chance. He did not understand or like her Negro folk songs then, but he
did recognize the quality she possessed. And it was due to this
precociousness in him that Magnolia, a little more than a year later,
was singing American coon songs in the Masonic Roof bill, her name on
the programme with those of Cissie Loftus and Marshall Wilder and the
Four Cohans.
But now she stood up, the scarlet receding from her face, leaving it
paler than before. Silently she handed the husky singer his banjo; tried
to murmur a word of thanks; choked. She put on her hat, adjusted her
veil.
“Here, wait a minute, sister. No offense. I’ve seen ’em lighter’n you.
Your voice sounds like a—ain’t that the truth, Jo?” Actually
distressed, he appealed again to his unloquacious ally in the third row.
“Sure does,” agreed Jo.
The unfortunate hoarse-voiced man who had loaned her the banjo now
departed. He seemed to bear no rancour. Magnolia, seeing this, tried
again to smile on the theory that, if he could be game, then so, too,
could she. And this time, it was the real Magnolia Ravenal smile of
which the newspapers made much in the years to come. The ravishing
Ravenal smile, they said (someone having considered that alliterative
phrase rather neat).
Seeing it now the young showman exclaimed, without too much elegance,
“Lookit that, Jo!” Then, to Magnolia: “Listen, sister. You won’t get far
with those. Your songs are too much like church tunes, see? They’re for
a funeral, not a theaytre. And that’s a fact. But I like the way you got
of singing them. How about singing me a real coon song? You know. Hello,
Mah Baby! or something like that.”
“I don’t know any. These are the only songs I know.”
“Well, for——! Listen. You learn some real coon songs and come back,
see, in a week. Here. Try these over at home, see.” He selected some
song sheets from the accommodating piano top. She took them, numbly.
She was again in the cold moist winter street. Quite dark now. She
walked over to State Street and took a northbound car. The door of their
room on the third floor was locked, and when she had opened it she felt
that the room was empty. Not empty merely; deserted. Before she had
lighted the gas jet she had an icy feeling of desolation, of impending
and piled-up tragedy at the close of a day that already toppled with it.
Her gaze went straight to the dresser.
An envelope was there. Her name on it in Ravenal’s neat delicate hand.
Magnolia. Darling, I am going away for a few weeks . . . return when
your mother is gone . . . or send for you . . . six hundred dollars for
you on shelf under clock . . . Kim . . . convent . . . enough . . .
weeks . . . darling . . . love . . . best . . . always . . .
She never saw him again.
She must have been a little light-headed by this time, for certainly no
deserted wife in her right senses would have followed the course that
Magnolia Ravenal now took. She read the note again, her lips forming
some of the words aloud. She walked to the little painted shelf over the
wash stand. Six hundred. That was right. Six hundred. Perhaps this
really belonged to that woman, too. She couldn’t go there again. Even if
it did, she couldn’t go there again.
She left the room, the gas flaring. She hurried down Clark Street, going
a few blocks south. Into one of the pawnshops. That was nothing new. The
man actually greeted her by name. “Good-evening, Mrs. Ravenal. And what
can I do for you?”
“A banjo.”
“What?”
“I want to buy a banjo.”
She bargained for it, shrewdly. When she tendered a hundred-dollar bill
in payment the man’s face fell.
“Oh, now, Mrs. Ravenal, I gave you that special price because you——”
“I’ll go somewhere else.”
She got it. Hurried back with it. Into her room again. She had not even
locked the door. Five of the six one-hundred-dollar bills lay as she had
tossed them on the dresser. A little crazy, certainly. Years, years
afterward she actually could relate the fantastic demoniac events of
this day that had begun at four in the morning and ended almost twenty
hours later. It made a very good story, dramatic, humorous, tragic.
Kim’s crowd thought it was wonderful.
She took off her veil and hat and jacket. Her black hair lay in loose
limp ugly loops about her face. She opened one of the sheets of
music—Whose Black Baby Are You?—and propped it up against the centre
section of the old-fashioned dresser. She crossed her knees. Cradled the
banjo. One foot tapped the time rhythmically. An hour. Two hours.
A knock at the door. The landlady, twelve hours fustier than she had
been that morning. “It ain’t me, Mis’ Ravenal, but Downstairs says she
can’t sleep for the noise. She’s that sickly one. She says she pounded
but you didn’t——”
“I’ll stop. I didn’t hear her. I’m sorry.”
“For me you could go on all night.” The landlady leaned bulkily and
sociably against the door. “I’m crazy about music. I never knew you was
musical.”
“Oh, yes,” said Magnolia. “Very.”
XVIII
“I was educated,” began Kim Ravenal, studying her reflection in the
mirror, and deftly placing a dab of rouge on either ear lobe, “in
Chicago, by the dear Sisters there in St. Agatha’s Convent.”
She then had the grace to snigger, knowing well what the young
second-assistant dramatic critic would say to that. She was being
interviewed in her dressing room at the Booth between the second and
third acts of Needles and Pins. She had opened in this English comedy in
October. Now it was April. Her play before this had run a year. Her play
before that had run two years. Her play—well, there was nothing new to
be said in an interview with Kim Ravenal, no matter how young or how
dramatic the interviewer. There was, therefore, a touch of mischievous
malice in this trite statement of hers. She knew what the bright young
man would say in protest.
He said it. He said: “Oh, now, Pete’s sake, Miss Ravenal! Quit kidding.”
“But I was. I can’t help it. I was! Ask my mother. Ask my husband. Ask
anybody. Educated by the dear Sisters in the con——”
“Oh, I know it! So does everybody else who reads the papers. And you
know as well as I do that that educated-in-a-convent stuff is
rubber-stamp. It ceased to be readable publicity when Mrs. Siddons was a
gal. Now be reasonable. Kaufman wants a bright piece about you for the
Sunday page.”
“All right. You ask intelligent questions and I’ll answer them.” Kim
then leaned forward to peer intently at her own reflection in the
dressing-room mirror with its brilliant border of amber lights. She
reached for the rabbit’s foot and applied to her cheeks that nervous and
redundant film of rouge which means that the next curtain is four
minutes away.
He was a very cagey New York second-assistant dramatic critic, who did
not confine his talents to second-assistant dramatic criticism. The
pages of _Vanity Fair_ and _The New Yorker_ (locally known as the Fly
Papers) frequently accepted first (assistant dramatic) aid from his pen.
And, naturally, he had written one of those expressionistic plays so
daringly different that three intrepid managers had decided not to put
it on after all. Embittered, the second-assistant dramatic critic
threatened sardonically to get a production through the ruse of taking
up residence in Prague or Budapest, changing his name to Capek or Vajda,
and sending his manuscript back to New York as a foreign play for them
to fight over.
Though she had now known New York for many years, there were phases of
its theatrical life that still puzzled Kim’s mother, Magnolia Ravenal;
and this was one of them. “The critics all seem to write plays,” she
complained. “It makes the life of a successful actress like Kim so
complicated. And the actors and actresses all lecture on the Trend of
the Modern Drama at League Luncheons given at the Astor. I went to one
once, with Kim. Blue voile ladies from Englewood. In my day critics
criticized and actors acted.”
Her suave and gifted son-in-law, Kenneth Cameron, himself a producer of
plays of the more precious pattern (The Road to Sunrise, 1921; Jock o’
Dreams, 1924), teased her gently about this attitude of intolerance.
“Why, Nola! And you a famous stage mama! You ought to know that even Kim
occasionally has to do things for publicity.”
“In my _Cotton Blossom_ days we were more subtle. The band marched down
Main Street and played on the corner and Papa gave out handbills. That
was our publicity. I didn’t have to turn handsprings up the levee.”
There was little that the public did not know about Kim Ravenal. There
was nothing that the cagey young assistant critic did not know. He now
assumed a tone of deep bitterness.
“All right, my fine lady. I’ll go back and write a pattern piece.
Started in stock in Chicago. Went to New York National Theatre School.
Star pupil and Teacher’s Pet while there. Got a bit in—uh—Mufti,
wasn’t it?—and walked away with the play just like the aspiring young
actress in a bum short story. Born on a show boat in Kentucky and
Illinois and Missouri simultaneously—say, explain that to me some time,
will you?—hence name of Kim. Also mother was a show-boat actress and
later famous singer of coon—— Say, where is your mother these days,
anyway? Gosh, I think she’s grand! I’m stuck on her. She’s the burning
passion of my youth. No kidding. I don’t know. She’s got that kind of
haunted hungry et-up look, like Bernhardt or Duse or one of them. You’ve
got a little of it, yourself.”
“Oh, sir!” murmured Kim, gratefully.
“Cultivate it, is my advice. And when she smiles! . . . Boy! I work like
a dawg to get her to smile whenever I see her. She thinks I’m one of
those cut-ups. I’m really a professional suicide at heart, but I’d
wiggle my ears if it would win one of those slow, dazzling——”
“Listen! Who—or whom—are you interviewing, young man? Me or my mama?”
“She around?”
“No. She’s at the Shaw opening with Ken.”
“Well, then, you’ll do.”
“Just for that I think I’ll turn elegant on you and not grant any more
interviews. Maude Adams never did. Look at Mrs. Fiske! And Duse. Anyway,
interviews always sound so dumb when they appear in print. Dignified
silence is the thing. Mystery. Everybody knows too much about the stage,
nowadays.”
“Believe me, _I_ do!” said the young second-assistant dramatic critic,
in a tone of intense acerbity.
A neat little triple tap at the dressing-room door. “Curtain already!”
exclaimed Kim in a kind of panic. You would have thought this was her
first stage summons. Another hasty application with the rabbit’s foot.
A mulatto girl in black silk so crisp, and white batiste cap and apron
so correct that she might have doubled as stage and practical maid, now
opened the door outside which she had been discreetly stationed.
“Curtain, Blanche?”
“Half a minute more, Miss Ravenal. Telegram.” She handed a yellow
envelope to Kim.
As Kim read it there settled over her face the rigidity of shock, so
plain that the second-assistant dramatic critic almost was guilty of,
“No bad news, I hope?” But as though he had said it Kim Ravenal handed
him the slip of paper.
“They’ve misspelled it,” she said, irrelevantly. “It ought to be
Parthenia.”
He read:
Mrs. Parthna A. Hawks died suddenly eight o’clock before evening
show Cotton Blossom playing Cold Spring Tennessee advise
sympathy company.
Chas. K. Barnato.
“Hawks?”
“My grandmother.”
“I’m sorry.” Lamely. “Is there anything——”
“I haven’t seen her in years. She was very old—over eighty. I can’t
quite realize. She was famous on the rivers. A sort of legendary figure.
She owned and managed the _Cotton Blossom_. There was a curious kind of
feud between her and Mother and my father. She was really a pretty
terrible—I wonder—Mother——”
“Curtain, Miss Ravenal!”
She went swiftly toward the door.
“Can I do anything? Fetch your mother from the theatre?”
“She’ll be back here with Ken after the play. Half an hour. No use——”
He followed her as she went swiftly toward the door from which she made
her third-act entrance. “I don’t want to be offensive, Miss Ravenal. But
if there’s a story in this—your grandmother, I mean—eighty, you
know——”
Over her shoulder, in a whisper, “There is. See Ken.” She stood a
moment; seemed to set her whole figure; relaxed it then; vanished. You
heard her lovely but synthetic voice as the American wife of the English
husband in the opening lines of the third act:
“I’m so sick of soggy British breakfast. Devilled kidneys! Ugh! Who but
the English could face food so visceral at nine A. M.!”
She was thinking as she played the third act for the three hundredth
time that she must tuck the telegram under a cold cream jar or back of
her mirror as soon as she returned to her dressing room. What if
Magnolia should take it into her head to leave the Shaw play early and
find it there on her dressing table! She must tell her gently. Magnolia
never had learned to take telegrams calmly. They always threw her into a
panic. Ever since that one about Gaylord Ravenal’s death in San
Francisco. Gaylord Ravenal. A lovely name. What a tin-horn sport he must
have been. Charming though, probably.
Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain. Bows. Curtain.
She was back in her dressing room, had removed her make-up, was almost
dressed when Ken returned with her mother. She had made desperate haste,
aided expertly by her maid.
The two entered laughing, talking, bickering good-naturedly. Kim heard
her husband’s jejune plangent voice outside her dressing-room door.
“I’m going to tell your daughter on you, Nola! Yes, I am.”
“I don’t care. He started it.”
Kim looked round at them. Why need they be so horribly high-spirited
just to-night? It was like comedy relief in a clumsily written play, put
in to make the tragedy seem deeper. Still, this news was hardly tragic.
Yet her mother might——
For years, now, Kim Ravenal had shielded her mother; protected her;
spoiled her, Magnolia said, almost resentfully.
She stood now with her son-in-law in the cruel glare of the
dressing-room lights. Her face was animated, almost flushed. Her fine
head rose splendidly from the furred frame of her luxurious coat collar.
Her breast and throat were firm and creamy above the square-cut
décolletage of her black gown. Her brows looked the blacker and more
startling for the wing of white that crossed the black of her straight
thick hair. There was about this woman past middle age a breath-taking
vitality. Her distinguished young son-in-law appeared rather anæmic in
contrast.
“How was the play?” Kim asked, possibly in the hope of changing their
ebullient mood.
“Nice production,” said Cameron. “Lunt was flawless. Fontanne’s turned
just a shade cute on us. She’d better stop that. Shaw, revived, tastes a
little mouldy. Westley yelled. Simonson’s sets were—uh—meticulous I
think the word is. . . . And I want to inform you, my dear Mrs. C., that
your mama has been a very naughty girl.”
This would never do, thought Kim, her mind on the yellow envelope. She
put an arm about her mother. “Kiss me and I’ll forgive you,” she said.
“You don’t know what she’s done.”
“Whatever it is——”
“Woollcott started it, anyway,” protested Magnolia Ravenal, lighting her
cigarette. “I should think a man who’s dramatic critic of the New York
_World_ would have more consideration for the dignity of his——”
Cameron took up the story. “Our seats turned out to be next to his. Nola
sat between us. You know how she always clutches somebody’s hand during
the emotional scenes.”
“The last time I went to the theatre with Woollcott he said he’d slap my
hands hard if I ever again——” put in Magnolia. But Cameron once more
interrupted.
“Then in the second act she clutched him instead of me and he slapped
her hand——”
“And pinched——”
“And Nola gave him a sharp dig in the stomach, I’m afraid, with her
elbow, and there was quite a commotion. Mothers-in-law are a terrible
responsibility.”
“Mother _dear_! A first night of a Shaw revival at the National!”
“He started it. And anyway, you’ve brought me up wrong.”
There was about her suddenly a curious effect of weariness. It was as
though, until now, she had been acting, and had discarded her rôle. She
stood up. “Ken, if you’ll get me a taxi I’ll run along home. I’m tired.
You two are going to the Swopes’, aren’t you? That means three o’clock.”
“I’m not going,” said Kim. “Wait a minute, Ken.” She came over to
Magnolia. “Mother, I just got a telegram.”
“Mama?” She uttered the word as though she were a little girl.
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
Kim indicated it. “There, Ken. Get it for me, will you? Under the
make-up tray.”
“Dead?” Magnolia had not unfolded the yellow slip.
“Yes.”
She read it. She looked up. The last shadow had vanished of that mood in
which she had entered ten minutes earlier. She looked, suddenly, sallow
and sixty. “Let me see. Tennessee. Trains.”
“But not to-night, Mother!”
“Yes. Ken, there’s something to St. Louis—Memphis—I’m sure. And then
from there to-morrow morning.”
“Ken will go with you.”
“No!” sharply. “No!”
She had her way in the end; left that night, and alone, over Kim’s
protests and Ken’s. “If I need you, Ken dear, I’ll telegraph. All those
people in the troupe, you know. Some of them have been with her for ten
years—fifteen.”
All sorts of trains before you reached this remote little town. Little
dusty red-plush trains with sociable brakemen and passengers whose
clothes and bearing now seemed almost grotesque to the eyes that once
had looked upon them without criticism. A long, hard, trying journey.
Little towns at which you left this train and waited long hours for the
next. Cinder-strewn junctions whose stations were little better than
sheds.
Mile after mile the years had receded as New York was left behind. The
sandy soil of the South. Little straggling villages. Unpainted
weather-stained cabins, black as the faces that peered from their
doorways. When Magnolia Ravenal caught the first gleam of April dogwood
flashing white in the forest depths as the train bumbled by, her heart
gave a great leap. In a curious and dream-like way the years of her life
with Ravenal in Chicago, the years following Ravenal’s desertion of her
there, the years of Magnolia’s sudden success in New York seemed to fade
into unreality; they became unimportant fragmentary interludes. This was
her life. She had never left it. They would be there—Julie, and Steve,
and Windy, and Doc, and Parthy, and Andy, and Schultzy—somehow, they
would be there. They were real. The others were dream people: Mike
McDonald, Hankins, Hetty Chilson, all that raffish Chicago crew; the New
York group—Kim’s gay, fly, brittle brilliant crowd with which Magnolia
had always assumed an ease she did not feel.
She decided, sensibly, that she was tired, a little dazed, even. She had
slept scarcely at all the night before. Perhaps this news of her
mother’s death had been, after all, more of a shock than she thought.
She would not pretend to be grief-stricken. The breach between her and
the indomitable old woman had been a thing of many years’ standing, and
it had grown wider and wider with the years following that day when,
descending upon her daughter in Chicago, Mrs. Hawks had learned that the
handsome dashing Gaylord Ravenal had flown. She had been unable to
resist her triumphant, “What did I tell you!” It had been the last
straw.
She had wondered, vaguely, what sort of conveyance she might hire to
carry her to Cold Spring, for she knew no railroad passed through this
little river town. But when she descended from the train at this, the
last stage but one in her wearisome journey, there was a little group at
the red brick station to meet her. A man came toward her (he turned out
to be the Chas. K. Barnato of the telegram). He was the general manager
and press agent. Doc’s old job, modernized. “How did you know me?” she
had asked, and was startled when he replied:
“You look like your ma.” Then, before she could recover from this: “But
Elly told me it was you.”
A rather amazing old lady came toward her. She looked like the ancient
ruins of a bisque doll. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes bright, her skin
parchment, her hat incredible.
“Don’t you remember me, Nollie?” she said. And pouted her withered old
lips. Then, as Magnolia stared, bewildered, she had chirped like an
annoyed cockatoo, “Elly Chipley—Lenore La Verne.”
“But it isn’t possible!” Magnolia had cried.
This had appeared to annoy Miss Chipley afresh. “Why not, I’d like to
know! I’ve been back with the _Cotton Blossom_ the last ten years. Your
ma advertised in the _Billboard_ for a general utility team. My husband
answered the ad, giving his name——”
“Not——?”
“Schultzy? Oh, no, dearie. I buried poor Schultzy in Douglas, Wyoming,
twenty-two years ago. Yes, indeed. Clyde!” She wheeled briskly. “Clyde!”
The man came forward. He was, perhaps, fifty. Surely twenty years
younger than the erstwhile ingénue lead. A sheepish, grizzled man whose
mouth looked as if a drawstring had been pulled out of it, leaving it
limp and sprawling. “Meet my husband, Mr. Clyde Mellhop. This is Nollie.
Mrs. Ravenal, it is, ain’t it? Seems funny, you being married and got a
famous daughter and all. Last time I saw you you was just a skinny
little girl, dark-complected—— Well, your ma was hoity-toity with me
when she seen it was me was the other half of the Mellhop General
Utility Team. Wasn’t going to let me stay, would you believe it! Well,
she was glad enough to have me, in the end.”
This, Magnolia realized, must be stopped. She met the understanding look
of the man Barnato. He nodded. “I guess you must be pretty tuckered out,
Mrs. Ravenal. Now, if you’ll just step over to the car there.” He
indicated an important-looking closed car that stood at the far end of
the station platform.
Gratefully Magnolia moved toward it. She was a little impressed with its
appearance. “Your car! That was thoughtful of you. I was wondering how
I’d get——”
“No, ma’am. That ain’t mine. I got a little car of my own, but this is
your ma’s—that is—well, it’s yours, now, I reckon.” He helped her into
the back seat with Elly. He seated himself before the wheel, with
Mellhop beside him. He turned to her, solemnly. “I suppose you’d like to
go right over to see your—to view the remains. She’s—they’re at
Breitweiler’s Undertaking Parlours. I kind of tended to everything, like
your son-in-law’s telegram said. I hope everything will suit you. Of
course, if you’d like to go over to the hotel first. I took a room for
you—best they had. It’s real comfortable. To-morrow morning we take
her—we go to Thebes on the ten-fifteen——”
“The hotel!” cried Magnolia. “But I want to sleep on the boat to-night.
I want to go back to the boat.”
“It’s a good three-quarters of an hour run from here, even in this car.”
“I know it. But I want to stay on the boat to-night.”
“It’s for you to say, ma’am.”
The main business street of the little town was bustling and
prosperous-looking. Where, in her childhood river-town days the farm
wagons and buggies had stood hitched at the curb, she now saw rows of
automobiles parked, side by side. Five-and-Ten-Cent Stores. Motion
Pictures. Piggly-Wiggly. Popular magazines in the drug-store window. She
had thought that everything would be the same.
Breitweiler’s Undertaking Parlours. Quite a little throng outside; and
within an actual crowd, close-packed. They made way respectfully for
Barnato and his party. “What is it?” whispered Magnolia. “What are all
these people here for? What has happened?”
“Your ma was quite a famous person in these parts, Mrs. Ravenal. Up and
down the rivers and around she was quite a character. I’ve saved the
pieces for you in the paper.”
“You don’t mean these people—all these people have come here to
see——”
“Yes, ma’am. In state. I hope you don’t object, ma’am. I wouldn’t want
to feel I’d done something you wouldn’t like.”
She felt a little faint. “I’d like them to go away now.”
Parthenia Ann Hawks in her best black silk. Her strong black eyebrows
punctuated the implacable old face with a kind of surprised resentment.
She had not succumbed to the Conqueror without a battle. Magnolia,
gazing down upon the stern waxen features, the competent hands crossed
in unwilling submission upon her breast, could read the message of
revolt that was stamped, even in death, upon that strong and terrible
brow. Here! I’m mistress of this craft. You can’t do this to me! I’m
Parthenia Ann Hawks! Death? Fiddlesticks and nonsense! For others,
perhaps. But not for me.