of husbands who worked in offices, who worked in shops, who worked in factories. She wondered about them. She was standing before a mirror adjusting her veil, and a woman was standing beside her, peering into the same glass, each seemingly oblivious of the other. “I wonder,” Magnolia thought, fancifully, “what she would say if I were to turn to her and tell her that I used to be a show-boat actress, and that my father was drowned in the Mississippi, and my mother, at sixty, runs a show boat all alone, and that my husband is a gambler and we have no money, and that I have just come from the most notorious brothel in Chicago, where I returned a thousand dollars my husband had got there, and that I’m on my way to try to get work in a variety theatre.” She was smiling a little at this absurd thought. The other woman saw the smile, met it with a frozen stare of utter respectability, and walked away.
There were few theatrical booking offices in Chicago and these were of doubtful reputation. Magnolia knew nothing of their location, though she thought, vaguely, that they probably would be somewhere in the vicinity of Clark, Madison, Randolph. She was wise enough in the ways of the theatre to realize that these shoddy agencies could do little for her. She had heard Ravenal speak of the variety houses and museums on State Street and Clark and Madison. The word “vaudeville” was just coming into use. In company with her husband she had even visited Kohl & Middleton’s Museum—that smoke-filled comfortable shabby variety house on Clark, where the admission was ten cents. It had been during that first Chicago trip, before Kim’s birth. Women seldom were seen in the audience, but Ravenal, for some reason, had wanted her to get a glimpse of this form of theatrical entertainment. Here Weber and Fields had played for fifteen dollars a week. Here you saw the funny Irishman, Eddie Foy; and May Howard had sung and danced.
“They’ll probably build big expensive theatres some day for variety shows,” Ravenal had predicted.
The performance was, Magnolia thought, much like that given as the concert after the evening’s bill on theCotton Blossom. “A whole evening of that?” she said. Years later the Masonic Temple Roof was opened for vaudeville.
“There!” Ravenal had triumphantly exclaimed. “What did I tell you! Some of those people get three and four hundred a week, and even more.” Here the juggling Agoust family threw plates and lighted lamps and tables and chairs and ended by keeping aloft a whole dinner service and parlour suite, with lamps, soup tureens, and plush chairs passing each other affably in midair without mishap. Jessie Bartlett Davis sang, sentimentally, Tuh-rue LOVE, That’s The Simple Charm That Opens Every Woman’s Heart.
At the other end of the scale were the all-night restaurants with a stage at the rear where the waiters did an occasional song and dance, or where some amateur tried to prove his talent. Between these were two or three variety shows of decent enough reputation though frequented by the sporting world of Chicago. Chief of these was Jopper’s Varieties, a basement theatre on Wabash supposed to be copied after the Criterion in London. There was a restaurant on the ground floor. A flight of marble steps led down to the underground auditorium. Here new acts were sometimes tried out. Lillian Russell, it was said, had got her first hearing at Jopper’s. For some reason, Magnolia had her mind fixed on this place. She made straight for it, probably as unbusinesslike a performer as ever presented herself for a hearing. It was now well on toward mid-afternoon. Already the early December dusk was gathering, aided by the Chicago smoke and the lake fog. Her fright at Hetty Chilson’s door was as nothing compared to the sickening fear that filled her now. She was physically and nervously exhausted. The false energy of the morning had vanished. She tried to goad herself into fresh courage by thoughts of Kim at the convent; of Parthy’s impending visitation. As she approached the place on Wabash she resolved not to pass it, weakly. If she passed it but once she never would have the bravery to turn and go in. She and Ravenal had driven by many times on their way to the South Side races. It was in this block. It was four doors away. It was here. She wheeled stiffly, like a soldier, and went in. The restaurant was dark and deserted. One dim light showed at the far end. The tablecloths were white patches in the grayness. But a yellow path of light flowed up the stairway that led to the basement, and she heard the sound of a piano. She descended the swimming marble steps, aware of the most alarming sensation in her legs—rather, of no sensation in them. It was as though no solid structure of bone and flesh and muscle lay in the region between her faltering feet and her pounding heart.
There was a red-carpeted foyer; a little ticket window; the doors of the auditorium stood open. She put out a hand, blindly, to steady herself against the door jamb. She looked into the theatre; the badly lighted empty theatre, with its rows and rows of vacant seats; its stage at the far end, the curtain half raised, the set a crudely painted interior. As she looked there came over her—flowed over her like balm—a feeling of security, of peace, of home-coming. Here were accustomed surroundings. Here were the very sights and smells and sounds she knew best. Those men with their hats on the backs of their heads and their cigars waggling comfortably and their feet on the chair in front of them might have been Schultzy, Frank, Ralph, Pa Means. Evidently a song was being tried out in rehearsal. The man at the piano was hammering it and speaking the words in a voice as hoarse and unmusical as a boat whistle coming through the fog. It was a coon song full of mah babys and choo-choos and Alabam’s.
Magnolia waited quietly until he had come to a full stop.
A thin pale young man in a striped shirt and a surprising gray derby who had been sitting with his wooden kitchen chair tipped up against the proscenium now brought his chair down on all fours.
“You was with Haverly’s, you say?”
“I cer’nly was. Ask Jim. Ask Sam. Ask anybody.”
“Well, go back to ’em is what I say. If you ever was more than a singin’ waiter then I’m new to the show business.” He took his coat from where it lay on top of the piano. “That’s all for to-day, ain’t it, Jo?” He addressed a large huddle whose thick shoulders and round head could just be seen above the back of a second-row centre seat. The fat huddle rose and stretched and yawned, and grunted an affirmative.
Magnolia came swiftly down the aisle. She looked up at the thin young man; he stared at her across the footlight gutter.
“Will you let me try some songs?” she said.
“Who’re you?” demanded the young man.
“My name is Magnolia Ravenal.”
“Never heard of it. What do you do?”
“I sing. I sing Negro songs with a banjo.”
“All right,” said the thin young man, resignedly. “Get out your banjo and sing us one.”
“I haven’t got one.”
“Haven’t got one what?”
“One—a banjo.”
“Well, you said you—didn’ you just say you sung nigger songs with a banjo!”
“I haven’t got it with me. Isn’t there one?” Actually, until this moment, she had not given the banjo a thought. She looked about her in the orchestra pit.
“Well, for God’s sakes!” said the gray derby.
The hoarse-voiced singer who had just met with rebuff and who was shrugging himself into a shabby overcoat now showed himself a knight. He took an instrument case from the piano top. “Here,” he said. “Take mine, sister.”
Magnolia looked to left, to right. “There.” The fat man in the second row jerked a thumb toward the right stage box back of which was the stage door. Magnolia passed swiftly up the aisle; was on the stage. She was quite at ease, relaxed, at home. She seated herself in one of the deal chairs; crossed her knees.
“Take your hat off,” commanded the pasty young man.
She removed her veil and hat. A sallow big-eyed young woman, too thin, in a well-made suit and a modish rather crumpled shirtwaist and nothing of the look of the stage about her. She thumbed the instrument again. She remembered something dimly, dimly, far, far back; far back and yet very recent; this morning. “Don’t smile too often. But if you ever want anything . . .”
She smiled. The thin young man did not appear overwhelmed. She threw back her head then as Jo had taught her, half closed her eyes, tapped time with the right foot, smartly. Imitative in this, she managed, too, to get into her voice that soft and husky Negro quality which for years she had heard on river boats, bayous, landings. I got a wings. You got a wings. All God’s chillun got a wings.
“Sing another,” said the old young man. She sang the one she had always liked best.
“Go down, Moses,’Way down in Egypt land,Tell ole Pharaoh,To let my people go.”
“Go down, Moses,’Way down in Egypt land,Tell ole Pharaoh,To let my people go.”
“Go down, Moses,’Way down in Egypt land,Tell ole Pharaoh,To let my people go.”
“Go down, Moses,
’Way down in Egypt land,
Tell ole Pharaoh,
To let my people go.”
Husky, mournful, melodious voice. Tapping foot. Rolling eye.
Silence.
“What kind of a coon song do you call that?” inquired the gray derby.
“Why, it’s a Negro melody—they sing them in the South.”
“Sounds like a church hymn to me.” He paused. His pale shrewd eyes searched her face. “You a nigger?”
The unaccustomed red surged into Magnolia’s cheeks, dyed her forehead, her throat, painfully. “No, I’m not a—nigger.”
“Well, you cer’nly sing like one. Voice and—I don’t know—way you sing. Ain’t that right, Jo?”
“Cer’nly is,” agreed Jo.
The young man appeared a trifle embarrassed, which made him look all the younger. Years later, in New York, Kim was to know him as one of the most powerful theatrical producers of his day. And he was to say to Kim, “Ravenal, h’m? Why, say, I knew your mother when she was better-looking than you’ll ever be. And smart! Say, she tried to sell me a coon song turn down in Jopper’s in the old days, long before your time. I thought they were hymns and wouldn’t touch them. Seems they’re hot stuff now. Spirituals, they call them. You hear ’em in every show on Broadway. ’S fact! Got to go to church to get away from ’em. Well, live and learn’s what I say.”
It was through this shrewd, tough, stage-wise boy that Magnolia had her chance. He did not understand or like her Negro folk songs then, but he did recognize the quality she possessed. And it was due to this precociousness in him that Magnolia, a little more than a year later, was singing American coon songs in the Masonic Roof bill, her name on the programme with those of Cissie Loftus and Marshall Wilder and the Four Cohans.
But now she stood up, the scarlet receding from her face, leaving it paler than before. Silently she handed the husky singer his banjo; tried to murmur a word of thanks; choked. She put on her hat, adjusted her veil.
“Here, wait a minute, sister. No offense. I’ve seen ’em lighter’n you. Your voice sounds like a—ain’t that the truth, Jo?” Actually distressed, he appealed again to his unloquacious ally in the third row.
“Sure does,” agreed Jo.
The unfortunate hoarse-voiced man who had loaned her the banjo now departed. He seemed to bear no rancour. Magnolia, seeing this, tried again to smile on the theory that, if he could be game, then so, too, could she. And this time, it was the real Magnolia Ravenal smile of which the newspapers made much in the years to come. The ravishing Ravenal smile, they said (someone having considered that alliterative phrase rather neat).
Seeing it now the young showman exclaimed, without too much elegance, “Lookit that, Jo!” Then, to Magnolia: “Listen, sister. You won’t get far with those. Your songs are too much like church tunes, see? They’re for a funeral, not a theaytre. And that’s a fact. But I like the way you got of singing them. How about singing me a real coon song? You know. Hello, Mah Baby! or something like that.”
“I don’t know any. These are the only songs I know.”
“Well, for——! Listen. You learn some real coon songs and come back, see, in a week. Here. Try these over at home, see.” He selected some song sheets from the accommodating piano top. She took them, numbly.
She was again in the cold moist winter street. Quite dark now. She walked over to State Street and took a northbound car. The door of their room on the third floor was locked, and when she had opened it she felt that the room was empty. Not empty merely; deserted. Before she had lighted the gas jet she had an icy feeling of desolation, of impending and piled-up tragedy at the close of a day that already toppled with it. Her gaze went straight to the dresser.
An envelope was there. Her name on it in Ravenal’s neat delicate hand. Magnolia. Darling, I am going away for a few weeks . . . return when your mother is gone . . . or send for you . . . six hundred dollars for you on shelf under clock . . . Kim . . . convent . . . enough . . . weeks . . . darling . . . love . . . best . . . always . . .
She never saw him again.
She must have been a little light-headed by this time, for certainly no deserted wife in her right senses would have followed the course that Magnolia Ravenal now took. She read the note again, her lips forming some of the words aloud. She walked to the little painted shelf over the wash stand. Six hundred. That was right. Six hundred. Perhaps this really belonged to that woman, too. She couldn’t go there again. Even if it did, she couldn’t go there again.
She left the room, the gas flaring. She hurried down Clark Street, going a few blocks south. Into one of the pawnshops. That was nothing new. The man actually greeted her by name. “Good-evening, Mrs. Ravenal. And what can I do for you?”
“A banjo.”
“What?”
“I want to buy a banjo.”
She bargained for it, shrewdly. When she tendered a hundred-dollar bill in payment the man’s face fell.
“Oh, now, Mrs. Ravenal, I gave you that special price because you——”
“I’ll go somewhere else.”
She got it. Hurried back with it. Into her room again. She had not even locked the door. Five of the six one-hundred-dollar bills lay as she had tossed them on the dresser. A little crazy, certainly. Years, years afterward she actually could relate the fantastic demoniac events of this day that had begun at four in the morning and ended almost twenty hours later. It made a very good story, dramatic, humorous, tragic. Kim’s crowd thought it was wonderful.
She took off her veil and hat and jacket. Her black hair lay in loose limp ugly loops about her face. She opened one of the sheets of music—Whose Black Baby Are You?—and propped it up against the centre section of the old-fashioned dresser. She crossed her knees. Cradled the banjo. One foot tapped the time rhythmically. An hour. Two hours.
A knock at the door. The landlady, twelve hours fustier than she had been that morning. “It ain’t me, Mis’ Ravenal, but Downstairs says she can’t sleep for the noise. She’s that sickly one. She says she pounded but you didn’t——”
“I’ll stop. I didn’t hear her. I’m sorry.”
“For me you could go on all night.” The landlady leaned bulkily and sociably against the door. “I’m crazy about music. I never knew you was musical.”
“Oh, yes,” said Magnolia. “Very.”
XVIII
“Iwas educated,”began Kim Ravenal, studying her reflection in the mirror, and deftly placing a dab of rouge on either ear lobe, “in Chicago, by the dear Sisters there in St. Agatha’s Convent.”
She then had the grace to snigger, knowing well what the young second-assistant dramatic critic would say to that. She was being interviewed in her dressing room at the Booth between the second and third acts of Needles and Pins. She had opened in this English comedy in October. Now it was April. Her play before this had run a year. Her play before that had run two years. Her play—well, there was nothing new to be said in an interview with Kim Ravenal, no matter how young or how dramatic the interviewer. There was, therefore, a touch of mischievous malice in this trite statement of hers. She knew what the bright young man would say in protest.
He said it. He said: “Oh, now, Pete’s sake, Miss Ravenal! Quit kidding.”
“But I was. I can’t help it. I was! Ask my mother. Ask my husband. Ask anybody. Educated by the dear Sisters in the con——”
“Oh, I know it! So does everybody else who reads the papers. And you know as well as I do that that educated-in-a-convent stuff is rubber-stamp. It ceased to be readable publicity when Mrs. Siddons was a gal. Now be reasonable. Kaufman wants a bright piece about you for the Sunday page.”
“All right. You ask intelligent questions and I’ll answer them.” Kim then leaned forward to peer intently at her own reflection in the dressing-room mirror with its brilliant border of amber lights. She reached for the rabbit’s foot and applied to her cheeks that nervous and redundant film of rouge which means that the next curtain is four minutes away.
He was a very cagey New York second-assistant dramatic critic, who did not confine his talents to second-assistant dramatic criticism. The pages ofVanity FairandThe New Yorker(locally known as the Fly Papers) frequently accepted first (assistant dramatic) aid from his pen. And, naturally, he had written one of those expressionistic plays so daringly different that three intrepid managers had decided not to put it on after all. Embittered, the second-assistant dramatic critic threatened sardonically to get a production through the ruse of taking up residence in Prague or Budapest, changing his name to Capek or Vajda, and sending his manuscript back to New York as a foreign play for them to fight over.
Though she had now known New York for many years, there were phases of its theatrical life that still puzzled Kim’s mother, Magnolia Ravenal; and this was one of them. “The critics all seem to write plays,” she complained. “It makes the life of a successful actress like Kim so complicated. And the actors and actresses all lecture on the Trend of the Modern Drama at League Luncheons given at the Astor. I went to one once, with Kim. Blue voile ladies from Englewood. In my day critics criticized and actors acted.”
Her suave and gifted son-in-law, Kenneth Cameron, himself a producer of plays of the more precious pattern (The Road to Sunrise, 1921; Jock o’ Dreams, 1924), teased her gently about this attitude of intolerance. “Why, Nola! And you a famous stage mama! You ought to know that even Kim occasionally has to do things for publicity.”
“In myCotton Blossomdays we were more subtle. The band marched down Main Street and played on the corner and Papa gave out handbills. That was our publicity. I didn’t have to turn handsprings up the levee.”
There was little that the public did not know about Kim Ravenal. There was nothing that the cagey young assistant critic did not know. He now assumed a tone of deep bitterness.
“All right, my fine lady. I’ll go back and write a pattern piece. Started in stock in Chicago. Went to New York National Theatre School. Star pupil and Teacher’s Pet while there. Got a bit in—uh—Mufti, wasn’t it?—and walked away with the play just like the aspiring young actress in a bum short story. Born on a show boat in Kentucky and Illinois and Missouri simultaneously—say, explain that to me some time, will you?—hence name of Kim. Also mother was a show-boat actress and later famous singer of coon—— Say, where is your mother these days, anyway? Gosh, I think she’s grand! I’m stuck on her. She’s the burning passion of my youth. No kidding. I don’t know. She’s got that kind of haunted hungry et-up look, like Bernhardt or Duse or one of them. You’ve got a little of it, yourself.”
“Oh, sir!” murmured Kim, gratefully.
“Cultivate it, is my advice. And when she smiles! . . . Boy! I work like a dawg to get her to smile whenever I see her. She thinks I’m one of those cut-ups. I’m really a professional suicide at heart, but I’d wiggle my ears if it would win one of those slow, dazzling——”
“Listen! Who—or whom—are you interviewing, young man? Me or my mama?”
“She around?”
“No. She’s at the Shaw opening with Ken.”
“Well, then, you’ll do.”
“Just for that I think I’ll turn elegant on you and not grant any more interviews. Maude Adams never did. Look at Mrs. Fiske! And Duse. Anyway, interviews always sound so dumb when they appear in print. Dignified silence is the thing. Mystery. Everybody knows too much about the stage, nowadays.”
“Believe me,Ido!” said the young second-assistant dramatic critic, in a tone of intense acerbity.
A neat little triple tap at the dressing-room door. “Curtain already!” exclaimed Kim in a kind of panic. You would have thought this was her first stage summons. Another hasty application with the rabbit’s foot.
A mulatto girl in black silk so crisp, and white batiste cap and apron so correct that she might have doubled as stage and practical maid, now opened the door outside which she had been discreetly stationed. “Curtain, Blanche?”
“Half a minute more, Miss Ravenal. Telegram.” She handed a yellow envelope to Kim.
As Kim read it there settled over her face the rigidity of shock, so plain that the second-assistant dramatic critic almost was guilty of, “No bad news, I hope?” But as though he had said it Kim Ravenal handed him the slip of paper.
“They’ve misspelled it,” she said, irrelevantly. “It ought to be Parthenia.”
He read:
Mrs. Parthna A. Hawks died suddenly eight o’clock before evening show Cotton Blossom playing Cold Spring Tennessee advise sympathy company.Chas. K. Barnato.
Mrs. Parthna A. Hawks died suddenly eight o’clock before evening show Cotton Blossom playing Cold Spring Tennessee advise sympathy company.
Chas. K. Barnato.
“Hawks?”
“My grandmother.”
“I’m sorry.” Lamely. “Is there anything——”
“I haven’t seen her in years. She was very old—over eighty. I can’t quite realize. She was famous on the rivers. A sort of legendary figure. She owned and managed theCotton Blossom. There was a curious kind of feud between her and Mother and my father. She was really a pretty terrible—I wonder—Mother——”
“Curtain, Miss Ravenal!”
She went swiftly toward the door.
“Can I do anything? Fetch your mother from the theatre?”
“She’ll be back here with Ken after the play. Half an hour. No use——”
He followed her as she went swiftly toward the door from which she made her third-act entrance. “I don’t want to be offensive, Miss Ravenal. But if there’s a story in this—your grandmother, I mean—eighty, you know——”
Over her shoulder, in a whisper, “There is. See Ken.” She stood a moment; seemed to set her whole figure; relaxed it then; vanished. You heard her lovely but synthetic voice as the American wife of the English husband in the opening lines of the third act:
“I’m so sick of soggy British breakfast. Devilled kidneys! Ugh! Who but the English could face food so visceral at nineA. M.!”
She was thinking as she played the third act for the three hundredth time that she must tuck the telegram under a cold cream jar or back of her mirror as soon as she returned to her dressing room. What if Magnolia should take it into her head to leave the Shaw play early and find it there on her dressing table! She must tell her gently. Magnolia never had learned to take telegrams calmly. They always threw her into a panic. Ever since that one about Gaylord Ravenal’s death in San Francisco. Gaylord Ravenal. A lovely name. What a tin-horn sport he must have been. Charming though, probably.
Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain.
She was back in her dressing room, had removed her make-up, was almost dressed when Ken returned with her mother. She had made desperate haste, aided expertly by her maid.
The two entered laughing, talking, bickering good-naturedly. Kim heard her husband’s jejune plangent voice outside her dressing-room door.
“I’m going to tell your daughter on you, Nola! Yes, I am.”
“I don’t care. He started it.”
Kim looked round at them. Why need they be so horribly high-spirited just to-night? It was like comedy relief in a clumsily written play, put in to make the tragedy seem deeper. Still, this news was hardly tragic. Yet her mother might——
For years, now, Kim Ravenal had shielded her mother; protected her; spoiled her, Magnolia said, almost resentfully.
She stood now with her son-in-law in the cruel glare of the dressing-room lights. Her face was animated, almost flushed. Her fine head rose splendidly from the furred frame of her luxurious coat collar. Her breast and throat were firm and creamy above the square-cut décolletage of her black gown. Her brows looked the blacker and more startling for the wing of white that crossed the black of her straight thick hair. There was about this woman past middle age a breath-taking vitality. Her distinguished young son-in-law appeared rather anæmic in contrast.
“How was the play?” Kim asked, possibly in the hope of changing their ebullient mood.
“Nice production,” said Cameron. “Lunt was flawless. Fontanne’s turned just a shade cute on us. She’d better stop that. Shaw, revived, tastes a little mouldy. Westley yelled. Simonson’s sets were—uh—meticulous I think the word is. . . . And I want to inform you, my dear Mrs. C., that your mama has been a very naughty girl.”
This would never do, thought Kim, her mind on the yellow envelope. She put an arm about her mother. “Kiss me and I’ll forgive you,” she said.
“You don’t know what she’s done.”
“Whatever it is——”
“Woollcott started it, anyway,” protested Magnolia Ravenal, lighting her cigarette. “I should think a man who’s dramatic critic of the New YorkWorldwould have more consideration for the dignity of his——”
Cameron took up the story. “Our seats turned out to be next to his. Nola sat between us. You know how she always clutches somebody’s hand during the emotional scenes.”
“The last time I went to the theatre with Woollcott he said he’d slap my hands hard if I ever again——” put in Magnolia. But Cameron once more interrupted.
“Then in the second act she clutched him instead of me and he slapped her hand——”
“And pinched——”
“And Nola gave him a sharp dig in the stomach, I’m afraid, with her elbow, and there was quite a commotion. Mothers-in-law are a terrible responsibility.”
“Motherdear! A first night of a Shaw revival at the National!”
“He started it. And anyway, you’ve brought me up wrong.”
There was about her suddenly a curious effect of weariness. It was as though, until now, she had been acting, and had discarded her rôle. She stood up. “Ken, if you’ll get me a taxi I’ll run along home. I’m tired. You two are going to the Swopes’, aren’t you? That means three o’clock.”
“I’m not going,” said Kim. “Wait a minute, Ken.” She came over to Magnolia. “Mother, I just got a telegram.”
“Mama?” She uttered the word as though she were a little girl.
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
Kim indicated it. “There, Ken. Get it for me, will you? Under the make-up tray.”
“Dead?” Magnolia had not unfolded the yellow slip.
“Yes.”
She read it. She looked up. The last shadow had vanished of that mood in which she had entered ten minutes earlier. She looked, suddenly, sallow and sixty. “Let me see. Tennessee. Trains.”
“But not to-night, Mother!”
“Yes. Ken, there’s something to St. Louis—Memphis—I’m sure. And then from there to-morrow morning.”
“Ken will go with you.”
“No!” sharply. “No!”
She had her way in the end; left that night, and alone, over Kim’s protests and Ken’s. “If I need you, Ken dear, I’ll telegraph. All those people in the troupe, you know. Some of them have been with her for ten years—fifteen.”
All sorts of trains before you reached this remote little town. Little dusty red-plush trains with sociable brakemen and passengers whose clothes and bearing now seemed almost grotesque to the eyes that once had looked upon them without criticism. A long, hard, trying journey. Little towns at which you left this train and waited long hours for the next. Cinder-strewn junctions whose stations were little better than sheds.
Mile after mile the years had receded as New York was left behind. The sandy soil of the South. Little straggling villages. Unpainted weather-stained cabins, black as the faces that peered from their doorways. When Magnolia Ravenal caught the first gleam of April dogwood flashing white in the forest depths as the train bumbled by, her heart gave a great leap. In a curious and dream-like way the years of her life with Ravenal in Chicago, the years following Ravenal’s desertion of her there, the years of Magnolia’s sudden success in New York seemed to fade into unreality; they became unimportant fragmentary interludes. This was her life. She had never left it. They would be there—Julie, and Steve, and Windy, and Doc, and Parthy, and Andy, and Schultzy—somehow, they would be there. They were real. The others were dream people: Mike McDonald, Hankins, Hetty Chilson, all that raffish Chicago crew; the New York group—Kim’s gay, fly, brittle brilliant crowd with which Magnolia had always assumed an ease she did not feel.
She decided, sensibly, that she was tired, a little dazed, even. She had slept scarcely at all the night before. Perhaps this news of her mother’s death had been, after all, more of a shock than she thought. She would not pretend to be grief-stricken. The breach between her and the indomitable old woman had been a thing of many years’ standing, and it had grown wider and wider with the years following that day when, descending upon her daughter in Chicago, Mrs. Hawks had learned that the handsome dashing Gaylord Ravenal had flown. She had been unable to resist her triumphant, “What did I tell you!” It had been the last straw.
She had wondered, vaguely, what sort of conveyance she might hire to carry her to Cold Spring, for she knew no railroad passed through this little river town. But when she descended from the train at this, the last stage but one in her wearisome journey, there was a little group at the red brick station to meet her. A man came toward her (he turned out to be the Chas. K. Barnato of the telegram). He was the general manager and press agent. Doc’s old job, modernized. “How did you know me?” she had asked, and was startled when he replied:
“You look like your ma.” Then, before she could recover from this: “But Elly told me it was you.”
A rather amazing old lady came toward her. She looked like the ancient ruins of a bisque doll. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, her skin parchment, her hat incredible.
“Don’t you remember me, Nollie?” she said. And pouted her withered old lips. Then, as Magnolia stared, bewildered, she had chirped like an annoyed cockatoo, “Elly Chipley—Lenore La Verne.”
“But it isn’t possible!” Magnolia had cried.
This had appeared to annoy Miss Chipley afresh. “Why not, I’d like to know! I’ve been back with theCotton Blossomthe last ten years. Your ma advertised in theBillboardfor a general utility team. My husband answered the ad, giving his name——”
“Not——?”
“Schultzy? Oh, no, dearie. I buried poor Schultzy in Douglas, Wyoming, twenty-two years ago. Yes, indeed. Clyde!” She wheeled briskly. “Clyde!” The man came forward. He was, perhaps, fifty. Surely twenty years younger than the erstwhile ingénue lead. A sheepish, grizzled man whose mouth looked as if a drawstring had been pulled out of it, leaving it limp and sprawling. “Meet my husband, Mr. Clyde Mellhop. This is Nollie. Mrs. Ravenal, it is, ain’t it? Seems funny, you being married and got a famous daughter and all. Last time I saw you you was just a skinny little girl, dark-complected—— Well, your ma was hoity-toity with me when she seen it was me was the other half of the Mellhop General Utility Team. Wasn’t going to let me stay, would you believe it! Well, she was glad enough to have me, in the end.”
This, Magnolia realized, must be stopped. She met the understanding look of the man Barnato. He nodded. “I guess you must be pretty tuckered out, Mrs. Ravenal. Now, if you’ll just step over to the car there.” He indicated an important-looking closed car that stood at the far end of the station platform.
Gratefully Magnolia moved toward it. She was a little impressed with its appearance. “Your car! That was thoughtful of you. I was wondering how I’d get——”
“No, ma’am. That ain’t mine. I got a little car of my own, but this is your ma’s—that is—well, it’s yours, now, I reckon.” He helped her into the back seat with Elly. He seated himself before the wheel, with Mellhop beside him. He turned to her, solemnly. “I suppose you’d like to go right over to see your—to view the remains. She’s—they’re at Breitweiler’s Undertaking Parlours. I kind of tended to everything, like your son-in-law’s telegram said. I hope everything will suit you. Of course, if you’d like to go over to the hotel first. I took a room for you—best they had. It’s real comfortable. To-morrow morning we take her—we go to Thebes on the ten-fifteen——”
“The hotel!” cried Magnolia. “But I want to sleep on the boat to-night. I want to go back to the boat.”
“It’s a good three-quarters of an hour run from here, even in this car.”
“I know it. But I want to stay on the boat to-night.”
“It’s for you to say, ma’am.”
The main business street of the little town was bustling and prosperous-looking. Where, in her childhood river-town days the farm wagons and buggies had stood hitched at the curb, she now saw rows of automobiles parked, side by side. Five-and-Ten-Cent Stores. Motion Pictures. Piggly-Wiggly. Popular magazines in the drug-store window. She had thought that everything would be the same.
Breitweiler’s Undertaking Parlours. Quite a little throng outside; and within an actual crowd, close-packed. They made way respectfully for Barnato and his party. “What is it?” whispered Magnolia. “What are all these people here for? What has happened?”
“Your ma was quite a famous person in these parts, Mrs. Ravenal. Up and down the rivers and around she was quite a character. I’ve saved the pieces for you in the paper.”
“You don’t mean these people—all these people have come here to see——”
“Yes, ma’am. In state. I hope you don’t object, ma’am. I wouldn’t want to feel I’d done something you wouldn’t like.”
She felt a little faint. “I’d like them to go away now.”
Parthenia Ann Hawks in her best black silk. Her strong black eyebrows punctuated the implacable old face with a kind of surprised resentment. She had not succumbed to the Conqueror without a battle. Magnolia, gazing down upon the stern waxen features, the competent hands crossed in unwilling submission upon her breast, could read the message of revolt that was stamped, even in death, upon that strong and terrible brow. Here! I’m mistress of this craft. You can’t do this to me! I’m Parthenia Ann Hawks! Death? Fiddlesticks and nonsense! For others, perhaps. But not for me.
Presently they were driving swiftly out along the smooth asphalt road toward Cold Spring. Elly Chipley was telling her tale with relish, palpably for the hundredth time.
“. . . seven o’clock in the evening or maybe a few minutes past and her standing in front of the looking-glass in her room doing her hair. Clyde and me, we had the room next to hers, for’ard, the last few years, on account I used to do for her, little ways. Not that she was feeble or like that. But she needed somebody younger to do for her, now and then”—with the bridling self-consciousness of a girlish seventy, as compared to Parthy’s eighty and over. “Well, I was in the next room, and just thinking I’d better be making up for the evening show when I hear a funny sound, and then a voice I didn’t hardly recognize sort of squeaks, ‘Elly! A stroke!’ And then a crash.”
Magnolia was surprised to find herself weeping: not for grief; in almost unwilling admiration of this powerful mind and will that had recognized the Enemy even as he stole up on her and struck the blow from behind.
“There, there!” cooed Elly Chipley, pleased that her recital had at last moved this handsome silent woman to proper tears. “There, there!” She patted her hand. “Look, Nollie dear. There’s the boat. Seems funny not to see her lighted up for the show this time of night.”
Magnolia peered through the dusk, a kind of dread in her heart. Would this, too, be changed beyond recognition? A great white long craft docked at the water’s edge. Larger, yes. But much the same. In the gloom she could just make out the enormous letters painted in black against the white upper deck.