floated on it—animals and furniture and houses, even—and you were so
scared, and I was born, and you wanted to call me Mississippi, but you
were too sleepy or something to say it. And the place was near Kentucky
and Illinois and Missouri, all at once, so they made up a name from the
letters K and I and M, just till you could think of a real name. And you
never did. And it stayed Kim. . . . People laugh when I tell them my
name’s Kim. Other girls are named Ellen and Mary and Elizabeth. . . .
Tell me about that time on the Mississippi. And the Cotton Blossom
Floating Palace Theatre.”
“But you know all about it. You’ve just told me.”
“I like to hear you tell it.”
“Your father doesn’t like to have me talk so much about the rivers and
the show boat.”
“Why not?”
“He wasn’t very happy on them. I wasn’t, either, after Grandpa
Hawks——”
Kim knew that, too. She had heard her father say, “God’s sake, Nola,
don’t fill the kid’s head full of that stuff about the rivers and the
show boat. The way you tell it, it sounds romantic and idle and
picturesque.”
“Well, wasn’t——?”
“No. It was rotten and sordid and dull. Flies on the food and filthy
water to drink and yokels to play to. And that old harridan——”
“Gay!”
He would come over to her, kiss her tenderly, contritely. “Sorry,
darling.”
Kim knew that her mother had a strange deep feeling about the rivers.
The ugly wide muddy ruthless rushing rivers of the Middle West.
Kim Ravenal’s earliest river memories were bizarre and startling
flashes. One of these was of her mother seated in a straight-backed
chair on the upper deck of the _Cotton Blossom_, sewing spangles all
over a high-busted corset. It was a white webbed corset with a
pinched-in waist and high full bosom and flaring hips. This humdrum
garment Magnolia Ravenal was covering with shining silver spangles, one
overlapping the other so that the whole made a glittering basque. She
took quick sure stitches that jerked the fantastic garment in her lap,
and when she did this the sun caught the brilliant heap aslant and
turned it into a blaze of gold and orange and ice-blue and silver.
Kim was enchanted. Her mother was a fairy princess. It was nothing to
her that the spangle-covered basque, modestly eked out with tulle and
worn with astonishingly long skirts for a bareback rider, was to serve
as Magnolia’s costume in The Circus Clown’s Daughter.
Kim’s grandmother had scolded a good deal about that costume. But then,
she had scolded a good deal about everything. It was years before Kim
realized that all grandmothers were not like that. At three she thought
that scolding and grandmothers went together, like sulphur and molasses.
The same was true of fun and grandfathers, only they went together like
ice cream and cake. You called your grandmother grandma. You called your
grandfather Andy, or, if you felt very roguish, Cap’n. When you called
him that, he cackled and squealed, which was his way of laughing, and he
clawed his delightful whiskers this side and that. Kim would laugh then,
too, and look at him knowingly from under her long lashes. She had large
eyes, deep-set like her mother’s and her mother’s wide mobile mouth. For
the rest, she was much like her father—a Ravenal, he said. His
fastidious ways (highfalutin, her grandmother called them); his slim
hands and feet; his somewhat drawling speech, indirect though strangely
melting glance, calculatedly impulsive and winning manner.
Another childhood memory was that of a confused and terrible morning.
Asleep in her small bed in the room with her father and mother, she had
been wakened by a bump, followed by a lurch, a scream, shouts, bells,
clamour. Wrapped in her comforter, hastily snatched up from her bed by
her mother, she was carried to the deck in her mother’s arms. Gray dawn.
A misty morning with fog hanging an impenetrable curtain over the river,
the shore. The child was sleepy, bewildered. It was all one to her—the
confusion, the shouting, the fog, the bells. Close in her mother’s arms,
she did not in the least understand what had happened when the confusion
became pandemonium; the shouts rose to screams. Her grandfather’s high
squeaky voice that had been heard above the din—“La’berd lead there!
Sta’berd lead! Snatch her! _SNATCH HER!_” was heard no more. Something
more had happened. Someone was in the water, hidden by the fog, whirled
in the swift treacherous current. Kim was thrown on her bed like a
bundle of rags, all rolled in her blanket. She was left there, alone.
She had cried a little, from fright and bewilderment, but had soon
fallen asleep again. When she woke up her mother was bending over her,
so wild-eyed, so frightening with her black hair streaming about her
face and her face swollen and mottled with weeping, that Kim began to
cry again in sheer terror. Her mother had snatched her to her. Curiously
enough the words Magnolia Ravenal now whispered in a ghastly kind of
agony were the very words she had whispered after the agony of Kim’s
birth—though the child could not know that.
“The river!” Magnolia said, over and over. Gaylord Ravenal came to her,
flung an arm about her shoulder, but she shook him off wildly. “The
river! The river!”
Kim never saw her grandfather again. Because of the look it brought to
her mother’s face, she soon learned not to say, “Where’s Andy?” or—the
roguish question that had always made him appear, squealing with
delight: “Where’s Cap’n?”
Baby though she was, the years—three or four—just preceding her
grandfather’s tragic death were indelibly stamped on the infant’s mind.
He had adored her; made much of her. Andy, dead, was actually a more
vital figure than many another alive.
It had been a startling but nevertheless actual fact that Parthenia Ann
Hawks had not wanted her daughter Magnolia to have a child. Parthy’s
strange psychology had entered into this, of course—a pathological
twist. Of this she was quite unaware.
“How’re you going to play ingénue lead, I’d like to know, if you—when
you—while you——” She simply could not utter the word “pregnant” or
say, “while you are carrying your child,” or even the simpering evasion
of her type and class—“in the family way.”
Magnolia laughed a little at that. “I’ll play as long as I can. Toward
the end I’ll play ruffly parts. Then some night, probably between the
second and third acts—though they may have to hold the curtain for five
minutes or so—I’ll excuse myself——”
Mrs. Hawks declared that she had never heard anything so indelicate in
her life. “Besides, a show boat’s no place to bring up a child.”
“You brought me up on one.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hawks, grimly. Her tone added, “And now look at you!”
Even before Kim’s birth the antagonism between Parthy and her son-in-law
deepened to actual hatred. She treated him like a criminal; regarded
Magnolia’s quite normal condition as a reproach to him.
“Look here, Magnolia, I can’t stand this, you know. I’m so sick of this
old mud-scow and everything that goes with it.”
“Gay! Everything!”
“You know what I mean. Let’s get out of it. I’m no actor. I don’t belong
here. If I hadn’t happened to see you when you stepped out on deck that
day at New Orleans——”
“Are you sorry?”
“Darling! It’s the only luck I’ve ever had that lasted.”
She looked thoughtfully down at the clear colourful brilliance of the
diamond on her third finger. Always too large for her, it now hung so
loosely on her thin hand that she had been obliged to wind it with a
great pad of thread to keep it from dropping off, though hers were the
large-knuckled fingers of the generous and resourceful nature. It was to
see much of life, that ring.
She longed to say to him, “Where do you belong, Gay? Who are you? Don’t
tell me you’re a Ravenal. That isn’t a profession, is it? You can’t live
on that.”
But she knew it was useless. There was a strange deep streak of the
secretive in him; baffling, mystifying. Questioned, he would say
nothing. It was not a moody silence, or a resentful one. He simply would
not speak. She had learned not to ask.
“We can’t go away now, Gay dear. I can’t go. You don’t want to go
without me, do you? You wouldn’t leave me! Maybe next winter, after the
boat’s put up, we can go to St. Louis, or even New Orleans—that would
be nice, wouldn’t it? The winter in New Orleans.”
One of his silences.
He never had any money—that is, he never had it for long. It vanished.
He would have one hundred dollars. He would go ashore at some sizable
town and return with five hundred—a thousand. “Got into a little game
with some of the boys,” he would explain, cheerfully. And give her three
hundred of it, four hundred, five. “Buy yourself a dress, Nola.
Something rich, with a hat to match. You’re too pretty to wear those
homemade things you’re always messing with.”
Some woman wisdom in her told her to put by a portion of these sums. She
got into the habit of tucking away ten dollars, twenty, fifty. At times
she reproached herself for this; called it disloyal, sneaking,
underhand. When she heard him say, as he frequently did, “I’m strapped.
If I had fifty dollars I could turn a trick that would make five hundred
out of it. You haven’t got fifty, have you, Nola? No, of course not.”
She wanted then to give him every cent of her tiny hoard. It was the
tenuous strain of her mother in her, doubtless—the pale thread of the
Parthy in her make-up—that caused her to listen to an inner voice.
“Don’t do it,” whispered the voice, nudging her, “keep it. You’ll need
it badly by and by.”
It did not take many months for her to discover that her husband was a
gambler by profession—one of those smooth and plausible gentry with
whom years of river life had made her familiar. It was, after all, not
so much a discovery as a forced admission. She knew, but refused to
admit that she knew. Certainly no one could have been long in ignorance
with Mrs. Hawks in possession of the facts.
Ten days after Magnolia’s marriage to Ravenal (and what a ten days those
had been! Parthy alone crowded into them a lifetime of reproach), Mrs.
Hawks came to her husband, triumph in her mien, portent in her voice:
“Well, Hawks, I hope you’re satisfied now.” This was another of Parthy’s
favourite locutions. The implication was that the unfortunate whom she
addressed had howled heaven-high his demands for hideous misfortune and
would not be content until horror had piled upon horror. “I hope you’re
satisfied now, Hawks. Your son-in-law is a gambler, and no more. A
common barroom gambler, without a cent to his trousers longer’n it takes
to transfer his money from his pocket to the table. That’s what your
only daughter has married. Understand, I’m not saying he gambles, and
that’s all. I say he’s a gambler by calling. That’s the way he made his
living before he came aboard this boat. I wish he had died before he
ever set foot on the _Cotton Blossom_ gangplank, and so I tell you,
Hawks. A smooth-tongued, oily, good-for-nothing; no better than the scum
Elly ran off with.”
“Now, Parthy, what’s done’s done. Why’n’t you try to make the best of
things once in a while, instead of the worst? Magnolia’s happy with
him.”
“She ain’t lived her life out with him yet. Mark my words. He’s got a
roving eye for a petticoat.”
“Funny thing, Parthy. Your father was a man, and so’s your husband, and
your son-in-law’s another. Yet seems you never did get the hang of a
man’s ways.”
Andy liked Ravenal. There was about the fellow a grace, an ease, a
certain elegance that appealed to the æsthetic in the little Gallic
captain. When the two men talked together sometimes, after dinner, it
was amiably, in low tones, with an air of leisure and relaxation. Two
gentlemen enjoying each other’s company. There existed between the two a
sound respect and liking.
Certainly Ravenal’s vogue on the rivers was tremendous. Andy paid him as
juvenile lead a salary that was unheard of in show-boat records. But he
accounted him worth it. Shortly after Kim’s birth, Andy spoke of giving
Ravenal a share in the _Cotton Blossom_. But this Mrs. Hawks fought with
such actual ferocity that Andy temporarily at least relinquished the
idea.
Magnolia had learned to dread the idle winter months. During this annual
period of the _Cotton Blossom’s_ hibernation the Hawks family had,
before Magnolia’s marriage, gone back to the house near the river at
Thebes. Sometimes Andy had urged Parthy to spend these winter months in
the South, evading the harsh Illinois climate for a part of the time at
least in New Orleans, or one of the towns of southern Mississippi where
one might have roses instead of holly for Christmas. He sometimes envied
black Jo and Queenie their period of absence from the boat. In spite of
the disreputable state in which they annually returned to the _Cotton
Blossom_ in the early spring, they always looked as if they had spent
the intervening months seated in the dappled shade, under a vine, with
the drone of insects in the air, and the heavy scent of white-petalled
blossoms; eating fruit that dripped juice between their fingers;
sleeping, slack-jawed and heavily content, through the heat of the
Southern mid-afternoon; supping greasily and plentifully on fried
catfish and corn bread; watching the moon come up to the accompaniment
of Jo’s coaxing banjo.
“We ought to lazy around more, winters,” Andy said to his energetic
wife. She was, perhaps, setting the Thebes house to rights after their
long absence; thwacking pillows, pounding carpets, sloshing pails,
scouring tables, hanging fresh curtains, flapping drapes, banging bureau
drawers. A towel wrapped about her head, turban-wise, her skirts well
pinned up, she would throw a frenzy of energy into her already
exaggerated housewifeliness until Andy, stepping fearfully out of the
way of mop and broom and pail, would seek waterfront cronies for solace.
“Lazy! I’ve enough of lazying on that boat of yours month in month out
all summer long. No South for me, thank you. Eight months of flies and
niggers and dirty mud-tracking loafers is enough for me, Captain Hawks.
I’m thankful to get back for a few weeks where I can live like a decent
white woman.” Thwack! Thump! Bang!
After one trial lasting but a few days, the Thebes house was found by
Magnolia to be impossible for Gaylord Ravenal. That first winter after
their marriage they spent in various towns and cities. Memphis for a
short time; a rather hurried departure; St. Louis; Chicago. That brief
glimpse of Chicago terrified her, but she would not admit it. After all,
she told herself, as the astounding roar and din and jangle and clatter
of State Street and Wabash Avenue beat at her ears, this city was only
an urban Mississippi. The cobblestones were the river bed. The high grim
buildings the river banks. The men, women, horses, trucks, drays,
carriages, street cars that surged through those streets; creating new
channels where some obstacle blocked their progress; felling whole
sections of stone and brick and wood and sweeping over that section,
obliterating all trace of its former existence; lifting other huge
blocks and sweeping them bodily downstream to deposit them in a new
spot; making a boulevard out of what had been a mud swamp—all this,
Magnolia thought, was only the Mississippi in another form and
environment; ruthless, relentless, Gargantuan, terrible. One might think
to know its currents and channels ever so well, but once caught
unprepared in the maelstrom, one would be sucked down and devoured as
Captain Andy Hawks had been in that other turbid hungry flood.
“You’ll get used to it,” Ravenal told his bride, a trifle patronizingly,
as one who had this monster tamed and fawning. “Don’t be frightened.
It’s mostly noise.”
“I’m not frightened, really. It’s just the kind of noise that I’m not
used to. The rivers, you know, all these years—so quiet. At night and
in the morning.”
That winter she lived the life of a gambler’s wife. Streak o’ lean,
streak o’ fat. Turtle soup and terrapin at the Palmer House to-day. Ham
and eggs in some obscure eating house to-morrow. They rose at noon. They
never retired until the morning hours. Gay seemed to know a great many
people, but to his wife he presented few of these.
“Business acquaintance,” he would say. “You wouldn’t care for him.”
Hers had been a fantastic enough life on the show boat. But always there
had been about it an orderliness, a routine, due, perhaps, to the
presence of the martinet, Parthenia Ann Hawks. Indolent as the days
appeared on the rivers, they still bore a methodical aspect. Breakfast
at nine. Rehearsal. Parade. Dinner at four. Make-up. Curtain. Wardrobe
to mend or refurbish; parts to study; new songs to learn for the
concert. But this new existence seemed to have no plot or plan. Ravenal
was a being for the most part unlike the lover and husband of _Cotton
Blossom_ days. Expansive and secretive by turn; now high-spirited, now
depressed; frequently absent-minded. His manner toward her was always
tender, courteous, thoughtful. He loved her as deeply as he was capable
of loving. She knew that. She had to tell herself all this one evening
when she sat in their hotel room, dressed and waiting for him to take
her to dinner and to the theatre. They were going to McVicker’s Theatre,
the handsome new auditorium that had risen out of the ashes of the old
(to quote the owner’s florid announcement). Ravenal was startled to
learn how little Magnolia knew of the great names of the stage. He had
told her something of the history of McVicker’s, in an expansive burst
of pride in Chicago. He seemed to have a definite feeling about this
great uncouth giant of a city.
“When you go to McVicker’s,” Ravenal said, “you are in the theatre where
Booth has played, and Sothern, and Lotta, and Kean, and Mrs. Siddons.”
“Who,” asked Magnolia, “are they?”
He was so much in love that he found this ignorance of her own calling
actually delightful. He laughed, of course, but kissed her when she
pouted a little, and explained to her what these names meant, investing
them with all the glamour and romance that the theatre—the theatre of
sophistication, that is—had for him; for he had the gambler’s love of
the play. It must have been something of that which had held him so long
to the _Cotton Blossom_. Perhaps, after all, his infatuation for
Magnolia alone could not have done it.
And now she was going to McVicker’s. And she had on her dress with the
open-throated basque, which she considered rather daring, though now
that she was a married woman it was all right. She was dressed long
before the time when she might expect him back. She had put out fresh
linen for him. He was most fastidious about his dress. Accustomed to the
sloppy deshabille of the show boat’s male troupers, this sartorial
niceness in Ravenal had impressed her from the first.
She regarded herself in the mirror now. She knew she was not beautiful.
She affected, in fact, to despise her looks; bemoaned her high forehead
and prominent cheek-bones, her large-knuckled fingers, her slenderness,
her wide mouth. Yet she did not quite believe these things she said
about herself; loved to hear Ravenal say she was beautiful. As she
looked at her reflection now in the long gilt-framed mirror of the heavy
sombre walnut bedroom, she found herself secretly agreeing with him.
This was the first year of her marriage. She was pregnant. It was
December. The child was expected in April. There was nothing distorted
about her figure or her face. As is infrequently the case, her condition
had given her an almost uncanny radiance of aspect. Her usually pallid
skin showed a delicious glow of rosy colouring; her eyes were enormous
and strangely luminous; tiny blue veins were faintly, exquisitely etched
against the cream tint of her temples; her rather angular slimness was
replaced by a delicate roundness; she bore herself well, her shoulders
back, her head high. A happy woman, beloved, and in love.
Six o’clock. A little late, but he would be here at any moment now.
Half-past six. She was opening the door every five minutes to peer up
the red-carpeted corridor. Seven. Impatience had given way to fear, fear
to terror, terror to certain agony. He was dead. He had been killed. She
knew by now that he frequented the well-known resorts of the city, that
he played cards in them. “Just for pastime,” he told her. “Game of cards
to while away the afternoon. What’s the harm in that? Now, Nola! Don’t
look like your mother. Please!”
She knew about them. Red plush and gilt, mahogany and mirrors. Food and
drink. River-front saloons and river-front life had long ago taught her
not to be squeamish. She was not a foolish woman, nor an intolerant. She
was, in fact, in many ways wise beyond her years. But this was 1888. The
papers had been full of the shooting of Simeon Peake, the gambler, in
Jeff Hankins’ place over on Clark Street. The bullet had been meant for
someone else—a well-known newspaper publisher, in fact. But a woman,
hysterical, crazed, revengeful, had fired it. It had gone astray.
Ravenal had known Simeon Peake. The shooting had been a shock to him. It
had, indeed, thrown him so much off his guard that he had talked to
Magnolia about it for relief. Peake had had a young daughter Selina. She
was left practically penniless.
Now the memory of this affair came rushing back to her. She was frantic.
Half-past seven. It was too late, now, for the dinner they had planned
for the gala evening—dinner at the Wellington Hotel, down in the white
marble café. The Wellington was just across the street from McVicker’s.
It would make everything simple and easy; no rush, no hurrying over that
last delightful sweet sip of coffee.
Eight o’clock. He had been killed. She no longer merely opened the door
to peer into the corridor. She left the room door open and paced from
room to hall, from hall to room, wildly; down the corridor. Finally, in
desperation, down to the hotel lobby into which she had never stepped in
the evening without her husband. There were two clerks at the office
desk. One was an ancient man, flabby and wattled, as much a part of the
hotel as the stones that paved the lobby. He had soft wisps of sparse
white hair that seemed to float just above his head instead of being
attached to it; and little tufts of beard, like bits of cotton stuck on
his cheeks. He looked like an old baby. The other was a glittering young
man; his hair glittered, his eyes, his teeth, his nails, his
shirt-front, his cuffs. Both these men knew Ravenal; had greeted him on
their arrival; had bowed impressively to her. The young man had looked
flattering things; the old man had pursed his soft withered lips.
Magnolia glanced from one to the other. There were people at the clerks’
desk, leaning against the marble slab. She waited, nervous, uncertain.
She would speak to the old man. She did not want, somehow, to appeal to
the glittering one. But he saw her, smiled, left the man to whom he was
talking, came toward her. Quickly she touched the sleeve of the old
man—leaned forward over the marble to do it—jerked his sleeve, really,
so that he glanced up at her testily.
“I—I want—may I speak to you?”
“A moment, madam. I shall be free in a moment.”
The sparkler leaned toward her. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Ravenal?”
“I just wanted to speak to this gentleman——”
“But I can assist you, I’m sure, as well as——”
She glanced at him and he was a row of teeth, all white and even, ready
to bite. She shook her head miserably; glanced appealingly at the old
man. The sparkler’s eyebrows came up. He gave the effect of stepping
back, courteously, without actually doing so. Now that the old clerk
faced her, questioningly, she almost regretted her choice.
She blushed, stammered; her voice was little more than a whisper. “I
. . . my husband . . . have been . . . he hasn’t returned . . . worried
. . . killed or . . . theatre . . .”
The old baby cupped one hand behind his ear. “What say?”
Her beautiful eyes, in their agony, begged the sparkler now to forgive
her for having been rude. She needed him. She could not shout this. He
stepped forward, but the teeth were hidden. After all, a chief clerk is
a chief clerk. Miraculously, he had heard the whisper.
“You say your husband——?”
She nodded. She was terribly afraid that she was going to cry. She
opened her eyes very wide and tried not to blink. If she so much as
moved her lids she knew the mist that was making everything swim in a
rainbow haze would crystallize into tears.
“He is terribly late. I—I’ve been so worried. We were going to the—to
McVicker’s—and dinner—and now it’s after seven——”
“After eight,” wheezed cotton whiskers, peering at the clock on the
wall.