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 the _Cotton Blossom_ had 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 Ravenal reverses, 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 the _Cotton 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 old _Cotton Blossom_ days 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 old _Creole Belle_ and 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 the _Cotton Blossom_ galley.
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 the _Cotton Blossom_ wives—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 the _Times-Herald_, the
_Inter-Ocean_, or the _Tribune_. 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.