the black coif seemed to be boring into her own eyes. “If you yourself
would rather not have her here with us we would prefer not to take her.”
“Oh, but I would! I do!” Magnolia cried hastily.
So it was arranged. Next week. Monday. Half a dozen woollen this. Half a
dozen cotton that.
Descending the great broad flight of outside steps Magnolia said, like a
child, “From now until Monday we’ll do things, shall we? Fun. What would
you like to do?”
“Oh, a matinée on Saturday——” began Kim eagerly. Magnolia was
enormously relieved. She had been afraid that this brief glimpse into
the more spiritual life might already have had a chastening effect upon
the cosmopolitan Kim.
Thus the child was removed from the pernicious atmosphere of the Chicago
Levee just when the Levee itself began to feel the chastening hand of
reform. Suddenly, overnight, Chicago went civic. For a quarter of a
century she had been a strident, ample-bosomed, loud-mouthed Rabelaisian
giantess in red satin and diamonds, who kept open house day and night
and welcomed all comers. There were food and drink and cheer. Her great
muscular arms embraced ranchers from Montana and farmers from Indiana
and bankers from New York. At Bath House John’s Workingmen’s Exchange
you got a tub of beer for a nickel; the stubble-faced bums lined the
curb outside his ceaselessly swinging door on Clark Street. The visiting
ranchers and farmers and bankers were told to go over to the Palmer
House and see the real silver dollars sunk in the tiled floor of that
hostelry’s barroom. The garrulous Coughlin, known as The Bath, and the
silent little Hinky Dink Mike Kenna were Chicago’s First Ward aldermen
and her favourite naughty sons. The roulette wheels in Gamblers’ Alley
spun merrily by day and by night. The Mayor of the city called a genial,
“Hope you’re all winning, boys!” as he dropped in for a sociable drink
and a look at the play; or even to take a hand. “What’ll you have?” was
Chicago’s greeting, and “Don’t care if I do,” her catch phrase. Hetty
Chilson was the recognized leader of her sinister world, and that this
world happened to be prefaced by the qualifying word, “under” made
little difference in Chicago’s eyes. Pawnshops, saloons, dives, and
gambling houses lined Clark Street from Twelfth to the river, and dotted
the near-by streets for blocks around. The wind-burned ranchmen in
bearskin coats and sombreros at Polk and Clark were as common a sight as
the suave white-fingered gentry in Prince Alberts and diamonds at Clark
and Madison. It was all one to Chicago. “Game upstairs, gentlemen! Game
upstairs!”
New York, eyeing her Western cousin through disapproving lorgnettes,
said, “What a crude and vulgar person!”
“Me!” blustered Chicago, dabbing futilely at the food and wine spots on
her broad satin bosom. “Me! I’ll learn you I’m a lady.”
The names of University of Chicago professors (Economics Department)
began to appear on the lists of aldermanic candidates. Earnest young men
and women with notebooks and fountain pens knocked at barred doors,
stated that they were occupied in compiling a Survey, and asked intimate
questions. Down came whole blocks of rats’ nests on Clark and Dearborn,
with the rats scuttling frantically to cover. Up went office buildings
that actually sneered down upon the Masonic Temple’s boasted height.
Brisk gentlemen in eyeglasses and sack suits whisked in and out of these
chaste edifices. The clicking sound to be heard on Clark Street was no
longer that of the roulette wheel but of the stock market ticker and the
Western Union transmitter.
It was rumoured that they were going to close Jeff Hankins’. They were
going to close Mike McDonald’s. They were going to banish the Washington
Park race track.
“They can’t do it,” declared Gaylord Ravenal.
“Oh, can’t we!” sneered the reformers. Snick-snack, went the bars on
Hankins’ doors and on Mike McDonald’s. It actually began to be difficult
to find an open game. It began to be well-nigh impossible. It came to
such a pass that you had to know the signal knock. You had to submit to
a silent scrutiny from unseen eyes peering through a slit somewhere
behind a bland closed door. The Prince Alberts grew shiny. The fine
linen showed frayed edges. The diamonds reposed unredeemed for longer
and longer periods at Lipman’s or Goldsmith’s. The Ravenal ring and the
succession of sealskin sacques seemed permanently to have passed out of
the Ravenal possession. The malacca stick, on the other hand, was now a
fixture. It had lost its magic. It was no longer a symbol of security.
The day was past when its appearance at Lipman’s or Goldsmith’s meant an
I O U for whatever sum Gay Ravenal’s messenger might demand. There
actually were mornings when even the Cockeyed Bakery represented luxury.
As for breakfast at Billy Boyle’s! An event.
The Ravenals’ past experience in Chicago seemed, in comparison with
their present precarious position, a secure and even humdrum existence.
Ohio and Ontario streets knew them for longer and longer periods. Now
when Magnolia looked into the motley assemblage of objects in the more
obscure pawnshop windows, she was likely to avert her eyes quickly at
recognition of some object not only intimate but familiar. Magnolia
thought of Kim, safe, secure, comfortable, in the convent on Wabash
Avenue.
“I must have felt this thing coming,” she said to Ravenal. “Felt it in
my bones. She’s out of all this. It makes me happy just to think of it;
to think of her there.”
“How’re you going to keep her there?” demanded Ravenal, gloomily. “I’m
strapped. You might as well know it, if you don’t already. I’ve had the
damnedest run of luck.”
Magnolia’s eyes grew wide with horror. “Keep her there! Gay! We’ve got
to. I wouldn’t have her knocking around here with us. Gay, can’t you do
something? Something real, I mean. Some kind of work like other—I mean,
you’re so wonderful. Aren’t there things—positions—you know—with
banks or—uh—those offices where they buy stocks and sell them and make
money in wheat and—wheat and things?” Lamely.
Ravenal kissed her. “What a darling you are, Nola. A darling simpleton.”
It was a curious and rather terrible thing, this love bond between them.
All that Parthy had grimly predicted had come to pass. Magnolia knew him
for what he was. Often she hated him. Often he hated her. Often he hated
her because she shamed him with her gaiety, her loyalty, her courage,
her tenderness. He was not true to her. She knew this now. He knew she
knew this. She was a one-man woman. Frequently they quarrelled
hideously. Tied to you. . . . Tied! God knows I’d be happier without
you. You’ve never brought me anything but misery. . . . Always finding
fault. . . . Put on those fine lady airs with me. What’d I take you out
of! . . . An honest living, anyway. Look people in the face.
Accusations. Bitterness. Longing. Passion. The long periods of living in
sordid surroundings made impossible most of the finer reticences.
Garments washed out in the basin. Food cooked over the gas jet. One
room. One bed. Badly balanced meals. Reproaches. Tears. Sneers.
Laughter. Understanding. Reconciliation.
They loved each other. Over and above and through and beneath it all,
thick and thin, warp and woof, they loved each other.
It was when their fortunes were at lowest ebb; when the convent tuition
had now been two terms unpaid; when the rent on the Ontario Street
lodgings was overdue; when even Ravenal, handsome and morose, was forced
to content himself with the coffee and rolls of the bedroom breakfast;
when a stroll up Clark Street meant meeting a dozen McLean suits as
shabby as his own—it was at this unpropitious time that Parthenia Ann
Hawks was seized with the idea of visiting her daughter, her son-in-law,
and her grandchild in Chicago. Her letters always came to the Sherman
House—had been called for there through these years though the
fluctuations of fortune had carried the Ravenals away from the hotel and
back again with a tide-like regularity. Twice Magnolia had taken Kim to
see her grim grandmamma at Thebes when the _Cotton Blossom_ was in for
repairs during the winter season. These visits had always been timed
when the Ravenal tide was high. Magnolia and Kim had come back to Thebes
on the crest of a wave foaming with silks and laces and plumes and furs.
The visits could not, however, be said to have been a success. Magnolia
always came prepared to be the fond and dutiful daughter. Invariably she
left seething between humorous rage and angry laughter.
“It wasn’t anything she actually did,” she would explain afterward,
ruefully, to Ravenal. “It’s just that she treats me with such
disrespect.” She pondered this a moment. “I honestly think Mama’s the
vainest woman I have ever met.”
Strangely enough, Kim and her grandmother did not get on very
satisfactorily, either. It dawned on Magnolia that the two were much
alike. Their methods were different, but the result was the same. Each
was possessed of an iron determination; boundless vitality; enormous
resistance; canny foresight; definite ambition. Parthy was the
blustering sort; Kim the quietly stubborn. When the two met in
opposition they stood braced, horn to horn, like bulls.
On both occasions these visits had terminated abruptly in less than a
week. The bare, wind-swept little town, winter-locked, had seemed
unspeakably dreary to Magnolia. In the chill parlour of the cottage
there was a wooden portrait of her father done in crayon. It was an
enlargement which Parthy had had done from a small photograph of Andy in
his blue coat and visored cap and baggy wrinkled pants. An atrocious
thing, but the artist, clumsy though he was, had somehow happened to
catch the alert and fun-loving brightness of the keen brown eyes. The
mutton-chop whiskers looked like tufts of dirty cotton; the cheeks were
pink as a chorus girl’s. But the eyes were Andy’s. Magnolia wandered
into the parlour to stand before this picture, looking up at it with a
smile. She wandered, too, down to the river to gaze at the sluggish
yellow flood thick now with ice, but as enthralling as ever to her. She
stood on the river bank in her rich furs, a lonely, wind-swept figure,
gazing down the river, down the river, and her eyes that had grown so
weary with looking always at great gray buildings and grim gray streets
and swarming gray crowds now lost their look of strain, of unrepose, as
they beheld in the far still distance the lazy Southern wharves, the
sleepy Southern bayous—Cairo, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, New
Orleans—Queenie, Jo, Elly, Schultzy, Andy, Julie, Steve.
She took Kim eagerly to the water’s edge—gave her the river with a
sweep of her arm. Kim did not like it.
“Is that the river?” she asked.
“Why, yes, darling. Don’t you remember! The river!”
“The river you told me about?”
“Of course!”
“It’s all dirty and ugly. You said it was beautiful.”
“Oh, Kim, isn’t it?”
“No.”
She showed her the picture of Captain Andy.
“Grampa?”
“Yes.”
“Cap’n?”
“Yes, dear. He used to laugh so when you called him that when you were a
little baby. Look at his eyes, Kim. Aren’t they nice? He’s laughing.”
“He’s funny-looking,” said Kim.
Parthy asked blunt questions. “Sherman House? What do you go living in a
hotel for all these years, with the way they charge for food and all!
You and that husband of yours must have money to throw away. Why don’t
you live in a house, with your own things, like civilized people?”
“Gay likes hotels.”
“Shiftless way to live. It must cost a mint of money.”
“It does,” agreed Magnolia, amiably.
“Like to know where you get it, that’s what.”
“Gay is very successful.”
A snort as maddening as it was expressive from Parthy. The widow Hawks
did not hesitate to catechize the child in the temporary absence of her
mother. From these sessions Parthy must have gained some knowledge of
the Ohio and Ontario street interludes, for she emerged from them with a
look of grim satisfaction.
And now Parthenia Ann Hawks was coming to Chicago. She had never seen
it. The letter announced her arrival as two weeks distant. The show-boat
season was at an end. She would stay at the Sherman House where they
were, if it wasn’t too expensive. They were not to pay. She wouldn’t be
beholden to any one. She might stay a week, she might stay two weeks or
longer, if she liked it. She wanted to see the Stockyards, the Grand
Opera House, the Masonic Temple, Marshall Field’s, Lincoln Park, and the
Chicago River.
“My God!” said Gaylord Ravenal, almost piously. “My GOD!”
Stricken, they looked at each other. Stared. It was a thing beyond
laughter. Every inch of space about them spelled failure. Just such
failure as had been predicted for them by the woman who was now coming,
and whose coming would prove to her the triumph of that prediction. They
were living in a huddle of discomfort on Ontario Street. Magnolia, on
her visits to Kim at the convent, was hard put to it to manage the
little surprise gift planned to bring to the girl’s face the flashing
look of gay expectancy. A Henrici cake elaborately iced, to share with
her intimates; a book; a pair of matinée tickets as a special treat;
flowers for the Mother Superior; chocolates. Now the Christmas holidays
were approaching. Kim would expect to spend them with her parents. But
where? They would not bring her to this sordid lodging. And somehow,
before the new term began, the unpaid tuition fee must be got together.
Still, the Ravenals had faced such problems as these before now. They
could have met them, they assured each other, as they always had. Luck
always turned when things looked blackest. Life did that to tease you.
But this was different. Gaylord Ravenal’s world was crumbling. And
Parthy! Parthy! Here was a situation fraught with what of horror! Here
was humiliation. Here was acknowledged defeat.
“Borrow,” suggested Magnolia.
“On what security?”
“I don’t mean that kind of—I don’t mean businesslike borrowing. I mean
borrowing from friends. Friends. All these men——”
“Men! What men?”
“The men at the—at the places.” She had always pretended that she did
not actually know he came by his livelihood as he did. She never said,
“Gamblers’ Alley.” She refused to admit that daily he had disappeared
within the narrow slit of lane that was really a Clark Street alley;
that he had spent the hours there watching bits of pasteboard for a
living. “The men you have known so many years.”
Grimly: “They’ve all been trying to borrow of me.”
“But Mike McDonald. Hankins. Varnell.” She cast pretense aside now.
“Thousands. They’ve had thousands of dollars. All the money we brought
with us to Chicago. Won’t they give some of it back?”
This he found engaging rather than irritating, as well he might have. He
shouted with laughter as he always did at a fresh proof of her almost
incredible naïveté. At times such as these he invariably would be
impelled to caress her much as one laughs at a child and then fondles it
delightedly after it has surprised one with an unexpected and charming
trick. He would kiss the back of her neck and then her wide, flexible
mouth, and she would push him away, bewildered and annoyed that this
should be his reaction to what she had meant so seriously.
“Nola, you’re priceless! You’re a darling. There’s no one like you.” He
went off again into a shout of laughter. “Give it back! McDonald, h’m?
There’s an idea for you.”
“How can you act like that when you know how serious it is!”
“Serious! Why, damn it, it’s desperate. I tell you I’ll never have her
come here and see us living like this. We’ll get out, first. . . . Say,
Nola, what’s to prevent us getting out, anyway? Chicago’s no good any
more. Why not get out of this! I’m sick of this town.”
“We haven’t any money to get out with, for one reason. And Kim’s at
school and she’s going to stay there. She’s going to stay there if I
have to——”
“Have to what?”
“Ask Mama for the money.” She said this mischievously, troubled though
she was. Out he flew into a rage.
“I’ll see her in—— I’ve been in deeper holes than this and managed to
crawl out.” He sat a moment in silence, staring with unseeing eyes at
the shabby sticks of furniture that emphasized the room’s dreariness.
Magnolia, seated as quietly opposite him, sewing on a petticoat for Kim,
suddenly let her hands sink in her lap. She realized, with a sort of
fright, that he was as completely outside the room as though his body
had been wafted magically through the window. And for him she, too, had
vanished. He was deep in thought. The mask was off. She sat looking at
him. She saw, clearly, the man her mother had so bitterly fought her
marrying. The face of this man now in his late thirties was singularly
unlined. Perhaps that was what you missed in it. The skin and hair and
eyes, the set of the shoulders, the lead of the hand from the wrist,
bespoke a virile man. But vigour—vigorous—no, he was not that. This
was a fencer, not a fighter. But he had fought for her, years ago. The
shambling preacher in the little river town whose name she had
forgotten. That simple ignorant soul who preached hell fire and thought
that play actors were damned. He had not expected to be knocked down in
his own musty little shop. Not much of a victory, that. Gay had opposed
that iron woman, her mother. But the soft life since then. Red plush,
rich food, Clark Street. Weak. What was it? No lines about the mouth.
Why was it weak? Why was it weak now if it had not been twelve years
ago? A handsome man. Hard. But you couldn’t be hard and weak at the same
time, could you? What was he thinking of so intently? His face was so
exposed, so defenceless, as sometimes when she awoke in the early
morning and looked at him, asleep. Almost ashamed to look at his face,
so naked was it of the customary daytime covering.
Now resolve suddenly tightened it. He stood up. He adjusted the smart
and shabby hat at an angle that defied its shabbiness. He reached for
the malacca stick. It was nine o’clock in the evening. They had had a
frugal and unappetizing meal at a little near-by lunch room. Ravenal had
eaten nothing. He had, for the most part, stared at the dishes with a
detached and slightly amused air as though they had been served him by
mistake and soon would be apologetically reclaimed by the slovenly
waitress who had placed them before him.
She had never been one to say, “Where are you going?” Yet now her face
was so moving in its appeal that he answered its unspoken question.
“Cheer up, old girl! I know somebody.”
“Who? Who, Gay?”
“Somebody I’ve done favours for. She owes me a good turn.” He was
thinking aloud.
“She?”
“Never mind.”
“She, Gay?”
“Did I say—now never mind, Nola. I’ll do the worrying.”
He was off.
She had become accustomed, through these years, to taking money without
question when there was money; to doing without, uncomplainingly, when
there was none. They had had to scheme before now, and scurry this way
and that, seeking a way out of a tight corner. They had had to borrow as
they had often lent. It had all been part of the Clark Street life—the
gay, wasteful, lax, improvident sporting life of a crude new Mid-west
city. But that life was vanishing now. That city was vanishing with it.
In its place a newer, harder, more sophisticated metropolis was rearing
its ambitious head.
Magnolia, inured to money crises, realized that the situation to-night
was different. This was not a crisis. It was an impasse.
“Let’s get out of here,” Gay had said. There was no way out.
The men from whom he had borrowed in the past were themselves
as harried as he. The sources from which he had gained his
precarious livelihood were drying up; had almost ceased to exist,
except furtively. I know somebody. Somebody who would like to do
me a favour. Somebody—who—would—like—— A horrid suspicion darted
through her mind, released from the subconscious. Appalled at its
ugliness, she tried to send it back to its hiding place. It would
not go. It stayed there before her mind’s eye, grinning, evil,
unspeakably repulsive. She took up her sewing again. She endeavoured
to fix her mind on Kim. Kim asleep in the cold calm quiet of the great
walled convent on South Wabash. French and embroidery and deportment
and china painting and wimples and black wings and long dark shining
halls and round white faces and slim white tapers and statues of the
saints that turned into fauns and why was that not surprising? A
clatter. One of the saints had dropped her rosary on the bare shining
floor. It wasn’t a rosary. It was an anchor ringing against the metal
stanchion of the _Cotton Blossom_.
Magnolia awoke. Her sewing scissors had fallen from her lap. Her face
felt stiff and drawn. She hugged herself a little, and shivered, and
looked about her. Her little gold watch on the dresser—no, of course
not. That was gone. She folded her sewing. It was late, she knew. She
was accustomed to being up until twelve, one, two. But this was later.
Something told her that this was later. The black hush of the city
outside. The feel of the room in which she sat. The sinister quiet of
the very walls about her. The cheap clock on the shelf had stopped. The
hands said twenty minutes after two. Twenty-one minutes after, she told
herself in a foolish triumph of precision.
She took down her fine long black hair. Brushed it. Plaited it. One of
the lacy nightgowns so absurd in the sordid shabbiness of the
rooming-house bedroom; so alien to the coarse gray sheets. She had no
other kind. She went to bed. She fell asleep.
It was just before dawn when he returned. The black of the window panes
showed the promise of gray. His step had an unaccustomed sound. He
fumbled for the gas jet. His very presence was strange in the dark. The
light flared blue, but she knew; she knew even before it illumined his
face that bore queer slack lines she had never before seen there. For
the first time in their life together Gaylord Ravenal was drunk.
She sat up; reached for her wrapper at the foot of the bed and bunched
it about her shivering shoulders. He was immensely serious and
dignified. He swayed a little. The slack look on his face. That was all.
“I’ll do the worrying,” he said, as though continuing the conversation
that had held them at nine o’clock. He placed the malacca stick
carefully in its corner. He removed his coat, keeping his hat on. The
effect was startlingly rowdy, perhaps because he had always so
meticulously observed the niceties. Standing thus, weaving back and
forth ever so slightly, he pulled from his left vest pocket, where it
fitted much too snugly, a plump bill-folder. Custom probably cautioned
him to retain this, merely widening its open side to reveal the sheaf of
notes within. But his condition, and all that had gone to bring it
about, caused him to forego his cunning. With a vague, but successful,
gesture, and a little lurch as he stood, he tossed the leather folder to
the counterpane. “Coun’ it!” he commanded, very distinctly. “Ten one
hun’er’ dollar bills and ten one hun’er’ dollar bills makes twen’y one
hun’er’ dollar bills an’ anybody says it doesn’ is a liar. Two thousan’
dollars. Would you kin’ly count ’em, Mrs. Rav’nal? I believe”—with
businesslike dignity—“I b’lieve you’ll find that correc’.”
Magnolia Ravenal in her nightgown with her wrapper hunched about her
shoulders sat staring at the little leather booklet on the bed. Its
gaping mouth mocked her. She did not touch it.
“Two thousand dollars?” she said.
“I b’lieve you’ll fin’ tha’s correc’.” He seemed to be growing less
distinct.
“Where did you get this, Gay?”
“Never min’. I’ll do th’ worrying.”
He unbuttoned his vest with some difficulty. Yawned prodigiously, like
one who has earned his rest after a good day’s work.
She looked at him. She was like a drawing in French ink—her face so
white, her eyes so enormous, her hair so black.
“You got this from Hetty Chilson.”