pointed toward the money. He seemed offended at something. Not angry,
but hurt. “How can you say that, M’nolia! I got one thousan’ from good
ol’ Het and not cen’ more. Wha’ do I do then! Marsh up to Sheedy’s and
win a thousan’ more at roulette. Ha! That’s a great joke on Sheedy
because, look, roulette isn’ my game. Nev’ has been. Faro’s my game.
Tha’s a gen’leman’s game, faro. One thousan’ Hetty, and marsh ri’ up
. . . roulette . . . win . . . ’nother . . . Thous. . .” He lurched to
the bed.
He was asleep at once, heavily, deeply, beside her on the bed, his fine
long head lolling off the pillow. She knelt in her place and tried to
lift the inert figure to a more comfortable position; succeeded,
finally, after some tugging. She drew the lumpy coverlet over him. Then
she sat as before, hunched in her nightgown and the wrapper, staring at
the open wallet with its many leaves. It was dawn now. The room was gray
with it. She ought to turn out the gas. She arose. She picked up the
wallet. Before extinguishing the light she counted out ten
one-hundred-dollar bills from the sheaf within the wallet. One thousand
dollars. Her fingers touched the bills gingerly, fastidiously, and a
little wrinkle of disgust curled her lip. She placed the bills on the
dresser. She folded the leather holder and tucked it, with its remaining
contents, under his pillow. He did not waken. She turned out the light
then, and coming back to the bedside drew on the slippers that lay on
the floor. She got her shirtwaist—a fresh white one with a Gibson
tuck—from the drawer, and her skirt and jacket from the hooks covered
over with a protecting length of calico against the wall. She heated a
little water, and washed; combed and dressed her hair; put on her
clothes, laid her hat on the dresser. Then she sat in the one
comfortable chair that the room afforded—a crazy and decayed armchair
done in dingy red plush, relic of some past grandeur—and waited. She
even slept a little there in the sagging old chair, with the morning
light glaring pitilessly in upon her face. When she awoke it must have
been nearly noon. A dour day, but she had grown accustomed to the
half-lights of the Chicago fogs. She glanced sharply at him. He had not
moved. He had not stirred. He looked, somehow, young, helpless,
innocent, pathetic. She busied herself in making a cup of coffee as
quietly as might be. This might rouse him, but it would make little
difference. She knew what she had to do. She drank the hot revivifying
liquid in great gulps. Then she put on her jacket, pinned on her hat,
took up the bills and placed them neatly in her handbag. She glanced at
herself in the mirror.
“My, you’re plain!” she thought, meaninglessly. She went down the dim
stairway. The fusty landlady was flapping a gray rag in the outer
doorway as her contribution to the grime of the street.
“What’s taking you out so bright and early, Mis’ Ravenal? Business or
pleasure?” She liked her little joke.
“Business,” said Magnolia.
XVII
The knell 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 the _Cotton 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.”
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.”