toward Cold Spring. Elly Chipley was telling her tale with relish,
palpably for the hundredth time.
“. . . seven o’clock in the evening or maybe a few minutes past and her
standing in front of the looking-glass in her room doing her hair. Clyde
and me, we had the room next to hers, for’ard, the last few years, on
account I used to do for her, little ways. Not that she was feeble or
like that. But she needed somebody younger to do for her, now and
then”—with the bridling self-consciousness of a girlish seventy, as
compared to Parthy’s eighty and over. “Well, I was in the next room, and
just thinking I’d better be making up for the evening show when I hear a
funny sound, and then a voice I didn’t hardly recognize sort of squeaks,
‘Elly! A stroke!’ And then a crash.”
Magnolia was surprised to find herself weeping: not for grief; in almost
unwilling admiration of this powerful mind and will that had recognized
the Enemy even as he stole up on her and struck the blow from behind.
“There, there!” cooed Elly Chipley, pleased that her recital had at last
moved this handsome silent woman to proper tears. “There, there!” She
patted her hand. “Look, Nollie dear. There’s the boat. Seems funny not
to see her lighted up for the show this time of night.”
Magnolia peered through the dusk, a kind of dread in her heart. Would
this, too, be changed beyond recognition? A great white long craft
docked at the water’s edge. Larger, yes. But much the same. In the gloom
she could just make out the enormous letters painted in black against
the white upper deck.
COTTON BLOSSOM FLOATING PALACE THEATRE
Parthenia Ann Hawks, Prop.
And there was the River. It was high with the April rains and the snows
that nourished it from all the hundreds of miles of its vast domain—the
Mississippi Basin.
Vaguely she heard Barnato—“Just started out and promised to be the
biggest paying season we had for years. Yessir! Crops what they were
last fall, and the country so prosperous. . . . Course, we don’t aim to
bother you with such details now. . . . Troupe wondering—ain’t no
more’n natural—what’s to become of ’em now. . . . Finest show boat on
the rivers. . . . Our own electric power plant. . . . Ice machine. . . .
Seats fifteen hundred, easy. . . .”
And there was the River. Broad, yellow, turbulent. Magnolia was
trembling. Down the embankment, across the gangplank, to the lower
forward deck that was like a comfortable front porch. The bright
semi-circle of the little ticket window. A little group of Negro
loungers and dock-hands making way respectfully, gently for the white
folks. The sound of a banjo tinkling somewhere ashore, or perhaps on an
old side-wheeler docked a short distance downstream. A playbill in the
lobby. She stared at it. Tempest and Sunshine. The letters began to go
oddly askew. A voice, far away—“Look out! She’s going to faint!”
A tremendous effort. “No, I’m not. I’m—all right. I don’t think I’ve
eaten anything since early morning.”
She was up in the bedroom. Dimity curtains at the windows, fresh and
crisp. Clean. Shining. Orderly. Quiet. “Now you just get into bed. A
hot-water bag. We’ll fix you a tray and a good cup of tea. To-morrow
morning you’ll be feeling fine again. We got to get an early start.”
She ate, gratefully. Anything I can do for you now, Nollie? No, nothing,
thanks. Well, I’m kind of beat, myself. It’s been a day, I can tell you.
Good-night. Good-night. Now I’ll leave my door open, so’s if you call
me——
Nine o’clock. Ten. The hoarse hoot of a boat whistle. The clank of
anchor chains. Swish. Swash. Fainter. Cluck-suck against the hull.
Quieter. More quiet. Quiet. Black velvet. The River. Home.
XIX
Kim Ravenal’s tenth letter to her mother was the decisive one. It
arrived late in May, when the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre was
playing Lulu, Mississippi. From where the show boat lay just below the
landing there was little enough to indicate that a town was situated
near by. Lulu, Mississippi, in May, was humid and drowsy and dusty and
fly-ridden. The Negroes lolled in the shade of their cabins and loafed
at the water’s edge. Thick-petalled white flowers amidst glossy dark
green foliage filled the air with a drugging sweetness, and
scarlet-petalled flowers stuck their wicked yellow tongues out at the
passer-by.
Magnolia, on the _Cotton Blossom_ upper deck that was like a cosy
veranda, sat half in the shade and half in the sun and let the moist
heat envelop her. The little nervous lines that New York had etched
about her eyes and mouth seemed to vanish magically under the languorous
touch of the saturant Southern air. She was again like the lovely creamy
blossom for which she had been named; a little drooping, perhaps; a
little faded; but Magnolia.
Elly Chipley, setting to rights her privileged bedroom on the boat’s
port side, came to the screen door in cotton morning frock and boudoir
cap. The frock was a gay gingham of girlish cut, its colour a delicate
pink. The cap was a trifle of lace and ribbon. From this frame her
withered life-scarred old mask looked out, almost fascinating in its
grotesquerie.
“Beats me how you can sit out there in the heat like a lizard or a cat
or something and not get a stroke. Will, too, one these fine days.”
Magnolia, glancing up from the perusal of her letter, stretched her arms
above her head luxuriously. “I love it.”
Elly Chipley’s sharp old eyes snapped at the typewritten sheets of the
letter in Magnolia’s hand. “Heard from your daughter again, did you?”
“Yes.”
“I never seen anybody such a hand at writing letters. You got one about
every stand since you started with the boat, seems. I was saying to
Clyde only yesterday, I says, what’s she find to write about!”
This, Magnolia knew, was not a mere figure of speech. In some mysterious
way the knowledge had seeped through the _Cotton Blossom_ company that
in these frequent letters between mother and daughter a battle was being
waged. They sensed, too, that in the outcome of this battle lay their
own future.
The erstwhile ingénue now assumed an elaborate carelessness of manner
which, to the doubting onlooker, would forever have decided the question
of her dramatic ability. “What’s she got to say, h’m? What——” here she
giggled in shrill falsetto appreciation of her own wit—“what news on
the Rialto?”
Magnolia glanced down again at the letter. “I think Kim may come down
for a few days to visit us, in June. With her husband.”
The ribbons of Elly’s cap trembled. The little withered well-kept hand
in which she still took such pride went to her lips that were working
nervously. “You don’t say! Well, that’ll be nice.” After which triumph
of simulated casualness you heard her incautious steps clattering down
the stairs and up the aisle to the lesser dressing rooms and bedrooms at
the rear of the stage.
Magnolia picked up the letter again. Kim hated to write letters. The
number that she had written her mother in the past month testified her
perturbation.
Nola darling, you’ve just gone gaga, that’s all. What do you
mean by staying down there in that wretched malarial heat! Now
listen to me. We close June first. They plan to open in Boston
in September, then Philadelphia, Chicago. My contract, of
course, doesn’t call for the road. Cruger offered me an increase
and a house percentage if I’d go when the road season opens, but
you know how I hate touring. You’re the trouper of this family.
Besides, I wouldn’t leave Andy. He misses you as much as Ken and
I do. If he could talk, he would demand his grandmother’s
immediate presence. If you aren’t in New York by June third I
shall come and get you. I mean this. Ken and I sail on the
_Olympic_ June tenth. There’s a play in London that Cruger wants
me to see for next season. You know. Casualty. We’ll go to
Paris, Vienna, Budapest, and back August first. Come along or
stay in the country with Andy. Nate Fried says he’ll settle up
your business affairs if that’s what’s bothering you. What is
there to do except sell the old tub or give it away or
something, and take the next train for New York? Your bookings
say Lazare, Mississippi, June fourth, fifth and sixth. Nate
looked it up and reports it’s twenty miles from a railroad. Now,
Nola, that’s just too mad. Come on home.
Kim.
The hand that held the letter dropped to her lap again. Magnolia lay
relaxed in the low deck chair and surveyed through half-closed lids the
turgid, swift-flowing stream that led on to Louisiana and the sea. Above
the clay banks that rose from the river lay the scrubby little
settlement shimmering in the noonday heat. A mule team toiled along the
river road drawing a decrepit cart on whose sagging seat a Negro sat
slumped, the rope lines slack in his listless hands, his body swaying
with the motion of the vehicle. From the cook’s galley, aft, came the
yee-yah-yah-yah of Negro laughter. Then a sudden crash of piano, drum,
horn, and cymbals. The band was rehearsing. The porcine squeal and bleat
and grunt of the saxophone. Mississippi Blues they were playing. Ort
Hanley, of the Character Team, sang it in the concert after the show. I
got the blues. I said the blues. I got the M-i-s-, I said the s-i-s, I
said the s-i-pp-i, Mississippi, I got them Miss-is-_sippi_
_blu_-hoo-hoos.
The heat and the music and the laughter and the squeak of the mule cart
up the road blended and made a colourful background against which the
woman in the chair viewed the procession of the last twenty-five years.
It had turned out well enough. She had gone on, blindly, and it had
turned out well enough. Kim. Kim was different. Nothing blind about Kim.
She had emerged from the cloistral calm of the Chicago convent with her
competent mind quite made up. I am going to be an actress. Oh, no, Kim!
Not you! But Kim had gone about it as she went about everything.
Clear-headed. Thoughtful. Deliberate. But actresses were not made in
this way, Magnolia argued. Oh, yes, they were. Five years in stock on
Chicago’s North Side. A tiny part in musical comedy. Kim decided that
she knew nothing. She would go to the National Theatre School of Acting
in New York and start all over again. Magnolia’s vaudeville days were
drawing to an end. A middle-aged woman, still able to hold her audience,
still possessing a haunting kind of melancholy beauty. But more than
this was needed to hold one’s head above the roaring tide of ragtime
jazz-time youngsters surging now toward the footlights. She had known
what it was to be a headliner, but she had never commanded the fantastic
figures of the more spectacular acts. She had been thrifty, though, and
canny. She easily saw Kim through the National Theatre School. The idea
of Kim in a school of acting struck her as being absurd, though Kim
gravely explained to her its uses. Finally she took a tiny apartment in
New York so that she and Kim might have a home together. Kim worked
slavishly, ferociously. The idea of the school did not amuse Magnolia as
much as it had at first.
Fencing lessons. Gymnastic dancing. Interpretive dancing. Singing
lessons. Voice placing. French lessons.
“Are you studying to be an acrobat or a singer or a dancer? I can’t make
it out.”
“Now, Nola, don’t be an old-fashioned frumpy darling. Spend a day at the
school and you’ll know what I’m getting at.”
The dancing class. A big bright bare room. A phonograph. Ten girls
bare-legged, barefooted, dressed in wisps. A sturdy, bare-legged woman
teacher in a hard-worked green chiffon wisp. They stood in a circle,
perhaps five feet apart, and jumped on one foot and swung the other leg
behind them, and kept this up, alternating right leg and left, for ten
minutes. It looked ridiculously simple. Magnolia tried it when she got
home and found she couldn’t do it at all. Bar work. Make a straight line
of that leg. Back! Back! Stretch! Stretch! Stretch! Some of it was too
precious. The girls in line formation and the green chiffon person
facing them, saying, idiotically, and suiting actions to words:
“Reach down into the valley! Gather handfuls of mist. Up, up, facing the
sun! Oh, how lovely!”
The Voice class. The Instructor, wearing a hat with an imposing façade
and clanking with plaques of arts-and-crafts jewellery, resembled, as
she sat at her table fronting the seated semi-circle of young men and
women, the chairman of a woman’s club during the business session of a
committee meeting.
Her voice was “placed.” Magnolia, listening and beholding, would not
have been surprised to see her remove her voice, an entity, from her
throat and hold it up for inspection. It was a thing so artificial, so
studied, so manufactured. She articulated carefully and with great
elegance.
“I don’t need to go into the wide-open throat to-day. We will start with
the jaw exercises. Down! To the side! Side! Rotate!”
With immense gravity and earnestness twelve young men and women took
hold of their respective jaws and pulled these down; from side to side;
around. They showed no embarrassment.
“Now then! The sound of _b_. Bub-ub-ub-ub. _They bribed Bob with a bib._
Sound of _t_. _It isn’t a bit hot._ Sound of _d_. _Dad did the deed._
Sound of _n_. _None of the nine nuns came at noon._”
Singly and en masse they disposed of Bob and Dad and the nine nuns.
Pharynx resonance. Say, “Clear and free, Miss Ravenal.” Miss Ravenal
said clear-and-free, distinctly. No, no, no! Not clear-and-free, but
clear—and free. Do you see what I mean? Good. Now take it again. Miss
Ravenal took it again. Clear—and free. _That’s_ better.
Now then. Words that differ in the _wh_ sound. Mr. Karel, let us hear
your list. Mr. Karel obliges. Whether-weather, when-wen, whinny-winnow,
whither-wither; why do you spell it with a y?
Miss Rogers, _l_ sounds. Miss Rogers, enormously solemn (fated for Lady
Macbeth at the lightest)—level, loyal, lull, lily, lentil, love, lust,
liberty, boil, coral——
Now then! The nerve vitalizing breath! We’ll all stand. Hold the breath.
Stretch out arms. Arms in—and IN—AND IN—out—in—head up—mouth
open——
Shades of Modjeska, Duse, Rachel, Mrs. Siddons, Bernhardt! Was this the
way an actress was made!
“You wait and see,” said Kim, grimly. Dancing, singing, fencing, voice,
French. One year. Two. Three. Magnolia had waited, and she had seen.
Kim had had none of those preliminary hardships and terrors and
temptations, then, that are supposed to beset the path of the attractive
young woman who would travel the road to theatrical achievement. Her
success actually had been instantaneous and sustained. She had been
given the part of the daughter of a worldly mother in a new piece by
Ford Salter and had taken the play away from the star who did the
mother. Her performance had been clear-cut, modern, deft, convincing.
She was fresh, but finished.
She was intelligent, successful, workmanlike, intuitive, vigorous,
adaptable. She was almost the first of this new crop of intelligent,
successful, deft, workmanlike, intuitive, vigorous, adaptable young
women of the theatre. There was about her—or them—nothing of genius,
of greatness, of the divine fire. But the dramatic critics of the
younger school who were too late to have seen past genius in its heyday
and for whom the theatrical genius of their day was yet to come, viewed
her performance and waxed hysterical, mistaking talent and intelligence
and hard work and ambition for something more rare. It became the thing
to proclaim each smart young woman the Duse of her day if she had a
decent feeling for stage tempo, could sustain a character throughout
three acts, speak the English language intelligibly, cross a stage or
sit in a chair naturally. By the time Kim had been five years out of the
National Theatre School there were Duses by the dozen, and a Broadway
Bernhardt was born at least once a season.
These gave, invariably, what is known as a fine performance. As you
stood in the lobby between the acts, smoking your cigarette, you said,
“She’s giving a fine performance.”
“A fine performance!” Magnolia echoed one evening, rather irritably,
after she and Kim had returned from the opening of a play in which one
of Kim’s friends was featured. “But she doesn’t act. Everything she did
and everything she said was right. And I was as carried out of myself as
though I were listening to a clock strike. When I go to the theatre I
want to care. In the old days maybe they didn’t know so much about tempo
and rhythm, but in the audience strong men wept and women fainted——”
“Now listen, Nola darling. One of your old-day gals would last about
four seconds on Broadway. I’ve heard about Clara Morris and Mrs.
Siddons, and Modjeska, and Bernhardt all my life. If the sentimental old
dears were to come back in an all-star revival to-day the intelligent
modern theatre-going audience would walk out on them.”
The new-school actresses went in for the smarter teas, eschewed
cocktails, visited the art exhibits, had their portraits painted in the
new manner, never were seen at night clubs, were glimpsed coming out of
Scribner’s with a thick volume of modern biography, used practically no
make-up when in mufti, kept their names out of the New York telephone
directory, wore flat-heeled shoes and woollen stockings while walking
briskly in Central Park, went to Symphony Concerts; were, in short,
figures as glamorous and romantic as a pint of milk. Everything they did
on the stage was right. Intelligent, well thought out, and right.
Watching them, you knew it was right—tempo, tone, mood, character.
Right. As right as an engineering blueprint. Your pulses, as you sat in
the theatre, were normal.
Usually, their third season, you saw them unwisely lunching too often at
the Algonquin Round Table and wise-cracking with the critics there. The
fourth they took a bit in that new English comedy just until O’Neill
should have finished the play he was doing for them. The fifth they
married that little Whatshisname. The sixth they said, mysteriously,
that they were Writing.
Kim kept away from the Algonquin, did not attend first nights with
Woollcott or Broun, had a full-page Steichen picture in _Vanity Fair_,
and married Kenneth Cameron. She went out rarely. Sunday night dinners,
sometimes; or she had people in (ham _à la_ Queenie part of the cold
buffet). Her list of Sunday night guests or engagements read like a
roster of the New York Telephone Company’s Exchanges. Stuyvesant,
Beekman, Bleeker, Murray, Rhinelander, Vanderbilt, Jerome, Wadsworth,
Tremont. She learned to say, “It’s just one of those things——” She
finished an unfinished sentence with, “I _mean_——!” and a throwing up
of the open palms.
Kenneth Cameron. Her marriage with Kenneth Cameron was successful and
happy and very nice. Separate bedrooms and those lovely
négligées—velvet with Venetian sleeves and square neckline. Excellent
friends. Nothing sordid. Personal liberty and privacy of thought and
action—those were the things that made for happiness in marriage.
Magnolia wondered, sometimes, but certainly it was not for her to
venture opinion. Her own marriage had been no such glittering example of
perfection. Yet she wondered, seeing this well-ordered and respectful
union, if Kim was not, after all, missing something. Wasn’t marriage,
like life, unstimulating and unprofitable and somewhat empty when too
well ordered and protected and guarded? Wasn’t it finer, more splendid,
more nourishing, when it was, like life itself, a mixture of the sordid
and the magnificent; of mud and stars; of earth and flowers; of love and
hate and laughter and tears and ugliness and beauty and hurt? She was
wrong, of course. Ken’s manner toward Kim was polite, tender,
thoughtful. Kim’s manner toward Ken was polite, tender, thoughtful. Are
you free next Thursday, dear? The Paynes are having those Russians. It
might be rather interesting. . . . Sorry. Ken’s voice. Soft, light. It
was the—well, Magnolia never acknowledged this, even to herself, but it
was what she called the male interior decorator’s voice. You heard it a
good deal at teas, and at the Algonquin, and in the lobby between the
acts on first nights and in those fascinating shops on Madison Avenue
where furniture and old glass and brasses and pictures were shown you by
slim young men with delicate hands. I _mean_——! It’s just one of those
things.
There was no Mississippi in Kim. Kim was like the Illinois River of
Magnolia’s childhood days. Kim’s life flowed tranquilly between gentle
green-clad shores, orderly, well regulated, dependable.
“For the land’s sakes, Magnolia Hawks, you sitting out there yet! Here
it’s after three and nearly dinner time!” Elly Chipley at the screen
door. “And in the blazing sun, too. You need somebody to look after you
worse than your ma did.”
Elly was justified, for Magnolia had a headache that night.
Kim and Ken arrived unexpectedly together on June second, clattering up
to the boat landing in a scarecrow Ford driven by a stout Negro in khaki
pants, puttees, and an army shirt.
Kim was breathless, but exhilarated. “He says he drove in France in ’17,
and I believe it. Good God! Every bolt, screw, bar, nut, curtain, and
door in the thing rattled and flapped and opened and fell in and fell
out. I’ve been working like a Swiss bell-ringer trying to keep things
together there in the back seat. Nola darling, what do you mean by
staying down in this miserable hole all these weeks! Ken, dear, take
another aspirin and a pinch of bicarb and lie down a minute. . . . Ken’s
got a headache from the heat and the awful trip. . . . We’re going back
to-night, and we sail on the tenth, and, Nola darling, for heaven’s sake
. . .”
They had a talk. The customary four o’clock dinner was delayed until
nearly five because of it. They sat in Magnolia’s green-shaded bedroom
with its frilled white bedspread and dimity curtains—rather, Kim and
Magnolia sat and Ken sprawled his lean length on the bed, looking a
little yellow and haggard, what with the heat and the headache. And in
the cook’s galley, and on the stage, and in the little dressing rooms
that looked out on the river, and on deck, and in the box office, the
company and crew of the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre lounged
and waited, played pinochle and waited, sewed and napped and read and
wondered and waited.
“You can’t mean it, Nola darling. Flopping up and down these muddy
wretched rivers in this heat! You could be out at the Bay with Andy. Or
in London with Ken and me—Ken, dear, isn’t it any better?—or even in
New York, in the lovely airy apartment, it’s cooler than——”
Magnolia sat forward.
“Listen, Kim. I love it. The rivers. And the people. And the show boat.
And the life. I don’t know why. It’s bred in me, I suppose. Yes, I do
know why. Your grandpa died when you were too little to remember him,
really. Or you’d know why. Now, if you two are set on going back on the
night train, you’ll have to listen to me for a minute. I went over
things with the lawyer and the banker in Thebes when we took Mama back
there. Your grandmother left a fortune. I don’t mean a few thousand
dollars. She left half a million, made out of this boat in the last
twenty-five years. I’m giving it to you, Kim, and Ken.”
Refusal, of course. Protest. Consideration. Acquiescence. Agreement.
Acceptance. Ken was sitting up now, pallidly. Kim was lyric. “Half a
million! Mother! Ken! It means the plays I want, and Ken to produce
them. It means that I can establish a real American theatre in New York.
I can do the plays I’ve been longing to do—Ibsen and Hauptmann, and
Werfel, and Schnitzler, and Molnar, and Chekhov, and Shakespeare even.
Ken! We’ll call it the American Theatre!”
“The American Theatre,” Magnolia repeated after her, thoughtfully. And
smiled then. “The American Theatre.” She looked a trifle uncomfortable,
as one who has heard a good joke, and has no one with whom to share it.
A loud-tongued bell clanged and reverberated through the show boat’s
length. Dinner.
Kim and Ken pretended not to notice the heat and flies and the molten
state of the butter. They met everyone from the captain to the cook;
from the ingénue lead to the drum.
“Well, Miss Ravenal, this is an—or Mrs. Cameron, I suppose I should
say—an honour. We know all about you, even if you don’t know about us.”
Not one of them had ever seen her.